The Jewel by Neil Hegarty

Author:Neil Hegarty [Hegarty, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789541793
Publisher: Head of Zeus

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His mother had died early in the city in the sky: a cancer swept through her in a matter of weeks, and she threw herself into this new experience with something like gusto. The tower, with its wide views and gales and excesses of fresh air, had worn her out: it was ‘too much, altogether,’ she said, and she closed her eyes and went with the gobbling, greedy cancer.

She seemed to expect that her son would be fine, left alone. Regina Road with its starched antimacassars and its crisp pastry might just as well never have existed. The furniture came with her, but the antimacassars were washed and folded in tissue paper and placed in a drawer, never to be seen again; and the three-piece suite, naked without the antimacassars, filled up the sitting room in the sky, so much so there was hardly room to move. She didn’t mind that, because she didn’t move much, after a while. No pastry, either. Not much cooking, and John she left to fend for himself.

It was as though she had placed the entirety of her past life into the drawer with the antimacassars. It was as though he had been placed there, too, and his dead father, and just about everything that meant anything to him – and his disorientation was all the more dreadful for being silent. She didn’t want to know about it, and there was nobody else to tell. There was only this light-filled flat in the sky, and the wind that screamed on stormy nights, and whistled thinly, along with the water pipes, most of the rest of the time.

She seemed, in fact, to think that he would be well rid of her: all those hours spent trailing home, back and forth to their tower, up in the lift and down again: this time could be put to better use. He could get himself a place of his own (with what? – but this thought also didn’t seem to occur to her) and get on with his life, without any irritations or distraction. None of this was said, and so he couldn’t quarrel with any piece of it, but it was all perfectly understood, and none of it made sense.

And, get on with what, exactly?

But when she was gone – and it was a quiet crematorium affair for her, and no drinking in the Prince Regent to send her on her way; that was all definitively over, now – he did indeed leave their flat in the sky and return to earth. Maybe his mum had had some sort of premonition of what he might do, and what he might become: because he did feel a sense of liberation. Guiltily, with grief distilled inside these sensations of freedom he was feeling – yet liberation, just the same. It had been punishing (for him, though apparently not for her; at any rate, she disguised it very well) to see how cancer consumed a body from within, leaving skin stretched

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