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

was absent from the previous ones.
    â€œI’m glad I’m here.”
    Fay doesn’t know precisely where all her siblings are, but there is a chain of command through which they can, if necessary, be reached and which is how news of my mother’s death spread. She tells me some family news, which I receive like a drink of water after crossing a desert. Since leaving Johannesburg, her sister Doreen has sold all her furniture and practically become a nomad. “I couldn’t,” says Fay. “I need the—what’s the word? Security.”
    â€œWhat about Tony?” I ask.
    â€œTony is Tony. He means well. It just doesn’t always come out right.”
    â€œAnd Steven?”
    â€œSteven is Steven.”
    I sit on the edge of the bed in the gathering gloom. The only light in the room is from the spots above the minibar and the glowing LED of the alarm clock. My aunt tells me about these people I have heard of all my life, whose characters, like those from a novel, I am familiar with as archetypes: Arty, Sporty, Sneaky, Fighty, Saintly, Baby, and Dead—although the designations overlap. By the sound of it everyone is a bit fighty and more than one is dead. “Fay was my baby, Steve was my baby.” Out of all of them, Fay, I think, is the one who will tell me what I want to know.
    â€œYou know your mother was called Pauline before she changed it to Paula?” says my aunt.
    â€œYes, I know.”
    Fay says this was because “the first thing she did when she got off the boat in England was to buy a pair of shoes, and the label in them said Paula, so that’s what she called herself.” I laugh indulgently. There is nothing in the Story of How I Arrived on These Shores about this. Besides, my mother would never have named herself after a pair of shoes. She changed her name because she’d always thought “Pauline” was soppy.
    Fay tells me my mother used to take her to the central library in Johannesburg when she was a little girl. She made her read
Anne of Green Gables
. “Me, too,” I say.
    She tells me the story of Derek, an old boyfriend of my mother’s who once visited the house and made a profound impression on the younger siblings. He owned a station wagon—no one could understand why my mother didn’t marry him. She and Derek were going to a dance. When he came to the door, says my aunt, my mother stepped out in an exquisite navy dress with a white collar. Everyone gasped. And then, crossing the room, she caught the dress on a baby’s wicker pram belonging to Fay and it ripped. Fay was seven; it was just after Christmas. My mother didn’t shout, says Fay, which made her feel even worse. “I remember it so clearly. It was such a beautiful dress. I don’t remember Derek at all. But I remember that dress. She looked so beautiful. I felt terrible when it ripped.”
    Several times, we push up against the boundaries of what can and cannot be said, buffeting and retreating like a boat trying to dock in bad weather. When I say, tentatively, that I find it useful to write things down sometimes, I sense her bristle and withdraw.
    I tell my aunt I need a few days to settle in, and we arrange to meet at the weekend. I will stay over at her house on Saturday night and we’ll have Sunday to catch up. She asks what I’d like to eat and should she buy yogurts, “or yoggies, as your mother used to call them. I can just hear her saying it.” So can I. A chill passes through me. “Yogurt would be lovely,” I say.
    Toward the end of the conversation, my aunt says, “I feel terrible, I never knew her mother’s name.” I sometimes forget they had different mothers, or any mothers at all, so absent from my mother’s narrative was her stepmother. Fay has barely mentioned Marjorie either.
    â€œHer mother’s name was Sarah,” I say.
    â€œSarah!” says my aunt. We are so desperate