The Arrangements by Ed Walsh

A sister and brother are shipped out for a month every year to live with their mother on a remote island, and feel like strangers in their own family.

Image generated with OpenAIThe arrangements were these. Early Sunday morning – it had to be a Sunday, he got nervy in heavy traffic – he would drive us in his old jeep from East Grover where we lived, to the ferry at Wooster’s Point, about three hours away. The he in question was Preston, my father. My brother, Joey, would hold his stomach and act sick in the car because he didn’t want to go. We told him things would be fine, and that he would have a great time, but he was always resistant to spending a month away from his home; his main home that is, with our father.

At Wooster’s we would cross the small ramp with our shoulder-bags and my father would wave us off. Sometimes he would tap the underside of his chin with the back of his fingers; it was a message to Joey. I can picture him now, our father, as clearly as I did then, blowing kisses and waving with both arms from the jetty. We would wave back until he was out of sight. I always had the feeling that he couldn’t wait until we were out of sight so he could start off back to the city. But maybe that feeling was wrong. Maybe he did think he was going to miss us. Maybe he did miss us.

I would have been eight, so my brother would have been around the six mark when they came to that arrangement, that was after my mother moved away. The man who went round the deck selling doughnuts and Cokes always made sure to ask if we were ok and did we need anything. I can’t remember, if I ever knew, whether my father had asked him to do that, or whether he just did it from the goodness of his heart without being asked. He was called Gus and he also checked the tickets and tied the boat to the jetty when we got to Vernon Island. He wore a cap on which was written The Tompion, which was the name of the ferry.

Once we pulled out into clear water Joey quit his acting, knowing it was too late by then. If it was warm, which it usually was at that time of year, we sat out on the deck and ate the sandwiches that Marnie had made; she was our fathers’ girlfriend at that time and she sang in one of his bands; she had replaced Gloria and before Gloria I can’t recall the names; there was a Tess in there somewhere, but there had been several. Marnie was long term though, right up until he died and as far as I know she still lives in his house.

Although there were always a few people going to the island for their holidays, we could always get a seat. If it got cold, we sat inside but we hardly ever needed to do that. I didn’t like it inside – I always had the feeling that people were looking at us in there. Sometimes they were looking at us. I used to look right back at them until they looked away, even when they were smiling kindly. I didn’t like the idea that they might be feeling sorry for us; two kids alone with travel-bags would almost certainly evoke pity in some people, especially women, and especially women with kids of their own. To them we might have looked pathetic. Well they could feel sorry for Joey, but not for me. I didn’t need anybody to feel sorry for me.

At Vernon, we waited an hour for a smaller boat to take us to the island of Douric, another fifty minutes or so. That was where our mother lived. The second boat was The Spinner and there was never more than a handful of people on it. Our tickets had been bought and posted to us well in advance by our mother but nobody ever checked them. There was often more cattle than people, and we would watch them being cajoled down into the dark space below the deck, and we would sometimes hear them above the noise of the engine as we sailed between the islands. I always felt sorry for them, not knowing where they were going or why.

Douric was not a place that many people came to for holidays; there were some, around the two bays, but not many. About seventy people lived there all year round, a few cattle-farmers, and some people who had retired there from the mainland. And there were some, like my mother, who were artists and who lived there because it was cheap and there wasn’t much to distract them from their work. There was one hotel, near to the jetty, The Griffin, which had a small bar. And there were two shops further round the bay and close to each other – one was food and post, the other was hardware and animal feed. There had been no school since the nineteen-forties, so no kids of a school age lived there permanently. That was why we stayed in the city with my father when she moved out there.

We could always spot her from a distance as we approached. Standing with the islanders, you could tell that she wasn’t born and raised there. She looked like a person who lived in a city, even after she had been on Douric half her life. In fact, she looked like a woman from West Grover; she never lost that style, even when she was dying over there and I was looking after her.

And she always seemed kind of pleased to see us; if she wasn’t, she put on a good act. She would smile and ask us what we had been up to, how things were – but she was not an over-the-top kind of person. She would hug us – but not the kind of bear-hugs you might expect from a mother who has not seen her children since Christmas.

She still did her work when we were there. She was a sculptor mainly, but turned her hand to most things which would bring some money in. Our presence there didn’t change her routine much. She had her workplace over the yard from the house she lived in, and she would be in there by six every morning. She would come back over at about ten to make sure we were up and had breakfast, and then she would go on working until two. I used to go across and watch her and it made a big impression on me; my mother, covered in dust or paint depending on what she was doing, concentrating on what was before her, cursing if something wasn’t going right. Although she could be funny and self-deprecating, she was a serious person, certainly when it came to her work.

While I was with her in her workplace, Joey would sit around the house reading comics or watching cartoons on television. When she finished and washed, she would, if the weather allowed, which it usually did, take us around the island; you can walk north to south in an hour, and east to west in about eighty minutes. We would spend ages scratching around the rock pools in one of the bays at the north end; that was where her house was, up at the north end.

Or, if the weather wasn’t so great, we would do things in the house, draw and paint and play cards. It didn’t matter to me what we did. Joey though could be hard work, and after a few days he would be asking how many days until we went back. At least once during every trip my mother would say something like, ‘Why is that kid so fucking miserable?’ And I didn’t know what to say other than, ‘He’s always like this.’ Which wasn’t exactly true, he was always on the quiet side, but when he was at home – in East Grover that is – he was livelier and showed signs of enjoying life; he would follow our father around the place and get him to do things with him, and he took to playing drums from an early age – drums and guitar, but drums mainly. My dad could also play drums, but it was his pal Shiller who was the real drummer; it was him who encouraged Joey that way and showed him the tricks of the trade.

There was a room on the top floor of the house which my dad and his friends had soundproofed, partially anyway; you could still hear a dulled bass sound when they were playing in there, but it was nothing the neighbours could complain about. From about the time my mother left for Douric, Joey spent most of his time up there, so I didn’t really see that much of him.

Anyway, that was our summers, for a few years at least. And they were our parents, Mara and Preston. And an odd thing was, they barely knew each other. When she was nineteen, my mother was studying art at the Grover Institute. She went one night with her friends to see a band in a bar down by the port. My dad was the guitarist. They met and drank and talked, and then they slept together that night. After that, they went out once, but it was obvious to both of them that there was no remaining attraction after that first night. She told me all this many years later when we were drinking wine, after she got ill. She made it sound like she was talking about people she used to know but hadn’t seen for years. Back then Preston thought he was headed toward a life of wealth and fame as sure as there are fish in the sea; he was in no doubt it would happen as soon as his talents were recognised. She was after a quieter life, a more serious life, as she put it. They went their own ways.

But she was pregnant; that was me, their daughter. She didn’t want or expect anything from him, but out of courtesy she tracked him down to the same bar and told him. I forget the details, but they made arrangements for him to see me for a few hours each weekend. Then, after about a year, she went to his place in East Grover to collect me. She had a glass of wine with him and they ended up having sex again – ‘The stupidest thing I ever did,’ was how she put it: that was Joey.

And that was them, two kids between them and they hardly knew each other’s names. Still, more arrangements were made. My mother remained living a few streets from her mother in the west of the city. My father remained in the east. At first, with assistance from his mother who lived in another town, he saw us at weekends, occasionally in the holidays, and then we started to stay over when he didn’t have gigs.

I can’t say I didn’t like being there, because I did. His house was busier than my mother’s, he had musician friends in and out, some of them slept over, anywhere they could. Sometimes we had to step over them before we went to school. There were also my father’s various girlfriends who, maybe to stay sweet with him, made a great fuss of us. Before Marnie though, none of them stayed sweet enough. Our mother used to complain about us coming back smelling of weed, but it was convenient for us to spend time there, so she never made too big a big fuss.

They came from different backgrounds. My mother’s mother lived in one of the expensive apartments opposite the Japanese Gardens. We used to visit maybe twice a month when my mother lived in that area, but I had the impression they weren’t too close; friendly enough, but not what you would call intimate. And she wouldn’t allow us to call her grandma; it had to be Claudette. My mother always called her Claudette, never mother. Her husband, my mother’s father, died when he was thirty-eight, by which time my mother would have been twelve. From what she later told me, it was as if her mother too died at the same time, such did her husband’s absence diminish her life.

The arrangements changed just as I turned eight. My mother got a commission from the National Monuments people to do a mural for the chapel on Douric. She had not heard of Douric before, but it was an eight-months contract and accommodation was provided. They showed her photographs of the place. She wanted to do it but there was the problem of what to do with us. As I said, there was no school on the island. Her first option was to ask her mother – she also told me this many years later – but Claudette was against the idea, thought it wrong for a mother to leave her children like that, and for so long, and so didn’t want to be complicit. I guess she wouldn’t have done it anyway, but that was her reasoning.

That left Preston. It was a big shock to Preston and he had to be persuaded, he had never figured on having children as part of his life every day, or having children full-stop. But she persuaded him, agreed to send him a monthly allowance to help with expenses if he wasn’t making enough from his music, and she said she would be back in eight months.

So, we moved ten miles across the city, from my mother’s quiet apartment, above which she had her studio, to my dad’s place. And to give him his due, he got the place nice for us; although it was probably Gloria, who he was with then, who made the place look homely. Although it was in need of a lick of paint and some new window frames, it was a big place and we had our own rooms. It was Gloria also who took us back across town to school; apart from those times he took us to the ferry, my dad wasn’t an early riser.

We saw our grandmother once in the first few months we moved. Gloria took us over there after we had been at my dad’s a couple of months or so. I think my mother must have suggested we spend a few hours there. And Gloria made the mistake of referring to your grandma when she took us to the door and Claudette corrected her. Gloria said, ‘Well I do beg your pardon’ in a sarcastic way, but Claudette just said, ‘Don’t mention it.’ It wasn’t worth Gloria going all the way back across town so she went across to the Japanese Gardens while we were in Claudette’s apartment.

Our mother rang while we were there; she used to ring Dad’s at six every Sunday evening to speak to us, but I think she wanted to hear from us with nobody else around. We told her we were ok, which wasn’t a lie. I missed her painfully but no one could say we weren’t being looked after. It was a bit chaotic at our dad’s – there were always people coming and going and musical stuff lying round all over the place – but everyone was friendly enough, and he had a cat that I loved called Hendrix. When one of his stoned friends accidentally drove over Hendrix, he replaced it with a kitten and called that Hendrix too.

We visited my mother for the first time – what we thought then would be the only time – that summer. She came across from Douric and met us at Vernon. For some reason, I had assumed the place she stayed would be something of a dump, probably because she wasn’t paying for it. But it wasn’t, it wasn’t perfect but it was a size, a big barn-like place with three bedrooms and a big kitchen with a fire. Much later it reminded me of something from an Andrew Wyeth painting. As soon as we got there I wanted to stay, I felt right at home, although I knew I couldn’t say that. Besides which, she would be back in Grover soon. Joey, as soon as he got there, wanted to be home.

She showed us the mural which she was working on. It covered almost the entire wall of the small nave of the white chapel. The only gap was where the Virgin was meant to be. I was impressed; my mother had done that. It was an Annunciation, but the landscape was not the idealised Italian – it was Douric; on later visits I would recognise the hillocks and bays and small trees which she had painted onto the wall. And the Archangel Gabriel was a smallholder who lived out at the western end of the island. She knew him through buying eggs and vegetables off him, that was before she started keeping chickens and growing what she could herself. She took us across there. He didn’t look or sound angelic, and she didn’t make him look angelic in the painting, but she made him look holy somehow, down on his knee, the heels of his big boots sticking out from his chasuble, giving the news to the Virgin.

When it came to the Virgin, she said she hadn’t come across anyone yet she could ask to sit, so she said I could do it. It didn’t sound like an invitation, so for ten days the three of us would walk the twenty minutes up to the headland and, while Joey mooched around outside, I sat on a stool with a scarf covering most of my hair while she transferred the image to the wall. I didn’t see the full thing on that visit, she still had to finish the details.

The four weeks went too quickly. It seemed to me like only a few days before she took us back to Vernon and made sure we were settled for the trip back to Wooster’s, where Preston waited for us. And then about a month before she was due to return – that would have been the October time – she rang as usual on the Sunday night. I picked up the phone, she sounded different. She said she wanted to speak to Preston, which was unusual. I shouted for him and he came in with an acoustic guitar hanging over his shoulder. He gave me a look as if to say, What the hell does she want with me? He picked the phone up and said, ‘Yeah?’ And then, ‘What do you mean, change of plan? What change of plan? What? Really?’ Then he asked me and Joey to go into another room.

Joey went, I stayed. I couldn’t hear my mother, but I could hear Preston. He said, ‘You cannot be serious, they’re expecting you back. Then, You cannot stay out there forever, surely. Haven’t you done what you went there to do?’ Then, ‘Yes, I know I’m their father. I know that, yes. You don’t have to tell me. And that’s what I am doing. Who else you think has been looking after them these last months while you’ve been out there on your island? I’ve got a life too, you know. I’ve got stuff I need to do.’ There was a long pause while he listened and then, ‘Ok, ok, I hear you, don’t get so dictatorial. And don’t patronise me, please. But you can tell them, you can tell them the great news. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled.’

He put me on and she told me what she had told him. She had met someone there and was going to stay. She told me extra, that the person she had met was also was an artist; he painted and was quite well known. He was called Harold Pascal and had been married, twice in fact; and he had a beard, although I couldn’t fathom why I needed to know that. I didn’t need to know he had two daughters either but she told me anyway. Apart from one or two times in otherwise trivial exchanges at her mother’s apartment, it was the first time I ever heard her sounding uncertain of herself. I said, ‘What about us? What about me?’ Even then, at nine, I knew I sounded ridiculous. She said we could continue to visit her and she would come across to Grover and it would all work out.

When she put the phone down Preston was still in the room strumming on his guitar. He said, ‘Well?’ I didn’t know what there was to say, so I just said ‘Well’ back. Then he said, ‘Your mother’s a strange one,’ and I told him I knew that. We called Joey in and he said, ‘Really? We’re going to stay here?’ He tried to look shocked, but he was pleased. He couldn’t keep the grin off his face. ‘So we live here now?’

Preston said, ‘Yup, this is your home. How about that?’

‘So we don’t have to go all the way to the island again?’ Joey said.

‘That’s up to you,’ Preston said.

‘It’s not up to him,’ I said. ‘We need to keep seeing our mother.’

‘Of course. Your sister’s right, Joey. Gotta keep those connections. I didn’t see too much of my mother, then she died and I regretted it. Still regret it. You don’t know what you got til its gone.’ He started to play Big Yellow Taxi on his guitar and I went up to my room.

She stayed at her mother’s place at Christmas and we saw her there. And in summer we met Harold Pascal. By that time she had bought the house. I was surprised when I saw him, it was obvious he was a lot older than her but, at the age I was then, I couldn’t measure the difference, he could have been anything from forty-five to a hundred. I found out later that he was thirty-one years older. He was ok, quiet but friendly enough. And although he kept his own place on the other side of the island, it was obvious he was used to spending time there – he knew where everything was in the drawers and he just used the bathroom without asking. By the time we went back the next summer, he had gone from the island and as far as I remember she never mentioned him again. I heard his name now and again in later years, although I never again met him.

When he was about nine, Joey decided he didn’t want to go anymore. It all got too much for him; the two ferries and the quiet of the island and the mother he now barely knew. Preston tried to persuade him to go more than my mother did, but he wouldn’t budge and it seemed there was nothing anybody could do about it. So I made the trips alone and, to be honest, it was better for the both of us me being there by myself, the mood was lifted. I started staying longer and going over at Easter. And I started to help my mother; she taught me various things about painting and sculpting and I took to it easily. By this time, on the back of the mural, she was getting regular work and doing well. When I was fourteen, she had a commission for a mural at the Sallus Toom Theatre in West Grover, on the other side of the park from her mother. I was thrilled, it meant I could see her more often and maybe even help with her work.

She stayed with her mother for the five months she was over. Me and Joey went across for dinner on the second Sunday and she looked pleased to see us. Claudette had gone to some trouble. She made everything herself, which surprised me, I thought she would just buy stuff in, but it turned out – and I didn’t know this previously – she had been a cook in some of the better south coast hotels in her teens and early-twenties, which was where she met her husband. The story had it that he wanted to congratulate the chef on some meal he had eaten, expecting it to be a man. I could not imagine her working anywhere, let alone in a kitchen.

And on that Sunday she was quite friendly, although we were really strangers to her. Joey was his usual sullen self, barely eating anything, speaking only when asked a question, and then giving only the minimum required. I gave him some looks to suggest that he ought to make some effort, but he just gave the same look back. I wanted to slap him, but I don’t think it was his fault, it was just the way he was. It was a pity though, because that was the last time he saw either of them.

He started to take music seriously when he was about thirteen. He often jammed with Preston and his pals, and sometimes they took him along to their weekend gigs. One night they all came back – Marnie and I had been watching television – and, except for Joey, they were pretty high. They had had more to drink and smoke than usual because it was Lester’s thirtieth birthday. Lester was the keyboard player. I liked Lester, everybody did, he was always around the place; like Preston, he had no other job than music and had no intention of getting one. For them, it was fame or bust.

When they all came back, I went to bed and was reading. After ten minutes or so Lester stuck his head round my door. He said, ‘Hi, how you doing?’

I said, ‘I’m ok.’

‘Mind if I come in?’

I shook my head, although I did mind. He sat at the bottom of the bed. It was unusual, but not too unusual, it wasn’t the kind of house that stood on ceremony. Looking back, I can’t say I was happy with it though.

‘What you reading?’ He put his hand under my blanket and touched my foot. I did wonder if I shouldn’t pull my foot away; anyway, I didn’t. I guess I didn’t want to offend him, or for him to think I was a little girl.

‘Carson McCullers,’ I told him, holding the book up: It was The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I loved that southern Gothic stuff, so did my mother. It was her copy I was reading.

‘I don’t think I’ve come across him.’

I was going to say her but stopped myself; I didn’t want him to feel dumb.

‘You are a great looking chick, you know that?’ Chick, that’s what they said back then, and worse, but I was fifteen and I suppose kind of flattered. I had had some attention before, I was starting to look similar to my mother, so the attention of men was something I was primed for. But the others who paid attention were boys, Lester was a man, thirty the previous day, it then being about one in the morning.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘And you know I like you, don’t you? You got great legs.’ He moved his hand further up and I said, ‘Thank you’ again. ‘I like you,’ which even then I knew made me sound like a stupid kid, which I suppose is what I was.

‘You mind?’ He stood and he put his hands to his belt, waiting for my permission to undo it.

I wanted to say, Yes, I do mind, I mind greatly, but for some reason not yet fathomed I said, ‘Suppose not.’

‘This is nice,’ he said as he slid in. ‘Cosy. This isn’t your debut, is it?’

Had I heard right, debut?

‘No,’ I lied. And I think I may have laughed, as if it was a silly question.

‘You want me?’

I didn’t.

He kissed me. Then he used his fingers on me a while until he thought I was ready, then manoeuvred himself on top. It seemed a natural thing for me to open my legs. It hurt and I gave a small yelp. He stopped and said Sorry and asked if I was ok. I said I was ok. I wasn’t. It was wrong, the whole thing, I knew that. He seemed kind though, he wasn’t out to deliberately hurt me. There was that at least.

He came quickly, and he rolled off me and we lay there quietly. I put my head on his chest like I’d seen done in films. And I felt as if I’d crossed over from childhood into something else – not quite adulthood, but something differently coloured from childhood, something nearer the colour of my mother.

‘Jesus, that was fantastic,’ he said, and kissed the top of my head. ‘You’re good.’

I didn’t know what being good meant, still don’t.

‘Thank you.’

And then there was a knock on the door. Preston came in and I sat up quickly. He stared at Lester, and Lester looked back at him, not knowing what to say. I had the feeling they might fight, which I didn’t want. Preston narrowed his eyes and looked from Lester to me. ‘You ok there?’

I nodded.

He repeated it. ‘I said, you ok there?’

‘Yes. Yes I am, I’m ok.’

‘Well answer me when I ask you a question. Is that too much to ask?’

I hadn’t heard him sound like that before, not even when he and Marnie were arguing.

Then he stared back at Lester for a while and said to him, ‘You’re needed downstairs.’ I didn’t think that was true, I didn’t think he was needed downstairs, there didn’t seem to be anything for him to be needed for, they would just be drinking and smoking weed and listening to records. Preston left. Lester dressed and kissed me on the brow as he left. He said, ‘See you later sweet pea.’ I was none too keen on the sweet pea business either. Or chick for that matter, but I had the feeling that I couldn’t say anything about that sort of thing for a couple of years yet.

Then I slept right through and didn’t get up until around midday. There was only the four of us in the house for the rest of the day, which was pretty unusual. Marnie asked me if I was ok – ‘Did he take precautions?’ she asked. I said, ‘Yes,’ but I didn’t know if that was true, it was something I hadn’t had time to think about. The question scared me.

Later Preston asked me, ‘You want to tell your mother about last night? Or you want me to?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

‘You sure.’

‘I’m sure.’

I had the feeling I didn’t want to burden my mother with anything. Because I didn’t know if she would want to know or if she would care, but I didn’t want to take the risk. Because I had the feeling that she loved me and wanted me to be like her. And because I wanted to be like her. And I couldn’t imagine her letting something like that to happen to her at that age. She seemed to be in such tight possession of herself, I imagined she had always been like that. We didn’t see Lester round the house after that.

So, I didn’t tell her until I was twenty-two by which time it hardly mattered. Because when I did tell her, Lester and Preston had been dead a good while, killed when their van crashed on the Electric Way coming back from a gig. It was bad timing, they had just been signed to another label and were waiting to record their first album. Lester was driving and fell asleep. Preston was beside him in the front. According to the inquest both of them were killed straight off. The other three in the band were hurt, and there were two women, who nobody seemed to know, also hurt. It was a Monday night, so Joey wasn’t with them. When it happened, I was eighteen and also at the Grover Art Institute. I shared a place with two other students nearby. So with Preston out of the picture, that left Joey and Marnie in the house in East Grover.

When I rang my mother, I told her that Preston had been killed. She said, ‘That’s bad news, I’m sorry about that. You must be upset.’ I was, and I told her so. She said, ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s only natural, but we get over these things. Really, we do.’ And I knew she was right, I knew I’d soon get over it. She didn’t ask about Joey.

I went to both of their funerals. Marnie made the arrangements for Preston. His brother and sister were there, and a niece and a nephew. I had heard about them before, but had never met them. The brother and sister were older than Preston and had a different look about them. It wasn’t just that they were dressed funeral-style, they gave the impression that they dressed pretty much like that anyway. They also gave the impression of having money and they stood out against the surrounding denim and the t-shirts with band’s names on them.

He came in to a Bach Cello Suite – he used to play some of that stuff in the house. The humanists sent someone called Angela to give the eulogy. She repeated some funny stories she must have got from people who knew him, references to his early fondness for marijuana, his kind nature, his playing in the school orchestra. Our thin laughter echoed round the big room. There were regrets from his family that they hadn’t stayed closer. His parents had separated when he was a kid and the kids were split. He stayed with his mother; I hadn’t known that. The humanist, Angela, made him sound like a good person, which I think he was. He slid through the curtain to Buffalo Springfield.

After, we gathered at the Wisdom-Hely on West Slaughter. I introduced myself to his sister. She said, ‘So you’re the daughter he kept secret. Someone told me he had one but I didn’t quite believe it. I couldn’t imagine my little brother having kids.’

‘He had two,’ I said. ‘My brother’s over there. That’s him in the Pink Floyd vest.’ Joey was talking to some of Preston’s musician friends and it looked like they were on equal footing. By then, he was playing in a couple of bands.

‘So, which one’s your mother?’ I told her that my mother wasn’t there, that they didn’t really know each other. I told her, she lives on Douric. By that time I had been there so often, I assumed that everyone had heard of it. She hadn’t. We promised to keep in touch, but we didn’t.

Marnie and Joey and I went to Lester’s funeral the next day. It was at a Catholic church up in the Beatrice area. We got talking to his cousin. Apparently, he had been brought up religious, had been a choirboy there and had gone to mass every Sunday right up to his death. In which case he must have gone to Mass a few hours after he raped me; by that time I knew it for what it was, but Lester was dead, so what did it matter?

Between one death and another, I started to make a living. After the Institute, and through a connection of my mother, I trained as a restorer at the City East Gallery. I loved it, still do; that slow repetitive work, that gentle erasure of dirt, making a new thing from the old. I like the intense concentration, the exclusion of everything that is not the work, the seriousness of the thing.

She rang me in the November. Like always, she missed out the small talk. She said:

‘Hello, how are you?’

‘I’m well. And you?’

‘I’m ill.’

‘Ill?’

‘Ill. Really ill. In fact, I’m on my way out. I’ve got six months at best and there’s work I need to do. It’s just such a nuisance.’

A nuisance?

‘Yeah, I’ll never do what I need to do in six months, not on my own. I need to ask a favour.’

‘Whatever it is, the answer’s yes. You should know that.’

‘I don’t know that. Anyway, you need to know what it is first. It isn’t a small thing.’

‘It’s still yes.’

‘I’m not sure I want to be on my own.’

What she wanted was for me to go there until it was all over. That was how she put it, Until it’s all over. And so I did. My boss at the gallery knew my mother and she said to take as long as you like. So, I went in the middle of the November. At Wooster’s Point, I noticed two large crates being winched on to the ferry, and the same crates were lifted on to The Spinner at Vernon. I wondered at the time what they could be.

She didn’t meet me at the jetty so I took a cab – the one cab on the island – to her place. She looked and sounded ok. We weren’t huggers but we hugged, long and silently. My curiosity about the crates was satisfied half-an-hour later when they were dropped at her door.

‘What are they?’ I asked.

‘I thought we might as well enjoy ourselves while you’re here.’

I pulled the top off one of them and took out the top straw. It was food and drink, and not just any old food and drink. There were crates of expensive-looking wine, and chickens, hams and cheeses from Castleberry’s Department Store; there were cans of abalone and soup and asparagus from Kellers; there was bread, frozen fish, crackers, butter, steaks, lamb’s hearts; all manner of things from the best shops in Grover. I said, ‘Oh my god, we’ll never get through all of this,’ and immediately regretted it. But she just smiled and said, ‘Well one of us might just die trying. And if we run out, we’ll just get more. What do you say?’

‘I say we give it a try.’

So we spent the afternoon filling the freezer and fridge and cupboards with the stuff. Shelves which previously held fish-fingers and cheap burgers and tins of beans, made way for the contents of those crates.

That night we had steaks and fries with a bottle of Chateau Margeaux, apparently one of the best. I asked her how much it had all cost and she said it was best not to know. Neither of us were huge drinkers – we both thought too much of it interfered with work. But I for one had never tasted anything like that wine and we smiled all the way through the meal. In fact, we smiled almost through the whole thing. It was as if the sighting of life’s end had lifted something heavy off her and we laughed a lot. Later she told me about her diagnosis. She had been seen in the Saint James in Grover but didn’t tell anyone about it. And it had been her plan to see it out by herself, but she had got scared. That’s when she rang me.

Although she didn’t start quite so early, she kept on working in her studio. I would go across first and get the fire going, then she would come across at about eight. I kept her company, did some of my own drawings while she worked on paintings for which she had been paid advances. She wanted to get them done while she still could. She turned down my offer of help, said it would be cheating.

And every night was a feast. Christmas must have reminded her of family, because during our meal she asked, ‘You ever hear from your brother?’ The fact was, I hadn’t heard of him in ten years. Last I knew he was still playing in bands and was mixed up with some dubious people. I had not run into him in the city, which made me think he may be elsewhere in the world, or he may be dead. I don’t know, either way would be no surprise to me. Like our parents, it seems we barely knew each other.

‘No. Not for a long time.’

‘Strange kid.’

In the new year, one time just before dinner, I asked, ‘What about the arrangements?’

‘Arrangements?’

‘You know, funeral, the house, your stuff. Do I need to do anything?’

‘Oh yeah, you just reminded me.’

She went over to a drawer and handed me a roll of paper with a thin ribbon round it. It was her will, a couple of paragraphs.

‘Am I reading this correctly?’

‘I don’t know, how’re you reading it?’

‘You’re leaving everything to me?’

‘What else am I going to do with it? I don’t know that many people.’

‘I don’t know what to say. Thank you.’

She reached across and put her hand on mine.

‘Don’t mention it. You’re my daughter and I think the world of you. I should have said that more often.’

I had never heard the word love come from her mouth, but when she said I think the world of you I couldn’t quite dam the tears and I said, ‘I love you.’

She smiled and said, ‘Thank you. I appreciate that. Let’s eat.’

So we ate, and we drank the best wine, and laughed. And in her kitchen, drunk, we listened to the rain falling on the island, and waited.