Mum’s the word
Jeremy Clarke
Sharon’s chucked in her job as a child protection officer and gone to live in Birmingham. She’s met a chap there who measures up to her ideal, and she wants to have lots of his babies. She had to come back the other day, however, for a hospital appointment. Sharon’s barren, and her only hope of having lots of babies has been to persuade NHS doctors to have a hand in it. They’ve agreed to this — as long as she gives up smoking. It was only a flying visit, she assured me on the phone. But as we haven’t seen each other for ages, would I like to come over for a spot of tea with her and her brother and their new lodger?
Her brother was standing on the front doorstep smoking as I pulled up outside the house. He was just standing there in the mellow 5 o’clock sunshine, peaceful and accepting: a Bench-wearing Buddha with sideburns. The guess was that he was taking refuge on the doorstep from Sharon, who is an alpha male and likes to reassert her dominance over the household, even on a flying visit.
I got out of the car. ‘You should see our new lodger,’ he said, squinting ferociously, as though blinded. Now Sharon’s brother is famously good-looking — the whole family is. I have yet to see him out with a sexual partner who didn’t make me stare in disbelief. So if he rated her that highly, then she must be something. ‘She’s 20,’ he added, as if it was an outrage. ‘Go and have a look.’ I went inside. In the kitchen were three very striking blondes, each with a glass of wine to hand. Sharon was wrestling the cork out of another bottle. Her brother’s latest eye-popping girlfriend was at the long pine kitchen table, studying a laptop screen. And there also at the table was the new lodger: petite, baby-faced, her straw-coloured hair spilling out from under a badly judged trilby hat. She was speaking with an Australian accent into her mobile phone. Sharon’s hugs are either dismissively cursory or it’s like being caught in the death grip of a predatory spider. It depends entirely on how much she’s had to drink. Either way it’s amazing how insubstantial she is for somebody who has such a devastating effect on civil society.
I disentangled myself and looked at her. Her eyes were bright and tragic. She held out an upraised palm for my inspection. There were three main points of interest. One, the longest fingers I’ve ever seen on a woman. Two, the tips of two of them were fluorescent with nicotine. Three, a pair of hypodermic needles encased hygienically in clear plastic lay across her lifeline. In these, apparently, resided her future maternal happiness, because childlike she was clutching them tightly in her fist, even as she cooked the tea. ‘One injection at six, the other at midnight,’ she said in a slurred whisper.
‘Why the whispering?’ I said. She jabbed an angry thumb sideways at the new lodger. ‘Nosy bitch!’ she hissed. The new lodger, who was pretending to be more absorbed by her phone conversation than was actually the case, I felt, interrupted it to shoot Sharon a look of sugar-coated venom. Evidently, I’d walked on in the middle of Act III.
Sharon and I sat down at the kitchen table to eat the ‘yellow label’ pizza (reduced in price because the product is at, or past, its sell-by date). I sat next to the new lodger; Sharon next to her brother’s latest girlfriend, who has lately found herself in the Pudding Club, and is very happy to be in it, in spite of Sharon’s brother’s insistence that she terminate her membership forthwith.
Sharon’s brother’s latest girlfriend adroitly made the best of the few advantages afforded by a dull middle-aged presence at the table by presenting it with the first scanned image of the foetus that was growing inside her. I held the flimsy printout with all due reverence. I wanted to say, ‘Ah!’, but couldn’t make my insincerity stretch that far, and I passed the indistinct image of what looked like a dead mouse across to Sharon without comment. She, from sheer jealousy, refused to even touch it, let alone look at it.
‘How come you’ve left it so long to become a mother, then, Sharon?’ said the new lodger, draping herself all over me, on the pretext of getting a better look at the tiny image. She might have looked like a bantamweight, this new Aussie lodger, but she was in there trading punches with a wily old heavyweight. And the gloves were well and truly off. It was magnificent. Even Sharon’s brother’s girlfriend, no slouch herself with the innocent barb, frankly goggled in admiration.
Sharon’s brother drifted in to feast his eyes on the new lodger and to see if it was safe for him to come back in. A brief glance at his sister’s bowed head told him it was not. He drifted out again.
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