The Late Hector Kipling by David Thewlis Read Free Book Online

like the vinegar-sodden whelks that she’s just wolfed down. And so it goes:

    ‘Well, there you go, we were married within a year. He was thirty-two, I was twenty-six.’ Another salty pause. ‘Three years later we had you. I had you. You, Hector,’ and she points right down the lens and pouts, a bit like Posh Spice used to until she was told to pack it in and smile a bit more. ‘And that was all we wanted. All that we could have wished for.’

    You know what I think’s going on here? Mum, the camera, all this? I’ll tell you right now. It’s Tracey fucking Emin, that’s what it is. Somehow that programme last night – Tracey shuffling around King’s Cross talking about her abortion – it’s got into Mum, that style, that approach, the candour, the tone of the confessional. Here she is giving it all up and away, and I’m thinking: ‘We’re on the beach in Blackpool, Eleni’s four days late, I’ve got my camera out and my mum’s coming on like Tracey Emin. Giving it large. She’s gone all White Cube on us. She’s gone all concept. Mum! My mum. Mum as confessional Art Star.’
    Mum continues: ‘And I used to look at you in your pretty little cot and think that one day, one wonderful day, you’ll have kids. It felt like . . . when you have a child . . . you don’t just have that child, you have the children of that child, and the children of those children, and so on and so on ... and it made me so happy that I cried. You in the cot trying to say Mama – although Dada seemed to come easier to you – trying to say all sorts of things. And then one day, out of the sudden blue, you were eight and you drew that budgie.’
    She gazes out to sea and walks ahead a little, rubbing her palms together like she’s on Channel 4 or summat, like she’s a seasoned professional, like she’s been up half the night messing with the draft of all this. I follow her. A seagull lands and starts pecking at a crab. Mum throws it a handful of nut crumbs. ‘We all need something small to look after,’ I expect her to say, but she doesn’t. She’s got her own thoughts, her own ideas, and here they come:

    ‘And I know that me and your dad couldn’t draw the bloody curtains, but you can. You can draw it all and make it look real and strange and lost. And I know that we’re useless. That I’m useless, but I did make you and you can make other things, and if you went on and made a baby then I think that would be lovely’ We’re back where we started with everything being lovely, which is more like Mum and I relax. I turn off the camera and wish she knew that I was smoking again. ‘Was that all right?’ she says and I say, ‘Yes,’ and, ‘Great,’ and, ’Definitely,’ and, Amazing, Mum.’ We set off back for home and talk of other things like candy floss and donkey shit and fuck knows what. Whatever it is it’s got nothing to do with babies from then on. But it has really.

    That night we all went back and congratulated Dad on painting the garage floor green.
    ‘It looks a bit like we’ve got grass in the garage,’ he says.
    ‘You know what, Dad,’ I say, ‘you’re right. It does.’
    We ordered a Chinese takeaway. At half-past eight I took control of the television and made everybody watch a documentary about Edwin Hubble.
    ‘Look at that,’ says Mum, pointing at a nebula cluster, ’it looks like an eye.’
    ‘The eye of God,’ says Dad, though he doesn’t mean it cos he doesn’t believe in God. Neither does Mum. At least I don’t think they do. They’ve never mentioned Him. My whole life, not one mention of Him. Until now.
    Anyway, Mum needn’t have bothered looking through Eleni’s buttoned-up coat into her womb, cos that night, after Mum and Dad had scuttled off to bed, we fucked on the cream settee again, and Eleni’s four-days-late bit all came flooding out. We didn’t stop when the blood started to pour over the cream settee, we persevered and mumbledthings like ‘Yes’ and ‘Oh