Katherine Carlyle by Rupert Thomson Page A

I knew he was attempting to arouse himself I felt, oddly, as if I were being searched. The silence in the room was pointed, critical. We couldn’t seem to move beyond the confines of our bodies.
    Maybe tomorrow
.
    Outside, the wind has risen, and I’m conscious of being high up, on the top floor of a building. Only the terrace is above me, Japanese in its simplicity. The empty glass globes gleam on the table; the stems of bamboo stir. To the northwest, on the horizon, are the tall chimneys. Smoke leaks across the sky like ink in water. Like calligraphy. I think of all the people below me — reading, drinking, talking, making love — then I curl up on my side and face the wall. After a few minutes I drift backwards and downwards, sinking into a place that has no color, no light.
    /
    Not long before chemotherapy began my mother cut her hair off with the kitchen scissors. She did it in the living room, in frontof the mirror with the varnished frame. I tried to stop her.
You’re making mistakes
, I cried.
It doesn’t matter
, she told me, laughing.
It’s going to fall out anyway
. I didn’t understand — I had no idea of what was coming — but she made it easier by turning it into a game. The golden hair on the floor resembled an illustration from a fairy tale.
    A few months later I walked into her bedroom and found her lying on her back with her eyes closed. Only her head showed above the covers. It was the middle of the day. The sky in the window was patchy and gray, rain threatening. Rome in the winter, the river breathing its damp vapors into the city. All the old, sad stones. Her hair was gone by then. Her eyebrows too. She looked fragile, ethereal. Half erased. A baby bird, an alien. A ghost. My throat ached at the sight of her.
I love you so much
, I whispered. She wasn’t aware of me. She didn’t even wake.
    There were good times after that, moments of almost hysterical elation, the brightness of forgetting. Then something would catch in me and I would remember what the future held. Like the statue of the winged woman in the Tiergarten, and those clouds gathering behind her, loaded, black …
    I was with her when she died. It was the evening of May 12. My father was in the kitchen with my mother’s sister Lottie, who had flown over from England. He had opened a bottle of wine and laid out olives, artichokes, prosciutto, and fresh bread. To keep our strength up, as he said. I couldn’t eat. Instead, I sat by the bed, my mother’s hand in mine, the sky above the Vatican warm yellow streaked with red, like the flesh of a peach. The usual sounds rose up from the street — plates being stacked, a church bell tolling, a motorbike. I wasn’t conscious of my body, only my hand holding hers. I was walking along a beach. On one side tall grassesfenced me in. Bleached to a pale, sugarcane yellow, they tapped and clicked in the offshore breeze. Off to the right was a brooding ocean, the waves explosive, the dark blue farther out flecked savagely with white. The sand beneath my feet was cool and slightly gritty. I don’t know where I thought I was. Puerto Rico, perhaps. Or Nicaragua. No place I had ever been. My mother was drawing breath, with long gaps in between, each intake arduous and harsh. As I walked on that imaginary beach I remained aware of her breathing, regular, relentless — hypnotic. But then the sounds ended and I realized that the last breath I had heard had been her last, though I hadn’t known it at the time, having expected to hear another, and then another, having become accustomed to the rhythm, not having been able to accept, or even contemplate, the possibility of silence. It had been like being on a train and watching the telegraph poles flick by, the wires rising and falling, linking one pole to the next. You watch the poles, you’re always waiting for the next one, and then suddenly they’re gone. There’s nothing in the foreground, nothing to focus on. The view that was always there is