A Traitor to Memory

He slipped inside and faced his mother. It was the first time he'd seen her in twenty-five years.

“Well,” she said. She was by the window as he thought she would be, but no longer the woman he remembered from his childhood. Twenty-five years of not stirring a muscle unless forced to do so had made his mother into a great mound of a woman wearing stretchy trousers and a jumper the size of a parachute. He wouldn't have known her at all had he passed her on the street. He wouldn't have known her now had she not said, “Jim. Wha's a dolly to make of this sor' 'f surprise?”

He said, “Hello, Mum,” and he looked round the flat. Nothing had changed. Here was the same U-shaped blue sofa, there were the lamps with the misshapen shades, up on the walls were the same set of pictures: each little Pytches sitting on the knee of his or her own dad on the only occasion Jen had managed to make any of them act like fathers. God, seeing them brought it back in a rush: the risible exercise of all the kids lined up and Jen pointing to the pictures, saying, “Here's your dad, Jim. He was called Trev. But I called him my little fancy boy.” And, “Yours was Derek, Bonnie. Look at the neck on that bloke, will you, dear? Couldn't put me 'ands anywhere near round his neck. Oooh. Wha' a man your dad was, Bon.” And on down the line, the same recitation, given once a week lest any of them forget.

“Wha' you want, then, Jim?” his mother asked him. She gave a grunt as she reached for the telly's remote. She squinted at the screen, made some sort of mental note about what it was she was watching, and pushed the button to mute the sound.

“I'm off,” he said. “I wanted you to know.”

She kept her gaze level on him and said, “You been off, lad. How many years? So wha's this off that's different from that?”

“Australia,” he said. “New Zealand. Canada. I don't know yet. But I wanted to tell you I'm making it permanent. Cashing in everything. Starting over. I wanted you to know so you could tell the others.”

“Don' think they been losing sleep wondering where you wanked off to,” his mother said.

“I know. But all the same …” He wondered how much his mother knew. As far as he could recall, she didn't read a newspaper. The nation might go to hell in a wicker basket—politicians on the take, the Royals stepping down, the Lords taking up weapons to fight off the Commons' plans for their demise, sport figures dying, rock stars taking overdoses of designer drugs, trains crashing, bombs exploding in Piccadilly—and none of it mattered or had ever mattered, so she wouldn't know what had happened to one James Pitchford and what had been done to stop more from happening.

“Old times, I suppose,” he settled on saying. “You're my mum. I thought you had a right.”

She said, “Fetch me fags,” and nodded to a table by the sofa, where a packet of Benson and Hedges spilled out onto the cover of Woman's Weekly. He took them to her and she lit up, watching the screen of the television where the camera was offering a bird's-eye view of a snooker table with a player bent over it studying a shot like a surgeon with a scalpel in his hand.

“Old times,” she repeated. “Good of you, Jim. Cheers, then.” And she pushed the sound button on the remote.

Pitchley shifted on his feet. He looked round for something that would do as employment. She wasn't really who he'd come to see, anyway, but he could tell that she wasn't about to part with any information on his siblings if he asked her directly. She owed him nothing, and both of them knew it. One didn't spend a quarter of a century pretending that one's past had never occurred only to come calling from the blue with the hope one's mum might decide to be helpful.

He said, “Look, Mum. I'm sorry. It was the only way.”

She waved him off, cigarette smoke creating a filmy snake in the air. And seeing that cast him back through time, to this very room, to his mum on the floor, to the baby coming fast and her smoking one fag after another because where was the ambulance they'd rung for, God damn it, didn't they have rights to get their needs seen to? And he'd been there with her, alone when it happened. Don't leave me, Jim. Don't leave me, lad. And the thing was slimy like an uncooked cod and bloody and still attached to the cord and she smoked, she smoked all the way through it and the smoke rose into the air like a snake.

Pitchley strode into the kitchen to rid himself of the memory of his ten-year-old self with a bloody newborn in his terrified hands. Three twenty-five in the morning, it had been. Brothers and sister asleep, neighbours asleep, the whole sodding world indifferent, deep in their beds, dreaming their dreams.