Rocks in the Belly (7 page)

‘Why do you have metal on your teeth?'

‘To make them prettier. Did you hear what I said?'

I nod but I'm thinking his teeth look much uglier than teeth without metal. He sighs and I panic maybe he can read my mind for real.

‘And how do you feel about everything at home? Because that's important isn't it — how you feel?'

I shrug.

He licks his lips really fast. ‘Do you know what I think?'

He asks a lot of silly questions. I shrug.

‘I think a special little boy like you who's burnt his hand and done these things to my office is expressing something sad. I think little boys who do things like you've done are having lots of feelings which aren't their fault. They just need a bit more looking after. Feelings are hard. I don't think what you've done to my office is your fault. I think it's a bad thing to do, don't misunderstand me. I think what you've done is a little bit bad, but it certainly doesn't mean you're a bad boy. That's important to remember. Do you think you can remember that? Good. And do you know what else?'

I'm looking at his carpet. I shrug.

‘I think it's very sad but children are sometimes the only ones brave enough to show the feelings that are really going on at home. Like a barometer. You know what one of those is?
Course you do
, clever kid like you. So you're very brave, you see? Not bad.
Look
at me.
You aren't bad.
You might do bad things sometimes, like all children, and grown-ups. But your mummy and daddy still love you very much.'

I nod but with my eyes still locked on to the same spot on the carpet, like my eyesight has been glued there and they're going to have to cut the piece out to get me home.

‘No doubt they're fond of Robert,' he's saying, ‘but they love you much more than they love him — what. What did that face mean?'

I shrug.

‘Yes, it is,' I say, looking out the window at the weather Mum's pointed at. She's trying to spread her toast but the toast isn't toasted enough and her knife is tearing the bread.

‘Here, take this one, it's already spread.'

She looks at me, her knife still going, spreading the butter on the mount of Venus on her palm, the part that's supposedly commensurate with your libido, your tenderness. She looks down at her buttered hand like someone did it to her, brings it up to her face and licks at it while the knife butters her hair.

I look at my own mount of Venus and the burn scar across it — push my chair away. She watches me go to the sink and wring out the dank rag. I come back and wipe the butter from her hand and she lets me, her face concerned. The butter is on the rag now and in between my fingers, and the rag stinks so much that our hands need cleaning.

Her face is impassive but there's a watchfulness in her eyes. She's still in there somewhere underneath all that dying. I can see it. Feel it. And it's this bit that I want to get at. To help. Even if it's also all that's left of the woman I blame.

‘I need …' she says. ‘We …' She stands up.

If that black walnut is in one easily recognisable part of her head it's the part that speaks. She's always missing the key word in a sentence, never the contextual. It isn't grammar she's lost, but the things in life. The important words, names of people she's supposed to have loved, the things she needs.

‘The …' Her mouth open, a finger pointing to the cupboard door. ‘Need to …' She stops, her body folding back into the chair and slumping those dejected few inches further. She shakes her tumour.

‘Talk around it, Mum. If you can't find the one word just talk around it, like they said.' She's frowning at herself but pointing at the cloth. ‘Clean? You want to clean the cupboard?'

If this were a game show, I just won the steak knives.

I look at the cupboard door and sigh. I don't want to spend the today part of my life cleaning a larder. Although, in the not-too-distant future I'll be emptying it alone. Selling up my childhood. Flying back to my safe little life. One ticket. One way.

‘Ok, Mum.'

As I'm finishing the washing-up she comes back with a little toothpaste on her chin and a look on her face like she gave herself a pep-think in the bathroom and she's ready for action. She grins at me and opens today's day on her tablet box, a letter on it denoting each day of the week. I fill a glass for her and she makes a show of taking her medication.

‘Ok,' she says. ‘Clean!' And marches into the larder, starts coming out with cherries in syrup and glass jars of dried lentils; rustybottomed tins, her slippers shuffling across the floor, everything teetering in her grip. She sets them on the table and smiles at me, her eyes twinkling.

‘What are we doing then, Mum?' She comes out with another armful of stuff. ‘Do you have to put them down
there
?'

She looks at me but deposits them on the table and a can of something rolls off and lands on the floor, doesn't move, the
resultant dent holding it still. She grins and vanishes back into the larder again, trying to sing a tune but the words won't come.

‘Mum.' Deep breaths. ‘If you don't tell me what you're doing I can't help, can I.'

She points at the buttery rag next to the dripping tap and I go get it.

‘You want to clean the shelves?'

She shakes her head then disappears back in. I move closer and turn on the light, lean on the wall and fold my arms. She comes out with cereals in Tupperware, old biscuit tins.

I'm trying for nonchalance. Patience. I'm trying for What does it matter?

‘You can't throw this stuff away yet. What are you going to eat every day,
ice-cream
?'

‘No …' She has a longer sentence but leaves it hanging in the air along with all her other unfinished sentences. Along with everything else unsaid. Whatever she was going to say next was left behind in a kidney dish in the operating theatre. Incinerated. That sentence might be soot now in the big chimney rising out of the hospital. Or in the air as dust — a thought that makes me think of a raindrop.

She pulls me over to the table where all the packets of flour and spices and tins and pulses are sitting.

I pick up a little herb jar of rosemary and look at it. ‘Rosemary. What, you've got something against rosemary suddenly? You're throwing it out?'

I just won the car. She comes skittering back with an empty black bin liner.

She's worse today. The insistent unrelenting cancer growing and growing in that tiny space between her skull and brain. Like she's trapped in a prison cell with an inflating bouncy castle. The air compressor running all the time, more air coming in. Her body pressed up against the wall, her ribcage squashed so that she can't
breathe properly. Can't talk properly. She's slowly being squeezed out of her own inner world, the steroids all she's got against the onslaught but the dosage can only go so high.

She's running out of runway in there and we're cleaning out the larder.

Deck chairs — Titanic.

‘Best before … wow!' I say, looking at the rosemary. ‘This is
ancient
!'

I just won the holiday, Mum grinning at me. I pick up the cumin. ‘Bugger me, Mum! You can't even make out the best-before date on this anymore.'

She's giggling but without making a sound, her hand covering part of her mouth, her cardigan off one shoulder.

‘And these cherries went off
eight years ago
! They look like red raisins.'

She's hobbled by laughter and I'm starting to catch a little of it. I pick up the flour. ‘Can flour
even go off
?' She has her legs together and her hands in the prayer position wedged between them like she needs the toilet but I think she's just laughing, her body shaking soundlessly, waiting for the verdict. ‘Five years ago!
Five.
FLOUR! How can flour go off!'

I pick up the packet of falafel mix but I don't tell her the date, I'm just laughing. Really laughing, so that this must be some kind of release and she's letting it out but the tears are running too. She sort of skips into the larder, comes back with other things in her arms, spilling icing sugar on the floor as she goes. Meanwhile I'm going through the dates, announcing them like vintage wines or train times or gym comp. scores. Both of us laughing, a bubble of relief rising up now because perhaps there's still time for Mum and me.

‘Are there antique-food dealers?' I say and a snort comes out from the larder.

I put the radio on and it's some ABBA half-hour, reminding me of sitting at the table, Mum cooking my lunch. The daytimes we had to ourselves while some belligerent foster boy was at school, Dad away at work totting up numbers for clients. Balancing the books.

She's humming tunefully along now, a few of the lyrics coming easily out of her for some reason, and me joining in tunelessly, under my breath.

We bag up the stuff, throwing out things that may have been on these shelves when Dad was here. Things which perhaps sat and looked at him as he went into the larder and did that Dad thing — standing with glazed-over eyes and calling out, ‘Where, love? Where did you say you were hiding it?' And she'd go in and find it without looking, the way he'd looked for it without looking.

I'm laughing along with her but the sadness is coming behind it too because we're throwing away all that history — sending it out the house in a plain black bag. A thought that stops me, makes me look at Mum and her hive of activity. The way she's coming in and out the larder, laughing, smiling, singing, the table filling up with old, faded, out-of-date packaging. Mum stopping to try and make a comment but having to go away again.

It all comes to a black bag in the end.

A DJ starts chatting, a fake smile tainting his voice. I turn the radio down and Mum unloads more stuff, a wet patch at her crotch, which drops me that inch that sadness drops you.

I'm stood here wondering what the rest of the world is doing now. Cars spewing up and down roads and I feel like nobody out there is understanding or living like Mum and I are. That's how it feels to me anyway. It feels like right now, in this moment, only that fragile Mum-type lady and me are really with life. We're the only ones where life is fully hitting home. This being one of those moments when you can feel the record light flashing in the top lefthand corner of your life.

She shuffles out of the larder, holding porridge oats.

‘Come 'ere,' I say and pull her to me, the porridge packet digging into us. I wrap my arms around her and we're there for a second but she laughs and pulls away, goes and sits in a chair and just like that, she's sad and quiet.

Just like that she's through laughing and out into sadness, changing quickly down through the emotional gears. Just the way Robert always did after his accident. The way he could be grinning but with his eyelashes still wet from crying.

Now she's sobbing, holding the porridge like a hot water bottle and I'm asking her what's up, even if my feet are planted on the spot rather than going to comfort her. Her face asking me how this happened. Her tears showing me that she sees it finally, what these best-before dates signify. That she's lost control. She's getting left behind. Running to keep up but life is moving on without her.

Everything is going to go on without her. Even I am going to have to go on without her.

‘It's ok, we're setting it straight, Mum.' I turn to the table of things, wanting to meet her eyes but failing. ‘Look,' I say, picking up a box of instant mash, ‘this is only three months out of date, can't throw that out for at least a decade.'

There's a smile for a moment but it has tears running over it. She licks her lips and one of those tears goes inside her. Icing sugar and flour on her cardigan. Me standing here fidgeting in the mixture of messes on the floor.

She's not the only one pressed up against the wall by her illness.

The doorbell goes and I stumble away through the house, running a hand along the corridor walls. I peek through the security eyelet and it's Mandy, the social worker — older, but there she is. She was forever in and out of our house, the conduit between our family and the foster-care system. Plus there's a man behind her,
about my age, maybe older, holding a big bunch of flowers.

I look down at my clothes, raising a hand to brush the antique food off but it's a lost cause. I open the door and they bustle in with their happy rhetoric.

‘Hello, how are you, this is Marcus. You remember Marcus!'

I remember Marcus. I spent two hours up a tree because of Marcus. Angry Marcus who liked to put pins facing up out of my bedroom carpet.

‘How's your mum?' she says, all earnest and serious.

I lead them through the house rather than stand here being looked at. ‘We're just clearing out the larder, actually. Most of the food's from the Jurassic era.'

‘Oh well, you can still eat that for years yet!' Mandy says and Marcus adds some quip but I don't catch it.

Mum's still in the chair clutching the porridge when we come in, her eyes lost to something out the window, far away.

‘I'll leave you guys to catch up,' I tell them, unable to watch Mum fail to navigate the clear discrepancy between what she was and what she's capable of now. These people knew her when she was that strong, forthright woman. Now look at her, whittled down to almost nothing. Threadbare.

I shut the front door behind me and march up the hill, hell-bent on cigarettes. Enough is enough, this isn't the time for martyrdom. Even the condemned get their smokes and their phone call.

The cloud is low but intermittent, the sun peeking through, the light changing every few seconds and the temperature making me lament the absence of a coat. Just a t-shirt with flour all over it. I look like a cocaine addict who sneezed.