He’d managed to hobble around with just a stick rather than crutches this morning. Aysha had observed him to make sure he was ready and it had her seal of approval. It felt like another step in the right direction – no pun intended – and boosted his mood no end. But it wasn’t just that. It was the dinner with his mum and Bess yesterday evening. It had gone so well. And he hadn’t imagined it. He’d caught Bess watchinghim more than once.
The only uncomfortable part of the turkey dinner had come when Bess brandished the bottle of plonk. It had had him on tenterhooks and, he suspected, his mother too.
Seeing that bottle had reminded him of the sound of the popping cork on one of their worst Christmases as boys.
‘Oh, relax,’ Marianne had told her teenage boys when she came into the lounge that particular Christmas. The boys had been clearing out the grate. ‘Haven’t you heard of people having a Buck’s Fizz on Christmas Day? It’s tradition! I don’t know who started it but I say bottoms up to whoever did.’ And she proceeded to down the drink from her champagne flute that was likely to be 80 per cent alcohol, 20 per cent juice at best.
Marco whispered, ‘How many of those do you reckon she’ll have before lunch?’
‘I’d say that bottle doesn’t stand a chance.’
As they laid another fire and watchedThe Terminator,their mum insisted she didn’t need help with the lunch; she was in total control. And so they left her to her singing, warbling the Christmas music at a volume the neighbours could probably hear without opening their windows.
On the dot of 2p.m., she hollered that lunch was ready and although she was slurring her words, given she’d polished off the champagne and was already on the wine, both boys sat down to what looked set to be their most civilised lunch since their dad had walked out on the three of them. She’d even remembered to buy Christmas crackers and that day, Gio had felt as though maybe their family was hanging together okay.
But when he cut into the second piece of turkey, it wasn’t cooked. ‘Mum…’ He showed her the piece and he hoped he hadn’t polished off any that colour already. The thought made him feel like he was going to puke.
Marianne leaned over, speared the piece of offending turkeyand dumped it on a napkin in the middle of the table before telling him, ‘The rest is fine.’
But his stomach churned at the thought of eating what could be a dinner teeming with bacteria. And the remaining turkey wasn’t much better so instead, he focused on the less-than-crispy roast potatoes and the vegetables which were almost pureed, they’d been on so long. It was as though their mother had dropped the brussels sprouts into the boiling water as the same time as the potatoes had gone into the oven.
His mother had been happy in herself at the dinner table but the second she noticed her boys, particularly Marco, shifting pieces of food around their plates and avoiding the meat, she started to cry.
‘You both think I’m useless.’
‘Mum…’ Gio tried to stop her rant in its tracks because past experience told him that once she got going, it would be next to impossible to come back from.
But she had already worked herself up.
‘You’re both acting as though I’ve served you something poisonous.’
‘You have.’ Marco forked a piece of the meat on his plate and lifted it up to show how pink it was inside. ‘I offered to cook.’ His comment did nothing to defuse the situation.
She thumped her fist on the table. ‘Why do you never trust me, why do you always assume I can’t do anything?’ The wailing started again.
‘Because you can’t,’ Marco snapped before getting up from the table, the crackers unpulled, no paper hats to be seen nor a joke from the scraps of paper inside to be heard between them.
He was right; she was pretty bad when it came to cooking, because she was usually half-cut when she did it.
Gio cleared the rest of the table and left her to wallow.
‘Why can’t you be a normal mum?’ Marco raged as Gio scraped the remains of his dinner into the bin.
‘I am doing my best! Your father walked out, the bastard! Why is everything my sodding fault?’ And with that, she came back into the kitchen, grabbed a fresh bottle of wine from the fridge, and retreated to her bedroom.
And Gio and Marco did what they usually did; they retreated too. And that was that. Both boys went to bed and wished for the whole thing to be over.
Last night at Bess’s, when she’d got that bottle out, Gio’s head had been right back there on his mother’s worst days. But the evening had turned into one of the best and spending all that time with Bess was something he’d fallen asleep thinking about and woken up smiling about too.
‘Gio, are you listening?’ Aysha prompted. ‘You’re not, you’re really not. Are you tired, is that it?’
‘Nope. Not too tired. Wall squats next?’
‘Right then, let’s go. Whatever has put you in this mindset today, I like it. But?—’
‘Don’t push it, I know.’
Over at the wall, he placed his feet hip-width apart and at the distance away Aysha had indicated before he slowly slid his back down the wall. His knees were almost at a 45-degree angle, he held for five seconds, his quads burned but it felt good to be strengthening his body again.
