Liv and Let Liv
I'm fourteen when my mother calls me from the pub, the Jester and his Bells.
"I've met the man," my mother says, slurring her words.
"What?"
"The man."
"What man?"
"The man who's going to rescue me."
"Are you drunk, Mom?"
She laughs.
"So who is this man?" I say.
"Anton Forster." she titters. "Very sexy. An industrialist. A magnate actually. He's in metals." She laughs again. "Liv darling, the man is quite hot. As it happens," she says, "he's almost molten."
The family met Anton Forster at a New Year's Eve party my parents threw. At twelve, it was the last year I fit comfortably in the cupboard under the stairs; and it was from this vantage point that I saw a man's hand sliding along the length of my mother's hot pink mini-dress, and heard my mother's laugh (her waterfall laugh, it was), a series of coquettishly cascading eruptions from the back of her throat. The hand was dark, heavily ringed. Definitely not my father's. I saw only the hand at that time. Then a door opened and my mother said, "Oh Clive, have you met Anton? Anton Forster, this is my husband. Clive Jeffries."
That was the last year in which my father reveled in my mother's provocative clothing. But her attractiveness to men had nothing to do with fashion. She was one of those women who could appear in a gunnysack and still look good. And two years later, after a chance meeting in the pub, Anton Forster bagged her.
One thing Anton Forster and I have in common is rings. An everyday ring day for me is eight, and on special occasions, donning the larger, heavier brass fittings I acquire from Derek the plumber's apprentice in exchange for a quick peck, it's ten. My mother's lover can best be described digitally. His entire personality can be grasped via his hands which are, if not a window to the man's soul, certainly to his fiscal solvency. Anton Forster is loaded. But time corrects my impression that Anton and I have anything in common. I have a sympathy for rings—or rather for those who feel the need to cover their fingers. My ringed rebellion—for that is what it is (my mother deplores the cheap ill-matching costume pieces, as she calls them, crammed on to my fingers, nails bitten to the quick)—my rebellion is against my mother.
If I had as many rings as Anton Forster, I wouldn't keep them in an old cardboard box. By all accounts, my mother went through that box once, cupping her hands and lifting out priceless palmfuls. The box, she said, smelled strongly of disinfectant. I'd be a fool to believe everything my mother tells me; but this, I do know, is true. I know because, a few months later at the hospital, when my mother lay on the brink, Anton Forster gave me one of those rings. An enormous filigree band. Suitable for a thumb, and smelling scrupulously clean.
My mother calls me from a phone box in the country. She's there with the ringed wonder.
"Something's happened. I don't know what to do. I didn't plan it, but—"
Something roars past just then—a truck perhaps.
"What did you say, Mother? I can't hear you."
She doesn't answer. I swear, even with the roar I can hear the woman's heart beating.
"Mother? You there?"
"Yes," she says finally. "I'm here... Pregnant, but here."
"Of course, it's not your father's," she says when we meet later at Anton's pied at terre. "Your father and I, we don't… There's nothing left to us. It's just ashes."
"You mean you no longer smolder? What, you once did?" I laugh.
"The point is, whatever we did we no longer do." She sighs. "Anyway, it's Anton's."
"And yours. Why do you say it's just his?"
"Because he wants it"—looking away. "At least I think he does."
"Don't you?"
"I want it. But I'll have to get rid of it, of course."
I look at her in disbelief.
"Why of course?"
"I can't have a baby," my mother says, her turn to laugh.
"Look, isn't this meant to be the other way around? I mean, aren't I supposed to be the one getting knocked up?"
Sitting down on the bed, I say, "What are you going to do? What are you going to tell Clive?" Calling him this is a recent affectation of mine.
"Oh God, I don't know."
"That you were tired of plain old toast for breakfast? You fancied a bit of British upper crust?"
My mother sits down on the opposite side of the bed.
"I detest it when you're biting."
That night I lie awake, wondering what it'll be like having a baby in the house. Downstairs, I find my mother sitting before uneaten toast.
"I couldn't sleep either," she says. "Not beside your father."
She tells me how she distracts herself with a game. Something Anton said gave her the idea. It started with him comparing his grown children to their child to be. The difference is vast, he claimed. The difference between the London Underground and the Orient Express. Now she lies awake at night finding tube stops to match us. My father, she says, is Piccadilly Circus, all bluster and flourish.
She nibbles on the toast.
"And me?"
"You, darling? Easy." She reaches across the table and touches my cheek. "Chalk Farm. On the Northern line. Black."
Later, a party ends with hanky-panky with some stranger in a back garden. Drunk, I almost miss the last train home. There's nobody in the compartment but me. Looking up at the subway map, I find myself: Chalk Farm, where everything crumbles to dust.
~~~~~~