Fragments of words crackle through the phone after that. Ultrasound. High risk. Decisions. Soon. But I can’t piece it together coherently because the voices of everyone else are swelling in my head.

Every flock of old hens from here to Loch Bhreagh to Town, tsking and clucking: There’s Crow Fortune, havin’ a baby for that other druggie fella, after him already gettin’ the Parsons one in trouble. And her with them tumours. And her mother back on the bottle. And the Spensers taking their home. Baby’ll likely be born handicapped, eh? What with the father and whatever made him all gimped up like that. And the grass smokin’ down there at The Wharf all the time. Her, sick and pregnant. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Them Fortunes. Makes ya wonder how much of it they bring upon themselves.

Willy Gimp, grilling me about how this even happened, what he’s supposed to do about it, and why I even bothered telling him.

Char and Allie giving me various shades of dubious advice.

And then there’s Mama’s voice. Loud and clear and fierce as hell: You made your bed, Missy. You’d best damn well lie in it.

When the phone rings again, I am too stunned to answer it. The ringing stops. Then starts again. Stops. Starts. Over and over. Finally, I pick up.

“What?” My social graces are gone.

“It’s me,” says Peggy, who never had much in the way of social graces to begin with.

I just start laughing like a hyena. I laugh and laugh and laugh. Laugh myself to tears.

“What’s wrong with you?” Peggy’s voice raised and rising, tight and desperate. “Christ, Crow! Shut up! There was an accident.”

“What? Who? What happened?” I mumble. There’s an unmistakable urgency in Peggy’s voice, snapping me into the awareness that shit just got real.

“A car accident. Your mother,” hushed and shaky.

“Jesus, is she okay?”

“No,” choked and barely audible.

Not at all.

She’s dead.

7 IN LIVING AND DYING COLOUR

Everybody always said that “letting go” was one of those things I had to learn to do. Let go of grudges against people who are just born arseholes. Let go of needing to run the whole show, and just let other people do a piss-poor job and make mistakes. Let go of the cat’s tail before she claws your eyeballs out. But letting go is a lie. Nobody really does it, not in the way that all the serenity-stuffed blissers out there would have you believe. We usually just find something new to cling to. Something to fill whatever void is left by whatever we pretended to let go of, because voids make us twisted and twitchy. Letting go isn’t liberating. It’s a gruesome process of coming undone, especially when nothing can fill the void left by losing the only thing that held you together. The thing that was so precious, so deeply embedded in every fibre of your existence that you don’t even know how to be in the world without it.