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opinion
This mother's life
Victor
Paul Borg opens up a single mother's bag – her dreams,
her life, her pain. This breed of women carry a potent attraction
in their sexual maturity mingled with the rebellion of adolescence
Sally couldn't wait to blow open her little world in an apologetic
tone, as if to say, ‘This is my life, and are you sure you
want to be part of it?' On the phone she had sounded unsure, too,
but willed herself to go out on a limb. ‘It was nice of you
to give us your telephone number,' then later, ‘I was going
to call you earlier in the week…' – and her voice drifted
off. Let's hook up, I said, but she could only go out once a week
when the father took the children. The moment after she invited
me home, a doubt started creeping into her voice again, mumbling
that she was tired and wouldn't I get bored sitting in a living
room with a mother, two daughters and a dog? So I sprang to my feet
and took a taxi to the edge of London in Crystal Palace, not forgetting
that bottle of wine.
When we first made contact in a party, she was drumming the bongos
and, as a smile painted her face, she looked into my eyes unflinchingly,
though in the mayhem of electronic dance music you would not have
detected her feeble thrumming if you weren't watching. She cut her
adulthood in the raving, New Age and traveller's circuit, the vagrant,
gipsy life of Generation X. For many years she house-squatted, and
she drifted for months on end across India and Thailand. Ganja fudged
her ambition, drink came with the evening, and hallucinogenic drugs
fired her imagination. Work consists of house cleaning mostly, and
for a few years she pestered motorists at traffic lights by wiping
their windscreen before thrusting an unsure hand for tips. ‘In
two hours during rush hour I used to make £30,' she said,
‘but now I have to take the children to school during rush
hour.'
Single motherhood changes you, she lamented, and it was a full-time
job. When I asked her what she did that week, she rapped a litany
of house-chores and – the highlight of the week – horse-riding
with her children – Dawn, 8, and Thila, 6 – both of whom
now sat in the living room as we sipped wine and listened to music.
Everyone demanded Sally's attention: Dawn wanted to be tickled,
Thila wanted to be read stories, the dog River wanted to snuggle
his head on her thigh.
The previous Saturday she had done three Ecstasies, and she had
played the bongos in another party. Today she was saying that the
fragmented life of drugs was history, and she wanted to escape from
London, from the claustrophobia of her insular orbit of family and
nagging life-long friends and ex-husband, all of which lived down
the road. Life is too furious in London and she didn't want her
daughters growing up in a muddle of drugs and smog. She wanted to
raise her children in the warmth of sunshine and the tranquillity
of nature; she wanted to move to Spain. She would buy a house in
a village in the mountains, an hour's drive from Barcelona and another's
hour's drive from the sea. ‘So I'll have a bit of city and
bit of beach,' she explained.
‘The sun in Spain would be too hot,' Dawn said.
‘It'll be energising,' Sally countered, ‘and old country
houses are cool and breezy.'
She had it all fixed in her mind, but in her eagerness she had ignored
the most basic prerequisite of successful emigration: a job. In
sleepy villages housewives wash their own houses and there are no
traffic lights where cars pause for someone to wipe their windscreens
clean for snitched tips.
The three-bedroomed house was clean and cosy, carpets lining the
floor, the living room painted an earthy amber, and on the personal
billboard there were pictures of friends and family and collages
of her daughters' poetry: I liked Dawn's line about ‘flowers
growing mellow.' Sally flounced to her feet and started juggling
balls, then she grabbed another set of balls dangling from a chain
and with a bobble of feathers at their end and she slunk them round
her body in the figure of eight. That smile returned to her face,
and her body writhed in graceful synchrony with the movement of
the balls. This breed of women in their thirties, even in middle
age, carry a potent attraction in their sexual maturity mingled
with the rebellion of adolescence and, underneath the crust of responsibility,
the teenager still seeking out the world. I could see that persona
in Sally's passionate, come hither smile; her eyes were smiling
faithfully, crinkling sexily. I could relate.
Dawn joined her mum, and as mother and daughter juggled and danced,
they giggled like conspiratorial, wicked mates. Sally treated her
daughters as mature friends, and gave them unblinking attention.
‘You have a good mother,' I told the daughters.
Sally wants Dawn to become a writer in that mother's habit of projecting
one's frustrated dreams on your children. Sally wanted to write
about her life.
‘Everyone wants to write the story of their life,' I pointed
out.
‘But my life might help other women,' she said. ‘My book
will show them the kind of domestic violence I suffered and inspire
them on how to get out of it. I would put in a bit of psychology.'
‘You have a story.'
Then she opened a leather-bound journal bursting with poems written
with a pencil. When she read, her voice suddenly swelled with grim
passion and longing. She performed three poems and, the last one,
called ‘Merry Go Round' recounted a cycle stuck in a spiral
of impossibility: the merry-go-round, same motions, same vista,
same feelings, same promises and same broken promises, a forever
spinning spiral equally served with emotions of nausea and banality.
Haven't we all been there before?
‘Who was the man?' I asked when she finished reading.
‘My ex-husband,' she said. She spoke about the violence –
the merry-go-round – he would hit her, then ask for redemption
and she would forgive him, then he would hit her again, on and on
and on. She said, ‘But the black-eyes stare at you in the mirror
every week.'
She had been married to him for seven years, nurturing his two daughters,
when she snapped. But he refused to go without a fight. She spoke
about the break-ins and the trails of destruction in the middle
of the night. And later, when she changed the lock, he terrorised
her boyfriends, slashing the tyres of their cars parked outside.
She held up her diary and said, ‘I want to publish this just
the way it is.'
It's too personal, I said. Readers wrapped in their little worlds
would not relate with her sentimental crunch – she had to write
from a stance of divorced emotions, from the enlightenment of outside
observation.
I wondered if she still believed – or if she ever did –
in the salvation of a man's arms whisking her into marital bliss?
When she told me about the French lover, the teenager was out. The
Gallic amour had lasted a few weeks in summer, consummated in a
medieval castle and emboldened by wine every night. And then he
was gone, like a butterfly fluttering towards new pastures, and
she found herself in the grey dreariness of the British weather.
Halfway through the night I asked her if I could crash out on the
sofa, but she could not muster the confidence to trust me. Men could
be unpredictable and dangerous, life had taught her. And River was
home.
I called a taxi and as we waited, River idled up to Sally. His soil-coloured
hide had been meticulously groomed, and he had big ears and goggling
brown eyes, a well-fed spaniel that had snarled when I turned up.
Sally spoke to him endearingly; he licked her lips and groaned with
approving pleasure. After Sally's ex-husband had left, River became
territorial and angry when people, especially men, slept over; he
would snarl and bark and knock things over. The vet had told her
that River, in his desire for a mate, had found the courage to assert
his authority – the unchallenged patriarch in the house.
The taxi beeped outside and I thought how Sally will always have
her dreams and her nice house in suburbia, and she might always
have a possessive male in the house who would be prepared to bare
his teeth and bite if he felt his grip slipping. But I didn't mention
that.
victor@borg.tf
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