Ruby Robinson

There is an ash tree behind this house. You can see it from our bedroom window. If you stare at it for long enough, you’ll see it drop a leaf. Stare at it now, you said, and notice the moment a leaf strips away from its branch, giving a twirl. Consider this. The ash tree unclothes itself Octoberly. From beside our bed, fingering the curtain, observe the dark candles at the top of that tree, naked and alert, tending to the breeze. A sheet of ice between the rooftops and this noiseless sky has turned the air inside out. Black veins of branches shake against the blue screen on which they hang. Small mammals are hibernating in pellets of warm air under ground. But, in spite of the cold, this ash tree does not shy from shrugging off its coat, sloping its nude shoulders to the night. So, you said, undo, unbutton, unclasp, slowly remove. Let down your hair, breathe out. Stand stark in this room until we remember how not to feel the chill. Stand at the window, lift your arms right up like a tree. Yes — like that. Watch leaves drop.

She said the cornflake cake made her day, she said a man cannot be blamed for being unfaithful: his heart is not in tune with his extremities and it’s just the way his body chemistry is. She said all sorts of things. We saw a duck pond and a man with a tub of maggots and a tub of sweet corn, we saw the walled garden and the old-fashioned library in the park, stopped for a cup of tea in a cafe where we had the cornflake cake cut into halves with the handle of a plastic fork. We saw yellow crocuses growing in a ring around a naked tree, the sky showing in purple triangles between the branches. We looked in the window of Butterworth’s at the bikes: they were beautiful, all of them. Gorgeous, she said. The sun was pushing through the iced air and landing on us on our heads and our shoulders and the backs of our legs. We bought nail varnish remover from Wilko’s, a bath sheet, and two Diet Cokes. She said she’d been talking to Jesus and God because she didn’t want to go to hell, although, she said, correctly, we’ve been through hell already, haven’t we. She said a woman should know her place, should wait. She lit a cigarette.

I can’t go up because I don’t know how. Nobody has shown me. So many names, my mother, I’m never sure what to call you. So many names for all your predators and crushes and suitors. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m here and I’m sorry I’m not here. Would you have made it on your own without the comorbid condition of motherhood and the slowness and consistency of time? I’m sorry for the slowness and consistency of time; years like zombies dawdling toward a cliff edge holding back the child’s writhing body, itching to grow, packed around the same mind I have now. I’m sorry the concept of promise outgrew the concept of child and that systemic contradiction and wizardry left only a dim sense of suspicion; a crescendoing breeze, accumulating clouds amidst bewildering dichotomies. I’m sorry for resembling your relatives and captors and the man who penetrated you, who’s still there, communicating boldly via intersections of others’ thought waves and memories, blatant into the long nights, haunting, for my inferiority in the face of nuclear family culture, feeding on detritus of white goods, leisure sports, laminate floors, a real home and fake recycling, for creeping by night into a tight void, blinds down, brain blown glass-thin, electric impulses and bloated thoughts bolted in. For this life being the only one my quiet mind knows, its many versions and phases, I’m sorry. I wasn’t your daughter — or anyone — when you were the blue-water navy, or the beheaded, or the baby boy. Or was I? I’m sorry I was not yet born and could not yet hear you when you were over there, listening carefully for the rain and small movements of animals, for sounds of life, through a green, five-fingered haze. I’m sorry I consider sentiment, fact; authenticity, originality, when they are irrelevant. So many choices in supermarkets, the natural habitat of panic attacks, it’s enough to make anyone sorry and I am. I’m sorry it’s taking over half a century to link your purple-patched brain scan to the basic biology of stress. The piano thunders on, sustain pedal wired to the facial muscles of all your neglecters, aching like hell behind their stamina and machinery. I’m sorry I had, logically, to think of my own self first / simultaneously, navigating through the fire and acid of Trust and her sycophant Love before returning. All the powerful were women; the power of penises and facial hair originated there, cajoled by matriarchs. As if skin and breath were insignificant! I’m so sorry. Where are you now, to take into my arms and resuscitate? Is it too late, given you’re fifty and no longer a child? It’s always mothers and mind control which is why I thank you for breaking the cycle, withstanding the enormity of generations, magnetic as water, to let us go. You weren’t to know about other outrageous families and sadistic counterparts. A nugget of my limbic system remembered choosing my own lemon-yellow baby clothes so thank you. I squeezed that into the thumb-sized space in the palm of my hand knowing all along they were wrong and imploding with it. I’m sorry I wept in the shower for your canceled wedding, letting the violet dress down the plughole, unsure what it all meant except things staying the same,future aggravating my brain, a baby brother gone again. I’m sorry you were out there, alone, defined by the worst of others and defined by your children’s prisms of hope and survival mechanisms. In one version, you did marry and lived in a house with green walls and extravagant furniture. I’m sorry that consensus reality had you set fire to your bed as you lay in it; arrested, put in a cell, let off the next day because the lawyer believed it was a genuine attempt and convinced the police. I’m sorry you’ve had to withstand such torrents of  knowledgeless advice and legal toxification, clinging to reality by a sinew of tooth, remembering yourself, through the rough and the smooth. I’m sorry I was absent, memorizing books of the Bible for a bar of Dairy Milk, owning up to things I’d never done, getting confirmed as an antidote to the evil core of me. I’m sorry it was exotic to think of kids like me ending up in prison, coincidentally, inevitably or prevented (which is the same), salvaged, peristalsized through society, brain safely contained, doused daily in cold water or electricity or disgrace, temptations kept consistently far enough away as to appear illusory like you, my brave mother, fantastic prodigy in flowing white caftan, knotted long brown hair, a beautiful gaze of solemnity, rare stone, emotionless (defined by others). I’m sorry I was ill-prepared for your soiled mattress and comatose body, under a wave of advocaat and transistor radios oozing with cheap Scotch. Even I developed feelings for them amidst adults acting like it’s okay to leave you this way, the blue bottle flies in on it, inflated with dog shit and red hot egos, resting on your cheek, your lip, too cunning to get rid of. I’m sorry that laughing off a difficult childhood didn’t make it never happen. Even a basic calculator recognizes an infinite loop as a malfunction; don’t they see cutting off my privates every night