On 13th December 2005 I was rehearsing with the Bulgarian Choir at the embassy in South Kensington. Bulgarian choral music employs unique harmonies and the voice is projected through the head, often adopting a tightened soft palate, rather than through the chest. It’s more than mysterious, and very enchanting. Being a part of that sound, as in a choir, you feel like your whole body manifests the vibrations of the music. After the rehearsal I started making my way to the tube, when my sister called. Did I know where Mum was? “Probably at bridge, tap or Japanese,” I said. She was always busy, with hobbies or friends. I thought nothing of it until my phone rang again, this time as my train was pulling out of Westminster station and I momentarily had reception. It was my sister again, but the line broke off as we entered a tunnel. My stomach sank.
As soon as I got out of the station at Swiss Cottage, I called my sister. She asked me if I was on the way to the hospital. What did she mean, ‘on the way to the hospital?’ Hadn’t Einav told me, she asked, about the accident? Accident?!? She explained. My mother, who rode her bike to and from work, had been involved in an accident and was now at St George’s Hospital in Tooting. I ran home and Einav and I called a taxi to take us there. Over the course of the journey I spoke to my sister several times and each time received a new splinter of information. She was being operated on. They didn’t know how serious it was. Her pelvis was broken. No, not broken, shattered. (At this I burst into tears). The journey took an agonising 45 minutes. When we finally got to casualty at St George’s we were led through to a special room where my sister was waiting. Nobody visiting a relative in casualty wants to be led through to a special room. A nurse came through and led us upstairs to the ward near the operating theatre where they were working on my mother. I asked the nurse how my mother was doing. The nurse mentioned head injuries. New information all the time. Stone-heavy drips of new information. No one was smiling. When we got upstairs we were led to another special room and shortly afterwards two policemen joined us. The 12 hours we were to spend in that room were some of the worst of my life. Until about 4am we had no idea whether she was going to live or die and, if she were to live, how life-changing her injuries would be. We waited - Einav, me, my sister, and the Police Family Liason Officer, Steve Bates. Like a special room, no-one wants to be assigned a Police Family Liason Officer. One of the policemen with Bates asked if these hours could be counted as overtime. How disparate our concerns were at that moment and in that place, when all we wanted was the news that she was alive, that we could see her, could talk to her, could hold her.
We spent the night at turns crying, at turns numb, going for aimless walks around the deserted hospital car park, pondering the various possible outcomes. It is not possible, in words, to describe how horrible it was to wait in that room all night. I've never felt so lost, so like a hostage. At one point I remember announcing, in tones aimed mostly at convincing myself, that whatever happened we would have to cope. We would have to cope. At around 3.30am my father arrived with food that none of us could eat.
“It’s extremely unlikely that she’s going to make it.” 4am. Two surgeons sat down on the low sofa next to us, sporting well-rehearsed airs of gravity. Their hands had been inside my mother. “Extremely unlikely.” She was bleeding, and they could not stop it.
The sight I saw in the ICU was horrific. She was no longer tall, solid, strong and vivid. She was shrunken, pale, and hunched up on the pillows in a posture that I have never seen anyone assume in conscious life. All around her and coming in and out of various orifices were tubes, wires and machines. She was surrounded by medical personnel who were working furiously at tending to her, keeping what was left of her alive. The blanket over her body was raised high around the area of her pelvis, where a large cage was holding her splintered body together. I approached my mother, who became at once both the person whose face I knew best in this world, and at the same time, a stranger. I held her hand. It was cold and limp. A puncture wound where a cannula had been was bleeding. No, not bleeding, dripping. Pouring. The blood, no longer able to clot, was simply falling out of her body and onto mine. I came up close to her, still holding her dripping hand, and began to speak. People say that the sense of hearing is often the last to go, but I will never know whether she heard what I said and I doubt that she did. What remained of her at that stage was less than a shadow. I told her I loved her and that I would try and live as she had taught me. That was all I said, but I repeated it many times over in several different configurations, repeating it as though the length of my speech could keep her alive. And then I said goodbye. I left, washed her blood off my hands and went back with Einav to the special room.
Looking back I’ve often wondered why we didn’t spend the whole night sitting at her side. At the time, it just didn’t seem to have been an option. Was it because the medical personnel were too busy, encircling her with their procedures and devices? Was it because the doctors who liaised with us didn’t really present it as an possibility? Was it because of the uncanny attitude of passivity that we collectively adopted in that room, the sudden onset of impotence and lack of agency? Or maybe we just didn’t want to? Had she been conscious, I would have been there. Maybe if there had been some hope of her surviving, I would have been there. But she didn’t have a hope and I wasn’t there for her. She gave me entrance into this world and I failed to accompany her departure.
As soon as the nurse came into the special room it was obvious that my mother was dead. I don’t remember her words, all I remember is how young she was, and that she was crying. And at that point a fire alarm went off, as though speaking on our behalves. It was loud, like our pain. And it was a protest. But it was cruel, because it was routine, and it would come to symbolise what everyone learns when they lose someone they love. That even as people die, daily life continues oblivious, nonchalant and mundane. Nothing but an 8am fire alarm drill at a south London hospital.
The journey home took us through unchanged London streets and onto the tube, whose passengers were going to work even though my mother was dead. We arrived home, shaking from the adrenaline of sleep deprivation, and the shock of a changed world. And then it hit me. Someone had killed my mother. And worse, that bastard had defined her last moments, and had somehow shared them with her. By killing her, he had become an important person in her life. Perhaps he had been the last person to have seen her alive.
Einav and I moved to my mother’s house, where my sister still lives, and together we instinctively sat a kind of shiva . We slept in my mother’s bed, which still had her smell. Visitors came, sat with us, brought food. I constantly had the feeling we were waiting for something, but for what? For her to walk through the door? For the pain to pass? It was the most torturous wait I have ever endured, and yet there was nothing to wait for anymore.
The police family liaison officer told us what had happened that night. My mother had been killed on a pedestrian/cycle crossing on the A4/Cromwell Road. She had landed in the gutter not 50 yards from home. The man who hit her, in his Alfa Romeo (why is it that details matter?), had not been a bastard at all, but a kind man, a surgeon on his way home from a hospital shift. His light had apparently been green, hers red. Colours have never had such a heavy meaning. It was some years before I could accept what this meant: that my mother had perhaps been reckless, and responsible in some way for her own death; and it took even longer for me to become angry with her on that account. The surgeon had got out of his car, administered first aid, and held her head while waiting for the ambulance. That she got to spend the last few moments of her conscious life in his presence is a great comfort. When we met him at the inquest, I hugged him and said, "I know it wasn't your fault."
In those early days, I blamed not my mother, certainly not the surgeon, but the road itself. The senselessness created such a vacuum; I had to fill it. Obsessively I traced the road on maps of London, noticing the way it ruthlessly sliced through the west of the city, splitting it into two pieces and gathering momentum until it reached Earl’s Court where it wantonly swallowed up my mother. Every part of that road had been responsible. Its delta of estuaries: Sloane Street, Fulham Road, Kensington Road, Old Brompton Road, Queen’s Gate, Gloucester Road, and, worst of all, Earl’s Court Road were all tainted with her blood. But most guilty of all was its source - Hyde Park Corner, which, like a demonic heart, relentlessly pumped traffic like blood, and cars like platelets into this artery of death.
I wish I had not gone to identify her body. In some way I thought that seeing her would help mitigate the denial element of grief. But now I think it was a mistake. Her best friend, Mark, accompanied me to the mortuary at St George’s, where we were met by the assistant coroner, a young, slight man with a necessarily serious manner. He led us into the room where she - or, at least, her body - lay on a gurney, covered up to the neck with a crisp white sheet. The room had a very particular smell, a mixture of sweetness and chemicals such that I have not smelt anywhere else. Her skin was pale and waxy. Employing heavy use of a gel or cream, someone had styled her hair in such a way as I had never seen her wear it in life. This made me cross, to see that she had been touched and handled in an intimate way by strangers who now knew her in a way she would never know them. There were some scratches and grazes on her face, but nothing too horrific. What was horrific was her absolute stillness. No matter how deeply a living person may try to enter into a meditative state, no matter how motionless a comatose patient may appear to be, nothing approaches that state of stillness achieved by a dead person. It was not merely the lack of physical movement or breathing that I perceived there in that room, watching my mother. What I saw was the total absence of the humming vibration of life, as though I could sense that the blood under her skin was stagnant. The configuration of her mouth, the way it lay in her face like an open gash, at once taut but also slackened, epitomised this unholy stillness. Mark kissed her on the forehead, but I couldn’t, and we left. I didn’t know then that I would later have flashbacks of my mother lying dead on the gurney, and that those flashbacks would also include the smell of the room where she lay.
A week after she died, I cried ugly like a baby, screaming "Mummy" and stamping my foot as though a tantrum would bring her back.
I miss my mother so much. Sometimes I feel that I'm her, especially when I'm relaxed, and I can feel her looking through my eyes. It's as though through loving someone we consume them and they can't possibly leave.
“The body was that of a well-nourished Caucasian female in her fifties.” The first line of the autopsy report said more about how absurd, how wrong her death was than anything. A doctor friend of mine read through it with me and explained the parts I couldn’t understand. I learnt about body parts I didn’t know existed. My mother was so badly injured by the accident, said my friend, that, had the surgeons known about the extent of the damage before going in, they would not have bothered. Fast metal versus soft flesh is an inequitable fight.
What was left of her - her eyes and her heart valves - we donated. Someone somewhere is walking around with them. I hope.
