Dispossession (23 page)

But meanwhile we were in crisis, we were deeply in the shit
and someone was heaving bricks at us; no time for stray anxieties,
my too-well-known mother and my unknown wife, what dark
games might they be playing, these dangerous women, at what might they play in
the future?

“Mother, where are you? Where’ve you
been
?”

“I’ve been keeping my head down,” and I rather thought that
was genuine surprise in her voice, and I was genuinely surprised to hear it.
“Like you told me to, darling. Only I was bored, and I thought one little trip
to town wouldn’t hurt, if no one knew I was coming. I’m at the station.”

“You’re
what
?” But the
shrieked question was redundant, because she’d told me already; and doubly so
because her response was inaudible, drowned by a bellowing tannoy. Had to be
the station for sure, and let’s hope Dale nor anyone else had put a tap on the
telephone. “Why didn’t you— no, never mind.”
Why
didn’t you tell me you were coming?
—I’d asked my mother that a dozen
times in my life, and the question had never made any sense to her. Why spoil
the surprise? Darling? Instead, “Did you know the police are looking for you?”

“No,” she said thoughtfully, I thought truthfully. “You didn’t
tell me about the
police
, darling.”

But there was no responding question from her, no
Why would they be doing that?
I chewed my lip,
feeling fretful and uncertain; then said, “Look, listen. Stay where you are,
okay? I’ll come down.”

“Right you are. You’ll know where to find me,” she said
cheerfully, and hung up.

o0o

When I left, a minute later and in a rush, it was no
surprise to find Suzie pounding down the stairs beside me. I’d almost expected
that; almost counted on it, indeed.

Even so, honour required a challenge. “You don’t have to
come, she’s my mother.”

“She’s my mother-in-law. And you’re foul to her. I think she’s
great,” stretching up to fit her own baseball cap onto my head. Two birds, one
stone: cover the bad haircut and the tracery of red-and-purple scars, advertise
her club. And remind me that she was looking out for my interests, where I was
forgetting all about them in my urgency.
Three
birds.

Crashing out of the street door and into the street, “You
never had to live with her,” the automatic defence, used so often before when
friends had met my mother. But then, a thought that seemed to follow naturally
from what her words implied, “So
do
you
know where she’s been, or what she’s been doing? If you get on that well?”
Maybe my wife talked to my mother, I was thinking, where I did not. Except that
apparently I did, apparently I’d told her to get the hell out for a while; so
maybe my wife had been privy to that conversation, or the thoughts and fears
that lay behind it.

“Nah,” she said, holding me up a second while she took
cigarettes from her pocket, stood still to light one. “If I’d known where she
was, I’d have known where to find her, wouldn’t I? When I was looking for you,
you bastard?”

“Oh. Yes. But,” part two, “do you know why she’d have gone
away, did I tell you that? Why I’d have told her to?”

“No. Did you? Maybe you knew the cops were after her.”

Maybe that was it, though it didn’t feel right; and then I
remembered,
You didn’t tell me about the
police,
darling
, and that was what didn’t
feel right about it.

“Something else,” I said. “Not the cops, she didn’t know about
them.”

“So ask her,” Suzie suggested. “Find out what she does know
about.”

I just grunted. I would do that, of course I would, but
already I was not expecting too much joy from an interrogation of my mother.
Tried that before, too often; failed too badly, also too often.

o0o

We shouldn’t have stood still so long. There was a banging
of car doors and a hurry of feet, and suddenly more people to ask us questions.
These were the press, frustrated from their vigil last night, determined to get
answers today: where had I been, what did I remember, how much had I lost? How
did I know Vernon Deverill, why was I working for him, what could I tell them
about the fire-truck?

Luckily I’d had some recent practice with reporters, and
national ones at that, so much tougher. A few months ago—no, more than a few,
better than half a year it must be now—a young client of mine had died of other
people’s carelessness. Poor little Marlon Thomas, violent, confused,
inadequate: and now dead with it, dead at seventeen and his death a matter for
questions in Parliament and front-page headlines on every paper in the kingdom,
a lead story for all the media. And he was my client and I had to be his voice
as best I could, and in public because it would never go to court, no one was ever
going to be charged with the rank negligence they were guilty of.

So I’d had my taste of dealing with the press, and learned
the knack of it. How to say what you want despite the questions they ask, how
never to say more than you need. I told them enough to satisfy their editors,
if barely; then I pushed through the scrum with Suzie all jabbing elbows and
scowls at my side, and rather to my surprise they let us go.

o0o

I glanced down and sideways to where Suzie was swinging
healthily along, keeping easy pace with me and smoking as she went; and I said,
“Do you have to do that?”

She knew what I meant, and for some reason she looked
delighted. “Yes,” she said unequivocally. Then she took the cigarette from her
mouth, hawked deep in her throat and spat a neat ball of phlegm into the
gutter.

“Oh, for God’s sake...”

But she was laughing up at me, her head cocked on one side
and her eyes alight. “Just checking,” she said, slipping an arm through mine
and hugging herself against my shoulder as we walked. “Finding the bits of you
that haven’t changed a bit. Actually I stopped spitting, after you blew a
gasket in the street one time. What is a gasket?”

“Something you blow,” I said distractedly, and barely
registered her snort, her nudging elbow,
fnaar
fnaar
and
who’s a dirty boy, then?
There was only a short walk from here to the station, and my mother was waiting
at the other end of it; I wanted to be ready to meet her.

Couldn’t meet the situation, didn’t know enough; but I’d had
a lifetime of coming face to face with my mother, and that always called for
preparation, mental alertness, on your blocks and balanced and fit to run.

Didn’t help much to have Suzie on my arm, or shouldn’t be
helping: enough of an unknown quantity on her own account, team her up with my
mother and this was a triangle balanced on its point, on my frail shoulders,
and I doubted I could bear the weight of it. So why was I not exactly glad,
perhaps, but not at all sorry to have her there?

Because you’re chicken
,
my private voices murmured.
Because your mother
scares you at the best of times, when nothing in the world is going on that
touches you or her; and this is not that, not by the longest of chalks; and any
dilution is better than the pure spirit unadulterated. Sooner a cocktail than a
straight shot, every time.

Fair enough. Good analysis. I chanced another glance down at
Suzie, who was still puffing on her cigarette and not in the least at the pace
that I was setting, was even tugging at me a little, trying to hurry me faster;
and this was something new to me, even those friends who enjoyed my mother not
tending to scamper quite so eagerly towards a new revelation of her. Carol had
always dragged her feet, lingered, tried to delay.

With, always, my own ready connivance.

Today we went swiftly through the sights and smells of this
one-street Chinatown, then cut through an old Georgian square, across a busy
road and down a back lane. Steel-shuttered storefronts and graffiti’d walls, a
couple of pubs and a casino; and so out into width and light and traffic, and
the railway station like a palace the other side of the parade and my mother
somewhere inside it, waiting for us no doubt like a queen.

o0o

The chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, screeched on
the tiles as she leapt up, drawing all eyes to us.

“She’ll be in the bar,” I’d said; and she was, of course she
was.
The only civilised place to wait, dear
,
and the availability of alcohol taking second place—of course—to the general
aura of civilisation. A close second, perhaps, but nevertheless and genuinely
second. Sometimes I’d even found her without a glass on the table, waiting with
nothing but her cigarettes for company.

Today she had a drink, a real drink. She was apparently
celebrating her reappearance with a brandy and soda and I supposed we could be
grateful for the soda, her concession to the clock, still reading a distance
short of midday.

And she might have had more than one already despite the
hour, because her chair skidded across the floor and her cigarette missed the
ashtray and her voice hit the roof as she saw us.

“
Darlings!
How
wonderful—but you, Jonty, let me look at you, what have you been doing with
yourself? This can’t be honeymooner’s pallor, surely, not still? And I hate the
hat. You’ve had all your hair cut off, haven’t you? Who are you pretending to
be?”

Jonty Marks, married man and
associate of villains.
I didn’t say that, but I came very close to
saying something acid, some reminder that I’d been sick and she hadn’t come to
see me. And caught myself just in time, remembering that she’d apparently been
in hiding and apparently on my own instructions. She might have been anywhere
in the country, a long way out of our local media’s reach; likely she didn’t
even know about the car smash or the amnesia, let alone anything that underlay
or derived from them.

She hugged me, fragrant and light in my arms though her
hands gripped tightly; and then she moved on to Suzie, and I found the space to
be surprised at that little premature stirring of bitterness in me, that she
hadn’t come to the hospital. Even without the excuse, I wouldn’t have expected
her. Why be bitter, at something so utterly in character? I’d thought myself
immune to any harm now. And was seemingly wrong.
Wrong
again, Jonty.

My mother, the curse of my rational years, all the years
since I’d hit double figures: I watched her embrace my wife, and wondered what
more damage she could do me, how much more to expect.

“Sit, sit,” she said. “Have a drink, let’s talk. How’s he
been, my stupid son, has he been a good husband, Sue love?”

“No,” Suzie said confidently, publicly, nothing confidential
about this information, “he’s been crap. I’m giving up on him, the moment I
find anything better. But listen, Ellie, we need to talk to you; and not here.
There’s all sorts of stuff been going on, and some of it’s nasty. The police
really are looking for you, you know. So I think we should just go straight
back to the flat, yes?”

And somehow she had my mother out of there, very quickly and
with no fuss at all; and five minutes later we were climbing the stairs again,
single file and me bringing up the rear and not having said a word, Suzie had
done it all; and I thought that maybe there could be advantages to being
married to this girl, and the obvious nudge-nudge attractions perhaps the least
of them.

o0o

Stupidly, I was expecting Suzie to play hostess for my
mother, to show her all around the flat; but of course Ellie had been here
before, she was more at home than I was. Or seemed so, at least; and I who’d
known her twenty-seven years could never tell what with my mother was seeming
and what was real, so I just treated everything as real and showed no surprise
if it inverted.

She tossed her straw bag onto the nearest sofa, ran a hand
through her hair—dark curls hinting towards grey, worn short and loose this
year, barely collar-length: cut for the wedding, perhaps, a new hairstyle to
greet a new daughter?—and said, “So what’s with this police stuff, then? Bad
enough that I should be hounded from my home by big business and its corruptions;
now it’s the police?”

“Seems so,” I said. “What big business, what are you mixed
up with?”

She stared at me, took a breath; and Suzie dived in there
quick, grabbed my mother’s breathing-space and used it. I’d never seen the
trick done better, rarely seen it done at all. My mother’s no politician, but
she’s picked up some of their less admirable habits, and bulldozing a
conversation is one she’s particularly fond of. She breathes in the middle of
sentences once she’s going, gives no one any chance to interrupt.

“Look,” Suzie said, interrupting as if to the manner born,
and she should have been my mother’s child, not I, “you both need to listen to
each other, you’ve both got stories we need to hear,” and that was clever, that
“we”, slipping herself into both teams at once, “so you might as well sit down
and get comfy. I’ll make some tea, but I want to hear too, so don’t start
without me.”

“Coffee,” my mother said, settling herself neatly beside her
bag, feet together and hands folded in her lap as my grandmother must have
taught her. Great if you’re a little old lady in tweeds, as my grandmother had
been; doesn’t look so well in a rangy woman who carries half a century’s
history mapped on her face and body but seems fit still for the other half to
come.

“Coffee, right. Sorry, I forgot.” My mother doesn’t drink
tea: too insipid, too traditional, too colonial, whatever. “Jonty?”

“Bring us a beer,” I said, sprawling on the other sofa.

No response to that, beyond a moment’s stillness; she didn’t
so much as frown or glare or give me any other sign of her undoubted
disapproval,
sun’s a long way short of the
yard-arm, boy, do you want to grow up like your mother?
But when she did
bring me a beer, an Oranjeboom in its bottle as I like it and ice-cold from the
fridge, she brought an ashtray also and laid it on the floor where clearly she
intended to smoke right beneath my nose, and I was fairly sure this was
punishment. And no doubt condign, for surely I deserved this and worse, far
worse. Whatever the motives were that underlay what I’d done—whatever it
actually was that I had done—finding myself subsequently or consequently
married to a fire-breathing, tobacco-tasting Anglo-Chinese beauty who could
actually talk to my mother seemed like the least of my deserts.