Verona. Six nights and seven days. I’ve had fagioli, spaghetti and linguini. And pasta, of course. But this is no holiday – after two days I have built up the confidence to fulfill the purpose of this trip, to visit my mother in her home for the first time in five years. Shuffling up a grey stone pathway, a sense of dread rinsed from my toes to my head.
-
As light broke through the window of my mother’s stifling home, I can hear her whimpering in the next room. You see, my father and brother died when I was just three years old, in a horrific car accident. My mother was driving. She was left to raise me on her own. Every day she mourns her lost husband and child, and descends deeper into an inevitable madness. My earliest memories of her are of a character pale and sick with grief. The walls are thin in Verona; listed buildings crippled by the weight of their past. One day, it will crumble.
Looking around my bedroom, untouched and unmourned since I left five years ago, a thick layer of dust hugs the furniture. It’s the same story across the whole house – I’ve come to believe that mother one day hopes she will suffocate if she leaves it hanging in the air long enough. I make my way to her room. On her landing there is a shrine; but not a typical shrine. This shrine is littered with old family photographs, though you’d never guess because they’re all face down. Nevertheless there are candles burning every morning, surely lit in the early hours. In the bleak purgatory of this house, these candles provide the only light.
“Mamma, would you like some breakfast?” I call through her door. She spits “Oh you demon of a child, why do you trouble me with ridiculous questions so early in the day? Oh most woeful, woeful, woeful day!”
My mother goes another day without breakfast. At noon I make a point to visit her in her room, because she hasn’t been downstairs all morning. I creep up to her bedroom door and pause a second to listen. No noise at all, so I begin to panic. Opening the door I see her, in her sleeping gown, sitting cross-legged in a meditative (or rather, vegetative) state. I enquire “What are you thin-”
“If you’re a dog, mermaids are real.” She turned her head to look at me, eyes empty and gaping.
“What?”
“Sea lions. You know what they are? I’ll tell you what they are! They have heads like dogs, but their bottom half is like a fish … they live in the ocean. They’re like dog mermaids.”
“Why not come down for lunch?” I ask, breathlessly.
“No, no, no, no, no…”
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