‘Perhaps we should go back a bit,’ says Dr Shaw, ‘to when you first arrived in Herne Bay.’ She looks down at the paper in front of her. ‘I understand it had been some time since you were last here. What made you return?’
I sit and watch as Shaw crosses and uncrosses her legs, as she sips tea from a polystyrene beaker, wipes the dregs from her mouth and places the cup on the floor beside her feet. The large, oval clock that hangs on the wall behind her head ticks rhythmically as we sit in silence, one pondering the question, the other awaiting its answer. An answer I am sure she already knows.
I will be forty years old in a couple of months and as I sit in this tiny, strip-lit room I see a cake with lemon icing and buttercream filling. I see my mother flitting about in a tiny kitchen, cracking eggs into a bowl that is as big as her head. And I see myself, four years old, balancing on the edge of the kitchen counter watching her every move. ‘I want a cake the colour of the sun,’ I had told her. And my mother grants my wish, for after everything we have suffered together she can’t bear to let me down. If I want a sunshine cake then she will make sure I get one.
I hear Shaw clear her throat and I look up, my mother’s face disappearing into the woodchip wall.
‘I fancied a bit of sea air,’ I reply.
Shaw leans forward and takes a cardboard file out of her bag.
‘We’ve spoken to Paul Cheverell,’ she says, taking a piece of paper from the file. ‘He’s your brother-in-law, yes?’
I nod my head. My chest tightens. What has Paul been telling them?
‘He told us that you came back because there’d been a family bereavement,’ she says, reading from her notes. ‘It was your mother, I believe?’
‘Yes.’
I stare at the wall behind Shaw’s head, desperately trying to erase the image of my mother’s grave from my mind, but it’s all I can see.
‘Were you and your mother close?’
I look back at Shaw and tell myself that the sooner I answer her questions the sooner I can get out of here. I shall pretend this is work, that I’m sitting in a meeting room not a police cell, and the subject under discussion is someone else: an abstract mother; a person who doesn’t make cakes or call her daughter ‘lovey’ or cry at Elizabeth Barrett Browning poems. If I imagine this other person and not my real mother then I can get through this.
‘Yes, we were,’ I reply, smiling. Smile at the difficult ones, get them onside.
‘You visited her often?’
‘Not as much as I’d have liked.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Well, my job means I’m not often in the UK for more than a few days at a time, and when I am here it’s non-stop.’
I know how lame it sounds as the words come out but I can’t tell Shaw that I found it all so difficult; that the thought of seeing my beautiful mother in a nursing home, her mind gone, was too much to bear.
‘She was suffering from dementia?’
‘Yes.’
I try to hold on to the image of the abstract figure, the hypothetical mother, but it fractures and I see Mum bending over the kitchen table with a pile of scrap paper, trying to find out where she’d written my aunt’s phone number. Those scraps of paper were her memory, her lifeline, but then she would lose them and get even more confused. At one point I sent her a Dictaphone and I remember her sitting on the sofa trying to work out the buttons, confusion etched on her face. She had no idea what to do with it.
‘How long had she been in the nursing home?’
‘Not long,’ I reply. ‘Just a few months.’
‘She must have deteriorated rapidly.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Though Paul has told me since that it was peaceful; that she died in her sleep.’
‘She’d had a stroke, is that right?’
‘That’s what they told me,’ I reply with a shrug. I want to change the subject.
‘Your brother-in-law said you couldn’t get back for the funeral.’
Shaw’s voice is cold and dispassionate and it cuts through me, reinforcing my grief, my guilt.
‘That’s right.’
‘Why was that?’
Her words are bullets and I have to force myself to stay in my seat when every part of me wants to jump up and fight back.
‘I told you, my work keeps me overseas sometimes for weeks on end. I was in Syria.’
‘And you couldn’t get back?’
‘No. I wanted to but . . . it was difficult.’
‘So you missed your mother’s funeral. That must have been tough?’
‘Yes. It was.’
I try not to think of that afternoon, of the men and the blood and the child crying out for me, and instead I think about the journey back to the UK. Sitting there waiting for the plane to take off, I felt something inside me break; I even thought I heard it snap, somewhere in my chest. It hurt, it physically hurt, like when you stretch an elastic band to its limit and it breaks in your hand. And in the midst of my grief for my mother was a gnawing guilt; the knowledge that I was running from an atrocity that I had played a part in creating. I had done something terrible, something I could never forgive myself for.
But I don’t want to tell Shaw any of this, it’s none of her business.