Turning Thirty by Mike Gayle Read Free Book Online Page B

ask if you could play marbles with them?’
    I looked at my dad in disbelief. ‘That was Tony, Dad, and he may have liked playing marbles with them but he didn’t like eating them either.’
    â€˜No,’ said my mum, ‘Yvonne used to love sprouts. I think you must be thinking of Yvonne. She definitely had a thing for sprouts.’ Yvonne was the smartest member of our family, so it goes without saying that, like me, she didn’t like sprouts either.
    â€˜Look,’I said, losing my patience, ‘Tony never liked sprouts, Yvonne never liked sprouts, Ed never liked sprouts, and I certainly don’t like sprouts. And I’m not eating these sprouts. Not now. Not in a little while. Not ever!’

eleven
    With the benefit of hindsight it was easy enough to see that I wasn’t getting all weird about a few sprouts. I mean, I was twenty-nine, and if I really didn’t want to eat them it wasn’t as if my mum was in a position to ground me or stop my pocket money. The truth was, I was getting a bit wonky about the circumstances that had led to my life changing so dramatically. Only twenty-four hours earlier everything had been different. Okay, so it hadn’t been perfect but at least it had been near enough normal for someone at my stage in life. I’d had my own place and I’d had a crumbling relationship – the minimum lifestyle requirements of your basic turning-thirty-year-old, surely? But now what did I have? Nothing. I had no girlfriend, I had the promise of a smart job that wouldn’t be starting for quite a while and I was living at my parents’.
    Entering the kitchen to deliver an apology I was assaulted by the sound of banging pots and pans emanating from the sink, where my mother was furiously distributing soap-suds in the air under the guise of washing up.
    â€˜I’m sorry,’ I said, closing the kitchen door behind me. ‘I shouldn’t have said what I said. I feel awful. It’s just that – well, I’ve got a lot on my mind, what with Elaine and everything and, well—’
    â€˜It’s all right,’ she said, turning away from the sink to look at me. ‘I knew it had nothing to do with the sprouts. I just worry about you, that’s all.’ She disappeared into the living room and returned with my plate, which she put into the microwave. Three minutes, forty seconds and a ping later, she re-presented my dinner to me at the kitchen table with a flourish. ‘Here you go. Now, eat up before it goes cold again.’
    The three of us spent the evening in front of the TV together, watching the best that British TV had on offer: Coronation Street , Des O’Connor Tonight , the Nine o’Clock News and the last half-hour of a made-for-TV movie about a mother with cancer trying to get her kids placed with new foster-families before she died. My mum cried, my dad channel-hopped in the ad breaks and I enjoyed the spectacle. This was how every evening used to be when I was a kid. Continuous telly from seven thirty until bedtime, cups of tea made during the ads and two bars of the gas fire on to take the chill off the room.
    â€˜Right, then,’ said my mum, just after ten o’clock. ‘Your dad and I are off to bed, Matthew.’
    â€˜Night, then,’ I said cheerfully, as I picked up the remote control and began flicking. My dad hadn’t let me anywhere near it all evening.
    â€˜Aren’t you going to bed?’ asked my mum, when I hadn’t moved.
    â€˜Nah,’ I said, still not picking up their hint. ‘I’m going to stay up for just a bit longer.’
    â€˜Are you sure?’ said my dad, somewhat shocked. ‘Only it is quite late, Matthew.’
    Finally it dawned on me that they wanted me to go to bed too. I was disturbing their routines, and if there’s one thing in the world my parents like it’s routine. Despite their insistence that I must be jet-lagged,