Sunday, 11 November 2012

Mother


They walked into the café together, but not in the right way.  As the mother took the step and crossed the room, selected a chair and sat heavily upon it, she had all the airs of a woman alone, looking forward, hands by her sides.  When she sat she did not touch the chair with any but the requisite body part, as if too proud, too afraid that even self-assisted sitting might show her age.  This indignant relationship with the furniture in fact derailed her otherwise perfect line of presentation; she must have been at least forty, though in a snapshot she was a woman of no more than thirty.

But once she’d placed herself down, there appeared her entourage, a son – a darling of nine or ten in a navy blazer and shorts, a flat-topped straw hat hanging from a pudgy index finger – was pulled to her table despite all lack of encouragement, by an invisible umbilical attaching him to the reluctant party in the low brown leather armchair, the copy of which he pulled himself up and onto, opposite her.  His exposed legs dangled, though he sat the very edge, trying to deny his diminutive body. 

But despite all his smallness it was soon clear to all neighbours who cared to listen that he was possessed of a large wit, more than most men carry into their wisdomless elderly years.  That strange kind of wit that some children take on so easily from the chronic satire of the upper-middle-class, a soft skull in a private-eye household, the brain impressed with the dialect of the panel game-show and the background noise of Radio 4. 

The mother sat back into the depths of the armchair, legs neatly crossed in slim suit trousers, her head resting on three fingers of her right hand.  The boy leaned forward and picked up a cardboard menu from the table. 
“Do you want a latte?  Or a cappuccino – you can have a decaf, I don’t know how that is supposed to work, coffee with no coffee in it, but oh well.”  Not a nod or smile from his counterpart, his challenge seems to be to excite her, to please her.  He continued, sceptical adult words spoken though a fresh young throat, he scoffed at the childish hot chocolate until the waitress appeared.  Rooting in her shirt pocket for a pad and pencil, she spoke sweetly.
“Hello what can I get you?”
“An Americano hot milk no sugar,“ the mother said in one word “and…” she pointed her eyes at the boy, the waitress scribbled and turned with a bright smile reserved for the smaller customers.
“I will have a small, no, a medium cappuccino please.”
The waitress faltered, curled a furl of hair behind an ear and suggested “Is that a decaf cappuccino?”
“No I don’t think so, just a regular thank-you.”
The waitress looked for an objection from the mother but she had bowed her head behind her hand, as if hiding from a vicious sun beam, the girl giggled and trotted off.
“You know mum” started the boy, “today Charlie said he was going to drop maths and I told him it was insane but he said he was going to and that-”
The boy spoke at with a quiet voice suggestive of an intimate, mature tête-à-tête, but with an excited pace that he could not suppress, as if sure that each following sentence would be the one to please his company.  The mother leant back further into the hollow of the chair, listening to her son as she would a husband she had long ago decided to loath. 
“- and he said was getting his father – they all say father, mum, it’s so posh, dad would hate that wouldn’t he mum – he’s getting his father to get him out of maths because the economoney doesn’t need more maths people, and I told him it was insane, mum, he wants to take up French instead but I told him, mum, I said to him ‘as if this economoney needs more French people’, I said that to him mum!”
The drinks appeared, the mother poured the steaming milk into the dark liquid, while the boy eyed his cappuccino and sighed loudly. 
“Can’t they not put chocolate in anything?  I bet it was that girl, mum, that girl you know?”  The boy he lifted the mug to his mouth and then placed it on the table, the chocolate-dusted foam lid clearly untouched, the mother glanced at the boy, he made an emphatic swallowing noise but she was clearly unconvinced and looked back to the ceiling.
“Let’s play a game,” the boy says suddenly, “do you want to play a game?  We could play that one with the letters!”
The boy’s mother looks at something just behind her son’s head, she sips from her coffee and hardly moves her lips as she speaks.
“No, no let’s not.”