To contradict myself, I called out: ‘Mum? Are you there?’ My voice was too loud in the small space. It was like déjà vu from yesterday evening. What I found then, in my son’s empty flat, was terrible. Now, the silence seemed to foreshadow another something awful to come.

The door to the living room on my left was open. The door to the bathroom in front of me was ajar. I pushed it open; inside it was empty.

The door on the right was her bedroom. It was shut. I opened my mouth to speak again but I didn’t like that she hadn’t answered me. The silence in the flat felt . . . oppressive.

And not like my mum.

She always had noise somewhere. The radio, the TV, something. I’d find the TV on and say: ‘Are you watching this?’ And she’d glance at the screen and say: ‘No, I don’t know what it is.’

‘Can I turn it off then?’

‘I like the noise,’ she’d tell me, shaking her head. She was a woman of noise: singing, tapping, talking.

She is a woman of noise, I told myself.

But already I believed the past tense.

Already I knew.

I put off going into the bedroom; instead I pushed open the half-open door to the living room. It was a long, bright room with a kitchenette, opening up to the lounge with its French doors onto the shared gardens. The room was empty; the doors shut, curtains pulled. I snapped the light on. The radio was off; the TV was off.

What had happened here? I thought of the expression on Mrs Dale’s face – ‘Anyone could’ve got in’ – before I accepted that the answer was behind door number three.

And that was the bedroom.

As I reached for the door handle, I noticed that my hand was shaking violently.

Fifty-Five

fifty-five:

– now –

Away from the farmhouse, I am lost. Now I turn in the field like a weathervane trying to find my north. The fog hugs the ground, smothering me. I have no stars, no wind, no lights, not even from the farmhouse. My ears strain for the sounds of something – anything like a road that might help me place myself.

Nothing.

I want to cry out: to rage. I want to scream. But I can’t.

How could I lose my way?

I wish my mother was here.

I think I even whisper her name in the dark. I think I call to her through the fog.

She doesn’t answer.

Fifty-Six

fifty-six:

– before –

‘Mum? Are you in?’ I was back in my mother’s tiny hall, my steps mouse small and timid to her bedroom door. I leaned in close, knuckles murmuring a knock against the door. My held breath finally exhaled against the wood, warming only my face. In the stillness, only silence whispered back.

She did not answer.