Mother

by S. E. Lynes

  ‘They’re just jeans, Dad.’ He braced for his father’s opinion on his Afghan coat, which was surely imminent.

  ‘Your hair’s grown,’ said his mother. ‘It’s down over your collar. What’s that coat? What is it, sheepskin? It reeks. Jack, smell his coat. It smells like a dog.’ For once, Margaret had beaten her husband to it.

  ‘You both look well,’ Christopher said, smiling, while to his relief his father ignored his wife’s request and instead wrenched the tattered, rope-bound case from Christopher’s grip. ‘Give us that, son, go on.’

  Son.

  Christopher let go without a fight. ‘It’s good to see you both anyway. Jack and Louise?’

  ‘At home wrapping presents, I should think,’ said his mother. ‘Last-minute Annies, the pair of them.’

  ‘Ah yes, well I must go and buy mine tomorrow.’

  ‘Haven’t you done it yet? What, none?’ The tone of his mother’s voice was more suited to having just heard he’d lost all his belongings in a fire. Now that he looked at them closely, it seemed that their lifetime of angst had been drawn on their faces with wrinkles. Their foreheads particularly were scored with deep lines.

  ‘There are only four to buy, Mum.’

  ‘Aye well, happen so, but tomorrow’s Christmas Eve! There’s practically nothing left in Woolworths.’

  Her accent sounded strong – both their accents did, his ears accustomed to different voices these last months. Outside the station, rain fell in diagonal rods; a queue of taxis rattled as if shivering in the cold. His mother took out a small square of clear plastic from her pocket and unfolded it to make a rain hood. This she tied under her chin before dashing tiptoe out to the car park, giving small shrieks of disgust at the weather. His father followed, case flat over his head. Christopher walked behind, wondered when he would get his next cigarette.

  ‘We’ll drive past the pier, show you the wreckage,’ said his father.

  ‘Wreckage?’

  ‘The pier! Washed away, last month. Didn’t your mother say?’

  ‘I put it in the letter,’ his mother said. ‘A storm. Terrible, it were.’

  ‘Of course,’ Christopher said, feeling himself blush, glad of his place in the back of the car. Which letter was that? One he had not even opened possibly. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.’

  ‘Well.’ His father’s mouth clamped shut in the rear-view mirror, opened again but only just. ‘Don’t suppose it’s of any great interest to you now.’

  ‘Too busy out on the randan, I expect.’ His mother, her words artificially light as ever, faltered as they always did under the persistent weight of her husband’s. ‘Chasing girls.’

  Girls.

  Through the streaked windows, his hometown rose before him: the beach and the promenade, the blackened skeleton of the pier. Girls. He had not seen Angie since that night in the Oak. He had not returned to that pub with Adam, who had moved on to the Bricklayers, nearer the campus, the Union bar sometimes, where the beer was cheap, and sometimes a string of pubs in town: the Cobourg, the Pig and Whistle, the Albion.

  They had reached Hestham Avenue. The sight of the house made him catch his breath. For one suspended moment, familiarity and strangeness stood side by side. Time had done this. Knowledge had done this. And he could share none of that knowledge with Jack and Margaret.

  His father swung the car onto the drive. Rain pooled in the pockets where frost had popped the tarmac. Christopher had to be careful to step over puddles when he got out of the car. He loved his new trousers but they sucked up water from a mile away. Determined not to lift his trousers like a long skirt, especially in front of his father, he tiptoed to the front door. He stepped inside, into the smell of the bathroom drifting down the stairs: damp towels, Imperial Leather soap, lily-of-the-valley talcum powder.

  ‘I’ll put my bag up,’ he said, and climbed the stairs.

  His brother and sister were in their rooms. Jack Junior said hello when Christopher showed his face at the crack in the door but Jack was too engrossed in Christopher’s old Scalextric to bother looking up. Louise did look up and gave him a thumbs-up. She was kneeling on her pink bedroom carpet, brushing the blonde nylon hair of what looked like the disembodied life-sized head of a girl. There were lipsticks scattered on the floor, bright plastic hair clips, a vivid blue square of eyeshadow.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ he asked her.

  She set the brush aside and divided a lock of the plastic head’s hair into three strands. ‘Girl’s World.’ She folded one strand over another, her brow knitted, her chin jutting forward in concentration. The expression was so exactly like Margaret’s when she darned socks or sewed buttons back onto his father’s shirts, it took Christopher aback.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ He reached the pole from its neat mount on the landing wall, pulled down the trapdoor and banged his way up the metal steps. His room was as he had left it, though it smelled of polish and there were stripes in the burgundy carpet where his mother had obviously passed the Ewbank. He took off his wet coat and hung it over the back of his desk chair. He took off his shoes and socks as they too were wet and put all of them on the oil heater, which was ice cold. He turned the dial and heard the click-click as it began to warm. His own breath clouded before him.

  He sat at his desk. What he was about to do felt wrong, but he had not had time until this moment and would not delay it further. It was why he had come up to his room after all. He grabbed his writing set from the drawer where it had lain undisturbed all term, placed the bold lined sheet beneath the top sheet and wrote:

  Dear Phyllis,

  I realised on the train that I had quite forgotten to wish you a Merry Christmas! So I will send this second letter right away in the hope that it reaches you between Christmas and New Year.

  He sat back and stared at the words on the page.

  Love is where the idle mind wanders, he had once heard someone say – or perhaps he had heard it on the television, or read it somewhere. If that was true, then he loved her, Phyllis, even though he had not met her. Yes, he must do, since his mind went to her whenever it was unoccupied, sometimes even when he was trying to focus it on his books.

  ‘Christopher.’ From the bottom of the stepladder Margaret was calling up to him. ‘Cup of tea, love.’

  ‘Coming now,’ he answered, scribbling frantically:

  I must dash!

  Merry Christmas, Phyllis, although you won’t get this until after. I hope it is all the merrier for me contacting you. I know it is for me.

  Yours,

  Christopher

  He wrote her name and address on the envelope and sealed it. His heart raced, battered in his chest. A second letter without hearing back from the first – he had not reined himself in, not really. Too late now! He grabbed his coat, his wet socks and shoes. He put on the shoes without the socks, which he stuffed into his coat pocket, the letter in the other. He would run out to the postbox as soon as he’d drunk his tea. Perhaps leave it half an hour for form’s sake. He had no intention of hurting anyone’s feelings, after all. And I believe that, even after all that has happened, Christopher would never hurt anyone, not intentionally.

  * * *

  On Christmas Eve, Christopher did his gift shopping in haste. That evening, he told me, he made himself eat three extra-strong mints to disguise any whiff of No. 6, then sprayed his room with Denim deodorant before heading down his metal staircase at quarter to eleven in time to go to Midnight Mass with the people he had called his family: Margaret, Jack, Jack Junior and Louise. Margaret was waiting for him on the landing, coat on, bag clutched at her waist as if someone were threatening to snatch it. He had not yet reached the bottom step when he turned to see her pained expression.

  ‘Christopher, are you wearing those trousers?’

  He stepped onto the landing and looked down at his dark navy flared jeans (an absolute bugger on the stepladder, not that he would have admitted it) and his new black ankle boots with the snazzy block
heel. ‘I was going to, why?’

  ‘Do you have any that aren’t… loons?’ She looked like she might cry, and he thought of Adam, of what he would say when Christopher told him about this. Loons? he would say, in a silly shocked old-woman voice. For the house of God, Christopher? It was all Christopher could do not to laugh out loud – it was only a lack of cruelty that prevented him.

  ‘I’m wearing a shirt,’ he said. ‘I don’t think God will mind.’

  ‘Don’t blaspheme.’

  Know God’s taste in fashion, do you? was what he did not say, seeing the futility of argument just in time.

  ‘I can change,’ was what he did say. ‘I’ve some old ones in the wardrobe.’

  ‘Aye,’ she said, her nose wrinkling at the bridge. ‘Happen.’

  He returned to the loft, the clank of shoe on metal serving only to amuse him further. Adam again, there in his mind’s eye: Flares, Christopher? In a church, Christopher? What are you, a murdering, drinking fornicator? How ridiculous. And it did not escape him that this ridiculousness was something he would not have seen back when he lived here, but three short months ago. And yet he could not pinpoint when or where he had learnt to view the world this other way. When had this happened to him?

  At least in his loft room, he thought, his mother could not see the smirk on his face.

  He searched out his old grey school trousers and changed in haste. They were too short and a little tight on the waist after a term of steamed puddings and beer, but not, at least, flaring out like the very devil incarnate. Stop it, Christopher. That’s enough. He put on his old black brogues, thought about wearing his school tie as a protest but instead grabbed an old purple tie and knotted it under the wide collars of his brown shirt. Over this new outfit, his Afghan coat must, he thought, look a little odd, though there was no mirror to check, and besides, he could hardly argue it mattered – not now. He returned to the main part of the house, repeating the dreadful and comic clonk-clank-clonk on the stepladder, his old woollen trousers airy around his knees after the skin-tight wrap of his jeans and the straight leg of course a cinch on the metal steps.

  ‘That’s better,’ came his mother’s voice from behind him, and when he turned to look, he saw that she was holding out a woollen coat. ‘Maybe pop this on,’ she said. ‘It’s only your father’s.’

  ‘Of course.’ He shrugged off the Afghan and let it fall to the floor. His mother was already at his back, spreading out his father’s coat, which smelled strongly of mothballs.

  ‘This was your dad’s going-away coat,’ she said. ‘Don’t think it’s been worn since 1952.’

  She slid it onto his shoulders then bent to retrieve the rejected Afghan from the floor. He studied his father’s coat a moment: the body fitted well enough, but the sleeves were too short, the cuffs of his shirt protruding by a couple of inches.

  ‘Do you need this?’ Margaret asked him.

  He looked up to find her holding out the letter.

  ‘Ah yes.’ Chest tightening, he snatched it from her hands and shoved it into his father’s coat pocket. ‘I need to post that, thanks.’

  ‘Who’s it to?’ She was smiling at him. ‘Your sweetheart?’

  He managed to return her smile, went so far as to wink. ‘Perhaps,’ he said.

  Margaret had not moved. She was still looking at him. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Ah. She’s… she’s called Phil.’ He felt his cheeks flush.

  ‘Phil? Isn’t that a man’s name?’

  ‘It’s short for… for Philippa.’

  He transferred the letter into his trouser pocket – it would not do to leave it in his father’s coat – and followed her down the stairs, wondering if she had seen the address. If she had, would she recognise it? No, it was a different address, and besides, there was no reason to think she would know or remember the original one. And he had written Mrs P. Griffiths. That could be anyone.

  * * *

  In the hall, his father, Jack Junior and Louise were waiting like strangers in a pungent cloud of Old Spice. Louise had on a pale blue wool coat Christopher had not seen before, a darker blue velvet Alice band in her hair. Jack Junior’s hair, a short-back-and-sides, was slicked to the side with Brylcreem, his parting a thick white stripe. He looked like a prat.

  ‘All set, finally?’ There was an indigestive strain to his father’s face and voice. His hair, Christopher noticed, was styled in the exact same way as his son’s.

  ‘Oh yes, all set,’ said his mother. ‘All ready for offski, and don’t we all look smart?’

  His father opened the door and held it, his mouth set in a flat line, while they filed out into the road. ‘Off we go then.’

  ‘You look weird,’ Jack Junior said as they walked towards the church.

  Christopher bent to whisper into his ear. ‘Well you look ugly. But at least I can change my trousers.’

  ‘Dork.’

  ‘Mummy’s boy.’

  ‘Poof.’

  ‘Wet the bed recently?’

  ‘I’m telling Mum.’

  ‘Go on then.’

  Christopher walked on ahead, buttoning up his borrowed coat against the bite of the wind, tying his scarf tighter and thrusting his cold hands into his pockets. St Mary’s Church would at least be a break, he thought, from this, this constant and pervading feeling of orbiting like Sputnik that grew with every passing hour. At this very moment he was floating in space, looking down upon the surreal scene of himself in his father’s coat, too short in the sleeve, his school trousers, too short in the leg, a change of clothes deemed better, no, deemed necessary to go and worship a God who supposedly saw all men as equal, presumably regardless of their sartorial choices. What had happened to him? He had not felt changed until he had come back here. But he had changed. He had become Bowie’s space oddity.

  In the comforting dimness of the church, he lit a candle for Phyllis, wherever she was, and another for his father, Mikael. Crossing himself, he offered a silent prayer for them both, for their safety and happiness, for their lives. The priest, Father Donald, followed by the two altar servers, one with the cross, the other with the thurible, marched in sombre procession to the front, diffuse grey coils rising. The air filled with a thick sweetness and with the sweet, striving harmonies of the choir.

  Alleluia, Alleluia.

  Father Donald arrived at his chair, and the choir and congregation fell silent. Closing his eyes, he crossed himself. ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit …’

  ‘Amen.’

  The service began. At the mention of Christ’s birth, Christopher thought of his own, of Phyllis, swathed in blue, the sweat on her brow, her cries of pain, the moment she first held him in her arms, knowing she could not keep him. His eyes prickled but he fought and recovered himself. When he sang, he sang the words to the statue of Our Lady at the front of the church and thought only of her – Phyllis, a vague notion, a shadow in the smoke.

  * * *

  By 11 a.m. on Christmas morning, he was itching to go into the garden for a smoke. But he had not the courage to light a cigarette in front of his parents. A drink too would be welcome, come to think of it – the small sweet sherry his father would pour at midday would hardly take the edge off. A physical urge to leave made it difficult for him to sit still. He wondered how long he could stay.

  ‘I’ll probably head back to Leeds on the second,’ he said once they had sat at the table for Christmas lunch, once they had said grace and pulled their crackers, once they had argued against Margaret’s annual voicing of her disappointment: The turkey’s dry again. No, no it’s delicious, Mum, not dry at all.

  ‘That’s a flying visit,’ Margaret said. Her glasses had a lean to them and the sherry had turned her nose red. ‘Can you not stay longer?’

  ‘I have to study,’ he said, loading his fork with a greedy mouthful but avoiding Margaret’s gaze. ‘Essays and so on. There’s a lot of work at university, you know – they don’t just give you a degree
.’ He was, he knew, using their ignorance against them and it pained him.

  ‘What do cannibals play at parties?’ Jack Junior read from the cracker joke slip.

  ‘Is your room warm enough?’ his mum persisted.

  ‘Swallow my leader,’ said Jack Junior, and laughed.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Christopher assured her. ‘Everything’s fine. There’s nothing wrong; I just have to study. I want to get at least a two-one.’

  ‘Is that the same as a degree?’

  Helpless, Christopher glanced towards his father, who hadn’t said a word. Perhaps he had not heard, too busy helping Louise put on her paper hat. Perhaps he had drunk some of the sherry in secret, lucky bugger.

  Christopher shook his head. ‘I can concentrate better at the halls, that’s all.’

  ‘Why do French people eat only one egg at a time?’ Louise read. ‘Because one egg is un oeuf. What?’ She frowned. ‘I don’t get that.’

  Christopher laughed, though no one else did. ‘It’s because un oeuf is French for an egg,’ he said, smiling at his little sister. ‘And un oeuf sounds like enough.’

  Louise threw the joke aside. ‘That’s rubbish. It’s not even funny.’

  ‘They eat frogs’ legs over there,’ came his father’s contribution to the cultural discussion. ‘What d’you expect?’

  * * *

  After dinner, they opened their presents. Jack Junior and Louise emptied their pillowslips onto the lounge carpet and tore through their gifts: books, a chemistry set, a Galt science kit, a game called Buckaroo. His mother handed him an envelope.

  ‘We didn’t know what you’d need,’ she said. ‘There’s ten pound in there.’

  ‘Thank you. That’s too much.’ He thought of the travel fares ahead, once he was allowed to go and see Phyllis, and put the money in his pocket. ‘But thank you.’