Chapter 10 - Simon, Sunday

I should have gone to a christening this morning - my cousin Emma’s first child, which would make him my second cousin I guess. But Dad was invited, and although he’s a bit unreliable about family stuff I didn’t want to risk bumping into him. It’s been so long since I last saw him I’m not even sure I’d know what to say to him. I can hardly remember why we stopped speaking, I guess it must have been out of loyalty to Mum, although as I was 25 at the time I guess I could have been more grown-up about it. But I always was a bit of a Mummy’s boy, but nobody was surprised. Nick still speaks to him occasionally, although I think he only does that to prove some kind of point to me and Mum. Well, he’s welcome to, I don’t want to have to make small talk with the post mistress.
And anyway, I can’t remember the last time I saw Emma - grandpa’s funeral maybe? Although come to think of it I’m not sure she went, she’s a bit sensitive about those kind of things, or so her mother likes to claim. Maybe I haven’t seen her since her wedding? God, what day that was! We couldn’t avoid going, it would have just been rude not to, so we spent all day on edge waiting for Dad to turn up. Mum was so tense she was knocking back the drink in a way that I’ve never seen her do before, and then she fell over during the hokey-cokey and it all got a bit mad. She was upset and Auntie Maggie had to go and rescue her from the toilet. I think she might have broken the door down. Anyway, Mum was dragged out sobbing, her hat all askew and the front of her dress all wet. Thank God Maggie doesn’t drink and could sort it all out - Nick and I had been getting on each other’s nerves all day and I’d drunk too much. I seem to remember him snarling at me to go fuck myself as we left the church, and we pretty much avoided each other for the rest of the day, which was quite an achievement considering how small the village hall was. I don’t think we’ve ever spoken about it since, but you can feel us all tensing whenever someone mentions Emma or weddings, as if any minute the whole sordid story might be retold.
I wish Nick and I were better friends, but somewhere in our teens we stopped confiding in each other and we’ve never managed to get that closeness back. I wonder if it was because he knew he was gay and didn’t want to tell anyone? He must have kept so much of his life secret at that time, no wonder he couldn’t wait to leave home and go to university, and no wonder we rarely saw him at home after that. Of course Mum was gutted - her baby boy a poof? What would the neighbours think?! Dad of course didn’t care, but then I think he’d already started having his affairs by then and was distancing himself from the family anyway. At one point Mum blamed Nick for Dad’s affairs - she had some mad theory about how Dad was punishing her for making Nick gay, by sleeping with the lady from the Co-op. Poor Nick, he hardly knew what to do, so he called her every name under the sun and left. I don’t think they spoke for two years after that. I really must phone him.

So this morning I ended up taking Mum out. She’d phoned before nine, just to check that I’d not gone behind her back to see Dad I guess. She sounded a bit flat, and although she never mentioned the christening I could tell she was sad to have missed it, and was concerned she’d never get to play the proud grandma at one of her own grandchildren’s christenings. Poor Mum, the odds aren’t looking good. But typically we never spoke about it, and instead just chatted about the weather and what we’d done the day before. She made no mention of the neighbours, so hopefully that storm’s blown over as well. It’s bound to blow up again when we need it least.
Anyway, I had no plans. Well, a half-hearted plan to have lunch with Jim, which neither of us really expected to honour and which I’d pretty much forgotten. So after Mum hinted rather unsubtley I agreed to meet her at the Sunday market, then go for lunch somewhere. I haven’t got much time for markets. I’m too lazy to see the beauty beneath the dirt - I want shiny new things, not battered old things that need some work. When have I got time to that kind of thing? And actually I’m not very good at it, none of the family are. We always had people in to do that kind of thing, so we never got shown how to do it - Dad would never let us interrupt the decorator with our stupid questions, because he was paying for his time and that needed to be spent painting, not showing small boys how to apply emulsion. And there was no point asking Dad as he wouldn’t have known anyway. So we grew up without a lot of the skills that might have been useful in later life. True, I can make a sponge that the WI would be proud, but somewhere along the way that became the kind of skill I didn’t want to boast about.

By the time I got to the market Mum had already found some china, none of which matched and none of which looked worth any more than she’d paid for it. I’m not sure why she needed more teacups, didn’t she already have dozens? But at twenty pence each she simply couldn’t leave them behind. They’ll end up in a cupboard until after she dies when Nick and I will just through them out, neither of us certain if we’ve ever seen them before. I wish she wouldn’t, but it’s impossible to tell her to stop, as she just thinks you’re trying to spoil her fun. So I obediently carried her shopping, all the time trying to steer her away from anything I didn’t want her to buy. But she doesn’t miss a thing, and pretty quickly we had more stuff than I could carry. Why she needed two glass jelly moulds is anyone’s guess. I wonder if she’s made jelly since we were at primary school? You don’t as an adult, well I certainly haven’t. There’s something very childish about it, but not in a way that makes me want to rediscover it. But who knows, perhaps next time I’m at Mum’s she’ll be serving it for tea?
I finally managed to get Mum away from the stalls with the promise of lunch. But first we had to get the stuff she’d bought back to hers - there was simply no way she’d manage to drag it all back herself, and I didn’t want to take half of it home with me in case I couldn’t resist the urge to chuck it in the first skip I came across. So we jumped on the bus and headed back to hers.
The first thing I noticed was the apple tree, and the appalling mess she’d made of it - a branch poked over the fetch, all splintered and broken as if a giant had bitten through it. The garden around it was trampled and scattered with leaves and fruit, and the fence was scraped and dented. God knows how she did it, or frankly why, but she’d clearly chopped the branch off with something blunt and inadequate for the job. I was terrified of meeting the neighbours, so I kept my head down until we were in the house. Probably best not to mention it, not unless I wanted another chorus of how difficult it was not having a man round the house. I always took those kind of conversations as some kind of hint, but I’m just not good at that kind of thing so it usually takes tears to get me to help out. Does that make me a bad son?
We ended up eating lunch in the pub round the corner. Mum doesn’t really do pubs. She’s not really that sociable, and I don’t think she likes that many people, so going out is a bit of a nightmare for her. And I guess she’s from a generation where women would never dream of going and eating out on their own. I’m no one to judge, it’s a skill I’ve yet to acquire myself. But the pub is modern and anonymous - a family pub in an area of middle-class families. Hell with beer basically, but they do a nice roast, which is something me or Mum would never bother to do for ourselves in a million years. Once we’d found a table sufficiently far away from the smokers and the kids, Mum relaxed, tensing up again briefly when the waitress came to take our order. From there on in it was small talk all the way - neither of us were stupid enough to mention the christening, which also meant Nick was a bit of a no-go area too. And she knew better than to ask me too much about myself. For my part I didn’t want to get into the whole thing with the neighbours, so we ended up talking an awful lot about the weather and the food. Thankfully the vegetables hadn’t been boiled to within an inch of their life, so Mum got to complain about that, which made her happy, and gave her a good excuse to decline pudding.
I walked her back home, stopping for a cup of tea and the inevitable conversation about the tree. I think she realises she made a mess of it, but is too stubborn to admit it, and would never apologise to the neighbours in a million years. I promised to go back next week and tidy it up, which gives me a week to work out what on earth you do to a tree that’s been butchered by a mad woman with an axe. If I’d had any sense I’d have taken the axe away with me, but you can’t carry an axe on the bus can you!