deranged and won’t listen, won’t care. I have to be credible.
I have to be coherent, orderly, the way she is.
She’s beautiful. And kind. Small, and sort of fraillooking, but the hardest worker. She never sits still, she
always has to be doing something, or making something,
with her blue-veined, fine-boned hands. You would forget,
after a while, that she was missing five joints on her right
one. You just stop noticing, so industrious she is, with
what she has left.
‘It’s like you’ve got a condition,’ I tell her in mock
disgust, whenever she sews or draws or types, and Mum
will laugh.
But she’s a bad cook, a really bad cook. I took over
doing that for the both of us when I was ten and she was
trying to hold down the country-town bakery job and the
thing at the doctor’s clinic that didn’t work out because
some sleazebag called Graham kept inventing illnesses
just to harass her for a date. It was the only thing I could
do to help, cooking, and I’ve just kept doing it, through
every move, every new upheaval. We had to leave town, I
remember, because of that man, Graham from Rainbow,
with his isolated farmhouse, extensive gun collection and
pack of pit bulls. There was nowhere to go, everyone knew
everyone; they all had an opinion. And everywhere my
mother turned, he’d be there; taking up her time, wanting
her all to himself. It was suffocating.
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