Turning Thirty

by Mike Gayle

  ‘He’s in Canada,’ said the cabbie. ‘Toronto, to be exact. Met a girl there on holiday and moved out about five years ago. He’s got three kids and a massive house. He’s really living the life.’

  I couldn’t help myself. ‘Is he a brain surgeon, then? He was so smart we always reckoned that’s what he’d do.’

  The cabbie laughed. ‘I know what you mean. He was miles smarter than anyone in our family. But no, he’s not. He’s a lawyer. Specialises in commercial law.’

  ‘And you’re his little brother?’

  ‘I was only twelve when you were at King’s Heath. You and my brother were at the top end of the school and I was at the bottom.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘I tell you what, though.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were cool in those days, you know. There were some great stories about you.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said, embarrassed.

  To prove his case he cited some of the legendary events in which I’d supposedly been involved in my schooldays, starting with the time I staged a roof-top protest over the inedible state of our school dinners (true: I got suspended for a fortnight), moved on to the time I streaked naked across the school playing-fields for a dare (false: an urban myth) and concluded with when I organised a policewoman kiss-o-gram for Mr Frederick, my form teacher, to celebrate his fortieth birthday (semi-true: I organised it but the school secretary twigged what she was up to and wouldn’t let her in). It was weird hearing him describe these events with the sort of reverent tones usually reserved for the first man on the moon or the fall of the Berlin Wall. But I suppose when you’re only twelve the kind of once-in-a-lifetime events that you’re actually interested in are the ones that involve sex, nudity and roof-top protests.

  ‘They certainly were good days,’ I confided, ‘probably the best. But I wasn’t the most popular kid at school, that’s for sure. I was just like everyone else, keeping my head down, trying to survive.’

  We talked about the old days, sharing as much as we had in common. I told him about my life and what I’d been up to. He told me about his life and what he’d been up to, and then he told me about a few of the kids from my year at school that he’d heard about through the ex-King’s Heath Comprehensive grapevine. The names he mentioned were ones that I had long forgotten. People like Peter Whittacker (then, the boy most likely to become a professional athlete) was now a sales administrator for a double-glazing firm; Gemma Piper (then, the girl most likely to go to Oxford and become the new Kenneth Branagh) had been spotted in a TV ad for washing powder; Lucy Dunn (then, the girl most likely to remain ‘nice but dull’ all her life), was now a radio producer at BBC Pebble Mill; and Chris Adams (then, the boy who always smelt of wee) was now the manager of a health-food shop.

  That was the news.

  ‘Here it is,’ I said, as we pulled into my parents’ road. ‘It’s the one with the immaculate, manicured lawn.’ He pulled to a halt. ‘How much?’

  He clicked off his timer. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ I said. It was a nice gesture but I wouldn’t have felt comfortable accepting it. I guessed the fare was somewhere around ten pounds so I took a note out of my wallet and handed it to him.

  ‘I can’t take that,’ he said. ‘No way.’

  ‘Well, thanks a lot,’ I replied. ‘It was a nice way to be welcomed home.’

  He insisted on helping me out with my bags, then we shook hands. As he drove off he beeped his horn and waved.

  Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the net curtains of both my parents’ neighbours twitching like mad. Unlike London where everyone jumps in and out of black cabs all the time, my parents’ road was inhabited by people who only ever used them to go to or from the airport before or after a package holiday. My arrival in one when my parents lived so close to the number 50 bus route, the most frequent bus service in Europe no less, was a clear sign of wanton decadence.

  Verily, the prodigal son had returned.

  nine

  As I stood on the doorstep, my finger hovering over the doorbell, it occurred to me that perhaps I should have called my parents to let them know I was coming home for a visit. And not just a little visit but one that would last some three months. I’d thought about telling them when I’d first had the idea but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it because it would involve me admitting that Elaine and I were over, the knock-on effect of that news being that their eldest son would not be providing them with any grandchildren in the foreseeable future.

  I rang the doorbell and waited. Even through the frosted-glass panel of the porch door I could tell that the figure approaching was that of my dad.

  ‘All right, Dad?’ I said brightly, as he opened the door. ‘I’m back!’

  Standing on the step in his red tartan slippers, holding a small gardening fork, my dad looked me up and down suspiciously. I could see it in his face that my presence here was causing him some consternation. ‘Matt’s here at home,’ his face was saying. ‘Why?’

  ‘Matthew?’ said my dad eventually, as if checking I wasn’t a random impostor.

  ‘Dad?’ I replied, mimicking his tone.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  I wasn’t too concerned about the abrupt nature of my father’s greeting. He was a man who liked to get to the point and work backwards.

  ‘I’m delivering milk,’ I replied, and gave him a wink. ‘Heard you’d run out. Thought I’d come all the way from America to bring you two pints of semi-skimmed.’

  My dad laughed and shook my hand firmly. He wasn’t a hugger, not even with women, but he did like to shake hands. Still standing on the doorstep he muttered, ‘You’ve got bags with you.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Are you staying for a while, then?’

  I nodded again.

  There then followed a long pause as we took each other in. I hadn’t seen my dad since the previous May when he and my mum had flown to New York to stay with me and Elaine. It was one of the strangest experiences I’d ever had. My mum insisted on putting on her posh accent for the entire time they were there, and my dad asked my permission every time he wanted to turn on the TV. It was as if they were both on their best behaviour trying to impress not just Elaine but me too.

  ‘Are you going to let me in or what?’

  ‘Of course. Of course.’ He stepped outside, still in his slippers – a cardinal sin in my mother’s eyes – and picked up one of my bags.

  ‘No Elaine, then?’ he said.

  He said this not as a proper question, because I was quite sure that he didn’t think Elaine was going to drop out of the sky, but more as a statement of fact. My dad wasn’t the sort of man to put two and two together unless he really had to. He much preferred to point out a two, then another two, and wait for me to say, ‘Bloody hell, Dad, four!’ which is what I usually did. But I didn’t do it this time. It would be easier on both of us in the long term, I reasoned, if we left it just a little while longer.

  ‘She did send her love, though,’ I told him.

  Which was true. Elaine thought my parents were fantastic. ‘They’re so real,’ she’d say, ‘unlike mine who are sooooooo fake.’ Elaine’s dad worked in construction and her mum worked in a bank. They lived in New Jersey and we didn’t see much of them, not even in the holidays. At Christmas even though we’d split up, Elaine and I spent the whole day alone together in our apartment. Christmas dinner was left-over Chinese and sixteen bottles of Budweiser.

  ‘That’s good,’ said my dad, visibly cheered. ‘She’s a good girl, Elaine.’

  ‘Yeah, Dad, she is,’ I replied, and we exchanged smiles. ‘Now, is there any chance that I can come in?’

  As my mum wasn’t home yet I was spared having to explain Elaine’s absence so I took my bags up to my old bedroom while my dad rustled up a cup of tea. Over that and a chocolate digestive my dad and I summed up what was going on in our lives in exactly four sentences:

  Sentence one: How are you?

  Se
ntence two: Not too bad.

  Sentence three: And yourself?

  Sentence four: Can’t complain.

  Pleasantries out of the way, the conversation after that centred on the weather, the state of the nation, recent developments in English football and the rest of the Beckford family. At twenty-nine I was the oldest of my siblings. After me were Yvonne and Tony, known in these parts as ‘the twins’, who were twenty-seven. Yvonne was doing her second degree at Edinburgh University, having decided after five years of medical school that she didn’t want to be a doctor after all. Tony was living in Nottingham, cultivating a borderline alcohol problem while occasionally drumming in a band called Left Bank. The baby of the family was Ed. He was twenty-two, taking a year out after university to travel around Thailand before committing himself to the world of work. As a family we weren’t exactly close – in the sense that we were all terrible at keeping in regular touch with each other – but we always knew that if any of us ever needed help or support it would be there without question.

  ten

  ‘You should’ve told me you were coming.’

  These were the first words my mum said to me when she arrived home mid-afternoon from the supermarket. Not ‘Hello’. Not ‘How are you?’ But ‘You should’ve told me you were coming.’ Like my dad, my mum liked to do her share of pointing out the obvious, no matter how annoying. I nodded and smiled because I knew that in her own way this was her biggest, fattest, sloppiest ‘I’ve missed you, son.’

  ‘I know, Mum,’ I said remorsefully, and kissed her cheek. ‘You’re right, I should’ve told you I was coming.’

  ‘I didn’t get any extra food in,’ she said indignantly.

  I glanced at the four huge shopping-bags on the floor at her feet with a wry smile. ‘It’s okay, Mum,’ I reassured her. ‘I don’t eat much, these days.’

  ‘And I haven’t cleaned your room,’ she protested.

  ‘The bedroom’s spotless, Mum.’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ she conceded, secretly pleased. ‘Elaine will think we live in a pig-sty.’

  ‘No, she won’t, Mum,’ I said quietly, ‘because she’s not here.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She couldn’t make it,’ I explained. ‘She would’ve loved to come but she couldn’t get the time off.’

  ‘You should be with Elaine,’ she said. ‘What if she needs you?’

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ I said. Despite her protests, I could tell mum was over the moon at having her first-born back. She just wanted to make it clear that she liked things done in a certain order.

  ‘How long are you home for?’

  This was a tricky one. Unlike my dad, my mum was blessed with an inquisitive, tenacious mind. Having said that, the tenacious side probably held more sway than the inquisitive, but either meant that I wouldn’t be able to get by with a shrug or ‘Dunno.’ I was going to have to tell her something. I took a deep breath then let it go. ‘Quite a while?’ I posed it as a question to make the whole idea more palatable.

  ‘How long’s quite a while?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘More than a month, less than . . .’ My sentence fizzled out as her stern look made it clear that she’d already had enough of chasing me around. ‘Three months,’ I said finally.

  ‘Three months?’ she echoed.

  ‘Give or take,’ I replied, adding a small shrug.

  ‘Give or take what?’

  ‘I dunno . . . a few days probably.’

  ‘What about Elaine?’

  This was it. I was going to have to tell her. ‘We’ve . . . split up.’

  She moved on to question two. ‘And what about your job?’

  ‘Now, that,’ I said confidently, ‘is fine.’ And then I steeled my nerves and told her the full story. My mum clearly couldn’t believe what she was hearing because she called my dad and forced me to begin my sorry tale again right from the start.

  ‘Can you see what’s happening to your son?’ said my mum to my dad, as I concluded my tale of woe. This was classic my-mum behaviour. As kids, whenever we got into trouble she would berate my dad with the line ‘Can you see what’s going on with your son/daughter?’ ‘So let me get this right,’ she continued. ‘You’ve split up with Elaine, left your home in America to move back here for three months so you can spend quality time with me and your dad, before going off to a job in a country you’ve never been before?’

  Put like that it did sound a bit dramatic. I couldn’t quite understand how my life – which had apparently been so simple for the last twenty-nine and a bit years had suddenly become so complicated.

  ‘And see some friends,’ I added feebly.

  ‘Right,’ said my mum, still finding this all too much to cope with. ‘Now you’re here I suppose I’d better sort you out something for lunch.’

  While most normal people quite reasonably consider food to be an important daily requirement my mum had turned it into the focal point of her existence. When it came to me and my brothers and sisters, nearly everything she did and said was regulated and defined by food. ‘Are you hungry?’ ‘When will you be hungry?’ ‘You look thirsty.’ ‘Are you eating properly?’ This, of course, was her way of showing that she loved us, but it could also work your nerves a little bit, especially as, unlike most mums who give up on trying to get everyone in the family to eat together once they’re past the age of sixteen, mine was a stickler for communal eating at all times. Come a quarter past five, my dad was ordered to finish gardening and by half past five dinner (never ‘tea’, too common, and never ‘supper’, way too posh) would be presented on laps, except on Sundays, special occasions or when visitors were present. Then we would eat at the dining-table in the front kept-for-best-in-the-off-chance-HM-the-Queen-should-ever-drop-by-unannounced-and-be-in-desperate-need-of-a-cup-of-tea room with its doilies, posh china and scary macramé picture of a donkey that my late great-aunt Irene had made. No excuse was accepted for missing a meal. No ‘I’m not hungry yet’, no ‘I don’t fancy this tonight’, and certainly none of this ‘Come on, no one under forty-eight eats their dinner this early in the day.’ No: you liked it or lumped it. So when after I’d unpacked my bags and a quarter past five arrived, I should have known that my mum would be calling up the stairs, ‘Matthew, your dinner’s ready!’ That I’d barely finished digesting the chicken salad sandwiches she’d made at lunchtime counted for nothing.

  ‘What’s for dinner, then?’ I asked carefully, as I entered the living room and sat down.

  ‘Your favourite,’ she replied, lowering a tray on to my lap. ‘Eat up.’ She smiled. ‘You look like you haven’t had a proper meal in ages.’

  As I looked down dolefully at the plate in front of me it occurred to me that really I had only myself to blame. I knew full well that my mum was for ever mixing up my favourite anything with the favourite anythings of my long-flown-the-nest siblings. Not that what was sitting on the plate was any of my brothers’ or sister’s favourite anything – other than, possibly, their favourite culinary nightmare: two pork chops, three large spoonfuls of mashed potato, gravy so thick you could stand a knife up in it, carrots, peas and . . . sprouts. Boiled into submission, stinking green balls of soggy-leafed affliction sprouts.

  My eyes darted feverishly around the living room to see what the only other diner at Stalag 9 thought of the cuisine. My dad was lodged in the armchair he claimed as his kingdom, watching an early news bulletin on TV, while chewing and pausing occasionally to have a go at the newsreader’s dress sense. My mum was still hovering in the doorway to the kitchen waiting for me to tuck into my first home-cooked meal in a long while. I looked up at her and smiled. There was a look of contentment on her face. There she was, watching over us, her family, making sure that all our needs had been attended to. It seemed that this made her happy.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down, Mum?’ I asked needlessly. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my mother sit down to eat a meal, it was as if her knees had locked and made it impossible.

>   ‘You haven’t started your dinner,’ she said. ‘Is it salt you want? I’ll just go and get it.’

  I looked at my plate again and paused before answering because the words on the tip of my tongue were along the lines of: ‘Can’t you see what’s wrong? Can’t you see that there are four sprouts on my plate, each the size of a mandarin orange?’ But I didn’t say anything like that, mainly because I couldn’t, not without hurting her feelings, which was the last thing I wanted to do. It was just like being a kid again. When I was about nine I came up with an ingenious system for disposing of sprouts: it involved me slipping them one by one into a handkerchief, then feigning a desperate need to go to the loo, and on the way throwing them behind the back of the fridge. It worked like a dream in theory, but I lacked the foresight to remove them later and give them a proper burial. After six weeks my system fell apart when the stench of decaying greenery overpowered the kitchen and my mum discovered my sprout hideaway. She went mental and I was grounded for what felt like a decade. And now, years later, I was facing the same dilemma.

  ‘Honestly, Mum,’ I began, ‘I don’t think I can manage all these.’ I gestured to the sprouts with my fork.

  ‘Nonsense,’ she said firmly. ‘They’re good for you.’

  ‘But I don’t like them.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ she replied impatiently.

  ‘No. I’ve never liked sprouts.’

  ‘You liked sprouts when I cooked your dinners. How has Elaine been cooking them?’

  That thought alone made me want to laugh aloud. ‘Elaine never cooked sprouts, Mum. Elaine never cooked at all, if she could help it. Anyway, I’m not even sure they have them in America.’

  ‘You used to love sprouts,’ piped up my dad. ‘D’you remember when you used to ask if you could play marbles with them?’

  I looked at my dad in disbelief. ‘That was Tony, Dad, and he may have liked playing marbles with them but he didn’t like eating them either.’