"Mummy, when your mum died, did she have bones?
Matan is four. So let's turn that macabre question into an opportunity for education!
"Yes. But everyone has bones, not only dead people. Come here, let me show you. These are your bones, can you feel that? If you didn't have bones, you wouldn't be able to stand up. You'd be all floppy, and wobbly like jelly. Show me what you would look like if you didn't have bones."
He crumples onto the floor. I crumple too.
"But mummy, where did your mummy die? I mean where? Do you know where?"
"You mean which road? It's called Cromwell Road, near Aunty Olivia's house."
"Do you know exactly where? Will you show me?"
"Yes, I'll show you."
"But mummy. Mums look left and right, don't they?"
Which is worse? To tell a child that grown-ups don't always do the right thing, or to tell them that doing the right thing won't always protect you? Either answer is crushing, and four is too early to be crushed like that. The clock of his attention span starts ticking loudly. "But mummy, they do, don't they?"
"Yes, my darling. Mummies look left and right. It's very important to look left and right. I always look left and right. I'll always be here for you. I love you." Inside I hope that my bluff remains flesh for as long as he needs me. We cuddle, but I can't tell which of us is squeezing tightest.
Yesterday evening, Maya, who is two, found a photo of my mother in an old chest of drawers. My beautiful, twenty-year-old mother. My mother in the life she had before me, in the hands of my daughter who came after she was gone. Only our navels bear fleshy testimony to this sad game of generational tag.
In the photo, her face is turned slightly to the side and illuminated from the right. It was taken in a professional studio, in black and white, and printed on the kind of heavy matt paper used by people in the days when photos meant something. It's the first time I've ever seen it. By the date scrawled on it, I work out it was taken just after she left my two-year-old half sister with her ex-husband's parents, and then moved to London alone, masquerading as single and unencumbered. Not a trace of that story can be read on her face. I'll never know why that photo was taken, nor why then. Some questions no longer have anyone alive to answer them.
Holding the photo, Maya is running towards me in the way that only toddlers do. Everything urgent, everything important, everything new.
"Mummy, is the car coming to get her?" she asks, and I can hear a note of concern in her small voice.
Two months shy of her third birthday, she has no intimation of the exhaustible and non-repeatable nature of time. No linearity, no 'then', only the NOW of the NOW. Still strong in her is that prelapserian ignorance that, growing up, we shed. Her question immediately makes me think of Roland Barthes (hey, my two-year-old is a prodigy!). Looking at the 47-year-old photo, I say to myself: My mother is dead and she is going to die. The car has come and it is going to come.
"Mummy, can you put the photo where we can see it?"
"Ok my darlings, but not in the bedroom." (This unexpected superstition embarrasses me, even in front of myself).
Later, I lie down in between them in the bed they share. "Sing us your mummy's song," they say, merrily. I start stroking their little heads, thinking that if we can all just stay alive for long enough so that none of our deaths is obscene, then I do not need anything else in this world.
Show me the way to go home / I'm tired and I want to go to bed.
I can't believe it's me who's doing the stroking.
Where is my mother's hand?