Mother

by S. E. Lynes

  ‘Sure.’

  She reaches to the end of the bed and rifles through the clothes they threw there. Pulls out his black T-shirt and puts it on. He watches her walk out into the light from the hallway. His T-shirt reaches the top of her thighs, and at the sight of her he feels himself stir.

  She comes back with two glasses and hands one to him, climbs back into bed and pushes her feet under the quilt.

  ‘So did you do that thing?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  She drinks her water. ‘What’ve you got to lose? Maybe they could put you in touch. I know they like to go slowly with these things. You have to write them.’

  ‘I’m not doing it that way. I’ve decided. These people are bureaucrats. Doing things the proper way takes way too long, man. Trust me.’

  In his mother’s purse all those years ago had been a small black-and-white photo of a baby in the arms of a nun. On the back was the date, and the name of the convent. He had pocketed the photo and, with the passion of an eight-year-old child, resolved to set off that very evening. He packed a bag with some clothes, some sandwiches and the card for his Child Saver bank account. Figured he’d hitch a ride across America then stow away on a boat. After that, it could not be far to the convent. He had looked on a map and Liverpool was right there on the coast – on the near side of England! He would simply show up and ask to look at their records. But that evening Dorothy made chicken casserole with dough balls and it smelled good, so he put the photo in his tin safe and locked the padlock and kept it safe for the following day.

  Week.

  Month.

  Year.

  ‘I know where the convent is,’ he says now, to the love of his life, a woman so unlike Dorothy, who cares no more for cocktail parties than for a trip to the moon, a woman who is happy if you so much as smile and lay your hand against her cheek. ‘I have a photo. All I need to do is rock up there and ask. They’ll have records, they must do. I just need to find the time is all.’

  Looking at Martha now, her strawberry-blonde hair mussed up from the activities of the last hour, he thinks that if he leaves it much longer to find out who he really is, he might be halfway to being a father himself.

  He lays his head on her lap. She takes his head in her hands and brings her face down to his to kiss.

  ‘I love you,’ he says.

  ‘However you want to do this thing, you should do it now,’ she says.

  ‘I should. Then we can get married.’

  ‘Then we can get married.’

  The day after the Oakland deal is finalised, he books the flight: an open return to London. From there he’ll hire a car. He’s going to need the flexibility. He’ll need his own steam.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was the first Saturday in March. Phyllis had asked Christopher to come and stay for the weekend. I can picture him, standing outside the front door, palms sweating around the cellophane wrap of carnations he told me he’d picked up from the garage. For each of the twins he had bought a Marathon bar, a packet of Chewits and one of Spangles. He was generous, was Christopher. That’s something you should know about him. He only ever wanted to please.

  Since his first visit, a few weeks ago now, he and Phyllis had agreed that he would phone her every Sunday evening. No such arrangement with Jack and Margaret; Christopher saved all his coppers for Phyllis, for the moment he would head down to the payphone and queue behind the other students waiting to call their families.

  The sound of her voice down the line was a drug, the days between calls cold turkey, the shakes coming in the form of vivid dreams in which nothing more happened than the two of them talking in the soft pink light he always imagined, her head on his chest. He could still feel the small square bone of her shoulder in the cup of his hand, could still watch her laugh in his mind’s eye whenever he wanted, replay and replay the way her left eye half-closed when she heard or said something funny or peculiar or embarrassing or suspicious. When she spoke on the telephone, he pictured her in this way, her face, the way she smiled. He thought of her hair against his lips, the soap fragrance, the silence in the warm living room.

  The two of them sitting together on the sofa while she told him the story of his birth had been exactly as he had imagined.

  In-between calls he wrote to her with the kind of news he could never share with Jack and Margaret:

  Another night out with Adam and the electronic-engineering boys last night. Siouxsie and the Banshees were playing at the Union. I lost count of how many pints I drank – those boys are a bad influence all right! Back to the library with a sore head for me today… I shall do well not to fall asleep at my desk.

  He said to me once that it was as if he had found in Phyllis a personality for himself that had been his all along, as if she had been its custodian these past eighteen years, and now that they had finally met, she had handed it over to him. Her lightness took away his weight, he said. Her love untangled the rope.

  Newsflash! I have grown a beard. All Adam’s idea, of course, part of his Christopher project, but he says it suits me. You shall have to tell me what you think when you see me. I’m not at all sure.

  She replied:

  A beard, eh? Heavens! I can’t wait to see you with it. I bet you look swish… Our Darren’s been in another fight at school. Takes after his dad, obviously. Bellicose little bugger… I’m doing Tess of the d’Urbervilles with my fifth years this term, have you read it? Do you like Thomas Hardy? We’re doing Antony and Cleopatra too, and Keats. I love Keats, do you? ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty!’ … David and I are off out to see Star Wars with the twins at the weekend. I wish you were coming with us.

  Phyllis’s letters were informal, chatty, but in them were flashes of the English teacher she was too. He read them over and over. On the page as in life, she flitted from subject to subject with a restlessness he’d noticed when they’d met. He had this same restlessness, he thought. He must have got it from her. He borrowed a book from the library: Poems of John Keats. He copied quotes from it into his letters, to please her.

  He did not tell her he had kept their reunion secret from Margaret and Jack.

  She did not ask.

  The weeks passed. Every moment not spent talking to her, writing to her or reading her letters he endeavoured to fill with studies or trips to the pub. Drink helped. And though he told Phyllis all about his drunken antics with Adam and the boys up and down the Otley Road, he made no mention of her to them. But on such high-jinks nights in Woodies, the Three Horseshoes or the New Inn, Phyllis would be with him, there in his head and heart, laughing along in that way she had. In these moments a strange and secret happiness brought to his reticent lips a smile over which he had no control, and he felt himself unfold, thought he might one day wrap himself around life the way Adam did. One day.

  Love is where the idle mind wanders.

  And now he was here, at her door, bracing himself to meet his other family, the ‘mad family’ as she called them. He saw the coddled shape of her through the bevelled glass and felt his stomach lurch. She opened the door and smiled with such apparent delight that he found himself catching his breath. This delight was for him. It was because of him.

  ‘Christopher!’ She had already reached out for him, was already pulling him towards her. The cellophane rustled against his chest. He feared she might crush the flowers but she stood back and took them from him. ‘Love the beard! You look older – not sure I want that, eh? Just kidding. And you brought flowers! Aren’t you lovely?’

  Lovely. ‘I…’

  ‘Come in, come in, we’re all here.’

  Inside, he could hear the television, and then the door to the living room opened and a boy’s face appeared around the jamb. He grinned and disappeared. Christopher heard the television die, then came whispering, then a man stepped out, smiled and came towards him.

  ‘Christopher – pleased to meet you, lad. I’m David. Come in, come in, come and meet the troublemakers.’ He shook Chris
topher’s hand, his grip firm, his brown eyes not leaving his. He was clean-shaven, his dark brown hair long at the back, the front spiky as a sea urchin at the top of his wide forehead. Christopher estimated his age to be around thirty-five. ‘So glad you made it over. We’ve heard a lot about you. Honestly, I’m glad you’re here because I thought Phyl was going to explode, and I’d hate to have to clean that lot off the walls.’

  Phyl. ‘Hello, David, pleased to—’

  ‘Give over.’ Phyllis had closed the front door and now ushered him further into the house. ‘Take no notice of him, Christopher. He’s a big bloody tease.’

  Guided by Phyllis – Phyl – he followed David to where the twins were wrestling on the living-room floor.

  ‘Oi, you two, pack it in.’ David separated the boys and held their wriggling forms by the hand. He lifted the hand of one, like a referee announcing the winner of a boxing match. ‘This is Darren,’ he said. ‘He arrived first so is technically the oldest.’ He let Darren’s hand drop and lifted the other’s. ‘And this is Craig.’

  Both were dark like their father, dressed identically in navy blue polo shirts and jeans that hovered around their ankles. At the waists, they both wore red-and-blue-striped elasticated belts with S-clip fasteners. David shook them by the arms so that they danced like puppets, making them both giggle. ‘Say hello then, you two.’

  ‘Hello then, you two,’ Darren said.

  ‘Cheeky bugger,’ said David.

  ‘Hello,’ said Craig and buried his head in his father’s belly.

  Phyllis had been right. The boys didn’t look like her at all and the realisation made Christopher sigh with relief. He could see David in them though – in the line of their brow and eyes, the set of their mouths, especially now as they grinned and threw sideways glances at each other. Behind them, on the television, the Incredible Hulk smashed up an office in silence.

  ‘Pleased to meet you both.’ Christopher stepped forward for a handshake, hoping that was the right thing to do. One after the other and both still giggling, the boys took his hand and shook it rather limply. ‘Oh! I almost forgot, these are for you.’ He dug in his canvas army-surplus bag and took out the sweets.

  ‘Yes!’

  In a flash, the goodies were swiped from his open palm.

  ‘Oi, you two,’ said David. ‘Don’t snatch! And say thank you to Christopher.’

  ‘Thank you to Christopher,’ said Darren, which earned him a cuff around the ear. ‘Ow!’

  ‘Thank you!’

  ‘Come into the kitchen, Christopher.’ Phyllis’s hand was on his shoulder. While David admonished the twins for their bad manners, she led him into the kitchen and gestured for him to sit at the table. ‘Let me get you a drink. Tea? Something stronger?’

  ‘Tea’s fine, thank you.’ He watched her walk over to the kettle by the window. She was wearing a dress this time; the soft plum-coloured fabric swung around her calves as she moved. She was so much younger than Margaret. Not like a mother at all. He wanted to talk to her all day, exhaust himself discovering all her mysteries until he knew her back to front and inside out. He should not, he felt, voice this thought aloud.

  ‘What’s this about tea?’ David had come into the kitchen. ‘We can’t be drinking bloody tea on a day like today, mate.’ He walked past Christopher to the fridge, opened it and pulled out a bottle of wine. ‘This is a big celebration. You don’t get to meet your grown-up stepson every day of the week, do you? Lambrusco. Can’t run to champers, I’m afraid, but at least this has bubbles. Do you like frizzy, Christopher? I’ve got some tins of Greenall’s or I’ve got larger. You name it.’

  Christopher wondered which was the right answer, and whether David had said frizzy and larger on purpose. It was the kind of joke Adam might make, so he decided not to question it.

  ‘I like anything,’ he said. ‘Lager?’

  ‘Larger it is. Good man!’

  To Christopher’s relief, David gave him a thumbs-up before retrieving two cans of Carling Black Label from the fridge and bringing them over together with the wine. ‘You’ll have vino, won’t you, Phyl?’ He winked, inexplicably, at Christopher. ‘She is très sophisticated, your mother.’

  Mother.

  Christopher felt his heart in his throat. Instinctively he looked over to where she stood at the sink. Beyond her, he glimpsed the garden and the shed through the back window. The curtains were made from pink gingham – bright and fresh – and on the windowsill was a pot of shiny green chives. This house, the way it felt to be here, was lovely. David had opened the cans and was pouring Christopher’s lager into a glass with bottle-top windows and a handle, a pint glass like they had in pubs. He held it out to him, its froth an inch thick at the top.

  ‘Ice-cream-cone job, I’m afraid, but it’ll calm down.’

  ‘Ice cream?’ Christopher took hold of the glass.

  ‘The head. Too much froth. I poured it too fast, sorry.’

  Still Christopher had no idea what his stepfather was talking about, but again he decided to leave it.

  ‘This’ll knock her out, you’ll see.’ David opened the wine and poured a glass for Phyllis. ‘She’s not had a wink of sleep, it’ll go straight to her head.’ He held up his beer glass. ‘Here’s to you, Christopher. I for one am very glad to meet you, and I want to say thank you right from the word go for making my missus a very happy woman.’ He coughed, as if embarrassed, and touched his glass against Christopher’s. ‘If I could make her half that happy, I’d be doing very well indeed.’

  For a moment Christopher couldn’t move. He wanted to pick up his own glass but there was no strength in his hands. And she, lovely Phyllis, had come over to the table and sat across from him, and now the three of them were sharing a drink at home on a Saturday afternoon like it was the most natural thing in the world. Phyllis was smiling at him, her eyes soft, as if he were her little boy and had done something that had made her proud. But he had done nothing, only walked into the house and sat down.

  * * *

  Later, while David went to the parade of shops further up the road, Christopher helped Phyllis with the dinner.

  ‘This is so nice, isn’t it?’ Phyllis said, reading his mind. ‘I mean, it’s nothing special, is it, peeling carrots at the kitchen table with your eldest son, but at the same time, it is, so very special, do you know what I mean?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I mean, not that I’m glad I’ve been without you, but if you hadn’t gone away and come back, I might never have appreciated a moment like this.’

  Moments like this were all they had, he thought. And it was enough. He passed her a carrot and picked up the next one.

  ‘I think perhaps I’ll learn to cook,’ he said. ‘I can’t even boil an egg.’

  ‘Boiled eggs are the hardest. You can’t tell what’s going on inside, can you?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, you can’t.’

  She nudged his elbow with hers. ‘I’ll teach you. If you come back, that is.’

  ‘I’ll come back,’ he said, too quickly, his voice louder than he had meant. ‘I’ll come back as often as you’ll have me.’

  ‘Every weekend then.’

  He knew she was joking, but at the same time she was not. And nor was he, not entirely, when he replied, ‘Every weekend it is.’

  Phyllis got up, brought a second bottle of wine from the cupboard and held it up.

  ‘We don’t usually drink red wine,’ she said, a little abashed. ‘David said we should buy it because you were coming and he said to buy red because we’re having lamb chops. Do you like red wine, Chris?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. We have sherry on Christmas Day, but that’s it.’

  ‘Heavens, you must think we’re alcoholics!’

  ‘I don’t. No. I would never—’

  ‘Relax, Chris, love,’ she said. ‘I’m only pulling your leg.’ She laughed, but tenderly, and stroked his hair. ‘Let’s get this open anyway.’

  The rattl
e of the key in the lock, the muffled chaos of the twins coming in. Christopher’s chest sank.

  ‘We’re back!’ David came through first, bringing the cold from outside with him into the kitchen. ‘Good man, you’re opening the red, what’s it like?’

  ‘We were waiting for you, weren’t we, Christopher?’ Phyllis said, glancing at Christopher, meeting his eye. From this look, he understood that he should agree, even though they had been about to drink it without David.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We were waiting for you to taste it.’

  * * *

  The evening passed like none Christopher could remember. They ate hungrily, talked easily, as if they’d known each other for a long time. The light fell, and when the plates were clean, Christopher jumped up to clear them away.

  ‘Stay where you are, you,’ said David, pushing him with some force back into his seat. ‘You’re our guest.’

  A little drunk by now, Christopher became aware of fussing behind the open fridge door.

  ‘Close your eyes, Christopher,’ Phyllis called.

  ‘All right.’ He closed his eyes, though not tight.

  ‘Watch it,’ came Phyllis’s voice, though she was not talking to him. ‘Careful.’

  ‘Let me do some.’ Craig – almost definitely.

  A glow, dim against the brush of his eyelashes. He opened his eyes. Phyllis was walking towards him, flanked by the twins and holding a cake covered in candles.

  ‘Darren,’ she said. ‘Go and turn off the big light.’

  Darren ran and flicked the switch. The room darkened.

  ‘It’s someone’s birthday next Sunday,’ said Phyllis. ‘March the twelfth. Ring any bells?’

  Christopher’s cheeks burned. He was about to protest, but David was already counting one, two, three, and then he, the twins and Phyllis were singing ‘Happy Birthday’ at the top of their voices.

  Christopher pressed his hands to his face, a sob catching in his throat. They finished singing and cheered.