{"id":3642,"date":"2014-07-02T16:00:55","date_gmt":"2014-07-02T16:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=3642"},"modified":"2014-07-03T14:31:03","modified_gmt":"2014-07-03T14:31:03","slug":"who-wants-tortoise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=3642","title":{"rendered":"Who Wants Tortoise?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It was a hot summer Saturday and I had to get home to my parents. I\u2019d had an abortion three days earlier and suddenly, urgently, needed milky tea, a super- soft settee and an endless supply of Aldi\u2019s imitation Kit-Kats. \u2018I\u2019m thinking of coming to see you,\u2019 I said, already at Kings Cross, my overnight bag at my feet. \u2018But I\u2019m only staying for the weekend.\u2019<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u2018She\u2019s lonely, she\u2019s coming for the weekend!\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Only<\/em>! Not lonely, Dad.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Rosa?\u2019 I heard my mother say, advancing closer, slippers slapping.<\/p>\n

\u2018Of course, Judy. She\u2019s lonely.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Of course she\u2019s lonely, Tom!\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Dad, I\u2019m not lonely. I said only<\/em>. Only staying for the weekend.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018And I\u2019m not surprised,\u2019 my mother said. \u2018She works too hard,\u2019 and taking the phone from my father, added. \u2018She needs to come home.\u2019<\/p>\n

My parents, despite being communists and joint life members of the city\u2019s Philip Larkin Society, place a great deal of faith in home, family and parental responsibility. It\u2019s an unshiftable hangover from their Methodist upbringings. They\u2019ve been married fifty years, still live in the house they bought in 1964 and even still nurture Tortoise, who they bought for my tenth birthday.<\/p>\n

\u2018Come back. Let us look after you,\u2019 my father cried, with such passion that I thought he might be really crying. \u2018We haven\u2019t seen you for ages, baby girl.\u2019<\/p>\n

It was true that I hadn\u2019t been home since Christmas, and the accepted reason was my demanding job two hundred miles away. The truth was that\u00a0somehow, this year, their stable, long, loving marriage had suddenly, out of nowhere, made me, aging, unmarried, childless, itch and ache. \u2018Yes, come home, darling,\u2019 my mother said softly. \u2018You need to be here where you belong.\u2019<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2018When we\u2019ve been to Aldi.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018We\u2019ll collect you from the station.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Please don\u2019t turn the heating up,\u2019 I pleaded but they\u2019d rushed off to prepare.<\/p>\n

I bought two doll-sized bottles of red wine in the buffet car and wondered if, more than I wanted to see my parents, I wanted to be away from Doug as I recovered from this latest abortion. Not that there was much recovering to do in 2014. This termination was little more than a free pill and hearty private bleeding. Quite unlike the ruinously expensive abortion I\u2019d had twenty-five years previously, which had required a general anesthetic and a secretive overnight stay in a remote private clinic, (beautifully located in a grand stately home, which if I\u2019d been able to stand up straight, or move without vomiting I would have liked to explore). There had been another mid-priced abortion ten years ago, when termination science had advanced to just a half-day stay, with a local anesthetic before a mildly uncomfortable, and worryingly quick, womb hoover. As I told Doug, \u2018Next time I\u2019ll be expecting the checkout girl at Boots to wave a wand across my waistband and poof, voila, done.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Cool,\u2019 Doug said. Who is fifty and goes to work on a skateboard.<\/p>\n

At Hull station a pair of brightly garmented hobbits waved wildly from the ticket barrier. Each time I see them they are shorter, slower, deafer and wearing\u00a0more eccentric clothing. They drink more wine and lose their glasses, keys, purses, and pills and fight weary battles with their expensive new technology (their knowledge is so scant and their public sector pensions so generous that department store salesmen see them coming a mile off). These hobbits have flat-screen interactive TVs, laptops, sat-navs, Ipads, Iphones, Kindles, \u2013 none of which they can satisfactorily use. My three brothers pay their children to deal with the daily appeals for I.T. aid.<\/p><\/div>\n

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My father hugged and kissed me but my small, impish mother just patted me on the shoulder and took my bag. Marxist Yorkshire ladies don\u2019t kiss on the cheeks. \u2018How\u2019s Doug?\u2019 she asked. \u2018How\u2019s the fromagerie?\u2019 I rolled my eyes and my mother cackled happily, but today I didn\u2019t want to entertain her with tales of Doug\u2019s ineptitude. Instead as we walked to the car we talked about the grant my organisation was applying for, which gave my mother the chance to argue that the national lottery had acted like a sedative on the poor who otherwise would be impaling the heads on bankers on fence posts. My father didn\u2019t mention Doug at all. Perhaps my parents could tell that our love was now a frail and wobbling shelf that couldn\u2019t be trusted to hold anything valuable up. I could argue that this was why I\u2019d had the abortion, but that wouldn\u2019t be true.<\/p>\n

My father drove home faster than might be expected for a man his age (the fact that he\u2019d bought a Saab in his seventies embarrassed my mother \u2013 \u2018Why not? No one\u2019s getting any return on their savings.\u2019 \u2018Because I\u2019m still an anti-capitalist, Tom. Who now feels like a footballer\u2019s wife!\u2019<\/em>). She handed out sweets from the little tin they had always kept in the glove compartment. It is the exact same butterscotch tin they\u2019d had when I was a child, now filled with\u00a0Aldi budget mints: the cheapness of modern foreign supermarkets being their favourite perk of modern life.<\/div>\n

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I shifted around to try and get settled on the back seat. I didn\u2019t want to bleed on the beige leather. I had no soreness this time, though I was also without the euphoria that had greeted my first abortion, or even the cool relief that had accompanied my second. Now I just felt carsick and so wound the window down and angled my face into the dusty Northern breeze.<\/p>\n

\u2018Your mother lived not far from here when I met her,\u2019 my father said. I sighed; I knew the story too well, and as I\u2019d aged it had become grindingly tedious.<\/p>\n

\u2018In those days they expected a woman to take a room with a landlady,\u2019 my mother said, bumping the conversation onto its familiar track. \u2018You certainly weren\u2019t allowed to live with a boyfriend.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Yes, you\u2019ve told me this before, Mum.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018There was none of that girls getting a shared house all together either, throwing parties, getting drunk, having boyfriends staying over -like you did, \u2018 my father said. Did I detect my mother shoot my father a warning glance? They never criticized me for not having wed or borne children but lately I suspected they discussed it. My mother certainly no longer opined so joyously about her role in the women\u2019s movement and the many victories she\u2019d secured for the female race. I suspected that, despite her faithful feminism, the more I earned, the higher I climbed, the more independent and distant from free-cycling, vegan cheese-maker Doug I became, the more my life bewildered her. My father often seemed confused by the level of freedom and opportunity I\u2019d had; to travel, to over-educate, and to reach the very top of\u00a0a profession where my pay out-stripped the combined incomes of my three cleverer brothers.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u20188 Mary Street,\u2019 my mother said twisting back to smile at me. \u2018We\u2019ll never forget 8 Mary Street,\u2019 my father said. \u2018That\u2019s for sure.\u2019 \u2018You\u2019ve told me!\u2019 I snapped and stared hard out of the window to try and discourage further confessions.<\/p>\n

It was an airless afternoon and on the streets children played on bicycles and dogs curled around them and dragged their snouts along the gutters. In my area of London you rarely see children without their parents, and dogs are never stray. As I watched a child skipping I had a sudden aching lurch of witnessing a moment from my own past – or perhaps from an alternative future in which a child of my own skipped on a melting pavement in the heat. I had to ask my father to slow down. He glanced at me in the rear view mirror with concern. He\u2019d refused a hearing aid though he needed one. Perhaps he\u2019d taken my \u2018Remember you\u2019re in a thirty limit, Dad,\u2019 as, \u2018Remember I\u2019m at my limit Dad.\u2019<\/p>\n

Perhaps I was at my limit. Who could ever know what their limit was until they bumped their forehead against it? Perhaps this trip home was me smacking up against it \u2013 it certainly felt like the end of something, definitely the end of my affair, maybe the end of Doug and me too, or perhaps just the end of being a wild career woman who had carefree abortions and, instead, the start of being – what? Who? I had no idea.<\/p>\n

By the time they were pulling into their street my parents had forgotten 8 Mary Street and were again worrying about Ed Miliband, who they\u2019d both voted for above his brother for in the branch elections but were now hugely\u00a0disappointed by. \u2018Why doesn\u2019t someone help him?\u2019 my mother moaned. \u2018Surely they could do a make over.\u2019<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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After a tour of the balmy summer garden, my father settled us at a newly purchased \u2018garden sofa\u2019 on their new outdoor eating area (paved at vast expense by \u2018lovely men\u2019 who\u2019d turned up unannounced at the door). He poured three large glasses of Aldi\u2019s finest red wine. \u2018It\u2019s such a bargain this booze,\u2019 my father smiled. Of course my socialist parents hated waste, were keen recyclers and took an appropriate interest in environmental issues but this did not extend to paying high prices for food or drink.<\/p>\n

When we\u2019d drunk the bottle my father brought out Tortoise and I gave him a knuckle-knocking pamper. I stroked his wrinkled thumb-size head, and massaged between my fingertips his bony paws. Suddenly, as though the touch of those reptilian claws had cast a spell, I felt very sad. The wine, which was making my mother ecstatic about state education (as my sister-in-law grimly noted, the fact that she\u2019d taken early retirement from teaching twenty years ago and hadn\u2019t set foot in a secondary school since also helped), was making me regretful and emotional. I cuddled Tortoise to my breast and tried to hide my dampening eyes. It might have been the final splutters of foetal bleeding but there in their glorious garden I was pounded by sudden reckless urges; I wanted a new lover. A new house. I wanted to paint. I wanted a garden, to change career, Botox. I wanted to live in New York. I wanted everything my parents had. I wanted Tortoise!<\/p>\n

Yes, that was it! Exactly what I needed. Several years ago my parents asked me to have him. Their winter foreign holidays were lengthening and they were running out of stably married Labour party members willing to take\u00a0charge of the cardboard box. At the time Doug and I had to admit that we simply wouldn\u2019t have the time to look after him. Doug was doing a night class in whey management and I travelled abroad frequently for work. During the week I was often not home until midnight \u2013 on account of the affair, which was then freshly raging – so no, we couldn\u2019t take Tortoise on; he would have to stay in the marital home. But now I suddenly wanted Tortoise. I had to have him. Without him I was cooked.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2018If you\u2019re still offering I\u2019m happy to have Tortoise,\u2019 I said as my dad unscrewed another bottle of cheap wine.<\/p>\n

\u2018Really!\u2019 my mother exclaimed, grabbing the bottle by the neck and glugging out another glassful. \u2018I\u2019m so pleased! That\u2019s wonderful. Let\u2019s celebrate.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018He\u2019s ever such good company, Rosa.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019m sure you won\u2019t regret it. Cheers.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018And if you do need to go away we can always step in to help.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Raise a glass to Tortoise and Rosa!\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Tortoise and Rosa. A fresh start\u2019 my father said, squeezing my shoulder.<\/p>\n

Reborn, we went indoors to their sauna-warm living room, where my mother enjoyed another rant about the banking scandal, and I munched a heavy slice of homemade seed cake, watched TV for two hours, then bled fiercely for three hours, after which we discussed the theatre. My elder brother had once said to me, \u2018You\u2019re living mum\u2019s dream life,\u2019 though this was not true. My mother thinks my career in arts management, no matter how elevated and lucrative, safe and disappointing. Once, fifteen years ago, at the age of 30, when I became the youngest woman ever to run a publically- funded theatre company I was photographed for Vogue. It some silly feature,\u00a0about \u2018key creative people who\u2019ll rule in the new millennium<\/em>\u2019, which Doug said should more accurately have been called \u2018Pretty young tarts in the arts<\/em>.\u2019 Mum had stared at my glossy, blow-dried, designer-clad self for a long time. Eventually she said, \u2018Pah who wants to be in Vogue. Perhaps if you\u2019d won an Oscar.\u2019<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I still wonder what she\u2019d been thinking when she stared at that photo. She\u2019d wanted to be an actress, and perhaps believed that if she\u2019d not got pregnant unexpectedly age nineteen, at the fabled 8 Mary Street, she would have become one. Certainly when she sees Judy Dench and Helen Mirren on television she studies them as keenly as if she\u2019s seeing a lost member of her own family.<\/p>\n

That night, relieved not to be tossing around on a lumpy futon besides a sozzled, snoring old cheese-maker, I rested calmly in my childhood bed and enjoyed thoughts of my cosy new future with Tortoise. Even my moth-eaten collection of teenage vintage clothes, which still packed my old room\u2019s wardrobes, and the sodden, slipper-sized sanitary pad pressed between my legs, didn\u2019t summon lurid dreams. I slept safe as a loved child.<\/p>\n

The next day, my last at home, when the bleeding was slowing, I agreed to go out for Sunday lunch. We were worried about leaving Tortoise in the car while we ate, and sure the Greedy Guzzler chain would not welcome genuinely reptilian diners, and so agreed that we\u2019d return home and get him after the meal, before driving me to the station. I felt anxious about leaving him, worried that he might miss me or succumb to some tragedy while I was away. Beyond my childhood bed I felt weak, and middle-aged and alone. I\u00a0wanted to cling to Tortoise like a life raft. But I agreed to the lunch without him.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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If you can call those mouth-scaldingly oily chunks of unidentifiable bread-crumbed protein, lunch. Still, The Greedy Guzzler chain was their favourite eatery. It offers not only offers bargain prices, but primary-coloured spot-lit sofas, tall vases of pebbles on floating shelves and gaudily upholstered throne-style chairs. It has the general cheery air of a daytime TV studio. Being distrustful of pretty much all private enterprise and never having been known to shell out for an organic vegetable, they were never going to take to insanely expensive gastropubs, of the kind my lover and I obsessively crept away to on Sundays. Burdened with their embarrassingly lavish pensions, my parents dined like anti-royalist kings at The Greedy Guzzler at least once, if not twice, a week.<\/p>\n

As we ate they cheerfully considered the secondary school anxieties that preoccupied their daughters-in-law. \u2018So what if only 38 percent get grades A-C at GCSE? It\u2019s still a damn sight better than they\u2019re getting in New Delhi.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018We never worried about where you\u2019d all go to school,\u2019 my father said.<\/p>\n

\u2018I was still in shock about actually having babies, Tom.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Me too!\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018I could feel my breasts tingle. That\u2019s how you know, Rosa.\u2019<\/p>\n

Recently my eldest brother had confided a concern that my mother\u2019s lack of inhibition suggested Alzheimer\u2019s. I wasn\u2019t sure; she\u2019d always called a vagina a vagina and, without ever experiencing it herself, advocated free love over housework. Once, when I was thirteen, to my utter horror, she\u2019d\u00a0cheerfully advised me and a school friend to \u2018learn how to masturbate so you\u2019ll never need a man unless you really want one<\/em>.\u2019<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2018And the sickness,\u2019 my father said with a frown.<\/p>\n

\u2018First your nipples go dark,\u2019 she said, turning to me and nodding as she chewed.<\/p>\n

\u2018Judy,\u2019 he warned.<\/p>\n

\u2018Sooty. Even before the sickness. And they tingle, like they\u2019re sniffing, like dark little noses.\u2019 She made her forefingers imitate those little noses and scrabbled them at her breasts. My father and I glanced at one another, but said nothing.<\/p>\n

In the pub if I\u2019d wanted the conversation to turn away from early pregnancy and return to me, I could have told them exactly what had happened with Doug, which was that a few years back we\u2019d both started having affairs. Which is how I got pregnant. I couldn\u2019t be sure that the baby wasn\u2019t Doug\u2019s but it wouldn\u2019t have made any difference; for some years I\u2019d had dreams of moving to a gallery in a North American city, while Doug dreamt of turning a dilapidated Highland croft into a creamery and maturing artisan cheeses. I accepted that now I\u2019d agreed to have Tortoise my future plans would have to change, but this didn\u2019t mean I wanted the three of us to live together on a remote Scottish island.<\/p>\n

After a boozy lunch (\u2018Darling, you must have pudding, the crumble\u2019s a steal at 99p!<\/em>\u2019) we set off home to collect Tortoise. All I had to do was put him in a box with some newspaper and a large green leaf and carry him to London. As we drove I pictured Tortoise and me in my living room snuggling up together in front of Newsnight.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2018Rosa, have I ever shown you where your mother first lived when we were courting? Now that was a poor area, wasn\u2019t it?\u2019<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2018We could build a better world,\u2019 my tipsy mother shouted, and began thumping the dashboard so the cheap mints spilled into her lap. \u2018If only we could all just stop fearing the poor.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Judy, I want to show Rosa 8 Mary Street.\u2019<\/p>\n

Inwardly I groaned; there was nothing I wanted to do less than tour the key sites in that crusty sepia tinged romance. I wanted Tortoise! Plus I was getting to that age when I didn\u2019t like plans to suddenly change. \u2018They\u2019ve knocked it down, Tom,\u2019 my mother exclaimed.<\/p>\n

\u2018I thought so too, but no,\u2019 he said with firm shake of the head. \u2018 It\u2019s a rough area but at the time we didn\u2019t care what it looked like.\u2019 My father gave my mother a knowing glance. \u2018Did we?\u201d<\/p>\n

She nudged him playfully. \u2018The landlady was very insistent that your father didn\u2019t ever come upstairs. He had to wait in the sitting room and she\u2019d come up to tell me that I had a visitor.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018I did break my way in a few times though.\u2019 \u2018Yes, Tom, you did, and look what happened!\u2019<\/p>\n

They both turned round to me and burst out laughing. \u2018Your father\u2019s such a wonderful lover, Rosa,\u2019 my mother said, stroking his forearm.<\/p>\n

If it were Alzheimer\u2019s, would I give up my future to care for her? Would I move home to wipe her bum as Tortoise inched round the lawn and Doug stirred curd in the basement? It seemed unlikely. And yet, for the first time, also appealing. And Tortoise would be in familiar surroundings.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I stared out of the window at the family homes. In London I\u2019d chosen a third floor city flat well away from the buggy blocked highways of nappy-valley. Tortoise would have nowhere to play. He\u2019d need to be taken out for tiny walks on a long thin lead. Everything would have to change.<\/p>\n

My father slowed the car and the two of them leant forward peering down side streets. \u2018When I found out I thought my life was ruined,\u2019 my mother said as she unbuckled her seat belt. We were parked behind a large yellow skip and I worried that this was a dangerous place to park an expensive car.<\/p>\n

\u2018Did you know that this is where you mother found herself pregnant?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Yes,\u2019 I said, getting sharply out of the car and slamming the door behind me.<\/p>\n

I could practically recite the tale verboten: she gets pregnant, her Methodist parents refuse to have anything to do with her, the landlady kicks her out, she has to leave her teacher training degree, and the attendant glittering opportunities with the university dramatic society. She weds my father with two witnesses dragged off the street and they settle down to married life in a single rented room on my student father\u2019s wages from a part time job. They quickly have three more children and then she goes back to get her teaching certificate at night class. Cue mass national applause.<\/p>\n

\u2018Of course it was all bedsits in my day,\u2019 my mother said as she hurried into the rubbly cave that was 8 Mary Street. I followed them to the dusty bombed out shell, which was as skeletoned as a Viking boat hauled from the seabed. An ancient gas fire had been ripped from the wall and lay in the middle of the floor besides a wood-burner which was bubble-wrapped and waiting to be installed. Torn wallpaper revealed layers of the last century\u2019s most fashionable flowers, vast orange marigolds, over pastel carnations over\u00a0tiny pink roses. \u2018This was Mrs Henry\u2019s parlour,\u2019 my mother shouted out and my father went through to join her.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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At that moment a male stripper appeared in the room besides me. It\u2019s the one who plays the character of the builder in the act; muscular, tanned and topless above faded, ripped blue jeans. To differentiate him from the fantasy fireman, the cowboy and the masked gunman he wore a hard yellow hat and had a leather belt of metal tools around his slender waist. He looked at me with a split second of interest and I hooked his gaze, until he slid it away effortlessly. \u2018Thank you for letting them take a look,\u2019 I said. My voice had slightly changed. \u2018My mother used to live here when she was young.\u2019 \u2018Sure, \u2018he said. \u2018No problem.\u2019 And he picked up a shovel and left. He was perfectly symmetrical, as if moulded in a factory.<\/p>\n

I wandered through to where I could hear a faint drift of voices but in the back room there was no sign of my parents just a strange staircase floating like a trick on the fairground cakewalk. The swaying staircase led to an exposed landing. To the left of this landing there was nothing, to the right a room remained and my parents had disappeared towards it, their mutters studded with excited laughter. Somehow, emboldened by the return to the lost past, the hobbits had climbed up the rickety staircase. I looked around for the man. It wasn\u2019t that I expected a man to help me. Alongside masturbation one of my mother\u2019s earliest lessons was plug wiring \u2013 \u2018Learn to wire a plug and you\u2019ll never have to depend on a man for anything<\/em>.\u2019 She couldn\u2019t be blamed for not imagining that by the time we\u2019d grasped self-love and elementary electrics, men would have created the wireless world. No, to the best of her ability she\u2019d ensured there was nothing I couldn\u2019t do alone.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I looked out into the garden where the topless stripper was shovelling dirt into the wheelbarrow, his wide shoulders heaving so his nut-brown sculptured torso rippled. He was the original: the guy who the nervy beefcakes on reality TV shows wanted to be. In a different story the stripper would look up and see me watching, he\u2019d narrow his blue eyes, beckon me outside, push me against a rough wall, lurch towards me, parting my quivering thighs with his huge denim knee as he surged against me. If there were a choice would I choose that over hurrying home to collect Tortoise? Was I choosing Tortoise because I was broken, and sure I had no other hope?<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2018Rosa,\u2019 my mother called, \u2018You\u2019ve got to come up here and see this.\u2019 They were now grinning down at me, two happy ghosts. \u2018The bathroom\u2019s still here. I was always in there, either throwing up or poking inside looking for signs.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Judy,\u2019 my father warned.<\/p>\n

\u2018We need to go,\u2019 I said. I ached, either from fear or the abortion or for the builder, but either way I didn\u2019t want to look at where my young pregnant mother had fingered herself. \u2018Tortoise will be waiting for me!\u2019<\/p>\n

The builder appeared behind me. \u2018I need to lock up soon,\u2019 he said flatly. He was pulling on his T-shirt: the act was over and he was back in the dressing room.<\/p>\n

\u2018Okay, I\u2019ll tell them,\u2019 I said. He did look at me for a fraction of a second longer but it wasn\u2019t keenness or curiosity but something more mysterious. I thought of the skipping girl in the street: I reminded him of something lost. Or warned him of some loss to come. \u2018Mum, we need to go for Tortoise,\u2019 I shouted, and\u00a0then I turned to the builder and added, \u2018I\u2019m having the tortoise. He\u2019s coming to live with me in London.\u2019<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2018Lucky tortoise,\u2019 he said, and left the room.<\/p>\n

My father began to lurch creakily down the hanging stairs. There was no handrail and he had to take the middle wall-less section arms outstretched for balance. I reached out my hand for him but he didn\u2019t take it, instead making a show of jumping off the second to last step and slapping his hands together in triumph. \u2018Cliff Richard\u2019s got nothing you, Dad,\u2019 I said.\u00a0\u2018Pah, Cliff Richard,\u2019 he laughed. \u2018Paul McCartney at least, preferably Leonard Cohen.\u2019 He clenched his fists; emboldened by his encounter with the triumphed-over past.<\/p>\n

My mother was still at the top of stairs. \u2018I wish I knew how to take photos on my phone,\u2019 she moaned. \u2018Do you know, Rosa? Would you come up here and take some with yours?\u2019 Without thinking I pressed my palm to my forehead. \u2018Perhaps we\u2019ll come another time,\u2019 she said quietly and moved to the stairs. I could tell she had been crying. Her knees were not as good as my father\u2019s and she\u2019d already had a hip replacement and an operation on her left ankle.<\/p>\n

\u2018Careful,\u2019 my father and I said in unison.<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019ll come and get you,\u2019 my father said moving to the stairs.<\/p>\n

\u2018No,\u2019 I said. \u2018It won\u2019t take the weight of both of you.\u2019 But he ignored me and threw himself onto the stairs, scrambling up. He was on the fourth step when there was a great crack and the step creaked open beneath him. I reached him in time and he fell against my arm and I helped him back down the last three steps. I glanced around for the young builder, though I had my father\u00a0safely in my arms. We stared at the broken step, then back up at my mother. She was stranded above us as surely as a kitten in a tree. She rolled up the sleeves of her blouse like she was about to start a fight. \u2018I\u2019ll try backwards,\u2019 she said. \u2018Then when I get to the broken step you can help me down from there.\u2019<\/p><\/div>\n

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In winching painful stages she made her way down onto her damaged knees. Her gnarled old hands were clawed on the floor, her skinny rump was pressed towards us, and when she turned her head perhaps both my father and I thought of one deep in Islamic prayer. Her skirt was rouched up so you could see her red polyester underskirt and a wedge of her wide white knickers. Her thickened ankles were my own most loathed body part. Blue veins, which threaded through the clotted cheese of her thighs, would soon be mine. She began to edge backwards towards the steps. Far away someone was hammering out a drum roll and outside a cloud crossed the sun like the stage lights dimming. Suddenly there was another ominous crack and, though the plank she was resting on held firm, she froze and began to whimper. My father and I reached for her but she was too high. We cooed and coaxed but she was rigid. The staircase began to sway and I looked up to where it was fixed with just two bolts from the landing. \u2018Go sideways and drop down,\u2019 my father commanded the seventy-three year old woman with the metal hip. Suddenly, without warning, she pushed herself off and, still gripping the wood with her hands, she released her legs so only her waist was still on the step and her legs hung free. \u2018Good girl!\u2019 my father said clapping his hands. \u2018Now edge along.\u2019 But she just hung there, her legs swinging, loose as a lady in a noose. \u2018She\u2019s stuck,\u2019 my father said, reaching up for her dangling toes. \u2018Dammit.\u2019 Any\u00a0other old lady would have been stuck but my mother began to edge her sagged and melted torso along to the end of the step like an FBI agent clinging outside a besieged embassy. Her head angled upwards like a ropey swimmer. \u2018Drop!\u2019 my father commanded. With heaves and groans and cries and our great chorus of encouragements, her misshapen softened carcass began to drop lower centimeter by centimeter until I could touch her thigh, then my head was at her doughy stomach and I was able to reach up for her armpits.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

\u2018Let go, Mum,\u2019 I panted and she slid against me, her legs gripping to my thighs, her arms clutched around my neck. I hugged her in, surprised to find that my abdomen wasn\u2019t too sore to hold her. I was gaining in strength. I gripped her fiercely. She was breathing quickly into my shoulder. I could feel her love warming through me. As she tried to loosen her grip to drop down, I hitched her up higher so she was almost straddling my waist. Of course at that moment the stripper appeared.<\/p>\n

\u2018Is everything okay?\u2019 he said languidly looking at my mother, clung to me like a huge old baby.<\/p>\n

\u2018Sure. Everything\u2019s fine,\u2019 I said, as though I cuddled my mother that way every afternoon.<\/p>\n

\u2018Put me down,\u2019 she whispered. \u2018Put me down.\u2019<\/p>\n

He watched as I put her down and she sank back against the wall, trembling. \u2018I tried,\u2019 she said.<\/p>\n

\u2018She\u2019s tired,\u2019 my father said.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n

The builder watched us for a moment longer, perhaps waiting for further explanation but when none was forthcoming he nodded, then drifted out of the house. Out of my dreams.<\/p>\n

\u2018Mrs Henry always said you were out to get into trouble,\u2019 my father said as we walked back to the car.<\/p>\n

\u2018She said I was a rebel and a tart.\u2019<\/p>\n

We laughed and got in the car and began the drive home. \u2018Rosa,\u2019 my father said. \u2018Compared to your mother you don\u2019t know what an easy life you\u2019ve had.\u2019 My mother touched his shoulder to silence him. \u2018You\u2019ve no idea, Rosa, really.\u2019 My mother tried to sssh him, but I smiled and nodded.<\/p>\n

\u2018I know,\u2019 I said suddenly, surprising myself. \u2018Actually, I\u2019m so used to the easy life I\u2019ve realised I can\u2019t even commit to Tortoise.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018What! No?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Sorry. I\u2019m just too busy.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018It\u2019s okay, darling. We\u2019ll look after him for you.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018And he\u2019s always there if you change your mind.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018I don\u2019t think I will, Dad. My life just isn\u2019t tortoise-shaped.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Are you sure,\u2019 my mother said, looking me firmly in the eye. \u2018It\u2019s not too late to change your mind.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Yes, Mum, I\u2019m sure.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Good on you,\u2019 she said. \u2018That\u2019s my girl.\u2019<\/p>\n

By the time we reached the station the ache in my abdomen had almost completely lifted and already I was thinking about my visit to China later in the week and the grant application I had to edit before bed. There was a disciplinary hearing in the morning and I needed to check the emails from\u00a0HR. Plus our marketing manager had been signed off with mental distress and I wanted to text her before bed. There was a meeting with an artist from Sierra Leone whose work I didn\u2019t know and I would have to research on line before I called him tomorrow. Plus I needed to tell Doug to move out, or go into therapy or learn to drive or start wearing a tool belt and hard yellow hat.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

As my train pulled out I watched the hobbits huddled on the platform chatting, probably rehearsing the sketch they\u2019d make of the Stuck on the Stairs for their grandchildren on Skype later.<\/p>\n

And again, just as I had when I first left for university from the very same station twenty-five years earlier, I glided away, thumbs-up and smiling. Off to control my destiny.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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