Grown Ups

by Emma Jane Unsworth

  I look at Benjamin. Poor love.

  “Yes,” my mother says. “I will be five minutes. Please just give me time to recharge.”

  He nods and walks away.

  “Son?” I say. “Husband? Brother? Lover?”

  “Tortoise.”

  “Oh God. You’re doing animals now.”

  “It’s an increasingly tough market.”

  I turn around. I help myself to a glass of water and then realize I am helping myself to something in my own kitchen. I feel like I am trespassing in my own life.

  “They’ll be gone in an hour,” my mother says. “I’m doing this for us.” I don’t reply. “I won’t do this again when you are likely to be here. We can set up a schedule, on the fridge. So there are no clashes. I am … sorry, Jenny. Let me take you out tomorrow afternoon, make up for it. I’ll buy you dinner. A matinee.”

  “Maybe.” I start to leave the room. “And stop unplugging the toaster,” I say, on my way. “It’s insane-making.”

  I have a few superstitions I’ve inherited from her. Don’t put new shoes on the table. Don’t sleep with your feet facing a doorway. Or a mirror. Don’t cross someone on the stairs without saying “bread and butter.” Spells to keep the house safe. From what? From falling apart.

  Too late.

  I pass Benjamin in the hall, waiting outside the living-room door. “I am … sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you,” he says, tearing up. “It has been agony. Toby was my constant companion.”

  I go outside to the garden. I light up a cigarette, and as I smoke it I watch the moths mob the porch light.

  I WOKE UP LIKE THIS

  a) Suzy Brambles has left me

  b) My mother is in my house and

  c) I left my tampon in, and it has leaked. The sheet looks like the Japanese flag.

  DRAFTS

  Subject: Not F it for Purpose

  Dear Womb,

  I want my money back. Not just for that, but for all the periods. Literally a quarter of my life. All that time, all those mood swings, all those sanitary products—and for what? NOTHING.

  Bests,

  Jenny McLaine

  THE MIND CREATES THE ABYSS

  Hey, how are you?

  Hey! I’m okay. On my way to meet my mother in some weird shabby pub she likes in Soho. How are you?

  I’m okay but listen I’ve got a bit of an emergency and I wondered if you could help—really sorry to ask but there’s literally no one else—my mum is away and the trains are screwed tomorrow and Sonny needs picking up from his dance class at 7—can you poss do it if I send the address, again sorry to ask

  Sure!

  Thanks so much—I know he’s 14 but it’s dark and not the greatest area and there was another stabbing just last week

  No sweat

  * * *

  I walk up to the French House, a dark, brash pub with flags outside and a smoking galley cordoned off with a stretch of vinyl that says STELLA ARTOIS. I’ve walked past it plenty of times but written it off as a little too local. I take a picture of it as I approach. Now, how to caption this …

  PUB LOLZ! #WOO

  No. I am not fifty.

  LIVING MY BEST LIFE IN SOHO! #WOO

  Nor am I a tourist. Delete delete delete.

  MAKING WEDNESDAY MY BITCH

  Ooh. That has allure. I post it, and take a quick look at Suzy Brambles. Nothing. That’s two days she’s been off it. What’s the deal? Is she writing a goddamn novel? Maybe her account has been hacked. Maybe her phone has been stolen. Maybe she’s broken a limb. I would just about accept a broken limb. If she were to post, tomorrow say, or the day after, a hospital-bed selfie with her shapely leg in a white cast, I would like it deeply, privately.

  “Jenny!” My mother has spotted me through the doorway. “Come in and meet my friend Linda.”

  I walk in and up to the bar. My mother is holding a dainty-small glass of white. She is leaning on the piano like Amadeus Mozart in the film Amadeus. A mad-eyed dog with a bouffant do.

  “Hiya,” says the woman behind the bar. She has piercings all the way up the sides of both ears—little studs and hoops and chains—and peggy front teeth that show a laissez-faire attitude in this dentistry-savvy age. I always suspected this place was run by vagabonds.

  “Wine?”

  “I don’t suppose you do coffee?”

  “Machine’s off.”

  “Wine’s fine.”

  My mother laughs. “Linda, this is my daughter, Jenny,” she says.

  The woman nods, turns and bends. Her bracelets jangle as she opens the fridge. My mother leans toward me. “We used to be lovers,” she says, not quietly enough. Still, presumably Linda is aware of this fact. If it is a fact. My mother continues: “In my youth.”

  “Excellent.”

  I walk up to the bar. The woman hands me a small glass of white wine. “We only do one size.”

  “This is the perfect size for me.”

  “You can have ten,” my mother says. “You can neck it like a shot.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Half an hour.”

  “An hour and a half,” says Linda.

  “Snitch.”

  “She came in all flustered, like she’d been at a casting.”

  My mother goes red. I look at her.

  “I thought you were at your course?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t hack that in the end, darling. Or rather—I feel I can do so much more. It’s too limiting to pigeonhole myself completely. I have things to offer the wider world. Besides, I don’t want to end up morbid, do I?”

  She waltzes over to the piano and starts to play “One Moment in Time” by Whitney Houston. Linda rolls her eyes and goes to clear a table. I sit at the bar, on one of the tall stools that always make me feel cool. I get out my phone and start scrolling. Just before the first chorus, my mother breaks her tune and shouts: “Come on, Jenster!”

  “Don’t call me that,” I say, still scrolling. “It makes me sound like an off-road vehicle.”

  She does the song to the end, screeching over the music like a banshee. I barely notice because the pub post is proving popular.

  “What’s that? I’m not on the square-photo one. I just do the Facebook.”

  She is suddenly at my shoulder.

  “Stop creeping!”

  “I didn’t look purposely, it was just there. You know how we’re trained, as humans, to look at a screen. Our eyes are drawn helplessly to the lit opportunity.”

  “Is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  Linda rattles a cocktail shaker. Ratatatatatatatat. She pours violet liquid into two martini glasses and garnishes each with a blackberry and a mint leaf. She places the two purple cocktails in front of us.

  “What’s this?”

  “A Bramble,” my mother says. “I asked Linda to make them up specially. I have a feeling you’ll like it.”

  I flinch. “What made you order that?”

  “It looks nice. Why? Is it terribly gauche or old-fashioned or something?”

  “No, it’s just …”

  “What?”

  Her head is close, so close. Her eyes—like the snake from The Jungle Book. I shake my head.

  She picks up a glass and hands it to me. “Okay,” she says. “Bramble for your thoughts.”

  I look at my mother and go through all the possibilities in my head of what I could or could not say and how she might receive it and—

  Oh God, what is even the point.

  I sigh, exhausted. “There’s someone on Instagram with the same name as this cocktail and she stopped following me recently and I don’t know why, but I know the possible reasons make up a large proportion of my daily thoughts. You could say I am quite distressed about it.”

  My mother shakes her head quickly. “Come again, darling?”

  I tell my mother about Suzy Brambles. As I tell her, she sips her Bramble and looks occasionally at my phone. When I
’ve finished telling her, I exhale and take a sip of my drink. My mother is studying me carefully.

  “So let me get this straight,” she says. “You’re upset because someone you don’t know might not like a version of you that doesn’t really exist.”

  “I assure you, it’s far more complicated than that.”

  “The trouble with your generation, darling, is that you think you invented the Internet.”

  “We … did. You’re thinking of cocaine and blow jobs. Although I never thought you were too au fait with drugs.”

  Linda raises her eyebrows. I recall an incident, I was thirteen or fourteen, when my mother found a twig in my blazer pocket that had fallen off a tree on the way home from school. “JENNIFERRRRRRRRRRR,” she’d shrieked through the house. I sloped downstairs and found her in the kitchen, with the twig held aloft. “Is this DRUGS?”

  “No, Ma,” I’d said coolly (I was the master of teen exasperation by then). “It’s a twig. Is the menopause making you this insane?”

  “So smart, aren’t you,” my mother says now. “Well, you might have invented the Internet but you didn’t invent all the feelings that come with it. The mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it. Can I give you my honest opinion?”

  “Can I say no?”

  “This is all about attention, Jennifer. You cultivated a twitch when you were eleven, remember? She did, Linda. She sat in front of the TV night after night, practicing a facial twitch, until it started happening spontaneously. She changed her handwriting every year for the start of the September term. My little chameleon. Now, how am I supposed to think this time you’re not just finding some new way of getting people to look at a version of you?”

  “Because I feel all this deeply.”

  “But why? What do you want from her?”

  “Jack Nicholson has been described as a ‘very social loner.’ I feel much the same way. I am happiest in my own company against a backdrop of general adoration. I want to be adored in my absence.”

  My mother laughs. “Sounds a lot like death, darling.”

  “Yes, it does, doesn’t it.”

  “Drink your drink.”

  “Stop looking at me.”

  “Show me her, then,” my mother says. “This fabled Suzy Brambles.”

  “Don’t say her name.”

  “Why?”

  “It makes me uncomfortable.”

  I don’t want it in the air.

  My mother nods slowly, staring at me.

  “Don’t give me shit about this. You’re the one who talks to ghosts.”

  “Yes, I do, don’t I? Now, show me this enigma who is tormenting my daughter! I command it!”

  I show my mother Suzy Brambles’s feed. “Now, don’t whatever you do touch it. NO! You almost touched it. Do not touch the screen. Hold the phone at the edges. That’s it. Okay, now carefully.”

  “So delighted and excited to be at the launch of Brigitta’s new photography book!” my mother reads from Suzy’s latest post. “No, she’s not. She’s just saying that to look like a person who knows someone who’s having a book published—note the first-name terms, I bet she’s met her once—and is going out doing things. She’s lying.”

  “She is not lying,” I say. “They’re great friends. They went to WerkHaus FarmHaus together a month ago. Suzy’s not a member, but she knows a lot of members. She’s never in the WerkHaus itself. That would be too much.”

  “It’s a pitch. She’s a hustler, darling. Is she over the age of twenty?”

  “She’s twenty-nine,” I say. “Just. She celebrated in France. Look.”

  I scroll back and show my mother the pictures from Suzy’s birthday celebrations in a petite gîte near Dieppe. Quelle belle vue! The baguettes were to die for.

  “What better way to see in the last year of my twenties than with wine, cheese, good company, and so much gratitude,” my mother reads. “Hahahahahahahahhahahah!”

  “What’s funny about that?”

  My mother selects another post. “Every time I read a French novel I think of what a marvelous job translators do and how important it is to acknowledge them.… ‘Every time’! Know what she’s really saying there? I READ FRENCH NOVELS. Hahahahahah!”

  “You’re being very harsh! Stop remotely trolling her!”

  My mother looks at me. “All these posts, Jenny, are not actually about any of the things they say they’re about. They are all about her. She’s selling herself. And you’re buying it, darling. This is like when I used to take you to the theater and you became fixated on individual actresses onstage, a different one every time. You’d stare at them during the applause, trying to catch their eye.”

  “Did you touch that just then? Did you tap it as you made that insulting point?”

  “No!”

  “You did. You double-tapped it. Oh my God.”

  I look at the heart. It has gone from empty to full. It is bright red. I have liked an old picture of Suzy’s, and now she will know. She will know I have been looking back through her profile. Like a weirdsome loser creep worm.

  “You liked it you liked it you liked it you liked it you liked it.” My head is in one hand. I am rocking slowly on the chair.

  “What’s the big deal?”

  “WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL????????”

  “She won’t know it was you.”

  “She will! That’s the point of all this shit! This is like when I accidentally liked one of Art’s ex’s pictures and I had to change my whole handle and profile name for a week so she didn’t know it was me and I still worry about the fact she will have looked back and realized at a later point. I have inherited your incriminating sausage fingers!”

  I take my phone back and click it to sleep. I drink my Bramble, severely anguished.

  “Don’t worry,” my mother says. “Seriously, darling. Your so-called Suzy Brambles is one big construct.”

  “Don’t say her name.”

  “Come on,” my mother says. “Sup up.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “All my old haunts. Some fresh air. Some perspective. You wonder why you’re anxious—when you constantly stare at a device that beams nightmares into your eyes. Enough two-D.”

  * * *

  “It’s not what it was, Soho,” I tell her as we walk.

  “What, sleazy and dirty?”

  “Affordable.”

  “I don’t think it was ever that. But I did go to some great parties in flats around here.”

  Then, “Slow down,” my mother says, “slow down.”

  I slow down.

  “Have you ever strolled around Soho?” my mother asks. “I don’t mean dashed between meetings—I mean just allowed yourself to dawdle, on these streets? Have you ever really looked up at these buildings?” she says, raising a bowled palm to the sky, like Hamlet.

  “I don’t know. I suppose not.”

  “Have you ever had a cigarette in Soho Square and not spent the whole time looking at your phone? No? I thought as much.”

  We head for the square, find a bench, and sit in silence. The square chatters and tinkles around us. I itch to look at my phone, but I resist.

  “Should have got Linda to do us a carryout,” my mother says.

  I look at the almost-bare trees. The last leaves flutter in the wind. I’m not normally an alfresco person, but I think you can occasionally commune with nature if the conditions are right and you’re miserable enough. I’ve had a few “moments” with rats, foxes, and squirrels: eye contact, each other’s focus for a brief second. I even had a mini-thing with a Canada goose once, but I think it was possibly brain-damaged.

  Straight after our moment it flew into a railing.

  * * *

  When we get home, she runs me a bath. Blobs of lavender and rose oil bob around the top. I sit and try to let my body soften in the water, but then a big gob of period comes out. I watch it unfurl between my legs, like a brown fern. It turns the whole bath brackish.

  My body feel
s like a city I have been defending vaguely, and selling off, piece by piece. I remember the first bra I wore—triangular and stiff—the first chunks of me portioned up into shapes to be sold. I was rain forest, razed for cattle. There’s a block of new luxury flats just behind my right ear. The boundaries of myself depress me because they are meaningless. I’m ravaged inside. I have been invaded by a Trojan horse full of  Time.

  * * *

  After my bath I head downstairs. My mother is in the kitchen drinking her nightly eggnog that she swears by for strengthening her already strong voice (a green smoothie every morning to regenerate her liver). She sings a sudden line of Billy Joel, and I am reminded of how she does this in her own kitchen—in our old kitchen—to “soften the atmosphere and dispel the spirits.”

  “Want one?”

  I shake my head.

  She pulls a box of melba toast out of the cupboard, extracts one piece, and spreads it thinly with extra-light cream cheese. I watch her as I breathe.

  “Do you not have it up anywhere?” she says. “That picture of you and the roses?”

  “No. It has nothing to do with me anymore really, that.”

  I don’t even know where it is. I think he must have taken it with him. It was his photo, after all. I was in it—or rather, my body was in it, but now I think if I saw it I’d feel more than I meant to.

  “How’s Art’s mum? What’s her name, Deborah? What does she think about it?”

  “We exchanged brief texts, all the best and whatnot, you know. I don’t really know. I feel like it’s not really my business anymore, is it?”

  My mother raises her eyebrows and bites her toast.

  I ADORED

  Art’s mother. She was splendid—stately and sharp, in her tiny flat in Glasgow. Her name was Deborah (Deborah) (it did, actually, suit her) but everyone called her Debs. My mind often returns even now to those Sunday afternoons when we caught the sleeper train to her place. The duck pond. The red bricks. The hallway tiled with tasteful art. I’d walk through the dappled lounge out to the veranda and she’d rise from her chaise, warm and musky, and pull me close with such a sweetness I felt as though she were my daughter—that was the level of delight. When she cooked for us—invariably a roast chicken—all the condiments came out: mustard, horseradish, peanut butter, mango chutney, the lot. She was like that. Generous. I got to a point where I was scared of saying I liked anything in case she gave it to me. One time she packed me off with a thin, sinister wooden statue of the Virgin Mary (I thought it was a decorative shoehorn!), Art rolling his eyes as I trotted dutifully out the door with it in my hand. I still had that somewhere in a shoebox, along with a silver Saint Gerard pendant she gave me when we said we were trying.