Chapter 10
That drawing unleashed the memories from that time. My mother was starting to fray. The threads of rational thought, normal behaviour, and balanced responses were slowly being pulled away. Not just fraying at the edges, fraying from the inside, from the seam, the pattern becoming less recognisable as the days went on. She was stick thin, hardly eating and at times barely cognisant. She lit up all over the house, stubbing out her cigarettes on the floor, in saucers, in Wedgewood china, and anywhere else she liked. There were burn marks on the rugs. My grandmother now admonished the eternal cigarette in my mother’s hand.
It started as an entreaty, grew into kind but firm advice, eventually blossoming into a grenade of anger tossed full into my mother’s bunker of vagueness. Marga
