Page 54 of Oyster

“I’m going to drop you off, Nico, then go home, to my real home, and change my clothes. To become more… me. Then I’ll be back, sitting in the car, waiting for you. For as long as it takes, for whenever you need me. I promise.”

Once, many years ago, I visited Amsterdam on a school history trip. The coach driver dropped us off right in the centre of the old town. I don’t remember much about it, except as the doors sighed open and our caterpillar of noisy French kids alighted, we breathed in diesel fumes (from the coach engine), strong coffee, and the overpowering heady aroma of marijuana. If you have never had the good fortune to visit, that’s what Amsterdam smells like. The odd thing was, the herbal, earthy scent was recognisable, even though most of us had never smelled it before.

Death held the same unique quality. A distinct, bittersweet, and stuffy odour, identifiable even to those who had never had the misfortune to share a small room with it before. As I took my place at my mum’s hospital bedside, I tried hard not to inhale the reek of pain and loss as it mixed with the familiar smells of home—my sister’s faint perfume, Max’s stale sweat, my dad’s beery warmth.

Despite being so shrunken, my mum’s gaunt frame dominated the scene. I swore she was half the size of yesterday. And twice as yellow. Awake and talking, though, so there was that.

My arrival prompted a flood of tears from Zoë. And not the first deluge, judging by the pile of scrunched-up tissues in her lap and how she clung to my dad like a barnacle. Max, his gangly limbs too big for the small plastic chair, was heading the same way, although trying his best not to show it.

“Here he is,” said my mum, and I swear her attempt at smiling came closer to opening my own dammed floodgates than anything else on this godforsaken journey. She was about to follow up, but a cough like rusted gate hinges took over instead, setting Zoë off even more.

“Do you need some fresh air?” I asked my dad. His voice was brittle, like glass, and his body rigid, like he’d shatter into a thousand pieces if I gave him a hug. “Why don’t you grab a coffee, take the others for half an hour.”

He gave my mum a kiss on the way out and whispered that he loved her, which I’d never heard him say, not ever. She knew anyhow—we all did. Perhaps that’s why he never felt the need to confirm it out loud to an audience.

I pulled up a chair. Like waxwork casts, my mum’s usually busy hands lay still on the covers, making me nervous about taking one. We weren’t a demonstrative family; I hadn’t taken her by the hand since I was big enough to walk along the sea wall unaided without tumbling down the wrong side. But as I shied away from them, afraid of how lifeless they appeared, I remembered how comforting Éti’s hand had felt in the car. My mum might be even more scared than us. And I might never have a chance again. So I closed one of them inside mine, trying not to notice the bones pushing through tissue-paper skin or how cold it felt.

“Can I get you anything? Like a drink, or another blanket or something?”Ora magic carpet out of here, a new liver, a different diagnosis, a miracle?“Are you in pain?”

She shook her head and declined both, through cracked lips shiny with Vaseline. Zoë’s work, I expected. This close up, I smelled her favourite lemony hand cream.

“Did you have a nice time in Paris?” A dry huskiness had taken over her normal voice, each word painful to pronounce.“You were on telly. Max said your girlfriend got you a really good seat at the match.”

“She did. She drove me here this morning. Wouldn’t let me catch the train. That’s why I arrived so soon.”

“She sounds ever so nice.”

“She is. She’s… she’s the one, I think, Mum.”My love that came without warning.

Her eyes fluttered closed; a tiny smile played at her lips. “Did she take you out somewhere fancy after the match?”

“No. We had a quiet night in at her place. Which is fancy enough.”

That smile stayed, although she remained very still, like even smiling might hurt. “Will you keep an eye on your dad for me, Nico? He said he’s going to cut down on the drinking. He’ll listen to you. He won’t like you saying it, but I know he will.”

“Yeah. Promise.”

“Zoë and Max too. Make her go out with her friends—she needs it. And make Max go out with you. Get him away from that computer game.”

“I will. I swear. Don’t worry.”

After that, she drifted off. The others came back. A nurse came in too, and did some stuff, so we all left again, and then we all trooped back in. Next time I checked the clock, it was after seven; night had fallen without us noticing. In that darkened room, with my entire family huddled together, I’d never felt so alone. I wondered if the others felt the same. Mentally drained, emotionally numb, and spiritually fuck knew where. Talking in whispers, scrolling through shit on phones, dredging up polite smiles and making chitchat with the nurses slipping in and out, as my mum slept on, like it wasn’t the worst evening of our lives.

And then at about ten o’clock, realisation dawned. Our last glimpse of the cloudy blue of her eyes, or the sound of her gentle voice, had passed. She’d shared her last ever observation, askedher last question, laughed her last laugh. Her breathing changed, louder for a start, as though all she needed to do was clear her throat with a jolly good hack and everything would be fine again. And although we’d been waiting for this moment for the last three months and done nothingbutwait for it the last few hours, when it came, it blasted us afresh: she was dying.

“I can’t do this,” blurted Zoë, in a sudden panic, about to scrabble out the window. We were on the fourth floor. “I don’t want to be here. I want to go home. Dad, Dad, I don’t want to see her like this.”

Clean out of hope and the right words to comfort his kids, my dad rubbed his face with his big rough hands and stayed silent, letting his expression speak as he stared at the love of his life, halfway out of this world with a foot in the next.

“Me neither.” Two words from Max, the first he’d spoken in hours, through gritted teeth, holding back his tears. He appeared so young right then. I wanted to walk over to where he was making himself as small as possible, give him a hug and tell him to go ahead, to cry and wail, like Zoë. But his spiky silence was fierce, shielding a hurricane too powerful for the confines of this little room, so I stayed where I was.

My mum’s shallow, noisy breaths filled the air. There was no escaping them. How many did she have left? Ten a minute made six hundred an hour. But for how many hours? Was she counting down her last thousand? How would we know which breath was the last, or that it had happened? How long did you wait for the next one before the certainty it would never come?

Against my shoulder, Zoë whimpered. I fingered my wave tattoo through the material of my clammy shirt. Three unmoored boats wrestling the ocean waves, losing the fight. A step along the timeline of my life. Éti knew some of the story behind it, but I’d have killed the romantic moment stone deadif I’d told her I’d been the one to stumble across the body of my dad’s friend Jacques, washed up on the shore.

I hadn’t liked the man very much. Fascinated yet repulsed, I’d watched, as his bloated, lifeless shape was lifted into the back of an ambulance. The medics took great care, even though his essence—the thing that made him Jacques—was already long gone. Call it his soul, his life blood, his vitality, or even simply his irritating way of slurping his coffee while moaning about his wife, but the thing bundled up in that blanket wasn’t Jacques. What remained was a carcass made up of bones, hair, and clothes, discarded by a spirit departing this world and shuffling onto the next.

My mum was still alive, but the second she crossed over the bridge to fuck knows where, the diseased cells and bones and organs and clothes lying in the hospital bed would no longer be her. They’d be nothing but random collections of molecules, making up a grey and lifeless corpse. I didn’t want to remember her that way. And neither did Zoë and Max.

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