Mother

by S. E. Lynes

  ‘I am.’ That was wrong too, made him sound like he thought he was better, which he did not. ‘I mean, what about, you know, the way things are? Like you said, there was a victim only last month. You can’t walk home by yourself – it isn’t safe. Besides, if you do, I won’t sleep. So you’d be doing me a favour, you see. You’d be helping me sleep.’

  She laughed, and despite the booze, his heart fizzed at the sound. She was lovelier than any girl he had ever met – not that he had exchanged more than a greeting with the girls back home.

  ‘All right then,’ she said. ‘Since you put it like that. To be honest, I would never have gone by myself; the girls would kill me, and like you say, the way things are.’

  ‘Do you think we should tell Adam?’

  She shook her head, gave a brief laugh. ‘I think Adam’s in good hands, don’t you? It’s Alison I need to check on.’

  She disappeared, returning a few seconds later.

  ‘Looks like Adam’s seeing Alison home safe. No surprise there.’ Angie threaded her arm through his. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  They walked. He focused on keeping step with her in case she should take her arm away. It seemed to him they were going further up the Otley Road, away from his halls, then off right somewhere. He let her talk, soothed by her idle chatter. She liked Blackpool, she said, but it was too full of tourists in the summer. She liked to walk along the beach in the autumn and the winter.

  ‘Do you have the rockets?’ she asked. ‘How about a big dipper?’

  ‘Big dipper yes,’ he said. ‘But no rockets, though it’s years since I’ve been. I only went when I was little. There’s a death slide, I think, in the House of Fun.’

  ‘Death slide, not sure I fancy that. Do you like candyfloss?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me neither! Disgusting, isn’t it? Like eating sugary hairsprayed hair.’

  They seemed to have been walking for a long time – about half an hour or so – when she turned right down an alleyway, which led to a gate; beyond, to the left, were playing fields, what looked like flats at the far end.

  ‘This is Oxley,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit of a way, I should have warned you.’

  They walked down to the flats and came to a sandstone building that was almost entirely black, neoclassical arches on a kind of porch. She stepped up into it and he followed her. It was very dark there. He leant back against the wall, felt it shore him up.

  ‘Oxley halls for women,’ she said, something scoffing in her tone. ‘Can’t wait to get out, get my own flat. Listen, it was kind of you to walk me home. Germaine Greer is marvellous and everything, but she’d be precious little use if I met him, wouldn’t she? Unless she had a knife.’ She mimed a slashing motion with her hand. ‘Here, cop hold of this, Mr Ripper…’ She was doing an Australian accent – quite well, he thought. ‘I’ll turn you into a bloody eunuch myself, you bloody pervert.’ She laughed at herself then sighed. He stared at her in awe. She was pretty, he thought.

  ‘He could be out there right now.’ She shook her head, serious again. ‘I wish they’d catch him.’

  ‘It’s a terrible thing.’ He smiled an apology, on behalf of whom he had no idea: himself, perhaps, for being of the same sex. He looked at the floor, and when he plucked up the courage to look at her again, she was taking off her glasses. Her eyes were large, so large they seemed to see right through him, to all that he did not know. She slid her specs into the breast pocket of her jacket and smirked at him as she had when they were introduced.

  ‘Well,’ she said, and looked towards the upper windows. One of them was open – the faint strains of Pussycat’s ‘Mississippi’ trailing out into the night. He wondered which window was Angie’s, what her room looked like, what it would be like to go there with her.

  ‘Your coat is thin,’ he said. ‘You must be cold.’

  She placed her hand on his cheek and smiled. ‘Warm hands, see?’

  His heart beat faster, in fear. ‘You should go in.’

  ‘We could sneak up to my room. I’d like to find out what’s going on in there.’ She tapped him gently on the side of his head: once, twice. She was still smiling, her fingers light on his neck, bare where he had neglected to bring his scarf. ‘Might get expelled though. Making cocoa in the presence of a male. Honestly, you’d think it was the fifties.’

  ‘I don’t have much to say.’ He closed his eyes briefly at the sensation of her long fingers reaching into the back of his hair, the soft scratch of her nails making his scalp tingle. ‘I’m afraid the illuminations were the highlight of my repertoire. Ill-um-in-ations, ah, see, must be sobering up.’ She had his head in her hands now and had begun to caress his scalp with such tenderness he wanted to rest his head on her shoulder and say nothing more except Don’t stop. ‘I mean,’ he continued, struggling now to concentrate on anything other than her, her hand in his hair, ‘you were right, I’ve never even been to a pub before. Before tonight. Don’t tell anyone, will you?’

  ‘Won’t tell a soul.’ She leant in close, her breath warm as freshly baked bread against his ear, her teeth no more than a gentle, blissful bite on his earlobe. He felt himself stir, stiffen; the thought of her discovering him this way filled him with terror. But she did, had discovered him, her other hand now on his crotch, her mouth closing over his. ‘Open your mouth a little,’ she whispered. ‘It’s OK. I’ve looked after you this far, haven’t I?’

  ‘I haven’t…’

  ‘I know. It’s OK.’

  He opened his mouth, matching hers as best he could. He wished he knew the things that others knew, that Adam certainly knew. He wished he could show her instead of her showing him, but she was too far ahead. Her tongue touched his, their lips pressed together; he felt himself harden further against her touch. She ran her hand down the length of him, up again, as if trying to build a picture by touch alone. Up and down, her mouth never leaving his. He wanted to tell her to stop but could not, did not want to. And then—

  ‘Oh God,’ he whimpered. ‘Oh God, no.’ His head fell into her shoulder just as her hand sprang back. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ she whispered, and stroked the back of his head. ‘That’s normal for a first time.’

  He could not raise his forehead from her shoulder. He did not want her to see his face, knew she would see even in the low light that he was burning.

  ‘You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ he whispered.

  ‘There’s no shame in it, Christopher.’ She hugged him, though their bodies only made a clumsy A-frame in the darkness. He wanted so much for her to leave him, but could not stand the thought of her seeing the dark patch he knew must be there on the front of his trousers. ‘You look after yourself, all right?’

  Thankfully, she turned as he released her. She waved, though without a backwards glance. He wrapped his coat around himself and watched her walk away, through the door of her halls, into safety. She did not turn back or wave again, and he wondered if this was out of discretion or disgust. He should have initiated their kiss. He should have slowed her hand. He should have known things like she did, like others did. She had said it was normal. But it was not. He was not.

  Chapter Six

  You have the devil in you, Ben’s mother used to say when he was naughty. And growing up, he was inclined to agree. The insinuation was that the devil came from his real family, though she never said this out loud. He had always understood he was adopted, at first in the amorphous form of feeling, a form to which words gave shape much later on. But his parents had always been honest with him about that, at least, explaining to him in simple terms that he was a gift to them from another mommy and daddy but that he was theirs now and always would be and they loved him. They loved him all right. And you can’t choose how you’re loved – he knows that because they told him that too. You just have to give thanks to the Lord that someone somewhere is looking after you, and suck up the rest. And whatever devil there was inside him had got him this far.


  To ward off the devil, there was church. Ben remembers how, on Sundays, his mother would lead him to Mass through the streets of Virginia, walking too quickly so that he had to half-run to keep up with her. He never asked why she couldn’t walk more slowly, why his father got to stay home. Come to that, he never asked why she was one way in church – holy, smiling and soft-voiced as an angel; another way at home – hard-voiced and not smiling, never smiling, and not like any angel he ever saw. Passing the Negroes coming out of Little River Southern Baptist Church, he often wondered why they looked so much happier with their God than his congregation did with theirs. Those joyous hymns, they sang them so hard he could hear them coming through the swinging double doors as his mother dragged him on by.

  Once, long ago, he had fantasised that his real parents were those very Negroes who sang so gaily in the church down the road. He used to wonder whether one day his skin would darken to the colour of coffee beans and he would discover, finally, that he did not belong with white folks at all. It would all make sense then. He would walk into Little River and take his place on the pew and sing those joyous hymns at the top of his lungs. But as he got older, he realised with a feeling of intense sadness that he would never be darker skinned than a glass of cream, would never sing with the people who smiled even outside the church. He would instead stay the same: Benjamin Bradbury, white, straight-haired, origin unknown. No one else was like him. At school, none of his friends had been adopted. The only other adopted children he had heard about were something to do with the war. Although they were called orphans, which was a different thing. As far as he knew, his birth parents were still alive. How could that be? Who would give away a child? And why?

  Of course, he is an adult now; life has already taught him that such questions are not math – they cannot be answered like that. And yet the questions persist, in a more sophisticated form, even as his world, once black and white, fuses into a spectrum of greys. Doubt. Even now, so young, his certainties are dropping like leaves in fall. Martha wants children. He wanted children, but now… Somewhere in his own childhood, though he cannot recall exactly when, his parents stopped being Mom and Pop and became Dorothy and George. Not overnight – it was a much slower thing, as if the words Mom and Pop had been written on his mind with magic ink, designed to fade over time. And as the years passed, he became aware that Mom and Pop, as well as being the people who’d taken him in or however the hell you said it, were what they called well-to-do. That his father’s Harvard education and career as an attorney in DC were big bugaboo, at least in their neighbourhood.

  They had met at Harvard, though Dorothy had never worked so far as Ben could remember. Enough to do with you scooting around my feet all day. What came between his parents’ meeting and the cocktail parties they hosted in their large suburban house was a mystery, like an episode of The Rockford Files he never got to see. That Dorothy was not happy he had concluded by the time he reached his teens from a series of clues: her thirst for vodka tonics from around three in the afternoon, her clumsiness when she fixed dinner and the way her knuckles paled when she held onto the kitchen counter.

  He wondered if this had to do with him.

  As a teenager, like many teenagers, Ben spent most of his time in his room. He drew, in secret, constantly. His parents could not see the point.

  ‘It’s right here on the end of the pencil,’ he once sassed.

  Evenings, pretending he needed to finish an assignment, he would lock his bedroom door, put on a record or a cassette tape and lose himself in Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, and in the endless lines that followed his pencil around the white pages of his sketch pad. First he copied, relentlessly. Cartoons, photographs, lettering from magazines – anything. Copied until the lines went their own way and made new forms of their own. Oh, how he loved that: the first mark, like the first footprint in snow. The mystery of what would take shape.

  Knock knock. ‘Benjamin, can you hear me?’ Dorothy at the door. He could tell by the way her voice projected sideways that her ear was pressed to the wood. ‘I don’t know how you can concentrate on history with that noise going on the whole time.’

  ‘It’s OK, Dorothy – I got it. Don’t worry about it.’ He turned the music up, just a little, whispering, ‘History of soul, sister, history of soul.’ Blowing smoke out of his bedroom window by this time, spraying his room with Blue Stratos, feeling the groove of the pencil across the page. ‘Rock Steady’, ‘Hit the Road Jack’, ‘Superstition’… until evening stole the sun from outside his window and he felt his stomach hollow as a cave. After supper, more drawing, collage, paint – until it was time to shin down the outside wall and meet his friends and smoke fat joints in the park. His bedroom was a wardrobe that led to Narnia, he often thought. You opened the door, made your way through the coats and behind lay a whole secret world.

  The years passed. Dorothy and George tried to stop him from drawing and so forth and make him concentrate on something worthwhile. These attempts failed: when he was four, he drew with the soap bar on the bathroom tiles the time they took his coloured pencils away. At fourteen, pocket money withdrawn for the quintillionth time, he jumped the barriers so he could take the train into DC – to the National Gallery, the Smithsonian, the Renwick. When his folks said no to art school, he stood on George’s stepladder and poured three different colours of emulsion paint onto the concrete garage floor. By then, he was seventeen. The bud of his early sass had bloomed into the full flower of frank and open rebellion.

  ‘Damn,’ he said, admiring the results in front of a horrified Dorothy. ‘It’s like Pollock or some shit.’

  Speechless on the steps that led into the garage from the main house, his mother returned to the kitchen and pressed her lips directly to the bottle neck of the Smirnoff.

  At last, his parents conceded that, if he wasn’t going to follow his father into law, then a career in graphic design would be the least shameful option.

  ‘Graphics,’ said his father at his farewell dinner, served by the help, Constance. ‘At least that’s one up from art, for Chrissakes. What do I know anyway? I can’t even draw a goddam stick man! And you can’t draw either, can you, Dotty?’ He shook his head, seemed about to say more but was silenced by a look from his wife. While they had been open about Ben’s origins, it was not a matter to be discussed, least of all at the table.

  ‘I guess I’m just a genetic blip,’ Ben said, smiling through his meatloaf and thinking about how awesome it would be at California School of the Arts – how much weed he would smoke, how many times he would get laid (already a respectable number). How much distance he would put between himself and these people, and how fucking relieved all of them would be.

  Chapter Seven

  They were trying to persuade me to take a shower just now. What a laugh. What a farce. What’s the point? I’ll never feel clean again. I don’t even care about them seeing me naked. My body is a separate thing. I observe it from the outside with a detachment that is almost interesting. It is thinner. My shoulder bones protrude at the top like knots, my eyes look bigger, darker – all iris and no whites. Meds, exercise in the courtyard, food. What’s the point? What’s the point of any of it?

  They helped me into my jogging bottoms and a loose white T-shirt.

  ‘OK, my darling,’ Nurse said as she left. ‘You’ll get on with that book of yours now. There’ll be someone right outside.’

  And here I sit. Not quite alone, because that is not allowed. Shower, meds, food. And this: as pointless as all the rest, I’m sure, this merry exercise I’ve got going for myself. But with no sharp objects to hand and a nurse outside the door, there’s nothing else to do.

  * * *

  I’m glad Christopher had Adam. It was Adam who sorted out his appearance, who took him into Leeds town centre to buy clothes – Those trousers are a bloody disgrace, man, who bought them, your mum? (She had.) Under Adam’s benign duress, Christopher bought flared jeans, an Afghan coat, T-shir
ts and two shirts with long collars.

  ‘That’s better,’ said Adam. ‘You’ll be fighting off the birds with a shitty stick in that get-up.’

  Adam persuaded him to do the Otley Run with a bunch of lads from electronic engineering. Christopher vomited into the gutter outside the Three Horse Shoes, a fact that, rather than singling him out as a weakling, appeared to bestow hero status upon him for days after. With Adam, he went to see The Damned at Leeds Union, to a club called Le Phonographique in the Merrion Centre. Whenever Adam proposed a night out, he never seemed to mind Christopher’s initial reticence, seemed to understand that he needed a harder push than most but that, once cajoled, he would come along and he would be glad. Christopher worried he was a charity case, that Adam would tire of him sooner rather than later. Having no one to share these worries with, he kept them to himself.

  ‘I tell you what,’ Adam said one night. They were in their room at the halls, about to go down to the Union for a drink. Having dressed in one of his new shirts, a tie and his flared jeans, Christopher was sitting on his bed, waiting while Adam tried on different shirts, turning this way and that in the full-length mirror he had brought from home. ‘All’s you need is a bit of chutzpah and you’ll be flying.’

  ‘Chutzpah?’

  Adam turned from his reflection, apparently satisfied with this, his fifth choice of shirt: a brown and beige stripe, tight around the body, the collars long, the neck open lower than Christopher would have dared. ‘I mean, look at you. You’ve got the looks, the height; you’ve got the smarts. You’ve even got the big brown peepers the chicks love, you bastard. If I had half what you had, I tell you what, there’d be no stone left unturned.’

  ‘You want to unturn more stones?’

  Adam laughed. ‘Good point. I can’t complain, and Sophie is a peach.’