Silence All These Years

When I got home mum wasn’t in the kitchen. It was Friday, after lunch and before dinner, which is the time that she opens a bottle of wine and sits at the kitchen table with the week’s post in a pile in front of her. I kicked my shoes off and tiptoed around the house looking for her. I didn’t shout in case she was sleeping. There’s nothing mum hates more than to be woken. I didn’t tiptoe to be quiet though; my socks stifled the sound of my feet across the carpets, it’s just something to do with being alone in a silent house, I always feel like I have to whisper. As if I’m disturbing the house itself by breaking the quiet. Mum wasn’t in the sitting room so I assumed she’d gone out and padded on the balls of my feet up the stairs. That’s when I noticed that she was sitting on the end of her bed. I nearly called out to her but stopped suddenly, something didn’t feel right. The way she was sitting was strange, with her back straight as if trained with splints, her hands flat on her lap as if she was waiting for something, or saying a prayer or something. It’s not like mum to be still. She’s always doing something. Unless she’s asleep. Even when she watches the telly she gets some sewing out or something. Threads a needle, whilst holding the coloured thread between her teeth. Red, last night, when she fixed a hole in my new cherry coloured cords. But it’s not like mum to sit all still and hopeless looking. It scared me a bit, as if I’d seen something that I shouldn’t have. Pete told me that he once walked in on his parents doing it. I wish he hadn’t told me that. Then I noticed that she was crying, not because I could see her face, but she breathed one of those shivery breaths you get after you’ve cried too much. Then she wiped her face and as she turned her head she noticed me on the landing. I thought she may turn on a smile, shake it off and pretend that she was okay. Like she does sometimes when I walk in on her looking sad or flustered, as she often does on post day. But she didn’t, she looked at me with a face that I can’t explain, a kind of angry, tired face. I didn’t know if I should say something or pretend I hadn’t seen her. But she held her gaze on me for a really long time, so I said, ‘are you okay, mum?’

‘Of course not,’ she said, still sitting. Her hands gestured and fell back onto her lap, palms up, sort of limp and helpless.
‘Do you need something?’ I asked, ‘like a cup of tea?’ I didn’t know how to make tea but saw on the telly that people always drink tea when they are ill or upset.
‘I need…’ she rubbed her palms across her lap, up and down, all frantically. ‘I need to,’ she stopped and dropped her head back, facing the ceiling, ‘silence all these years. I need…’ She looked back at me, ‘oh, God. No, Illie, I don’t need anything, go away.’

It wasn’t like mum to be like this. It scared me. Perhaps she was ill, or grandma was ill or Max? I stood looking at her for a moment lost in the horror of an ugly daydream about Max or mum dying.
‘Illie, go away please. Just for a while.’ She said it in a strange, calm voice, which made me start to cry as I went across the landing to my room.

Inside I closed the door and got into bed with my head right under the covers so I could hear my breathing really loud, like being in a jar. What did she mean, to ‘silence all these years’. It was like a riddle, like something from Rebecca’s World. I closed my eyes and tried to think about something nice, I imagined I was in a huge meadow, with a dog, a big sheep dog, and we’re running and the sun is out and ahead of us is a big tree with a rope ladder and a tree house, and secret ink which only shows up when you put the paper in water, and my own bathroom with little bottles of bubblebath in a row on a shelf, and a massive cherry pie, and summer evenings when the lawn has been cut, and the day before Christmas when the house smells of spices and the sound Ziggy makes when he purrs and.