The River (working title)

18 year old Patrick and his mother arrive in a new town, hoping to make a fresh start and put down some roots. However, their pasts are never far behind them.

We are standing on the bridge. The sun is warm on our backs despite the time of year. We lean against the rail, looking down into the bay, wondering how far the drop is. We both know each other’s thoughts by now, or at least we should. She turns to me, the wind sweeping hair across her face. Eyes, hazel, brown, glittering in the sunlight. A splash of light freckles across her cheeks and nose. Her mouth, small yet full, painted this morning a curious shade of blue. Before I can lean in for another kiss, those lips start moving. The wind drowns out her voice, and even though I bend my head down so she can shout into my ear I hear nothing. The wind is gusting stronger now and her coal black hair is whipped back and forth across her face in dense tangles which sporadically obscures her features and stops me from reading her lips. I realise I can’t even read her mind now, and suddenly things don’t feel right. Is that the bridge swaying in the wind? I ask her, but she only smiles and continues to work her mouth, excitedly telling me something I can’t quite seem to grasp.

She puts one hand on my shoulder and points with the other at something behind me. She is laughing, and desperate for me to see what she does, but I am almost too terrified to look around. I daren’t take my eyes off her. She is wearing a summery, sky-blue dress with poppies printed on it. It is whipping up around her, just like Marilyn Monroe, famously stood above the subway grill, except I can’t see her legs, only oceans and oceans of dress. The wind is cold now, and I offer to lend her my coat, but I can’t get the words out. The wind has taken them. The wind, it seems, is intent of taking everything it can.

She continues to point, her excitement only growing. I don’t want to turn away from her. I never want to turn away from her, but I know by now there is nothing I can  refuse her. I look around to just in time to see the sun swallowed up by black, jealous clouds which tell me everything is wrong, very wrong. I look over my shoulder down the bridge, and see a dark shadow racing down its rippling length as cars and trucks ride waves and undulations beneath metal and concrete. Just before I turn back to her I glimpse colour against the sky. A flower followed by another, and another. Each one dances briefly on the air before being sucked up and eaten by the sky which grows darker by the second.

I turn back to her, but only the dress remains, floating in front of me like some puppet, slowly being stripped of its flowers, and then its colour until it begins to be dragged up. I manage to grab hold off it, and cling on the best I can. It’s all that remains of her. I scream out her name, but of course I can’t hear it. I’m not even sure I can remember it anymore. Now the dress is being tugged violently from me by the wind. The force is such I’m being hauled up onto my tip-toes, and I hold on ever more tightly as I begin to feel the fabric slowly slide from my grasp and burn my hands. It’s not the pain which causes me to let go, but the shear strength of the wind. Suddenly I’m floating up past the rail. I try to catch it with my feet, but the dress, now grey and worn, is ripped from my hands and I stare down into a black, grey cloud which now rests above the bay, and suddenly I’m falling. And I fall…I fall…I fall…I woke.

    

 

When I was 18, me and my mum moved to a new town. We had been bouncing from one place to another for what felt like forever. Our residences would last until mum either quit her latest job or it quit her, likewise with her lovers, who were usually of the married variety.

Mum’s last beau had belonged to the latter with the added novelty of owing money to just about every local loan shark, and some that weren’t so local.

So Mum, well-practiced in the art of the “Midnight Flit”, had brought us to our latest place of fresh starts where maybe we could reinvent ourselves. I don’t know how she did it, but Mum as always, knew a friend who knew a friend, who had gotten her fast-tracked on the housing waiting list, and a job in a call-centre selling life-insurance. The same had been promised to me, but unlike my Mum I couldn’t have sold water in the Sahara.

We’d stayed with Mum’s friend for a couple of days until we’d been able to move into a flat. Mum had gone straight into her job while I’d done my best to busy myself around the place for the first couple of weeks doing what I could to help us settle in, that was until the first bills landed in Mum’s lap and she quickly pointed me in the direction of a factory with vacancies for someone with a passion for constructing pram-covers while being fed a steady, sonic diet of a Radio One playlist.

So, come Monday morning, I was filled with a mixture of resignation and dread that leaned more towards the former, due to my burgeoning experience of soul destroying jobs. Of course, even though I knew roughly what to expect, the prospect of once again being the new boy, and feeling like a spare part was enough for me to skip breakfast as I always did on the morning of a new job.

The low wall by the bus stop was hard and cold, but I was too tired to stand: I’d slept poorly the night before. The bus came into view like some lumbering wreck of a beast moving through the sunshine, the windows of both decks clouded in condensation.

 I rose slowly with the other passengers, feeling my whole body creak. I shuffled onto the bus and handed my fare over to the driver; an unsmiling, bearded man with thick, tattooed arms, who was clearly as enthused about the day ahead as I was. I scanned the lower deck, it was full. Not that I had any intention of travelling at ground level when it was de-rigueur for any self-respecting teenager, even a weirdo loner such as myself, to sit up on the top deck.

I hauled myself up the dusty stairs behind some school kids and caught a glimpse from behind their bobbing heads of what could be described as my peers: college students arranged in little throngs and clusters of cliques. The most menacing wore heavy work boots and were spread across the back row of seats. I quickly found a seat to myself and looked through the window as the world crawled to work and met its daily obligations.

The traffic was sluggish that morning and the town's arteries were as clogged as those of a stroke victim defiantly sparking up the first of the day. At one point we crawled along a bridge which passed over a non-descript river: the banks were muddy, vegetated, and marked with pockets of rubbish. At least the water dared to sparkle in the sunlight. I imagined its course; winding its way towards the sea and the ocean, free to end up anywhere, or disappear forever.

The body of water was still present in my mind as I got off at my stop, and it accompanied me as I made the five minute walk to the factory. It was still with me as the three-storey edifice of Pramco Limited loomed over me as if I were its prey.

The shop floor was plain and functional: white-washed bare brick walls met a dusty and sandy coloured floor. The wall facing the street was adorned with three small, barred and dirty windows, which seemed "'neither use nor ornament'", as Mum would have it, due to the meagre light they allowed through. The majority of the lighting came instead from cheap and hard lighting strips placed along the mercifully high ceiling.

At the far end of the shop floor plastic pram frames were cast. The smell from the molten plastic clung in the air and I counted myself relatively lucky I had only had to push the frame through pram covers.

The other end of the room housed what, at first, resembled a giant drum riser, except it had a glass front through which the owner of the operation, a stern looking man of around sixty, known only as “Higson”, watched his minions.

The supervisor, Bob was welcoming enough in a salt-of-the-earth kind of way, helping to put me at ease with my additional role as new guy. ‘It ain’t easy when yer new to a job,’ he said, looking at me through the thick lenses of his glasses, ‘and yer don’t know no c**t.” Well put, Bob.

Somehow, I had made it through the day without walking out (something I was no stranger to since I had entered the wonderful world of work), and I found Bob's entertaining banter cut through the hubbub of my other work colleagues, and the banalities of the interchangeable DJ's punctuating the same thirty or so songs, any of which still have the power, after all these years, to instantly transport me back to that shop floor

 

I heard the laughter as soon as I entered the flat: it belonged to mum-and a man. There had been many men over the years.

I tried in vain to creep to my room, but the laughter subsided and mum called me into the kitchen. A cloud of cigarette smoke hung over the table where she sat with a man who looked well acquainted with his forties.

He was clad in the usual office clobber, his jacket resting on the back of  his chair while his tie traced the curve of his paunch, which I presumed had emerged around the same time as his receding hair line. I mistrusted him on sight. I’d met him so many times before over the years it was getting boring.

Those deceptively friendly and jovial types showed up time and again in our lives: firm of hand-shake and short of tenure, always guaranteed to make mum laugh with easy, end-of-the-pier cheeky-chappie humour. Stock-full of stock promises, tired jokes and man-chat. The kind of men who buzzed round beauty and insecurity like flies circle a discarded ice-cream.

.‘Hello, sweetie,’ she always called me this when she had male company. I instantly felt like I was eight years old again, being prodded with questions. ‘How’s your first day gone?’ I wanted to reply with something world weary, yet witty, but eight year olds are not known for possessing either of those traits.  I felt myself wilting under the scrutiny of mum’s droopy-eyed adoration and the smug, man-of-the-big-bad-world- grin belonging to the kind of guy who I knew would try to ingratiate me by addressing me as his “mate”, a term I hated when it was patronisingly executed with just the right amount of insincerity.

‘It’s gone alright,’ I mumbled over the kitchen sink.

‘Made any friends yet?’ I looked at mum with incredulity as I imagined the laddish brigade I shared my work space with. Dressed in baggy jeans and sweat shirts, on which rested either dust or stray splodges of dried plastic, f*g perched behind the ear, uniform banter.

‘Not really,’ I said, casting my gaze in the man’s direction. A fatal mistake, as he took it as a cue to indulge in some man chat.

‘Any nice looking girls there, mate?’ he spoke with the kind of cracked voice which usually comes from too many f**s, and shouting above all the other idiots he surrounded himself with. I cringed inwardly at that last word as I thought of my female work colleagues; who on initial inspection seemed to be thinner on the ground and even then a female version of the lads.

‘Haven’t noticed,’ I said.

‘Too busy gettin’ on with the job in hand, eh?’ When I failed to respond, mum thought it best to begin the introductions.

‘Sweetie, this is Alan. He’s the manager of the sales team I’m working in,’ she said this with no little pride in her voice, as if his position might impress me.

‘Well, someone’s got to crack the whip when it comes to some of the lazy b******s we have in the office,’ I was nonplussed and he knew it, ‘not that I have to resort to that with your mother here,’ mum laughed giddily, playing the flirty teenaged girl once more. He wasn’t giving up that easily though: here was a man who either side stepped rejection or was too stupid to realise when it was being given. ‘So, your mum tells me you’re working in a factory. What exactly do you do then, mate?’

‘I make pram covers.’ Like you give a f**k, I thought.

‘Pram covers, eh?’ he said, with a grimaced smile, ‘well, I suppose you’ve got to start somewhere.’

‘Yeah...s’ppose,’ I mustered, pathetically.

‘And what are they payin’ yer?’

‘Enough.’ My accompanying look must have been icy enough for him to realise that maybe he had exhausted his welcome for the evening after an uncomfortable silence even mum couldn’t fill.

 ‘Well, I’m sure it’s hard work.’ I didn’t know if he was referring to my job or his attempt at trying to prize a conversation from me. ‘Oh, is that the time already?’ he said, glancing at his watch. He rose from his chair and put on his jacket.

‘Are you going so soon?’ said mum.

‘Yeah, love. I think me lado here wants his tea, and who can blame him for that after a hard day on the shop floor making…what is it you make again?’

‘Pram covers.’ I barely allowed the words from my mouth.

 ‘Well, when you’ve had enough of pram covers give us a bell, and you can come and see how real money’s made.’ He reached into his inside jacket pocket before pressing his hot hand into mine, firmly, of course, causing me to start slightly as if he had pranked me with one of those hand held buzzers. I looked down and saw his business card. ‘Well, what did you think it were, a tenner?’ he erupted with laughter and mum followed suit. I felt like tearing it up in his f*****g face. Mum saw Alan to the door and I stood there with my head hung as I looked at the card. 

I read the top line; “Calvert’s Life Insurance”, before I crumpled it up and threw it into the bin.

Mum breezed back into the kitchen, patting down her blouse and straightening her black office skirt. She was still a beautiful woman, and she knew it. Perhaps not in an entirely vain sense, but more in how she knew she possessed a tool. I briefly thought of how hard Dad must have fallen for her at first sight. ‘Now, that was really nice of Alan, wasn’t it? You want to keep hold of that card. It might come in handy,’ she said. ‘Where’ve you put it?’  I suddenly felt a surge of guilt wash over me.

‘I’ve put it in my pocket.’ I said, patting the front of my jeans.

‘Well, don’t put it there. It should go in your wallet.’

‘Yeah, I will.’

‘Well,’ mum said, casting a glance at the empty pocket. ‘Make sure you do.’

Right then, part of me wanted to retrieve that scrap of paper; wipe the crap off it, straighten it out and place it in my wallet if it would make her happy. 

Mum emptied the ash tray and busied herself with making tea. ‘Need any help?’ I said.

‘No, you’re alright. You go and watch telly, or something,’

‘Okay,’ but I stood there a few seconds longer thinking that I should be telling mum how Alan was no good for her. How he would use her up just like all the others had. Telling her things she wanted to hear, like the likely lies to come. Lies, I thought, looking at the bin. Then, just before I left the room, I caught her face in the kitchen window as she hunched over a tin of beans: she was humming a tune now and what looked like a contented smile played on her lips. Ever the optimist was mum, despite the countless hopes, dreams and loves dashed before her over the years, despite losing dad, she chose to look to the future. Now, there she was, reflected in the window, busy with living and dreaming, her forward momentum kept us both moving to the next good thing. The next dream, constantly keeping a distance from the past as the places and people we inhabited and co-habited with shrank away steadily away in the rear-view mirror, barely visible to mum, whose eyes looked far past the meal she was preparing for herself and her boy, and straight at the happiness only she could see for us.

 

Author's Note

All feedback welcome. Please let me know if you spot any grammatical, or spelling errors.