Swansong by Kerry Andrew

Author:Kerry Andrew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

Your look always darkened, rain on stone, when you spoke of your mother. She never liked me. I knew it even from afar, by the way your voice sounded like it was caught on barbed wire.

I met her only once. We went on the train to a grand building with a long private driveway and thick, sticky air inside. A lot of woolly looks from the other residents.

When she was still at home, you told me, she would have strange fits in her sleep. Clutching the bedclothes, arching up, cries like foxes in the night. There were things you couldn’t explain. Eggshells, floating in milk. A thimble full of dull grey powder, finer than chalk. You once walked with her past a row of moles hanging by their noses from a wire fence, and she’d sent you back for a teacup and a knife and refused to say why. Crystals – you brought me one and I didn’t recognise it. It wasn’t local.

In her room, I sat on a chair so she could get a better look at me. There were dried leaves on a saucer, a spider in a jar. Her stare was as sharp as a glugful of whisky.

After that, I felt like she was always watching. I imagined her eyes on us as we walked. I saw her stitch her lips up tight at my laugh, which was loud, a barnacle goose overhead. The hiss of disapproval in the oak leaves. The tut of branches in the wind.

She was everywhere.

I hear her still. My own haunting. She is in my bones. I think I understand the darkness in her more than you do now. How someone can pull another to them, can move them like liquid silver.

As the light stays longer in each day, I can feel it in me.

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