The letter from the insurers came on the Tuesday: a white envelope with a window, Mum’s name, a date and a time, the second Thursday in January, 08:30. Mum opened it at supper, read it twice and set it down on the table with the smack you use on a fly.
“What’s this, then?”
“An appointment for a screening.”
“I can see it’s an appointment. Where has it come from?”
“I booked it. In your name.” There was no point in lying: the signature on the form had been mine anyway. “The programme is free and it’s all done in one day.”
“Klara.” Mum’s voice dropped into the register that used to still the whole flat when I was small. “You filled in forms for me. For a grown woman. Without asking.”
“You’d have said ‘after the holidays’.”
“Because it is after the holidays!”
“Mum, your ‘after’ never comes!”
We both fell silent at the sound of it. The kettle clicked and went quiet. A television was on somewhere at the neighbours’, a stranger’s life carrying on as usual, with no interest in our kitchen. Mum took off her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose.
“What is going on with you, my girl? You’ve dropped your boy, you’re running about after other people’s children, you’re booking me in with doctors as though the house were on fire. Where’s the fire, Klara?”
I couldn’t tell her the truth. I couldn’t say nothing either. I chose the part of the truth that would fit inside that kitchen.
“I dreamed I lost you. So real that I still wake up and listen to see if you’re breathing. I know it’s silly. Go once, and I’ll leave you alone.”
Mum looked at me for a long time. Something in my face must have been older than seventeen, because she stopped being angry.
“Once,” she said. “And none of your waterworks.”
“Agreed.”
“And you’ll bake a cake. For taking matters into your own hands.”
“Two.”
“Don’t push it.”
On the second Thursday in January we arrived as the doors opened. The clinic was new and glass-fronted, with a queue-number display and a coffee machine; Mum surveyed the whole operation and delivered her verdict: “They live well. On our contributions.” She informed the nurse on reception that she was perfectly healthy, that her daughter was a general, and that if she wasn’t out in two hours, thirty tulips would be lost at the shop. The nurse, by the look of her, came from our end of town: she nodded with complete understanding.
I sat in the corridor on a plastic chair and held Mum’s coat. The screening ran to schedule: bloods, a consulting room, another consulting room. Trolleys went by, the air smelled of machine coffee and of something medical that had turned my stomach ever since the first life. I worked through the Ladder’s budget in my head, an old method: when you’re frightened, count. Towards the end of the second hour a doctor came out, young, with tired kind eyes, and said in the everyday tone people use to announce a delayed train,
“We’re going to keep your mother a little longer for one more scan. Nothing alarming, we’d just like a closer look.”
I nodded calmly. Calm I could do: ten years of training on other people’s panic attacks. Only the coat in my hands ended up crushed and folded in half.
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