by Helen Slavin
But I would have done that because I am not My Mother. You can talk to the Dead but you can never really know what another person is thinking.
School. Yes. Well. I considered my time there as akin to being in prison for a crime I had not committed. Apart from being a social pariah and getting on with my homework, I managed a few school discos. Even with my reputation as the class weirdo there were fumbled kisses and slow dancing but most of those early sexual experiences ended badly with my heart broken. It struck me that boys didn’t have a thought in their heads. Their genitalia like compasses, always pointing north.
Funny how the words for the male member all smack of stupidity. ‘Member’ for a start off, some idiot politician. John Thomas, who no doubt plays a banjo in Tennessee. Todger, the thick dog who can never find where you’ve thrown the stick. Dick, the man who wears the most hideous golf sweaters at the local links. Cock, a strutting brainless bird puffed up with his own importance and getting round all the birds. Donger, a dwarf breed of conger eel. Prick, so quick you hardly notice and before you turn your head it’s all over.
I did fall in love, usually with desperately unattainable people. The lad in the dry cleaners, the man in the record library. Sean Connery.
What was My Mother’s job? For a living she ran the office in a plant hire firm. For a vocation she helped people. That’s why we always had more bedrooms, for all the people who would come to stay. Miss Chatham the librarian after her affair with the Head of Libraries. Chris Baker after her husband died and she was scared to go back to her house. He came to see where she was, that was his only unfinished business. There was Ellen Danby, Mrs McCann, Jane Kirkpatrick and her three kids, another French student who burned all our pans. The Hungarian chess team.
She fostered people. She gave them money and comfort. She never expected anything back. She did not mind all the people in her life. In our life.
Which brings me to My Father. He was not located on any map, local or otherwise. What she told me about him was chiefly fairy stories—the most handsome man, the best dancer, the brainiest professor type of thing. Professor of what she could never make her mind up, one time it would be professor of physics, another time he’d have a more artistic bent, doctoring with philosophy. He was Phallus, the Great Greek Hero poncing through my imagination, raising golden trophies and fighting glorious causes but never reading bedtime stories or picking me up from school on a rainy Thursday.
At first I had thought that she said this to protect me, that probably he had been another sad Mr Dauntsey type with cheesy feet and a liking for cold ham sandwiches. I wanted him to be the hero that she so clearly wanted. That she needed.
In the end I realised that the even sadder truth was that she probably couldn’t remember who My Father was. I had been conceived on a pile of coats in the back bedroom of someone’s semi after too many glasses of English table wine. Doubtless in My Mother’s memory My Father was an odd blurred identikit face formed from his own features and the faces in the posters on that back bedroom wall. Steve McQueen. Paul Newman.
He was the first person I looked for. My Father.
I always expected to see him any day now, trundling into my consciousness in a natty chocolate brown suit. He was like a huge surprise, a special secret. I spent years disappointing the Dead because I was looking for him. ‘What? You’re not My Father? Listen, if it’s about Crown Derby I don’t want to know.’
My Mother had relationships with all the lorry drivers at the plant hire firm at one time or another. The only person she did not have an affair with was Mr Ringley the regional manager because he had a wife and kids. At least he had a photo of a wife and some kids on his desk. He never talked about them. She asked him once about them, just making small talk as they pored over a map of the local area, sticking pins in the locations of their current rolling stock of vibrating pokers and jib units. Mr Ringley did not talk about his family in office hours.
‘They are for home use only,’ was his comment. My Mother never told, you know, that she’d seen the family photograph in an old Grattan catalogue. A woman and two kids all kitted out, smiling. Mail order family.
The real pain in the backside was Aunt Mag. Aunt Mag wore a chocolate brown A-line skirt and a too-tight sweater. Every sweater ever invented was too small for Aunt Mag. She had the most enormous bosom. It was like a couple of badgers slung round her neck. Her hips were narrow beneath, stunted in the shade.
I imagine the more gruesome amongst you would like to know how she died. Quickly. She was much older than My Mother, the eldest sister in fact, and she had smoked like a factory chimney since she was twelve. There had been a brief period when she lived in Blackpool as the sidekick to a comedian. Then she had smoked cigars to try and be showbizzy.
One afternoon she was visiting us, we had just had lunch, tinned crab and a green salad with some crispy spring onions and pickled beetroot. I was in the kitchen doing the washing up and My Mother had just nipped over the road for a moment to give a spare key back to one of the neighbours. Aunt Mag was watching television in the front room.
And then she wasn’t. She was standing next to me in her chocolate brown sweater and skirt and looking very put out.
‘I’m very put out,’ she said. She looked familiar of course, because she was Aunt Mag. The chocolate brown wardrobe was also familiar and it took me three tea plates and a cut-glass fruit bowl before I realised. What surprises me looking back is that I didn’t panic. I didn’t shout or yell or break down in tears. I dried the dishes. I simply looked at her and I thought, ‘Oh dear.’
‘Are you listening to me? I still had things to do. This is really unfair. Who’s going to let the cat in?’
See what I mean about the useless, the futile and the utterly bloody pointless? No one was going to let the cat in. Paul Howarth had just run over it in his Austin Maxi. Not that we knew it at that moment.
‘I’m more bothered about Mum. Is there something you want to say to her? If there is, can I just head her off at the pass, because you’ll have left yourself in the front room. Can I do that? Save her the shock, eh?’
Aunt Mag’s earthly remnants were sitting in the chair, the TV Times in one hand. As I was looking at her thinking what needed to be done, My Mother came in behind me. She wasn’t hysterical either. She was very quiet then. She looked at Aunt Mag and then at me. Then she phoned the doctor and the undertaker and her other sisters. She seemed to get paler and smaller as the afternoon wore on, until she looked like a storybook representation of a ghost herself. She sat on the stairs until the undertaker came. Then she stood in the kitchen. She made a pot of tea which she didn’t drink.
‘What was it you wanted to say?’ I asked Aunt Mag.
‘I want to tell her the truth about Our Dad,’ Aunt Mag said, ‘I never have got round to it.’ She was tugging at the sweater, patting her hair. She always did that, patted it into place even though it was fixed with industrial-strength hair lacquer. She had hair like candy floss, my Aunt Mag.
‘What is it?’
‘He wasn’t who she thought he was is all.’
Warning bells were already clanging in my head.
‘What do you mean by that? He wasn’t a civil servant, he was a juggler? A transvestite?’
Aunt Mag pursed her lips.
‘He wasn’t her dad.’
Hurtful. Interfering.
‘Aunt Mag, you had fifty-eight years to tell her that.’
‘Yes well…You know what it’s like.’
‘You’re not here to deal with it.’
Aunt Mag was patting her hair again, smulching her lips together as if she was smoothing her lipstick.
‘She’s got a right to know. It was wrong of me not to tell her.’
‘I’m not telling her.’
Aunt Mag tried to pull rank then. I walked away. She followed me of course. My Mother was pulling on a coat, ready to go to the register office.
‘Strike while the iron’s hot,’ she said, almos
t in a whisper. And then My Mother was crying. Sitting on the stairs and heaving out great sobs. Hot, burning tears, all the afternoon’s grief sluicing out. I sat with her, held her. Glared at Aunt Mag.
‘Tell her now. Strike while the iron’s hot like she says. It’s got to be done.’
I ignored her. We went out to the register office. When we got back she was still waiting. I kept ignoring her. Until bedtime.
She wouldn’t let me sleep.
‘I’m not going anywhere until you tell her.’
I was panicking a bit. I did not want to spend the rest of my life with my Aunt Mag nagging at my heels and there was no way on God’s green earth that I was going to tell My Mother that her dad wasn’t her dad. I knew how that felt. I was so angry with Aunt Mag for wanting to do this. To be so discontented as to want to sow such destruction for someone she had supposedly loved. I couldn’t think of a way out. I lay there in the dark with her sitting by my bed, her arms folded defiantly under her badger bosom. It was stalemate for about two days.
Day Three: I had a brainwave. I was about to go out. Pulling on my coat, I kept the most serious face I could.
‘Aunt Mag…I think that to clear up all your unfinished business we should tell My Mother about her dad.’
She was patting her hair again now. Her show of triumph.
‘But I think we should also tell her about you and Mr Bentley.’
She stopped patting her hair.
‘What about me and Mr Bentley?’ she looked at me, quizzical. Worried.
‘Tuesdays.’
She looked at me for a long moment, her brain whirring all the information. How did I know about that, she was desperate to ask.
‘You never saw us. You don’t know anything.’
‘Mr Bentley told me.’
Aunt Mag looked puzzled.
‘He told you. But you were only…oh no…you mean…’
Mr Bentley in his chocolate brown salesman’s suit. Only six weeks before. He had loved My Mother, more than all that soap.
When I returned from town Aunt Mag was gone.
I left school and got a job at the plant hire firm with My Mother. I was the cabin boy, there to run a lot of errands and do odd jobs that no one else was being paid to do or could be arsed doing. I didn’t mind it. It didn’t last.
I got on well with the drivers. I often had to make coffees, do a sandwich run, fetch pasties or pies. I don’t know if I was pretty, it never occurred to me, but they all chatted with me. I gave good directions, drew little maps of various towns and their ring roads for people. I was quite good if anyone had to go to Blackpool since we had visited there quite a lot while my Aunt Mag was a comedian’s straight man.
My favourite was Beck. I never did know what his first name was. He was always Beck. He had a funny moustache and he was always asking me about where he should take his girlfriend, Shell. Should he book the little Italian place or should they risk the Chinese? He gave her flowers, asking me which I’d like to receive if someone was giving me a bouquet. Asked my advice about buying birthday and Christmas presents. A silver locket, an ankle bracelet. Beck would come in and he would make me some tea and he would always ask if I could give him a hand with his paperwork. This was partly because he liked me but mostly because he couldn’t read or write very well. Some people are just meant to be with you.
You know where this is going don’t you?
What I remembered was opening the file drawer to look for the Prescotts invoice. A pink invoice. What two of the drivers and one of the admin assistants remembered was seeing me go rigid as a plank and then hearing Beck’s voice.
‘Love you, Love.’
When I came round I was lying on the couch in Mr Ringley’s office and My Mother was sitting on a plastic chair by the door. Back then I thought she was guarding the door. Keeping me safe. Now I look back and I think she was sitting by the emergency exit. Ready to run.
The news was in by then. I could tell by the missing radio. Instead of tinny pop music there was nothing. Silence. I thought then that I should find out where Shell lived and give her the message.
‘Where does Shell live?’ was all I said.
‘Leave it, love.’
My Mother was sitting on the chair like someone waiting for root canal work or the Queen. I opened my mouth to speak and she winced, waiting for someone else’s voice to come out. Then she came to me. Took my hand. Squeezed it.
‘Leave it, love. She doesn’t need it. She needs to start letting go.’
She kissed my hand.
‘Leave it, love.’
I was let go myself shortly afterwards. I did quit. I had used company time and paper to type out a neat letter of resignation. I handed it to Mr Ringley. He took it as if it had come straight from the Angel of Death. He looked as if he wouldn’t open it in case it was bad news. I prompted him, let him know the contents.
Turned out he was going to drop me anyway. I had saved him the task.
My Mother was waiting for a lift home. We shared a clapped-out car. She knew I’d been let go, not that I had quit.
‘Let’s go to Valerie’s for a brew shall we?’
And she drove us into town. Her driving terrified me. She drove like she was on the dodgems.
Valerie’s was a stripped-pine sort of place that we had been going to since I was little. I had progressed from still orange to a pot of tea and seen all the changes of tables and tablecloths. If we went out with Aunt Mag we always had to go to a horrible dark green place called the Chump Chop because they had a smokers’ corner. Valerie’s always had fresh flowers on every table and cheese on toast available all day. Whatever you asked for you could have. I thought she should have the menus printed up saying simply, ‘What do you fancy then love?’
My Mother and I nursed a pot of tea for two and My Mother ate a scone. We didn’t talk. We didn’t need to. That was one of the best things about her. Understanding silences.
After that I moved away. Not far. Just to the university town up the dual carriageway. I got a small house with a small garden and a job in the archaeology department doing the administration and volunteering for the digs.
I was utterly at home there amongst the bones and the artefacts. The unfinished business there was beyond my talents. Some of the things I wrote down phonetically to try and make sense. English can be a foreign language if the person you are talking to is two thousand years old.
Mum’s Eye View: sideways on
Yes. I was disappointed that Mag didn’t have anything to say. I thought she might have some parting shot. I also think that Annie was covering it up. I thought it had to be pretty bad for her not to tell me. To protect me. But I don’t know. It was funny between Annie and Mag after the whole Thursdays business.
She’s right. There were too many people in the house. I don’t know. Couldn’t help myself. Had to help them. Even if it was just a roof over their heads for a few weeks. I know I have to be honest here. They protected me from Annie. It didn’t have to be so intense if there was a load of us in the house. I didn’t have to think all the time about what might be happening in Annie’s head, because I had to get a casserole on or hoover the landing.
Don’t get me wrong though, I enjoyed helping out. I don’t think it did us any harm to link up with so many people. We had a lot of experiences. When Janey Kirkpatrick rolled up with her kids that was a good time for Annie. She had brothers and sisters for a while, like an extended family. I liked to see someone come in through my doorway looking lost or abandoned and then see them three weeks later with their stockinged feet on the coffee table or mowing my lawn. Making themselves at Home.
I know what I did wrong. I’m not perfect.
Onwards
BE WARNED. It starts to get a bit Love Story now. Without the terminal illness I might add.
I had not bothered much with anyone. I’d been taken out to the pictures by a few blokes and had a few dinners. I’d even managed to have sex, but quite frankly they bored me.
I couldn’t see the point of going out with someone that you didn’t really like and trying to make yourself like them.
Most of the young men, and a couple of the older ones I picked out, seemed only interested in one thing. They made small talk, ate dinner or pretended to listen to your boring recollections from your day at work because they felt that this would work some miracle on the elastic of your knickers. They didn’t want you. They wanted sex. Conversation was just some boring form-filling requirement that had to be gone through to get to the sex. No one seemed any good at it either. Possibly I wasn’t. I wasn’t experienced, I hadn’t read any books and despite her encyclopaedic knowledge My Mother never told me a thing. She didn’t even fill me in on the mechanics of it.
I knew only the most basic stuff, information gleaned from some absurd line-drawing cartoons that we were shown as part of our sex education class at Petri Dish High. These were the cartoons they showed right before they showed us the full colour close-up pictures of penises pus-filled with gonorrhea or todgers dripping with evil venom from some other hideous disease that was ‘sexually transmitted’.
It was like aversion therapy really. Except that the only aversion it created in us was to those Czechoslovakian arthouse animated films which are full of simplistic line drawings and philosophical meaning.
For a brief time at the university I was known as the Ice Maiden because I was notoriously hard work on a date. Then I discovered the Ice Maiden Sweepstake. The bet was on as to who could crack the Ice Maiden. ‘Crack’. It was their word. I would have preferred ‘thaw’: you melt the ice with the heat of your passion. But no. They would have a ‘crack’ at it. Chiselling. Bashing. Clumsy and hurtful. They were no different from the schoolboys really, with their heat-seeking penises.
It took Evan to change that. Evan Bees. He sounds like he should be in a crossword puzzle, which is in fact the first thing I ever said to him. He joined the archaeology department on a research scholarship and he was nearly thirty, that is to say, seven years older than me. He already had a doctorate and somehow that drew me. I blame My Mother entirely, as you do. It was all those fairy stories she had told me about My Dad, the naughty professor.