The Light Ages by Ian R. MacLeod Page A

wasn’t wearing the inky pinafore she usually wore when she’d been working at her school. Picking at my food, I tried to remember whether anything had been different about this morning other than my own preoccupation with my secret plans for the day.
    ‘Can I go up and see her?’
    Beth bit her lip. Her wide, pink-cheeked face was framed by black, glossy, carelessly cut hair. ‘When you’ve finished eating.’
    Father came in from work soon after and headed straight upstairs without bothering to wash. Hobnails thunked across the ceiling, followed by the rake of a chair, his voice raised in a question, what might or might not have been the murmur of Mother’s reply.
    The fire in the range spat and crackled. The sounds from the other houses of pots banging, doors opening and closing, people talking, washed in through the thin walls. Redhouse seemed further away than ever. Father came down and shook his head at the withered food Beth offered. Hunched in his chair, he lit a cigarette and stared at it until a worm of ash dropped to the floor. It was silent above us now. The evening crawled by. I went into the scullery to wash my plate, then crept up the stairs on my blistered toes, trying hard as all the usual creaks popped and clattered not to make a sound. The landing swayed in the lanternlight that came from my mother’s room. Not wanting to go in now, just wanting to get to my bed in the attic and put this day behind me, I crept past the half-open door.
    ‘Robert?’
    I hesitated. The floor creaked again.
    ‘That is you Robert. Come in …’
    My mother looked ordinary enough, propped up by an extra pillow and wearing her better night-gown. Her eyes flickered to the shadows that bulked in the room’s corners, then back to me.
    ‘You look tired, Robert. That scratch on your cheek. And you smell different. Where have you been?’
    I shrugged. ‘Just the usual …’
    Her hands lay above the blankets, thin and delicate as a bird’s. The right one grasped the cloth, was slowly contracting and relaxing. SHOOM BOOM. The rhythmic motion stopped when she realised I was watching. A dull shudder passed through me.
    ‘Anyway, you’d better get to bed.’
    She tilted her head slightly, offering her cheek. Her skin felt brittle and hot.
    My mother’s new frailty became a kind of normality as Coney Mound settled into another winter. One by one, she gave up her various part-time jobs. Money became shorter and Beth, stuck with all the extra work that had fallen to her, failed her Guild of Assistant Teachers’ exam. After long hours of frigid rage, Father managed to complete the necessary forms to apply for the hardship funds set up by the Toolmakers’ Guild and a cheque was issued. Meagre though it was, it paid for occasional visits by that black frock-coated harbinger of death and uncertainty, a Master of the Physicians’ Guild. I watched the doctor rummaging in the glimmer of his bag, bottles clinking, his steel glasses and bald head shining with the glow of his useless potions, his meaningless spells, before he applied the drainings and poultices that always left my mother filler and more fretful.
    Sometimes, though, she would still be up when I got home, sitting by the parlour fire with a blanket over her legs and another over her shoulders which now seemed to rise too narrowly and too high. Occasionally, she would even be on her feet and moving about, ignoring Beth’s protests as she tried to get on with some household task that she had convinced herself was being neglected. She was clumsy enough at the best of times but I remember one evening soon after the first snowfalls when I came in and found her standing at the kitchen table, trying to crack eggs into the bowl. A scatter of crushed shells lay around her and yokes and whites drooled from her fingers, glistening in the faint darkness that now always seemed to surround her as if she was receding into a dream. I stayed out late the following evening. That year,