The Son of a Certain Woman

by Wayne Johnston

  “I never ask for money.” Medina sounded hurt.

  “Well, I’m sorry, sweetheart, but it’s true. He has full-time, better-paying work than you and me combined. We work part-time and we never know from week to week how many hours we’ll get. I’m not proud of what I’m doing, but I’m not ashamed of it either. It’s a fair arrangement as far as I’m concerned. I’m not just talking about ‘visiting hours.’ You may not have noticed, but Pops is head over heels for me. By boarding here and paying so much money, he gets to be around me almost all the time. That’s mostly what he’s paying for, the company of someone he loves.”

  “But you don’t love him,” Medina said. It sounded almost like a question.

  “I like him. And I don’t tell him that I love him. He knows exactly how things stand and he’s happy with it.”

  “What will happen if he goes somewhere else to live?” I said.

  “I don’t think he ever will.”

  “When do you do it with Pops?” I asked.

  My mother rolled her eyes and stabbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “Never you mind, Perse. Never mind when or where. I told you, not often. Just often enough. Which is too often, believe me. But that’s all I’m telling you.”

  Medina suddenly pushed back her chair and went over to the kitchen sink, her back to us, head hung down, shoulders shaking with what I thought was silent laughter. She turned and stood there with one arm across her belly, supporting the other arm. I saw that tears streamed down her cheeks.

  “What’s wrong, Medina?” I couldn’t help feeling I had made her cry.

  “Nothing, Perse.” She was staring through her tears at my mother. “Pops,” she said with as much disgust as if he was standing right in front of her. “Of all the people you have to—to take in off the street.”

  “He bought the beer that’s in your glass,” my mother said.

  “Fuck off,” Medina snapped. I’d never heard her say that to my mother. I looked at my mother in astonishment. Her lips were pressed tightly together as if she was suppressing the urge to reply in kind to Medina.

  “It’s only a few times,” I offered. Medina burst out in bitter laughter.

  “Perse,” my mother said, “this is not the kind of conversation you should be having with your mother and your aunt.”

  “A few times. Really? Really, Perse? That’s what you think Pops settles for?” Medina cried. “Tell him how often ‘a few’ is, Pen.” She glared at my mother, who glared back without flinching.

  “Enough to mollify him. And don’t you dare ask me what that means! Perse, this whore hunt is over.”

  Medina put her hand over her mouth, but this time she really laughed. Imitating the deep-timbre monotone Pops had once used on the occasion of giving my mother a sweater for Christmas, she said, “What do you think of it, Paynelope? I wrapped it myself. I can bring it back if it’s not your size.”

  My mother astonished me by letting loose a conspiratorial guffaw.

  “I can bring it back if you don’t like the colour,” Medina continued, her voice becoming softer. “I can bring it back if it doesn’t suit your taste. I must say, Paynelope, you have the ripest-looking pair of tits I’ve ever seen.”

  My mother threw back her head and laughed until her back teeth showed. I looked back and forth between them, wondering if the argument they were getting over was the first real one they’d ever had and if they’d think of me as the cause of it.

  “Does he wear his safety glasses, Pen? Where does he put his pipe? Or should I say pipette. I’ll bet he says ‘Paynelope’ a lot. I must say, Paynelope, your vagana has never looked more becoming.”

  “There’s that look again,” my mother said, tapping my forehead with her finger. “Do not look at me like that, Percy. Do not judge me, little sanctimony man. I told you, the whore hunt is over.”

  I turned and ran to my room. I climbed into the upper bunk. I felt sorry for Pops and I wasn’t sure why—perhaps it was because Medina had laughed the way she had, at my mother but mostly at Pops. That’s what you think Pops settles for? I should have felt sorry for her, for her having to do such things. But I also—and this is what surprised me—felt envious of Pops, for whom she undid the belt of her bathrobe, as I now realized I’d long hoped she might somehow do by accident, or even on purpose, in front of me. My Black Mick mother letting Pops touch what Medina had called her ripe-looking tits, letting him slide his hands the long length of her legs and revel in the smoothness of her thighs. I looked at the Mass cards of Saint Drogo. I was only nine but I knew she’d done it with him because that was all that stood between me and a place like Barter’s Hill, a belly grumbling with hunger, the finger-breaking “strops” of Gus McHugh, persecution at the hands of the rabble of the Seven Schools. But I knew that to do it with me was proscribed, forbidden, unthinkable. It had to be. Boys didn’t do it with their moms, not even boys like me with moms like mine. I knew I should have been disgusted by the idea—by the idea of her doing it with anyone. But I wasn’t, and I wondered why. I wasn’t at the very bottom of the list of those even hypothetically eligible for a piece of Penny pie—I wasn’t even on the list. I cared that I wasn’t. I hated it that I wasn’t. It seemed that my brain was as warped and stained as my body. Perhaps my FSS proceeded from, was the physical manifestation of, a festering, miscoloured, misshapen brain. Perhaps I was becoming Percy the First after all, the terminally ill, mute freak of freaks the doctors had mistaken me for.

  I was glad Pops would be away for a while, knowing I would have been even less able than usual to suppress a blush or sit still or look at him, or answer anything he said to me without my voice breaking, or even without crying, which would have been impossible to explain though I would try to and thereby further arouse his suspicions.

  Days later, I scrutinized Pops, convinced there must be something about him that I’d missed. It’s not as if he ever makes the first move. I couldn’t imagine her making that first first move, let alone imagine Pops’ reaction to it. She had known he would be agreeable if she made the first move. She would have had to cajole him through his surprise and nervousness and whatever moral qualms he had or felt obliged to pretend he had. It took more nerve, however, more gumption than I’d thought he had to let himself be led to bed by his luscious landlady—and to keep it secret from me for so long. I looked at Pops, sitting in the sunroom in his lab coat in his window-facing chair. I supposed it had been no great feat for my mother to hide their arrangement from me, given how comically repelled by him she and Medina seemed to be. But still—maybe there was more to him than I’d realized, Pops with his scrubbing-brush moustache, his ubiquitous, ever-stained lab coat and his safety goggles that dangled from his neck, making him look like the official inspector of something, one who stuck stubbornly to an odd way of pronouncing certain words. Maybe Pops was not the sum of such parts but had a secret life, carried secretly within him lest it be mocked into non-existence the hope of being loved by my mother, the one woman—it might well be—whom he’d ever done it with. I wondered, with a measure of dread, if this secret hope might not be as doomed as my mother made it seem, if she would one day tire of the secrecy and marry Pops. Perhaps, when she decided to rent a room to a boarder, she already had in mind some such arrangement as the one she had with Pops. Perhaps her farsightedness had had to do with me, because she expected to have me on her hands forever—not that she would have thought of it that way—saw that I lacked the fortitude to prosper in spite of it. My mind was a swarm of conjecture and confusion. Anything, everything, nothing seemed possible now.

  THE NIGHT OF THE VAT RAT

  SOME noise had woken me. But it must have abruptly stopped since I heard nothing. I listened, thinking that, though the door and windows were closed and though a cement block that no rat could burrow through lay on the heating duct, there might be a Vat Rat in the room. Then I heard the sound again. It was definitely coming from outside the room, from the basement maybe.

  We lived around the
corner from a beer brewery, a smoking, steaming factory that, when the wind was easterly, sent our way the overwhelming, sickeningly sweet smell of barley malt. And the brewery—and therefore the neighbourhood—had what my mother called a “permanently temporary” problem, a perpetual “outbreak” of rats. She was quoting the brewery, which had been saying since it opened that it would “soon have a handle on the outbreak.” My mother predicted they would sooner have a handle on the outbreak of children in China.

  The brewery had announced in an ad they took out each spring in the paper that the especially wet spring had softened and eroded the ground around the brewery, exposing pipes and valves, so more rats than usual were making their way in and out of the brewery, hops-and-barley-bloated rats, demented from chronic alcohol consumption, craving more and more of what one day might cause their very stomachs to explode. They were said to have made their way into some houses, gnawed through the very walls, through the paste and glue of Gyproc, while residents of the Mount stood guard around their children’s beds with axes and shovels upraised, or lay awake in their beds all night, listening for the grimly patient, never-pausing Vat Rats drunkenly incising through the walls.

  “They like the beer.” Pops shrugged, as if he had in a few words explained something that confounded everyone else in the neighbourhood. My mother said that Pops believed if there was a logical explanation for something, its noteworthiness, dangerousness, even its very existence, was undone.

  The attics, basements, crawlspaces of the Mount were set with the largest rat traps that could be found, bought or made. I took as gospel the rumours of rats so fast they stole cheese straight from the traps, rats so smart they knew how to trigger the traps without getting caught. There was a story of a rat so big and strong that it had scuttled backward into a hole in a wall while dragging a large trap that was clamped around its neck. Boys said the rats were bringing back the Black Plague. They pretended my face was evidence of this.

  I threw off the blankets, climbed down the ladder of the bunk bed and put my ear to the door. I heard what sounded like a gasp followed by a series of whimpers. I wondered if Pops or my mother was sick. Then it occurred to me that they might be doing it. My mother had said it was “no picnic” doing it with Pops.

  I eased the door open and heard the same sounds, louder, unmistakably now of two people. They sounded as if they both had bellyaches and were commiserating with each other and suffering and having fun, all somehow at the same time. I went out into the hall and saw that the door of my mother’s room was slightly open, a thin slant of light lying across the floor of the hall. I hurried to the door, no longer taking care to be quiet. My hand was an inch from the doorknob when I saw them.

  They were lying side by side in my mother’s bed, on top of the blankets, naked and making funny noises. I saw my mother’s wide bare back and backside, one leg lifted to accommodate Medina’s hand, which was buried in her to the nether knuckles as my mother’s looked to be in her. I supposed they were kissing, though it looked more as if they were biting each other’s lips. Medina, who was facing me, had arched her back, smiling, her teeth parted, her head tilted, corkscrewing into the pillow that was pressed against the wall. She arched more and more until it looked like her back would break, and her breathing, their breathing turned into a series of rasps, as if they were soon to perish in each other’s arms.

  I turned, desperate to tiptoe away, but my elbow hit the door. Brushed it maybe. I wasn’t sure I’d made a noise until the sounds inside the bedroom suddenly stopped. I ran back to my room, but in my panic I crossed the hall and wound up in the kitchen, racing through it to the basement door. I could hear nothing now but the thumping of my heart, the pulse of it pounding in my head. I opened the door, turned on the light and hurried down the basement stairs. I swung round at the bottom, one hand on the newel post, and made straight for the sump pump hole, my concocted-in-an-instant plan being to claim that I had heard a Vat Rat in the basement, had come down to investigate, only to see the rat escape into the sump pump hole. I all but posed at the hole, pointing down at the water, where I saw what for a second made me think I was still asleep and dreaming: there was a Vat Rat. It had tried to climb in through the sump pump drainpipe and had become wedged in the pipe so that half of it protruded from the pipe into the hole and half of it was still inside the pipe. The half that was sticking out consisted of the head and forefeet and upper torso.

  The rat was unmistakably dead, its mouth open so that its teeth were bared, its eyes two narrow slits, its face a rictus that conveyed all the fury and frustration of its final confoundment.

  It was not difficult, what with this sight following so closely the one in the bed, to let loose and start bellowing for my mother. “Mom, Mom, Mom!” I was on the verge of shouting for Medina too when I caught myself and called out for Pops instead.

  I heard my mother running down the stairs. “Percy, Percy, what’s wrong?”

  Still pointing down into the hole, I said, “Look, it tried to get in and it got stuck.”

  “What?”

  She joined me beside the sump pump hole. She wore a bathrobe. Her face was flushed and sweat shone on her forehead.

  “Merciful God. It must be the size of a cat. Poor creature.”

  “It’s not a poor creature, it’s a rat!” I said angrily.

  We turned when we heard Pops coming down the stairs.

  “Was that you shouting, Percy?” he said. “Or was it Iago trying to wake up all of Venice?”

  “Look, Pops,” my mother said.

  He joined us beside the hole. “Well, there’s one that’s had its last meal of barley malt.” I threw my arms around my mother and pressed my head sideways against her stomach. I smelled Medina’s scent and caught the scent of something else I couldn’t name. My mother ran the fingers of one hand through my hair.

  “You said it tried to get away?” she asked. I nodded into her bathrobe.

  “It may have tried about three days ago,” Pops said. “That’s about how long it’s been dead.”

  “I was in bed and I heard a noise in the basement.”

  “Well, you didn’t hear a peep from this fellow,” Pops said. “Smells like last year’s cabbage. Don’t think he starved or died of thirst. Suffocated probably.”

  “Maybe I heard another rat.”

  My mother put her hands on my shoulders and held me at arm’s length. I was sweating. I felt my hair matting to my forehead. “Are you all right, Perse?” I looked in her eyes. I wondered what she saw, if she saw that I had seen her and Medina. She turned me around. “Upstairs to bed. I’ll be up soon to see how you are.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m pretty sleepy now.”

  “Are you sure?” She sounded relieved. I nodded.

  “I’ll see if I can get this beast out of there,” Pops said.

  “Do you need any help?” my mother asked.

  “No,” Pops said. “You know what they say about too many rat removers.”

  “What do they say?” I asked.

  My mother rolled her eyes. “They say: ‘Too many rat removers exponentially complicate the effects of rodent entrapment and consequent morbidity.’ You get perfect grades and you’ve never heard of that expression? I could rattle it off by the time I was five. Off to bed now.”

  Climbing the stairs, I also noticed the smell of beer, from my clothes, my hair. She’d been drinking.

  I had heard from boys at school about “lizzies,” about women reputed to be lizzies, two middle-aged women in particular about whom the parents of the neighbourhood exchanged coy smiles, furtive winks, describing the women as “friends,” two spinsters who lived together for companionship, who were tolerated because of their matronly appearance and absolute discretion, because they kept to themselves and didn’t look the way you would imagine women like that would look, or as if they were capable, even in perfect privacy, of doing such things as were known to be favoured by “lizzies.” I doubted that such tolerance
would be extended to my mother and Medina, a mother carrying on with the sister of her ever-absent fiancé under the same roof as her child, just feet away, in fact, from where her young son slept, especially if it came out that they were so flagrant that the boy had caught them in the act, the Primal Scene à la Lesbos.

  I scrambled up the ladder, lay on my upper bunk on top of the blankets.

  The urge to sleep usually trumped everything. I had often nodded off with tears still streaming down my face, only to wake in the morning as fretful as I had been the night before, expecting my mother to convince me that she could somehow restore everything to normal. But nothing could rid my mind of the funny sounds I had heard her making with Medina, or the sight of Medina looking as if she were trying to grind like a corkscrew through the headboard. I had nothing on which to base a guess as to how, if at all, these sounds differed from the sounds a man and a woman lying side by side or otherwise disposed in bed might make.

  My mother and Medina. Lizzies. That word from school was all I had. Lizzies. Was it just the once? The first time? Could they have been so unlucky that, while doing it for the first time, they’d been caught? Perhaps it would be the one and only time. Especially if they knew they’d been caught, and by whom.

  I assumed Medina was no longer in my mother’s room, that she’d cleared out, fled the house as quietly as possible when the rest of us were in the basement. She was probably home by now.

  My heart pounded. My dick was stiffer than it had ever been. I tried to understand what exactly had been going on, what my mother and Medina had been doing to each other. I thought of Medina, her mouth wide open, eyes shut as if she were relishing the taste of her favourite food. I thought of my mother’s wide bare back. Then I wished it was she who’d been facing the door, her tits in full view, the nipples whose shape I had so many times seen outlined through her bra and blouse at last revealed. I found myself rubbing the back of my dick with my thumb, wondering how my mother had made Medina feel what she must have felt, judging by her face and the sounds she made and the way she undulated on the bed, which was so much more than I ever had while precociously self-experimenting. I imagined my hand was my mother’s hand, my thumb her thumb. I felt something inside me shudder, and shudder again, and then, swollen past all times before, I spurted onto my hand, my fingers and my belly, my first real time, it seemed, the first estimable come of my life, for I’d never so much as woken this wet even from a dream.