Bright Burning Things(55)

‘Herbie’s back!’ He looks up, disbelieving. How many times have adults told him lies in the last few months? ‘Yesterday – he came back yesterday. Was asking about you!’ He looks back down at the table. ‘I also have Marmie at home, the tabby kitten, remember? The one you chose that day.’

He’s struggling now to contain excitement, I can see the battle playing out: don’t trust her, not safe, and yet some part of him wants to bust out of his skin and run to me and bury himself in me.

‘They like each other. I think poor Herbie is a little bit in love.’

He squirms on his plastic seat. ‘Don’t be silly, Herbie is much too big.’

My heart, a tight fist, lands with a thud in my stomach. Since when has he been pronouncing his perfect ‘r’s? Where has Hewbie gone to? Someone must have spent time with him, correcting his baby speech. I’d like to punch that someone in the face.

‘And dogs can’t fall in love with cats, silly.’

Silly? D’you mean Yaya? Say it, please say it. I will the word to fall out of his beautiful rosebud mouth.

‘They sure look like they’re going to be good pals, though.’

He pretends to be uninterested, picks up a book from the pile on the table, flicks through it and settles on a page with a kangaroo and a baby in its pouch.

‘I made one of those for Marmie!’ blurts out of me.

He raises his face to study me.

‘We went to the park with her and people were laughing and pointing, but you know what I always say…?’

Tommy looks back down at the book, pretending to read.

‘…Who cares what other people think? Let them stare; they have nothing better to do.’ A slight smile plays out on the corner of his mouth. Maureen’s attention shifts; she sits upright, her antenna twitching. What kind of a mother feeds her son with antisocial, verging on paranoiac, sentiments like that? The desire to shock builds in me, Maureen now cast in the same category as all those bossy old biddies who were forever butting in. Heat builds and I want to pull my top off, reveal my toned body to the big worn mattress of a woman, soft in the middle, who’s making surreptitious notes on me. What would a ‘good’ mother say now?

‘Only some people, of course, Tommy. Only some people have nothing better to do than stare.’ Digging myself in deeper here. Why wasn’t I handed a manual on good mothering when he was born? I search and search for memories of my own mother, concrete ones, ones that don’t have that woozy quality. I mean, I was eight, not eight months, when she died, but there’s nothing there, beyond that spinning sensation, beyond my own fabrications. Didn’t they know I didn’t have a clue that day they let me go off on my own from the hospital? The only support I was offered was a harried public-health nurse who said on occasion, ‘Are you sure you’re coping on your own?’ I’d nod, tears in my eyes, greasy hair (probably), and say, ‘Sure, I’m fine, just fine’ – then, in the sixth month, the nurse promptly disappeared. Maureen, teach me things, be like a mother to me so I can know what to do.

After a strained silence Maureen says, ‘Tommy, tell your mummy about school. What did you learn at school today?’

School? I don’t remember giving permission to send him to school. I don’t want him bullied, and he’s too small.

He speaks in a low, colourless voice: ‘Learned to spell “Mummy” and “Daddy”.’

Did he say that on purpose, just to get a rise out of me? My hand itches. I rub it hard. This is exactly why I don’t want him being contaminated; he will not grow up comparing himself to other people.

‘That’s great, Mummy, isn’t it?’ Maureen prompts.

Who is this ‘Mummy’ of whom she speaks? I nod, manage a swallowed ‘Yes’ and then: ‘Great boy. Clever boy. Mummy always said you were a bright boy!’ How forced I sound, how like a caricature of a 1950s housewife smiling inanely at the camera while secretly high on Valium and gin, raging at the injustice of the role she has been trapped in.

‘I told them I don’t have a daddy,’ Tommy says. Maureen’s gaze is boring into me. I’m going to have to reach for the right script here.

‘You do have a daddy, Tommy, of course you do,’ I try. ‘Remember I told you that your daddy loved you very much?’

He looks towards the ceiling and beyond, into the celestial sphere, with that dreamy face I know so well, and sticks his thumb in his mouth, then removes it guiltily. I’m so relieved to see his old habit still has a hold over him – he hasn’t been totally eradicated, repackaged. I notice that welt at the joint and I want to reach out to kiss it.

‘My big guarding angel in the sky,’ he says.

‘That’s right,’ I say, reinforcing the lie in front of a professional.

God knows what repercussions will flow from this one, though to be fair if you were to put any mother and son in such an unnatural position every mother out there would fail on some point. I’m only human. I try speaking to myself in a soothing, non-critical voice, be that loving parent I never had growing up. This is what a lot of the guys said in the meetings: it’s the hypercritical voices, the ones full of self-loathing and judgement, that make them liable to fuck it all up in a moment.

‘They asked us to draw a picture of our mummy and daddy,’ he says. At least he’s talking to me, but I can’t help feeling he was planted with these prompts, is testing me in some way. How dare they assume – I mean, surely in this day and age? Test-tube babies, one parent, two fathers, two mothers, all the variations of ‘family’ dance in front of my eyes. I’m catapulted straight back to my own experiences in the classroom, my attempts to make up a mother figure with a halo above her head, the others sniggering or, worse, freezing me out. I will not have him subjected to that level of ridicule.