The house is empty; empty of familiar voices, smells and warmth. I stand in the narrow hallway, listening. After long moments, as dust motes float on musty air, I hear her voice, gently chiding. ‘Put your coat on. You’ll get a chill on your chest.’

In her latter years, after Dad died, the outside world became an alien landscape for my mother. Days passed into weeks when she’d not put a step outside her front door. Too busy, she’d say and Thomas, my mother’s second cousin, a grocer, would always oblige. I can hear her rattling off her weekly order over the phone. Then they’d chatter on about the past, their mutual friends or acquaintances that had, ‘gone over to the other side.’ Then, when he arrived with her groceries, they’d talk some more going over the same ground.

Later, she’d reel off, like an obituary columnist, the names of those who’d died, listing their illnesses, dates of their demise in accurate detail. ‘One day you’re here,’ she’d say. ‘The next, you’re just a memory,’ and, as she uttered those words, she’d look at the photograph of Dad posing in his allotment on a sunny day. Sadness and loss grew heavy upon her after my father died. They weighed down her spirit. Curved her spine into a human question mark.

‘When I go, take care of your mother, Nanette,’ Now I can hear his deep baritone voice made husky from smoking too many pipes. The day I was born, Mum wanted to call me Annette. Dad insisted upon Yvette. Unable to agree, they came up Nanette. He’d joke and say, ‘Neither of us could agree on the ‘ettes’.

Now I’m a parent and I find myself repeating the very words my parents uttered. In return, my teenage son and daughter tell me to, ‘stay cool,’ but as a mother, I too fret like my parents once did.

Stirring from those memories, I call out, ‘Hello!’ knowing that there’ll be no bustle of welcome to herald me into the kitchen where a strong pot of tea would be waiting, and a slice of Mum’s fruit cake, its currants winking their little black eyes at me, urging, ‘Eat me. Eat me. Forget the calories.’

‘That’ll put hairs on your chest,’ Mum often said. I’d laugh and tell her that I didn’t want hairs on my chest.

‘Well, you need some covering up.’ And she’d glance at what she considered a too low cut blouse or T-shirt I happened to be wearing.

Now I step into the sitting-room, my feet resounding off bare floor boards. Heavy drapes conceal the back garden. I draw one curtain aside and looked out onto nothing but a jungle of brambles that weep purple juice. Letting the curtain fall back, I look for the white china Phoenix my father won at the village fete when I was about six years old. But the house has been stripped bare. I realise I’m too late.

The front door opens. My older brother, John, strides into the room as if time spent in his childhood home is wasted time. ‘Estate agent not here yet?’ He states the obvious as usual.

‘I’m looking for the Phoenix,’ I tell him.

‘Chucked it out with the rest of the rubbish,’ he says.

‘Why didn’t you wait for me?’ Tears are close. I stem them with feelings of anger.

‘The bloody house has been empty for a month!’ He remonstrates as if I were one of his minions.

‘What’s a month compared to a lifetime of love, marriage and two kids?’ I ask the brother who considers financial success the most important qualities a person can achieve.

‘Then you should’ve come sooner.’ He frowns. ‘Time waits for no man as Mother used to say.’

A knock on the front door puts a stop to further arguments. John goes to answer it and a middle aged man enters the sitting room. I wish him good day and I leave without the Phoenix, carrying only my memories with me.