Otherhood

by William Sutcliffe

  ‘By not asking permission. We’d just turn up. They wouldn’t throw us out. Not if we acted tough.’

  ‘But why?’ said Gillian.

  ‘Because we can’t just let them give up on us. Even forgetting grandchildren, if there’s one thing they really do owe us, it’s the right to know them. And they’ve shut us out, which just isn’t fair.’

  ‘It wouldn’t work,’ said Helen.

  ‘And it wouldn’t only be about us, it would be about them,’ continued Carol, her tone rising in confidence as she became alarmed and excited to discover that she was beginning to believe what she was saying. Gillian and Helen’s objections – which were at heart also hers – sounded feeble and cowardly. Carol was, to her surprise, winning the argument. ‘If they can’t finish growing up on their own, maybe they need us to make them grow up,’ she said. ‘They’re not too old to be told off, and they’re not too sorted out to still be in need of . . . of . . . I don’t know . . . mothering.’

  ‘Mothering?’ said Helen.

  ‘Yes, mothering. We haven’t finished the job. It’s as simple as that.’

  ‘A week?’ said Helen.

  ‘But . . . how?’ said Gillian. ‘I mean, what would we do? How would they take it?’

  ‘We’ll find out, won’t we? If they think they’ve got the right to forget us, then we’ve got the right to go and remind them.’

  ‘Like a student protest? A sit-in?’ said Helen.

  ‘No, we make it a nice visit. We just try to remind them who we are, and try to figure out who they are. I honestly don’t think I know any more.’

  ‘No,’ said Helen. ‘Me neither.’

  ‘Nor me,’ said Gillian.

  ‘You are joking, though,’ said Helen. ‘I mean, you wouldn’t actually do it, would you?’

  Carol and Matt

  waxy pallor

  Sitting alone in Matt’s strange, soulless cavern of an apartment, Carol wondered how the other two were getting on. Perhaps she was the only one who had gone through with it. Even right up to the last moment before she rang the doorbell, she had been on the brink of backing out and heading home. The chances of Helen and Gillian being as brave as her, and of getting away with it, seemed low.

  She took out her mobile to ring and find out, then stopped herself. She didn’t want to know; she didn’t want to be put off. What her friends did was no longer the point. Now she was here, she just had to think about her and Matt. The fact that he hadn’t turned her away did not, of itself, amount to a significant achievement. It was just the start. She had to focus on her objective, which was to help him.

  Carol would never have thought of herself as the kind of person likely to snoop, least of all in breach of the trust that a host has placed in a guest, but Matt wasn’t really a host, and she wasn’t really a guest. She knew it wasn’t her flat, but it was, in a sense, the next best thing. He was her son and she loved him. She’d never do anything that wasn’t in his interests.

  By this logic, just the fact that she wanted to look around made it justifiable, and she decided to start by looking under his bed. The first stage of the operation was research. She had to find out more about who he really was. Specifically, she had to seek out the gulf between how he presented himself to her and who he really was. Under the bed seemed like a logical place to begin.

  The main thing he kept there, she discovered, was dust. Dust and sports equipment, the combination of which told her that he was the kind of man who enjoyed buying his gear more than using it. This didn’t come as much of a surprise. Throughout his childhood he’d been the same, nagging for a particular must-have Christmas present from October, only to lose interest in it by the end of Boxing Day.

  A small, black, interestingly un-sporty box caught her eye just as she was about to stand up. She reached through the shag-pile of dust to claw it free from the corner in which it was wedged. The box had no lettering or logo on it, but was solidly made out of expensive cardboard. This was a woman box, not a man box.

  Carol sat on the bed and opened it up. Inside, on a bed of artfully crumpled red tissue-paper, was a pair of handcuffs, two tubes of ‘Lick Me Lubricant’ and ‘Spunky Cappuccino Chocolate Body Paint’, and a small string of beads that had presumably been left in the box by accident. Tucked down the side of the crêpe paper was a tiny envelope, on the front of which was the letter ‘M’, written in a swirling, feminine hand.

  It wasn’t entirely without a pang of conscience that Carol pulled the card from the envelope. She had fallen out with Matt in the past over her slight tendency towards nosiness, but the fact is, if it is your job to empty your child’s bedroom bins, you simply will stumble across things that may not have been intended for your eyes. She knew she had, on occasion, overreacted. She could see now that her reaction to his fountain pen refill kit, which really had looked startlingly like a syringe, had been a little hysterical, but she had only been trying to do the right thing. Everything she had ever done for her child had always been only for him. But the difficult thing with children was that they never forgot or forgave anything. You could get a thousand things right, but it was the one thing they objected to that would be remembered.

  It occurred to Carol that, with each passing generation, parents seemed to be getting more lenient with their children, while children got stricter with their parents. How long would it be, she thought, before things went full circle, and teenagers started beating their parents when they misbehaved?

  As an envelope-opening pang override, Carol asked herself what kind of person could possibly not look. What freak of self-control would stop herself reading the card? Anyone lacking that curiosity would be inhumanly self-absorbed. Such a person would be, above all else, a terrible mother. It was, therefore, in her capacity as a good mother that she opened the card and read it.

  The front of the card was blank cream, textured with thin, shallow ridges. The inside said:

  M

  You have been a very bad boy.

  I am going to have to punish you. Mercilessly.

  K

  XXX

  Who was K? What had Matt done? How she had punished him didn’t require too much figuring out.

  Carol realised that her hands had begun to tremble, and beads of moisture were prickling at her neck. Was her son a pervert? Did this count as bondage? Did people really do this? Normal people? Was this something a mother should worry about? Were there self-help groups for this kind of thing?

  Carol had another look at the tubes. On closer inspection, they seemed like they had been used once. Enthusiastically. Unsparingly. But only once. The lid of the box, moreover, had been just as dusty, if not even dustier, than the squash and tennis rackets. Once, on reflection, probably wasn’t enough to class you as a pervert.

  Carol put the tubes back in the box, her fingers working with clumsy haste as she rearranged the tissue-paper into its previous position. She felt suddenly rather hot, and began to think she might be blushing. Lurid images were now flashing into her mind, of a variety she didn’t know her subconscious even housed.

  She clapped the lid on the box, pushed it firmly back to a distant corner among the under-bed filth, and stood up. She walked briskly to the kitchen and swallowed down a tall glass of water, its coolness on her tongue and lips dispelling the sordid murk that had begun to cloud her mind.

  She washed her hands, twice, sensing as she dried them a tiny and rather surprising upswell of maternal pride. Women wanted her son. Not just mousy, bland women, but women like ‘K’, who were capable of going into heaven knows what kind of shops and emerging with small black boxes of unspeakable items.

  You wouldn’t want your son to marry a K. You certainly wouldn’t want a K as the mother of your grandchildren. But there was a certain pride in discovering that your son knew how to handle one. It was a little like mountain-climbing. You wouldn’t like the idea of your child going, but you’d feel proud when he got back home safely.

  The world was full of Ks, and always
had been, even though they had only recently opened shops for them. Carol knew there was a K in every Tube train, every office, every supermarket, and next time she found herself near one, she resolved to feel a little less scornful, and a little less intimidated.

  As for Carol’s research, this was important and discouraging news. Her pursuit of an explanation for the lack of grandchildren had immediately taken a step forwards. Now she knew the scale of the task. If Matt was to produce for her the babies she so craved, he had to travel from a K to a breeder.

  The idea that Carol would be able to have any effect on his taste in women at all, let alone such a radical one, suddenly struck her as ludicrously ambitious. Unless, these days, there were women like K who also wanted children. It was possible. There was no limit to the increasing demands that men felt they could make on women, and a touch of whorishness in the bedroom had quite possibly, since her day, been added to the menu. But how she would find such a woman, or persuade Matt to take an interest in her, she had no idea.

  The vigour with which Carol set about cleaning Matt’s apartment demonstrated that her prying into her son’s secrets had not been entirely without guilt. There was something almost purgatorial in the zeal she applied to the task. By the time she had finished, everything sparkled, even things that weren’t supposed to. The entire flat was transformed from sepia matt to high gloss, its odour from old cigarettes to pungent chemical slanders against pine and lemon.

  Worrying that she had perhaps gone overboard on the cleaning products – it was, after all, a little difficult to breathe – Carol opened the windows and set off in search of flowers.

  By the time she had finished, the flat was barely recognisable. This gave her a moment’s pause, as she remembered that it was not in fact hers, but the more she thought about it, the more confident she felt that Matt wouldn’t be so churlish as to resent her efforts.

  She slumped into Matt’s sofa, exhausted by her domestic exertions. With no one watching, she saw no reason not to give herself up to the sluttishly enveloping upholstery, and she had to admit that it was alarmingly comfortable. Furniture really wasn’t supposed to do this to you. This level of physical luxuriance was almost obscene. It wasn’t healthy to get this much pleasure just from sitting down. Drugs, Carol imagined, probably felt like this, only more so.

  No wonder people like Matt were lazy. If sitting down was this good, standing up must seem like such an effort, and so joyless.

  It wasn’t a notion that entirely made sense, but Carol found herself thinking that young people these days made it very hard for themselves by making everything so easy. There were so many more things luring them into idleness. And not just idleness, either. Just about any sin you could think of had a higher billing than it used to. When she was young, if you wanted to sin, you had to make it all up for yourself. Now every advertisement hoarding and TV programme that caught your eye was an instruction manual for moral depravity. When it was so much easier to be bad, it must surely be harder to be good.

  Under the coffee table, among a heap of DVDs, Carol spotted a copy of the magazine whose title, BALLS!, she recognised. This was where Matt worked. She had never read it before. Matt had never actively discouraged her from reading it, but he had never sent her a copy, and had never told her where to get one. Now she could see why.

  On the cover was an almost-naked girl whose expression was half gloating, half that of someone who has just sat on something unexpectedly sharp. She was holding, with almost erotic reverence, a hinged silver ingot of technology that might have been a camera, a phone, a computer, or a state-of-the-art set of cake forks. Carol wasn’t really qualified to tell. Perhaps it was the object she had accidentally sat on.

  BALLS! the magazine proclaimed, and underneath, in smaller type, ‘DON’T FORGET YOUR BALLS!’

  The magazine began with what called itself a news page, though every item was nothing more than a picture of a girl or a pair of girls, either in a bikini or topless, with a caption giving their name (Carol had no idea if she was supposed to recognise them) and a tongue-in-cheek comment about either where they were, who they were with, or what had happened to their clothes. Further on there were more articles in the same vein, mixed in with the odd piece on football, gadgets or cars, but even those were heavily illustrated with near-naked women, their crotches usually concealed by a prop (a football, say, or a tyre) relevant to the theme of the article. Carol couldn’t tell whether the magazine was trying to be pornography or journalism or the mail-order catalogue for an electronic goods firm.

  There were a few interviews, some with girls who were only given a first name, which Carol assumed meant they were either global megastars who didn’t need a surname, or girls off the street. The interviews tended to consist of four or five questions, along the lines of ‘What’s the easiest way to chat you up?’ and ‘Have you ever flashed before?’

  Even regardless of her son’s involvement, just discovering that a magazine like this existed was depressing. The mental age of the intended readers looked to be about twelve. It was almost a comic. Yet it was all about sex, or rather about breasts. Carol genuinely couldn’t understand what BALLS! was, or why it was there, or who it was for. The idea that this was her son’s life made her want to cry.

  Carol returned the magazine to the coffee table and wiped her hands on her skirt. She had often talked to Matt about his job – about how his career was on the up and up, and the number of people he had working under him, and how the circulation had been soaring – but the topic of what was actually in the magazine had never cropped up. She had never thought to ask, and he had never offered the information. She had simply known that it was a men’s magazine, and until now she always thought she understood what that meant.

  On the rare occasions that she’d pondered his reticence, she had thought it must simply stem from his fear (accurate, as it happened) that Carol thought magazines were somehow effeminate. Men’s magazines, for all their vein-busting effort to be manly, had always aroused Carol’s suspicions. Real men, as she saw it, didn’t need advice or help in how to be masculine.

  Yes, thinking about it now, she saw that he had been actively evasive about the content of his magazine, but she had allowed him to be, thinking she understood the reason why. She had always felt they were tacitly drawing a veil, together, over the embarrassingly effete nature of his job. It had never occurred to her that he was concealing something genuinely sordid.

  When she saw girls exposing themselves on advertisement hoardings, she sometimes wondered how they faced their mothers, and if their families knew what they did for a living. Now Carol asked herself how she would face her son.

  She doubted that it would be advisable to let him know what she thought. If she said anything at all, her full revulsion would flood out, and before she knew it she’d be telling him his life was mired in filth. If her goal was to improve their relationship, this was possibly not the most fruitful path to pursue.

  Matt, meanwhile, was having a frantic day, up against the monthly deadline that, as ever, caused an afternoon of panic, tipping into exhilaration as the pages were finally sent. As was the tradition, the whole staff then went to a Soho bar popular with footballers, models and people who were willing to pay five pounds a beer in order to drink with footballers and models. It did not occur to Matt, who had for the moment forgotten about his visitor, to skip the celebration and head home.

  Matt bought the first round, which came in at forty quid, including the tip he gave to Marcello, the Cuban barman, who according to one rumour was in fact Brian from Hounslow. By the time he had spent eighty pounds, his gang of colleagues was beginning to get rowdy. As the total nudged over a hundred, a flock of models swanned into the bar, which brought a touch of sobriety back to the evening as the group zeroed in on their various targets.

  Matt opted for a girl who was, well, nearly identical to all the others, except with black hair, slightly blacker than the other two dark ones, and who insisted that her n
ame was Angel.

  By the time he hit the hundred and fifty mark, he and Angel were getting on extremely well, all the better for Matt giving elaborate descriptions of his importance in the BALLS! hierarchy. There was a moment, when she described a childhood memory of a holiday on the Orkney Islands, that he thought he’d maybe had sex with her once before, but since she showed no sign of remembering him, he felt it would be inappropriate to say anything. He decided, out of courtesy, to play along with the idea that they were new acquaintances.

  In the taxi back to his flat, which took the total to just over two hundred, the foreplay began. She was in the bag. Matt, of course, had no idea how much the evening had cost him, nor that Angel had so far spent one bus fare: 80p. The maths might have unsettled him.

  Thanks to a frisky little moment in the lift, Matt was semi-tumescent as he entered the flat, much as he had been on the previous occasion when he greeted his mother.

  ‘Hello, darling!’ she called from the kitchen. ‘I’ve roasted up a chicken for you. It might have gone a bit dry, cause I was expecting you back earlier, but it should be all right.’

  Matt grabbed Angel by the arm and whispered hurriedly in her ear, before Carol could get within earshot, ‘It’s my mum. We’ve had a . . . a family tragedy. Don’t ask her about it. I’m putting her up for a few days while she tries to pull herself together. I thought she’d be at . . . at her counselling this evening, but it must have been cancelled. Forgot to mention it.’

  ‘Oh, that’s so sweet,’ said Angel, a sentence she had uttered at least forty times that evening.

  ‘Oh!’ said Carol. ‘You’ve brought a friend.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Matt. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

  He looked around his apartment, wondering for an instant if he might have got out of the lift on the wrong floor. He had never seen it so tidy, or so clean. His home had never previously struck him as particularly messy, but looking at it now, he saw that the flat he’d walked out of in the morning had looked like a vandalised version of this one.