Free One for My Baby by Tony Parsons

shorter. That’s the trouble with forever.
    Blink and you miss it.
     
    In the morning my mother waits until my father has gone to the gym and then she tells me that she wants us to give him a birthday party.
    My mum is full of smiles and very pleased with this idea, even when I try to talk her out of it.
    “He hates parties,” I say. “Especially birthday parties. Especially his own.”
    “He’s going to be fifty-eight,” she says, as if that makes all the difference. “And he’s got lots of friends, your dad.”
    Sometimes when I am talking to my mother I get the impression that we are having two different conversations. I tell her that he doesn’t want to be reminded of his age. She tells me that he’s going to be fifty-eight and that he has lots of friends. My mum often makes me feel like I’ve missed something.
    “Mum, what’s turning fifty-eight got to do with it?” I say. “You think he wants to be reminded that he’s fifty-eight? And he hasn’t got lots of friends. Who are his friends?”
    “You know,” she says. “There are the journalists he worked with at the paper. All the sports people he knows. The book people.”
    “None of these people are his friends, Mum. They are just people he knows. He doesn’t even like most of them.”
    She’s not listening to me. She has made her mind up and she is busy getting ready for work. She already has her uniform on – a short-sleeve gingham dress made of nylon or some other man-made material with a kind of fake apron stitched on to the front. Later she will pull back her hair – still glossy and dark, although I think she might have been colouring it for a few years – and put on a little white pill-box hat.
    My mum is a dinner lady at a local school. It’s not the Princess Diana Comprehensive School for Boys, where I taught. She works at the Nelson Mandela High, which is co-ed and even tougher. “The girls are as bad as the boys these days,” my mum says. “Worse.” But she refused to give up what she calls “my little job” even when the serious money started to pour in from my dad’s book. That’s why my parents need help with their big house. That’s why Lena’s here. Because my mum wouldn’t give up her little job.
    My mum loves Nelson Mandela. She really does. She likes having a laugh with the women she works with in the kitchen. She likes getting out of the house and giving some kind of shape to her day. But what my mum likes best about her job are the children.
    I say children, although of course many of them are hulking great baritones who would sell their granny for the price of an ounce of puff. At least that’s how I see them. My mother thinks that there’s no such thing as a bad child.
    “My kids,” she calls them. She’s sentimental about the children she feeds even though she has seen the worst of them, even though she has experienced them in all their surly, foul-mouthed violence, even though they are obviously not worth getting sentimental about. My mum still calls them “my kids”.
    She doesn’t let her kids cheek her when they are queuing for their burgers and chips. She doesn’t tolerate bad language in the school canteen. She doesn’t even let the little bastards scrap with each other (better they beat the hell out of each other rather than their poor underpaid teachers, if you ask me).
    My mother has been known to put down her ladle – or whatever it is she dishes out the gruel with – stride into the playground and break up a fight. I have told her dozens of times that she is barking mad, that she could get seriously hurt. She doesn’t listen to me. She’s only five foot two, my mum, but she’s tough. And very stubborn.
    She has worked at the Nelson Mandela for almost twenty years, back in the days when it was still the Clement Atlee Grammar School. This means that there are men and women on the verge of middle age who remember her from their own years at the school. You might be walking down the