Everything

I had a realisation the other day. I’ve become unemotional. Disconnected. Untouchable. Untouching. I no longer write about people, mainly myself, me once being my number one fascination but about things. I don’t try and craft words around lumps of flesh and bone and blood and mess but of alloy and steel and nylon. I write about them and then illustrate them, not by pen or pencil, or oil or watercolour, but by cold flat vectors. Why? I tell people the reason is that there’s no money in it. There’s no money in anything else to be creative, edgy, open. Moving, emotional.

I sit outside the coffee shop, in my usual place, drawing lines on my computer to look like things, grey and black and one dimensional, illustrating text equally as flat, words even an accountant would find unexciting.  It’s a book about top rope soloing, three years in the making. What next, five years on a book about shoe lace tying?

A mother and son sit down at the next table, her in her seventies, him in his twenties. It means more to her than him. She tries to make small talk, but there’s a distance, a silence, and I wonder why. She is his baby, but she is just his mother.

My brother walks into the sea and does not scatter my mum's ashes, but simply dumps them at the surf line, where they sit like fly-tipped cememt. And refuse to go. Her funeral was a year ago, but these things take time. I wasn’t her, just what was left, a life, atoms of a once person, still loved, slowly washing away by the lapping waves.

I stay in her house, still unsold and find a bag of things left for me to take home. On top is a Speak and Spell my mum had somehow afforded in the early 80s, bought in the hope it would help her son catch up, which she had kept for forty more years. Beneath it are photos of me as a baby, telegrams sent on my birth, and a note about a Godfather I had no idea about. I find a baby book that contains a lock of my hair and a note of my weight, month by month, notes on a new life that no one would ever find of interest but her, that one day it would all just go in the bin. But not today.

I fly home and try not to think of the pile of wet ash; what is left of a life, that is that all there is?

When she died, suddenly, I had only practical things to say, that sudden was better than slow, that that’s how she would have wanted to go, trying not to think about how long it would take your mum to die, alone, without her children, no one to say goodbye, or sorry. She was there at the start, but you weren’t there at the end. My sister fell apart - a bit - but not me. I was strong. But on that beach, watching the grey fade to black, I didn’t feel that strong. There was something I had to unwrap, to think about, but I just couldn’t. Now now. Not yet. Not ever.

At home. I look at the face of Isla, born after Mum had gone, the spitting of me as a baby, but all I see is her because I was, and she was me, and we’re all each other, still.

I sit and watch the mum and the son. They still aren’t talking. I focus again on the drawings, the vector lines, the black and the grey. I wonder what he would say if I was to walk to their table and tell him that I would give anything to sit with my mum, one last time, for one last cup of tea, to talk about that Speak and Spell, that unknown Godfather, that baby book with my hair, and her small handwriting of weights and measures, to say that it’s only now that she’s gone that you’ll understand what you’ve lost, that all the love you will ever feel for someone, will be nothing compared to how she feels about you.

But I don’t. I’d only cry.