Boy Parts(7)

I fiddle with my belt. Mam snaps out of her fantasy timeline with the handsome husband.

‘You should have gotten the next size up in those trousers. I thought before, they look really tight on your bum,’ she says.

‘They’re supposed to be tight. And if they were looser on my bum, they’d be very loose on my waist.’ She doesn’t admit that I’m right – she has been distracted by a woman she has seen out of the window, limping out from a Brexity pub called The Dame’s Garter with a vape dangling from her puckered lips, which are as brown and wrinkled as an unbleached arsehole. Her hair is scraped back from her forehead, silver roots and brassy red ends, which are thin and stringy. A clown dangles from a gold chain on her leathery neck.

‘Did you see her?’ says Mam. ‘I went to school with her. She’s younger than me. Can you believe it?’

‘Really?’

Mam is well preserved, well dressed, and skinny. She sports a permanently unmoving forehead, and lips as plump as my own. She had worry lines for about a week in 1997, and put a stop to that very quickly.

‘That’s what happens when you smoke, and you don’t moisturise,’ Mam says. ‘She was always dead common – the whole family. They lived on my estate. Even by our standards, they were scum.’

Mam is rude to the waitress when she brings our salads, and I pierce the fabric of my trousers with the fork. She complains about everything in front of her. The salad is too oily, her lemonade is too sugary, her friend has cancer and keeps posting about it on Facebook.

‘Wow, what a cunt,’ I say. I’m too exhausted, too irritated, to keep a lid on it now. I drop my calm-down fork.

‘Irina.’

‘No, I’m serious Mam. What a cunt, talking about her cancer on Facebook. She should just fuck off to Dignitas and get it over and done with, shouldn’t she?’

‘You always have to escalate everything, don’t you? You can never let anything lie; it always has to be this big drama with you. You’re very extra, Irina.’

I’m extra. She’s extra. And if I’m extra she’s the reason I’m so fucking extra. I no longer want to eat my own salad (which is, admittedly, far too fucking oily). She has this shitty look on her face now, like Ooo, I’ve got you, that’s shut you up!

‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘how’s work?’

‘Fine.’

‘And the photography stuff? How’s that?’ she asks, sounding bored. I smile. ‘Well, don’t just sit there looking smug, Irina, what is it?’

‘I got invited to take part in a pretty big exhibition today. Hackney Space want my photos and a film as part of this big retrospective they’re doing on UK fetish art. So, you know, all that hard work finally paying off I suppose.’

‘Is that what they call hard work nowadays? Fetish art.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘Honestly, Irina, I wish you’d take some photos I could hang up.’

‘Lots of people hang up my photos.’

‘Yes, lots of strange gay men, and sorry if it makes me a homophobe for not wanting photos of willies all over my house.’ I feel like I’m at lunch with a fucking Daily Mail comments section. ‘I miss when you did your nice drawings, Rini. You’re so good at drawing.’

This is something she’s totally made up: that I used to do nice drawings, and that she ever liked them. She told me once that a picture I drew of Galadriel looked like a burns victim (I was, like, twelve). She told me if I was naturally gifted, I’d be better at drawing, and you can’t really do anything with art if you’re not naturally gifted with it.

I grafted my arse off through GCSE, and she was shocked at how much I improved. Like yeah, no shit, when you put loads of work into something you get better at it. She was always like, Irina, you just give up if you’re not good at something straight away, as well.

The shit with Lesley absolutely would not have happened if I’d had a little bit more encouragement at home. My therapist at the time said so, more or less.

‘Yeah, well, Hackney Space is a pretty big deal, anyway. It’s good news.’

‘I suppose. It’s been years since you had an exhibition. I’ve never heard of them, though.’

‘I have print sales. I don’t need an exhibition it’s just… Well, it is a big deal.’

‘It can’t be that big of a deal if I haven’t heard of them. I’m not stupid just because I don’t know all the weird little galleries in London.’

‘I never said you were stupid, I just said, it is a big deal. Because it is.’ I hiss, ‘What is your problem, Mam?’ I’m furious again, and she’s just sat there. She lifts an eyebrow, with great difficulty.

‘Problem? I’m happy for you, darling. You needn’t take everything so personally! I just said I haven’t heard of the gallery.’ I sulk in my seat.

She offers to buy me an outfit as a treat. I accept, begrudgingly. A lifetime with this woman has taught me that I can be bought. Quite easily, in fact. She treats me to a little black dress from the sale at the soon-to-close-down branch of Westwood, and I’m just as giddy as a schoolgirl by the end of the afternoon.

I get off the bus a stop later and go to Tesco. I imagine I cut a strange image, with my Westwood bag and my basket full of red wine and bag salad.