Peony’s not pregnant. I should know, I clean the loo. And the pants. You get the picture.

She’s up to something though. In the evenings, as Mother, Charlton and I settle in front of the World Cup, her phone will ring and she’ll answer it with a “not now!” and leave the room in a rush.

Yesterday Mother asked her: “What are you going to do with your life, dear?”

We were at the garden table examining the clothing catalogues, it being summer sale time.

“Mother!” I said. “That’s Peony’s business and nobody else’s.”

Peony scowled at whatever she saw in her catalogue.

“Plenty of irons in fires,” she mumbled.

“That’s right,” I soothed.

“It’s just that we had such high hopes for you,” continued Mother. “What with your own mother failing to achieve anything. We put all our hopes into you. You did so well at university.”

I was just agreeing with this assessment when I heard the echo of the insult.

“What do you mean failed? I’ve worked my arse off all my life.”

Peony patted me on my shoulder.

“Mum’s a writer,” she said and I swear I heard a distant tone of commiseration in her voice.

“Ha!” replied Mother.

Oh I didn’t want to have this conversation. I’ve had it too often before. I never come off well.

“She is,” insisted Peony and still there it was, that little ding of pity.

Mother pulled a face.

“It’s not really writing though, is it? Not real books, I mean. Come on.”

I sighed.

“Can we not have this conversation?”

“They’re very nice books,” tried Peony. “People get to choose whether they want to read them or not. Who cares what publishers think? Let the people decide! We’re living in a new era, Grunma. Nothing’s mainstream any more.”

Mother won’t argue with Peony. To her, Peony is a shining temple goddess. You can’t go bickering with a goddess.

“If you say so,” she grumbled. “I can’t continue speaking, dears. Not with my condition. But let me just have the last word as befits my age and status. They’re not proper books. Not really.”

Peony laughed and slapped her grandmother affectionately on her back.

“Silly old tart!” she exclaimed and her phone rang and she hurried to the end of the garden to take the call.

 

Just as the sea must give up its dead, so a duvet will eventually disgorge a long-forgotten sock.

This morning I took out the bed linen from the washing machine and was giving each piece a good violent shake when a smallish white sock rolled down the side seam of a duvet cover and fell at my feet.

It was one of Peony’s old school socks and I calculated that it must have been in there for a minimum of six years. And as I made that calculation I kind of sagged in the middle, suddenly unable to support myself, and sat on the kitchen step and wept a moment for I don’t know why. Because she’s grown up and gone, I suppose.

Ten minutes into my doorstep tragedy, the doorbell rang and I shouted (with routine irony): “I’ll get it. Don’t get up,” and went and flung open the front door and who should be there but my golden girl herself, all splendid and with her hair its proper colour at last and wearing a red linen dress that I wouldn’t mind owning myself.

“Hey Mum!” she said. “You alright?”

“Oh Peony,” I said and resumed my tears at once. “How did you know?”

“How did I know what?”

“That I was just thinking about you.”

“Oh you’re always thinking about me. Old news. Any chance I can come inside?”

“Of course!” I exclaimed and pulled her bodily over the threshold. She’s a strong build that one, her arms are nice and thick. I’m so proud.

From the living room, Mother called: “Who’s that? Who’s there?”

Peony checked her watch. It was ten past ten. “Frasier,” she said and left my side and went into the room where Mother was watching her favourite show.

“Hello you mad old coot,” Peony greeted her.

“My girl” shrieked Mother. “My beautiful, gorgeous girl is home. Oh you’ve come back to me. Come ‘ere, you wonder. At last, somebody who loves me.”

I leant against the door frame and watched grandmother gather in granddaughter. Same strong arms, same sure grip.

“She’s come home,” whimpered Mother over my daughter’s bowed back.

“Just for a bit,” confirmed Peony when she broke free. Her smile was heavenly.

Mother looked at me and bit her lip.

“Oh don’t you want me?” Peony asked. “A third witch one too many for your coven?”

“Course we want you,” I chided her. The very thought. “It’s just that your uncle Charlton has moved into your room.”

She considered the issue a moment and in her usual good-natured way merely shrugged and said: “Ah well.”

Mother sat up in her arm chair and brought down her hand in a slicing action. It’s her guillotine signal. It means she’s made a decision.

“Charlton can come in with me and share my bed.”

I can’t tell you how pleasing this announcement was to me.

“Hadn’t we better ask him?” suggested Peony. “Uncle Charlton might not want to share quarters with Grunma.”

“Nonsense,” asserted Grunma. “It’s your room. You must have it back at once. It’ll be like old days.” (By which she meant the old days when Charlton was her baby boy.)

“Charlton’s out at a comic book convention,” I told her.

“I’ll get my bags from the car then,” sang my daughter and left the room.

Mother eyed me darkly.

“She’s pregnant,” she muttered.

 

“Your brother was very mean to me while you were away,” Mother tells me while I scrub the blackened insides of all my mugs. Were they incapable of washing anything?

“He threatened to put me in a home.”

“You are in a home,” I snap. “My home. You’ve been here nearly ten years. Didn’t Charlton wash these mugs? I’ll need to bleach them now.”

“Is it really nearly ten years?” she asks and she does that little staggering movement as though she might fall at any moment and reaches to steady herself on the counter. “I didn’t know that. My mind is going, you know. Probably due to my condition.”

Her mind is not going. A daily diet of Countdown, Fifteen to One and Pointless keeps in sharpened. It’s a formidable tool and always has been.

“You see,” she says dolefully. “Charlton is always such an angel, utterly selfless. It’s come as quite a shock to have him fuss about me. It wasn’t fair to ask him. He’s got more pressing things to do. Now with you I don’t care in the slightest that you’re always mean to me. That’s the natural order of things, daughters being such frightful bitches to their mothers. I expect your daughter will be just as vile to you.”

She’s said her piece and off she totters, and I know that there is so much resentment brewing inside her from having been left behind that I can expect a month of reprisals.

Peony will never ever have to live with me. I love my daughter far too much for that.

*

“Right then, Charlton,” I tell my brother when we meet on the landing. “I expect you’ll be getting home.”

“That’s the problem,” he shrugs. “I have no home. I stepped into the breach to help you out while you went gadding off on your cruise and my lease expired and they said I had to be living there to get another lease and so I had to let it go. You made me homeless.”

“What do you mean, help me out? She’s your mother, too. For two weeks I thought you could do your share.”

He doesn’t answer because he’s Charlton and a charming smile usually suffices for an answer.

“But that’s Peony’s room,” I point out.

“She’s twenty and has left home. She doesn’t need it.”

“You’re forty five. Why would you need it? Yes I know you’re not going to answer. You never do. You just smile like an imbecilic dog.”

“God, Mother’s right,” he says, shaking his head sadly. “You are a heartless cow. Would it hurt to be nice for a change?”

I jam the tips of my fingers into my eye sockets until the world goes queasily orange. When the blur subsides I see he is still there.

“You can stay for a fortnight maximum. That gives you time to find somewhere to live, get a job and grow up.”

“Don’t talk bollocks,” he grins. “This is London. Flats are like men’s teeth.”

“Hen’s teeth,” I tell him.

“Hens don’t have teeth,” he corrects me.

“Ten days,” I tell him. “You now only have ten days to get out.”

And he saunters back to Peony’s room and I remain standing there on the landing wondering how I could possibly have been so stupid as to have let either of them in, mother or son. Because I very much doubt now that I will be able to shift them.

 

People have been asking me what I’m going to do with all that redundancy money.

And there’s a fair bit of it, given that I’ve spent the last 28 years organising the working lives of an office full of idle solicitors.

“Will you travel?” they ask.

Ah, I say. I am a writer of stories. I travel all the time in my mind. I don’t need to leave my armchair to experience the thrill of new vistas. There isn’t a dusty corner of this planet that I can’t visit in my imagination. My dreams are vivid. As soon as I close my eyes I enter another world.

“Yes,” they say. “But when you wake up your mother’s still there.”

I’m booking a cruise tomorrow.