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RATING: PG-13
CATEGORY: S. MSR.
SPOILERS: post Requiem.
KEYWORDS: Progeny, Angst, third person POV.
SUMMARY: A teenager muses on his mother's
unspoken feelings.
***
"It is as if the dead saw thru our eyes, other for a moment borrowed
these windows, gazing." - Diane Di Prima -
My mother hates me.
There.
I know the Truth.
Today she gave me the proof I needed. With hindsight, it came as a relief,
after years of not knowing, of wondering whether I was paranoid or not.
Mothers love their children; it's a fact of life, which is probably why I've
had my doubts for so many years. But today she gave me undeniable proof.
It was there, so clear in her light blue eyes. The same shade as mine.
She didn't even try to hide it this time.
In the past I've caught glimpses, wafer-thin slivers of hatred quickly
swallowed in the shadows of her pupils like a mortal sin too terrible to be
confessed.
Because I'm sure as hell she never told her priest about it. My pretty
Catholic mother with her pale skin and strange accent is full of secrets.
I wonder if she ever shared them with my father.
Whoever he is.
My birth remains a mystery. I did ask, of course, many times. Her answer,
when I get one, is always elusive. "It's complicated," is the best I've ever
got.
I've been looking for clues, mostly by examining myself in a mirror. I have
her eyes but not her hair and *definitely* not her nose. And I'm tall. Mum
is a titchy redhead.
I can't remember any men ever living in the house, even when I was little.
We've led a rather secluded life. Mum doesn't like to socialize and doesn't
have any friends over here. Well, none that I know of; maybe she's got some
at work. She does come home late at night sometimes, but never brings anyone
with her.
Mum is a lecturer in pathology at Oxford, 20 miles from here. That's a fancy
way of saying she cuts up dead people to make students reconsider their
choice of career. The Hippocratic oath doesn't seem so glamorous when you're
elbow-deep in lower intestines.
She loves her job. She spends hours writing medical stuff on her computer.
That's something, I guess.
Mum likes her people dead and interesting. She's not very good at dealing
with the painful living ones. Like me.
She does have two men in her life, though.
Americans. Like her.
George and Walter.
The only two other people she allows in our house. She probably thinks that
making them stay in a B&B after they've crossed an entire ocean to reach us
would be too much to ask.
I call them the Men in Black. They both look like undercover CIA agents or
something, although they don't wear guns. They move with the caution of
spies, like the ones you see in the movies. Come to think of it, Mum moves a
bit that way too. Is my mum a spy? Did she come here to escape a deadly
conspiracy? I know it's way too farfetched, but sometimes I wonder why she
left America, since it's obvious British culture leaves her indifferent. She
sighs when I watch Eastenders and she doesn't even like cricket. I think she
prefers baseball: I've never seen her watch any sport on telly but there is
an old baseball bat in the attic which I'm not allowed to play with.
Anyway. Back to George and Walter.
Walter is a tall, bald, sullen man who doesn't talk much, which I know suits
Mum just fine. He comes once a year or every other year, it depends. He hugs
Mum and they share small talk in front of me over dinner. They're not very
good at it, even I can see that. Walter asks me about school, and listens
distractedly as I explain to him the finer points of our school system,
which is a bit pointless as he never remembers a thing from one year to the
next. Then he and Mum disappear into the study where I'm persona non grata.
He's usually gone in the morning.
I like Walter but I don't think he's my dad.
Now, George is a different kettle of fish. Mr. Hale's coming and goings are
m ore erratic. He wears a leather jacket and kisses Mum on the forehead.
When I was small he used to come quite often, twice a year or so, and would
sometime stay a few days. He even stayed a full week once, the summer I was
six. We all went to London Zoo and he let me give some of his sunflower
seeds to the monkeys. Mum said that only monkeys would appreciate that gift,
but she was smiling.
George manages to do that, make her smile. Sometimes.
I was happy that day. I wanted him to be my dad.
When Mum put me to bed that evening I told her so. Her hands froze on the
covers, and when I looked up at her she turned her head away quickly to stop
me reading her expression, but I saw. The raw pain in her eyes made me want
to scream for her. If she couldn't let it all out maybe I could.
Of course, I didn't.
I am, after all, my mother's son.
She left the room without kissing me goodnight. I heard George leave that
night. I never mentioned the subject again.
It might have been three years before he turned up again. His hair had gone
even whiter than before.
George plays havoc with Mum's nerves. I've never seen her lose her temper
with anybody but him. Well not *seen*, exactly, but I've heard doors slam.
George makes Mum cry.
I know that because every time he leaves, her eyes go grey and just a little
too bright, and she goes very silent for several days.
George makes love to Mum.
Or at least used to. When he's around nowadays I always find him on the
couch in the morning. Maybe the separation is less painful for her that way.
But once when I was little I woke up in the middle of the night with
something I couldn't keep to myself. I made my way to Mum's bedroom, torn
between the need to show her and the reluctance to wake her up. I saw soft
light filtering from under the closed door, so I opened it carefully in case
she'd fallen asleep with the light on.
I froze when I saw she wasn't alone. George was there, kneeling on the bed.
He must have arrived while I was asleep. They were both naked and rocking
gently in each other's arms, Mum's ankles locked against his back, her cheek
resting on his shoulder. She was making soft sounds like a baby cat.
Then she opened her eyes and saw me.
I held out my bloody hands.
"John!"
She jumped off the bed, and rushed towards me, struggling into her discarded
bathrobe, her flushed face suddenly turning paler than the sheet George had
thrown over himself.
After cleaning me up, she carried me back to my bedroom. She kept repeating
"You're fine, you're fine," into my ear as she did so. I felt fine, but I
don't think she did.
She stayed by my bed until I fell asleep, holding my hand and stroking my
brow, a sure sign she was very upset. She's not really the touchy-feely
type, you see.
I don't know why she was so worried.
It was, after all, only a nosebleed.
Mum never gives anything away, but I'm slowly learning to read her. Too
slowly though. Maybe that's why I want to study psychology when I go to
university in a few years time, to try to understand what's going on in her
head.
I know she didn't want to hate me; she'd been trying very hard not to for so
many years, since I was born in fact. She did try to love me in her own
clumsy way. But she never really got the hang of it. Another thing Mum can't
do is lie.
Mum is a fundamentally a good person, I think. I've never known her to be
unduly cruel or unfair, merely distant. I know what she feels for me must be
very disturbing to her. One thing she can't hide from her eyes is the guilt.
And thank God for that, because it helped me reach the conclusion that I was
not to blame.
Because of course I did wonder for a long time. Ever since I was sentient
enough to form coherent thoughts I knew there was something wrong. There was
a restraint in the way she held me, fed me, changed me, kissed me, sang
(badly) to me; an elusive but tangible distance about her.
I tried to be the perfect son. I hardly ever fussed, never threw a tantrum,
tried to keep to myself, tried not to need her too much even when I was
little and nightmares plagued my nights. I never told her about the white
light and the smelly old man I swore I could see lurking near my bedpost.
Even after all these years I can still recall the exact taste of the damp
pillow I stuffed in my mouth in order not to cry too loudly. Salt and
Tesco's fabric softener.
I tried to love her the way she loved me: at a distance.
I tried to be this stranger she had to care for without having to bear the
burden of emotional attachment.
I tried to be her John Doe.
Today she came home early. It was a pleasant half-term spring afternoon and
I was outside fixing my bike by the shed. I paused to enjoy the timid caress
of the sun on my cheeks, looking at the clouds, trying to give them names.
I was hesitating between a radish and a squirrel when I heard a faint sound
like a sharply indrawn breath.
Mum was standing very still near the open wooden gate, her eyes fixed on me.
As I met her gaze, I saw something die there, whatever tenderness she had
ever held for me withering away and being replaced by a hatred so colossal
it took the breath right from my lungs.
All pretences were gone.
There was no mistake: it was directly aimed at me. I looked down, mostly
because I couldn't stand the terrifying finality of her stare.
I heard the gate slam as she left, then her car.
What I'd been holding dropped from my numb fingers and fell noiselessly on
the freshly mown lawn as my hands began to shake. A panicked voice in my
head was shrieking like a fast-forwarded tape that she was only mad at me
because of what I'd been doing.
Of course I couldn't believe it. If only because the tip of the iceberg
lodged so deeply inside my mother's heart sometimes showed through her icy
blue eyes when she wasn't careful, but also because the voice's so-called
logical explanation just didn't make sense.
It was, after all, only a cigarette.
The End.
HOMEWORK:
* Who is John's father? Justify. (10 points) * Reference from Little Green
Men? (1 point) * Reference from Arcadia? (2 points) * Reference from Detour?
(1 point) * Reference from The Unnatural? (1 point)
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