Turning Thirty (6 page)

This was it. I was going to have to tell her. ‘We've . . . split up.'

She moved on to question two. ‘And what about your job?'

‘Now, that,' I said confidently, ‘is fine.' And then I steeled my nerves and told her the full story. My mum clearly couldn't believe what she was hearing because she called my dad and forced me to begin my sorry tale again right from the start.

‘Can you see what's happening to
your
son?' said my mum to my dad, as I concluded my tale of woe. This was classic my-mum behaviour. As kids, whenever we got into trouble she would berate my dad with the line ‘Can you see what's going on with
your
son/daughter?' ‘So let me get this right,' she continued. ‘You've split up with Elaine, left your home in America to move back here for three months so you can spend quality time with me and your dad, before going off to a job in a country you've never been before?'

Put like that it did sound a bit dramatic. I couldn't quite understand how my life – which had apparently been so simple for the last twenty-nine and a bit years had suddenly become so complicated.

‘And see some friends,' I added feebly.

‘Right,' said my mum, still finding this all too much to cope with. ‘Now you're here I suppose I'd better sort you out something for lunch.'

While most normal people quite reasonably consider food to be an important daily requirement my mum had turned it into the focal point of her existence. When it came to me and my brothers and sisters, nearly everything she did and said was regulated and defined by food. ‘Are you hungry?' ‘When will you be hungry?' ‘You look thirsty.' ‘Are you eating properly?' This, of course, was her way of showing that she loved us, but it could also work your nerves a little bit, especially as, unlike most mums who give up on trying to get everyone in the family to eat together once they're past the age of sixteen, mine was a stickler for communal eating at
all
times. Come a quarter past five, my dad was ordered to finish gardening and by half past five dinner (never ‘tea', too common, and never ‘supper', way too posh) would be presented on laps, except on Sundays, special occasions or when visitors were present.
Then
we would eat at the dining-table in the front kept-for-best-in-the-off-chance-HM-the-Queen-should-ever-drop-by-unannounced-and-be-in-desperate-need-of-a-cup-of-tea room with its doilies, posh china and scary macramé picture of a donkey that my late great-aunt Irene had made. No excuse was accepted for missing a meal. No ‘I'm not hungry yet', no ‘I don't fancy this tonight', and certainly none of this ‘Come on, no one under forty-eight eats their dinner this early in the day.' No: you liked it or lumped it. So when after I'd unpacked my bags and a quarter past five arrived, I should have known that my mum would be calling up the stairs, ‘Matthew, your dinner's ready!' That I'd barely finished digesting the chicken salad sandwiches she'd made at lunchtime counted for nothing.

‘What's for dinner, then?' I asked carefully, as I entered the living room and sat down.

‘Your favourite,' she replied, lowering a tray on to my lap. ‘Eat up.' She smiled. ‘You look like you haven't had a proper meal in ages.'

As I looked down dolefully at the plate in front of me it occurred to me that really I had only myself to blame. I knew full well that my mum was for ever mixing up my favourite anything with the favourite anythings of my long-flown-the-nest siblings. Not that what was sitting on the plate was any of my brothers' or sister's favourite anything – other than, possibly, their favourite culinary nightmare: two pork chops, three large spoonfuls of mashed potato, gravy so thick you could stand a knife up in it, carrots, peas and . . . sprouts. Boiled into submission, stinking green balls of soggy-leafed affliction sprouts.

My eyes darted feverishly around the living room to see what the only other diner at Stalag 9 thought of the cuisine. My dad was lodged in the armchair he claimed as his kingdom, watching an early news bulletin on TV, while chewing and pausing occasionally to have a go at the newsreader's dress sense. My mum was still hovering in the doorway to the kitchen waiting for me to tuck into my first home-cooked meal in a long while. I looked up at her and smiled. There was a look of contentment on her face. There she was, watching over us, her family, making sure that all our needs had been attended to. It seemed that this made her happy.

‘Why don't you sit down, Mum?' I asked needlessly. I don't think I've ever seen my mother sit down to eat a meal, it was as if her knees had locked and made it impossible.

‘You haven't started your dinner,' she said. ‘Is it salt you want? I'll just go and get it.'

I looked at my plate again and paused before answering because the words on the tip of my tongue were along the lines of: ‘Can't you see what's wrong? Can't you see that there are four sprouts on my plate, each the size of a mandarin orange?' But I didn't say anything like that, mainly because I couldn't, not without hurting her feelings, which was the last thing I wanted to do. It was just like being a kid again. When I was about nine I came up with an ingenious system for disposing of sprouts: it involved me slipping them one by one into a handkerchief, then feigning a desperate need to go to the loo, and on the way throwing them behind the back of the fridge. It worked like a dream in theory, but I lacked the foresight to remove them later and give them a proper burial. After six weeks my system fell apart when the stench of decaying greenery overpowered the kitchen and my mum discovered my sprout hideaway. She went mental and I was grounded for what felt like a decade. And now, years later, I was facing the same dilemma.

‘Honestly, Mum,' I began, ‘I don't think I can manage all these.' I gestured to the sprouts with my fork.

‘Nonsense,' she said firmly. ‘They're good for you.'

‘But I don't like them.'

‘Yes, you do,' she replied impatiently.

‘No. I've never liked sprouts.'

‘You liked sprouts when I cooked your dinners. How has Elaine been cooking them?'

That thought alone made me want to laugh aloud. ‘Elaine never cooked sprouts, Mum. Elaine never cooked at all, if she could help it. Anyway, I'm not even sure they have them in America.'

‘You used to love sprouts,' piped up my dad. ‘D'you remember when you used to ask if you could play marbles with them?'

I looked at my dad in disbelief. ‘That was Tony, Dad, and he may have liked playing marbles with them but he didn't like eating them either.'

‘No,' said my mum, ‘Yvonne used to love sprouts. I think you must be thinking of Yvonne. She definitely had a thing for sprouts.' Yvonne was the smartest member of our family, so it goes without saying that, like me, she didn't like sprouts either.

‘Look,'I said, losing my patience, ‘Tony never liked sprouts, Yvonne never liked sprouts, Ed never liked sprouts, and I certainly don't like sprouts. And I'm not eating these sprouts. Not now. Not in a little while. Not ever!'

With the benefit of hindsight it was easy enough to see that I wasn't getting all weird about a few sprouts. I mean, I was twenty-nine, and if I really didn't want to eat them it wasn't as if my mum was in a position to ground me or stop my pocket money. The truth was, I was getting a bit wonky about the circumstances that had led to my life changing so dramatically. Only twenty-four hours earlier everything had been different. Okay, so it hadn't been perfect but at least it had been near enough normal for someone at my stage in life. I'd had my own place
and
I'd had a crumbling relationship – the minimum lifestyle requirements of your basic turning-thirty-year-old, surely? But now what did I have? Nothing. I had no girlfriend, I had the promise of a smart job that wouldn't be starting for quite a while and I was living at my parents'.

Entering the kitchen to deliver an apology I was assaulted by the sound of banging pots and pans emanating from the sink, where my mother was furiously distributing soap-suds in the air under the guise of washing up.

‘I'm sorry,' I said, closing the kitchen door behind me. ‘I shouldn't have said what I said. I feel awful. It's just that – well, I've got a lot on my mind, what with Elaine and everything and, well—'

‘It's all right,' she said, turning away from the sink to look at me. ‘I knew it had nothing to do with the sprouts. I just worry about you, that's all.' She disappeared into the living room and returned with my plate, which she put into the microwave. Three minutes, forty seconds and a ping later, she re-presented my dinner to me at the kitchen table with a flourish. ‘Here you go. Now, eat up before it goes cold again.'

The three of us spent the evening in front of the TV together, watching the best that British TV had on offer:
Coronation Street
,
Des O'Connor Tonight
, the
Nine o'Clock News
and the last half-hour of a made-for-TV movie about a mother with cancer trying to get her kids placed with new foster-families before she died. My mum cried, my dad channel-hopped in the ad breaks and I enjoyed the spectacle. This was how every evening used to be when I was a kid. Continuous telly from seven thirty until bedtime, cups of tea made during the ads and two bars of the gas fire on to take the chill off the room.

‘Right, then,' said my mum, just after ten o'clock. ‘Your dad and I are off to bed, Matthew.'

‘Night, then,' I said cheerfully, as I picked up the remote control and began flicking. My dad hadn't let me anywhere near it all evening.

‘Aren't
you
going to bed?' asked my mum, when I hadn't moved.

‘Nah,' I said, still not picking up their hint. ‘I'm going to stay up for just a bit longer.'

‘Are you sure?' said my dad, somewhat shocked. ‘Only it is quite late, Matthew.'

Finally it dawned on me that they wanted me to go to bed too. I was disturbing their routines, and if there's one thing in the world my parents like it's routine. Despite their insistence that I must be jet-lagged, cold, and/or tired of watching TV, I remained up and out of trouble until well after midnight absorbed in Lee Marvin's performance in
The Dirty Dozen
. Turning off the TV as the credits rolled I made my way upstairs and into the bathroom. My mum had opened a new toothbrush just for me and left it next to the sink with a fresh towel. The whole scene made me laugh: when I was a kid she was forever telling me that our house wasn't a hotel and all these years later she was paying attention to detail that would make the Ritz feel like a bedsit in Archway.

Lying in my single bed –
How long had it been since I'd slept in
a
single bed
? – I looked around the room I used to share with my two brothers. It was a large room and we had a corner each with the fourth left vacant to enable us to open the door. We'd tried to customise our own sections of the room and stamp our personality across them. My corner used to be covered in posters of pop bands and Tony's had housed his collection of steam-train posters and paraphernalia, now lodged deep under his bed. As Ed had been only ten his corner was covered in his drawings of comic-book super-heroes and cars. When Tony and I moved out, Ed had had the room to himself. Now all four walls were covered with his personality – posters of his football team, clip frames housing snapshots of him and his mates at various European football matches, and posters of female kids' TV presenters wearing nothing but their underwear and a sultry smile.

But lying there in my old bed, even without my posters adorning the walls, it still felt like home. This was my history. In this room I had grown into what I was and that made me feel good. I've chosen the right place, I told myself, just as I was free-falling into sleep. If I'm going to find an answer to anything then the best place to find it is at home.

How are you? How was your flight? How is Birmingham? How are your parents? Hooooooooooooowwwwwww?

I need to know!

love

Elaine xxx

PS After I left you at the airport I just cried and cried until I was a seething mass of saline solution and snot. Very attractive. When I got back to the apartment I was even worse. The place seemed so empty without you. I also have a confession. You know that black T-shirt you couldn't find? I stole it. It's under my pillow. It's just so cheesy (my actions not the T-shirt) I just wanted something that smelt of you until everything stopped hurting. Anyway – that's enough of that.

Bye!

PS Does anyone famous that I might've heard of come from Birmingham?
Just wondering. E.

‘Morning, Matt,' said my dad, from his position on the sofa.

It was one thirty in the afternoon the following day. I'd just got up and come into the living room dressed in the sky blue pyjamas my mother had thoughtfully left on my bed the night before. They had still been in the packet. Only my mum would have an emergency pack of men's pyjamas.

I looked over to my dad and gave him a little wink to acknowledge the lack of subtlety in his particular brand of sarcasm. ‘All right, Dad?' I replied, then proceeded to scratch a number of places that usually got a bit itchy when I'd spent so long in a nice, warm bed.