Another Mother's Son (3 page)

A SINGLE BED,
desk and cupboard, all of the same blonde imitation wood, are arranged along the length of two walls and stand on a mottled brown carpet. Like a hotel bedroom, Room 8 offers a blank page on which unconnected strangers can write. I feel overwhelmed by everything that might happen to Oliver here and also by the dullness of dull student days. I put down the bags I am carrying and go over to the square, metal-framed window that overlooks the car park.

A middle-aged man trundles two vast suitcases along the paving, his paunch thrust into prominence by the backward drag. The suitcase wheels make a noise like horses clopping in rhythm until they collide. He stops to unlock them, then sets off again. A girl follows. She struggles with an armful of garments, some loose, some enclosed in plastic covers that balloon in the breeze.

‘Are there enough days in the term to wear all those clothes?' I say.

I turn round and see a tall youth wearing my son's grey marl fleece and blue jeans. He is hunched over his phone. Sun-bleached hair flops forwards. He is oblivious to his surroundings. Neither man nor boy, he is in some significant way nothing to do with me, though Oliver's possessions are everywhere – his backpack and bags on the floor, his parka flung on the bed.

The front door bangs again and on the other side of the wall something clatters to the ground. ‘Da-ad. Help me.'

‘She's dropped the lot,' Oliver says and the slip-sliding youth vanishes.

‘I hope it won't be too noisy living so close to the entrance,' I say. ‘Drunken revellers. People knocking on the window if they've lost their key. I remember—'

Oliver interrupts. ‘It doesn't make any difference. They're just rooms.'

This is the case. I am struck by his attitude – and proud of it – though aware that the realism is caused more by his attachment to his phone than by the taking up of a considered philosophical position. One day, the external world and the inner world will vanish, replaced by a series of beeps.

‘What do you want to do?' I try out the lighting; open and shut cupboards and drawers. Raw dust of cut chipboard has settled in crevices. I pick out a long dark hair from a drawer and drop it in the wastepaper basket.

‘I dunno. Unpack. See who's around.'

‘What about eating? Shall we go into town and find some lunch?'

‘No, it's all right. You go home if you like.'

‘Really? You must be hungry, aren't you? We could get fish and chips and brave the beach.'

He shakes his head.

‘Let's go and find the kitchen,' I say. ‘Case the joint.'

‘What? Oh, it'll be obvious.'

I think of my own mother placing a potted scented geranium on the windowsill of my first room at university, the one that looked out onto a brick wall. Later, she folded up the drab bedcover and hid it in a cupboard.

‘OK, then. I may as well go,' I say.

It is only after I have slung my bag over my shoulder and stand dangling the car keys that Oliver comes to and registers what is happening. ‘You leaving, Mum?' He appears perplexed. He puts his phone in the back pocket of his jeans.

‘We could—'

‘I'll see you off.'

I take a last look at the room. I imprint it on my mind for future reference. On the way out, I stoop and pick up a flyer that had been pushed under the door. ‘CEOs and Corporate Hoes,' it says. ‘Come and get raped!' The accompanying line drawing shows a be-suited man with his hand splayed over one of the spherical breasts that tumbles out of a girl's low-cut top. Two champagne flutes brimming with bubbles complete the picture.

‘Charming,' I say, flapping the paper at Oliver. ‘Women's emancipation was for this? We're heading back to the Palaeolithic era. You should report it.'

‘Don't worry about it, Mum. It's just fun.'

We leave the building and make our way between the parked vehicles, Oliver a few paces behind me. When we reach the car I open the boot to check that nothing has been left behind. I turn to Oliver and stretch out my arms for a hug. The goodbye is over. I get in the car, start the engine and reverse between the two large, shiny cars on either side. Oliver stands and watches. As the wheels go forward again, I see him in the rear-view mirror. He is waving; a side-to-side arm wave that would be visible from a departing cruise ship.

I head for London, aware of rain clouds coming from the west and the first drops on the windscreen. The South Downs shrink when approached from the south. Fast cars streak past, their engine noise amplified, trapped between hills. High above, a group of ramblers – tiny figures in brightly coloured cagoules – cross the road bridge. I fiddle with the radio and fail to get a signal. I know what I am going back to. It's as if Ewan hates what's out there, Randal, my ex-husband, said on one occasion. Out where? The world. What? As it is today; to some extent, you hate it. You make no bones about it. Certain aspects, yes, I agreed. Are you blaming me? You're quite negative, Lorna, Randal said. Thanks, I said. Where are you in all this?

I SHOULD NEVER
have mentioned the three poses to Randal. It was a joke, really. Our son, Ewan, sits, head bent, with the angled lamp casting a tight circle of light onto the desk; or, in the same circle of light, with his head resting on his arms; or he lies, a mound in the bed.

For Christ's sake, Lorna, Randal said. Are you suggesting that Ewan deliberately arranges himself in one of these tableaux whenever he hears you coming upstairs? OK, I said. Let's leave it. I was trying for humour. You are, Randal said. I am what? When I come to the house you are, let's say, by the stove, by the sink, or getting stuff out of the washing machine. Thanks, I said. I'm doing all this on my own, don't forget. I always was, even when we lived together. When I came into the front room you were sitting on the sofa sanding the hard skin off your feet. It doesn't prove anything beyond my failure to prick your sluggish conscience. I only did that once, Randal said. Just once and there was a good reason. I was about to run a half-marathon. Where's your father when you go to see him on Saturday? In his chair, I replied. Exactly, Randal said. That's just how people are; boring and predictable. We are copies of ourselves.

He did not convince me. There is more to language than words. Ewan could be saying something to me, though I have no idea what.

I last saw my ex-husband at the beginning of the summer holidays. He was wearing a black V-necked jumper over bare flesh and had grown a millimetre of beard. Same eyes, prominent and stary, with white parts that have stayed clear as he grows older, not bloodshot, nor wobbly, like just set albumen. I watch out for signs of ageing in him. The blue is changeable in colour like spilt petrol on a dark surface. He pressed his face against the glass in the front door and tripped over the loose section of matting on the stairs, as usual. Nothing was said, and yet, afterwards – after he had gone – I felt lonely, as if I had to cope with Ewan on my own. Without being able to identify any palpable signs, I sensed that Randal had begun to distance himself from the problem. The something-must-be-done desperation that afflicted him when Ewan first took up residence in his bedroom had vanished, together with the camaraderie. It was the loneliness that alerted me.

I am back in Dairyman's Road by mid-afternoon. The house is stuck at an earlier hour. The sun has moved round and falls like a golden highway across the remains of breakfast. Ross is at Jude's. I begin to clear up. I have come back too soon. I should have gone to the sea, walked along the front as far as the beach huts, sat on the sloping shingle. Instead I am in Palmers Green, slotting spoons into the cutlery basket of the dishwasher, and will shortly go to visit my father. Saturday tea at the Winchmore Hill flat, Sunday lunch at Dairyman's Road. This is what happens at weekends.

I go upstairs. Up the main flight. Up the space-saver steps. I knock gently and push the door open. The blind over the roof light is down and the room in semi-darkness, lit by the desk lamp.

Ewan's head rests on his arms, his face is hidden. The whiteness of the nape of his neck is exposed by the halogen glow. His hair spills onto his sleeve. He makes no response to the news that Oliver is installed in his student accommodation. Standing in the doorway, I move on to some other subject. He raises his head and makes some kind of reply. I am queen of the banal in my dispatches to Ewan. Luckily, I have a surplus of inconsequential thoughts. I try to avoid subjects that have a bearing on his situation. He set off, like Oliver, and then returned. It is amazing how much might, at a tangent, wound him in some way. I start on something and realise that hidden within is an implied criticism or a reminder of what he is missing.

Hello Lorna, Hope all is well with you and the boys. Is Ollie having fun in Brighton? JFP back from Malaysia – ‘hilarious' as ever. Got the B team to do an ‘egg drop' i.e. drop an egg safely from the roof using drinking straws and masking tape. Cluck, cluck, Whoa! Currently snowed under but should see the light of day in a week or so. R xx

RANDAL DOIG, MY
ex-husband, works for the British subsidiary of a North American precision-engineering company based in South Cambridgeshire. He started there about four years ago – met Charmian. That was his line and he sticks to it, though I believe a back story exists and a degree of plotting. Speedy boarding, Liz calls it, because he was present at the gate and ready to go. I have never really known what he does but the company makes, or rather finds, custom-engineered something something something equipment solutions. I have tried to memorise the phrase and believe it contains the word ‘rotating'. He moved out of our house in Dairyman's Road and into a rented cottage in a North Hertfordshire village that he and Charmian subsequently purchased. He comes to see the boys less frequently now and, apart from his calls from the immediate vicinity, no longer communicates by phone. He has embraced the voiceless media and sends us what are effectively round robins, alive with links to YouTube clips. As the messages sometimes contain work gossip, I guess they also go out to former colleagues who have cleared their desks and decamped. Randal is kind enough to personalise the odd sentence – usually at the beginning and again to close – and these leap out as though in a completely different font, say, Aharoni, in a lake of Tahoma.

Although I am grateful for the crumb of recognition, I feel a crisis of identity followed by hatred and reply to his latest email with the opening sentences of
Wuthering Heights
.

Hello Randal, I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society.

Lorna

Randal will skim read and delete.

In the centre of London, I am as quiet as a hermit. I tune out tourists and marching soldiers, the State Opening of Parliament, the self-important outriders with whistles. The room I occupy is carved out of a corner of a larger one. It has an internal window, half-masked by a Venetian blind with wonky slats that looks onto the main office. Since the window is behind my desk not much looking takes place. I treat it as an aberrant part of the wall. Light comes from overhead fluorescent tubes and some, in the form of daylight, through my open door.

I work alone for much of the time, though there are volunteers at the archive and also members of the public who come by appointment to do their own research. In the last round of spending cuts, funding for extra projects was withdrawn and all the young temporary cataloguers were laid off. The big office is empty and the computers covered over. The concealed forms and dusty surfaces, together with tired paintwork, make it a place of abandonment. It might be a garment factory in abeyance through lack of orders – all stitching suspended. More than half the operations have moved out to new premises on the Greenwich Peninsula. The entire 1920s structure, the cruciform block that rises in steps to a tower above St James's Park underground station, is to be sold off and converted into bespoke luxury apartments. Civic offices, hospitals, magistrates' courts, police stations, libraries – buildings with a function throughout London – have become savings accounts with en-suite bathrooms. By night, the stairwells of these unoccupied premises are vertical bands of light. Windows glint blackly. No one lives behind them.

Every day, enquiries land in my inbox. They are often about relatives who were employed by London Transport but I also receive less mainstream requests. I form a picture of my correspondents from their names and the style of their messages; a picture that disappears rapidly as soon as I clap eyes on them. Not only are the specifics wrong but the whole tone of the person. I sometimes wonder what becomes of these images and whether they people my night-time dreams. Certainly, my dreams are full of individuals I do not know from Adam. It is no different with Chris Orrick whom I collect from reception. He turns out to be bald and agile, a retired operations manager in a freight-haulage company and, he takes pains to inform me, still available as a consultant. I loathe the newly retired. They have a lifetime of work behind them and a pension and continue to forage for employment. Chris is an ambiguous name and this person might have been a woman, though the ‘
Cheers
' made a man more likely. He wears jeans and a red polo shirt and carries a beige mac over his arm. He has a laptop in a case, a stubby fold-up umbrella and a Marks and Spencer's plastic bag that he tells me contains a snack.

I've moved goods all over the world. Logistics have a universal resonance. Now I've retired, I want to write a novel. Nothing too dark. A London Underground disaster would make a good starting point. Cheers, Chris

I explained in my return message the difficulties of calling up unspecific material and recommended that Chris find a topic to focus on. He then homed in on the Bethnal Green crush of 1943, saying it had potential. The lapidary writing style misled me. Chris Orrick talks non-stop. His eyes go everywhere. He has never felt fitter. His contemporaries veg out on sunshine holidays but he, Chris Orrick, has a project. As we walk side by side along the corridors of closed doors, he comments on the cabling that bulges from a broken section of trunking, the high-pitched noise of a lift held open while cartons are unloaded, a missing carpet tile. The first time he halts mid-step, I think he has suddenly realised he has left something on the train, or is meant to be somewhere else. But it is to point out a defect he has spotted. ‘A a a a a a a,' he says, as if he is imitating a motor scooter stuttering to a start, followed by a long low ‘whoo' like wind in a ventilator.