It was around 2pm in London.
I was at a friend’s house in the west of the city. We had just finished lunch when my phone began to ring relentlessly with a Maltese number that I did not recognise. The caller was so insistent that it disturbed me. If there was an emergency in Malta, where the rest of my family still lived, I would have been called from a number I recognised.
I copied the number and sent it to my mother on WhatsApp, asking whether she knew it. I noticed that the message I sent received one grey tick, meaning it hadn’t been delivered. A message from a friend in Malta, an emergency doctor, came in: “Everything OK?”
“Hurricane Ophelia?” I replied, referring to the storm that had started in the Azores and was now threatening London. “Yes, fine.”
As I sat down with my coffee, my girlfriend Jessica rang. “Paul, Cora just called me,” she said, referring to my aunt. “She said that Matthew’s been trying to get through to you.”
I hung up and the Maltese number called again. I walked into another room, sat down on a sofa and answered. It was Matthew.
“Paul,” he said, “there was a bomb in her car.”
And then, with each word separated by what felt like an eternity, he added, “I don’t think she made it.”
I felt my mind lift to the room’s ceiling, so that I was looking back at myself, sitting on a sofa at a friend’s house, listening to my brother tell me that our mother had just been assassinated.
“Paul?” he said.
“What do I do, Matt? What do I do?”
“Come home. Now,” he said. “Get on the next flight to Malta.”
Outside, the sun was the colour of blood and the sky purple. Hurricane Ophelia was blowing Saharan dust into the city, scattering the sunlight differently. Purple was my mother’s favourite colour. Ophelia, who in Hamlet didn’t realise the danger she was in until her “muddy death”, brought it to me.
MY MOTHER’S SPEECH was not as forceful as her writing. It had something of the up-and-down Maltese cadence, but it was gentler than was typical, and it came with more pauses, some to think and others to let sources talk. There was a shyness about her that meant she always felt more comfortable expressing herself in writing than out loud. I have a trace of that shyness, too, and it reminds me how driven she was to do her work. “I love it,” she told an interviewer 10 days before her murder. “It’s a compulsion to write.”
