Arthur knew his mother had died before anyone told him. Not because he was particularly close to her—in fact the opposite was true—but because there was no other reason for his sister to be calling him at eight o’clock on a Friday morning. Arthur looked at his phone vibrating in his hand. He was standing on the corner of Queen Street and early morning commuters rushed around him this way and that on their way to whatever very important business they had to do that Friday morning. Nobody noticed the man standing on the corner with his old-fashioned homburg hat, briefcase in one hand and phone in the other who was at that moment imagining yelling at the crowd, ‘Here, you answer it. Perhaps you’ll slow down a minute and remember your own mother and how many days it’s been since you spoke to her last’.
It had been eight hundred and forty days since Arthur had spoken to his mother. Anna, his sister, would text him every now and again to give him updates such as, ‘Mum’s been diagnosed with cancer,’ and ‘Doc says she won’t make it til Xmas’ and Arthurs personal favourite, ‘Don’t you think it’s time to make amends?’.
Arthur’s phone was still vibrating. The street crossing bleated and the throng surged around him. He looked up at the flashing green man and back at the screen in his hand. He would have preferred a text. Anna would judge how he reacted to this phone call. No matter what he said, he would be unequivocally wrong. Would she be crying when he answered? Probably. Would she expect him to cry? The crossing signal subsided. The green man disappeared, and a red one appeared instead. Arthur shuffled away from the road and answered the call.
He was right of course. He’d been around the block enough times to predict people’s behaviour though he was still a little unclear on how they expected him to react. Mirroring Anna’s wails of anguish seemed inappropriate. Instead, he attempted what he hoped would be a comforting approach by pointing out that their mother was no longer suffering. He’d intentionally kept his voice even, yet he could taste the bitterness in Anna’s voice as she retorted that it wasn’t the point. He hadn’t even been there while she was suffering, she said, and she supposed he wouldn’t be interested in attending the wake on Saturday either. In fact, Arthur had no problem with attending the wake. Now his mother was dead, she could hardly do any more damage.
Eight hundred and forty days ago, Arthur had had no intention that it would be the last time he’d see his mother. He’d gone over to see her like he did every six months or so, sitting in his childhood home at the table where he grew up, drinking tea out of the floral-patterned mug he’d gifted her for Mother’s Day back in 1982. It was all very familiar. And as usual, Arthur felt a smouldering in his stomach as he listened to his mother complain about her life and telling him how he should be living his. You’re selfish, she’d tell him. No wife, no kids; all alone, just living for yourself. Arthur didn’t live all alone. He had an aquarium of fan-tailed guppies, but he didn’t bother telling her that.
This day as he sat at the table only half listening to his mother, he noticed a pigeon had made a nest in the tree outside the dining room window. He watched as the pigeon fluttered down to the nest and two tiny gaping beaks popped up, squeaking for food.
‘Pigeons,’ he told his mother, motioning toward the window with the floral mug.
She and glanced toward the window and narrowed her eyes. ‘Vermin,’ she said. ‘I hope a storm blows them out of the tree. We don’t need pigeons around here.’
The steady smoulder moved from Arthur’s stomach to his chest. He drained his tea, stood up, walked the kitchen, rinsed the mug, and put it in the sink.
His mother shuffled after him from the dining room. ‘Where are you going all of a sudden?’ she asked.
‘I’ve gotta go,” he said. I’ll see you later.’
And he meant it. He thought he would see her later. But in the months that followed, for better or for worse, a peaceful kind of apathy set in before the smouldering subsided. He didn’t hate her. He just didn’t want to see her. Or hear her. Or interact with her in any way. Even when he heard about the cancer. The silence was too beautiful, like a spell that shouldn’t be broken.
At the wake, Arthur sat down again at the dining room table. People wandered around the house like ghosts that didn’t belong. A few elderly ladies patted him on the shoulder and told him they were sorry for his loss. Anna glared at him and said nothing at all. She was preoccupied playing the mourning daughter. Dressed all in black, she went from person to person showing them how distraught she was by dabbing a handkerchief at her smudged eyes. Her husband and their two teenaged daughters solemnly distributed cups of coffee and sandwiches cut into triangles.
To Arthur, the whole masquerade felt like the final scene of a B-grade movie; predictable, boring, laughable. When the credits began to roll—the boring parts like cleaning up afterwards—all these spectators would get up and leave. This wasn’t their problem. It never was.
Arthur glanced over at the window. The pigeon and nest were gone (that didn’t surprise him). But the tree was gone too. There was nothing. Arthur stared slack jawed at the empty space until he found himself wondering if he’d imagined the whole thing.