On Top of Everything

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  I found myself nodding my head in a peculiar fashion as that old familiar feeling of not quite getting it started fluttering in my chest. Nice to finally meet me? The Heathrow Express was only a fifteen-minute ride. That didn’t warrant a ‘finally’. Even if she had been sitting next to Monty on the plane from Bangkok and he had started talking about me before they took off, a ‘finally’ was still surplus to requirements. How long had these two known each other? Why the ‘finally’?

  I shifted my confused stare to my son.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked feebly, as the fluttering turned to a banging.

  ‘Don’t freak out, Mum,’ Monty said, a warning tone in his voice.

  Me? Freak out? Why would I?

  ‘Crystal and I are together,’ he said with a casual shrug, the sort of slightly guilty shrug you might use if you’d just owned up to buying your second chocolate ice cream of the day. ‘Actually, we got married. Mum, this is my wife.’

  ‘You what?’ I asked. I could have sworn he had just said that he was married to this woman, this frizzy little over-cooked blonde with the ridiculous name of Crystal, that she was his wife. But Monty was just a boy. He didn’t have a wife.

  He was talking to me, I could see that, but I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying. I was looking at her, at Crystal, and she was looking straight back.

  ‘What?’ I asked again, wishing with every fibre of my being that Harry was with me, that I could share my panic and fear and disappointment and hysteria and did I say panic? I needed him to keep me from feeling that the world was spinning away from me. To grab me and pull me back to the earth’s surface.

  ‘… met at the health farm not long after I got there and we both knew straight away …’ Monty was moving towards me, his lips still moving, but I no longer wanted to be close to him, this frightening stranger. I backed away.

  ‘… got married by a waterfall in the Currumbin Valley before we …’

  If this wasn’t a dream, I thought, feeling my face ache with the effort of keeping it from collapsing, if this was true, if Monty had come back to me with some hideous dried-up Australian wife attached, then this was the third rotten thing in my current roll and it made having no job and a gay husband feel like items Julie Andrews would add to her list of favourite things.

  Monty was just a boy, my boy. He would never do something like get married without telling me, without wanting me to help him choose the right person. We were a team, we did things together, we always had.

  ‘Mum!’ He reached out and grasped my arm and when I looked down at his hand it seemed so foreign to me that I started to shake it off. His hand was so big and brown. His nails were clipped neat and short. ‘Mum!’ his grip tightened. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I’m really sorry. But —’

  Crystal was still standing back with the bags, still looking at me, not defiantly, but not apologetically either.

  ‘But how old is she?’ I asked Monty.

  ‘What has that got to do with it?’ he fired back and I saw an unfamiliar glint in his eyes.

  ‘I am your mother,’ my voice was getting louder, people were starting to stare, ‘and you have just informed me that the “woman” I am looking at over there, the complete stranger about whom I know not a single thing, is married to you, my nineteen-year-old son. I think I have the right to ask how old she is.’

  ‘You married Dad when you were nineteen,’ Monty said forcefully, looking much less like a fully-fledged man and much more like an angry teenager in a way he never really had before.

  ‘I know how old we were,’ I tried to smile, ‘and I’m not saying I have a problem with you being nineteen.’ Which was not true because I most certainly did. ‘And let’s not get onto the subject of your father right now.’ I had so many things to be angry about, I didn’t know where to start or stop. ‘I just want to know how old this “wife” of yours is.’

  ‘I’m thirty-four,’ Crystal said.

  She had snuck up on me, was standing at my shoulder now, somehow carrying all their bags, which she placed carefully back on the station floor. ‘I’m really sorry this has come as such a shock but I really love your son, Florence, and I hope you will come to respect that.’

  ‘Respect?’ I felt a terrible urge to slap her. Indeed my palms were itching. ‘Where was the respect for me when you took my son and married him without telling me? He’s nineteen years old, Crystal. He is just a boy. What does a thirty-four-year-old woman want with a boy?’

  ‘Oh, Mum, for fuck’s sake, you’re embarrassing yourself. Just listen to what you’re saying. She didn’t take me! Jesus, and what does age matter? You’re being ridiculous.’ Monty was laughing at me and this hurt so deeply my inner fishwife lashed out at him.

  ‘I’m being ridiculous? Just a year ago you relied on me for bus money. Your teddy bear slept in your bed. You cried because Beckham stayed with Real Madrid. Now you have a wife? You don’t think that’s ridiculous?’

  ‘Fine, be like that then,’ Monty said, snatching up his pack and his shoulder bag. I had never seen him like this. I had never dreamed of seeing him like this. ‘We don’t need this shit,’ he said to Crystal. ‘Come on, babe. We don’t need to go back to her place.’

  To ‘her’ place? When did it stop being his place?

  ‘Monty, wait a mo,’ Crystal said calmly to my son’s angry back and he stopped. Then she turned to me. ‘I know you’re angry, Florence, and I appreciate you believe you have the right to be and that you are having a difficult time at the moment but if you think about Monty and me, it’s not the end of the world, is it? That your son is married and, well, happy?’

  What did this little strumpet know about the world and its end?

  ‘I’m not so bad, when you get to know me, despite my age,’ she continued with an ill-timed attempt at humour. ‘I hope you’ll come to see that. Don’t you have any faith in the choices the son you brought up would make? Don’t you think he would choose a wonderful person to share his life with?’

  This kind of talk made me feel weak at the knees, and not in a good way. I’d had a lifetime of this kind of talk. The worst thing about it was that it somehow made perfect sense — just not the right sort of perfect sense. Of course I had faith in Monty’s choices. Supreme faith. I just wanted to be there when he made those choices to make sure there weren’t any hiccups. Crystal was a hiccup. And just like a hiccup, she needed to be suppressed. But as I stood there wishing I knew kung fu or some other more lethal form of martial art to aid me in this suppression, I caught Monty’s eye and he looked so hurt, so wounded, my need to inflict severe physical harm on his wife (wife?) evaporated.

  I never could bear to see that look in his eyes, let alone be the one to cause it.

  Oh, I loved that boy. With what was left of my heart, I just loved him. He was the best thing I had ever done. I couldn’t bear that he’d hurt me like this but neither could I bear to hurt him. I was the adult (although Crystal came a pretty close second) in the situation. It was up to me to lead the way. I took as deep a breath as my shock would allow and held out a hand to him as though he was four years old and I needed to get him out of the playground and inside for his afternoon sleep. ‘Don’t go like this, Monty,’ I pleaded. ‘Please, come home. Please. I’m sorry.’

  I didn’t know what to do or think or feel but I knew I could not survive having him walk away from me just then.

  He looked at my hand and then at Crystal, who nodded encouragingly. Then he asked where I had parked the car with a brusqueness that broke my heart before striding off in front of us.

  ‘Thank you, Florence, I know this must be hard for you and it means a lot to us that you’re trying to be understanding,’ Crystal said as we followed him out of the station.

  ‘You don’t have the tiniest clue about what anything means to me,’ I told her, keeping my voice light and non-threatening in case my son could hear me.

  ‘Well, thank you, I appreciate your honesty,’ she answered, without
missing a beat, and skipped ahead to catch up with him.

  I watched her tiny little skirt shimmy and shine as she moved in front of me and hoped against hope that this tough little nut would never get to meet my parents and sister because I knew for a fact that they would just love her.

  CRYSTAL

  It wasn’t my idea not to tell Florence and Harry but then they weren’t my parents, it wasn’t my deal. And Monty seemed pretty sure he knew the best way to handle it.

  He definitely didn’t want them getting wind of it before we got married but I think he toyed with telling them soon afterwards. Then he got the call from his dad while we were in Thailand. No way could he drop anything else on his mother, he said, especially from a distance. It would freak her out too much.

  I loved it that he was so concerned about her, that he thought so much about her reaction. I knew he was a little afraid of how his folks would take it, but I also knew he loved me with all his heart and was not afraid of what we had done.

  She pretty much flipped out at the train station though.

  At first she just stared at me blankly with her mouth opening and closing and then she kept saying, ‘What? What?’ in a louder and louder voice even though Monty was trying to tell her what.

  When she finally got it, she was so angry I thought she was going to slap me. Monty was really pissed off too but you know I sort of understood how she might be feeling. When he’d talked about his mum while we were in Australia I had imagined someone older. I knew her age but I had still pictured someone much more matronly than Florence. It’s her name, I suppose, and the fact that she is my husband’s mum. When I saw her at the train station, though, my first impression was that she didn’t look that much unlike me. Taller, obviously, and darker, but otherwise? And if I was thinking that, then so must she have been.

  Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with being an older woman, with Monty’s age. He’s wise beyond his years and besides, I fell in love with him before I knew he was only nineteen and I couldn’t fall back out again, no matter how hard I tried. Sure, I probably wouldn’t choose to get involved with a guy so much younger than me but if there’s one thing I have learned in my years on this earth, it’s that timing is everything. We met, we made an instant overwhelming connection and all obstacles had to be overcome. It’s as simple as that. I just couldn’t feel about someone the way I do about Monty and not pursue that simply on the grounds of our age difference. What if I never felt like that about anyone ever again? What if that was my big shot at true happiness and I gave up on it because of, basically, mathematics?

  No, Monty and I were meant to be and so we were.

  From a mother’s point of view, though, I could accept that I might not have been the sort of girl, the sort of woman, she had envisaged her boy ending up with and therefore just the sight of me, the idea of me, would be disappointing to her. Then, adding in the surprise factor, the unexpectedness of having a daughter-in-law, on top of the unexpectedness of Monty’s father having a boyfriend, she really deserved to be shocked and angry.

  When I saw her standing there at the station, wanting to spit at me, but so desperate to have her son come home, I tried to put myself in her shoes.

  How would I feel if my son turned up married to a woman fifteen years older than him?

  I can’t answer that. I wish with all my heart and soul I could, but I can’t.

  CHAPTER TEN

  She came from Melbourne and was a massage therapist but dabbled in reflexology. She told me this in the car on the way home as I drove in astonished silence, concentrating on keeping my eyes on the road. They wanted to close, or spin like marbles in their sockets.

  Monty was married? To an Australian massage therapist who dabbled in reflexology? Who was old enough to be his … well, I don’t know what, but she was old. Too old. And she was his wife.

  I felt sick. Helpless. Furious. Sad. Frightened. Sick again.

  Jobless, husbandless, and now, son-less. Oh yes, try arguing my theory of three rotten things with me now, Harry, you bloody gay bastard.

  I rang him the moment I got into the house. But it was not my day, my week, my month, possibly my year, for it was not Harry who answered the phone at the Lancaster Gate bedsit.

  ‘Who is this?’ I asked of the polite male voice at the other end of the phone, some unknown emotion clipping my words, making them small and hard and mean.

  ‘It’s Charles,’ the voice said on the other end. ‘Is this Florence?’

  Well, if Harry’s intention was to test my easily plucked filaments, this was definitely doing it. My heart was now officially not just broken, it was shattered. It was shattered and jumped on and burned and then the ashes were spread across the Arctic Circle and frozen and when that was melted they were eaten by some strange creature with a long nose and shat out again and picked at by birds.

  I ached. Not just emotionally but in every part of my body. Even my hair hurt. The tiny holes in the corner of my eyes where the tears strained to leave my tortured body hurt.

  ‘Please ask Harry to ring me urgently,’ I told ‘Charles’, trying to sound cold and unforgiving but I was too upset for this to be truly authentic. So much for Harry being holed up in his bedsit crippled with remorse.

  ‘There’s no need,’ Charles said. ‘He’s right here. I’ll pass you over.’

  I heard the muffled sound of grown-up men talking and then Harry was on the line, sounding falsely cheerful and uncomplicated.

  ‘Floss, darling, is he here?’

  ‘Don’t you “Floss, darling” me, you snake,’ I hissed. ‘What’s he doing there, answering your phone? You knew I would be calling, Harry. Why would you do that? Are you trying to hurt me? Any more than you already have?’

  Harry seemed genuinely surprised.

  ‘Of course not, no, oh Floss, I’m so sorry. I thought you would want to spend a couple of hours with Monty first and actually I thought it would be he who rang me but I just didn’t think, really at all. The last thing I want to do is upset you more than I already have. Please believe me. Charles is just here to give me a hand with, ah, to help… I’ve been to Ikea.’

  I had tried very, very hard over the past few weeks to not imagine what Charles was helping my husband with. Every now and then I caught a flash of something that made me gulp: two naked male torsos on a passing bus advertisement, two men holding hands walking along the canal, Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Relax’ blaring out of a passing car radio. It wasn’t that I was even interested in what grown men did with each other, I wasn’t, I didn’t care at all, that had nothing to do with it. What upset me was the reminder that out there existed another world, a world Charles had taken Harry into, where there was no place for me, no matter how hard I tried, no matter what I did or didn’t do.

  ‘Tell “Charles” to shove your bookcase and come home at once. I need you here,’ I said.

  ‘For God’s sake, Floss,’ Harry said tiredly.

  ‘Monty has come home with a wife,’ I then told him, doing my best to keep calm. ‘An Australian woman practically old enough to be his mother. She dabbles in reflexology, Harry. He’s married. Monty is married.’

  There was silence at the other end.

  ‘That bloody idiot,’ Harry finally breathed. ‘What the devil has he done? He’s just a bloody kid.’

  It should have been a bonding moment. It had potential to be our best since the split. Here we were joined again by virtue of being parents locked into the same nightmare. But I was still too raw to feel completely joined with Harry just at that point. Something to do with Charles giving him ‘a hand’ with his Ikea, no doubt. In fact, in a fit of complete contrariness considering I felt pretty much the same way myself, I found Harry’s reaction thoroughly galling.

  I was angry that Monty had married Crystal without mentioning it in passing, I told Harry. Not that he was young when he did it. Harry and I had indeed been the same age when we married and before Harry changed his tune we were the poster
children for marrying young.

  The battles we had to fight with those who thought they knew better!

  ‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure,’ my whiskery Great Aunt Violet had warned me three times in the course of one short visit before our wedding. Had it not been for the divine ginger flapjack she had the presence of mind to bring with her, I might have throttled her.

  Harry’s parents had been totally against it too. They never quite made it clear just who they’d set their sights on for their younger son but did make it clear it wasn’t me, his childhood sweetheart, a secretarial college drop-out with a doo-lally family who never stopped kissing and hugging and all smelled overwhelmingly of lavender oil.

  My own parents were hardly more encouraging although their objection was that I was getting married at all — such an over-rated institution according to them — not that I was doing it at nineteen.

  We’d showed them though. For twenty years our detractors had been forced to eat humble pie. And even now the ones who were still alive couldn’t blame the age at which we were married for its awful end. They could blame Harry. And ‘Charles’.

  ‘It’s not him being a kid that is the problem,’ I whispered angrily down the phone to him because I could hear Monty and Crystal, or ‘Crystal’ as I was already calling her, clattering around in the kitchen. ‘It’s her being old. Older. Harry, he’s just a boy and she’s a fully grown woman! It’s bordering on obscene. She only has another two minutes of child bearing left in her and Monty is not ready to be a father. Oh God, I can’t even believe I’m having to think these things. Monty, a father? Jesus Christ, Harry, you’re right. He’s still just a child. He’s got a pimple on his forehead, for heaven’s sake. There must be something we can do.’

  ‘Too bloody right there is,’ Harry agreed, full of bluster. ‘I’m going to come around and give that woman a piece of my mind and we will take it from there. Don’t worry, Floss, we’ll get Monty out of this mess.’