Wolves by Simon Ings Read Free Book Online Page A

tries to wave her hands. She has not yet become accustomed to their weight. Her white plastic hands carve the air, lugubrious and slow, a knife in one, a fork in the other. I have phoned her in the middle of her dinner.
    She shrugs my sudden departure off, refusing to show the hit. She knows what my unannounced excursion signifies. She wants me to know that she is going to make this easy for me. She says, ‘You’re too young to commit, I suppose.’ Her formulation – that, being a few years her junior, I am too immature for her – is a generous one. It raises the kindly spectre of ‘irreconcilable differences’. She is, in fact, handing me an alibi.
    Even over this stuttery video link, I can see how hard she is working to deal with our sudden break-up. Her scars are red with the effort, and her face has screwed itself up in that odd, lopsided way that it falls into so easily now. It looks as though it has been stitched together out of rags. Which, I suppose, it has been.
    We discuss bills, forwarding arrangements, practicalities. (No mention of my mother’s table.) Already she is talking about when, not if, I should move out. That she despises me for running away is a given. Still, I expected this conversation to be much more difficult and, if I’m honest, to be a deal more flattering to my ego. Anyone would think that it was Mandy throwing me over.
    Then – at the very end – she says, ‘I don’t suppose you have to make a final decision yet.’ Her face, glassed and reconfigured, trembles over a forked mouthful of celeriac salad, and for a second the illusion – that her face might simply slide off the bone – acquires a ghastly realism. It is all I can do not to reach out to hold it in place.

SEVEN
    M um’s depressions were more or less regular, and always straightforward. In some ghastly way I looked forward to them. They made life simple. Mum in a slump was a loved object, someone to be taken care of, fed, read to, made comfortable, encouraged to wash and dress. She became my doll, as I became hers – once she was free of her black dog and rushing about designing wedding dresses or cooking up new kinds of make-up.
    ‘Sit up, Mum.’ ‘Mum, do you want to watch a movie with me?’ ‘What do you fancy to eat tonight, Mum?’
    She would take to her bed – not for long, a few days – and it was up to Dad and me to keep the house running. Life was rugged and clear – a set of operations to ensure our fitness and the hotel’s hygiene.
    ‘I’ll take the first shower.’ ‘Call and see if George can cover the bar tonight.’ ‘Bin bags. Tea. Eggs.’
    Mum’s manias were much more difficult. It is one thing to be brought low by a warring world, and the assured mutuality of destruction. It’s another thing to think that you can do anything about it.
    Mum’s political convictions, her financial ineptitude and her frequent mood-swings were mutually reinforcing. I remember how, in her euphoria, it would occur to her, as if for the first time, that she had never been ‘depressed’. She had been oppressed .
    Patiently, she would explain to me exactly how I oppressed her. Dropping her guard, she would then expand upon her theme, describing all the many ways – some of them wincingly intimate – in which Bill, my dad, oppressed her. Her chief oppressor, however, was money. Among the aisles of the supermarket (‘Marmalade (big tins)/Bleach/Serviettes’) I remember how she once attempted to anatomise for me the structural iniquities of a market-led economy.
    I was less entranced by her philosophy than by her shopping. Ignoring the list Dad had given her, she was gathering all manner of unfamiliar stuff: dried fruit, porridge, soya meals, packet soups. It took Dad and me a couple of days to decipher this. It turned out that Mum, in her escalating mania, was preparing to abandon us for a protest camp that had grown up around a nearby military airbase. She would make friends there, she told us. She would