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‘Simples. You’ve just turned eighteen. And you need another parent?’
He’s right. Just think of himstuck with a stepdad he can’t stand, his real dad making an unwelcome appearance literally three or four times in his life. And Emily left to deal with her depressive father on her own. Who needs it?
Blood banging in my eardrums. I glance around the fire: Emily leaning forward, a wired spring; Ben’s face pulled sharp by a frown; Fran’s questioning eyebrows.
‘Yeah, what do Ineed with some anti-social cave dwelling old biker daddy?’
Jarvis lowers the letter nearer the flames, expression deadpan as only Jarvis can do.
‘Go on then,’ I say.
He looks at me again, but I don’t flinch. He’s about to let go when Emily jumps up and snatches the letter.
‘No! You can’t let him do that, Gethin.’
She hands me the paper, all eyes on me. Rumble of thunder in the distance.
My heart thumps as I stare at the letter, my alleged dad’s picture clipped to the top. I’m stunned by the force of my reaction.
‘OK,’ I say, faking a lightness I don’t feel. ‘It’s not as if burning will actually stop him existing now?’
I fold the letter and put it in my pocket. Hold my hand out to the first heavy drops of rain as the thunder breaks again.
A Different Conception – Pat
The waterlogged haze fills the streets outside my bedroom window, my eye tracing pictures in the salmon pink dissolving streetlight. It must be nearly ten, just the odd swish of a car punctuating the stillness at the end of this June day.
I look at the forgotten collage spread across the worktable. Unearthed in a frenzy of displacement junk-clearing after the debacle of Gethin’s birthday lunch, now it tortures me with his rose-tinted childhood. All I need with one day to go before my submission deadline.
The collage is an eight-foot-long piece of calico sewn with a trail of Gethin’s life. Starting with the ten-mil syringe of his conception; the twenty-week scan; Gethin minutes old with his screwed-up face in that mass of dark hair and those big red baby balls. Then it spreads wider: his first pair of shoes, lock of hair; Gethin and Francesca in the double buggy with holly piled high in the rain cover. I added to the collage over the years: Gethin as Pied Piper in the school play; his drawing of the cat in a space helmet in its fiery rocket; clippings from his Horrible Science and astronomy magazines. Every time he had a clear-out, I stole the icons of the just-gone days. He knows nothing about it, but would he even care? At least these days I have a wider focus for my art, which is really where I need to be right now.
I turn back to the sketches for the installation. If only I could recapture the buzz of those first drawings. Experimenting with a 3D setting to explore the contradictions of contemporary political art. So excited to be accepted for the Cuttin’ Edgeexhibition after all those years of isolation and rejection. And now the crashing doubt.
For this, Gethin’s eighteenth became incidental. Leaving him to his party while I worked in the studio, coming home and picking my way through the bodies. Losing it as I turfed a couple out of my bedroom. His friends edging their way to the door, and me screaming at him to stop shouting.
‘You’re shouting, Mum.’
By the time I’d finished, the friends had gone, he’d stormed off to his room, and I was left with the dregs of their strange drinks, wondering what happened when my son grew up.
I hear a step and jump up, expecting Gethin. But it’s Grace peeping round the doorway, her dark bob framing those wide mascaraed eyes and luscious red-lipsticked mouth.
‘The door was open, I was calling. Are you all right, babe?’
‘Apart from throwing myself into this sentimental diversion…?’
‘Wow!’ Grace comes to get a closer look at the collage. ‘Babe, only you would think of such a beautiful thing. Look at that!’ She points to the picture Francesca drew of them hollowing out a pumpkin, sewn in next to the chewed end of a severed latex finger.
‘It was your idea, as I remember.’ I lean into her, a surge of gratitude that she’s here. ‘I was going to do some Bayeux tapestry thing about Greenham, but it didn’t happen, and when Gethin was a baby you suggested I use it for a record of my journey with him.’
‘Did I? But it needed your gorgeously creative self to make it.’ Grace puts her arm around me.
‘You convinced me it wasn’t pure self-indulgence. A Different Conception, you called it.’
‘I always thought it was something to shout about, the way you had Gethin.’ She turns to look at me, that beautiful smile.
I can’t help smiling too, especially when Grace catches sight of the syringe.
‘Oh My God!’ She points in an exaggerated gesture. ‘Babe, I thought you extracted the sperm with it, needle and everything!’ She claps her hand over her mouth.
