Mother Read online

  Praise for Mother: A Memoir

  ‘A tender and graceful study of parents and children, and a finely judged and measured attempt to capture the flitting, quicksilver shapes of what we keep and what we lose: the touch, the tone, the gaze of the past as it fades. It is a moving and beautifully achieved memoir, and a testament to the writer’s skill and generosity of spirit.’

  Hilary Mantel

  Praise for Nicholas Royle’s novels

  An English Guide to Birdwatching

  ‘This is a novel operating at the outer edges of the form, deep in the avant-garde…play[ing] brilliantly in the fertile ground between fiction and memoir. An English Guide to Birdwatching is Rachel Cusk rewritten by Georges Bataille, full of strange sex, sudden violence and surreal twists. Illuminated throughout with gorgeous illustrations by Natalia Gasson, this is a novel that will charm, unsettle and baffle in equal measure.’

  Alex Preston, Financial Times

  ‘Great books are still written, they just have to take place in Literature, the continent that never forgets. While reading An English Guide to Birdwatching, I travelled in all the time periods, places, countries of literature. It was more than an odyssey…’

  Hélène Cixous

  ‘A metafictional fever dream.’

  The Guardian

  ‘This is one of the strangest novels I’ve read in years. Digressive but coercive, impassioned but fey (digressive and coercive, impassioned and fey), it’s a curiously compelling investigation of the nature of writing and the writing of nature. I ended it moved in ways I could not explain; I also ended it rather dizzied and thoroughly gulled.’

  Robert Macfarlane

  ‘An ambitious and far-reaching work that tackles many subjects … but most of all, it’s about language: how vocabulary, tone, emphasis, linguistic provenance, double meanings, even rhythm define the way we consume every aspect of life… It’s also sexy, funny and, in quieter moments, very touching. There is heartfelt writing here… we come to think about the nature of love, and about our taking for granted the world beyond language; the sea, the sky, and the birds. Marvellous..’

  Big Issue

  ‘Royle has achieved what no other British writer has yet managed to achieve: to write about birds, people, bankers, capitalism, and climate change all together and in a way that asks us not only to listen but also moves us to act upon what we hear.’

  Alex Lockwood

  ‘This is a book that will bring delight to anyone who likes the idea of a novel in a novel in a novel… A fantastic work of literary fiction … breaking boundaries and fourth walls to become something unique and highly enjoyable..’

  The Worm Hole

  ‘A daring novel, both wickedly playful and deeply touching.’

  Alison Moore

  ‘A mischievous, comic and inventive literary achievement.

  Booktime magazine

  Quilt

  ‘A book of mythological power. Quilt is unforgettable, like all those great pieces of fiction that are fed by our immemorial root system, the human dream of metamorphosis.’

  Hélène Cixous

  ‘It is quiet, lapidary, and teases out the tangled filaments that link figuration to fact and insight to feeling with the unnerving stealth of a submarine predator.’

  Will Self

  ‘An intense study of grief and mental disintegration, a lexical celebration and a psychological conundrum … Royle explores loss and alienation perceptively and inventively.’

  The Guardian

  ‘Royle’s baroque, athletic prose… confers a strong sense of the “strangeness” of English, “which, after all, belongs to no one” and should be continually reinvented … Moments of delightfully eccentric humour and impressive linguistic experimentalism.’

  The Observer

  ‘A work of remarkable imaginative energy.’

  Frank Kermode

  ‘It is in those commonplace moments at the end of a life … moments which Nicholas Royle describes with such piercing accuracy, when this novel is truly at its strangest.’

  Times Literary Supplement

  ‘What deceptively begins as a more or less realistic piece of autobiographical fiction evolves into an astonishing narrative that puts into question the very notion of everyday reality. A highly readable and stunningly original experiment in literary form.’

  Leo Bersani

  ‘Captures the absolute dislocating strangeness of bereavement. While the novel is bursting with inventive wordplay, Royle’s use of language is most agile and beautiful in his descriptions of rays … The shifts in point of view have a sort of fairground quality to them, suddenly lurching, demanding your compliance, but it is the way the storyline ultimately develops that takes the breath away.’

  New Statesman

  ‘Quilt is one of those books I long for but come across rarely… It is strange, surprising, sui generis … with its overturning qualities, its ability to stick in the head while resisting resolution, and its determination not to leave the reader feeling that the end of the text is the end of the reading experience. What my reading life needs – what the literary world needs – is more Quilts and fewer comfort blankets.’

  John Self, The Asylum

  For

  Sam, Sebastian, Alexi, Elena,

  William and Augustus

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Pre-word

  Marbles

  If you can’t remember

  Surface

  Epistolary

  Maxwellian

  Who’s turned the lights out?

  Out of the picture

  Gugga

  Simon

  Permissive

  Nurse

  Chote

  Demonic

  Polar bear

  Snap

  Emily’s analyses

  Way-on-High

  Painter

  Speechless

  Speechful

  With best wishes

  Air

  Ghosts

  Wit

  Earth

  A dream

  To catch a mouse

  Giftie

  Little creatures

  Bombs away

  Woman reader

  Meat

  Perspectives

  Beyond recognition

  Water

  Fizzog

  Dreamother

  Funereal

  Trap

  Autobiography

  Worlds not realised

  Machine

  Mother tongue

  B-r-ring!

  Flowers

  Handbag

  The instant of her death

  Book

  Planet

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Pre-word

  Pre-word In my mind’s eye she is sitting at the circular white Formica-top table in the corner. Morning sunlight fills the kitchen. She has a cup of milky Nescafé Gold Blend and is smoking a purple Silk Cut. She is dressed for comfort in floral bronze-and-brown blouse and blue jumper with light gray slacks and blue slippers. She is absorbed in a crossword (The Times) but not oblivious. She does what always takes me aback. She reads out one of the clues. As if I’d know the answer. Her gift for crosswords is alien to me. I get stuck at the first ambiguity or double-meaning. Whereas she sweeps through all illusions allusions red herrings and anagrams and is done most days by lunchtime. But her fondness for crossword puzzles is inseparable from my interest in words. Where they come from. What they might be doing. Earliest recorded use of ‘In my mind’s eye’: Shakespeare’s Hamlet (around 1599). Referring to the Ghost.

  My mother died years ago. What has induced me to write about her after all this time remains myste
rious to me. It is connected to the climate crisis. As the natural historian David Attenborough says: ‘the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.’ In ways I cannot pretend to fathom I have found that writing about my mother is bound up with writing about Mother Nature and Mother Earth. And no doubt it has to do also with my own ageing and the buried life of mourning. The strange timetables of realisation and loss. A memoir is ‘a written record of a person’s knowledge of events or of a person’s own experiences’. ‘A record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation.’ So the dictionaries tell us. But this memoir of my mother makes no attempt at a comprehensive record. It reveals very little about her early life or adolescence. Friends and lovers. Her education. Travel. Work. It doesn’t offer any sort of rounded picture. It seems less a record of events than a grappling with what escapes words. Not just love and loss but fire and air and water and earth. Smell and music. Voice and touch.

  I knew from the outset that I couldn’t write a model kind of book. For reasons as plentiful as blackberries the classic memoir conforms to certain established principles. The linear and chronological. An orderly unfolding of information and impressions. In a conventional memoir there’s no messing about with the strange materiality of writing or exploration of how ‘memory’ and ‘mother’ might be inseparable. A memoir has no business with the stuff of crosswords. Anagrams and palindromes. Puns and double-meaning. But in the case of my mother these things are in play from the beginning. MAM. Mother: A Memoir.

  What is this mother? Who says it? To whom? First and foremost the title refers to my mother. But all of us have or had one. Does that distinction between past (‘had’) and present (‘have’) hold any real meaning? Isn’t a mother not just for keeps but the very figure who keeps watch over keeping? Mother: A Memoir: the title might be construed as a sort of crossword clue. ‘Memoir’ comes from an Old French feminine noun for ‘an act of commemoration, especially of the dead’: memoire. Somewhere down the centuries the word became masculine. I am intrigued by this sense of a buried or repressed feminine. I am drawn to trying to explore the mystery of the mother of memory. Mother as memoir. As the act and passion of memory as such. ‘Mother’ has to do with birth. With the giving and gift of life. But she also has to do with the earth. The sea. The unconscious. Dreams. ‘Mother’ for me is not only a woman called Kathleen Beatrice McAdam. Née as people say. Nay. I love my mother’s ‘birth names’: my father called her Kathleen while her sisters and most others called her Kate. But these names also seem a kind of violence and absurdity. She is prior to names. Pre-name. Pre-word.

  Marbles

  I have lost plenty of people. Every loss is a lessening. Every loss makes one more aware of how much there is to lose. But the death of my mother was something else. I don’t know when she died. She had dementia. For ten years she was among us in the midst of life cut off. An island going down under rising sea-levels. A skyscraper collapsing in a decade-long earthquake. A sunset sleepier than a druid’s daydream. It began in her mid-sixties. It was over before her seventy-fifth birthday. It wasn’t like an island or a skyscraper or a sunset. These similes are to no purpose. Nothing captures the pace of her descent into where she went.

  Like others near and dear I pretended it wasn’t happening. I’d ask if she would like a coffee. I’d suggest we go shopping or take a drive down to the sea. I’d say these things as if she was right as rain. I appeared to be unscathed. Not sinking an inch. I would see that she wasn’t answering but act as if the pause in the footage was someone else’s problem. A technical glitch. It could be ignored. It would come clear in a moment. I could see that she was not listening. She was looking out of the window at the birds around the bird-table. I would repeat the question. She would turn to me with whorls in her eyes. She would look in my direction as if. As if if. As if if I could just repeat the question one more time – just once more – it would connect. Repetition the mother of memory. As if if things could just rewind this era might start over. Here we are. Regained. We’d drive down to the coast. Walk arm in arm past the fishermen’s huts along the dark Jurassic shore. Drive over the fragile medieval bridge into the little town and sit in one of her favourite pubs. She would have her cup of coffee. I would have my pint of beer.

  When does a mother die?

  I’m losing my marbles.

  So she said one autumn morning in Devon. It was in the kitchen. I had just taken a coffee bean out of the machine and was chewing it slowly.

  Losing her marbles. In the past she might have said this of an old friend or elderly family member. My grandfather’s cousin or my mother’s great-aunt in Scotland whom we would not see for several years at a time. She and I would head north. Like a band on tour. A duo without audience. We would drive through the Great Glen. Listening to the jigging charm and melancholy of Mark Knopfler’s Local Hero or the road-to-nowhere Little Creatures album by Talking Heads. We would stop on Skye or Mull. Or we’d go up east – away past Loch Ness and down again. We would stay in bed-and-breakfasts. Sharing a twin room. At some point on the tour (as arranged in advance by letter) we visited Cousin Nessie in her time-capsule of a cottage on the Square at Drymen. Cups and saucers clinked and teaspoons tinkled. The clock of ages on the mantelpiece stumped up the hour and the half- and the quarter-hours in strange accusation. What is the past? What is a family? It made our hearts knock together. After tea and scones we left and my mother remarked that Nessie was losing her marbles. She said it with all the peremptoriness of a High Court judge. The verdict was sound.

  On other occasions the loss of marbles escaped me. I had to reconsider what had taken place. The gestures. The looks. Things said. With a friend of my father’s in Somerset it had not been clear. But my mother had picked it up. Visible as an item of litter in an otherwise spotless National Trust garden. She was Acute personified. A bloodhound for lunacy in others. She would note a detail. A failure to retain something just said. An absence of attention. A lower score on the conversation chart. I always imagined her judging what others said – assessing their ability in the arena of wit and recollection and story-telling fast as lightning. And about my father’s friend my mother was right. Within months he went from absent-minded to pit-stop care home to pushing up the daisies.

  There must have been a point at which we failed to go back to see Cousin Nessie. Solitary in her time-capsule at Hillview Cottage. Her name cropped up only later. She’d passed away. The British way is with ‘away’. Americans go without it. She’d passed. The away may be superfluous but the American idiom has a Christian tint: when people pass they pass to the Lord God or to heaven. And ‘away’ is such a dreamy two-in-one word. Fleet but longing. These details matter. The matter of my mater. Matador killing metaphor. My mother’s every utterance was a play before the law of written or printed matter. As if her voice threw round each word a gentle mantle of quotation marks. As if she spoke from a love for the provisional that understood that no locution was ever playful enough. A mind mid-clue. On occasion my mother would say that someone had died or passed away. But more often she would fling up some funny everyday idiom. Her father’s cousin in the Central Region was pushing up the daisies like the man in Somerset. She had popped her clogs.

  Besides a fine nose for marble-loss my mother had a great taste for irony. ‘Irony’: I picture the word wrought and looped – gappy and splendid in the manner of the fencing in her beloved Richmond Park. Just another word for the invisible cloaks and lassos thrown. Many people failed to get her. A shopkeeper or dog-owner caught up in conversation could very soon be immobilised by her tongue. Impossible to ascertain the status of what this quick-witted woman had just said. They should all be strung up. Did she mean it? You look so much younger. Did she mean it? She could pull herself to pieces in a minute twenty times a day but did she ever mean any of it?

  Still I don’t recall her ever saying in jest: I’m losing my marbles. For e
xample at having mislaid the car key. Or forgetting an optician’s appointment. Which made the declaration that bright autumn morning with the intensity of the Colombian coffee bean disintegrating in my mouth all the more sickening.

  My father and I had understood for months that something terrible was happening. You’ve been losing them for a good while (one of us might well have retorted). They’ve been rolling around scattering this way and that – slipping under the skirting-boards disappearing into previously unknown nooks and crannies whizzed off without a murmur every which way in a muted nightmare pinball – for a good while already. Nothing good about it. A terrible while. Hideous wile of a while. For you too must have known. And we had said nothing. Too choked to say. But now for the first time you were saying it yourself.

  They were the saddest words ever spoken to me. I wanted it to be a duo’s refrain. I’m losing my marbles. A playful echo of other times. A riff of her old self making light of fetid fate. I wanted it to be immediately untrue. I wanted the judge to remove her wig and laugh the moment down the plughole. When my brother Simon and I shared a bedroom as boys and at night pleaded with her to come and frighten us by entering the room in different costumes – one minute a sheeted spectre – the next a fortune-teller – the next a shadowy crocodile – how we thrilled to be frightened. Knowing it was our mother in disguise. And now she was making a throwaway colloquialism scarier than a declaration of nuclear war. I was chilled to the marrow. Moribund metaphor. Icing on the cadaver cake. Cold clammy ivy wrapped my innards in an instant. And tears fell from my face incongruous as hot ice. I swallowed the fragments of the coffee bean. I prepared to vomit.

  Nothing came. What to say? Rolling down my cheeks. My water marbles.

  Ludicrous to pretend: No of course you’re not. Don’t be daft darling mother. Or to effuse: Yes yes of course. We had noticed. That’s why we’ve been trying to set up an appointment with the doctor. So that we can get you a proper diagnosis and see what medication might be prescribed.