Adults

by Emma Jane Unsworth

‘She’s like a baby bird,’ I said. ‘All mouth.’ Kelly laughed. I went on. ‘She puts the “other” in “mother”.’

  Kelly laughed again. ‘Don’t we all.’

  It was too soon to offend her. I backtracked. ‘I guess we all get Stockholm syndrome where our mothers are concerned.’

  ‘Right. No wonder he broke for the border.’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean—’

  ‘Shut up.’ She poured more wine.

  We chatted for hours, I completely lost track, and then she got out her guitar and sang ‘Love Is Like a Butterfly’ by Dolly Parton. She had a good voice, raspy in the right places, and she played well – she’d taught herself. Only when she’d finished did I remember my taxi driver and rush out the back to find that he – like my loneliness – had long gone.

  MANCHILD

  I walk down the garden and find Sonny sitting on the bench outside the shed. He is looking at his phone. When he sees me he stops and puts it in his pocket. He looks so grown up I almost stop in my tracks.

  ‘Heya.’

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘What you doing?’

  ‘Revising.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘GCSEs.’

  I sit down next to him and look at both of our sets of trainers, lined up on the ground. ‘Sonny, don’t watch any freaky shit online, will you?’

  ‘Don’t you start.’

  ‘I mean it. I know you’re smart but that will teach you all the wrong stuff about sex.’

  ‘Okay, you need to just stop being so extra.’

  I nod slowly in agreement.

  ‘Did you bring my present?’

  ‘No. I brought you twenty quid instead.’

  He looks at me. I look for Kelly in his face, like always. ‘Bet you’ve smoked them, haven’t you?’

  ‘Do as I say, not as I do. God, my Granma used to say that and I hated it.’

  ‘Not surprised. I hate it, too.’

  ‘I don’t know how to talk to you, Sonny.’ I look back up towards the house. ‘I am stuck between a rock and a hard place.’

  ‘Which one am I?’

  ‘Oh, you’re the rock. You’re all rock.’ I make rock horns with my hands.

  He laughs and looks mortified for me.

  ‘Take over the world and be quick about it,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe that’s why I don’t feel like a kid,’ Sonny replies. ‘Because the planet is dying and someone needs to take responsibility.’

  ‘You have baths,’ I say, uselessly.

  WHO YA GONNA CALL

  In the cab on the way home, she says: ‘I remember the moment I fell in love with you. Like, you you. The person, not just the tiny human who’d come from nowhere. You don’t have a moment like that, do you? A falling-in-love moment. Children don’t. I didn’t with my mother, god knows I didn’t. It’s just part of you, your love for a parent, until it isn’t. But parents actively fall in love with their children. It happens. There is a moment. You were in your highchair in the kitchen and I was making a coffee. Coffee and sugar kept me going at that point. The radio was on. The Ghostbusters theme tune came on and I started dancing, and you started laughing. I exaggerated the moves, made it all ridiculous and over the top. They way you laughed at that I knew we’d get along. And I knew I loved you. As you. The little individual you were, with your duckling hair and your dirty laugh.’

  I look at her hands in her lap. I think of all the times I watched her from the wings. The real times and the remembered times and the imagined times. I say: ‘I think children do have that moment. I think they do.’

  If we were more evolved, more mature, more comfortable people, we would embrace or something at this point.

  NAKED AMBITION

  I’m leaving the Foof office, high on my latest column glory. I walk out of WerkHaus with a spring in my step. I decide to get something nice for dinner, something to take home, a gastropub bistro dish for two. As I walk past Oxford Circus, I see the homeless man I ranted at that time. I stop. He looks at me, expectantly.

  ‘I’m sorry for ranting at you drunkenly,’ I say.

  He looks at me as though he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘of course you don’t remember me. You must have hundreds of people giving you shit every day. Why would you just remember one?’

  He narrows his eyes. ‘Wait a minute,’ he says. ‘Were you the one going on about Facebook?’

  ‘That’s me! That was me!’

  It is so good to be remembered, even negatively.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says.

  ‘Well, I’m very sorry anyway. I’m a bit better now.’

  He says, ‘That’s okay.’ He says, ‘I thought you looked like a person in great pain.’

  I nod. ‘You weren’t too far off the mark.’

  I can see now how unwell I was. This culture of constant checking, of feeling as though everything can be instantly sorted, and accounted for, and validated, and gratified – that has to rub off on us psychically, doesn’t it? I’ll check, I’ll check, I’ll check. The weather, my thighs, my politics, my lunch. Erasing all mystery. But does it? Does it, really?

  As I turn the corner at the end of the street I see her. I blink. It’s definitely her. My mother. For sure. She looks different, but it’s her. She’s wearing a little green hat and lots of make-up and a natty little black suit jacket and jeans. She looks all dressed up for a … well, for a date.

  Uh-oh.

  A fever strikes me – I must save her from whatever she has got herself into. With that dreadful life guru or any other opportunist on a heartless dating site.

  I think about shouting to her, but then I think, no, don’t. I follow her.

  I have to make sure she doesn’t end up catfished or dogfished or kidnapped or shown floor plans of someone’s prospective flat.

  I follow her, down street after street, until we end up at a tiny theatre in the West End. Funny time for a matinee. She goes inside. But something’s not right. The theatre looks dead. No one is around. What kind of pervert attacks a middle-aged woman in an empty theatre? I guess that’s the problem with the internet. The fetishes are infinite. There’s a fetish for everything. Even middle-aged women in empty theatres.

  I hear muffled voices, and then my mother’s voice – easier to pick out the words of that one, attuned as I am to it. I pick up my pace – quietly, quietly as I can – down the corridor.

  She says, ‘I’ll just get straight on with it then, shall I?’

  And then I hear Art’s voice.

  Art’s.

  I reach the main auditorium and peek inside. My mother is standing on the stage looking forward, her clothes off and thrown in a lump on the floor. I make myself flat as I can against the wall and look through the sides of my eyes.

  Art is moving around, stalking and shooting, with his camera. People are moving beside him – hair, make-up, people holding lights and reflectors. Everyone is looking at my mother as she poses there, naked – oh god, naked – on this stage in the middle of London. My mother: the Greatest Show on Earth.

  ‘That’s really great, Carmen,’ Art says. ‘Just a little more of the leg, of the stretch marks. This piece is all about those beautiful lines.’

  ‘These things!’

  And then I see her – Suzy – next to Art. Standing there like it’s just normal to be someone I am obsessed with standing next to my ex. The world is turning in on itself, and also exploding. I flatten myself more against the wall.

  Suzy says: ‘You grew too quick!’

  And my mother – MY MOTHER – replies: ‘I shrank too quick.’

  ‘Because you grew too quick,’ Suzy says.

  My mother is contorting herself into various unrecognisable poses – not of humans but of writhing insects or swarming reptiles. I can’t bear to watch. But I do.

  Suzy says: ‘Can I post one of these? Please? They are so raw and perfect. So immediate.’

  Art says: ‘Sure, but credit me.�
��

  My mother says: ‘Credit me.’

  Suzy raises her phone and lines up the shot of the scene.

  I’ve got to either puke or move. Puke or move, Jenny, puke or move. I move. I might also puke, but I am moving. I stride right in and I say: ‘WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?’

  I want to say YOUNG LADY.

  Or OLD LADY.

  But mostly ARRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGH.

  Everyone and everything stops. The people who don’t know me clearly think I am some prudish theatre worker or zany wandering type. The people who do know me know that I am all of those things, and also – righteously angry. I stand looking at them, one by one – my mother, Art, Suzy. All of their mouths are open.

  I say: ‘WHAT KIND OF DEPRAVED ARRANGEMENT IS THIS?’

  My mother reaches for her clothes to cover herself up. I am aware on some level of the innate ridiculousness of myself. This is me: I am half panic, half pantomime. And this is about me, all of this, is it not? Has to be.

  Art says: ‘Carmen, I thought you said you cleared this?’

  My mother bats her hand and mutters, ‘My daughter’s not my keeper.’

  This prompts a kerfuffle of sudden understanding amongst the attendees who don’t know me. Oh, it’s her daughter …

  Suzy says: ‘She is free to be the woman she wants to be.’ She says it with the barest edge of civility.

  I point at her. ‘Don’t you even THINK about making this a feminist thing, Brambles.’

  My mother says: ‘How did you find me here?’

  Art says: ‘I can explain. This is a full story. Your mother is part of my next exhibition: Scars and Girls. It’s about motherhood.’

  My mother says: ‘It’s going to be a beautiful and important exhibition.’

  I look at the three of them, from face to face to face. Suzy looks irritated, as though me turning up here is ruining her day. My mother is looking at me in a panicked sort of way, like she’s only just realised what a monumental fuck-up this might be. Art is watching me with a look in his eye that is deliciously fearful.

  I am Ripley with the flame-thrower. The elevator reaches the bottom floor. Ding.

  I take a deep breath. ‘You win, Art. You win.’

  He coughs and looks unsure, shuffles from foot to foot, looks at the buttons on his camera. ‘I don’t want to win.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. It’s not your fault but it’s what you were primed for. You bided your time because on some unconscious level you were playing a long game. A long game I could never play.’

  ‘I’m not playing any games.’

  ‘Your whole life is a game! You’re like Peter Pan or Picasso. The puer aeternus. But I’m glad to know what I know. To be what I am, in this painful age of personal enlightenment.’

  With that, I turn and walk out, out from the dark theatre into the daylight.

  She’ll follow me, I know she will. And when she finds me I will be ready.

  Outside, it is not sunny, it is overcast, but it might as well be the height of summer. It feels as though a big light has gone on after so many months in darkness. I’m like a critter that has shed its skin and come out sturdier.

  SOHO SQUARE

  I look at my phone. Suzy has posted the picture of the shoot already, with the caption:

  Such an honour to be here at my paramour @ArtWilson’s shoot for his next exhibition exploring motherhood with remarkable women like Carmen #scarsandgirls #motherhood #stretchmarks #ageing #bodyinspo

  It looks pretty good in black and white. Iconic.

  I type:

  Must be plenty you can relate to, yuppie mum of the year – is he going to do your C-section? #OWNYOURTRUTH

  I stare at the comment. Like it is a little draft missile, lined up, ready to fire. Boom, Suzy Brambles, down you go.

  And then I delete it.

  And then I mute her. Not angrily, but because I know there will never be any good feeling for me now in looking, and there probably never was. This is a private act of sanity. There’s a sign pointing towards her in my mind, a big old sign carved out of an oak tree, and it says: Only Trouble This Way Be >>>

  I hold my phone close to my temple and imagine tumours blooming inside.

  When she appears at the far gate, it is like a reckoning. Like my own death has caught up with me. I stare at her and she stares back. The air between us crackles. She starts to walk over.

  I fantasise about saying it, standing up and screaming it: I HAD A MISCARRIAGE. I watch her fling herself to the ground and beat the earth with her fists. NOOOO NOOOOO NOOOOOOOOOO! I watch her weep for the grandchild that will never be. For her daughter’s shame and agony. Why didn’t you tell me? Because you’re a grief leech! A misery vampire! I watch her tear her own hair out and hurl it towards me in bloody clods—

  She sits down next to me. I look at her but she doesn’t look at me now – she looks dead ahead. She is everyone who ever loved me, everyone who ever left me, everyone who ever admired me, everyone who ever ignored me. She is a Bloody Mother Fucking Arsehole, as the song almost goes.

  ‘I know what you must think of me.’

  I see her wringing her duchess hands. The blue polish is chipped on her thumbnail.

  I look to the sky. ‘That’s your job.’

  She makes a firm mouth and bows her head low, like a scolded dog. She used to do this. Martyrdom, I believe they call it.

  ‘I have my reasons,’ she says. ‘I have a right to still want things for myself, Jenny. I wasn’t thinking of you.’

  ‘Evidently. All of it is you. I cannot shed you. My work patterns. My love patterns. Good god.’ I look at her, into her big blue bloodshot eyes. ‘You’re scared.’

  She doesn’t argue.

  ‘Did you approach him, or did he approach you?’

  ‘He said he was looking for models for a new project. I put myself forward and he said yes instantly. He was worried about what you’d think, but I said I’d tell you.’

  ‘So why didn’t you?’

  ‘I told you a million times in my head, but I kept putting it off. I even wrote you an email that I didn’t send. Texts I didn’t send. Ridiculous, really! I just got so anxious about it and then it was the day of the shoot and you were off to work and – well, here we are.’

  ‘Why did you come? To London?’

  ‘Same reason you always came. To take the taste away.’

  I light up another cigarette.

  ‘Can I have one?’

  I light one for her, too. She smokes it with her fingers curled, like an amateur.

  The day is fading. The last bands of sun sneak across the square.

  She says: ‘I suppose part of me was, on some deep unknown level, hanging on to the idea that you might come home.’

  ‘What? You turned my room into an en-suite! You threw away all my schoolwork!’

  ‘I suppose I was trying to look like I’d moved on, you know, to not seem bothered. I think it still hurts that living with me isn’t an appealing prospect for you.’

  ‘There is no one I want to live with right now, Mum. And I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

  She sighs. ‘That’s always been my problem. I knew the kind of man I wanted to die with, but I could never find the one I wanted to live with.’

  CHIEF EMOTIONS

  So I have a confession to make

  You posed naked for Art, too

  No, worse: I’m following your mum’s new crush

  OH ARE YOU INDEED

  Yes

  (I am too)

  Hhaaha

  He’s SUCH A NAUSE

  SUCH a nause

  He calls himself the CEO, that’s ‘Chief Emotions Officer’, of motivational site Becoming Who You Are

  CHIEF EMOTIONS OFFICER

  Did you see what he posted this morning? He posted a picture of a zebra in sunglasses with the caption ‘Are you a baller or a bailer?’

  He tweets fifty times a day

  My intelligence wants to take out a res
training order on him. When I read his dross I feel physically assaulted

  Is this actually his job???

  I’m so glad we’re bonding over this, Kelly

  SHE SAYS

  ‘One day I’ll travel light, but not in this lifetime. He thinks I’m the best person in forever.’

  She brings the last of her bags into the hall. The van is waiting in the street.

  ‘Watch your step with him, Mum.’

  ‘I think he really likes me! Like, me-me, I mean.’

  ‘I’m pleased for you-you. Really.’

  ‘He’s invited me to do some travelling with him later this month. LA, San Fran. A few conferences and a bit of a jolly. I think it’ll be good for me, and I’d like to get to know him better. Would … that be okay? Would you mind?’

  ‘Why would I mind?’

  ‘It’s over Christmas.’

  I look at her. ‘S’fine.’

  She says, meaningfully: ‘Thank you. He’s a bit younger than me, but it’s not like that,’ she says.

  ‘How much younger?’

  ‘Ten years. But I don’t feel sixty. Truth is, I feel twenty-five. I’ve felt twenty-five since I was twenty-five – it’s like my personality was set then when I had my calling and I’ve never changed. And it’s not like anyone’s pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes. We’ve got all that out of the way. He has his children. I have you. There are no secrets.’

  ‘Does he have an ex-partner?’

  ‘His wife died four years ago. I’m going to try and put them in touch.’

  ‘Like hell you are.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘Love does not advance by weddings; love advances by funerals.’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘He organises these big spiritual sessions. Gatherings, really. Five people doing reiki on you at once.’

  ‘What, gang reiki?’

  ‘Jennifer. Apparently, people hook up to do group meditations online and when there’s enough people in a city the vibes are so strong that the crime rate falls.’

  ‘So he’s a superhero.’

  ‘He’s a man who knows what he wants.’

  ‘You mean he’s rich.’