She came to our school Christmas concert. We were at the same junior school she once went to and she arrived, peering round, full of nostalgia. The school hall smelled excitingly of cigarettes and cologne as we waited behind scenery to come out in cardboard masks and sheets and tinsel. We could see our mother, sitting near the front with our quiet father. They were listening to the headmaster’s speech, which he always gave and which, she said, he used to give when she was a girl. He was aiming jokes over the kids’ heads and trying to appeal to the parents. My mother realised only then that the jokes he told were quite blue.
The head called out raffle prizes. Everyone had donated tins from the back of their cupboards and the school secretary had done them up like hampers in red cellophane with bows. Mam said, when she was at school there, she always wanted to win a hamper, but they never did. And then, when she was a grown up, her number suddenly came up. Two little ducks, twenty-two. Starting to laugh, she stood up and said, “But I never win anything!” What we won was quite a small hamper. Just a box with tins of butter beans and custard, nothing very Christmassy in it.
She went up to the front to fetch it off the headmaster and he was still trying to make the parents laugh. Mam was wearing a tight old dress with no arms and she kissed him smack on the forehead. Afterwards she wished that she hadn’t bothered...his forehead was shiny with sweat. But his eyes nearly came out of his head and everyone laughed, so it was all right.
In those days my mother was huge. She was never really fat...just solid through and through. When she started to lose that size she started to lose her humour. When she grasped the headmaster on the school stage it looked as if she could just squeeze him up. She hated losing that strength.
Her laugh. It came out of her like a force of nature. Me and my sisters used to love to start her off. It was like a reward to hear her go on and on, to start as a rumble somewhere deep inside, then to hear it catch fire and send her helpless, send her shrieking. She laughed until the tears rolled down and for us at least it was the most infectious laugh in the world. We aided and abetted that laugh. We coaxed it out and fanned its progress with laughter of our own. We’d sit her in cafes and wait for someone across the room to give a chuckle or a sudden guffaw and our mother would start. She couldn’t help herself.
“You’re like witches,” our father would say, hounded out of his own house. “This is what it must be like to be with a coven of witches.”
Our mother thought he should get out more, have more fun. She made him take her out, down the Big Club, as they called it, one Friday night. They had a blue comic on. Dad blushed the whole time. Our mother would laugh at anything that had to do with bodily functions, as she called them. The blue comic that night knew he was onto a good thing, with our mother at one of the front tables. She shamed our dad.
The comic got her up on the stage and she kept on laughing, clutching her knees. He locked her in a shiny black cabinet and the idea was that he’d shove swords through, like a magician. You could still hear our mother, muffled inside, and this the audience loved. And then she went too far and lost control. The blue comic drew attention to the pee spreading out from under the black box. She’d warned him before she’d stepped inside, “I’ll lose control of myself,” she’d said, as if putting her on the stage made her capable of anything. The blue comic dodged her pool of pee and shouted, only half-joking, that she’d electrocute him if it touched his mike cable.
Our mother came back that night and woke my sisters and me and told us all what had gone on. How she peed herself laughing on the stage. Dad was in the bedroom doorway. He’d had a few and bravely said, “Have you no shame?”
Mam stood and towered over him. “You want to get yourself a sense of fun. What do you fellas do, anyway? You go to the gents and widdle all over the floor. I’ve seen it. It’s only pee.”
He grunted. “When have you seen the inside of the gents?”
She ignored him.
Nothing more was said that night, and all the laughing stopped. At breakfast time the next day Mam was down in the mouth, and it was up to us to bring her round. It always was. But it wasn’t difficult to start her going again. People will laugh at anything if they really want to. You just have to let go.
I used to talk to Timon until his shift ended and then we would walk each other home. He lived alone, not that far from our flat. That year the illuminations down our stretch of the shore were all about toys. From the streetlamps we passed were hung teddy bears, ringletted dolls, aliens, giant ray guns.
Timon told me what he envied most about me was my family. “There you are, going back to your full flat, all your sisters about you. And I’m going back to my lonely, cold place.”
And if that wasn’t a hint to be asked back to our kitchen for a mug of tea and a plate of sausage sandwiches, I don’t know what was. I’d already told him this was the way we would all meet up at the end of the night. Whoever was in first got the frying
