Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
‘I’m coming Saturday, love. Don’t argue. I’ve got the train booked.’
I wasn’t going to argue. I was going to. Right. I was going to argue.
‘The flat’s a tip, Mum.’
‘I’ve seen tips. I raised two boys.’
‘It’s a studio.’
‘I’ve seen studios. Your brother lived in one for three years with a microwave that didn’t have a door.’
She’s coming. That’s. Right. She’s coming. Mum is coming to Manchester and the flat has,
The flat has Celyn in it.
Friday night, Celyn’s at the bar, I don’t go, I clean the flat.
The tea goes in the cupboard, the back of the cupboard, behind the PG Tips.
The mug goes next to the other mugs. Just a mug.
Could be anyone’s mug. The hoodie goes in the wardrobe, folded, bottom shelf.
The toothbrush, I hold it for a minute. Stand in the bathroom, the toothbrush is green, mine is purple.
A green toothbrush in a cup next to a purple toothbrush is, a fact. A fact with a person in it.
The toothbrush goes in the drawer. Quick, the way you pull a splinter, because slow means feeling the wood of it. Green, in the dark next to the spare fuses and the takeaway menus, and I slide it shut, and the slide’s the loudest thing in the flat.
Book, pillow. I punch the indent out. Press it flat. Two pillows, both flat, like nobody sleeps on either one. Hair elastic, pen, nail polish remover.
I change the sheets, wash them, hang them. The dryer’s broken. Been broken for three weeks, can’t be arsed to call the landlord. The sheets on the radiator, detergent and nothing else.
The flat looks like my flat now. One person’s flat. One mug on the counter. One toothbrush in the cup. One pillow with no indent. The lie of a room cleaned for a mother who sees everything.
I stand in the flat and I count the things.
Nine things. Ten if I count the smell on the sheets.
Nine things, and every one came out easy. That’s the part. Months of a person in this flat and I can wipe them out of it in an evening, a drawer and a wardrobe and a wash cycle, and being good at it sits in me like something I’ve done wrong with my hands.
I text Celyn: Mum’s coming tomorrow. Won’t be at the bar.
Celyn: Tell her I say hi. Then, before I’ve put the phone down: Or don’t. Since I’m getting folded away with the good mugs.
The dots come and go. A long time. Then:
There’s the door, then. The one you keep a hand on at the bar. Didn’t take you long to pick which way.
Celyn would usually take the edge off a thing like that. A joke, mostly on the end, a let-out for both of us. Not this time. The dots don’t come back. The hurt just sits there in the blue bubble, no softening after it, and I’ve earned it.
I want to answer it. I want to type come round, stay, I’ll tell her you’re here.
I’ve known what you are to me since that bar and I still can’t get the words to the door.
So I don’t answer that part, because answering it opens the thing, and tonight I haven’t got the thing in me.
Not because I don’t want to. Because I don’t know how.
Will do.
I won’t.
The flat’s clean. One mug, one toothbrush, one pillow with no dent in it. Built in an evening. I’m good at making a thing look like nobody’s touched it. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been ashamed of being good at.
Saturday, the train gets in at eleven.
Mum’s smaller than I remember. Every time.
I saw her six weeks ago and she’s smaller.
The coat, the bag. The big one, the one she takes everywhere, the one Dad bought her before Dad was someone we don’t talk about.
The hug at the platform. She smells like the kitchen in Lewisham.
Stock cubes and the soap she’s used since I was eight.
‘You look well, love. Bit thin.’
‘I’m not thin, Mum. I’m fourteen stone.’
‘Thin for you.’
The flat. She walks in, stands, looks.
Her look, like Dave checking a site: the slow sweep, the eyes that stop on what matters.
‘It’s small.’
‘It’s a studio.’
‘It’s small for you. You’re a big lad.’ She puts the bag down. Opens it. Tupperware. Three of them. The stew, probably. The cake. Something else. Something wrapped in foil. ‘I’ve brought food.’
‘You didn’t have to.’
‘You’ve got half a loaf and a tin of beans in that kitchen. I checked.’
She checked. She’s been here forty seconds and she’s checked the kitchen.
‘There’s a Tesco round the corner.’
‘I saw it. I saw the pub too. And the barber’s. And the bar on the corner with the nice sign.’
The bar on the corner with the nice sign. The bar where Celyn sits every night with the laptop and the tea and the chipped nail polish and the thing the mouth does before a smile. The bar I’m not going to mention.
‘Good area,’ I say.
‘It is.’ She’s in the kitchen now. The cupboard. ‘You’ve got two types of tea.’
Bollocks.
‘The PG Tips and something. What is this?’ The tin. The Welsh writing. The loose leaf.
‘Mate from work. Left it.’
‘Your mate from work drinks loose leaf from a tin with Welsh writing on it.’
‘Welsh mate.’
She puts it back, doesn’t say anything, the look, the Mum look, the one that stores and doesn’t comment. Same as Dave.
Saturday is normal. We walk the NQ streets, different through Mum’s eyes. She looks up at the buildings how I did when I first arrived: the warehouses, the brick, the graffiti that she calls ‘art’ and I call ‘spray paint’ and we both know neither of us is right.
She buys a scarf she doesn’t need from a stall on Oldham Street.
Purple. The woman selling it has tattoos up both arms and a shaved head, and Mum gets her going about the wool and where she sources it and whether it’s machine washable because ‘you can’t put everything in the machine, can you, I’ve ruined three of Terry’s jumpers that way.
’ The woman laughs. Mum makes friends in ten minutes flat.
Always has, anywhere, with anyone. I stand behind with the bag and wait.
We walk past the bar. I don’t look. Mum looks. The sign, the tables inside.
‘That’s the one,’ she says. Already knowing.
‘What.’
‘The bar. The one you go to.’
I don’t answer, she walks on. The scarf in the bag. The bar behind us.
We eat at a place in the Northern Quarter, the nice one, not the pub, and she has the fish and I have the pie and she tells me about the neighbours and the leak in the bathroom and Mrs Coulson’s daughter who’s had another baby and Ewan’s last visit and how thin Ewan looked and how she told Ewan to eat more and Ewan said he eats plenty and she said plenty of what and Ewan said, normal.
Mum talking, me listening. The rhythm of it, the Lewisham one, the kitchen one, unchanged since I was ten and sat at the table doing homework I didn’t understand while Mum talked about the shop and the neighbours and the price of everything.
Sunday is the same. We go to a market, the one by the canal.
She buys cheese from a stall run by a bloke with a waxed moustache and I carry the cheese.
She asks about the site. I tell her about the site: the pour, the steel, Block C, Dave.
She asks about mates. I tell her about Gaz.
She doesn’t ask about the bar, doesn’t mention it.
At the cheese stall she turns to me, the coat, the bag. The purple scarf she bought yesterday already around her neck because it was cold this morning and she said ‘good thing I bought this’ like the weather justified the purchase and not the other way round.
‘And you’re happy? In Manchester?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Good.’
The silence. The question in the silence. The one she’s not asking. The one that’s shaped like Celyn’s mug and a toothbrush in a drawer and a second pillow with an indent.
Lunch we go to Ewan’s, Mum’s idea, booked before she got on the train. Chorlton, the proper houses, the gardens, the bins that stay numbered. The hallway smells of garlic and rosemary, the kind off a plant, not a jar.
Laurence cooks. Sleeves rolled, an apron, an actual apron, dark and clean, the one Ewan bought as a joke and Laurence wears it straight.
He tops Ewan’s glass before it’s empty. Ewan leans back when Laurence passes behind the chair, not looking, knowing the hand’ll be there.
Mum watches the whole meal. Eats the fish, says it’s lovely, asks Laurence where he learnt. Stores the rest.
Twenty years of Ewan and I never thought he’d land here. A flat that smells of herbs, a man who burns himself on the pan and doesn’t flinch and just pours more wine. Mum sees it too. She doesn’t say much. She stores it with the rest.
Sunday evening, the flat. The Tupperware’s been refilled, she went to Tesco while I was in the shower and made a shepherd’s pie from scratch with a pan I didn’t know I owned.
Wine, too. She brought it in the bag, a bottle of the white she likes, the cheap one from Aldi, the one that’s actually decent.
The flat’s warm, the radiator, the sheets on it almost dry. Mum in the chair, the one chair, the one I moved from the desk. Me on the sofa, the wine.
My phone lights up on the arm of the sofa. I don’t reach for it, but the screen’s face-up and the name’s right there. Celyn. Half a line under it before it cuts off: has she found me yet x
I turn it face down. Too late or not, I can’t tell. Mum doesn’t look at the phone. Looks at me, at whatever the face did in the half-second the name was showing.
I don’t say anything. That’s new. I had a lie ready for the tea, the Welsh mate, quick as anything. For this I’ve got nothing, and I don’t go looking.
Mum stores it. Same as the tea. Says nothing.
The silence goes on for a while. A comfortable while. Silence with weight in it.
Only happens when you’re not expecting anyone.
The radiator clicks. The street outside, someone’s music, far off, the bass on a word I can’t hear.
Mum in the chair like she’s sat in it for twenty years instead of twenty minutes.
The wine glass, still half full. She never rushes conversation after a meal. She lets it settle like a sauce.
‘Your brother’s alright, ain’t he.’ Not a question. ‘That Laurence. Good ’un, that one. You can tell by how he is at his own cooker.’
I drink, don’t answer.
‘You got someone like that, love?’ The hand up before my face can do a thing. ‘Don’t answer me. I’m not asking you to. Just let your mum have her say for once.’
The wine, the radiator. I listen.
‘You’ve always been the one that holds things. Even when you was little. Your brother’d go to bits and there’s you, holding it all, never a peep. I used to call that strong.’ She turns the glass on her knee. ‘It’s not, though. It’s just quiet.’
A beat.
‘And if there’s somebody,’ she says, ‘then I’m glad.’
‘I told them about dad,’ I say.
‘What’d they say?’
I think about Celyn’s flat. The face. How they went still. They do that when something hits right. That’s a load you shouldn’t carry alone, they said. No question, no fix, just. Stated. Like it was a fact anyone could see if they looked.
‘They said it wasn’t my job to fix it.’
Mum nods, one nod. She sets the glass down.
‘Now that’s someone with sense.’ The voice drops.
Lower. The one she uses at funerals, at hospitals, when someone’s just said something true and it needs respect.
‘It’s not down to you, love. Your dad, Sean, that’s his to do, not yours.
The ringing. The picking a birthday to do it on.
His. You carrying his silence about for him doesn’t make it any lighter.
Just means the two of you carry it instead of one.
’ A pause. ‘That’s not love. That’s a debt. ’
The flat, the radiator. The street outside with its music.
‘Your brother made himself small for years,’ Mum says.
‘At home, growing up, before any of it was out. Small so your dad wouldn’t see him, small so the part about him wasn’t so loud.
Didn’t work, did it. Just made Ewan small.
’ A beat. ‘He packed it in once it was out. Stopped shrinking, stopped caring what your dad would let himself see. Your dad could call it a phase, mind, right up till Laurence. A good man at the table who meant it. That’s when your dad properly went quiet.
’ She looks at me. The eyes. ‘I’m not watching that happen twice. ’
‘They won’t let me,’ I say.
‘Good.’ The word sits like a brick. Solid. ‘Sounds like they know what they’re about. The looking at things. The not looking away.’
The wine, the chair.
‘You’re happy, love?’
And how she asks, not the surface question. The underneath one, the mother one.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I am.’
She lifts the glass, drinks, sets it down.
‘Then that’s the thing, love. The rest is just furniture.’
‘Ronan.’
The voice underneath it. The one that means this isn’t about the neighbours.
I look at her, the wine glass, the hands around it. The same hands that made the shepherd’s pie and bought the cheese and held the bag and hugged me at the platform.
‘Whoever they are.’ She says it. Like she’s been waiting to hear since the phone call. Weeks. Months. ‘You can tell me, you know.’
They.
She said they.
They. Mum. Eileen Carrick, fifty-four, Lewisham, stock cubes and soap and Mrs Coulson’s daughter, said they. Chose it. Picked it out of the three she could have, and picked that one.
I don’t know if she knows what it means. Don’t know if she’s guessing or if Ewan told her or if she just. Chose the one that covers everything.
I put the wine down. Leave it this time.
‘Not yet, Mum.’ The voice is smaller than I want it to be. Thinner. ‘I’m not ready.’
She nods. One nod. Doesn’t push, doesn’t do the face. Doesn’t do the bit where the eyes fill up and the chin goes. Just the nod.
‘Alright, love.’
She picks up the wine. Drinks, puts it down.
‘When you’re ready,’ she says. ‘I’ll be here.’
The glass on the table. The wine, the flat, Mum in the chair.
I look at the glass. The wine going still. The warmth in the room from the radiator and the shepherd’s pie and the word she picked.
Still warm.
Like Mum.