The world broke down, in a small way, when my mother was wheeled out of the house on a stretcher. The last time I saw her she was sitting up in her armchair, waxen and pale, after her heart stopped beating. The next time it was only her shape, zipped up in a body bag, sailing away. I watched from between the banisters as the men and women in green sombrely removed her from the house.</p>

I turned my head another way and they transformed. No longer were they uniformed professionals, but headless women- three of them, in billowing dresses that flew around them like wings.<br>
Greek statues in marble depict solidified gods and nymphs, like this my eyes reformed the matter in the air, from mirages to new deities. They took the stretcher in their long white arms and their clothing flew slowly round, as if underwater. Silently, they moved in a procession, out the door and down the steps and out of sight.</p>

I don’t know where they took her. A hospital, a stainless steel-lined morgue, to cut her up, to sew her back together, to dress her up in clothes we had selected.<br> Perhaps.<br>
Then: she was in a box, carried up the hill to the grave by four men with sunken skin and stiff black suits. <br>
Then: they lowered her into the ground and we looked down into the pit.<br>
There was a body in the box; they told me it was her.<br>
<br>
 * <br>  
<br>                                                                           
Time shifted along, like ice flows at the poles. I sat on my piece of ice that floated slowly on the Arctic seas, aimless. Never moving forward. Cracking on contact, freezing again. The seals moved as dark shapes underwater. The sun shone cold. I reached out a hand and found hope- another human’s warmth. A young man: with eager hands and straining clothes, and growing impatience. He grew afraid of the look in my eyes, the watery imprint of another realm, a place of darkness he did not want to visit. He couldn’t bear to look at me, and he left. My mother had left me all over again.<br>
I looked up to the bareness of the sky, and longed for God. My ice sheet moved away and onwards through the freezing sea.</p>

No, this will not do, I thought.<br>
I will find her again.</p>
<br>
*
<br>
The Nereids: the headless women in their underwater movements who had taken my mother away. They took the souls of the departed and carried them across the sea to the afterlife. If I could find them, I could find her. I could go back to where we had begun.</p>

I called to the narwhals, and they pushed me along. Northward, onwards, to the top of the world where the sky swims in Technicolour, shot with electric green.</p>

They stood in front of me, those three headless women. They swayed like seaweed. Their bodies hummed.<br>
‘Down to the underworld?’ one said. ‘But you’re not dead!’<br>
‘I know,’ I said, bowing down in supplication. ‘But I can offer you whatever you want. Please: let me descend, so I can see her again.’<br>
The Nereids moved their torsos distractedly. If they’d had heads, they would have shaken them. They turned to each other.<br>
‘This is not allowed, surely?’ said one.<br>
‘But we’re not fussy, are we?’ said the next.<br>
‘As long as there’s no guarantee of her ever coming back…’ said the last.<br>
They paused.<br>
They turned back to me.<br>
‘We can take you there,’ one said.<br>
‘But we can’t promise we can take you back,’ said the next.<br>
‘Only Hades decides who leaves,’ said the last.<br>
‘I know,’ I said, ‘I understand the terms.’<br>
I gave them each a cup of my blood, and they were satisfied.<br>
‘Come, then,’ they said.<br>
And off we went.</p>

They carried me in their arms across the sea. We skimmed the water with our feet, rode on the vast backs of blue whales, and travelled through the turns of the clock from light to dark and on to endless day when the sun never sets and the doors to the underworld stand.<br>
There, they set me down.<br>
‘We’ll go no further,’ said the Nereids.<br>
I stood on the glittering rock and nodded.<br>
‘Thank you for your kindness,’ I said.<br>
They paused a moment, sighed collectively, and left.</p>

I stood at the edge of the world.<br>
The gates opened out of the ground, and the earth gaped wide. It was a leap of faith to jump. I knew I might never return again.<br>
The sun blazed in the sky, that was nowhere, and endless. The darkness rumbled.<br>
I jumped.<br>
<br>
*
<br>
I landed on the damp shores of the River Styx. It was an underground river, with a great ceiling above it dripping cold water that echoed in the cavern. The mud was black, and sucked down my feet as if it meant to swallow me whole. On the shore, the boatman stood.<br>
He was old and tired and he looked at me from under hooded eyes. He knew I was alive.<br>
‘It’s only one way,’ he croaked. He looked worried. On the other shore, the air shifted. No one stood on the other side.
‘I know,’ I said. I stepped forward. ‘Please take me across.’<br>
‘As you wish,’ he said, and stepped back to let me board the boat.</p>

The oar moved through the smoke stained river. My eyes took in the space around that stood still, like stems in water. The air watched. It chose when to move.<br>
I looked down into the water that passed slowly underneath. Dark shapes moved on its surface- debris, shadows, memories. It sighed. A heavy, sad sigh. The sigh that departs the human body in the final moments of life, a sigh, I thought, that came from the souls swimming in the river, though I saw no evidence of them, no matter how hard I tried to bend my eyes into the deep dark of the River Styx. <br>
‘We’re here,’ he said, as the boat jolted onto the shore.<br>
‘Thank you,’ I said.<br>
He said nothing, but turned the boat around and began to row back to the other side.<br> 
The air was thick with something that felt like soot in my lungs. It wasn’t meant for the living.</p> 

As I walked along the path I felt eyes watching me from the rocks and mud. They moved as I walked. They wondered at the heavy reality of my presence. I tried to pretend they weren’t there, and trod on through the land of the dead.</p>

There was a kind of sky in the underworld. It slid and shimmered above like petrol, and reflected the underside of the sea. Looking far through, I thought I could see the pilot fish drifting on. Down there, there were no bird calls, only the whale song way above, in the dark water, where life peels away.</p>

Hades met me on the riverbank.<br>
He appeared as a dark shape that grew larger as I grew nearer. He looked like an undertaker with long fingers, and he turned his head like an owl. The water changed colour when he did so, and the air shivered and morphed into new forms. He could fashion new beings with the blood from his fingers; he could extinguish lives with a motion of his eyes.<br>
‘Now what do you want, my dear?’<br> 
I bowed down low before him. I pressed my hands into the dark mud at his feet. The sadness of the water soaked into my skin. <br>
‘Lord, please- let me have her back. I’ll do anything.’<br>
Hades laughed.<br>
‘Ah, my dear,’ he sighed. ‘They all say that.’<br>
He crouched down. I looked up and saw his face. The shadows lowered. I looked into his eyes; his eyes stretched backwards into the darkness. I felt dizzy- I wobbled.<br> He pressed his hand onto my shoulder. He was like a cliff falling and I, the trembling waves beneath.<br>
‘You really want her back?’<br>
Tears from my eyes fell onto his arm and echoed in the cavern.<br>
‘Please,’ I said. ‘I’ve come so far.’<br>
Hades nodded. And for a moment it seemed as if he had changed into a shark, a great shark lying on the bank with its fin on my shoulder and its great mouth opening wide with rows and rows of teeth and the black forgetting falling away inside-<br>
‘You have come far,’ he said.<br>
He was a man again.<br>
‘You can take her back with you,’ he said, softly and singsong, as if talking to a child. He rose, and so did I, and he gestured behind him.<br>
There she was. Standing in white. Her eyes looking nowhere.<br>
‘Mama!’ I shrieked, and jumped and tried to run-<br>
His body fell across my path. He shook his head.<br>
‘On one condition,’ he said. ‘You can walk back to the land of the living, and she will follow you- but you must not look back. You must not look back, even for a second, to see if she is there, until you have walked into the sunshine.’<br>
Behind us, a towering staircase carved from the rock appeared. It led up, up, through the shuddering depths of the earth to the first break of sunlight of the new day.
‘If you look back- even once- she will return to me forever.’<br>
I looked at mama. She stood still by the rocks. I turned to Hades. His eyes, his tunnel eyes, said: What choice do you have?<br>
So I ascended the stairs.</p>

As I climbed them, I listened for the sound of her footsteps. I trod as quietly as I could upon the rocks, and strained my ears- but I heard nothing.<br>
‘Please mama,’ I said, ‘Please- give me a sign that you’re there. Say: ‘I’m here.’ Please.’<br>
I kept walking upwards. The air became clearer, the shadows fell away. The rocks became luminous with the light from above. Yet still, I could not hear her.<br>
‘Mama!’ I cried, ‘Please- just a sound! A cough, a sneeze. Just let me know you’re there.’<br>
I felt the warmth of the sun on my arms.<br>
‘Just say hello.’<br>
I heard the birds singing. I hear the waters of the ocean falling on the sand. I was almost there.<br> 
But what if Hades had tricked me? What if she hadn’t followed me, and was back down there, in the dark? If I turned now, I would still have the chance to run back down, say he tricked me, demand a new bargain. Even if it meant living down there forever, with her.<br>
I stopped on the last step.<br>
Before me, the sand opened up under the sun. The sky was blue. There was a boat on the shore waiting for me.<br>
‘Mama…’ I sobbed, ‘Please let me know that you’re there.’</p>

No sound. She was not there. He had tricked me- she was back down in the underworld; he had kept her there and tricked me into leaving her!<br>
I turned, furious, ready to fling myself back down those infernal steps-<br>
But I saw her, standing for a second. The sun was on her face, and she was smiling.<br>
‘Mama-’<br>
Then she was gone.<br>
And the door to the underworld closed. <br>
And she was lost to me forever.</p>
<br>
*<br>
<br>
At the end of the world, I sat down on the beach, and cried. The ocean rolled back. Underneath it was the corpse of the boatman, and all my memories, scattered like glass.</p>

And I am at her bedside again, where I always return. Her lids are lowered, her mouth half-open. The oxygen tank hisses beside her and her moaning has finally stopped. There she is, at the mouth of the cave, returning to the dark elsewhere. There she is, in a nightgown that hangs on her skeletal frame, exposing the lumps of tumours and her stretched out skin.<br>
The image repeats, and repeats.<br>
I always look back.

