Shining On (2 page)

And,
she said (glaring at me because the woman is an experienced enough mother to hear you thinking a digression about lacrosse),
and
I hope you are listening, because when I say I am not going to do it anymore, I mean
I am not going to do it anymore.
She glared at each one of us in turn— a kind of equal-opportunity glare.

And one last thing,
she said, in an even scarier, quieter voice, and I risked a sideways glance to see if Francis Ford Coppola was in the wings directing this masterful perfor-mance.
From this moment on,
she continued, I am deaf to whining. Deaf to any annoying tone of voice
you three
— she shot a relatively benign look at Dad just to let him know he was off the hook on this particular issue, assuming he backed her up, that is—
can dream up.
Screaming will only be acknowledged if accompanied by bones sticking out of skin or hatchet actually
buried
in skull.

Moe was shuffling his feet a little now, and sneaking peeks at his watch because his teacher hated it when any-one was late to school.

She glared at him and he jumped to attention like someone out of the Queen's Guard.

Right, she said, surveying her troops and appearing a little calmer now. Any questions?

Nobody dared say anything, except, of course, Alec, who could smarm for England and has not lived fifteen
years on this earth without picking up a trick or two along the way. He had stopped lounging against the wall, which is what he does with most of his waking hours, stood up fairly straight, plastered this sickening look of sincerity across his wily mug and said, OK, Mum, fair cop, we're with you on this. I'm only surprised you didn't make a stand a long time ago.

Then, just to prove she wasn't born yesterday either, Mum made this kind of snorting sound and rolled her eyes, indicating rejection of smarm, and said, I can't tell you how pleased I am that you approve, Alec. Now everyone better get a move on because school starts in twenty minutes and
you
are going to have to figure out how to get there.

As one, we turned to Dad, who was now trying to make himself two-dimensional and slide behind the fridge, which would have been easier if he hadn't been six-foot-four and built like a rugby scrum half. But Dad is a man who knows when to fold in poker, like when all he's got in his hand are twos, threes, and fours of different colors. He folded gracefully.

Come on then, he said in a resigned voice. Pile in. We'll leave Mum alone for now and give her some time to collect herself.

Some time to collect myself? Mum said.
Some
time
to collect myself?
How kind, how fantastically kind of you. Why, I can't think
how
to show my appreciation short of taking out a full-page ad in the
effing Financial Times.
(She practically screamed that last bit.) But, say what you will. I
now have
the rest of my life
to myself, and it's you suckers who are going to have to cope.

She smiled at us then, a genuine smile, all warm and mumsy and loving, and kissed us each in turn, the way you'd kiss people who were trooping off to a firing squad.

Have a lovely day, all of you. See you later.

We hated it when she turned all nice and snatched the moral high ground out from under us. But it was getting late so we all crammed into Dad's car, elbowing and kicking and biting each other like captives in a government crocodile-breeding initiative, and headed off to be late to school.

Naturally there was a fair bit of conversation in the car about Mum's little episode.

She's bluffing, Alec said. She's probably just getting her period.

I wouldn't be so sure, smart-arse, Dad said. She didn't look like she was bluffing to me. And just a tip for later life—don't ever even
think
those words in the vicinity of a woman or you'll find yourself castrated before you can say oops.

Moe grinned and I sniggered, knowing our dear big brother's future was definitely going to be bollock-free.

Anyway, we got to school late, and all of us got detention, except Moe, who has a professional way of looking like he's about to burst into tears. By lunchtime we'd all for-gotten that we even had a mum at home, what with all the gossip and sexual harassment and who's not talking to who
and have you noticed who
she
's hanging around with these days to talk about.

After school, Moe and I caught a ride home with Esther's mum, who wears flowery clothes and acts like a proper mum, asking if you're hungry and doling out crisps and having tissues with her at all times, and never screaming
shut the bloody **** up!
at her children like someone else I can think of. Not that I'd want her as my mum, due to her being an irony-free zone, not to mention harboring a fervent wish for Esther to grow up to be a Person of Substance, an expression she actually uses in public, which explains why Esther looks so long-suffering and wants to be a flight attendant.

My mum always said she wanted me to be a ballerina, which is her idea of the world's funniest joke because I'm not exactly small and could be two ballerinas if they cut me in half and I had four legs. Moe wants to be a vet, like every other eight-year-old, and Alec just wants to get out of school, drink alcohol, go clubbing, get his driver's license, get a car, and have a girlfriend who'll let him have sex with her all the time, though not necessarily in that order.

But I'm getting off the point here.

We stayed at Esther's for supper, dutifully notifying Mum so she couldn't shout that she'd gone to all the trouble to make us a nice blah blah blah with three kinds of blah blah blah on the side and we weren't there to eat it and hadn't even had the courtesy to phone.

She seemed pleased to hear that we weren't coming
home for dinner, and it wasn't until I hung up that I realized she hadn't said the usual—if you're not home by seven, you're toast—but I took it as tacit and made sure Esther's mum gave us a ride home. We walked in the door at ten to seven, which I thought was a pretty good touch, just in case someone's watch might be running a few minutes fast.

Mum was on the phone when we got there, talking to her business partner, Jo. They'd had a lot of interest from America after the article that was written about them in
Country Life,
and apparently antique garden implements were all the rage among rich Americans who had too much money and not enough antique garden implements.

I noticed immediately that the breakfast table looked exactly the same as it had when we all left for school that morning, with dirty dishes and open jars of marmalade and crumbs everywhere, and I thought Mum was going a bit far to prove a point, given how much she hates mess of any kind, but I thought I'd better play along and so started clearing up. I shouted for Alec to come help, but he said he didn't give a monkey's whether it was cleared up or not, and since we were in charge we should be able to live in squalor if squalor was what we liked.

As squalor went, this was pretty tame, and anyway I had homework to do and got distracted by Hooligan wanting to go out for a walk and since Mum wasn't giving orders any-more, I let him out in the garden and even he looked con-fused that no one was shouting at him to stay away from the herbaceous borders.

Hey, Moe, I hissed. Get this. And I pointed to Hoo out in the garden doing a poo the size of Mont-Saint-Michel by Mum's
Nicotiana sylvestris,
and Moe's eyes widened and we both thought, cool!

After that we forgot about Hoo and watched some tele-vision while pretending to do homework and in the com-mercial breaks I managed to write a whole essay entitled “The Egyptians: Why They Became Extinct.”

After the initial shock, this new regime was turning out to be much more relaxing than life with Mussolini. Oops, did I say a fanatic Italian dictator? I meant Mum.

When Dad finally got home he looked a little grumpy about no dinner being on the table, but it wasn't long till he got the hang of things and filled a soup bowl full of Frosties and sighed really loud a few times to make sure everyone knew he wasn't thrilled about the new order. Moe looked at Dad's Frosties and, because no one said no, he had some too.

Over the next week or so, Mum moved into her office in the garden, which she'd had the foresight to make Dad build with its own shower room and enough of a kitchen to survive on. Also, as she put it, there was no way she was going to step foot in the kitchen until we four called pest control. She still came to say good night to us, a little like a fond auntie, and sometimes we hung around and did our homework in her office because every place in the whole house seemed to have something messing up the surfaces where you might want to put a book. And she didn't seem
to mind us coming in as long as we didn't bother her or leave wrappers on the floor. Which was tricky, given that all our meals seemed to come in wrappers these days. She was on the phone a lot, and having meetings with her partner and smiling more than we'd seen in ages.

Which was great.

Only, after a few weeks of this, us kids were starting to look at each other and think, hey, fun's fun, but there are no clean clothes in the whole house and we've run out of cereal for breakfast and tea, and speaking of tea, there's only one manky box of teabags that came free from Tesco about a hundred years ago and Dad's taken to drinking in-stant coffee, which puts him in an even worse mood than he is naturally. Also, the dog needs brushing, the radiators make a horrible noise, and every envelope that arrives has
For Your Urgent Attention
written on it in red.

So we sat down that Saturday at what had once been the breakfast table but now looked like that exhibit at the zoo, filled with half-eaten meals and
Rattus norvegicus
proba-bly written on a brass plaque somewhere. I noticed the two goldfish in the bowl on top of the fridge for the first time in ages, and it was clear no one else had noticed them either, considering that they had given up swimming some time ago and taken up floating on the surface. Moe was wearing the cleanest of his shirts, which had ketchup spilled down the front and a chip actually stuck to it, Dad had gone out to have breakfast alone with the newspaper at Starbucks, and Alec and I were drinking blueberry cordial, which was
the only thing left to drink in the house since we ran out of teabags and the milkman stopped coming.

OK, guys, I said. I think it's time to start begging.

Moe looked annoyed. But we're doing perfectly well without any help, he said, digging into a bowl of recently thawed peas from the freezer with some week-old takeaway curry mixed in.

Alec said he was going to be sick and Moe should be taken into care, and they began to shout at each other and Alec stormed out, but I called him back because it was so obvious to all of us that something had to be done. We managed to be civil to each other long enough to write a letter setting out our terms of surrender. Here's what we wrote:

I typed the letter up on Dad's laptop, set it in a nice curly font, and after I printed it out we all signed it and drew
hearts on it and so forth to suck up, and then we slipped it under the door of the studio and went back into the house and got to work.

It took all day, so it wasn't a bad thing that we didn't hear back from her right away. We scrubbed the floors and the walls, the kitchen and the bathroom, we swept off all the junk piled on every surface and separated out the bills and left them neatly stacked, and Dad paid them when he got home. Moe cleaned out the refrigerator and Alec and I went up to the shop with a lifetime's supply of pocket money and bought food—not the stuff we'd been eating all month, like chocolate breakfast bars, but proper food, like chicken parts and green beans and granary bread and cheddar cheese. We cleaned out the fishbowl and flushed both the fish down the toilet, which wasn't inhumane considering their advanced state of fatality, put clean sheets on all the beds and did about fifteen loads of laundry, and even folded it up afterwards. Alec got out the Hoover, but mira-cles have to end somewhere, and when the phone rang and it was his girlfriend, I ended up doing it myself.

It was a not entirely unsatisfying day, if I say so myself. Even the house itself seemed less bad-tempered, like it pre-ferred being clean.

Well, Mum may have suspected something was up when she saw all the black rubbish bags stacked outside by the front door, or she might just have got tired of sleeping on the little daybed in the studio. Or maybe she even missed us. Who knows.

But that night, around ten p.m., we saw lights on in the studio, and later found a handwritten note pushed through the letter box.

It read,
I'll think about it. Love, Mum.

And I guess she thought about it all day Sunday, be-cause it was teatime on Sunday when she finally knocked on the door like a visitor, and when we let her in, she looked around in every room, and nodded every now and then, and finally she sat down at the (immaculate) kitchen table and said, OK, I'll come back.

We all started cheering and surrounded her and hugged and kissed her, but she held up one hand and continued.