Things to Make and Mend by Ruth Thomas Read Free Book Online

it smells stagnant. It has probably been like that for a couple of days. While he is searching for a box of teabags, I pick up the cloth between the tips of my fingers, walk quickly over to the bin in the corner of the room and drop it in. I glance at my son and freeze: he has observed me.
    ‘Old habits.’
    Joe raises his eyebrows and smiles.
    ‘Mothers,’ he says to Kenneth. He is so mature, so worldly; my mothering, I suppose, is no longer a concern.
    ‘Milk in your tea?’
    ‘Please, Joe.’
    He opens the fridge. The fridge seems to be full of half- finished jars of gherkins. Sprigs of yellowing dill float in the brine, preserved, suspended, reminiscent of something in my old school science lab.
    ‘So,’ Joe says into the fridge, ‘would you like a biscuit? I expect you’re hungry.’
    And he closes the fridge door, goes to a cupboard and takes out a new packet of chocolate bourbons.
    ‘Or we have digestives,’ he says. ‘I mean …’
    My son has never been very good at hiding things. Girlfriends. Lost girlfriends. Once, when I went to visit him in a flat he was living in in Newcastle, I bumped into a girl of about twenty varnishing her nails in the bathroom. Burgundy varnish. She had apparently been living with Joe, in his flat, for six weeks.
    ‘Hi, I’m Constanza,’ the girl had said, looking up and giving me a big, delightful smile. She was olive-skinned and pretty. She sounded Spanish. ‘And are you Joe’s …?’ she began, baffled.
    ‘I’m his mother.’
    ‘His mother? You are too young.’
    ‘Yes, well, I had Joe pretty young. I expect he told you.’
    ‘No, no, he didn’t tell me.’
    Even now, at forty-three, I am still thrown by people’s astonishment. You have a son of twenty-seven? No! How is that possible? Often, I am mistaken for his older sister.
    ‘I was a teenage mum,’ I used to say a few years ago, when I wanted to shock people at dull departmental dinner parties, or at conference ‘jollies’.
    ‘How unexpected,’ one man joked, flapping his damask napkin. ‘You seem so cultured.’
    ‘How … French,’ said another man.
    ‘I am cultured. I am not French,’ I said, irritated.
    ‘Yes, but you act as if you are. French, that is.’
    ‘Do I really? How do French people act?’
    ‘Bossy.’
    ‘Bossy?’ I repeated, feeling a rush of irritation. ‘Bossy? Well. Ha! Maybe I have reason to be bossy. Maybe I’ve had to put up with a lot of comments like that over the years. Maybe I –’
    ‘Calm down,’ the napkin-flapper said, slightly alarmed. ‘I was joking.’
    ‘It is so nice to meet you,’ Constanza the pretty Spanish girlsaid when I left my son’s flat in Newcastle. ‘I look forward to meet you again.’
    But we never did meet again. My son’s girlfriends come and go, come and go. One day they are in his bathroom, polishing their nails, and the next, they are gone.
    *
    While the kettle is boiling, I go to the bathroom. It is long and thin and in need of repainting. There is a tall window at the far end, above the lavatory. The view is of other tenements and the distant, dark North Sea. I look at the things he has in his bathroom: a modest collection of cheap shampoos and shaving gel. There is still some evidence of his former girlfriend’s life here: a blue glass bottle on the window sill, a small whale-shaped mirror stuck to the wall, a half-empty box of cotton buds on the bath ledge.
    ‘He is packing to leave,’ I think. ‘And I am here to help him.’
    ‘Mum?’ Joe calls from the kitchen. ‘Tea. We’re in the living room.’
    ‘OK,’ I reply, walking back into the hallway, and wondering for a moment where the living room is.

Buttonhole
    Sally does not go out much in the evenings. She likes home. But she did recently go to a party with Sue from work. It was an hour’s drive away and she thought, well, she should. Sue drove – efficient, motherish – peering through the rainy windscreen at the dark, hedge-narrowed roads.
    The party was full