Turning Thirty by Mike Gayle Read Free Book Online

certain order.
    â€˜How long are you home for?’
    This was a tricky one. Unlike my dad, my mum was blessed with an inquisitive, tenacious mind. Having said that, the tenacious side probably held more sway than the inquisitive, but either meant that I wouldn’t be able to get by with a shrug or ‘Dunno.’ I was going to have to tell her something. I took a deep breath then let it go. ‘Quite a while?’ I posed it as a question to make the whole idea more palatable.
    â€˜How long’s quite a while?’ she asked suspiciously.
    â€˜More than a month, less than . . .’ My sentence fizzled out as her stern look made it clear that she’d already had enough of chasing me around. ‘Three months,’ I said finally.
    â€˜Three months?’ she echoed.
    â€˜Give or take,’ I replied, adding a small shrug.
    â€˜Give or take what?’
    â€˜I dunno . . . a few days probably.’
    â€˜What about Elaine?’
    This was it. I was going to have to tell her. ‘We’ve . . . split up.’
    She moved on to question two. ‘And what about your job?’
    â€˜Now, that,’ I said confidently, ‘is fine.’ And then I steeled my nerves and told her the full story. My mum clearly couldn’t believe what she was hearing because she called my dad and forced me to begin my sorry tale again right from the start.
    â€˜Can you see what’s happening to your son?’ said my mum to my dad, as I concluded my tale of woe. This was classic my-mum behaviour. As kids, whenever we got into trouble she would berate my dad with the line ‘Can you see what’s going on with your son/daughter?’ ‘So let me get this right,’ she continued. ‘You’ve split up with Elaine, left your home in America to move back here for three months so you can spend quality time with me and your dad, before going off to a job in a country you’ve never been before?’
    Put like that it did sound a bit dramatic. I couldn’t quite understand how my life – which had apparently been so simple for the last twenty-nine and a bit years had suddenly become so complicated.
    â€˜And see some friends,’ I added feebly.
    â€˜Right,’ said my mum, still finding this all too much to cope with. ‘Now you’re here I suppose I’d better sort you out something for lunch.’
    While most normal people quite reasonably consider food to be an important daily requirement my mum had turned it into the focal point of her existence. When it came to me and my brothers and sisters, nearly everything she did and said was regulated and defined by food. ‘Are you hungry?’ ‘When will you be hungry?’ ‘You look thirsty.’ ‘Are you eating properly?’ This, of course, was her way of showing that she loved us, but it could also work your nerves a little bit, especially as, unlike most mums who give up on trying to get everyone in the family to eat together once they’re past the age of sixteen, mine was a stickler for communal eating at all times. Come a quarter past five, my dad was ordered to finish gardening and by half past five dinner (never ‘tea’, too common, and never ‘supper’, way too posh) would be presented on laps, except on Sundays, special occasions or when visitors were present. Then we would eat at the dining-table in the front kept-for-best-in-the-off-chance-HM-the-Queen-should-ever-drop-by-unannounced-and-be-in-desperate-need-of-a-cup-of-tea room with its doilies, posh china and scary macramé picture of a donkey that my late great-aunt Irene had made. No excuse was accepted for missing a meal. No ‘I’m not hungry yet’, no ‘I don’t fancy this tonight’, and certainly none of this ‘Come on, no one under forty-eight eats their dinner this early in the day.’ No: you liked it or lumped it. So when after I’d