AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I look blank at her, delayed memory reaction.
‘You know, we had one of those like grow-in-an-egg alien things? We decided,’ she pauses, clutches her stomach. ‘We decided it was your baby.’
‘Cos my dad was an alien, is it?’ I catch Fran’s giggles. ‘Son of Alien!’
‘We made you antennae out of Christmas reindeer horns.’
The giggles subside as I scoop up the remaining crumbs from my plate, thinking about Don’s letter, how it won’t let me rest.
‘It is just the weirdest, the thing of him suddenly existing,’ I mutter.
Fran takes my plate and shifts to lie on her side looking up at me. Her dark long hair trails along her neckline, moving up and down with her breath. I focus on the pyramid of coloured storage boxes opposite the futon.
‘I guess you didn’t need him to exist,’ Fran says. ‘You were always so close to Pat, like she was maybe enough?’
The top box of the pyramid is slightly off centre – I want to get up and straighten it.
‘Gethin?’
I look back at her, try to think about what she’s saying.
‘Yeah, we were close. We talked a lot and I used to tell her everything. If I ever did anything wrong, like at school, or did something mean to another kid, I literally couldn’t rest until I’d told her about it?’
‘You told her when we drank that Calpol. I got in such trouble with my mum.’
‘I couldn’t stand the guilt. Telling her was, you know, like a cream of tomato soup and hot chocolate type of feeling?’
And it comes to me, when I was about eleven, totally screwed with guilt over porno fantasies about women, any woman. After all she’d drummed into me about sexism, there was surely no comfort from Mum on this one. But I can still feel the floods of relief after I blurted it out, and she said it was actually all normal, the main thing was what I did, not what I thought. I kept pushing it, telling her more and more stuff, but I didn’t manage to shock her at all.
Fran touches my hand, making me jump with a resurge of eleven-year-old sexual guilt.
‘Chill, Gethin! Just wondering what happened with you and Pat? Nothing more to confess?’
‘Huh? Guessing there’s a limit to how much a dude wants to spew out to his mum? When hanging out with your mates in a rainy park becomes the most important? Worship of da holy weed!’
‘Oh My God, you guys taking pictures of piles of bud, like it was the most amazing thing?’ Fran grins at me.
‘Yeah, man! That was Lenny and Frank, like sending each other competitive photos. I didn’t have a camera phone, remember?’
Fran agrees that Mum was always a bit tight about anything involving a screen, and I remind her of how much grief I had to give Mum before she finally got me a second-hand Xbox. Literally crying when I opened it. Even then, I spent most of my time round Lenny’s, because his mum let us eat pizza out of the box while sitting in bed playing Grand Theft Auto.
‘I dunno.’ Fran frowns. ‘Pat was such a lot of fun when we were kids.’
I nod, thinking of trips to the space museum, costumes for Halloween, building dens in the woods. ‘But that was the thing: she couldn’t deal with fun-loving boy morphing into moody teenager.’
‘Maybe it’s harder for a single mum with a boy? You know, with a girl, there’s always clothes and make-up.’
I laugh at the idea of Pat as a clothes and make-up type mum. I tell Fran I’m thankful that at least she’s around less, since she started with her studio. Remembering how I had to literally talk her into it, saying I’d be full-on with my GCSE revision and shit. She liked that, of course. But I was glad to be out of the spotlight.
‘She’s so intense, my mum,’ I add. ‘Grace is a lot more chilled.’
‘Oh, that’s just what you see – she can give it some too.’
‘Mum used to be all, whatever makes you happy,’ I carry on. ‘But when I told her I didn’t want to do physics any more…it’s like, you know, all about freedom and democracy, but, Oh, No, we didn’t mean vote for that!And this thing about my sperm donor? It totally wasn’t an issue but now she’s made it one. I want to let Jarvis burn it, but it burns me instead, through a hole in my pocket.’
I pull out the letter from my jeans, bringing Gran and Granddad’s card with it.
‘Hey!’ Fran looks at the picture of a skateboarding kid with a mobile phone. ‘That’s never from your dad?’
