Will Self: The Quantity Theory of Insanity: Reissued

And then, invariably, as I drew closer the likeness would evaporate. Not only wasn’t it Mother, but it seemed absurd that I ever could have made the mistake. This late-middle-aged woman looked nothing like Mother, she was dowdy and conventional. Not the sort of woman at all who would say of effete young men that they ‘had no balls’, or of precious young women that they ‘shat chocolate ice cream’. Yet each time the fact that Mother was dead hit me again, it was as if it hadn’t really occurred to me before and that her failure to get in touch with me over the past six months had been solely because she was ‘hellishly busy’.

When I stopped seeing fake Mothers in the street I reckoned that I had just about accepted her death. Every so often I thought about her, sometimes with sadness, sometimes with joy, but her absence no longer gnawed at me like a rat at a length of flex. I was over it. Although, like Marcel after Albertine has gone, from time to time I felt that the reason I no longer missed Mother with such poignancy was that I had become another person. I had changed. I was no longer the sort of person who had had a mother like Mother. Mother belonged to someone else. If I had run into her at a dinner party fully conscious, she probably wouldn’t have recognised me. My mother was dead.

All of this made the events that transpired in the winter of the year she died even more shocking. I was walking down Crouch Hill towards Crouch End on a drizzly, bleak, Tuesday afternoon. It was about three o’clock. I’d taken the afternoon off work and decided to go and see a friend. When, coming up the other side of the road I saw Mother. She was wearing a sort of bluish, tweedish long jacket and black slacks and carrying a Barnes & Noble book bag, as well as a large handbag and a carrier bag from Waitrose. She had a CND badge in her lapel and was observing the world with a familiar ‘there will be tears before bedtime’ sort of expression.

The impression I had of Mother in that very first glance was so sharp and so clear, her presence so tangible, that I did not for a moment doubt the testimony of my senses. I looked at Mother and felt a trinity of emotions: affection and embarrassment mingled with a sort of acute embarrassment. It was this peculiarly familiar wash of feeling that must have altogether swamped the terror and bewilderment that anyone would expect to experience at the sight of their dead mother walking up Crouch Hill.

I crossed the road and walked towards her. She spotted me when I was about twenty feet off. Just before a grin of welcome lit up her features I spotted a little moue of girlish amusement — that was familiar too, it meant ‘You’ve been had’. We kissed on both cheeks; Mother looked me up and down to see how I was weighing in for the fight with life. Then she gestured at the shop window she’d been looking into. ‘Can you believe the prices they’re charging for this crap, someone must be buying it.’ Her accent was the same, resolutely mid-Atlantic, she had the same artfully yellowed and unevened dentures. It was Mother.

‘Mother,’ I said, ‘what are you doing in Crouch End? You never come to Crouch End except to take the cat to the vet, you don’t even like Crouch End.’

‘Well, I live here now.’ Mother was unperturbed. ‘It’s OK, it’s a drag not being able to get the tube, but the buses are fairly regular. There’s quite a few good shops in the parade and someone’s just opened up a real deli. Want some halva?’ Mother opened her fist under my face. Crushed into it was some sticky halva, half-eaten but still in its gold foil wrapping. She grinned again.

‘But Mother, what are you doing in Crouch End? You’re dead.’

Mother was indignant, ‘Of course I’m dead, dummy, whaddya think I’ve been doing for the last ten months? Cruising the Caribbean?’

‘How the hell should I know? I thought we saw the last of you at Golders Green Crematorium, I never expected to see you in Crouch End on a Tuesday afternoon.’ Mother had me rattled, she seemed to be genuinely astonished by my failure to comprehend her resurrection.

‘More to the point, what are you doing in Crouch End? Why aren’t you at work?’

‘I thought I’d take the afternoon off. There’s not a lot on at the office. If I stayed there I’d just be shuffling paper back and forth trying to create some work.’

‘That’s an attitude problem talking, young man. You’ve got a good job there. What’s the matter with you? You always want to start at the top, you’ve got to learn to work your way up in life.’

‘Life, Mother? I hardly think “Life” is the issue here! Tell me about what it’s like to be dead! Why didn’t you tell any of us you were having life after death in Crouch End? You could have called … ’

Mother wasn’t fazed, she looked at her watch, another crappy Timex, indistinguishable from the last one I’d seen her wearing. ‘It’s late, I’ve got to go to my class. If you want to know about life after death come and see me tomorrow. I’m living at 24 Rosemount Avenue, in the basement flat, we’ll have tea, I’ll make you some cookies.’ And with that she gave me the sort of perfunctory peck on the cheek she always used to give me when she was in a hurry and toddled off up Crouch Hill, leaving me standing, bemused.

What I couldn’t take was that Mother was so offhand about life after death, rather than the fact of it. That and this business of living in Crouch End. Mother had always been such a crushing snob about where people lived in London; certain suburbs — such as Crouch End — were so incredibly non-U in Mother’s book of form. The revelation that there was life after death seemed to me relatively unimportant set beside Mother’s startling new attitudes.

I probably should have gone and told someone about my encounter. But who? All a shrink could have offered would have been full board and medication. And anyway, the more I told people how real the experience had been, the more certain they would become that I was the victim of an outlandishly complex delusionary state.

I had no desire to be psychiatric cannon fodder, so I went off to see my friend and had a fulfilling afternoon playing Trivial Pursuit. Just suppose it was all for real? I had to find out more about Mother’s resurrection, she’d always been so emphatic about what happened to people after they die: ‘They rot, that’s it. You put ‘em in a box and they rot. All that religious stuff, it’s a load of crap.’ Setting aside the whole issue of the miraculous I really wanted to see Mother eat humble pie over this afterlife issue, so much so that I went through the next thirty-odd hours as if nothing had happened. It was an exercise in magical thinking. I figured that if I behaved as if nothing had happened, Mother would be waiting for me, with cookies, in Rosemount Avenue, but if I said anything to anyone, the gods might take offence and whisk her away.

Rosemount Avenue was one of those hilltop streets in suburban London where the camber of the road is viciously arced like the back of a macadamised whale. The houses are high-gabled Victorian, tiled in red and with masonry that looks as if it was sculpted out of solid snot. Calling it an avenue was presumably a reference to the eight or so plane trees running down each side of the road. These had been so viciously pruned that they looked like nothing so much as upturned amputated legs. Poised on the swell of the road I shuddered to myself. What had brought these macabre images into my mind? Was it the prospect of my second encounter with a dead person? Was I losing my balance? Examining myself I concluded in the negative. In truth suburban streets, if you look at them for long enough, always summon up a sense of mortality — of the skull beneath the skin. The Reaper always waits behind the bus shelter. You can see his robe up to the knee; the rest is obscured by the route map.