Pearl

by Siân Hughes

Even though the past is folded over and over like puff pastry and my mother, of all people, would understand just how I am wrapped up in its layers and cannot find my way out.

It’s very hard to think of good ideas when you are sad. Later, when you are less sad, the ideas look obvious, but you need an imagination, or something else. You need to believe that what you do matters.

Shame is the black sticky stuff that fills the pipes under your sink. It backs up all your worst dirt and leaves it clinging to the sides of the sink for everyone to see. There’s no way round it. The water won’t run clear until you’ve dug out every bit of it. And I want the water to run clear. I want to see right through it.

Sometimes I think I have lived my life as an observer, saving all the best bits for her by looking very carefully and trying to remember the details she would have liked.

If you are a mother you are always to blame. I know that now. If you did not give birth to them too slowly or too quickly, underfeed them, overfeed them, pick them up, set them down, push them forward, hold them back, love them too little or too much, you are to blame for their very existence. You loaded them with your own dodgy genetic package and sent them out into the world to deal with its particular set of time bombs.

Forgetting is not the worst thing. Remembering is not the worst thing either. The worst thing is when you have forgotten, and then you remember. It catches you out. You forgot for a moment, a day, a week, a month, but the effect is the same each time you remember. You feel it rushing back around your lymphatic system, and you remember the hurt. And there is a part of you that thinks, perhaps the pain is optional now? What might it be like to live without it? This is treachery. You hate yourself for it.

They never found a note. They didn’t need to. Everything she left us was a note. The songs she left in my head, the fairy tales, skipping rhymes, conversations with the dead.