Same Time Next Week

Chapter 46

Amanda bolted into the hospital and up the stairs because the lifts usually took ages to arrive. She crashed down the corridor and rang the bell for admittance to the ward. She had to ring again, her impatience burning a hole inside her.

Bradley and Kerry were sitting in the private room where their mother was put after her shingles diagnosis. Ingrid was lying peacefully, her mouth fallen open, but she wasn’t asleep, there was a telling difference in her waxy pallor, the essence of her missing.

Amanda leaned over the side of the bed and held her, the little girl inside her letting out, Mummy, mummy, I love you. A last kiss, her skin was already cold.

‘What happened?’ she asked Bradley.

‘She died,’ said Kerry, sorrowfully dabbing her eyes with some tissues grabbed from a nearby box.

Amanda could have lamped her.

‘When?’

‘We hadn’t been here long. She was sleeping, then she let out this long ragged breath and Kerry had the foresight to go and fetch a doctor. She slipped away, just like that. We had to go and get a coffee and something to eat… for the shock. And we rang you from the cafeteria.’

Amanda slumped down onto the chair beside the bed. This was too big to take in, she hadn’t expected it. Ingrid was getting better, they said, the infection was clearing. Another change to acclimatise to. She couldn’t cry, her tears were frozen behind her eyes.

‘Her heart just stopped. It couldn’t have been more peaceful. I was holding her hand,’ said Bradley.

‘She’d have liked that,’ replied Amanda. No better way for her to go. ‘What happens now?’

‘They’ve given me a booklet. As next of kin, I—’

‘Sorry, what?’ Amanda’s head snapped up.

‘Amanda, don’t let’s argue now. Mother named me as next of kin. You know she was like that, the son should be next of kin.’

‘It’s not the time nor the place to argue,’ added Kerry in that silly squeak of hers.

Amanda’s eyes burned in her direction and Kerry took her cue.

‘I’ll let you talk,’ she said and scurried out.

‘I might as well tell you, Mother wanted one of those no fuss cremations,’ said Bradley, when the door was shut.

‘What?’

‘She said—’

‘For god’s sake, Bradley, do we have to talk about this now? She’s only just gone.’

‘I don’t want you inviting all and sundry to something that isn’t going to happen.’

Her mother was dead, they were talking about funerals. It didn’t seem real. Her brain couldn’t absorb the reality. It was too much all at once.

Bradley was still chuntering on. ‘She was adamant about it, made me promise.’

Amanda switched her attention to what he was telling her. Not even he could believe the tripe coming out of his mouth.

‘You know as well as I do she wouldn’t have agreed to that.’ Her mother had said more than once that she was quite excited about her funeral, as if she would be able to attend it herself and enjoy the fuss. The same way she would be looking forward to seeing Bradley open that big tin box sitting under the bedroom carpet.

‘Well, she did agree to it. I mean… suggest it. She’d seen an advert on the televis-ion.’ He pronounced it telly-viz-ion , exactly the same way his money-grabbing creepy-arse father had; he’d absorbed all his pretensions and added to them. ‘More and more people are seeing the sense in not throwing all that money on a fire these days. Literally.’

‘A cost-cutting exercise, eh? Wouldn’t want to eat into the capital, would we, Bradley?’ Amanda snarled. If looks could kill, Bradley would have been toast at that moment.

He stood, pulled his trousers up and over his gut.

‘I think emotions are bound to be running high, so Kerry and I will go home and I’ll be in touch.’

‘I want to see the will,’ said Amanda. ‘I want to see where these wishes of hers are stated.’

‘In good time. I think we both need to grieve first.’

He really should have been a comedian.

She stayed for another half an hour just sitting in the calm, imagining what her life would have been like had she not felt so obliged to stay close to a woman who blamed her for so much that was wrong with her own. And the irony that, as the daughter ‘whose job it was to look after her mother’ she would be denied the all-important duty of giving her the send-off she had wanted.

Her phone beeped in her bag and when she lifted it out it was Ray. They’d swapped numbers before she left; he had wanted to drive her here, and she’d said no because she didn’t want his world venn-diagramming with this world of hers, she wanted to keep it pure and away from infection.

Are you all right? Come back here x

said the text.

She replied that she was, but was going home. The evening was over, its earlier magic drowned by a sweet-and-sour motherlode of past memories and a present she needed to try and get her head around. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that their mum had hung on, refusing to bow out until Bradley made an appearance, because she loved him that much. She was capable of that strength of feeling – but only for her son and not her daughter. And now she was gone for ever, leaving Amanda with more questions than she had ever answered. Amanda wished she could fast-forward to next Tuesday and unpack all this with the women in Ray’s back room. It couldn’t come fast enough.