Rocks in the Belly

by Jon Bauer

  I walk into the kitchen and switch on the kettle. I’m whistling one of the tunes from the bar last night. As the water starts its low grumble I’m straightening out the piece of paper with Patricia’s number on it, looking at the handwriting as if I’m looking at her — a corner of my angry footprint over the paper.

  The kettle clicks off and I pour, the old lady creaking the upstairs landing. I dump the kettle and head out to greet her. She’s up on the twelfth step, her gut peeking out, clammy skin showing where her shirt has ridden up. It takes her a moment to recognise my face. I put a smile on.

  She drops a foot to the next step, her jowls wobbling, her chest almost buxom with the weight she’s gained, her hand holding the banister I used to spy from. Then her other foot drops gingerly down, the bandaged ankle looking massive, my first-aid skills only just clinging on. In her spare hand is the plastic tablet container with most of the little doors hanging open, just a few tablets rattling inside. I only refilled it yesterday.

  She limps down the stairs in this frail cancerous opera but I’m not buying it anymore. I know the real her is still in there.

  I lift a fist near my mouth, mimicking a microphone: ‘Ladeees and gentlemen, I give yooooou Mum!’ I provide a quick round of applause and she smiles under a frown. ‘As you can see, Mum is modelling a delightful ensemble today …’ She’s still coming one step at a time, sort of frowning at me but also unsurprised by my patter, as if this is what we do every day of the week.

  ‘Yes, Ls and Gs, your EXCLUSIVE first look at “Summer Chaos” by Cancer Klein. Taken from his killer European show “Terminal”.’ More applause. ‘This is the very essence of clashing, ladies and gentlemen. Note the juxtaposition of different shades of red. The men’s work shirt, so working girl, and yet the cashmere cardy says, “I may be dying, but I’m casual!”

  ‘And what about those off-white tracksuit pants inviting the eye down, past the belly (special thanks to our sponsors at MilkMaid Ice-Cream). This is turning fashion back to front, Ls and Gs, and frequently inside out too.’

  She’s reached the last step and I’m giving her another enthusiastic round of applause that she greets with a warm smile, her tongue playing around her teeth.

  My heart’s going as I race ahead of her to the table, other people’s family portraits staring at me all the way, the pictures of our real family sitting out in that leaky shed. These new pictures not fitting the darker squares left behind where the paintwork has been protected from the bleaching sun.

  I show her to the best spot at the table, watching for any sign of her noticing. I kiss her elegantly on the cheek and she smells of toothpaste, a bit of the bandage hanging off her ankle now.

  ‘Sleep?’ she says smiling sweetly and lowering herself into sitting, her half-bald little head and her twinkly eyes. She gazes down at the cutlery as if they’re babbling nonsense to her.

  ‘Danish, Mum?’ I offer the plate, one hand behind my back. She looks at them, shakes her head. I fill her bowl with Krispies and pour the milk, sprinkle a bucket of sugar on top. She gazes up at me, her face almost free of wrinkles thanks to all the water retention and fat under her skin — smooth as a swollen knee.

  ‘Sleep well?’ she says, her voice going up into singsong at the end.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, looking at her for a moment. ‘You’ve taken your tablets.’

  Nursey said the things she’s lost could pop back briefly at any time. Or not. Mum smiles, waiting for me to do something that’ll remind her how we’re supposed to be behaving. I sit and pour myself Krispies and milk, take up my spoon amid the snap crackle popping.

  Still holding the days of the week medication box, she follows what I do and looks down at her own cutlery, back at my spoon, selects hers, looks at mine again. I take a spoonful and she copies me. Chewing with her mouth open, milk on her chin.

  ‘I see you got the pictures of Robert out then, Mum.’ Calm, conversational. Cool.

  A blank gaze so I point my spoon at the photographs laid out at the end of the table. She looks at Robert, then down at her cereal again, her face held. I shake my head at her even though she isn’t looking, I lean over, rifling through the pictures for the one of Robert sitting at the table where she’s sitting, a tea towel tucked into his collar to protect his clothes, a plastic mat on the floor under his chair and a strap to keep him in his seat. I toss the image closer to her and it lands almost the right way round, my heart thumping at me, my guts thickening into that fat, terrifying flexing.

  I point at the image, looking her in the eye, trying to keep my demeanour smoothed out and even. ‘You’ve ended up just like him, Mum.’ I smile and she smiles too, confused — has another go at a spoonful but gets only half of one, her forefinger wet in the milk. She chews absentmindedly like a cow working the cud, but she’s looking at the professional photographs on the wall now, everything standing up on my body like static.

  She’s gazing at the one of the family posing all in a line, their backs to one another, the dad in front of the mum, the children all concertinaing behind.

  Now the one of the little brunette boy in yellow dungarees, his brother beside him with glasses already, he’s only seven or eight. His little hand on his brother’s shoulder, uncertainty on his face. You can almost hear the orders being barked from the sidelines.

  Why do we have to smile in photos anyway, as if we’re always happy. What’s so bad about having portraits of real life on our walls.

  The old lady’s mouth is open, staring at the strangers, her spoon and the tip of her forefinger in the milk. I’m watching every twitch on her face but chewing my food slowly, my body configured at the table the way she always bullied me to be — upright and proper. I’m watching her but looking like I’m not. The Krispies reminding me of Robert after his accident, everything in him crackling and snapping. Memories of all those dinners we sat down to afterwards once he was allowed home. Robert screaming at this dinner table. Robert wanting to be released from the big chair he was strapped into. Wanting his bib off. Mum trying to hold her nerve and me sitting here, quietly eating, my manners not under scrutiny anymore. More invisible than ever but appeased somehow. Or parked upstairs with a tray and my telly up loud enough to hide Robert’s bedlam. Mum red around the neck with that stress rash clawing its way up her — turning even more towards Robert now that he needed her absolutely. Just what she’d always wanted, some pit of need to throw herself into. That and the little pack of valium in the bathroom. Then a bigger pack … Mum floating around the house.

  A noise is floating in her throat now, her hand outstretched pointing the spoon at the pictures, milk dripping into the fruit bowl in the middle of the table, a wrinkly apple sitting in it.

  ‘What is it, Mum? What’s up? And try and get your elbow off the table. You know better than that.’

  She doesn’t look at me she just swallows, her eyes staring at all the portraits, her brow creased. She turns round behind her, the chair creaking — more strangers staring at her. Some of them aren’t even the same ethnicity as us. She swivels back, her chest rising and falling. She pushes the spoon into the air towards them then half stands, unsteady. ‘Who?’ she says.

  I take a spoonful of cereal and chew, loving the noise filling my head. I swallow. ‘You’re talking a bit today aren’t you, Mum. Must be one of your good days.’ Another spoonful, post it in, my face locked still, the box of tablets rattling a little in Mum’s hand from the strain of holding herself half up out the chair. It’s not valium she’s taking anymore but there’s still a gliding emptiness on her face.

  Not right now though, she isn’t gliding now.

  ‘Please,’ she says, ready to cry.

  ‘Have you overdosed? Let me see your medication.’ I put my spoon down, chewing with my mouth shut, mopping my lips with a paper napkin — reach out for the tablet box but she refuses so I stand and head into the kitchen, come back with a tea towel just like the one on Robert in the picture. I tuck it into her.

  ‘T
here,’ I say in my best foster-child voice, ‘isn’t that nice, Mum, eh? Who’s a mucky pup now then?’

  I turn the picture of Robert wearing the tea towel so that it’s the right way up for her, but she’s still frozen, looking round at the walls, searching her memory, a noise building in her throat. There she is in that little ship’s cabin on those high seas in her head, trying to keep her memories straight on the walls. Look at them falling and smashing on the floor.

  I don’t like seeing her pain, but there’s another part of me that needs the sound I can hear building in her throat.

  ‘WHO?’ she says, her bottom lip milky and wobbling, her spoon clattering back to the bowl but her fingers stay hovering in the air with the white on them, her face breaking its shape, tears running down, me biting mine back, breathing away the emotion.

  ‘What is it, Mum?’ I say suddenly, as if I’ve just caught on. As if this moment is very, very serious. I turn from her to the strangers staring at us from the walls — then back to her with her face begging me, all broken open and cut in half.

  I make my own face aghast. ‘What, Mum, you don’t know who these people are?’ I lean forward, slowly shake my head. ‘You’ve forgotten them? Oh, Mum, you poor thing.’

  Her eyes fill up with what’s on my face, her crying slowing for a second, her breathing. A little white tablet falling from an ajar door in the tablet box and landing on the table, her eyes darting down at it, then back up to me, killing me but I’m not stopping, no way.

  She goes for the dropped tablet, her fingers struggling to get purchase until it sticks to the wetness on them and she puts it clumsily into her mouth like a giant eating a person. She winces at the bitter taste, her hand going for her orange juice but I lunge, take it far away from her, gather mine up too, and the milk jug.

  I put all the liquids on the sideboard, turn to her again, her tongue chalky, her hand up near her mouth, eyes wide. Now she looks as if she really doesn’t know who I am.

  ‘You don’t know your own family.’ And I shake my head, letting her see my tears, as if her forgetting is why I’m crying. Her chest going in and out with such violence that I think she’ll die. But all I want is to hear that despair, my teeth biting down on my own lip.

  ‘Why did you do it, Mum? Why didn’t you care what was happening to me?’ I can feel the red dot fading on my chest now, from where I just jabbed it with my finger. Mum giving me that same pathetic, stuttering despair, plus a noise that’s building, growing, heading for a big boom.

  I want that fucking noise.

  I’m standing now, fists holding my weight forward on the table, the breakfast things wobbling with my shaking. ‘Look at you now though.’

  I race round the table, my chair falling over behind me, and I’m picking up the picture of Robert in the same chair, the same state. I stuff it right in close to her face. ‘Karma! It’s karma, Mum. And you were screaming at ME yesterday.’

  I grab the one of me at the photographer’s all those years ago. ‘I was eight! Look at him. What, wasn’t he good enough? Wasn’t he broken enough for you?’

  I drop the picture in her Krispies and take a step back, sobbing, Mum looking up at my face and breathing in a long breath, and then …

  Push a lever, get a sweet.

  Eventually her lungs empty of scream and she stops, the air rushing back in. She looks down at her front, the tea towel still tucked into her collar — the strangers on the wall. Another scream gushes out of her and my body lifts into goose pimples even though her sounds are also tearing me up the middle.

  She turns to me after that scream, Alfie sneaking quickly by, escaping out through the cat flap, Mum’s face altering as she lunges for all the pictures of Robert, collapsing on top of him, sobbing and sobbing, clawing him to her, the tablecloth slipping, almost sending her off onto the floor, her bowl of Krispies tumbling over, spilling onto her. She gathers all the Roberts up in her arms and her sobs are muted now by her face right up against the table, the pictures creasing.

  ‘Mum, I’m sorry!’ I try to stand her up but she shoves me away and the doorbell rings like it’s the end of a boxing match.

  I freeze, the old lady still snivelling over Robert on the table. ‘Shoosh, Mum!’

  I take a step closer to the window, wiping at my eyes, Mum whimpering still, bent over the table, her belly hanging out of her shirt, milk and Krispies all over her.

  I straighten my clothes, my hair. I feel a sort of calm now, standing here in the semi-silence, listening, my chest going up and down.

  ‘Shh! I think someone’s at the door.’

  She shuts up too, stopping to listen, the whole house seeming to hum with all that’s just happened in it. Grandma bleeding to death in the toilet. Dad and Mum drifting further and further apart until his heart went on him one morning while he was lying on the couch watching breakfast TV, heckling the weatherwoman about her tits as she gestured to the clouds in the north — black diagonal lines under them. Rain predicted. Mum coming in with an armful of washing and Dad sprawled out white as a cloud. No more weather for him.

  The predicted downpour came the day we put him in the ground. The way it did when we’d put Robert there all those years before.

  A policewoman appears at the front window and peeks in, her hands cupped against the light.

  I jump, then manage to wave at her. ‘Just a minute.’

  She walks away saying something to someone beyond the window.

  ‘The police are here.’ My voice cracks and I flutter into the kitchen like a trapped blackbird. ‘Now look what you’ve done, Mum!’ I come back out and want to wail at all these stolen pictures staring at me from the walls.

  Put the cuffs on, I’m stuffed.

  On the way to the door I stop in the hallway, straighten my hair, take a breath. Even if she says something they won’t listen to some dying old lady. Surely.

  I’m the innocent one.

  I wipe my eyes again then brush off some of the Krispies and head down the hall.

  ‘Someone at the door, Mum! Who could it be, eh?’ The police looking like distorted sharks through the front door’s peephole. Two of them.

  I open up, the light striking me in the face. ‘Good morning, officers, what can I do for you?’ but my fluttering voice betrays me.

  I try to think they’re just a man and a woman in uniform but they don’t look like a man and woman, they look like a policeman and a policewoman, both of them scanning me with their police eyes.

  The policewoman turns down her radio while the policeman introduces himself but I’m thinking more than I’m listening so I only catch ‘Senior Constable’ something and a ‘Williamson’. The policewoman smiles. She must be Williamson.

  ‘Can we come in for a moment?’ she says.

  ‘Of course.’ I drop my voice, ‘But I have to warn you my mother has cancer,’ as if it’s contagious. A pause for them to do their face changes and mumbles. ‘Terminal. In the brain. Really advanced. She’s very confused.’ I thin out my lips and nod solemnly, inviting them to quite understand. ‘She finds it hard to talk … And doesn’t make any sense when she does, I’m afraid, poor thing. Gibberish.’

  ‘Well, we won’t keep you any longer than necessary,’ he says and I step back and let them in, the stampeding inside me becoming unbearable as they pause to wipe their feet and pass me by — the smell of cheap perfume, cologne, the muttering from their radios, all of it jamming my frequencies.

  I shut the door to the hedges and follow the police-people into the house. Just keep your cool.

  We congregate in the lounge, the policewoman staring at me while the other officer says a ‘Hello there’ to my mum, loud and patronising. ‘No, don’t get up, love,’ he says. ‘Nothing for you to worry about.’

  Love.

  ‘Would you like some tea, coffee? Krispies?’ I say, a little high-pitched and smiling — Mum’s hands up around her chest, wrists facing each other as if from an angry jumping-up dog. Like the police are all the bad
news she’s had over the years. This house has stood so much bad news.

  The officers wave away my empty offers of tea, filling up the room with their uniforms, Williamson showing me her bum as she turns to look at the pictures — wandering around the lounge in her comfortable shoes, Mum watching her face as if she might have come to explain who’s in these pictures.

  I keep an eye on Mum, willing the words to stay inside her. She picks up the tea towel and starts kneading it, her face awash with new tears running down the tight swelling of her cheeks — Robert still strewn all over the table, Krispies and milk all over her, the floor. The tablecloth adrift. There may as well be my dead dad on the couch and Robert outside fitting in the garden. Grandma’s blood inch deep all over the carpet.

  While I’m looking at Williamson staring at the stolen portraits, Senior what’s-his-face is watching me. I can feel his eyes, like he’s framed and stolen too.

  ‘It’s ok, Mum, these officers have just popped by, nothing’s the matter I don’t think. There’s not really anyone else left to die is there!’ I look at her, trying for a smile but she’s sobbing again. ‘What have you come about, officers?’ I say over the old lady’s noise. ‘As you can see it’s not a good time.’

  My leg starts up thumping then inside my trousers. Whose body is it.

  Williamson is coming closer, Senior what’s-his-face levelling his gaze at me. ‘We have a report about a —’

  Mum grabs Williamson, mumbling something to her, tugging on her uniform but glancing occasionally over at me. Limping heavily, she leads the reluctant officer to the pictures and all I can do is stare at the conspicuous mismatch between the portraits and the dusty, darker squares on the paintwork.

  ‘Come on, Mum,’ I say, the officers paying attention to her, waiting for some sense to come but I’m taking her by the hand that’s still holding the tablet box. She wrenches free, shouts that deaf shout — a nothing word but it lights the touch paper of panic in me and it burns brightly, blinding.