The Phone Call On A Tuesday
The phone rang at twenty past four on a Tuesday, which was a bad time for a phone call, because it was the hour when the afternoon has gone on too long and the evening has not yet begun, and you cannot pretend to be busy. I was at the kitchen table in the flat in Bethnal Green with a mug of tea gone cold and a lighting plot for a revival of *A Month in the Country* that was refusing to solve itself. The director wanted the third act lit like a room that had been lived in for too many years without being aired. I had been staring at the plan of the stage for an hour and had drawn nothing.
I knew it was my mother before I picked up. She always rang on the landline, even though I had given her the mobile number twice, written out in block capitals on the back of a Christmas card the second time. She did not trust the mobile. She did not trust any number that was not tied to a wall.
"Maeve," she said.
"Mam."
She let a silence go that was not awkward. My mother and I had a long and settled grammar of pauses. I waited.
"He's been moved," she said. "They've shifted him up to the hospice on Monday. Saint Clodagh's. The one out by Barna."
"Right," I said.
"They said to tell the family. If there was anyone who'd want to come."
There was nothing in her voice. She might have been ringing to tell me the price of oil had gone up again. My mother had been ringing me like this for four