Mummy Said the F-Word by Fiona Gibson Read Free Book Online

of her mint, ‘know the meaning of hard work. Building ships with our bare hands. Riveting steel plates. Manning the furnace.’
    La-di-da.
    ‘We worked hard in them days, you know.’
    ‘Yes, I’m sure you did.’
    I scan the day room as Mum chunters on. She truly believes that she ran a Clyde shipyard single-handedly, operating enormous cranes and ripping steel plates with her teeth. When these shipyard rants started, I knew that things weren’t right. My heart would plummet as she tailed off, scrabbling for words. As far as I’m aware, the only jobs Mum had were working in her father’s tobacconist shop in Glasgow’s East End and terrorising my brother and me. She had me at forty-two years old, when my brother, Adam, was thirteen, which was considered beyond ancient back then. I was a mistake, obviously. ‘An accident,’ she’d delight in telling me, when her words still made sense. ‘You half killed me. I got pleurisy after giving birth to you and I was never the same, ’cause they sewed me up wrong.’ She made herself sound like a defective handbag.
    ‘And her,’ she rages now, causing her downy-haired neighbour to drop her digestive, ‘she’s got a damn cheek!’
    ‘Mum, no one’s doing anything to you.’
    My head is starting to ache. Travis has yanked off his shoes and left them on the carpet where anyone could fall over them and smash a hip. As I force them back on to his feet, I wonder what Millie is doing right now. Having her eyebrows threaded, or her breasts exfoliated? I doubt if she has tended her own brows for a decade.
    ‘Granny,’ Travis announces, swinging round from the TV, ‘we went to Forpe Park. Daisy got wet. We saw boobies.’
    Mum frowns. ‘Whose boobies?’
    ‘Daisy’s,’ Travis explains. ‘Daddy
ger
-friend.’
    Mum glowers at me. ‘Haven’t you found yourself a nice man yet?’
    ‘No, Mum, but I’m working on it, and I’ll report my findings as soon as there’s anything to tell.’
    ‘I’m not surprised, you being that stout.’
    Stout? She always does this – implies that I’m morbidly obese. I’m a size 12, for crying out loud. Hardly gym-honed, a tad spongy round the middle from three pregnancies – three pregnancies, Mother! – but not quite two-seats-on-an-aeroplane-sized either . Who does she think she is? Eva Herzigova? In line for the next Calvin Klein underwear campaign?
    Mum grins savagely at me. A fragment of mint gleams on her lip. How did Dad manage to stay married to her without moving permanently to the attic? Perhaps her vitriolic streak is why he decided to depart from this earth almost twenty years ago. He’d willed that fatal heart attack to happen, brought it on by piling thick slabs of butter on to his toast. It was his only escape from Jeannie’s ill humour.
    Mum and I slump into silence, as usually happens during my visits. Some of the inmates are chatting idly, but their conversations take so many unexpected twists and turns that most look utterly lost. I keep trying to coax Travis away from the TV, but it draws him in by some powerful magnetic force. The woman beside Mum is gazing so fondly at him I can’t bring myself to tell him off. Mum takes another mint from her pocket and flicks its wrapper on to the floor.
    To test me – or maybe to amuse himself in a perverse way – Martin once suggested that Jeannie move in with us. ‘Jake and Travis could share a bedroom,’ he said. Never mind their seven-year age gap; didn’t families of fifteen used to cram together in a room the size of a cutlery drawer?
    Was he out of his
mind
? As it was, our marriage was hardly in sparkling form. Perhaps that was the plan, that Jeannie’s arrival would sound the death knell for us and provide the escape clause he craved. Like Dad and his butter. I wouldn’t have put it past him. I agreed, however, that something had to be done. Although carers were dropping in to prepare Mum’s meals, she’d been found wandering the streets of Hackney at