She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me (6 page)

She was adamant that no one should come to the funeral; just my dad and me and the woman from the Humanist Society who, when she visited a few days after the death, seemed taken aback by the stringency of my mother's wishes. My dad and I wavered. There were my mother's friends from London; there were the parents of my own friends, who'd become her friends; there were neighbors and friends from the village. All summer they'd dropped in with offers of help: portable fans to disperse the heat, ideas on how to tempt her appetite. We owed them a funeral. An elderly woman called Hazel whom I knew by sight but had never spoken to stopped me in the street and asked if I needed help going through my mother's wardrobe. “It can be hard,” she said. We got all the way to Hazel, buoyed by the idea we were doing the right thing, before stopping and helplessly scrapping the list.

The humanist looked at me. (I thought she'd be woollier, but she was actually quite stern. “Mum would have liked her,” we said afterward, hopefully.) It's not that she didn't have friends, I said. It's that she didn't want . . . she didn't like the idea of people gathering in these circumstances. I knew exactly how my mother felt about this: that being the only dead person in the room would put her at a decided disadvantage.

Mr. Quigley, the undertaker, had come for her that night in formal dress, accompanied by his daughter, who was very young and very grave, wearing what looked like a man's black suit and standing behind her father, staring respectfully at her shoes. The undertaker had explained we might want to wait in the living room and shut the door; the removal of the body could be upsetting.

My dad and I did as he instructed, milling awkwardly in the middle of the room. Her glasses were still on the windowsill, on top of a paperback she'd been reading, a shiny-backed crime novel from the library. Twenty-seven versions of my own face stared down at me from the Shrine. There was a sharp bump against the door. Something in my brain lifted up and resettled. The turn from the hallway to the porch was tight and I couldn't imagine how they'd make it, or how two slight-looking people, an old man and a girl, could manage the load. (Mr. Quigley may not have been old, but that's how he seemed, in his gentle formality.)

We opened the door and went out into the hallway. The porch opened onto the warm summer night. Mr. Quigley and his daughter reemerged from the darkness, and when we shook their hands, I noticed the girl's watch, which was huge, like something you'd wear to go diving. “My mother will be fascinated by all this,” I thought.

On the day of the funeral it started to rain, the first rain of summer. “Hammy to the end,” I thought. We honored her wishes and kept the guest list to two.

London–Buckinghamshire–London

THE SHIFT IS INSTANTANEOUS.
It is as if, the day after her death, a van pulls up outside my house and men start unloading luggage onto the pavement.

“Oi,” I say. “Hang on a sec. None of that's mine.”

“Sorry, love,” says the man. “Someone has to have it.”

What can I say? “OK. Bring it in.”

My dad and I had never talked about it. He could hardly get a word in with my mother around, although in the last year of her life a subtle change had started to occur. Whereas usually when I rang home she gave my dad five minutes on the line before swooping in and taking over, as she got sicker and less able to follow the conversation the balance had tilted. My dad's portion of the phone call got longer and longer, while my mother's dwindled. I would tell him jokes and stories from my day that I hadn't told her. He would laugh, and I would know, in the background, she was hearing it and registering the change. I knew how awful this was, but I kept on doing it. I was punishing her for leaving me.

As a result, my dad and I have never really talked about anything serious, certainly not about her history. She was the gatekeeper and she kept the gates shut.

•   •   •

I DON'T HAVE THE HEFT
for this. I can't get lids off jars. I get drunk on half a shandy. My mother, who could get the lid off anything and metabolized alcohol like water, would be appalled by this admission, it being worse in her view to admit to a weakness than to have one in the first place. “Go and ask the man,” she would say when I was little, trying to get me to overcome my Englishness. I didn't want to ask the man. I would rather do without than ask the man. How I became a journalist, when all you do all day is ask the man, I have no idea. And yet despite being a journalist, I have never so much as fed her name into a search engine. All I have, after her death, are the stories she told and the stories she threatened to tell but didn't.

It had delighted my mother when I went into journalism. “I'd have been proud, of course, if you'd been a maths genius,” she said airily, “but it wouldn't have been my
preference
.” She bored the neighbors rigid with details of my life. She once got into a fight with someone in the village who suggested, mildly, that I was an odd choice to send to Israel to interview Ariel Sharon—twenty-five years old and bereft of any knowledge, let alone specialism in Middle Eastern politics. (In fact, so wholly unthreatening a proposition was I that Sharon, showing me around his farm, picked an orange from his orchard and, after peeling it, fed a piece of it into my mouth like a baby bird, while I tried to arrange a response around the giant size of my freak-out. Such are the dividends of knowing nothing.)

“She seemed an odd choice,” said the man in the village, and my mother snapped, “I'd like to see you do better.” In the newsagent's, she furtively moved stock so that copies of the
Guardian
, where I worked, covered copies of the
Telegraph
, where I didn't.

Lurid threats were made as to what, precisely, would befall my employers if anything befell me.

The year before she died I won an award, and my mother considered her legacy: “Some people write novels or paint beautiful paintings,” she sighed. “I created you.”

Now I sit in my flat in London and turn on my computer. “I will be professional about this,” I think. I will do all the things you do in the early stages of a story: flip between websites, jump up for snacks, write words at crazy angles in your notebook, hoping they'll never come before a judge, not least because you've drawn a little house with a chimney and smoke coming out of it in the middle of the page confident that if it looks like action it will generate results, or at least the momentum to achieve them down the line. It will be a matter of lists and itineraries. I am suddenly cheerful. Some cups of tea, some common sense, and who knows what harm might be undone?

I had asked my dad, groping for a language—any language—in which to talk about these things we'd never talked about, if she had said much to him.

“There was something about a trial?” I said, as we sat in the kitchen not long after the funeral. We were drinking red wine from the box on the counter. Apart from cocktails, which were different, I wouldn't drink much when I was at home. I drank plenty in town, but at home I instinctively avoided it. I might have a glass of champagne at Christmas, but I wouldn't join my parents in wine at the table. “It's good you don't drink too much,” said my mother occasionally. “Not like your mother.”

“That's not true,” I'd say angrily. I wouldn't take her up on it, she who never asked for help nor confessed to a need. It was too late, by then, to change my idea of her. Now it's just me and my dad, drinking a glass of red wine like ordinary people.

“Yes,” he said. “She mentioned it, a long time ago.” And he repeated the quote she had given me, which the prosecutor had said of her stepmother: “If that woman isn't careful, I'll have her up as an accessory.” There had been some kind of abuse—violence and worse—and that's all he knew, too. Like a veteran returning from the First World War, my mother had maintained, in her marriage as in her life, a hard line on revisiting the past. My dad had respected that. I said something like, “Obviously her dad was a weirdo.” My dad said something like, “That would be putting it mildly.” We reached the limit of what either of us was able to say.

The day after her death I had rung her sister Fay in Johannesburg, a conversation I remember less for its content than for the fact I made the call on my cell phone. Peak hour, long distance, on a cell. “You must be mad!” my mother would have said. I had been calling my friends all day, getting two seconds into the conversation and then losing it. “Did you know I was crying all the way through that phone call?” my friend Merope said later, although I hadn't heard her through my own crying. Later, much later, my friend Pooly said, “After I spoke to you I had to go home from work.” My friend Dave picked up the call in a bar: “Hold on, hold on, I'm going outside,” he said. I told him the news. Dave had come up to see us a few weeks before, when my mum could barely open her eyes. Now he said, “I'm standing on a traffic island in the middle of the street and there are tears just streaming down my face.”

Unlike these calls, neither my aunt nor I cried, and Fay didn't try to console me. We didn't know each other, after all, although I had the sense we were striving to live up to the same steely ideal. “Dying just isn't the sort of thing my mother would do,” I said glibly, and Fay laughed.

“No, it isn't.” My aunt told me a bit about her life, her grown-up children and grandchildren, her routine. Like all my mother's siblings, she wasn't married and hadn't been for a long time. Every morning, she told me, she got up at the crack of dawn to go out and feed the birds in her garden.

“That's so funny,” I said. “My mum does that, too.”

“Your mother had a lot of time for Fay,” said my dad in the kitchen that evening.

“I'd like to go there,” I said, “to South Africa, to see them.” It had only been a week and already—with no siblings, no aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no one I had common cause with except for my dad—I was tired of my face being the only reminder. He said that sounded like a good idea.

“I offered to go,” said my dad. “But Mum always said no.”

•   •   •

THE SOUTH AFRICAN
national archive has a searchable database, broken down into seven geographical regions. Search terms return on a single line with a date, shelf reference, and archive locator, indicating the whereabouts of the paperwork. Civil trials, criminal trials, land disputes, naturalizations, and probate going back to the nineteenth century all seem to be held on the system, on which I defy anyone to spend five minutes and fail, guiltily, to have the response I did: say what you like about the British Empire, they knew how to keep records.

Her maiden name had, at one time, been relatively common in those parts and so pages of unrelated data come up—old wills and estate disputes, applications for citizenship, bail hearings—before I recognize the name of one of my aunts. Below it is the name of another aunt, and then a third. It is only a record of their divorces, but they are such hypothetical figures to me that, even though by now I have spoken to Fay on the phone and seen letters from the others, their names in the archive strike me as the first decisive proof—official proof—that they actually exist.

A few pages on, and there he is: my grandfather, unmistakable with his unusual middle name, Mauritz, the Dutch version of Maurice. There is a single line of description—Criminal case.
Regina vs. James Mauritz DeKiewit
—and a date two years before my mother emigrated. A trial had taken place. Something terrible had happened. We weren't all caught in a hideous misunderstanding. I stare at it for a long time before printing it out.

Then, for good measure, I run the name through the other regional databases. To my surprise, my grandfather's name returns a second match, in a remote depository in Pietermaritzburg, three hundred miles south of Johannesburg. I ring my dad.

“Do you know anything about a murder?” I say.

“No,” he says innocently. “What murder?” (Like a human GPS, my dad, after thirty years of marriage to my mum, is used to mapping a vague context onto thoughts that start in the middle and work outward.)

“Before all the other stuff.”

I tell him what I've found: my grandfather's name alongside two others in a murder trial.

“Ma never mentioned it.” He is thoughtful. “Maybe it's not him.”

“I will send away for the papers,” I say.

“Be careful,” says my dad.

“What?” I scoff. “It's hardly dangerous. Everyone in this story is dead.”

“No,” he says. “I mean, be careful how much of this you want to know.”

•   •   •

I THINK ABOUT IT
afterward, what I am doing and why. The stronger reaction, I think, would be to walk away, to honor the firewall my mother put between her past and my present and to carry on with my life. But I can't. In those days and weeks after her death it is all I can think about. While she was alive, it was none of my business. Now, unless I make it my business, it will follow her into oblivion. By way of explanation, I return in my mind to something that happened in high school. When I was fifteen or so, a brief craze for Ouija boards swept the school, and every lunchtime for a month girls gathered around homemade boards to commune with the dead. The dead had three fixed qualities: omniscience, omnipresence, and they were all men, which is weird. You'd think it'd be like calling home from college, when your dad picks up the phone and has three seconds of secure airtime before your mother, scattering furniture, touches down to snatch the receiver from his hand.

Most of the spirits we called up introduced themselves as Bert or Arthur and, in reply to the question “Where are you?”—or rather, “WHERE ARE YOU?” bellowed at the penny as if it were an antique listening device—spelled out A-Y-L-E-S-B-U-R-Y C-E-M-E-T-E-R-Y, whereupon someone in the circle burst into tears and said it was her grandfather.

Two significant things happened during these sessions. The first has nothing to do with my larger point, but is worth repeating for the benefit of skeptics. To test the authenticity of the exercise, those in the circle asked the spirits things only they knew about themselves: pets' names, middle names, and then Lizzy Shute suggested bra sizes. She was a big girl, as were two of the others around the board that day, and there was much clapping and screaming from the crowd as the penny divined their CC and D cups. I will never forget the agonizing journey undertaken by Bert or Arthur to describe my 28AA. My point is this: for those who doubt the reality of the afterlife, don't you think, if I had been pushing that penny, I might at least have given myself a B cup?

There were strict protocols surrounding Ouija. At the end of each session, you had to politely ask, “Please can we leave now?” and wait for the spirit to release you. There were rumors of people who hadn't broken the connection cleanly and, like a phone bill that keeps running, had accrued a vast and unhealthy debt to the Other Side, causing them to throw themselves from buildings and become teenage mothers. The craze eventually ended when the deputy head, looking grimmer than anyone had ever seen him—grimmer than when Michelle Leyland fell out of the coach on the way back from Germany, grimmer than when Joanna Fretwell told Mrs. Stone, the PE teacher, to fuck off—visited every classroom in turn and said words I forget but which impressed us deeply at the time. We were nice girls. We stopped.

And here is my second point: twelve years later, in the wake of my mother's death, it occurs to me that despite everyone's best efforts, a connection has failed to be severed. Politely it has been asked, “Please may we leave now?” and the request has been denied. I won't have it any longer. The time for politeness has passed.

•   •   •

FROM A LIST
of researchers provided by the Pietermaritzburg archive, I choose a man with the most English-sounding name and e-mail to ask if he'll photocopy papers for me. He replies promptly with details of a Barclay's bank account in Worthing. Typical Brit, I think. Keeping a toehold in England in case he ever has to flee.

Two weeks later, a large buff envelope drops onto the mat before work. I put it on the table, and that evening, when I get home, I stand by the window and tear it open. The top page is divided into two halves: English on the left-hand side, Afrikaans on the right. Under the heading “Preparatory Examinations” there are three names, one of which is my grandfather's. Then: “charged with the offense of MURDER.” The capitalization strikes me as histrionic. The case was prosecuted by a William Scott Bigby on behalf of His Majesty the King, and the three men, “hereinafter called the Accused,” were “now or lately prisoners in the jail at Ladysmith.”