Call Your Mother Before Nine

The urge arrived while I was rinsing a saucepan: call Mum. Now, not tonight. It came with a deadline attached, which is the part I cannot rationalise — the words 'before nine' were simply present in the urge, the way a smell is present in a kitchen.

It was 8:40. We speak on Sundays; it was Tuesday. I dried my hands and rang her, feeling theatrical.

She answered in high spirits, mid-tidying, teasing me immediately — 'twice in one week, have you been arrested?' We chatted about a neighbour's dispute over a hedge. I kept her talking without knowing why I was keeping her talking. At 8:56 by the clock on my oven, there was a sound I will hear for the rest of my life: a sharp intake of breath, a clatter, and then the flat, busy hum of a phone lying on a floor.

She had gone over on the kitchen step — the silly half-step down to the pantry that we had all been promising to fix for a decade — and broken her hip. But the line was open. I could shout to her, and she could answer, faint but sensible, and my sister lives four minutes away, and because I was already on the phone the ambulance was moving before nine o'clock struck.