New Animal by Ella Baxter (speed reading book .TXT) 📕

I want her to teach me the soup recipe with the soaked barley, and I want us to go and get fake nails like we did last summer and tap our fingers on every surface of Aurelia’s, testing the clicking sounds. I want us to take Spanish classes together, and do the Vogue diet where you only eat boiled eggs and white wine for four days straight. I want to talk about life and death with her.

As I am weighing up whether I can use the strip of chairs as a battering ram to break down her door, the nurse stands aside and we are finally allowed in.

I see the number of tubes that reach into her like reverse roots. Her thick, strong mother arms are filled with them, and it terrifies me. I stand at the furthest point from her, my back wedged into the corner. I look at my feet, willing them forward, but they are frozen.

Simon sits next to her, kissing her hand, while Vincent paces the length of her bed, before wrapping one hand around her foot. I can see the shape of her toes through the white waffle blanket. She has the most beautiful feet.

‘You need to come back to us.’ He rubs her big toe with his thumb.

I don’t realise Judy is standing next to me until I feel her shoulder touching mine. Carmen also appears, pink-eyed, and talks emphatically to a different nurse. Hugh crouches next to Simon stroking his knee, and I hear him murmuring things like, You’re doing so well. We will get through this, as Simon puts his face in her hand, curling her fingers with his own so that they cradle him.

The new nurse walks around my mother’s bed holding a clipboard. Frowning, she presses the call button. I remain nice and still, using all my meditation skills and willpower to remain standing quietly as the distress in the room builds.

The doctor purposely slows his pace as he comes through the door. Someone must have taught him that he shouldn’t rush his way through bad news, but the slow speed doesn’t suit him. He has a trim waist and a neat haircut, and I know that he could walk a whole wing of the building in a few seconds if needed. This is a man who might swim forty laps before breakfast. He checks my mother’s tubes and her monitor, and we all learn that she’s dead by his lack of speed.

The doctor looks around warily then approaches me. ‘Arrangements will need to be made,’ he says. ‘If you contact a funeral service, they can take care of relocating her, otherwise she will be transferred to the hospital morgue.’

‘We are the funeral service,’ I say.

Vincent interrupts. ‘My wife is not going into the morgue. Are you crazy? She’s coming home with us. You have offended me. This is very offensive. What’s your name? Who’s your supervisor?’

Simon pulls a set of keys from his pocket. ‘We can take her today,’ he says, handing them to Carmen, who moves quickly towards the door. Hugh stands and hugs Simon’s head awkwardly to the side of his body.

‘I’ll go and get things ready for her back at work,’ Judy says, rushing to catch up to Carmen.

I look at my mother. I can feel her tugging at the invisible line between us. Yanking it from afar. The umbilical cord. I plug my bellybutton with my finger. I miss her and I need her, and she’s me, or a part of me at least, and I haven’t fully absorbed her yet. I haven’t gleaned all the woman-ness from her, which is what a daughter does. Whose daughter am I now? Where has she gone?

I’ve never seen Carmen drive, but the van arrives faster than seems physically possible, given the distance, and our mother is zipped into a bag and loaded into the back—a slice of trauma seared into each of us to be digested at another point in time. Vincent insists on driving us home in my car, even though he looks haggard, while Hugh and Carmen travel behind in the van.

‘Your mother,’ Vincent says, while indicating right and merging left, ‘loved you both so much.’

I can’t breathe. I take off my bra underneath my dress, which is still open at the back. I need a window open. I need a glass of water.

‘Who will tell your dad?’ Vincent glances at me in the rear-view mirror, looking concerned because everyone knows Jack is still mourning a divorce from decades ago. Which one of us is willing to break this news?

‘Dad,’ Simon repeats, but I’m not sure if he’s referring to Vincent or our birth father, Jack.

At home, I lie on my bed with the air conditioner on high, holding my body in the same position as my mother’s in the refrigerated unit at Aurelia’s. Vincent has left all the windows open in the main house, and for hours strange noises bounce between our two homes. It sounds as if he’s taking everything apart and putting it back together, like the act itself will apply to him.

I think of my mother’s plump form wearing the landscape down, dropping skin cells and banging doors shut, making her mark on the world in various ways, even the book by her bed, marked halfway through with a folded page. Death always comes too soon, like a bus leaving minutes earlier than the timetable said it would. I want to feel her weight and measure her length. I want to know the exact colour of her eyes. What scars she has. I want to put her favourite things in a pile, and then I want to be underneath the pile. I douse the bungalow in her perfume but it brings no comfort. No peace.

I run to the bathroom in the main house and search through the washing basket until I find her sundress. I clutch it to my chest and carry it back to my bungalow,