I cried in the lingerie department of the Marks & Spencer just off the high street in Oxford, standing between the racks of bras. I didn’t wish you were there, exactly. It would have been weird if you were since I was in my 30s and I didn’t need advice to buy a bra. But just because you never would be there again. I couldn’t tell you about the ridiculous scratchy thing that I had just felt with the fingertips of my left hand, that looked like it had orange feathers embroidered on it, and that I knew would make you laugh. I couldn’t thank you now for the times you did give me advice about bras, when my own mother didn’t notice I needed one and didn’t know where to take me to buy one that didn’t make me look 40 when I was 10. I couldn’t tell you that I didn’t follow your other advice about not following men across oceans. And I couldn’t stumble out onto the street with my eyes blurry with tears and call you and get on the bus to Eynsham and feel less alone.

 

They found you in the morning, and I could imagine you the way we always found you in the morning when I filed in with your own children to pile on to the foot of your bed. You always had a paperback and would put it down spine-up on your knee and bite your lip to try to look cross at the interruption.

 

I don’t know if I thanked you for the time I spent part of the summer in your downstairs bedroom reading Orlando and read the parts I liked the best out loud to you - like the part about walking and crying over someone at an open air market in Southwark, which is a much more impressive place to be cried over than the lingerie department of the Marks & Spencer off Oxford High Street.

 

Just before Marks & Spencer, I went to the bookstore - your favourite one with the steep stairs. The last time we were there, you took them slowly, gripping the banister. It was after your first stroke, but you went down anyway because the linguistics books were all downstairs and that was what we both came for, and the stairs in your house were just as steep, and you were stubborn.

 

I want you to know that I forgave you for the time you told the waiter it was my birthday and a whole restaurant sang to me. And that it’s okay, even though there was a tambourine, and we split a whole bottle of arak with your second husband, because we sat at the front of the bus on the way home and the rain and the dark made it feel like the bus was alone in space and not on the road to your house.

 

The bag was getting heavy on my shoulder and I was getting a rash from the canvas strap right next to my bra strap. The last time I called you, I was on the platform waiting for a train to London with this same bag full of jars of your marmalade, wrapped in faux pashmina scarves you had helped me choose from the covered market, because I had arrived at your house cold and with a rip in my suitcase that we covered with bright pink duct tape. You called me “nowhere girl” and said you were my “mum-away-from-mum.”

 

I cried in the lingerie department of the Marks & Spencer just off Oxford High Street, where I came in because I didn’t bring quite enough clothes with me travelling again. I know you would laugh about that, and tell me to bring my own duct tape, even though I still have most of the bright pink roll that you slipped onto my wrist like a bracelet the last time I left your house. I drag it around in my bag between places that aren’t really places, like train platforms, and steep staircases, and busses in the rain at night, and aisles between clothes racks, and everywhere else where I realize I have something left to say to you and can’t.