She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me by Emma Brockes

door.”
    â€œBut if there’s a fire you can still get out?”
    I remove the note, lie down, and sleep for several hours with sudden, weightless abandon. Heaven, I think, might very well be a version of the high-end business hotel.
    When I wake up, it’s still raining. I go downstairs and walk gingerly out into the parking lot. Nothing happens. I turn left and walk down a sidewalk running alongside the highway. There are glass-and-chrome business parks on either side and a well-manicured strip of grass down the middle, where black men in overalls are either sleeping or touting for work. They look like figures drawn on a laminate sheet, overlaid from a different reality entirely. They emphatically fail to molest me when I pass.
    At the end of the street is a shopping mall, where I revel in the triumph of finding the adaptor plug I need and in the prices in Yo! Sushi, where even the purple plates are under a few dollars. By the time I get back to the room I’m euphoric. I have managed, in defiance of the hotel’s instructions, to walk along a road without incident. I pick up the phone and, looking in my notebook, turn to the first number on my list.
    â€œOh, my darling!” Joan’s voice bursts down the line as if released from a can. “Where even are you? In your hotel room?! Oh, I can’t bear it—what would your mother say? I’ll get Ted to drive over
this instant
and pick you up—”
    â€œOh, Joan, that’s lovely of you but—”
    â€œI can have the spare room all ready. It’s a bit cluttered, but alone in your hotel room, and is it even safe there? Oh, I’m almost crying, I”—a muffling as her hand goes over the mouthpiece—“in her hotel room, yes I’ve told her, oh, I can’t bear it—”
    â€œJoan, it’s the Crowne Plaza.”
    A howl down the telephone. “How much must it be costing!”
    I am out of sync, generationally, with Joan’s children because my mother had me so late. There is a more than twenty-year age gap between Joan’s daughter Jennifer and me. “Dear Aunty Paul,” wrote Jennifer to my mother once a year on her birthday. I reassure Joan I am happy in the hotel and arrange to meet her in two days’ time. I turn to the next number on my list.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    THE PHONE RINGS for a long time before someone picks up.
    â€œHello?” The voice is faint. My heart drops as if the cable snapped.
    Fay and I have spoken several times by now; there should be no taboo in it. But ringing from a distance of a few miles seems a different proposition to ringing her from England. Those conversations were distant, logistical, hampered by a bad line. Now, I’m nervous. It occurs to me it’s possible I’m about to embarrass myself. I have come all this way to claim a connection everyone else involved might think expired long ago.
    â€œFay, it’s Emma.”
    â€œEmma!” Her voice soars. “Are you here?”
    â€œI’m here!”
    â€œWhere are you?”
    My aunt does not object to me being in a hotel; boundaries are being observed, as are certain formal preliminaries necessary when white South Africans of a certain age encounter anyone, of any age, from anywhere else.
    I ask after her daughter, Victoria, and after telling me where she is and how she’s doing, my aunt assures me unbidden that her children were brought up to respect all human life. When her son was thirty-six, she says, he thanked his mother for teaching him to see everyone as equal, so that while some of his contemporaries are struggling to adjust to the new South Africa, he is not. When she herself goes on holiday, says my aunt, Maria, her maid, stays in the house and sleeps in the guest room like anyone else.
    â€œIt’s just so wonderful you’re here,” she says. Her voice is low and quiet. There is an urgency to the conversation that