Another Mother's Son Read Free

banging.
    A lamp stands on the sill among dog-eared paperbacks with the shade touching its reflection in the window. I switch it on. Nothing in the house keeps its own space. Objects overlap like memos on a crowded noticeboard.
    I write a text to Ross: This must not happen again . I erase it and send: Where are you?
    I open the fridge door and look inside, shut it again. The bread bin contains half a granary loaf. I take two slices and slot them into the toaster.
    There have been too many parts to the day, each element differentiated and with its own particular hue. All they have in common is myself – and that is not enough to bind them together. On the contrary, my presence obstructs the flow. Deborah Lupton bounces along full of good cheer. She sutures the lives of the twins, the younger Luptons and Mr Lupton, the Lloyd-Barron Academy Parents’ Association, the drop-in centre for the over seventies, the Woodcraft Folk – and in the process makes a seamless whole of her own life. Ginny Lu, in a quieter way, is the same. These women are not merely good sorts, they are organising principles. The episodes that make up their days and weeks, whatever the contents, are all stamped by the Lupton/Lu in-house franking machine whereas I scrabble around guessing the correct postage for each and every item. When I get it wrong I imagine a scrawl across the outside of the package indicating the insufficiency or a recommendation that the mail be returned to sender.
    I still see myself as a student type, a kind of girl hoodlum, though, apart from the tattoo of a snail shell on my left shoulder and the naturally back-combed hair, that notion hardly stands up. Some wised-up friend said I looked like Patty Hearst and, once I had found out who Patty Hearst was, it pleased me to be linked to someone who had been kidnapped by an urban guerrilla group and taken part in a San Francisco bank robbery. A London girl with a short upper lip and wide-apart eyes, I liked the conjured-up image of glamorous instability and, before the days of Wikipedia, went to the trouble of looking up Stockholm syndrome.
    I have an ex-husband, Randal Doig, and an insecure job working as an archivist in the Corporate Archives of Transport for London. I am the mother of three sons. We live together in Dairyman’s Road, Palmers Green, in a thirties house with small-paned bay windows up and down, red tiles and a roof light, invisible from the street, that looks slantwise up to the sky.
    In my lunch hour, in fine weather, I lie on the grass in St James’s Park. The sun feels the same on my skin as it did when I was nineteen, my eyes shut behind a pair of sunglasses.
    The toaster emits a sooty smell and switches itself off. The popping-up mechanism has not worked since Ross forced in a whole hot cross bun. I look around for the meat skewer.

4
    MY SONS WERE all born during John Major’s government and I often wonder whether that has had an effect on them. The privatisation of British Rail, the introduction of Sunday trading, the Dangerous Dogs Act, the Cones Hotline, Back to Basics – the tone of that administration seeped into their minds and made them obstructive. As a predictor, someone’s birth prime minister must be as good as an astrological sign.
Bonar Law 1922–3: Renowned for your excellent memory and business acumen, you may be depressed at losing your grip. Don’t worry. Soon you will be ready for the next step. Try growing a moustache.
    Liz Savaris, my best schoolfriend, who now lives in Aberystwyth, does not think much of my theory. Birthwise, we both scraped into Alec Douglas-Home’s term of office and so far have not come up with any points of reference, though
The Way the Wind Blows
, the title of A.D.-H.’s autobiography, is sufficiently fatalistic to suit most circumstances. Certainly, my own life has seen the odd twister. I call Liz whenever I need to clamour for sympathy, which she gives wholeheartedly in a