Send Me A Lover by Carol Mason Read Free Book Online Page A

pair of hips, nipping in at an hourglass waist. And the rest of the package is a pair of large and high-sitting boobs that are still, unfairly perfect. You really would never think she was sixty. ‘I’m not sixty! I’ve just past fifty-nine!’—is another thing she’ll say, when she’s not trying to kid herself she’s really fifty.
    ‘Hello?’ she snaps, when the phone rings and interrupts our catching up. She’s ready to ward off strange telemarketers with the Venom of Vivien. ‘Hello Stan. Yes…. Very well….’ She makes a talking-mouth with her hands and rolls her eyes at me. ‘Yes, well, I have my daughter here at the moment… Angela… yes. Is there any other daughter I have that I should know about?’ She chuckles tiresomely and rolls her eyes again at me. ‘Yes she’s fine, but she really has just arrived, so, you know I really should go and, you know…’ She makes a garrotting gesture, then covers the mouthpiece and says to me, ‘They get all drippy when they’ve been on the beer, don’t they? Slopping on at you… It’s a pity they couldn’t swallow their false teeth in the process, then we’d be spared the ordeal of having to listen to them. We’d only have to hear them choke, which could be quite enjoyable.’
    She takes her hand off the mouthpiece. ‘Yes Stan. Fine Stan. Very nice of you Stan I love you too, now be off with you Stan. Call me again in a few months.’
    She hangs up and says, ‘Die!’ And I’m not sure whether she means that for the phone or for poor Stan.
    Stan is one of my mam’s ‘admirers’. My mam refuses to admit that she’s the sex siren of the senior citizen’s community. Half the widowers in Sunderland get an extra kick in their leg just thinking of her. ‘I’ll give them a kick,’ she’ll say. ‘My ankle right up their anus.’
    I’ve actually witnessed her telling one of them: ‘I have lots of friends. But they are all lady-friends .’ Which is a Vivien way of telling them that they can dream on, because their dreams are all they’re going to have.
    ‘No more men for me,’ she’ll say to me. ‘Your dad put me off for life.’
     
    ~ * * * ~
     
    Three days after I arrive, I wake up extremely irritable. For one reason, it’s still raining, and feels more like February than early June. The trees droop in the garden. The dahlias droop their lovely big heads. I droop looking at it all, and my mother droops looking at me. Then there’s the added catastrophe of there only being Nescafe Instant in the house, not my Illy that I’m used to: the one small luxury I couldn’t give up when I had to start economizing. On top of that, I want to feel happy that I’m home spending quality time with my mother. I want to drag happiness out of me by its ears, for her sake as well as my own, but I can’t get to grips with it.
    Sigh.
    I make an excuse to pop into town today by myself, just because I’m feeling one of my ‘perverse’ moods (as she calls them) coming on and I don’t want to take it out on her.
    She is happy to let me go. I wonder if she feels my glum face is cramping her style.
     
    ~ * * * ~
     
    Could I live here? I ask myself as I wander around the city centre. Sunderland has changed for the better over the years. It is still very much a working class Northern town, but it has smartened up, when I think of the dump it used to be when I was growing up. The people haven’t changed. They’re still as nice and friendly as ever. Except for the scary, rough contingent, unique to the North East, who will confront you with a menacing look if you catch their eye on the train. And there really are some evil kids lurking around the dodgy council housing estates. I remember getting accosted by a group of tiny tots as I walked home from shopping. ‘Give us your bags, or else!’ one of them hollered. He couldn’t have been more than eight years old but he and his tiny friends got me trembling around the kneecaps.
    I tried climbing up their