Freda Churches is from Denny in Scotland. She has three children, a Siamese
cat, a whippet and an adopted chicken who lives on a farm in Norfolk. She has published poems and short
stories in Cencrastus, Chapman, MsLexia and Nerve, and her work has been broadcast on
BBC radio. Freda was a runner-up in the 2002 Fish Short Story Prize and won the Prize in 2004, with
"Spoonface."
|
Opening the door with one knee she
manoeuvres the chair into the bathroom and wedges it against the wall. Unwraps a clean bar of soap, places
two fresh towels and a blue sponge on the shelf above the radiator. Removes his jacket, tugs it down across
the stick-arms clammy with night-sweat, over the pearled points of his elbows and off onto the cracked, ceramic
floor.
She stoops to peel off his bed-socks, gazing in awe at the huge feet dangling limply
on the ends of his scrawny legs. Discards the damp pyjama bottoms, hooking them round the toe of her slipper and
flicking them under the sink. Trying not to peek, down there. Because this is now forbidden territory. An alien
landscape of fleshy furrows and blue-veined crevices, dark and bristling with hair. His ‘nether regions,’ according
to Eileen his careworker, who observes her feeble, motherly efforts with pity.
Feet planted in front, she heaves him into her arms and cheek-to-cheek, step over
step, in a kind of shuffling movement, swivels him around. She peers through the steam, astonished at how tall
he has grown, thinks how she used to hold his father like this, at the Saturday night knees-up in the community
centre. Moon dancing, they called it. She remembers their little joke about the place having no atmosphere and
smiles.
Slowly she bends, and when she can no longer bear his weight, allows him to drop the
last few inches onto the plastic bath-seat. He begins to rock, limbs jerking like he’s being electrocuted, body
thudding convulsively across the metal frame of the chair. She braces herself against the door and pins his hands
to her chest. They wrestle silently for a while, until he slumps into the customary pose - legs knotted together,
wrist folded rigidly under his chin, head cocked at the ceiling, as though bored with the whole procedure.
She grips the lever and winds him skywards. Swings him over the bath. ‘Whee! You’re
on the chairoplanes son!’ And lowers him in an anti-clockwise motion into the water. Cleans the slaver from his mouth,
soaps his chest, reading the Braille of bone and rib. Gets down on her hunkers and with a sort of fumbling movement,
nudges his penis aside. Feeling the soft weight of it against her hand, lathering the sponge and washing him
tenderly - without actually looking. Knowing a part of him has been lost forever.
Unfurling a leg, an arm, sensing beneath her fingers the crackle of ball and socket
and feeling her throat cramp, still, after all this time, at his pain. Wiping over the pubes and down between his
buttocks where tiny scabs of shit cling, and watching in a dreamy kind of way, as they float like flecks of rust
between a rainbow of bubbles. Thinking - absurdly, how wonderful it would be if by a process of osmosis, by some
Lourdes-like miracle, his swollen brain would shrink and he would, rise up and walk.
The bathing comforts him. It soothes her also. The ripple of perfumed water across
skin. She finds in it a flutter of peace, is aware of a strange lightness going through her. At moments like this,
when he is calm and birdsong sweetens the air, she tells herself she is happy to be alive. Honoured to have a son.
She spins the lever around, elevates the seat and pats him dry. Notes that his body
is punctured with gooseflesh regardless of her being up since five and switching on the radiator and wonders for
the umpteenth time why, despite years of practise, she cannot accomplish the simple task of keeping him warm.
Quickly, she inserts his legs into large, rubberised pants, feeling the lightness
zoom out of her. Fastens him into a blue shirt, and grey Armani jeans, (because in this day and age boys like
to be fashionable), pushes his feet into socks and trainers and cleans his teeth. Contemplates the whiskers on
his chin and makes a mental note to buy razor blades and shaving foam. Balances on the lavatory seat and brushes
his black curls, amazed at the blue lights dancing there, wipes the perspiration from her brow with the back of
her hand and says with a touch of triumph in her voice: Who’s mammy’s handsome boy then?
Later, she wheels him along the lobby, reverses into the living room and places him
by the window. Squeezes soggy cornflakes between his clamped lips. Tips warm, sweet tea into his mouth from a Bob
the Builder feeding cup, catching an occasional glimpse of his tongue, yellow and furred, in spite of the generous
application of every imaginable potion, lotion, ointment and tincture ever invented. He gulps, makes a choking
sound and she has to batter him on the back. Sometimes, she batters him a little too hard.
Lunchtime. Eileen arrives with a brochure and some papers to be filled, about a
place that can take him. A special unit with electric chairlifts, water therapy pool and computer facilities.
She considers the wild, thrashing arms, the balled fists and stiff, knobbly fingers, and wonders what good computer
facilities can do. Wants to cry that she is perfectly capable of taking care of her own laddie. Is insulted by this
woman who comes here day in day out, and does not seem to know him at all. Instead, she puts the papers in her
message bag and says: You’d need a Philadelphia lawyer to decipher this’
| "The bathing comforts him. It soothes her also. The ripple of perfumed
water across skin. She finds in it a flutter of peace, is aware of a strange lightness going through her. At moments
like this, when he is calm and birdsong sweetens the air, she tells herself she is happy to be alive. Honoured to
have a son." |
He stares listlessly from the window as his mother pulls on her coat, opens the
door and clatters downstairs into the street. Branches rear up from the trees and beat against the sky as she
makes her way between the drying greens. Her figure swaying round the gable end looks small and weary, her
lumpy shoulders bent against the wind.
She is shrinking under my weight, he thinks, as he watches her disappear over
the hill towards the bus stop.
‘A’ve seen better legs hangin oot a nest,’ says Eileen, birling him into the
bedroom for his afternoon nap. She comes away with the same joke all the time, but he tries to smile, for politeness
sake. Contracts his face, gathers his lips together, and succeeds only in leering up at her. She unfastens his pants,
slaps ointment in a matter-of-fact manner onto his backside and drags them back on. Folds his torso on top of the bed
and hurries next door to catch the afternoon episode of Neighbours.
A large dressing-table leans against the far away wall. He jerks his head at the mirror,
appalled by the twisted, knock-kneed figure reflected there. Gapes in indignation at the white-soled trainers, the
Armani jeans sitting clownishly under his oxters and knows they are completely wasted on him.
He thinks about his mother, who spends what little money they have on designer
clothes for him and dresses herself in cheesy outfits bought from the charity shop. This pale-faced woman, back
bowed by lifting and laying, washing and wiping the sheer, lumpen, wood-in-a-sack weight of him. Who rises three
times in the night and turns his sweaty body like meat on a spit. Who evacuates his bowels with a gloved hand,
retching dryly, discreetly, behind her curtain of hair. Who cleans and powders his arse six times a day then
plants him in that ludicrous plastic bath-seat with the hole through which his genitals dangle, to hang poised
like a trapeze artist over this circus of horrors, that is his life.
He waits for something loud to happen on TV so Eileen can’t hear, and tries to
speak, wraps his floppy epiglottis around some vowels. The sound terrifies him. He shudders at the thick, animal
growl. Glares at the framed picture of a little blonde boy with a teardrop on his cheek and wonders what the fuck
he has to cry about.
He drags his eyes from the picture. Feels them roll in his head and waits for
them to steady. Drops chin to chest and fixes them on the rose-patterned bedspread. For months he has been
working on an idea. An important project. Something that will astound his mother.
Before he hit on the idea, he used to occupy this time alone by memorising words
and phrases. Compiling rhyming lists of everything that was wrong with him into a sort of paraplegic poetry. An
alliteration of afflictions - cystitis, psoriasis, infections, injections, sclerosis, neurosis, fits, fevers
and flatulence, lumber punctures and various other conjunctures, paraplegia, diarrhoea, inflammation, vomiting
(projectile and persistent) constipation and occasional catheterisation. Embrocation. Isolation. Masturbation.
He ponders on what his mother would say if she could see inside his mind. This
son of hers who dreams of naked women with plump breasts and ripe, red vulvas. Who curls up in shame while she,
wearing a distant expression, strips the damp, semen-stained sheets from his bed. Lately, he has noticed something
strange about her that causes his heart to slither. A change has come between them. He feels it instinctively.
There is something different in the way she looks at him that has nothing to do with the sheets.
She is aware as she hurries away from the thin, brooding face in the window, that
she is a character around town. The ‘poor soul’ with the spastic son. So, every afternoon she takes the bus into
the city. The daylight is more frightening than the night, the crowds more lonely than an empty street, as she
walks, holding herself stiffly against the press of people with the pavement rippling before her.
Sometimes, she dreams of her boy walking, tries to make her feet his feet as she
drifts along. So deep is she in these imaginings that she attempts to enter the chemist’s through the display
window. Two girls with spiky hair and white, podgy stomachs nudge each other and snigger. She buys razor blades,
shaving foam and Paracetamol and flits outside into the wind again. Veers along Princess Street in a kind of
clumping gallop and into Jenner’s Department Store.
Breathless and flushed, she takes the moving staircase to the Bistro on the fifth
floor where she sits almost every afternoon looking out at the castle, pretending to be a woman from Morningside
with a son at the university. She glances around and notices that the bare-bellied girls, tempted by the idea of
further comedy, have taken a seat in the corner. She orders coffee and settles on a stool in the light of the
window, reading the newspaper, not really taking it in. Knowing that whatever happens, whatever changes may occur
in the world, they will not alter her life.
Afterwards, she sits on a bench in the indoor shopping centre, watching trays of
people going up and down in a glass elevator, like specimens in a jar. A girl with shiny, auburn hair and a
dour-faced youth are lounging opposite. She wonders what the girl sees in him and recalls herself at that age
and her meetings with Him from Glasgow. Who told her once that she was beautiful, that he loved and adored her.
Who lifted her skirt, pulled the leg of her knickers aside and did it to her against the damp wall of the old
railway bridge one wet December night. A lover with shining, green eyes whom she thought she knew...
How often since then had she longed to feel the comfort of someone’s arms around
her? She imagines how marvellous it would be if her boy could comprehend - if he could speak. A few phrases. Make
her believe she is not alone.
In the long hours before dawn she holds pretend conversations with him--about
simple, everyday things. Utters the words out loud just to hear the sound of her own voice.
Would you like an egg for breakfast son?
Aye. That’d be great Ma. You make the best eggs.
They talk about programmes on TV. Books, magazines and football. The kind of music
he enjoys. The clothes he likes to wear. She has the vague notion that he doesn’t approve of the way she dresses
him. She does not ask why he screams in the night. Why he is never warm.
Occasionally, she finds it hard to swallow. Her larynx feels sore and swollen.
It bulges with unspoken questions. Sometimes, when he’s asleep, she walks to the corner shop merely to exercise her
vocal chords. Stands in front of the counter and coughs to clear the glut from her throat. Hears herself ask in a
broken whisper, for disinfectant, toilet paper and Elastoplasts - which you can never have enough of.
For the past few months, he has been plucking at the bed covers. Rubbing and
twisting till the quicks of his nails are raw and bleeding. Every morning she paints them with foul tasting
liquid and bandages his fingers, but he tears them off and roars in her ear in a voice she can barely recognise.
A voice filled with - what? Pain? Fear? Anger? Now, he has done something he has never done before. Lashed out
and hit her with his fists. He has become unpredictable.
She sits on the bench, filled with a black despair and wonders what to do. If he
knows. If he has finally perceived somewhere deep in that mashed brain of his, that it is all her fault. For
being weak. For having thrust him half-strangled, into the world too soon, for not being beautiful enough or
smart enough to keep hold of her man.
‘You’re doing a wonderful job,’ the doctors and nurses smile. But they cannot see
the truth. That she is a bad mother. Who loathes the relentless rocking. The baring of teeth. Who on a number of
occasions has ignored his cries, sipped brandy straight from the bottle then drifted into a drunken coma. Has
heard him call in the night, pulled the covers over her head and left him splodging in his own urine. This Saint
of paraplegic sons, who once allowed him to swallow his own snot, because she was too exhausted to walk across
the room and pull a tissue from the box. Who has struggled with an almost overpowering desire to ram the pillow
into his slack mouth so that she can have five minutes peace.
She eases the papers along with a coloured brochure from her message bag and studies
the photograph of Summerford House, which is not really a house, but an Institution. Feels her heart thud agonisingly
in her chest and wants to wrench it from her body, to gut herself of the terrible grinding grief, and is at the same
time repulsed by the force of her own self pity. She sits on the bench with the world swimming around her and cannot
understand how it has come to this, when all she ever wanted was a husband, a house and a brown dog.
Working on the project is a difficult because his head refuses to keep still for
longer than ten seconds. Hands twist into claws. Arms and legs lie in ambush, in readiness for him to begin, before
firing out in all directions. It has taken an age simply to get the timing right, waiting for the spasms to recede.
Now, he is able grasp the right hand with the left and rotate it into position, prising open the clenched fist a
little further each time.
So excited is he at this minor miracle that on a few occasions he has tried to show
his mother. But each attempt failed. The impulse swivelled out of control, and struck her a thumping blow to the
ribs. He listened to the breath gust out of her and saw she was livid. He knows he must wait before approaching
her again, but worries that the project will not be ready on time. He has heard her talking to herself in the
night and is frightened that he might be driving her mad.
Every other week the rose-patterned bedspread is removed for washing and replaced
with a plain, biscuit-coloured blanket. He’d tried working with it at first, concentrating on the invisible thread
between eye and hand, but it was impossible. There are no guiding lines. It lies heavy and rough across his body,
an empty canvas to be squinted at for hours on end. He calls it Blank-it Week. Seven empty days and nights when
everything recedes and a suffocating anguish falls about him like a shroud.
On Blank-it Week, the excitement of the past few months is stifled. There is nothing
to do except practise his poetry or slouch in front of the mirror and study his reflection. He tries to view himself
as a stranger might and sees a collection of bones. A great nodding dummy. A weird puppet, who has witnessed the
slow withering of his mother’s spirit.
The long hours of practise have brought with them a problem. His fingers are
ragged, the tips tender and worn to a shiny smoothness. Occasionally, he amuses himself with thoughts of burglary,
of pinching silver from a big house and leaving behind no prints. Better a stealer of silver, he tells himself,
than a robber of souls.
It’s almost time to go back to the flat, but she sits on the bench for a few more minutes,
thoughts turning in an endless loop. She hopes that when she returns he won’t have ground his fingers to the bone.
That pus hasn’t oozed from his nails and stained the sheets. She wonders what makes her go on.
What next? She has seen the pictures of Summerford House with its abundant facilities
and knows that despite everything she cannot, will not, put him there. Because by morning she will be gone. She
knows that Eileen will make the arrangements. Is as sure as any mother can be, that he will be well taken care of.
Having reached this decision, a momentary lightness enters her heart. She climbs the
stairs on the bus filled with a sense of purpose. Clutches her bag tightly as it bumps off into the gloaming. She
has purchased some nice things for him to take. Socks, slippers, a few shirts. A pair of swimming trunks, because
according to Eileen, they can do great things nowadays and he might just manage the water therapy pool. Some
toiletries, two pairs of pyjamas. And as a special treat - a crisp new duvet.
She sees him now, lying at home, his thin figure almost invisible under the flowery,
old bedspread and imagines his room at Summerford House. It is light and airy with bright carpets and curtains.
A caring place. Where he will no longer suffer the raw agony of pressure sores because she has neither the strength
nor the will to lift and turn him, or endure the choking fits because she has never quite managed the art of feeding
him properly. A place where he will be safe and warm.
Before he grew too big, his mother used to point to words and pictures in story- books.
But over the years she has given up. She thinks that he cannot take it in. That language is lost to him. Sometimes
she’d hold his hand and sing a little song where each digit was given a name. He sings it to himself now as he
works.
Tommy Thumb, Tommy Thumb, where are you?
Here I am. Here I am.
Peter Pointer, Peter Pointer. Where are you?
He draws along the larger branches, then as the stiffness begins to ease, graduates
onto the smaller buds and twigs. Following the sweep of stem and shoot, keeping as close to the edge as possible.
Outlining leaves and petals, the intricate curves, the delicate, convoluted heart.
The printed thorns jab like real thorns as he begins tracing the rose. So caught up
is he in what he is doing, that the bony knuckles appear as an extension of the blooms themselves. A giddy pleasure
sweeps over him as muscle and nerve bend to his will. He pictures his mother’s face when he finally reveals his
surprise, feels a familiar trembling in his belly, a slewing of his innards and tries not to mess himself with
the thrill of it all.
Towards evening she returns and Eileen leaves.
| "He ponders on what his mother would say if she could see inside his mind.
This son of hers who dreams of naked women with plump breasts and ripe, red vulvas. Who curls up in shame while she,
wearing a distant expression, strips the damp, semen-stained sheets from his bed." |
She hauls a crumpled suitcase from
the press and slips it behind the scullery door. Enters his room and finds him by the window. Darkness has fallen,
the wind has dropped and a grey mist has descended over the town. She switches on the heater and pulls the curtains.
Washes his face, removes the remnants of Elastoplast from his fingers and chats about her day. Knowing he is
indifferent to the world and all it contains. That she might as well talk to the wall.
She strips off shirt, trousers, and trainers and clothes him in slippers and new
pyjamas. Not the usual maroon-striped outfit worn in those sort of places, by aged men with stubbly whiskers and
no teeth, but modern plain-dyed trousers and jacket in a soft jersey material.
He wants to tell her to leave the curtains open, that he finds the fuzzy, streetlights
comforting. How he watches the rain slanting across them and longs to feel it in his hair. Is surprised at the way
the distant clouds transform themselves into lilac mountains as dusk creeps in. He could see that the world outside
moved and yearned to be part of it.
He has heard her whispering with Eileen about that other place, with its swimming
pool and computers, and aches to know more. Imagines his body floating in warm turquoise water. Sees himself
propped in front of the screen. Visualises the word processor, his finger moving across the keyboard, each letter
rising and falling: I need to get out of this graveyard flat. He wants to let her know that sometimes he
chokes on his food deliberately, so she can batter his back. That he hears his lungs rattle and feels in each blow,
a strange contentment.
In the scullery, she slots the chair under the table and warms some alphabet soup,
hot and nourishing, and the only thing he can swallow. Because she has a preposterous idea that one day the letters
might slither back down his gullet and coagulate into a clause or a phrase. She touches the spoon to his lips,
hears it slop along his windpipe. Gapes in a bone-weary stupor as he vomits anagrams of sick onto the blue-checked
tablecloth.
A dumb anger begins to smoulder. ‘Hot Chocolate.’ The words spring from her mouth,
louder than she intended. She heaves herself up, fills a pan with milk and bangs it onto the stove. Snatches a tin
from the shelf. Switches off the gas, pours milk and chocolate into the Bob the Builder cup and carries it to the
table along with a bag of Silver Spoon sugar, because he has always had such a sweet tooth. Muttering some silly
joke along the way about him not being born with one of those in his mouth.
He is unfathomable. Something about the way she is being watched is making her
lips feel funny. She places the cup in front of him and shuffles wearily back to the sink.
He listens to the clock ticking on the wall. The sound has a dull permanence about
it. There is stiffness in her movements, awkwardness in the slant her head as she bends and straightens. As if
something has gone out of her. He has no proof, merely a feeling. In the space of a few short hours his mother
has become a stranger.
Her palms feel slimy as she takes a mug with the word MOTHER on the side, which
was supposed to be a present from him, but was really from Eileen. Slides it across the worktop. Stands with her
back to him and fumbles inside her bag, conscious of a fleeting moment of power, then returns one foot in front
of the other as though walking in mud, and sits immobile. Eyes fixed and unseeing.
Hot Chocolate. The words alarm him. It was as if she had been waiting to
say them for a long time. He stares at the steaming mug in her hand and feels a crawling sensation about his
spine. Stares at her, and sees something he has never seen before. Inspects her face and cannot find his
mother.
She is talking to him now. Getting to her feet and opening a parcel. Blethering on
about an awful good sale at Jenner’s. A queer little crack appears in her throat as she speaks, her tone higher
than usual. A jumble of words, running together at full speed. He struggles to arrange them and gasps as they
leap into order, clipping neatly across the membranes of his ears, like soldiers on parade, making the hairs
spring from his scalp. Roses-on-bedspread-so-old-fashioned-bought--NEW DUVET.
He recoils in his chair, rigid with shock. Tries to control his eyes but they
are made of elastic. They bounce around in their sockets, taking in a reel of flickering images: Hot
Chocolate - Door - Suitcase - NEW DUVET. He contorts his face in an effort to control the pupils. Adjusts his
line of vision and focuses on the great flag of material she is holding, printed in two shades of blue with
white crested waves and a large grinning dolphin on the front - and UNDERSTANDS IT ALL.
His mother is grinning too. Standing before him in her shiny, puffball skirt
and ridiculous looking waistcoat. Waving the cover in front of his face, like a daftie. Holding it up so he
can SEE THE WHOLE PICTURE.
What time’s the bullfight? He wants to laugh hysterically. To charge, tear it to
shreds, trample it into the ground. He feels the walls of his belly shake, the sound gurgling up and bellowing
from his mouth. Eeeegh! It comes out in a thin, strangulated bleat. A mouse squeak, a trickling mockery of
everything he feels inside.
Eeeegh! He tries again, tongue trembling with murderous rage. Screeches suddenly
in her ear. Punches the air, lashes out with his hands. Butts her with his head, throws his legs out and pivots
forward, a comet of saliva flying out behind him. Rears up again and sends the MOTHER mug crashing onto the
floor then lunges at the bag of sugar and in one swift action, pummels it across the table.
She staggers to her feet watching the sugar hiss onto the blue-checked cloth. Blinks
as the scene swerves in front of her. Feels her heart veer in her chest, has to grab hold of a chair to keep from
falling. Stands transfixed, a sob tearing at her lungs as he gropes for his arm, fingers spidering downwards to
take hold of his wrist.
He sucks a bolt of air into his lungs and thinks about the roses. Imagines the lines,
the size and shape of them. Listens to the familiar squelch of his insides and prays that he won’t shit in his new
pyjamas. Opens his fist and waits patiently as Peter Pointer take a bow. Feels the veins in his hand pulse with
the force of it, takes aim and thrusts into the silvery drifts of sugar.
He traces the smooth, round heart of the flower first, then drags his hand across
and carves a thin, vertical stalk with two smaller shoots, one sprouting upwards at an angle, the other growing
down. Raises his hand again, body and mind vibrating with effort, and carefully outlines the curve of two petals,
joining them together in one single, sweeping movement. Next to this, he constructs another heart, this time
slightly misshapen, with a wee shoot growing at the side.
There is no sound. She closes her eyes, for a moment because they are telling her
something she can scarce believe. Opens them again and stares in a kind of stupefied trance, feeling the throb of
something great between them.
She moves towards him as though walking in some other place, tears running, little
puffs of laughter escaping from her mouth. Gapes at the glittering grains and stumbles across the scullery floor
into a different world. Reads with complete clarity what is written there and is struck by the force of it. Four
bold letters. Two desperately beautiful words. Crystallised in her mind forever:ok ma.
Opening the door with one knee she manoeuvres the chair into the bathroom and
wedges it against the wall. Unwraps a clean bar of soap, places two fresh towels and a blue sponge on the shelf
above the radiator. She bends and gathers him to her, settles him onto the bath-seat and immerses him once more
into the water, amazed at the strength and loveliness of him.
A shy clumsiness settles over them as she kneels at the foot of the bath. She kisses
the down on his cheeks, lifts his hand to her lips and feels the deep, physical burn of it opening towards her.
Sees the shining brilliance in his green eyes, alive and quivering, and understands for the first time. Raises him
up from the water. Looks at her son and sees, not the baring of teeth, but A FULL AND WONDEROUS SMILE.
* * *
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