The bedroom felt like an old, reliable friend. Maureen looked at the pillows and the mirror and almost whispered to them, speaking out her frustration. ‘I mean it when I say I’m lonely,’ she said to herself, ‘it’s true in the night, but when they come I don’t like it.’ The sentence mortified her but she added more. ‘When they take off their coats I feel mugged by everything they expect.’ She knew it wasn’t fair, that in her mind she lived like a servant when in reality she ruled like a queen. But she couldn’t change, she would never change, and it was her habit now to say they were ‘hurting’ her if they complained. ‘And why would anybody hurt a person who lived on her own?’ She could tell Esther thought this was some kind of strategy to get her own way.
‘See the family: I could run a mile.’ This is what she used to say to Anne next door. ‘I could see them far enough.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Anne said. ‘Don’t you enjoy your family? They all seem so nice.’
‘They’re a handful, Anne. I’m not kidding you. It’s not easy. You don’t know the half of it.’
For years her children had witnessed it on their mother’s face, how put-upon she felt by them, how aggressed by their basic wishes. They tried to understand it. Family life, to her, was a complication best left to television. She liked greeting cards because she could buy them on her own and send them on her own, and
she despatched all responsibility when she posted those cards.
The soaps were her haunting counsel. She watched them and got ideas about how the members of her own family were less than they should be. She said it broke her heart, but, in a sense, she liked it when people let her down. It made her feel justified. Alexander was an alcoholic and a genuine worry to everyone, and there was nothing she could do. He was angry and messed up, his life was out of shape, so he just blamed his mother. She could see that. The other two, Ian and Esther, confused her much more. They had spent years trying to supply her with a new perspective, to little effect. They kept trying and they kept hoping their lives would please her but Maureen had formed a heady resistance to their idea of family bliss. Esther reminded Ian it was a condition she suffered as well as a decision she made. And if she ever took the trouble to compare herself to her own mother, she would see that the same pattern had been repeated. Old Sadie had liked who she was with her friends but not who she was with her family. She hardly ever invited them round, and she, too, hated finding her cushions on the floor. Maureen sometimes felt like a person being punished for no reason.
Stanley said people didn’t really know her. Maureen remembered Esther repeating what he’d said as if it was news from God. ‘Your mother used to be light-hearted and full of fun,’ he also said. Maureen didn’t want to hear it from Esther, but it was true. The children think they know everything but they don’t know the half of it. ‘I used to make cakes and there’d be flour everywhere,’ Maureen said to herself in the bedroom, ‘and halfway to Carlisle he’d open his piece-box and find these perfect wee cakes.’ Maureen knew that Esther had brought it up — what Stanley said — in the hope that the information would boost her mother’s self-esteem.
It’s one of Esther’s favourite expressions, said Maureen, and some of us don’t need boosts and don’t want self-esteem, we just want peace and quiet at the weekend and for the past to stay in the past.
She counted to ten in front of the window. Ian was coming down the path with his daughter and his face was serious, but when they came in she heard the usual cheers. Esther always had to kiss everyone and now she would be greeting her older brother. She’d be lifting the little one and squeezing the poor wee thing to death. It would soon be over, Maureen thought, laying down the coats. The audio books were by the bed and Maureen looked forward to that. You get to a certain age and it’s just too late to start changing. ‘Hello, son,’ she said when Ian entered the bedroom with more coats.
‘Cold out there,’ he said.
‘Well, that’s November for you.’ She looked down to see her newest grandchild padding in behind her father. ‘And look at this wee lady with her chubby face. Ah, Bonnie. Come here till I see you, darlin’; take your shoes off now, there’s a good girl.’ Bonnie came waddling forward in her winter wraps with her fingers out like twigs, and, when she lifted her, a real smile broke over Maureen’s face. She patted down the fluffy hair and smelled the winter on her granddaughter’s cheeks. ‘Have you been a good girl? Have you? Have you been a good girl? Well, Bonnie, my wee pet, I’ve got a treat for you, so I have. Yes I have.’
‘Don’t give her sweets, Mum,’ Ian said.
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘No. We don’t give her sweets.’
‘Oh, don’t be silly. Just a wee sweetie, eh. She deserves a wee sweetie just like any other kid.’
Ian wondered why she didn’t just say ‘fuck you’. It would’ve
been easier in a way if she had. Fuck you and your plans and your decisions that are different from mine. Fuck them. And fuck you for coming in here thinking I should respect them, because I don’t, I think they’re nonsense. As well as that I think you lot are all out of touch with normality. All children want a sweetie and what kind of grandmother would I be if I denied my wee granddaughter a sweetie? It’s you and Esther. You’re that stressed you can’t let your kids be at peace.
Why didn’t she just say it and be done with it?
She pulled open the drawer and picked out a bar of Highland Toffee and a Kinder Surprise. She didn’t hand them to Bonnie but placed them on top of the chest of drawers next to a framed picture of Stanley and the children at Butlin’s in 1973. She turned to Ian to see what he was going to do about it and he flushed before he spoke.
‘Mum,’ he said. ‘There’s a reason we don’t want the kids to have these things. It’s because we had four or five fillings each before we left primary school. And because our dad had his first heart attack at the age of fifty-two. So it’s not really a matter of whether Bonnie
deserves
a wee sweetie, because what she deserves much more, my daughter, is to not grow up with a mouthful of scabby teeth and then have heart disease at an age when healthy people are thinking about running a marathon. That’s my choice as a parent. Okay? Is that all right with you?’
‘Oh shut up, Ian. I’m not in the mood today.’
Bonnie emerged from the bedroom with the chocolate egg and Esther could see that Ian and their mother had already had an argument. She noticed the slow progress of Maureen’s befuddlement and a slight limp as she made her way to the kitchen counter and handed the plates to Jack. She wished she could just go
and hug her mother and tell her this was a happy occasion but it was years too late. That’s what happens. She looked at Maureen as if she suddenly had a clear idea of her and took the plates herself from Jack. ‘I’ll help you, Jigger,’ she said.
‘This Parmesan’s smelly,’ Scott said.
‘Don’t say smelly, Scooter.’ That was Esther. She didn’t like the boys to use words like smelly or toilet. Something could smell strange or you might visit the loo, but smelly was definitely out of bounds and so was belly when you could say tummy.
‘It was all they had in Tesco’s,’ Maureen said.
‘You’re better buying it fresh,’ Scott said. He always got more sophisticated when his father wasn’t there. Esther considered it a sign of maturity or something, probably meaning he would cope better at university. They sat down. Maureen wasn’t eating what was on her plate. At times she thought she should have tried much harder to keep Stanley. Tried much harder to please him and make him happy. When it came to it, she let him go as if her disappointment in him — her sudden hatred — was simple confirmation that men weren’t worth a button. She liked to tell herself that everything would have been different with the children if she’d had a man in the house. Perhaps Stanley would’ve protected her against their need to be special all the time.