The House of Hidden Mothers

by Meera Syal

  She raised one eyebrow, Bollywood style. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you, sweetie.’

  ‘There! In the corner! Nah, behind you! Behind you!’

  Feeling like an unwelcome pantomime dame, Toby peered into the far corner, where sunlight couldn’t penetrate the overhanging tin canopy, and saw the outline of a motionless prone piglet. He scooped it up in one fluid movement, shielding it from the little darlings now baying for blood.

  ‘Is it dead then? Can we see?’

  The piglet was barely breathing; each tiny inhalation seemed a mighty effort.

  ‘Fighting for life’ made sense to anyone who had held the runt of any litter, battling its early and inevitable demise. He’d seen so many of them and still didn’t understand why Nature bothered creating them in the first place. What was the point, throwing together a weaker, smaller version of a species just so its mother could reject it, its siblings bully it and some other passing predator get a free and easy meal? Maybe it was the Darwinian equivalent of the naughty step, a way of warning your kids to behave, of reminding them how hard life could be and how lucky they were. Maybe Priscilla had lined up all her piggy kids this morning before opening hours and pointed a quivering trotter at their unfortunate brother, coughing in the corner.

  ‘If you don’t listen to Mummy and eat all your swill, that’s where you’ll end up. All eighteen of you. Take a good look. That could have been you.’

  The piglet gave a little quiver as if he was reading Toby’s thoughts. He wouldn’t last the night, not unless they chucked money, time and resources they didn’t have at him. In any case, not intervening was policy at Broadside City Farm.

  ‘We want the children to have as authentic an experience as we can give them,’ Jenny Palmer, the farm manager, had told him on his first day. Jenny was an earnest, friendly sort and had tried very hard to look as if she lived on the premises and was up at sparrow’s fart to milk the herd. But Toby had already clocked the designer wellies and the line where the fake tan ended and her neck began. What did he care? He was grateful to have a job, even a temporary one such as this.

  ‘You have to remember,’ Jenny continued, ‘that many of these children have never even seen a real cow or a pig or a horse. They have no idea that vegetables come from the ground. Many of them don’t even have gardens …’ She shook her head sadly.

  Toby tutted in what he hoped was a sympathetic manner.

  ‘So that’s why we have to let them just come here and be. Explore. Breathe. But this is a working farm. We sell our milk and eggs and meat, as you know, and we don’t want to shield the children from that either. They need to know how we make our food – that all those cute little piggies will end up as bacon. And if an animal is sick or dies, well, we let them see that too. I mean, if it happens during opening hours, obviously. Otherwise we put it on the website. The most important thing is, we let Nature take its course as far as possible and we don’t interfere.’

  Toby wanted to ask what ‘as far as possible’ actually meant. If a fox broke into the henhouse and they caught it in the act, would they just sit back and enjoy the majesty of a good feathery massacre? Could they shoot or poison rats? Or drown the kittens they couldn’t give away? He knew the answer to the last one: kittens were cute, and nothing cute deserved death, apparently. Just the under-achieving uglies that no one really wanted anyway.

  The children’s whooping stopped as Toby turned round and made his way carefully towards the gate of the sty. They vied with each other for a good look at the piglet. Some of the girls oohed and aahed, wanting to stroke it. The boys laughed, pointing at its tiny spiral of a tail, its muddy snout. The boys always laughed, at least the ones over the age of eight, when it seemed to become deeply uncool to show any kind of emotion other than mockery. But when no one was looking, they were all the same, all these hard-nosed, urban, feral kids on their school trips. Alone and unobserved, they talked to the animals, private crooning conversations, offered them inappropriately sugary snacks from their lunchboxes, ventured tentative strokes of furry ears and velvety muzzles. Toby knew that under all the bolshy backchat, their first instinct was to be kind. Maybe that’s why runts were created, he mused. Not to encourage us to kill the weakest, but to help them.

  ‘He’s not dead,’ Toby said loudly as he eased his way out of the swinging iron gate, careful not to jostle any of the chattering schoolchildren, all runny-nosed and red-cheeked.

  ‘He looks rough, man!’ laughed one lad at the back.

  ‘Can you make him better?’ asked a voice at his elbow.

  A young girl – mixed race, Toby guessed. He’d learned not to say ‘coloured’ any more after Shyama had threatened him with violence the first time he’d used the term in front of her.

  ‘Coloured? Sorry, have we just slipped through a hole in the time and space continuum and landed in 1971? Maybe you’d like to call me Little Lady and smack my arse while you’re at it.’

  He would have quite liked to do both, but he guessed that would also be a big mistake.

  ‘Listen, there weren’t any col— different races of people where I grew up …’

  ‘Except those nice smiley Bengalis in the local curry house,’ Shyama sneered.

  ‘Well yes – except they weren’t Bengali. They were Kashmiri. And they couldn’t go home – lots of trouble there, apparently. Riz left a wife behind. Awful story. My mum was always inviting him over. He always came but he never ate much except for the chips. Probably a bit too bland. My mum thought brown sauce was a step too far. He’s a bloody mean darts player though, Riz …’ He trailed off, wondering which bit of his story had offended her most.

  Instead she pulled him to her and kissed him so hard, his head swam.

  ‘You’re a good man, Toby. And the nice thing is, you don’t know you are. Hope it lasts.’

  That was in the early days, when they danced around each other, pulled and pushed by lust and longing, wondering and dreading who would walk away first. Though if ever there was a time to cut and run, Toby guessed this might be it. Before they started a process that would tie them together irrevocably.

  ‘Can you make him better?’

  This girl was stunning, blue eyes against burnished skin, hair like a dandelion clock, so full and fine he wanted to blow on it and see if it would break into feathery seeds and fly away. Is this what his children with Shyama would have looked like? People said that mixed-race kids were especially beautiful, maybe getting the best of each gene pool. He didn’t know why, but he liked the thought of it. And the thought that he might never have a child with Shyama made him feel so weak and empty that he stumbled for a second, provoking a good-natured cheer from the slowly dispersing audience.

  Toby sat on a nearby hay bale to steady his breathing. Where had that come from? He’d never wanted a kid before, even when confronted by one as adorable as the little girl who was now back at his side, staring at the shivering piglet. He’d never been one of those men who had an urgent desire to scatter their seed far and wide to ensure their immortality. He’d had one scare, some years back now, with his first long-term girlfriend, who had run out of their small shared bathroom in a fury, waving a plastic stick in Toby’s face.

  ‘Negative! See? You can’t even do that properly!’

  What had annoyed him was that he hadn’t even known she was trying to get pregnant. She had just assumed that because they had got engaged and were discussing wedding plans, why not? He called the relationship off the next day, horrified when he imagined what would have happened if her plan had worked. There would have been no paternal outpouring of joy, no swelling of his manly breast at the news that his boys had got in there, done the job and done it good, he was sure of that. Maybe he had spent too long around animals, watching reproduction in all its messy, grunting reality and clinical efficiency, attended by bored farmhands and busy vets, where it was merely a process that would keep mothers breeding and babies coming so bills could be paid.

  The little girl exte
nded a gentle finger and stroked the piglet along its heaving back. Her clumsy tenderness stirred a kind of yearning in Toby, full and bittersweet. He had always considered himself to be an ordinary man in every way: average at school, OK-looking, modest ambitions, not the kind of bloke you’d notice in a room full of people, but if you had a drink with him, the kind of bloke you might want to see again. ‘Solid’ was an adjective he provoked in others, steady and unexciting as timber. He had always assumed he would find a regular job in some branch of animal husbandry or agriculture, settle down with a nice local girl with dimpled knees and cheery common sense and live a contented, uneventful life. Good enough for most of the human race. But then, what was that Chinese curse? ‘May you live in interesting times’? Since colliding with Shyama’s unapologetic sun, everything he had mapped out was thrown into stark relief; the world he thought he had created and occupied so fully had revealed itself to be a mere speck of leaf litter eddying on a fast-flowing river. Time wasn’t linear or graded, as he had always assumed, it was unpredictable, relentless motion. This was a lot to take in for an average kind of man. This is what he wanted to tell her, but he never found the words, and on the rare occasions he did, his mouth was too busy kissing her.

  The day they did Hinduism – and yes, it had been a Wednesday – Toby had been flicking through a child’s picture book of Hindu gods (she had told him not to take this too personally) and had paused at one illustration of a blue-skinned deity with heavily lidded, blissful eyes. What struck Toby, however, was his mouth, half open, a tiny galaxy of stars, moons and comets within it.

  ‘What’s he swallowed?’ Toby asked her.

  She paused, looking up briefly from the family photo album that had diverted her attention. ‘He hasn’t swallowed anything. He holds it in his mouth.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The universe.’

  She then spent another ten minutes trying to explain how the gods were both part of everything and yet also created everything, but he wasn’t really listening. He was too astounded by this image of a universe within a mouth, the infinite residing within the ordinary. He knew this was important, maybe the most important thing he had ever discovered in his life, if only he could articulate it.

  He still couldn’t, but remembering that feeling led him quite easily to name the one that overwhelmed him now. And he realized it was true that he did not want a baby. He wanted his and Shyama’s baby. And if they had to seduce Nature into cooperating with them or pummel her into submission, so be it. Despite today’s bad news, they would keep trying. Anything.

  ‘He won’t die, will he?’ the child at his side asked anxiously.

  ‘No,’ said Toby, in a blatant violation of company policy. ‘He will be fine.’

  As Shyama reached her front door, it swung open to reveal her mother, Sita, with a tea towel in her hands, as always.

  Sita cocked her head on one side like a small bird, neat, bright-eyed, her silver hair coming away from its loose bun. ‘You’re early! I was just doing some tidying.’

  Shyama ignored the subtle rebuke – the breakfast dishes were rarely cleared before she and Toby dashed out of the house in the morning – and instead gave her mother a swift hug. She was shocked to discover that her mother seemed to have shrunk, her head barely reaching Shyama’s shoulder, and that beneath the comfy leisurewear top her bones felt brittle and delicate. One hard squeeze and she might shatter. Shyama followed her mother into the kitchen, noticing the slight curve in her shoulders and her gentle, uneven gait.

  ‘Your back playing up, Ma?’

  ‘Oh, you know. How about nicecuppatea?’

  It always tickled her, hearing her parents peppering their conversation with what they imagined to be casual English banter. It was even funnier when there was a group of them, when the cards club or kitty-party stalwarts met up, their loud Punjabi spliced with Enid Blyton slang such as ‘That takes the biscuit!’ or ‘Mind your business, loafer!’ or ‘You hop it, bloody fool!’

  ‘Oh and Tara’s friends are here,’ Sita added pointedly.

  Shyama sighed. She had planned to flop on the sofa and eat her way through the biscuit tin. Instead, Tara and an assortment of her student friends were doing just that.

  In amongst the tangle of limbs and empty crisp packets she recognized a few familiar faces – the pretty blonde girl and her razor-cheekboned surly boyfriend – Tara sitting between them and some god-awful show at full volume on the television. Tara barely looked up at her mother’s loud hello, glued to the screen, where a group of silicone-busted, orange-skinned young women were watching two other luminous-toothed girls trying to pull each other’s hair extensions out.

  ‘Sorry!’ Shyama raised her voice, not sorry at all, but actually bloody fed up and in need of a good cry. ‘Could you …?’

  Tara huffed loudly and grabbed the remote, reducing the volume by one bar.

  ‘Hi, everyone.’ Shyama made an effort to sound friendly, though she barely got grunts in return. ‘Thought you had a screening today?’

  ‘Four o’clock. We’re going in a minute … ohmygod, did you see that?’

  The whole sofa erupted in whoops and cheers. One of the orange women had decided to join in the fight, her pneumatic mammaries strangely motionless as she administered some ineffectual slaps with tiny taloned hands.

  ‘So this is part of your course, is it, watching these crappy reality shows?’ Shyama enquired.

  ‘Yes, actually.’ Tara shot her a brief glance. ‘And it’s called Structured Reality, as it happens.’

  ‘What’s structured about it?’ asked Shyama. ‘It just looks like a cat fight in a strip club.’

  ‘Maybe, but it’s real.’

  ‘A reality show, like I said.’

  ‘No, actually, because what the producers do is get a bunch of real people and create storylines and situations out of their real lives, so Becca and Tiggy have been actually dating the same guy for weeks and they’ve only just found out.’

  ‘So they don’t watch their own programme then?’

  ‘Well, I dunno, maybe it was filmed ages ago, but anyway, Mindy’s the real bitch in all this because she’s only stirring it because she’s after Ade herself and they made her blurt it out in the bar in front of everyone.’

  ‘Who’s “they”?’

  ‘The producers. More dramatic, isn’t it? Otherwise she would have just put it on social media, like normal people.’

  ‘So it’s producers manipulating abnormal yet real people pretending to be very bad actors?’

  ‘No, it’s the next stage in the evolution of the documentary genre,’ sighed Tara, rolling her eyes at her mates, who were all studying the same Media and Culture course as she was, although, unlike her, most of them lived away from the parental home. Tara had rejected any thought of leaving London to study, saying it was pointless as she only intended to live and work in the capital when she graduated. That’s if she didn’t get a job in New York or South America. She had ambitious and admirable plans for the future; however, what she hadn’t planned on was being turned down for university accommodation as the family home was too close to her college. So she had ended up living at home and commuting for study. Just like school, but with more unexpected playdates and sleepovers with her mates whenever they fancied a bit of home cooking and all-night TV.

  ‘You know, I could just drive you down to the local psychiatric ward and you could have a good laugh at the looneys.’

  Finally everyone looked up at Shyama. She had meant it as a joke. She wanted to explain that this was a reference to how the Victorians got their kicks from watching the mad and the maimed, and how such programmes seemed to be an extension of the same soulless voyeurism. (It wasn’t her theory, she’d read it in a Sunday supplement in one of her endless waiting rooms.) Clearly this gathering was not impressed in the slightest. Who was she kidding? This was the generation who were defined by their new-media narcissism. Without an audience somewhere, they simply did not exist. I twee
t, therefore I am. And at this moment Shyama suddenly saw herself in Tara’s furious eyes: a sour-faced, middle-aged woman who didn’t know when to shut up.

  Tara flicked off the television and on cue the gaggle rose up, murmuring their thanks as they sloped out.

  ‘See you later,’ Tara muttered as she tried to push past Shyama.

  ‘Have you spent any time with Nanima today?’

  Tara stopped at the door, waiting till her friends were well out of earshot. She turned to her mother, talking slowly in the same exaggeratedly patient tone that Shyama herself had used on her daughter years ago.

  ‘Yes, as I have been here all day and you haven’t. And yes, I have keys and money, and yes, I will text you on my way home. Anything else?’

  The bird’s nest on her head had grown; it had graduated from the size of a sparrow’s cottage to something approaching an eagle’s luxury apartment, held up by various butterfly slides and sparkly pins. Shyama hoped to God her daughter never got nits again.

  ‘No,’ Shyama said, and then, ‘I, er … went to the doctor today.’

  She had no idea why she was broaching this subject with the one person who had always been completely uninterested in it. But she felt so alone; a cold damp grief seemed to be seeping into every bone. She would have liked to hold her child – the only one she would ever have now – and comfort herself that she at least had her.

  Tara’s expression didn’t change. ‘OK.’

  ‘And, well, the IVF thing, it’s not going to work. I wore my bits out having you!’

  ‘So it’s my fault then?’ Stung, Tara flicked the intended joke back at her.

  ‘Don’t be silly, that’s not what I meant.’

  ‘So that’s it then, is it?’

  Shyama chose to ignore the tiny flame of hope flickering in her daughter’s eyes. She knew Tara had spent twenty years as an only child – Shyama’s best years in terms of strength and youth – her main focus and only joy during a sad and slowly dying marriage. And instead of flying the nest, her daughter had built one on her head and stayed put.