The freedom problem

After my mother’s funeral I spent a week by myself, visiting some of the less well known islands in our archipelago: Invisible Island, the Silly Islands, the Slightly Silly Islands, the Sensible Islands and the aptly named Island That Isn’t There.

After my tour I returned home. To an empty house. My mother’s bed was empty. She was gone. There was nothing there. She had been replaced by a gap. She was as absent as the Island That Isn’t There.

Whilst mother had been alive I’d complained bitterly about the way she was holding me back. Having to care for her 24/7 meant that I couldn’t visit the mainland, I couldn’t go and see Alun and his new friends at university, I couldn’t get a job, I couldn’t even go and see Spandau Ballet at the Apollo.

Now she was dead I could do anything I wanted. Visit the mainland, visit Alun. Even visit other mainlands, the ones I’d read about in books, and seen on TV: America, Europe, Canada.

The world was my oyster. I had an income, a small inheritance, and was no longer burdened by responsibilities. I was young, I was free, I could do anything I liked.

I didn’t leave the house for days.

Alun called round to see me every morning. All I could say was “She’s dead,” or some variation on the theme. Not some variation on the sentence, that would be silly, “Dead she’s,” or “She dead s,” would make no sense at all. I was grieving, but not totally insane. What I mean was that my loss, my mother’s death, was all I could talk about or think about. Even when Alun was angrily waving the latest letter from the mainland council, I failed to take in what he said.

“I felt the same when my father died,” Alun said one morning, when I’d failed to take an interest in the mainland council’s plan to introduce a toast tax and Alun’s subsequent plan to rechristen Happy Island Bread as Happy Island Muffin.

“You did?” I said.

He nodded. I find with men, with off-mainlanders in particular, emotion is something you share primarily through the process of not sharing it. Words just get in the way. So do actions.

“But after your dad died you left for the mainland, saying you couldn’t bear to be on the island any more, whereas I haven’t been able to bring myself to leave the house.”

“Exactly.”

Alun was right, of course. I understood that. Our reactions were identical, even though they were also the complete opposite of each other. To get away totally, or not move an iota, both are the same reaction – the sheer inability to cope with the loss.

Though I was lost to the world, I still made time to write. I had deadlines to meet. I had a novel to write.

It was in the fog of grief that I wrote the first of my New York murder mysteries.

Very occasionally, to this day, I receive letters, emails, from New Yorkers, fans of my writing, asking how I managed so successfully to capture life in New York City without having ever visited the place, let alone lived there.

In my responses I refer to research, the information available online, the floating library (which used to pass Happy Island every six months or so) but the truth is I didn’t do any research at all, because I wasn’t writing about New York.

I was writing about death, about loss, about the mortality of man and, more importantly, the mortality of man’s mother. And such stories are universal. My career, such as it was, would be built on my mother’s death. Every murder, every corpse, every victim, would just be me re-visiting that same dark place in my soul.

Because, at the end of the day, death is all there is to write about.