When I stepped off the double-decker bus, the mist swirling about like a memory in a painting, I saw my mother sitting on the cold pavement, her grey hair like an unravelling skein, and she was begging. My husband and I stood rooted to the spot, as though the city itself had shifted and we were caught between waking and sleep. No one knew a thing about thisno neighbours, not even my sister who lives miles away in Brighton.
I am forty-three, my mother sixty-seven. We both live in London, though at opposite endsshe in a labyrinthine estate in Hackney, me near the river in Putney. Like other elderly folks, she ought to be watched over, but she flatly refuses to move in with me for one peculiar, stubborn reason: shes surrounded by four cats and three dogs in her little flat, and she also feeds every stray moggy and mutt in her square. Every bit of money I slip to her for food or prescriptions seems to vanish, spent on tins of animal food or the odd veterinary bill.
I bring her the groceries myself, knowing she wont bother to get them, just so she can keep her pension and the notes I give her to sustain what she calls, with a secret smile, her menagerie. Just the other night, after tea at a friends place in Camden, my husband and I decided to leave the car and experience the citys odd magic by bus. Imagine my astonishment: alighting near the high street, I saw her, my mother, sitting there clutching a battered cup, collecting coins from passing strangers. My mind spun in circles; my husbandcalled Jamie and always so sensiblejust stared.
Hes seen me put aside money from our monthly budget for Mum, so he quietly wondered where the pounds were really going. It dawned on us: shed taken to the street not for herself, but to gather money for animal food and jabs, for her furry little kingdom.
Its all rather melancholic, but imaginewhat would you feel if you found your own mother in such a dreamlike position, folded on her coat on a street corner under the orange wash of a streetlamp? What would family or friends say, or the folks at the book club? Theyd think me an ungrateful daughter, heartless, whod let her mother slip away like a wisp in a city thats always half-asleep.
Now I wander the streets of London, peering down side roads and under awnings, calling Mums name into the dusk. Shes begun to keep herself hidden from melike a will-o-the-wisp that flickers on the edge of visionher loyalty to animals greater than her wish to be found. Even my pleading shouts drift down the pavements unheard, and shes simply learned to vanish ever better in the citys endless, dreaming maze.
