Boy Parts(59)

‘Just eat the fish,’ snaps Mam. ‘This has really thrown my evening off, Irina. It really has.’ She was going to catch up on Corrie tonight.

While Dad is out hunter-gathering, Mam sits me down at the dinner table and interrogates me. She says her curtain-twitching friend, Susan, (who lives on my street) saw me getting into an old car with a short foreign-looking man, and worried, because she’d been reading all about these Asian grooming gangs.

‘I was so embarrassed when she rang me, Irina,’ she says. ‘What on earth were you doing?’

‘I’m seeing someone,’ I say. But she snaps that I should be more careful about who I’m seen with. ‘Are you telling me not to go out with men who look like they might be Asian? Or are you asking me if I’m being trafficked or something?’

‘Oh, so I’m a racist now,’ Mam snaps. She tells me the issue was the height difference and the dodgy car, not the ‘racial thing’. She was embarrassed because Susan had said your Irina got in a battered Micra with some little foreign-looking fella, and then brought up the grooming gang stuff, because she thought it was strange that I was with such a little bloke. Mam says Susan wouldn’t have brought up grooming gangs or pimping had we not looked so strange together.

‘Susan looks like she’s been hit in the face with a shovel,’ I say. ‘And she dresses like it’s 1997. Why would I care what Susan thinks?’

‘You know she had that stroke, Irina. So, who was he, then? I had a look through your tagged Facebook photos again, and I didn’t see anyone matching Susan’s description.’

‘Oh my God,’ I say, under my breath. I need to delete Facebook. ‘I just… It was just the once. He works in the Tesco near mine.’

‘You said you were seeing him a second ago. Susan didn’t make him sound very attractive,’ Mam says. ‘Not my type – working in a Tesco. Honestly. At your age.’

‘Well I might see him again. I don’t know.’ I look down at the table. I can’t look at her face. She’s smirking. I feel sick. I tell her he’s in teacher training. I don’t comment on the age thing. I think he might be twenty-four. At the most. I couldn’t find his Facebook page, because I don’t know his last name. ‘Anyway, I’m not going to pick dates based on who I think my mam will find attractive. Sorry he’s not conventionally handsome, or whatever. I’m a broad church.’ I think she’s about to drop it; she falls silent for a moment. Her fat upper lip is curled, and her over-plucked eyebrows are raised to her tight hairline.

‘I know you are,’ she says. I ask her what she means by that. She clicks her tongue. ‘Not everything’s a dig, Irina,’ she says. ‘But it must be if I’ve said it, because I’m the worst mother in the whole world, aren’t I? Just the horrible bitch who nursed you, and bathed you, and who pays your rent.’

‘Half my rent. And I never asked you to pay it,’ I say. ‘You did it to make me move out, remember? And it’s Dad’s money, anyway.’

‘You are so ungrateful. It’s like you were born ungrateful.’ She snarls it at me. Like I was born just to spite her. And she goes on to talk about the expensive Barbie whose hair I coloured red, the wrong-coloured bike I screamed about on Christmas day when I was ten, and the time I told her to fuck off in Tammy Girl when I was twelve, because she was trying to make me get a thong to wear with these jeans I allegedly had a ‘VPL’ in when I put them on. She tells me that I’d always pour salt in the wound by crying to Dad, and that I was an angel for him. Which isn’t true. I used to bite him, like, all the time. He just forgave me, and she never did.

I get up from the table while she stews.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m getting you a glass of wine,’ I say. And I go to the fridge. Suddenly relaxed, she tells me to make sure I get the Riesling and not the Chardonnay, because the Chardonnay they’ve got is bloody awful.

‘I want red,’ I say.

‘We don’t have any.’

I pour us both a glass of the Chardonnay. She makes a face, and I tell her it’s best to get rid of it – she slides her glass over to me with her eyes narrowed. ‘You drink it,’ she says. ‘I know you like a drink.’

She gets herself a glass of the Riesling, and there’s something petty in how little wine she pours for herself. She puts her glass beside mine to compare it, telling me that she only likes a splash of wine on a weeknight.

I ask her about her cancer friend – the annoying one, on Facebook.

‘She’s gone into hospital now, not long left,’ says Mam. ‘And you think she’d be spending a bit less time on Facebook, wouldn’t you? But no.’

That keeps her busy, till Dad gets back. He drops the bag of fish and chips on the dining table and begins dishing it out. He runs back and forth with cutlery, and condiments, and kitchen roll, while Mam and I sit and watch him. Mam points out there’s three portions of chips.

‘I got Rini a portion of chips as well,’ he says. I whine. ‘You don’t have to eat them, love; they’re just there if you want a treat.’ He smiles at me. ‘A few chips won’t kill you, you little skinny-mini.’ He kisses the top of my head.

‘Thank you, Daddy,’ I say. He lovingly moves a large cod from its sweaty box to my plate.