Sense of place

He started the car engine, then almost immediately stopped it. He still needed to calm down. Even the best visits to see Mother were bad for his nerves, but this time had been awful. There was never any talking to her on certain subjects. For a start, she'd never liked Angie—had once called her (not to her face) a scrawny little bitch, all ribs and teeth—and had only grudgingly blessed their union when she had realised she risked losing her beloved son for good. So he could hardly discuss what had been happening at home. And Mother had never acknowledged how much Father used to knock them all—Mother included—about the house as though they were dice rattling in a cup. There was no shared ground there, for loving reminiscences about the days before the old bugger popped his clogs. But today it had been clear from the start that, despite the dangers hiding behind every other possible topic of conversation, explaining to Mother why they needed to sell the house she had lived in for sixty years was not the comparatively easy option.

He could still picture her now. She had planted herself into the carpet, with the heavy, bulbous writing-desk on her right, drawers and board locked and snapped together, and the dresser looming over her left shoulder, a faded dinner set exhibited on it behind a lattice of vertical dowels, and a collection of family photographs beneath. She was occupying a position of power, an intersection of domestic ley lines, and it looked like there was no budging her this side of doomsday.

He had tried to reason with her. That was a mistake: the house wasn't about reason; it was about family. He wouldn't be suggesting she move out, he explained, if it weren't absolutely necessary. He knew how much she loved the place, but—and he never finished the sentence. "You've no idea how I feel about this place," she countered, and then she was off. Dad this, Grandad that, his sister and two brothers the other. Spending a honeymoon decorating the front room. All of the children born in the master bedroom upstairs; all of them growing up; all of them leaving; poor Graham, the eldest, lost at Goose Green.

Well, of course, he said, he loved it too. He tried to crack wise, recalled cracking his head on the stone lintel at the bottom of the stairs. He would miss the old place too. "You say it," she replied, "but you don't mean it. You don't feel it in your bones like I do." And there was never any arguing with her bones. Some families were governed by the matriarch's moles, but his was built around his mother's thin frame. It was supported by her compactness and springiness; it spread and moved from place to place at her articulation alone—whenever it reluctantly did so then she complained her joints ached; and Graham and Father would always be her phantom limbs, limbs that nonetheless could easily, magically, take the whole weight of her whole argument if the occasion demanded.

It was then that it occurred to him: what about her bones? First he told her he was sorry, that he didn't want to upset her. He only had her best interests in mind: "aye, and me money," she interjected, but he carried on apologising all the same. It's her house and he shouldn't have raised the idea of her selling it like that.

But what would happen, he asked after half a beat, if she became sick? What would happen if she fell? Who would help her if she was in this house all alone? And as she started to reply, saying that she could ring either him or his sister and they'd come over, he asked her how she would reach the telephone from the bathroom with a broken hip. There was no reply to that, of course (not even the obvious negative) that didn't admit she was old. And that was out of the question.

As he was saying all this she had taken one hesitating step backward and put her hand on the dresser to steady herself. He stood up and moved towards her, explaining that it was best for her, never mind the rest of them, if she would just live somewhere with people to look after her all the time. "You're going to put me in a home," she said, matter-of-factly. Then she repeated it, but in a wail that ended with her breaking into tears. "Only," she cried, and then wept a little more.

He stood up at this, and walked over to hug her. He hadn't hugged her, not properly, for years, but thought he would try it out. She was so small, and seemed to be made entirely out of shoulderblades and elbows. "Only," she said again, muffled in his embrace, "only I'm already in me home. I don't need to go anywhere else."

He told her they could talk about it another time. He said she shouldn't worry too much till then (knowing she would), and just make sure instead that she was making the right decision either way (knowing she would). He said that he and Charlie and Ellie would be there for her, whatever she decided. He even called her Mum. And when he stopped hugging her then he himself was standing with the dresser to his left and the writing-desk to his right. Two minutes later he was out of the door and another thirty seconds later he was round the corner and sat in the car.

Both hands on the steering-wheel, he now smiled grimly to himself. She was a hard woman, his mother. She almost never cried; the last time he remembered her doing so was at Father's funeral. So when he saw the first few tears... that was when he had known for certain: he had won. She would sell, although it might take her a long time to decide. She would move out. Satisfied, he started the engine again, and gently—so gently that it seemed almost loving—he pulled the car out and moved away.