Erwin Mortier - Stammered Songbook - A Mother's Book of Hours

And here I sit as I write this, in a corner of the hospital corridor, in which my mother is washed and is terrified: plastic everywhere, down to the indoor plants, above my head a neurotic neon tube.

It happened again, while she was sleeping on the sofa in the afternoon. My father had gone to see family and I had promised to “mummy-sit”. She went pale in her sleep, her cheeks almost as white as this paper. Under her eyelids I saw the pupils gliding towards the top edge of her eye sockets and from her trunk and midriff a series of shocks passed through her limbs. I slid one hand under her neck, and laid the other on her belly, and meanwhile I kept my eyes on her face and her lips, to see whether there were any convulsions with which she could have hurt her tongue, but I saw that under the thin skin of her mouth she was simply biting down hard on her teeth.

It lasted for a minute at most. I was worried sick, but at the same time I contemplated her and thought: go now, go on. If this is to be the moment, go then, let go, it doesn’t matter. But the convulsions ebbed away, and she came round and looked at me and smiled. My eyes filled with tears, to tell the truth, and I felt, as it were, my whole life, my whole idiotic, humdrum life, from the sandpit to the wheelchair in which I shall doubtless end up cursing or gaga, trembling in me.

Should I get dementia, it will be evident from my handwriting. It will become more legible, for other eyes too. Years of writing at night and in the quiet hours have distorted my private handwriting till it has become a sort of intimate stenography — a series of dots and curls and other score marks which have become a highly personal memory aid for me. If I, as we say in these parts, start misfiring, my writing will undoubtedly become slower, and automatically neater — if there is anything left to write about.

Even now it regularly happens that I need half an hour to decipher passages that I have written the night before in handwriting that hobbles along in clogs after the ecstasy of inspiration. And yet it doesn’t annoy me. Indeed, I find it reassuring to be able to sit and stare at my notes as if they were a millennia-old clay tablet, which may preserve a forgotten epic or the inventory of the temple storerooms round the altar of the earth goddess.

She always said that my handwriting was like her sister’s: just as illegible or anyway difficult to decipher. Her own handwriting bore the mark of school all her life, rather more angular than the calligraphy she had been taught in the 1950s. Letters to the head teacher, when we were ill or absent for some other reason, invariably contained references to “my son” or “my daughter”, which surprised us.

She never talked about us like that.

I would like to read the letters, the masses of letters she wrote to her sister the nun, usually sitting on the edge of her bed.

She wrote with a blue biro on squared paper.

Her signature was easy to forge. We all regularly signed school reports and suchlike — to which she more or less turned a blind eye. She was not very keen on the growing paper mountain generated by an education system obsessed with forms.

She wrote to her sister often when her sister got cancer. I should like to know how her consolation sounded, her concern, perhaps her own fear too.

Every day I repeat the miracle — or better the triumph — of the moment when our species invented writing. Reading and writing are things that we eventually do without thinking. Again and again the nimble-fingered miracle of our memory that, word by word, syllable by syllable, recalls the totally arbitrary link between a letter and a sound and what that association means. Again and again the creation of meaning from a dreadful background interference which without the other person’s ear would not convey any message… And that miracle, that everyday explosion into meaning, crackles and sparks back in time, to the ports of the Phoenicians, to the kings of Sumer, to the glazed tiles of the tower of Babel, scattered in the sand.

Shortly after she became ill, when she was here in my house and could not think of the word “book”, my father showed her a newspaper report, something about a book of mine that was about to come out. It took her a quarter of an hour to read the article. And when I asked her if she understood what was in it, she nodded, but I could tell she was lying from the uncertain way she looked at my father.

Hickory. Dickory. Dock. The words are deserting her again. She is de-wording and de-languaging and de-remembering.

We learned to read through books about a boy and girl called Jan and Fien. They had a dog called Pim. I can remember being moved and astonished when they introduced me to the word “home”. The fact that, by replacing two letters with one the magic constitution of the word “house” changed, I found miraculous.

So I learn to read and write anew every day — this miracle moves me every day afresh, more strongly, more intensely than before. Our home no longer exists, but I distribute, as it were, the family affection we knew, which was given to us, my brothers and sisters and me, in generous helpings, over a dozen braziers to store it elsewhere. You. Sweet. Warm. Kiss.

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She gets up from the table, goes to the kitchen. When she comes back into the room she catches sight of herself in the big mirror against the wall next to the table. For minutes on end she tries to avoid her own reflection, in order to sit with that of my father and me at the reflected table. She is like the robin that pecks at its own reflection in the window pane. She no longer knows that the woman whose face is contorted with pain and fear is herself.

When she comes to us, I have to close the curtain quickly, says Veerle. Otherwise she walks from the hall slap bang into the French windows.

Where does that behaviour come from that she sometimes exhibits? That wells up out of her and ebbs away again? Why does she suddenly start taking her skirt in one hand when she gets up from the sofa, so that in a caricature of coquettishness she wobbles through the living room with one bare knee?

It disappears, after a while. But then she is suddenly fixated on shoes. She takes a pair of slippers from under the radiator in the kitchen and goes upstairs with them (with me behind her, terrified she will fall), and traipses round from room to room with them, crying. Until I sit down and she flops down on the sofa beside me half an hour later and allows me to stroke her back, too exhausted to ward me off.

I imagine I can hear it, the silent havoc spreading through that body: strings that break, wires that snap, high-tension cable singing as it gives out — the soft moan of collapsing beams. My mother, a house that is slowly collapsing, a bridge dancing to a tremor. Sometimes she falls asleep even before her shoulders reach the back of the sofa. She remains hanging there asleep, hands in front of her. Short spasms run continually through her wrists and fingers. The last pylons are still standing, but they are rocking.