‘Why are you so angry?’ Renate, a friend of my mother’s, asked me when we were sitting together in a café.
I flinched because I thought I was very composed, sitting there drinking my tea and talking to her about all kinds of things. She, however, only wanted to talk about the book I’d written, in which I accused mothers like mine of saddling their daughters with their dreams of freedom, without giving them a clue how to put them into practice. Renate had taken my book personally. Rightly so, I thought, even though I hadn’t been thinking of her in particular when I was writing it.
‘No generation can avoid being blamed by the next,’ I answered.
‘Well then, good luck with your own children,’ she said, and I nodded.
‘Yes, thanks a lot.’
I am a last-word freak. But so is she.
‘You’re welcome.’ She said it with that facial expression: poorly disguised smugness, fake meekness.
I can do that expression too. Mothers pass it down to their daughters, along with their unfulfilled dreams. In fact, this expression tells of your dreams while your lips stay tightly pursed, and you say nothing. Lips pursed, chin jutting forward slightly — Renate is a pro at that expression. But so am I.
And Bea has started doing it too, and I can’t stand how some things just keep on playing out forever. I’d rather be angry, talk, write, and spit in Renate’s tea, so she really sees for once what being angry means.
‘Do you remember the floor tiles we had in our flat?’ I asked.
‘No, why?’
‘They were ugly. And it didn’t have to be that way! But I had to work that out for myself. You didn’t talk to us.’
‘Of course we did, all the time! Don’t pretend we didn’t.’
‘Not about floor tiles and why we had them.’
Renate raised her eyebrows and gave me a derisive look. That’s another thing she’s good at: making you feel that you’re out of your mind.
She used to do it back when she came over to visit my mother, and I would join them and tell them some story — about school, friends, or the injustice of the world. Renate would raise her eyebrows, along with doubts about what I’d said, pointing out things I’d overlooked, doing her best to unnerve me. And I let her, instead of using her objections as arguing practice.
These days it’s different. These days I argue back. So I told her I was now convinced my mother had thought the floor tiles were ugly too, but had accepted them because they were all she could afford, they just happened to be there, and had nothing to do with her. But that’s where she’d made a mistake; now, the floor stood for her. Well, okay, maybe that was a slight exaggeration: for me, my mother is the woman who stood on that floor.
Renate’s eyebrows stayed raised.
‘Don’t you get it?’ I asked, furious. ‘I should have known what she really wanted, and how we ended up with the things I thought were normal, and what other options there might have been, and why she didn’t take them!’
‘And what has that got to do with you?’
‘Everything! Because I stood on that floor too!
Renate shook her head and ordered more tea. Went to the bathroom, clearly didn’t want to talk about it. But now she has to, since my mother can’t: she died before I realised what I needed to ask her, where I needed to dig deeper because, as I was to find out from Renate, her silence was deliberate, not an oversight. Neither Renate nor my mother wanted to burden their children with anecdotes and old stories, especially not ones about their lack of options, unfavourable starts in life, or lesser evils.
‘We wanted you children to be free to follow your own path.’
‘Yes, exactly,’ I said. ‘Clean slates all round.’
Renate wasn’t in the mood for my irony. She preferred to be the one to tease.
‘Your mother would have obviously preferred terrazzo flooring in a chalet on Lake Geneva.’
Yeah, yeah. Obviously.
List for Bea: pulped chipboard floors are my personal favourite, but they’re ridiculously expensive these days because they’re so niche. Pulped chipboard has become a luxury for enthusiasts only, so forget it.
Floorboards in the kitchen might look nice at first, but they’re prone to grease stains, and all the dirt falls into the gaps. You know the kind from our flat: a floor like that is very hard to clean.
On the other hand, a tiled floor, which is easy to mop, isn’t exactly low maintenance either because you have to mop it every day. It doesn’t absorb or hide anything unless it has a streaky or speckled pattern — and then, Bea, it’s absolutely hideous. Even worse than PVC, in fact, because tiles are cold underfoot, except if you have underfloor heating. Let’s just say that neutral terracotta tiles with underfloor heating are okay if you have a cleaner who takes care of them all the time.
I’ve never had a cleaner. I’ve worked as a cleaner, but that isn’t part of my list about floors — or is it?
Of course it is. Definitely.
I’ve decided to tell you everything. Nothing is natural; everything is constructed and connected; everything helps or harms somebody or other; and anything that’s taken for granted is particularly suspicious.
Bea is fourteen and needs to be taught the facts of life. She has to be initiated and
