MORNING SERIAL
PART ONE
IT was the first of January. I followed the ambulance for an hour. I wouldn’t let anyone get between me and the speeding vehicle, even at roundabouts I drove so close that I imagined anyone could see an umbilical cord connected us, and I was not to be trifled with.
Slightly hysterical sacred music boomed out of the speakers, an extraordinary jazz/funk mass I’d recently bought on CD. Altos chanted and sopranos soared. I picked out words: Sanctus; Angus Dei; Gloria; Kyrie Eleison. It was a little surreal but entirely appropriate.
Though I was swimming with adrenaline, I felt completely calm. Only a short while before I had been holding my mother’s head up to keep her airways open. All signs of life had gone. She was slumped in a chair, her arms dangling and twitching, her skin clammy. She was deathly pale and had no pulse that I could detect. Her eyes were wide open, senselessly staring at nothing. Could she hear me? I didn’t think so. Just before she lost consciousness she’d said, ‘It’s as though you’re far, far away…’
I knew I had to get her into a horizontal position, but it was impossible. A substantial woman, she’d lost the strength in her legs some years before and now she was a dead weight. Moving her would have been highly risky. I held her head up with one hand; in the other was the phone.
A woman I will never meet coached me, telling me I was doing really well. She stayed on the line for half an hour or so while we waited for the ambulance.
All this time, Mum was unconscious but still breathing – just. I saw how the body looks when life leaves it. The expression in her eyes – the absence of it. These were not Mum’s eyes. I’d thought she might be dead, or in the process of dying peacefully right in front of me. I spoke softly and comfortingly to her and listened to the kindly, nameless woman who stayed on the phone supporting me.