Send Me A Lover by Carol Mason Read Free Book Online

Newcastle. The alternative was chugging through central London to Kings Cross to then take the train for four hours. Or there’s always the other joy of seven hours on the Victoria to Sunderland coach. I often wonder why my mother couldn’t have moved away and married somebody who lived closer to everything. She still could have found one that tripped off to the pub every night, and never brought her flowers on her birthday, only they could have been London pubs he went to, and London flowers he never sent. It would have made my life so much easier.
     
    ~ * * * ~
     
    I roll out of the taxi at my mother’s front door coughing and wheezing like a bag of drowning kittens. The rest of the world has moved with the times: but not Sunderland. The taxi drivers aren’t supposed to smoke, but there’s always one who will try to get away with it, and I have to get him. When I bleat, ‘I have asthma!’ he promptly pulls out a can of lavender air-freshener and tries to simultaneously blind me and gas me, either for my benefit, or to hide the smell of freshly hatched fart that was potent when I came on board. On top of things, it’s raining again, and rain in the summer makes me uptight.
    ‘You’re looking uptight,’ my mother greets me at the garden gate, not minding that she’s getting seriously drenched, her arms wide open for a hug.
    ‘I’m fine!’ I growl.
    Something about the constancy of her just triggers a silent sob in me, but I have to mask it by being stroppy.
    ‘You look pale, Mam!’ And older than when I last saw her, nine months ago. ‘Have you lost weight? You seem a little thinner.’
    ‘You look like a skeleton on diet pills, and I’m not saying anything am I.’ She pinches my cheeks. ‘Where did your little face go? Your little chubby cheekies?’
    I peel her hands off me. ‘I never had chubby cheekies Mam. And if you’re just going to find flaws in me, I’m going back to Canada on the next flight.’ I drag my suitcase up the garden path, secretly trying not to be too happy that I’m back here.
    ‘My sour-puss daughter’s home,’ she says. ‘All’s well with my world.’
    Coming into the home where I grew up always fills me with a confused nostalgia. Everything is as it has been for thirty years. Same withered carpet. Same tired chairs. The random addition of a new photograph with me in it. Same mother. My initial reaction was wrong; she doesn’t really look older. She’s every bit the Vivien Smith she always was. Hair the same style it’s been for as long as I can remember—a jaw-length, fringed, ash-blonde bob with wild, untameable bits kinking up at the ears ‘like a duck’s backside,’ (her words). I can picture her licking her fingers, staring in the mirror, and trying to plaster the wild bits down. Her face is not conventionally beautiful, yet it just is. There’s a fine mix of femininity in the soft, unusual, almost topaz eyes, balanced with strength in the aquiline nose (‘my beak’, as she calls it; ‘all the better to peck you with’ then she’ll dip her nose rapidly to your face then pop a fat kiss right on your lips, making you go, ‘Yack!’ and wipe your mouth—something I remember doing a lot of when I was little, and she was always attacking me with kisses). Perhaps the chin is too long, the mouth too wide, the cheekbones too low, and the eyebrows too dark against her porcelain skin, but it all adds up to a face you would look twice at, a face you would remember. Other than pronounced laughter lines around her eyes, her skin hasn’t a wrinkle. Other than a slight softening in the elasticity of her upper arms, my mother’s body could be that of any woman of indeterminate age who takes good care of herself. People do double takes of appreciation when they look at her—and not just men. Her dress sense is shamelessly modern. Like today she is wearing a knee-length slim-fitting denim skirt, with a low-rise waistband that coasts over a nicely rounded bottom and