Rita walked up the stairs toward her mother’s bedroom. She tried to make a phone call but had changed her mind at the last minute. The framed charcoal sketches she’d packed in wads of bubble wrap when her mother was moving out of the family home were hanging on the walls crooked, maybe deliberately crooked. She resisted the urge to straighten them. She could hear her mother’s voice saying ‘Isn’t it funny how some people feel the need to do that and others don’t?’ Her mother thought of herself as self-aware or at least more self-aware than others but she wasn’t self-aware, not one bit. There were Indian feathers on the walls leading to her mother’s bedroom and she remembered her mother telling her about the Indian doctrine of animism. ‘When a feather falls to earth, the Native Americans believe it carries all of the energy of the bird. Every living thing possesses an inherent virtue, power and wisdom’ Her mother was a bird but virtue, power, wisdom were not her traits. Was she an improved version of her mother? Did she have any of these?

Rita slowly moved around the bedroom with the focus of someone who needed tasks to stay upright, opening drawers, stacking folded cardigans, dropping costume jewellery into a shoebox. Her hands shook. She kept her breathing shallow, terrified if she inhaled too deeply, she’d smell something that explained her mother’s sudden death and at the same time aggravate her cravings for drugs, as deep breaths could. She worked her way around the room with a running commentary in her head — Carol’s colour-coded linen cupboard, the scented candle collection, the framed photo of Glenn and her as children that Carol kept facing the wall for reasons Rita never asked about and now couldn’t.

When Rita arrived at the bed itself, she crouched to drag out the boxes stored underneath, expecting lots of boxes assembled by a woman who compartmentalised her life — old tax returns in date order, Christmas cards neatly tied together by ribbon and ordered by year, maybe her Prince record collection ordered by release date. Instead, she found only two cardboard boxes, both sealed with brown packing tape, both labelled in Carol’s handwriting. One read CLIVE. The other mysteriously and very much unlike her mother, had no label at all.

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