So, that was the reason Mum didn’t arrive at my flat in half an hour. She came round eventually to break the news, but by then we’d had the Big Scene. That was what it was like, a theatrical performance with the actors giving it everything they’d got. I was the audience, spellbound, in the front stalls. First: the sound of the downstairs front door opening. Oh good, I thought, childishly, getting up from my bed, Mum’s here. Then the sound of rather heavy footsteps on the stairs. Not Mum’s, I thought, unless she’s wearing welling-tons. Then I heard the sound of a key in our own front door, by which time I was out of the bedroom. I saw Ian. I pointed at the still closed kitchen door and mouthed, ‘Your mother!’ He looked puzzled, said just one word, ‘What?’ and that was enough for his mother to emerge.
So there we were, all three of us, standing in a tight triangle. Me in the bedroom doorway, Ian with his back to the closed front door, his mother in the kitchen doorway. ‘Here you are,’ she said. ‘About time.’ Ian stared at her. He stayed absolutely still, not a flicker of response. ‘Cat got your tongue?’ his mother said. Ian ignored her. He seemed to collect himself together, and without acknowledging his mother in any way walked past her into the living room, where he went and stood looking out of the window. ‘For God’s sake,’ his mother said, irritably, and marched through to join him. She stood directly behind him, up close, and she was whispering, but I couldn’t hear her words. Whatever they were, Ian was not replying. Then she raised her voice. ‘You listen to me, son, I’m not going away until I’ve had my say.’ Still no movement, no speech, from Ian. I didn’t know what had rendered him so mute, but I couldn’t bear his mother’s bullying tone, and I couldn’t bear, either, being a mere spectator to such a bewildering scene. ‘Look,’ I said, joining them, ‘why don’t we—’ ‘You shut up,’ his mother snapped. ‘This is between me and my son.’
And then Ian did turn round and speak. His face had changed. He was frowning, red-faced and angry. He told his mother not to speak to me like that, how dare she. Then he told her to sit down and try to be civilised. She started to laugh at him, but the laugh turned into a cough, and she did sit down. Her coat was still buttoned up, the bag clutched now to her chest as though I might snatch it. She sat on a battered old chair my father had passed on to me when he bought a new one. The upholstery had split on one of the arms and I’d never done anything about it. Once over her cough, she looked at the stuffing leaking out as if it might contaminate her. I stared at her, examining her feature by feature. I could see nothing whatsoever of Ian in her – not a trace, no fleeting resemblance, no vague possibility of a shared genetic relationship. But I knew this was meaningless. She was Ian’s mother. She’d said she was, he hadn’t denied it. He must look like his father, a man he once said he’d never known. He told me to sit down, and I did, my knees shaking.
‘Leave,’ Ian said to his mother, ‘before I say something you won’t like.’
‘Huh! You’ve already done that scores of times.’
‘And you’ve deserved it.’
It will sound so like a ball being bashed back and forth across a net, all regular and even, thump, thump, first one of them, then the other, but it didn’t sound like that at all. There were deadly pauses between the things they said to each other, and the tone of each voice varied from the ultra-soft and menacing to the shrill and venomous. I felt sick listening to them, feeling the hatred between them and yet still having no idea what it was based on. I started to speak but only got as far as ‘please’ before Ian’s mother told me to keep out of this, it was none of my business, she was talking to her son.
‘He knows what I want,’ she shouted.
‘You are a fantasist,’ Ian said, very slowly.
‘You’re no fantasy!’ his mother raged back.
‘You’re a fantasist and I refuse to aid and abet you.’
‘Oh, a fantasist, am I? Then where do you come from? You can settle this fantasy easily.’
‘No.’
‘Take the test!’
‘No. I refuse.’
‘I’ll make you.’
‘You can’t.’
‘Oh, see if I can’t.’
‘Leave. This is Isamay’s flat.’
‘She asked me in.’
‘She asked you in because you are my mother. She didn’t know you’re a complete fantasist.’
‘I am not! I can prove it! All you need to do is—’
‘Leave. Now.’
I could see his mother was trembling, either all the aggression was suddenly gone or else she was about to change tactics. She took a cigarette out of her bag, and a lighter.
‘No smoking,’ I said, feebly. She ignored me, flicking the lighter on, lighting the cigarette, and taking a deep drag. ‘Ian?’ I said.
‘Oh, don’t appeal to that one,’ his mother said. ‘He’s a coward, he’ll no’ do a thing. Scared, he is, aren’t you, son?’
But Ian stepped forward, snatched the cigarette from her and stubbed it out viciously on a plate left there.
‘My,’ his mother said, ‘what’ve you been feeding him, eh?’ And she calmly took out another cigarette.
‘Look,’ I said, desperately, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but please don’t smoke here. Why don’t you just tell me why you’ve come, and what you want?’
‘I might do that.’
‘Go ahead,’ Ian said.
She lit the second cigarette, and I thought if it means getting her to talk, and then leave, what does it matter? So I said nothing, and neither did Ian. He just walked back to the windows and opened both of them wider. The wind blew in, rattling the blinds, and Ian’s mother shivered ostentatiously. ‘My, it’s gone cold in here,’ she said. She smoked. One, two, three, four pulls on the cigarette, but they were puffs, not drags, puffs of defiance. ‘Well now,’ she said, ‘it’s a long story. Settle yourself, sweetheart, eh?’
I didn’t move or speak. I was sitting down anyway. I tried hard to look Ian’s mother in the eye, to show her I wasn’t afraid of her, though I was. I was afraid of what she was going to tell me. Ian was still near the window. I wished he would come and sit with me, hold my hand, so that we could face this hostile woman, and whatever she was going to say, together. It seemed horribly significant that he had made no move to do so. He went on standing by the window, not even looking directly at his mother, who sat opposite me. I wanted to move but there was no other seat in the room, and she had begun her story. It was, as she’d warned, a long one. She took me back to her childhood, describing exactly what kind of place her family lived in. She said she was pretty, and boys paid her attention from the first. She said she liked the attention and she liked getting away from home, especially away from her mother, who was ‘a religious nut’ and made her life a misery. At seventeen, she met Mick and fell pregnant. He married her and she had two children by him before she had the sense to go on the pill. They lived in Glasgow but there wasn’t much work about and Mick took a job on an oil rig. Good money, but he was away for months at a time and she was still young and she liked to go for a drink with her pals on a Saturday night. And then she met Ian’s father. ‘And that,’ she said, at this point, ‘was the result,’ nodding towards Ian.
Ian said not a word. I kept turning round, waiting for him to interrupt, at least to hurry her on, or tell her to stop, but he was by then quite detached. I was the one practically in thrall to her, and she knew it. ‘Well now,’ she said, ‘Mick came home one day and there I was, in the family way again, and he knew it couldn’t be his bairn, and he said he’d divorce me. He went mental. Threw me out of the house, after he’d slapped me about first, wouldn’t let me have my two wee girls, sent them to his mother’s, and said that if I used his name on my bastard’s birth certificate he’d kill me.’ She paused, put her head on one side and, though I hadn’t spoken, said, ‘What? You’re wondering what happened to the pill? Oh, that’s easy. I’d stopped bothering, with Mick away so long, and then I got taken by surprise, oh, I did.’ And she la
ughed, and leaned towards me. ‘Swept off my feet I was by Ian’s dad, he was a very passionate fella all right.’ There was another stagey pause, before she again leaned forward and whispered, ‘I didna know I was pregnant, see, I came on just the same for four months, not as heavy, but still the bleeding—’
‘For God’s sake!’ Ian erupted, and now at last he did move and stood in front of her. ‘Finish the fairy tale and go,’ he said.
‘I’m talking to your lassie woman to woman,’ she said, attempting, and almost attaining, an aggrieved, dignified air. ‘I want her to understand how you came about, I have to give her the details.’
‘No you do not. She doesn’t want to hear this stuff.’
‘Oh, she does, look at her, she does.’
‘I just want to know why you’re here. What it is you want from Ian,’ I managed to say, speaking very quickly so that I wouldn’t give away to Ian, as I’d already given away to his mother, that yes, yes, I did want every tiny detail, however distasteful, however much they disgusted him.
‘We’re getting to that,’ she said, and sat back in the chair. ‘Are you going to block my view, or do I have to move?’ she said to Ian. ‘The lassie will want to watch my face, she’ll want to see I’m telling the truth.’
‘Ian,’ I said, ‘please sit here, beside me.’
He did. I took his hand. ‘Aw,’ she said, ‘sweet, holding his hand. Now, where was I? Oh, yes, telling you about falling pregnant and never catching on until I was nearly four months. Why didn’t you have it seen to, you’ll say, it wasn’t too late, not these days, but it wasn’t these days, it was those days, and in Shettleston even in the 1970s it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t straightforward, or I’d have done it, I’d have seen to my little mistake, don’t you worry. But nobody would help me. My doctor was a Catholic bitch, she wouldn’t send me to the right people, and I’d no money to go private and my own mother wouldn’t help me, especially her. So. I had to go through with it. I had a terrible time, terrible, not like the other times.’ Ian started to stand up again, furious with her. ‘Sit yourself down. I’m not going to go into it, not when she’s expecting herself. So. I had him, and then what could I do? I was stuck back at home again, nowhere else to go, and preached to every bloody day and no money, and I couldn’t get my wee girls back.’
Ian made a dismissive sound, not unlike one of May’s grunts.
‘Oh?’ she said, ‘You think I didna try?’
‘I think you didn’t care,’ Ian said.
‘And how would you know that, my wee man?’
‘I know.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘can we . . .’
‘Just get on with it,’ she finished for me. I nodded. ‘So,’ she said, ‘no money, living at home with my saintly ma, and what way out did I have? Eh? You won’t guess? You think you can guess? Well, you’d be right. I met another fella, Sammy. Worked on the railways. He was older, been married before, like me. He had a place in Caldercoats, in Glasgow. I moved in, with Ian. He was a good man, Sammy, wasn’t he, Ian?’
‘This has nothing to do with anything,’ Ian said.
‘Well, maybe on that one you’re right. Sammy has nothing to do with your father and why I’m here, which is what this lassie wants to know. So, Sammy died. He was fifty-four, and he had a stroke at work and he died five days later in hospital. I wasn’t his widow, I didn’t get the pension, I hadn’t—’
‘Stop!’ shouted Ian, and this time he stood up again and began pacing about. ‘What she’s going to drag you through,’ he said, ‘is how she went from man to man and I was the big handicap until suddenly I was a possible asset if she could convince people I was who she said I was, who she says I am, which she can’t because it’s a complete fantasy. There isn’t a shred of proof.’
‘Then take the test,’ his mother said, quietly.
I must have looked as I was feeling – completely confused and lost. Ian’s mother smiled. Somehow she seemed to think she was winning whatever game she and Ian were playing, with me as piggy in the middle. ‘Do you know what test I mean?’ she asked. I shook my head. ‘A DNA test,’ she said. ‘It’s a way these clever scientist boyos have of—’
‘I know what a DNA test is,’ I said.
‘Right. Well then, that’s all he has to do. Take the test. Prove I’m right. Prove that his father was who I’ve told him it was. Where’s the harm?’
‘The harm,’ Ian said, ‘is what it does to me, but you wouldn’t care about that, of course, you wouldn’t even recognise how I might be harmed.’
‘You’re right there, sonny. You should be proud to know you’re the son of—’
‘For God’s sake!’ Ian roared, before she could get the name out, and then he said, ‘Isamay, please, go into the bedroom and close the door. Please.’
Ian’s mother laughed. ‘Oh, dearie, dearie me,’ she gasped, ‘what a state he gets in! Afeared of the very name! All right, all right, don’t send her away, poor lamb. I won’t say it, I won’t say the name. I’ll get on with it. When you were five, I saw his photograph in the paper, when he had the accident and died, and I thought my God, it’s him, and—’
‘The pound signs flashed,’ Ian said. ‘But it didn’t work, your ridiculous scam.’
‘No,’ his mother said, ‘nobody believed me and I couldn’t prove it. But now I can. I could’ve proved it the last twenty years, if only I’d known about DNA sooner. Oh, it’s dangerous, isn’t it, Ian darlin’, when the likes of me gets educated in such things? Eh? All I need is you to oblige . . .’
‘And I won’t. I’ve told you that again and again. I don’t want to know who my father was, and especially not now, when I know exactly why you’ve started all this crap again. Isamay, please let me have five minutes on my own with this woman, please.’
I got up and did as he asked. His mother made no objection, no attempt to stop me. I closed the bedroom door and lay down on the bed, relieved to do so. With the sitting room door shut as well, I couldn’t hear a thing. They weren’t shouting, anyway, or I’d surely have been able to hear some sound. I looked at my watch: 6.10. At 6.32, I heard the sitting room door open, and then there was a short interchange, maybe a couple of sentences each, between Ian and his mother. I could hear their voices without being able to make out the words. Were they angry? I debated their tones of voice with myself. No, not exactly angry so much as firm, on Ian’s part, and threatening on his mother’s. There was the squeak of the hinges on the door that opens on to the landing. So Ian’s mother was leaving. Would he see her down the stairs and into the street? Yes, I could hear him go. I waited. He came back up the stairs very slowly indeed. I waited again. He seemed to hesitate outside the bedroom door. ‘Ian?’ I called. He came in and took his shoes and jacket off, lay down beside me and took my hand.
I don’t know why I still felt so frightened. She’d gone, but what she’d left behind, the atmosphere in the flat, scared me. ‘Ian,’ I began, but he put his hand lightly over my mouth. ‘Sssh,’ he said, ‘later. Rest, sleep for a bit.’
Surprisingly, I did, and so did he, I think, because when Mum arrived, to break the news about Isa, we were both still lying on the bed. The shock was awful but it was somehow numbed by what had already taken place that evening. I couldn’t tell Mum about what Ian’s mother had said, about the scene there’d been, not in front of Ian, and in fact she was too wound up about Isa’s death to ask many questions. Ian made us all tea but I didn’t drink mine. Mum said I looked shattered and I should try to sleep and we’d talk the next day. I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep – my mind was racing, going over and over everything that had happened – but after Ian had seen Mum out, he came and lay beside me again, held me, and I calmed down, and eventually sheer physical exhaustion took over, and I did sleep.
I slept for fourteen hours. Ian had gone when I woke up at almost ten in the morning, but there was a note on his pillow. It merely said what I’d have known anyway, that he’d gone to work, and he’d see me later, lots of love
. Nothing else. It depressed me that he couldn’t at least have promised to explain everything when he came home – surely he wasn’t going to carry on this not-really-talking business. I could hardly get out of bed but I badly needed to, and forced myself up. The sun coming through the frosted glass of the bathroom window dazzled me, and I stumbled and hit my hip on the corner of the bath. I had to sit down to stop my legs shaking – I just felt so feeble and weepy, and resented Ian not being there.
Eventually I pulled myself together enough to shower and get dressed, then I drifted into the kitchen to make the coffee I didn’t feel like drinking, just to make things seem normal. But of course things were not normal. The last twenty-four hours had been wildly abnormal. I needed to reclaim some semblance of normality, but how? The only way I knew: by working. By sitting down at my desk and steadily working through my notes. By taking myself away from the memory of Ian’s mother, and everything she had said, and concentrating on other women, my grandmothers. But then I was distracted when it struck me that my child was going to have Ian’s mother as one of her grandmothers. Of course, that’s how it would be, Ian’s mother in the role of the Bad Grandmother, a woman whose genes had already been passed on to her. We couldn’t get rid of her. Ian hadn’t managed it. My child had no chance.
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