The Last Visit

It’s the nights that are the worst. Nothing is the same in the dark.

The coat rack is a man holding an axe.

The pile of clothes beside the bed is concealing an army of snakes.

The old pillows stuffed under the bed is a zombie waiting…

waiting…

waiting…

You sit up, your heart is in your throat. 

It was just a dream.

It was just a dream.

It was just a dream.

You force yourself out from under the sheets, to get a drink. You know if you stayed huddled under the duvet your thoughts would spiral out of your grasp and you would lie without moving until the sun rises and all your limbs are stiff. 

So you make your way to the kitchen, turning on every light on in every room, and your pour yourself some water from the Brita jug in the fridge. You can’t drink tap water - it always tastes metallic and that metallic taste reminds you of blood and the blood could be from a body that is decaying in a water tank somewhere. 

You stand next to the window and you drink your water and you feel your heart rate slowly drop until you can breathe normally and the oxygen surrounding you no longer feels empty.

Taking a deep breath, you check if all the windows are locked. You check the front door - twice. You check under the bed. You kick the pile of clothes. You shine your torch into the back of the wardrobe.

You get back into bed, leaving all the lights on. The thought of being alone in the dark is too much. You grab the corners of the duvet and pull it tightly around you, until you are nothing more than a big, self-swaddled baby.

Beth. Beth. Beth. BETH.

You sit up, looking frantically around the room. Your head is spinning. You recognised the voice, but it couldn’t be. It’s not real. It must have been a dream. You pick up your phone - having given up on getting a full night's sleep. 3:33am. Just six minutes after you went back to bed. Can you enter a dream state after just six minutes of sleep? Maybe you’re delirious. You haven’t slept a full night since it happened, and it happened months ago. But this is the first time you have felt like she was there. These past few months have been full of nothing other than painful loneliness. 

You have been hoping for a sign, for something to prove you wrong. Something to tell you that she is still there. That there is a heaven, or a hell, or some kind of afterlife. That her soul didn’t just fragment into oblivion the second that she flatlined. That her existence wasn’t just wiped from the record and she is still hanging around somewhere.

You had briefly thought that she had come back as a seagull. There was one that sat outside your window everyday and you felt such a connection with it that you fed it stale crackers and bread, until it was hit by a British Gas van. In hindsight, she would never have come back as a seagull - she was deathly afraid of birds. And it probably only returned each day because you were treating it in the same way that lonely old women treat stray cats.

Lying in bed makes you feel vulnerable, so you get up and go and sit on the sofa. You scroll through the TV guide until you find a channel that only plays Friends on a constant loop. You wish that you had friends - or more accurately, that you still had friends. 

After it happened, you cut everyone off. You couldn’t bare the constant sympathy, the hugs, the forlorn faces, the avoidance of certain topics, the pity invites. Everyone expected you to be sad, to want someone to take care of you. Friends offered to clean. Casseroles and soups and pies were left on your front door step. But you weren’t sad. You were angry. You wanted to punch someone - and you did.

After you were arrested for letting loose on a disgustingly cheerful McDonald’s greeter, your friends started stepping away. The ones who still showed up with casseroles and soups and pies were ignored. The ones who didn't take no for an answer were subject to vicious hate campaigns. The last one to hang on woke up one morning with a car that resembled an uncooked omelet with the words leave me alone you ugly bitch written in the yolk. After that, you were finally alone.

Something shifts around you, pulling you out of your trance. The air starts to thicken and it gets cold - so cold. And then you feel a tap on your shoulder. 

Beth.

You turn around. And there she is.

She’s not like the translucent ghosts you see in the movies. She looks more like Edward Cullen when he steps out into the meadow and starts sparkling in the sun. She looks physical - she looks like she is truly there in front of you - but the glistening light seeping from her pores make it clear that she is not. 

In all your fantasizing about her in the afterlife, you had always assumed that her injuries would vanish and she would have returned to the most perfect version of herself. Maybe her younger self, maybe before she had children. Now, you realise, that is not the case. 

Her head hangs unnaturally to the left, like she is holding an invisible mobile phone between her shoulder and ear. Her hair is matted and stray strands obscure the majority of her left eye. Her left ankle is floppy, lying lifelessly next to her leg. And her neck bares a red necklace of blisters. She looks exactly as she did when you found her.

‘Mum?’ you whisper, unable to hide the fear in your voice.

Beth.

Her mouth doesn’t move when she speaks. She doesn’t blink. She just stands, staring at you. The words floating in the air around her.

‘What are you doing here?’

I have come to talk.

‘Why?’

I need you to live.

Stunned, you don’t say a word. She needs you to live? The audacity. You laugh.

Beth.

‘You want me to live? But you died. You chose to die. If you truly cared about me and my life, you never would have put me through this. You knew that I would be the one to find you. Did you think that I would be fine after that? Did you think that I could just move on with my life after cutting my own mother’s lifeless body down? After holding you, screaming, waiting for the paramedics to arrive - just to confirm what I already knew - to confirm that you were dead? To spend every day after wondering why I wasn’t enough for you. Why my own mother hated me so much that she would rather tie a rope around her neck than spend another day with me? How could a mother do that to her own child?’ 

You’re crying now. Your face is wet, your eyes are burning. Your cheeks and your hands are hot and you can’t stop shaking. All that rage that had been building and building and building since the day it happened has surfaced. You hadn’t allowed yourself to direct your anger at your mum - it seemed wrong to be angry at the dead. But in the confusion of grief, you had misplaced your anger. You had taken it out on everyone and everything else, because the source of the rage no longer existed. But now it was here, standing in front of you.

‘I have lost everyone. I have lost everything. You were my best friend. You were supposed to always be there for me. You were supposed to be here to teach me about motherhood, to help me plan my future wedding. To scold me when I put on weight, to hold me when I cried overbreak ups. To tell me what skincare products worked for you, how to do my hair, how to shave my legs. But you’re gone. I don’t have a mum.’

Beth. You will always have a mum. These are such trivial matters. You will have a wedding, and you will have children if that is what you want. You will learn and you will grow. I am not the keeper of all womanly secrets - that is what friends are for. And yes, I have watched you cut them all off in downright nasty ways. You need to fix that. They worry about you everyday - they are just too afraid to approach you.

‘But why did you do it? Why did you leave me?’

I didn’t want to leave you. I wanted to leave this world. To escape all my feelings. Everything had just become too much for me. I realise now that I was ill, and maybe if I had asked for help the outcome would have been different. But we can’t change the past. Oh Beth, I am so sorry. I am so sorry. But please Beth, don’t make my mistake. Don’t cut everyone off. Talk to people. Talk to people when you feel happy, talk to people when you feel sad. Don’t be alone. Don’t hide your feelings - embrace them, let them out. Now, I don’t have long Beth. I will go as the sun begins to rise, and I won’t be able to return again. So let it out.

And you do. You scream at her, you shout at her. You curse in front of your mother - something that you have never done before. At one point, you call her a heartless bitch. You perform an exorcism on yourself - letting go of all the vicious rage that has grown like a tumour on your heart. 

You feel your body become lighter and your mind become clearer. You can see the colours around you for the first time in what feels like an eternity. 

You can hear the trees moving in the breeze, the birds waking up and starting to sing.

And then, when your voice is hoarse and you have nothing else to say, you climb over the back of the sofa and you hug your mother for the very last time. 

And you hold her, crying, until the warmth returns to the room and the pale orange of the sunrise lights up the sky.