My mother is gentle and her smile is reassuring as she continues to try and balance out the chalk and cheese family dynamic we have had ever since I was old enough to form my own opinions and make my own friends outside of my dad’s inner circle of church groups and Sunday School.
‘No, you’re not that at all and although I don’t want you to hurt each other, David, I am proud of you as much as I am of him,’ she whispers softly, then adds with some trepidation, ‘You do know he’s going to start on you about the need to go back and finish your degree course any day now.’
I lean my head back, take off my tie and wrap it round my wrist, then I switch the radio channel and I’m delighted when it blasts out Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, my favourite and the very type of track that would make my father fall to his knees in despair. My mum ignores the music and chooses instead to shout over it. ‘Have you thought about it at all? Will you go back, do you think? I really wish you—’
‘I don’t want to be a lawyer! I never did! How many times do I have to tell you both?’
‘But it’s an awful waste of three years if you don’t justfinish the course, and Billy Beattie says he’ll give you another chance in his office if you’d just—’
‘Stop the car, please.’
‘What?’
‘I can’t stand this any more. Stop the car.’
‘David!’
She switches off the radio with swift vigour and the silence it leaves in its wake seems more deafening than the music itself was.
‘Stop trying to control me! Both of you!’
She pulls in the car at the side of the lane that leads to our family home, so close to a hedge there’s no way I can get out. I take a deep breath, knowing my mother is not the one to blame for all my frustrations and trying to resist the urge to run.
‘You know we only want the very best for you, darling,’ she tells me again. I push my head back and close my eyes.
‘You have no idea what’s best for me.’
She starts up the engine again and the car chugs along the bumpy lane to our lavish, inherited family home.
I can’t wait to get out of here.
SIX WEEKS LATER
2.
KATE
Ican feel our Maureen’s eyes burn through me as I put the second spoonful of sugar into my tea, and so I stir it deliberately hard against the mug to drown out the inevitable telling off she is about to give me.
‘Don’t even start, Mo,’ I say with a smile. ‘I know what you’re going to say.’
I don’t need to look around to know she’ll be shaking her head and squinting her eyes, her pink face folding up in despair.
‘Two sugars? And you who’s training to be a nurse?’ she says, her voice peppered with envy and with enough of an irresistible ‘tut-tut’ tone to put me in my place. ‘You won’t be thin like that for ever, Kate Foley. Wait and see, it will catch up on you one day. I used to be a size ten too, but it doesn’t last for ever.’
I spin around with two steaming mugs in my hands and set one down on the worktop beside where she stands,drying the dishes with a tea-towel that I pledge inwardly to put straight in the bin as soon as I have her back turned. I’ve spent every single hour since I got home this morning cleaning the kitchen, helping her prepare for her daughter’s birthday tea party this evening, and she still gives out to me about sugar in my tea.
I notice the mug I give her says ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, while mine says ‘Little Miss Trouble’, most definitely the wrong way round. The mugs are almost as old as we are and we chose them for ourselves. I remember the day Mum bought them for us at the market in town and the memory of that day stings inside, making me yearn for those simpler and more innocent times.
Maureen, as hard as she tries, will never be the sunshine type. She’s more like an autumn shower, I suppose, but it’s never really been her fault. It’s the way life goes.
‘Are you nervous?’ I ask her. ‘You always tell me off when you’re nervous.’
‘I’m not nervous,’ she replies. ‘I’m not a bit nervous.’
‘You are nervous,’ I tell her, folding my arms. ‘Look, you know he’s not worth it, Mo. He’s scum and he never was worth more than a second of your time, never mind the worry if he’ll bother to show up to his child’s birthday party or not.’
Maureen throws down the tea-towel and I eye up the bin, wondering if I could get rid of the greying rag right now as she squeezes the hot mug in her hands.
