Gone Read Online Free Page A

family. Nothing, not even our mother broke our family. Nothing, except death.
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    My mind died for a long time during her illness, and immediately after her death. I thought of her every day after she was cremated, though of her as ashes. Every night my last thought was her in the coffin in the mortuary at the hospice. She had been alone there. I cannot shake from my mind that she was still alive then, and scared. Thought of her as dead flesh, as ashes, as gone.
    The Sunday before she died I took her out to the front of the hospice and wheeled her down to the Grotto. She was running out of cigarettes, and I said I’d go around to the shops to get her some. I walk down the long drive, and, as soon as I turn the bend, run. She might die there and then in the wheelchair. She is weaker than I have ever seen her. The shopkeeper is chatting amiably to a customer who is wearing a pink hat. Why remember that pink hat when I can’t remember the sound of her voice? While I wait for the shopkeeper to be done talking I pull some sweets off a shelf. Maybe she would like some chocolates. Biscuits, too. A Sunday newspaper. When the man finally serves me I ask for eighty Dunhill. Always Dunhill when she was in the money. I shove them in the bag and rush out. No matches. I run back and throw ten pence on the table and shout matches at the man who has returned to his conversation with the pink hat. I stop running at the bend in the drive, slow to a fast walk. Her head is down, her chin on her chest, asleep. A cigarette, trailing smoke, held loosely between her fingers. I say her name quietly and she opens her eyes slowly, like a cat waking from a hot sleep. The cigarette drops from her hand. She can tell from my face I am thinking how close the moment is. She looks ashamed of herself, of the indignity of dying, dying before she becomes a woman. She reaches down to pick up the burning cigarette off the tarmac and stops half way, as she does I can see her as a teenager crouched for the four-hundred-metre relay, digging her spikes into the hard grass for leverage, the fastest finisher in the school. She could be behind thirty metres by the time she was passed the baton and still hit the tape first. I pick up the cigarette and hand it to her, but she shakes her hand minutely.
    â€”Sick of being sick, she says.
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    The night before she died I slept badly. Sadness finally exhausted me and I dozed. My mind fell in and out of sleep, in and out of dreams, morphine drugging Ruth into death, Ruth calling for our mother, Ruth calling, screaming an animal scream at death. I thought I should take her out of the hospice tomorrow and bring her to Tivoli Road. I thought about getting up now and visiting her. It was nearly three in the morning. I felt her mind awake, felt it moving through me, through the streets, through the houses, felt her breathing a goodbye, each breathing in a heavy triumph and each breathing out a resignation; soon it would be the last breathing out, no more words would be spoken, no more thoughts would form. She would be lucid. Everyone asleep in the hospice, the night nurse listening to the radio in the curtained office. I fell back asleep and in my sleeping, she slipped away. Nothing bit like that single regret.
    Whenever I look at her photograph on my desk I freeze and am able to think of nothing, not even her. Eventually, I begin to notice the photograph less and less. The funeral begins to occupy my thoughts. I question my motives. Was I no different from the priest who wanted to save her soul in his fashion when I wanted to celebrate her memory in mine? Perhaps I was looking for attention by dramatically and poignantly making a stand at the funeral with the priest. Perhaps I was no better than the hypocrites who shook my hand in their effort to assuage their guilt. I wasted so many days not writing when I promised her I would write every day. The most horrific truth is