Page 25 of I Love You, I Love You, I Love You

Now

It’s a Sunday and I’m at Mum’s for a roast. Roast to Mum is taken very literally. Find anything you possibly can and roast it. And somehow it always tastes alright. I’m here for the addictive quality of my family mostly. That fix I can’t get anywhere else. Our comforting in-jokes and that cosy familiar same-species likeness that you only get with immediate family that permits you be 100% yourself at all times.

251 Palace Road looks pretty much the same as when Mum bought it with the promise to renovate it all those years ago – not from want of trying. The little DIY was stubbornly refused by the house – the layered paint bubbles, cracking with condensation and conversation, rickety improvised floorboards hammered with the craftsmanship of a Loony Tunes character. Since buying our place, I have so much more respect and empathy for Mum. I remember thinking you could just do all the knocking down walls in a weekend yourself and it’d look fantastic. Turns out no and no.

Mum’s headquarters is at the kitchen table, her ‘office’. Covered with a bowl of homegrown mouldy fruit and bendy veg, un-opened post, remote controls, expired bank cards, batteries, a gardening trowel, WD-40, lumps of dope and stuff to sell online. Over the years, this table has seen it all. Friends and neighbours come and go. It’s a watering hole, a place to plot world domination and butter bread for sandwiches; a confession box. Tea, coffee, anything stronger all-year round, an extra plate, room for one more. Mum’s kitchen table is a place to take risks, plan revenge, offer unsolicited advice, for belly laughs, bad news and chopping onions. Not the most comfortable and yet it’s everyone’s favourite booth at a haunt.

Mum sits head of the table now, in her position of power, right opposite the doorway. She doesn’t even flinch when I enter. Her callous hands rolling a spliff, muscular legs stuffed into Caterpillar boots, as weathered and intimidating as a cold mountain. Her all-year weathered terracotta suntan on her chest and shoulders from gardening is rich, her long beetroot hair in an unkept scorpion plait. But her wet soulful brown eyes give her away, show me she’s happy to see me, as she always is when I’m home.

I can see she’s not even started on the roast. When I gently hint at that she tells me, ‘It’ll only take me five minutes’. Yeah. OK. I open the cupboard where sometimes, on a good day, Bombay Mix or ginger biscuits fly out at you but today, nothing. Mum’s dog, Spy, sniffs around me.

‘Where’s Jackson?’ she asks.

‘Playing football.’

‘That man … I’ve never met anybody with so many athletic hobbies; it’s unsettling.’

‘Yooo!’ My baby brother Sonny enters, wearing baggy tracksuit bottoms and a vest; his pumped arms hang on the doorframe. He’s the only one to have inherited Mum’s height. ‘What you saying?’

‘I’m saying,’ I answer, with my head in the fridge to be met only with rancid jars and Mum’s marinades, ‘do you not have any food in this house?’

‘Do you not have a house?’ Violet lashes.

‘Do YOU?’ I fire back. Violet thinks she’s able to live at Mum’s rent-free for life because she’s saving to open a café.

‘What else are we meant to do?’ She means it.

‘The world is crazy out there,’ Sonny adds. ‘Do you think I want to be here as a successful man in my early twenties? No, I don’t. It’s impossible to live.’

‘Oh, so I see,’ Mum interrupts even though this is NONE of her concern, ‘I’ll just pay for all three of you to live.’

‘You HAD us!’ Violet argues. ‘We didn’t ask to be born into this shit world.’

‘You’re meant to be taking care of me now!’ Mum argues. She’s wearing a vest top and no bra; her boobs – evidently once blown with warm milk to feed her three babies – jobble.

‘That isn’t possible by the way, so don’t ever retire,’ says Sonny. She has to hear this at some point.

‘At least stand on your own two feet, then?’ Mum begins wiping marmalade off some designer ties she plans to sell on eBay.

‘Don’t you think we’re trying?’ Violet points at me as though I’m the example of trying.

Mum says, ‘It’s really not that hard: you go to work, you earn money, you buy a house. I did it.’

This boils my blood and I’m hangry. ‘Mum, you never even had a stable job in your entire life because it was the Nineties so you could just rip meaningless cheques from your chequebook like a Monopoly-joke that meant nothing because the cheques would just bounce back and now you get to bumble about in your fat house that you bought for nine pence and will get to, all thanks to inflation, sell on for trillions, meanwhile we can’t even afford a shoebox in a crummy cupboard because you polished off our inheritance in a Martini glass, and will have to cook our dinners of conkers over a friggin’ candle! You know I use tampons as a TREAT?’

‘That’s more because of the environment, though, right?’ Violet adds.

‘Don’t get me started on the fucking environment, Violet,’ I snap. ‘I just want love.’ It comes out way more heartfelt than I intended.

‘OK-eee,’ says Sonny. ‘Awkward.’

‘Oh, someone give her a hug,’ Mum says, not giving me a hug. ‘She just wants love.’

Violet puts her arm around me and pats sympathetically – ‘There, there’ – but it comes out sarcastically.

Adam, my stepdad, wades in at this point with wellies on made for wading. Good, because he’s just landed in shit.

‘Hey, Ella, you look tired.’

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