• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1378 0

on that curve with the back of my head between her breasts, knowing her face was somewhere above and feeling very sure of myself. I can’t remember her features at all. Light or darkness came from them according to her mood, and I am certain this was more than the fantasy of a small child. I remember her sitting very still in a room of chattering strangers and steadily reducing them to whispers by the sullen silent fury she radiated. Her good moods were equally radiant and made the dullest company feel gallant and glamorous. She was never happy or depressed, she was glorious or sombre, and very attractive to modest dependable men. The men I called father were all of that kind. Apart from loving her they had no peculiarities. She must have attracted them like an extravagant vice for she was a poor housekeeper; on coming to live with a man she tried to prepare meals and keep things tidy, but the effort soon waned. I think the first house I remember was the happiest because it had only two small rooms and my first father was not fastidious. I believe he was a garage mechanic, for there was a car engine beside my bed and some huge tyres under the recess bed in the kitchen. As I grew older my mother was less ready to come when I thumped the wall, so I learned to crawl or stagger to the bed next door and be pulled in. She would lie reading newspapers and smoking cigarettes while my father made a hill under the blankets with his knees and suddenly flattened it when I had climbed on top. Later he would rise and bring us a breakfast of tea and fried bread and eggs.

The house was in a tenement with a narrow, busy street in front and a cracked asphalt yard at the back. Behind the yard was the embankment of a canal, and on sunny days my mother dragged me up this by straps fastened to a harness round my chest and we made a nest in the long grass beside the mossy towpath. The canal was choked with rushes and leafy weeds; nobody passed by but an old man with a greyhound or boys who should have been at school. I played with the tobacco pipe and my slipper, pretending I was my mother and the pipe me and the slipper my bed, or pretending the slipper was a car with the pipe driving. She read or daydreamed as she did at home, and I know now that her power came from these dreams, for where else could an almost silent woman without abilities learn the glamour of an enslaved princess, the authority of an exiled queen? The place where we lay was level with our kitchen window, and when my father returned from work he would prepare a meal and call us in to eat it. He seemed a contented man, and I am sure the quarrels were not his fault. One night I was wakened by noise from the dark wall at my ear, my mother’s voice beating like high waves over protesting mutters. The noise stopped and she entered the room and lay with me and hugged me hungrily. This happened several times, filling the nights with anticipation and delight and leaving me stupefied all day, for her thundering kisses exploded like fireworks in my ears and for long spells annihilated thought entirely. So I hardly noticed when she dressed me, and packed a suitcase, and took me away from that house. I don’t remember if we travelled by train or bus, I only remember that as night fell we walked along a track between trees whose high branches crashed together in the wind, and the track brought us to a farmhouse where we lived for over a year. My sister was born soon after we arrived.

My mother’s ominous attraction is shown by the fact that even in a visible state of pregnancy, with a two-year-old son, she was employed as a housekeeper by a thrifty farmer whose wife had died. For the first few weeks I was happy. We slept together in a small low-ceilinged room at the back of the house and ate by ourselves. I remember us sitting furtively in a corner of the cosy parlour while the farmer and his children dined before the fire. My mother was singing softly in my ear:

“Wee chooky birdy, tol-lol-lol

laid an egg on the window sol.

The window sol

began to crack,

Wee chooky bird roared and grat.