by Ajay Close
Every morning I reached down to check the consistency of my mucus, waiting for it to pull between my fingers in jellied strands. For the next five days, before and after work and last thing at night, Frankie and I made love – or, at least, had sex. Unfailingly, the following week I felt a tenderness in my breasts. The smell of cigarettes made my gorge rise. I had never realised there was so much meat in the world. Neighbourhood barbecues on sultry afternoons, Sunday mornings greasy with bacon and egg, commuters on the station platform wolfing down their roll and sausage. Once these smells would have revolted me, now I gulped them in with the greedy thought perhaps I’m craving. For the last week of the cycle I was unbearable, yawing between joy and savagery, shopping for sleepsuits one minute, the next cursing myself for having dared to hope. And finally came the monthly rage, a physical need to destroy, or fuck, which in its orgy of blood could look like the same thing. The best sex Frankie and I had these days was when there wasn’t a chance in hell of conceiving. And then it all began again. The waiting; the grim, timetabled coupling; the heightened sensory awareness; turning in front of the mirror to see if I had bigger breasts…
Yet for most of my life I had managed fine without biology. Except at school, where it was one of my straight As. I was never one of those hormonal women, the type who referred sotto voce to ‘the time of the month’ and burst into tears for absolutely no reason, taking the next day off work or, worse, soldiering on bent double over their desks. I’d been deaf to the ticking clock. Which was where I heard Frankie’s unspoken accusation: I had frittered away my fecund years only to decide at the age of forty that I’d like to have a baby. And if he too had been late in this realisation, he wasn’t the one whose reproductive equipment was nearing its use-by date.
He crossed to the stove and turned down the gas. ‘It’s three hundred quid for the first consultation. I’ll pay it.’
‘I thought this was about both of us.’
‘You’ll need to be there.’ He took the skinned tomatoes out of the boiling water and added them to the pan. ‘If that’s OK.’
‘You hate private medicine.’
‘You’re forty-three. The NHS won’t touch us.’
His phone rang. It was on the shelf. We both grabbed but I was quicker. I handed it across.
‘Frankie here… how’re ye doin’, doll?’
It was Lauren at the studios, I could tell by his sexy growl. He walked into the hall, closing the door behind him. I started clearing the debris off the worktop.
He came back into the kitchen, slipping the phone in his pocket.
‘What?’ I knew what, had made a little bet with myself that this would happen.
‘There’s no one to cover the Aberdeen game.’
I was careful not to react.
‘Dougie’s got a bug. He can’t move more than six feet from the cludgie.’
‘Sounds messy,’ I said.
For a couple of seconds nothing happened, then I lost control and laughed. It wasn’t just that he was unambiguously in the wrong. My refusal to point this out was such a deniable form of goading.
There was a suspenseful moment before he, too, saw the funny side.
‘You’ll never get to Aberdeen in time,’ I said.
‘They’re playing in Paisley.’
‘You can stay for the first hour with Kenny and Ruth, then.’
He confiscated the cloth I was using to wipe the counter and stowed it out of reach, but in a matter-of-fact way that broke the chain of provocation linking him forgetting the pecorino, me driving to the supermarket, his cooking mess, and my martyred decision to clear it up.
‘C’mere.’ He put his hands on my shoulders.
We eyed each other, wanting reconciliation but still close enough to our fighting selves to be wary of premature embraces.
‘You’re a wee bitch,’ he said tenderly, ‘aren’t you?’
I shrugged modestly.
He sighed. ‘And I’m a lucky bastard to have you. You chose me over every other guy you could’ve had – I’m fucked if I know why, but you did. You think I take it for granted?’ He pulled me close, his lips warm on my ear. ‘I love you, Freya Cavalle, and if you give me a wean I’ll be the happiest guy in Glasgow.’
We heard a knock on the window. Ruth, Kenny and the kids were grinning at us from the other side of the glass.
‘Just don’t turn into your mother,’ he murmured, as we broke apart from the kiss.
Soap
‘Darling!’
Princes Street was packed with tourists, shoppers, pipers, police and placard-carriers, but it took me all of three seconds to locate Lilias: she was the one everybody was staring at.
‘Over here, darling!’
She was wearing a soft leather skirt and a white linen shirt secured at the neck with an antique silver brooch. Her white-gold hair, pinned in an Edwardian cloud, was a scene-stealing melodrama of elegance and escape. I caught the blueish translucence under her eyes, the cream, pink, white of skin, lips, teeth, and familiarity filled in the rest. Radiance, vivacity, a touch of Lady Muck. She would be seventy in November. She was my mother.
We grazed cheeks and she held me at arm’s length. ‘Is it safe for you to be here?’ Her eyes flicked to a couple of farmhands eating ice creams. ‘They’re everywhere.’
‘Looks like they left the pitchforks at home.’
‘You won’t be laughing when they recognise you.’
‘They won’t be recognising me.’
‘It’s very petit-bourgeois, darling, this shrinking violet thing. I can’t think where you get it from.’
‘Children pick up all sorts of bad habits when they don’t have a mother for nine months of the year.’
I was sorry as soon as I’d said it.
She glanced over at the columns of the Royal Scottish Academy, a trick she’d learned from Gielgud when they met doing commercial voice-overs: focus on something beautiful, forget the fluffed take.
‘New coat?’ she asked.
‘Not really.’
‘I approve. Very slimming.’
Lilias always looked the same to me, but I took a punt on the brooch. ‘Is that art deco?’
‘Hardly, darling, with a pie-crust edge.’ Her upper lip lifted just high enough to show her perfect teeth without disclosing the worrying things happening at the gum. ‘You are funny, I’ve had this for ages. But I do have something to show you. I’ve had a few repeat fees, thanks to good old Gold, and Susie Lennox is always telling me about this marvellous man in Stockbridge who’s so clever with his hands, so I thought I’d give him a try.’
She turned, presenting me with the back of her head, and I saw the silver clasp in her hair.
‘You wouldn’t believe the palaver I had to go through to get it. I nearly bought myself a Nicole Farhi coat instead. He wouldn’t take a detailed brief – he wouldn’t even show me a sketch. I had to trust him.’
‘It’s lovely.’
‘You don’t like it,’ she said.
‘No, I do. It’s lovely.’
She shrugged and looked away.
Belatedly I found the line she had scripted for me: ‘It’s very you.’
The face she turned towards me was flirtatiously combative. ‘I told him, “You don’t even know me, you can’t expect me to commission a piece on that basis.” I was ready to walk out, and he was ready to see me go. He’s a proud man. He’ll work for you, but you have to give him his due as an artist. We’re very alike in some ways. We talked about it.’
‘So who won?’
I saw her jib at my choice of verb. In Lilias’s world everybody was happy when she got her own way. ‘We compromised. I said I didn’t need a drawing, but I wanted at least three adjectives, and he said it was going to be romantic, traditional and absolutely contemporary.’
We laughed, not necessarily for the same reason.
A gang of farmers’ wives swept along the pavement towards us in fashion-crime jeans with sleeveless body-warmers over thei
r sweaters. I caught the reek of mince and onions as they passed. Lilias moved out of their way without seeing them.
‘I thought we’d have lunch at that little place in Bruntsfield,’ she said.
‘I’d rather eat in town—’
Her expression acquired a bright fixity of purpose.
‘It’ll take us for ever to get out there.’
‘I’ll be going there anyway.’
‘Yes, but I’ll have to get back into town before spending an hour on the train.’
‘No one likes a whiner, darling.’
That shut me up.
She glanced down at the half-dozen carrier bags she had accumulated in the course of a morning’s shopping. ‘Do you think you could give me a hand?’
We walked the route of the march in reverse, so I saw it all: the tractors and combines in their clouds of exhaust, the T-shirts proclaiming farmers an endangered species, the banners opposing the closure of village schools and post offices, the cow with ‘30p a pint’ shaved into its coat.
‘Don’t stare, darling.’
Lilias looked bored, having the professional’s intolerance of amateur theatrics, but I was agog. The mounted contingent was at least a hundred strong. Hunt masters bulging out of their red coats, pony-club sweethearts, a posse of giants on Clydesdales who looked like rugby players up for a laugh. Then came the infantry. Men with straw on their boots and faces weathered to a beetroot flush. Solid, square-jawed lairds squiring dowdy women with long necks and high, intelligent foreheads. And everywhere I looked, the unbelievably old: bodies aged beyond gender, whittled down to liver-spotted skin and bone, but still very erect in their bearing. Who were these people? They never showed up in the peat-heated country pubs where Frankie and I ate Sunday lunch. They weren’t in the car commercials filmed in the Highlands, or the fashion spreads shot in the glens. They were barely a statistical footnote in the reports that crossed my desk, and yet here were twenty thousand of them parading the streets of Edinburgh.
‘I hope Colin’s had the good sense to stay away.’
Colin was the Minister for Rural Affairs, whom she’d never met but, trading on my notional connection, called by his first name.
‘He’s up in Easter Ross, opening a community learning centre.’
‘Wise man. Perhaps you should have taken a leaf out of his book.’
‘Why?’
She looked at me.
‘It’s not even my department, Ma.’
‘You’re in power.’
‘No, no I’m not. Politicians are in power, I’m a middle-ranking civil servant.’ I heard my voice and hated its sarcastic measure, but I had lost count of the number of times I’d tried to put her right about this. ‘I don’t take political decisions, and I don’t have a well-known face. Frankie is famous. He appears on television. The Herald once printed a picture of my shoulder when I was sitting next to Frankie at a testimonial dinner for Norrie “Nutmeg” MacAllister, but it’s not very likely anyone’s going to recognise me from it.’
I took a breath. I’d said enough. No one recognised Lilias either, unless they had a photographic memory for corpses. Over the past decade her most reliable source of income had been police dramas. If she was lucky, there was a suspenseful scene before she met the killer, or an explanatory flashback at the end, but often her performance consisted of lying sheeted and immobile on a mortuary slab. It was true she turned heads on the street, and that some of these people thought they knew her, but only because she put so much effort into making them look.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, ‘Colin should get himself a Barbour.’
And then I saw them: a woman in her thirties and a teenage girl, uncannily alike, so it took a moment to pinpoint the details that made the elder seem a flawed copy. A pouching in her face, heavier breasts under her baggier sweater. They were leaning in to each other, like best friends it seemed to me, although another observer might have described them as exactly like mother and daughter. The girl was having trouble getting her words out. Each time she tried to speak, her mouth quivered. She pinched her lips together, but it only made her giggle all the more, while the older woman waited, her calm enclosing the two of them in a bubble of impregnable space. I had been watching mothers and daughters for as long as I could remember, but that day I put myself in the mother’s shoes, with the light of the girl’s wide-open gaze on my face, and her body angled towards mine, and my heart overflowing with pride and love. Could I give a child that absolute attention – not just for an afternoon, but every minute – or would I discover I too carried the Medea gene? The girl straightened up and finished her sentence, and the bubble that enclosed them became a vacuum of suspense, until the mother’s composure cracked in uproarious laughter and, turning her head, her shining eyes grazed mine.
‘I think our waiter’s taken a fancy to you.’
It was four o’clock. I had heard a great deal more about the silversmith who was so clever with his hands, and Roderick who was writing a screenplay for her, and the butch lesbian who loitered in the changing room when she took her Tuesday ballet class. They were casting the older Fonteyn in a miniseries. The script didn’t call for dancing but she wanted to colour every gesture with authentic grace. I had failed to mention any admirers, manually adept or otherwise, and had no social or professional triumphs I cared to report: obviously I needed the fillip a smitten waiter would provide. As far as I could tell, he had no interest in either of us.
He approached with the bill and she gave me an arch look. He took this to mean that I was paying.
‘Thank you, darling, that was lovely.’
‘Lovelier than all the other undressed chicken salads I’ve watched you eat?’
I said it teasingly, but she pulled the barely-perceptible frown she used to minimise facial lines. ‘Didn’t you like your crème brulée?’
‘I wasn’t mad on you correcting my pronunciation when I ordered it, but the crème brulée was fine.’
‘You didn’t finish your soufflé.’
‘It was a bit on the rich side.’
‘Oh dear,’ she said, in the voice she used when I was being difficult.
Lilias always encouraged me towards the heart-attack dish on the menu. Frankie said it was vicarious self-indulgence, but I knew better. It wasn’t enough to keep herself slim: others had to grow fatter.
Still, I got my own back every once in a while.
‘It’s bad for you, you know: always eating the same food. You need a varied diet.’
She shrugged. ‘We all have to die of something. Even me, you’ll be relieved to hear.’
I must have looked surprised.
‘Just a joke, darling.’
I squinted at her. For a moment the air had buzzed with the static of improvisation, but Lilias was an actress of the old school, she always worked to a script. Until now lunch had followed its usual course. For the first hour she had done most of the talking, growing even more animated with her second glass of wine. When she was hungry enough to want me to take over, she had asked for my news, and I had drawn a blank. (Once, long ago, I’d boasted of a complimentary memo from the Perm Sec, and she’d replied, ‘Will they give you gold ink for your rubber stamp?’) She had not yet recommended a skin consultant or personal shopper or trainer in the Alexander technique, but when she did I would refuse to write down the name, and she would give me a lecture on sagging pores or slouching or dressing like a Jehovah’s Witness, or this shrinking violet thing. Lilias believed in recycling every word of praise that came her way. The youthfulness of her feet, remarked on by her pedicurist. A wardrobe mistress’s surprise at her slender waist. The casting director who compared her singing voice to Streisand’s (though he didn’t offer her the part). There was always at least one man in her thrall, to the chagrin of a fatter and less charming woman. It’s possible she reported these tributes in the hope that I would follow suit, but I was a bureaucrat, working with other bureaucrats. We didn’t spend our days exclaiming ove
r each other’s feet.
Between mouthfuls of crème brulée (mine) and sips of unsweetened black coffee (hers), we had discussed her next audition. A spinster of the parish due to meet her maker at the hands of a cross-dressing curate in one of those English murder mysteries that sell so well on the Pacific Rim. She was wondering if RP would suit the character better than Mummerset? Would a stammer be gilding the lily and, if so, how about a lisp? Once, in my door-slamming, denunciatory adolescence, I had accused her of being more convincing as an actress than she was as a mother. If anything, she had seemed pleased.
Yet I always looked forward to these lunches, always hoped the next time would be different, and her eyes would light up with unfeigned delight while we took turns on centre stage, the air around us shimmering with all the things we had to say. And once in a while it was almost like that. I’d be less shrinking and she less large, and a snatch of dialogue overheard at the next table would trip us into laughter. ‘What did I tell you?’ Frankie would say when I got home. ‘You just need to give her a break.’ But at our next meeting she would be her usual all-singing, all-dancing, all-oxygen-stealing self, while I sat and watched from the other side of the table.