At 1 o'clock, my father picked me up in the car, as pre-arranged.  “I'm going to Pol-”

He was holding his hand in front of his mouth to hide a belch… once, twice, three times.  “Excuse me.” 

“Dad, are you all right?” 

“Yes, yes, misia”

“Your stomach?”

“It’s not so bad now.”

I thought his voice sounded tired and I wished he hadn’t insisted on picking me up, but he was old fashioned about such things.  “It was bad earlier, then?”

A Volvo swept past us, its headlights filling the interior of our car with its harsh yellow light, then leaving us again in the murky half-light of the street lamps.  

“Dad?” He let go of the hand-brake and moved off.

“Ignore it and it’ll go away, as the English say.”

“I'm worried about you.  And Mum.  Is she still up?”

 “No.  She went to bed at eleven.  I've been sitting in the living room by myself reading the paper.”  The briefest of smiles flashed into his face then died away almost immediately.  “It was very peaceful.”

We had to stop at the pedestrian crossing, to listen to it bleep-bleep-bleeping into the stillness of the night.  Dad stared ahead, his short fingernails drumming on the steering wheel.  “I can't cope.  I really can't cope,” he muttered to the windscreen, as we waited for two merry party-goers to stumble across the black and white lines.    “Please, God, I'm so tired.”

I jolted round to face him.

“Tell me about Poland,” he replied, forcing a smile.

I did, in a just a few words, all my excitement dampened. 

“So,” he said, “you are in Krakow with Magda and then you are at Checkpoint Charlie.  How do you get from southern Poland to Berlin?  And where do you meet up with Jenny again?”

“I don’t know, Tata.  I suppose… I could go north to the Baltic coast… see that cousin Monika in Gdansk.”  I tossed my words out lightly, as if this idea had just occurred to me.  “And, while I was there, I could find Pyotr Murkowski for you.”

We were now easing into our own drive.  “Don’t bother looking for Pyotr, but visit Monika if you wish.  She’s a member of our family.  I haven't met her and I've never been to Gdansk, but I think she has a daughter about your age.”  We both got out the car.  “Gdansk used to be a German city before the war.  Danzig.  Gdansk - and the Polish Corridor - were the reasons Hitler gave for invading.” 

“I want to go and find Pyotr.”

“No, Marya, no.  Not after all these years.”

“Do you have an address for him?”

“No, I don’t.”  He opened the front door with his key and we both stepped inside.  “Leave it, Marya.“

“But you used to write to him, so you must’ve had his address.”  I looked into his tired, lined face.  “It’d be really good if you two could write again.  Like me and Magda.”

“He’s probably forgotten I exist.”

“I'm sure he hasn’t.  You said you used to talk about books and get on really well.”

“That was a long time ago.  I don’t want you trying to contact him, Marya.” 

“But, Dad, you need more friends, male friends.  I'm worried about you.”

He kissed my cheek.  “Marya, misia, I'm fifty nine, not eighteen.  And now I'm going to bed.  Dobranoc.”

The alcohol I had drunk at the party had made me thirsty, so I went into the kitchen and made tea.  I got out Dad’s atlas again and laid it on the kitchen table.  I had been doing this so often of late that it instantly fell open at the map of Poland.  What was it like?  Every drop in my veins was Polish, yet the country was a stranger to me.  My parents wouldn’t talk about it, except very occasionally, when they would mention a relative.  And my mother would talk about her father’s cake-shops in Krakow.  Magda would often write in her letters that she lived in “a beautiful place”, close to the Tatra Mountains, which my map showed as glistening purple shadows on white-grey.  With my finger, I traced a possible holiday route:  Zilina – Krakow - north to Gdansk - west to Szczecin – west again to Berlin. 

Setting my mug down on the kitchen table, with a thud which sounded like an earthquake in the small hours, I walked into the living room, to the family address book beside the telephone.  The M page contained only my friend, Angela Matthews, and our dentist, Mr Morrissey.  I put it back.  I recalled that Urcky, in a fit of tidiness, had rewritten the address book in 1973, just before her wedding, because our previous one was falling to bits. 

But Mum never threw away anything.  She got nervous and irritable even if anyone suggested taking old clothes to the charity shop.  She would hide things away, often in the sideboard.  Under the tablecloths was her favourite.  I opened the table linen drawer.  The cloth we had used on Christmas Day lay on top, spotted with turkey gravy, something we hadn't noticed, because the whole of last week had been quite stressful.  The lacy thing which Mum brought out when she offered tea to Father Flanagan was crumpled in a tight bundle at the back.  I dug deeper.  Underneath was the faded, off-white cloth with dull green stripes we had used as children, below it an identical one with red stripes.  Sophie and I used to demand “the red one” - as we called it - every day, and, on Mondays, Mum would rush around to wash it, hang it on the line and iron it before four o'clock, so it would be ready for our tea after school.  “There, girls,” she would say, wrapping an arm the shoulders of each of us.  “You had your red one, so don’t you spill your food.  Otherwise it is green one all week!” 

The old tatty address book lay on the base of the drawer, under “the red one”.  Again, I flicked through the pages to M.  The first entry in my father’s neat schoolteacher-y hand was: Pyotr Murkowski, 33 Ul Reda, Narkowo, Gdansk.  I copied the address on to a scrap of paper, put away the tablecloths and went to bed.

But he might have moved, I thought when I stirred at about seven, vaguely aware of my parents’ voices on the landing and footsteps on the stairs.  On the other hand, he might not, I told myself as I drifted back to sleep.

When I woke again, it was fully light and I could hear a large vehicle drawing up in our drive and a car or van door being wrenched open with a creak.  It was now eleven o'clock, I noted, as I dragged myself out of bed and to the window.  Urcky’s car and Lynn’s car were parked opposite.  And several neighbours were hovering in the street, staring into our drive – at an ambulance.

Mum?  Again?

Someone was knocking on our front door.  Keeping my eye on the window, I dragged on the clothes I had been wearing yesterday and shoved my feet into my shoes.  The ambulancemen weren’t wearing uniforms, I noticed, just suits, very formal, with black ties, like American missionaries.  Maybe this was because it was New Year’s Day, or perhaps the ambulancemen were on strike – as they had been last year, during what we were now calling The Winter of Discontent.  I hadn't heard about a ambulancemen’s strike on the News, though.

“Where’s Marya?” I heard Urcky ask as I opened my bedroom door.

“Asleep,” Dad replied.

“Let her sleep,” said Urcky.  “She’ll find out soon enough.”

“She’s a teenager, isn't she?” said Steve, with a snigger.  “They sleep all day.”

“I'm here, actually,” I shouted, running down the stairs.  “What’s going on?  Mum… what’s happened?”  I noticed that the living room door was closed, which was unusual.  “Is she in there?”  I couldn't understand why everybody was outside in the hall, why nobody was sitting with her.

“You can't go in, Marya,” said Urcky.

“Why not?”

At that moment, someone touched the door handle.  Dad flinched as he saw it move downwards.  Lynn heaved a loud sob and grabbed Dad’s hand.  Then the ambulancemen edged out, carrying a stretcher with a woollen red blanket draped over it, underneath it my mother’s slim, elegant silhouette, and, in my mind, I added her usual tailored dress and stockings with seams.  She was lying on her back, motionless.  Maybe the ambulancemen had told her she must, that it wasn’t safe for her to lie in her normal, tight foetal position.  And they had completely covered her with their clinical redness, even her head and face.

I drew in my breath and looked at my father, my eyebrows arching and my forehead creasing into tight folds.  He was looking on without speaking, without moving, hardly breathing.  Lynn, beside him, let go of his hand and made the Sign of the Cross, then Urcky, gulping and swallowing back tears, genuflected as the stretcher passed her.   Her husband, Brian, an Anglican, bowed his head with an understated English dignity which sometimes passes us Catholics by.  Only Steve, who, as they say, “wasn't anything”, stood with his hands behind his back, shuffling his feet as the stretcher-bearers, who were not ambulancemen, carried my poor mother out of the house for the last time.

“Wait!” I cried, as they lifted her into their van, which was not an ambulance.  “Move it, Steve!”  I pushed aside my brother-in-law, whose podgy form had drifted into the front doorway, and rushed outside. 

They were strapping her in.  For a moment I stood and stared, conscious of neighbours standing in the street.  Then one of the be-suited men made to close the tailgate, which seemed quite stiff because he was pushing with all his strength.  “Wait!” I recited the Angelus into the darkened vehicle, in Polish, the language my mother had used exclusively in recent years.

As the hearse drove away, one of the neighbours walked over.  “I'm so sorry, my dear.  Such a nice lady.”

How would she know, I wondered as I walked back into the house.  My mother never went out and the neighbours never came in!

Urcky put her arm around my shoulders as we all moved into the kitchen.  We didn’t want to go into the living room just yet.  “What happened?” I asked.

“She did it eventually,” my sister replied in a hollow voice.

“Oh,” I gulped.  It was a shock, even though we had been living with this fear for years.  “This morning?”

“Yes.”

“Where was Dad?”

“In the bath.”

“They say,” Steve added, “that people who talk about committing suicide never do it, but she did.”

“Shut up, Steve!” cried Lynn, who was already crying.  “Shut up!”

“How?” I had to ask.

Nobody answered.  “She took painkillers and then put a plastic bag over her head… to speed things up, I suppose,” Steve replied at last.

Urcky drew in her breath, filling out both lungs like party balloons, stretching their membranes to bursting point.  Brian glared at Steve, then passed his gaze over Urcky and my father, who was standing with his back to us, staring through the window into the damp, dank winter.

“The paracetamols?” I asked.

“Yes,” Brian answered, in a quiet voice.  I could see he was trying to be gentle.

“How did she find them?” I demanded.  “We kept them hidden.  Dr Grant told us to hide them.  We put them in the bookcase.  Behind “Bleak House” and “Martin Chuzzlewit”.  They’ve been there for five years and she didn’t work it out.”

“Well, maybe she was dusting the bookcase or something,” said Steve, perching his bottom on the kitchen table.

“She stopped doing housework years ago,” I retorted.

“There’s no point in speculating, Marya, love.” Urcky put her arms around my shoulders again.

“And where did she get a plastic bag from?  We throw them out immediately.”  My body tightened in her big-sisterly hold.  “Dr Grant told us to do that as well.”

“Steve says she probably got the bag out the bin,” said Lynn.

“Don’t, Lynn, don’t!”  I threw off Urcky’s arm.  I had dressed in a massive hurry this morning and nature was calling me. 

And I needed time alone. 

With the bathroom door bolted behind me, I stared for some time at our old fashioned suite, white porcelain, off-white and crazed with pale grey veins.  Our house, all so familiar, but tainted now.  The furious roar of the flush, falling through three feet of narrow pipe, expressed feelings I could not put into words.  I stared at a moth, living beyond its season in the warmth of the house, crouching at the bottom of the bath.  It was funny that the bottom of the bath was dry this morning.  Usually, when someone took a bath, there was a watery residue by the plug for several hours.