Thicker Than Water

Now Dad was dead, and Terry was dead, and none of it meant anything any more. Except that the impassable terrain was still there between us shell-shocked survivors. The débris. I was walking on it now.

Mum’s house was ex-council, now owned by a private landlord called the Inner City Partnership. Mentioning their name was a quick way to elicit a spectacular torrent of abuse from her, but there was no denying that this was a step - if not a whole damn staircase - up from Arthur Street. The door wasn’t covered by a slab of particle board, for one thing.

And it had a bell.

I rang, and silence answered. After a while, I rang again.

Mum answered on the fourth ring, just as I was giving up. She opened the door and stared at me for a moment or two, blank-faced and bleary-eyed, before recognition kicked in.

It was hard for me, too. In my mind, Barbie Castor always has a heroic, larger-than-life stature, as one of those Walton women of whom it was said, with approval and respect, ‘she fights like a man’.

As a kid I used to look up›use, l to her in a literal and physical sense too, but her generous build and rugged independence made her the sort of person who it was easy to hide behind, easy to shelter in and rely on. Even her walking out on us hadn’t tarnished that image of her: if anything it had helped, because just when I was hitting my iconoclastic teens she wasn’t around any more to be measured against reality and found wanting. Consequently, when I thought of her at all, I saw her from the ten-year-old Felix’s perspective, which meant looking up from close to ground level.

Mum was still big, but - like one of those packages sold by weight, not volume - her contents had shifted in transit between the past and the present. Her bulk had a softer edge to it now, and her short-sleeved top showed me that some of the definition had gone from her finely muscled upper arms. It had gone from her face, too, her eyes passing over me once and then twice rather than pinning me to the wall until she was good and done with me.

‘Felix,’ she said, with a rising inflection, and then again, with slightly more conviction, ‘Felix!’ She took me in her arms, briefly but with feeling.

‘Hello, Mum,’ I said. Anything was going to sound banal under the circumstances, so I settled for, ‘How’s it going?’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m all right. Come on in.