Skinner's Mission

28

Alex Skinner sat in the mingling glow of a large red candle and of the gas fire.

The trunk looked even bigger on the floor of the tiny living room in her flat in Glasgow’s University district. She stared at it, nursing a long-stemmed wine glass which she held pressed between her breasts.

She sat there for perhaps half an hour, motionless apart from occasional sips from the glass, doing her best to prepare herself mentally to lift the lid on her mother’s life, as Adam Duritz sang, unnoticed, from her stereo speakers.

She was alone, as her flatmate had left that afternoon for Easter vacation. The weekend was hers, if she chose. She had intended to spend it with Andy Martin, but he had warned her that he was heavily committed to the Charles investigation.

For most of the life that she could recall, her mother had been a misty, mystical figure. Unknown to Bob, she had begun to hold secret conversations with Myra only a few weeks after her death, as a means of consolation, and of keeping the pain of bereavement under control.

Over the years she had kept her mother alive in her heart, as best she could. Now she had seen her again for herself, she realised that the mother she had made into an imaginary friend had been no more than a candy floss fantasy beside the real Myra, a woman whose vitality had proclaimed itself like a fanfare, even from the flickery old cine film.

She had remembered her hair, her face, her soft breath, her smell, but the power of her mother’s personality had been beyond her comprehension at the time of her death. In the film shot on the beach, when she had taken over the camera, her father had seemed to be completely under her spell. Now so was Alex, once again.

She thought of the diaries. What would she see, through these windows into her dead mother’s soul?

For a while, she considered going to bed, and leaving her reading for the morning, like her father. But a mix of daring and curiosity overwhelmed her. She switched on the overhead light, and opened the box.

Everything inside was in brown paper parcels, save for a pair of black high-heeled shoes, and a maroon-coloured tube containing, Alex guessed, her mother’s College diploma.

She picked out one parcel. It rattled as she lifted it. She squeezed and shook it and felt the round surfaces of bracelets and necklaces. She replaced it and took out another which yielded to her touch, until she encountered a curving wire which she guessed to be the support of a brassiere cup.

She took out the biggest parcel of all. It was heavy and her touch told her that it contained a number of rectangular objects, tightly bound together. Eagerly she tore it open, and found inside a series of A4 hard-covered volumes, bound with yellow twine into two bundles. They were ordinary page-per-day, stationer’s desk diaries, some blue, some black, some red, some green, each with the year in gold lettering on the front.

She looked at the bundles and counted seven in each; fourteen diaries in all, bound together in chronological order. Her mother had been almost twenty-eight when she died; she had begun to keep her diaries in her fifteenth year.

Alex took a deep breath and refilled her glass with Fleurie. Picking up the first bundle, she slid the first volume out without untying the twine.

She settled into her comfortable armchair, opened the diary and began to read.