ACTIVITIES: walking on the heath, swimming at the Lido (summer only), reading, knitting, learning to sew, yoga, aggressive cleaning.
If I was working at an ad agency I don’t think I’d go crazy about someone like my mum. I might half-heartedly throw a few bath oils or cleaning products or hair dye her way, but she wouldn’t have much to spend so I wouldn’t waste too much effort.
This would be my big mistake.
My mum is buying stuff all the time.
If there’s a bogus new miracle product on the TV, me and Mercy place bets on how long before Mum buys it. Our bathroom cupboard is spilling over with twenty-four-hour moisturisers, anti-wrinkle creams, cellulite busters and hair thickeners.
Mum says she used to be a beautiful woman, but having three kids and an absent husband has ruined her looks. She says that it’s harder than you’d think to have looks and then lose them, and Mercy says she should try just being ugly all her life and that’s no picnic. Mum says Mercy has low self-esteem. If you ask me, low self-esteem is what most girls live on, instead of food.
The main thing about my mum is that she’s sad. Life isn’t turning out for her the way it was supposed to. She blames Dad for a lot of it, of course, his old friends and us, and also she blames herself.
I know this for a fact, not because she ever told me but because she told Bob Cutforth. A lot. Whenever he came over for dinner they would get wasted together and I would listen outside the kitchen door because when people are wasted they talk about stuff they can’t talk about when they are sober. Once I heard Mum say to Bob that she’d spent the last year they were together hoping Dad would disappear off the face of the earth because she couldn’t stand how things were between them. She said she’d wanted to be free from the job of loving him because he made it such hard work. In her fantasy of being on her own she blossomed (Mum’s word) and did all the things she’d always blamed Dad for stopping her doing. But in reality, when he disappeared she was less than she’d been before, not more.
Remembering that conversation is like being there listening to it for the first time. The line of my spine feels caught, like I need to stretch it, my stomach is a hole, I’m listening to my own breathing and the big wall clock in the hall, and I’m staring at the streaks and blisters in the paint on the kitchen door and thinking I might kick it down and punch my mum in the face for wishing my dad away.
They’re quiet for a bit and then Bob says to her, “You didn’t make him go, Nicky. What did you do? You loved him and you loved his kids. You’ve done nothing wrong.”
Mum started crying then, just softly, and I went upstairs to my room and thought about what it was like to be her, and if her and Bob would end up getting married.
Another time, when I was sitting right there with them at the table, she said to Bob, “I wasn’t as good a wife as you all thought I was you know,” and then she went on about how much she hated being stuck at home with the kids and how she resented Dad’s great job and how she made him pay all the time and was insanely jealous and always thought he was playing around and how she was basically never happy at what turned out to be the happiest time of her life. Bob said she shouldn’t talk about that stuff in front of me, and she said, “Lucas is nearly thirteen and his dad’s left us, so he’s the man of the house now.” Then she ruffled my hair and told me to go to bed, like I was eight, which hacked me off because I was a man when it suited her and a kid when it didn’t.
She’s better now than she was then.
But the thing about my mum that still bothers me is that people mostly feel sorry for her and she lets them. Mum reckons life dealt her a bad hand, which is a good way of saying that her absent husband, her three kids and the fact that she’s not twenty-one any more are not her fault. I want to ask her if women in places like Sudan or Palestine or Kosovo worry as much about face cream and stretch marks and living without a man around, but I haven’t yet, and who knows, maybe they do.
And sometimes Mum gets angry with the wrong people – meaning those who are still here as opposed to he who has left. Some days I know as soon as I look at her that I’m not going to get a civil word out of Mum at all. Even just the sound of our voices makes her roll her eyes and tut and act like we’re squatters in her actual brain, and not people with as much right to be and speak as she has. On a bad day like that you can tell she’s programmed herself just to say NO to everything, practically before she’s heard it, which means she loses out when we’re saying do you want anything from the shop, or offering to put the dinner on.
What I think on days like that is this.
Maybe life didn’t turn out the way Mum planned, but it’s not our fault. Unless the thing we did wrong was being born, and if you start from there you can never do anything right, no matter how hard you try.
One good side-effect of Violet turning me on to old people was I got to know my gran a lot better. Her name is Pansy – another perfect name for an old lady, another flower name. I’d never really had much time for her before, what with her being old and having false teeth she got too small for, and skin like a bit of screwed up grey tissue that you find in your coat pocket, and pretty extreme opinions on just about everything. She and my grandad live round the corner in sheltered housing. Pansy says there’s nothing more patronising or that fills her with more dread than a primary colour window surround. She says it’s a sign that whoever lives there is no longer taken seriously. It’s worth remembering that they gave up their big house to move here so that we could live in it. Pansy would rather we didn’t forget it.
Pansy is a live wire and she’ll talk about anything and has theories about stuff she’s hardly heard of, like jungle music and PlayStation and Internet dating. She swears all the time but she never actually says the word, just mouths it, with her face especially screwed up, her gums and false teeth colliding slightly, the insides of her mouth sticking together and then pulling apart so swearing becomes this strange spongy clacking sound. It’s quite effective.
Pansy is passionate about football and has been for years. But somehow, at the same time, she’s managed to learn absolutely nothing about the rules. She once said that footballers should get extra points for hitting the post or the cross bar because it’s much harder than scoring a proper goal. She’s a Tottenham fan because she grew up in Enfield and her dad played in the brass band at White Hart Lane. If you ask me, there’s never enough reason to be a Spurs fan because I’m into Arsenal and so was my dad. Pansy says Dad only supported Arsenal to hack her off when he was a kid. Grandad, who can take football or leave it, rolls his eyes and says, “They used to fight like cat and dog when Grandstand was on.” She loves to slag off Arsenal, and mostly that’s fine because we’re at the top of the league and they’re going down.
Pansy was the first person I told about Violet. I needed to tell someone that a dead lady was talking to me and I had several good reasons for letting her in on it. For a start, it was Violet who made me more interested in the person inside Pansy’s old body. Also, I figured Violet would appreciate having another old lady around after all those cab drivers. And I knew Pansy’d be into it because she was always reading about the occult and she liked mediums and stuff and she even went to see one once to see if she could find out if Dad had “passed over” so I knew she’d never dismiss the idea of communicating with the dead.
Of course, that’s the other thing that me and my gran have in common, apart from Violet and the London Derby – my dad, her son. “Our missing
