Free One for My Baby by Tony Parsons Page A

street with my mother when some beer monster will suddenly come up to her and say, “Hello, Mrs Budd, remember me?”
    “Used to be one of my kids,” my mum will say.
    I don’t understand how she can feel the way she does about these children. I guess it’s because she has a lot of love to give. Far more than my father and myself ever really needed from her.
    When I was growing up, my mother had a series of miscarriages. It’s not something we talked about at the time. And it’s not something we talked about later. But I clearly remember being a bystander to my parents’ loss.
    I don’t know how many times it happened. More than once. I can remember that there were these times in my childhood where there was a lot of talk about me having a little sister or brother. Not from my parents – I guess after the first miscarriage you are too wary to count on anything – but I remember aunts and female neighbours smiling down at me, talking about how soon there was going to be someone that I would have to look after.
    I didn’t understand what they were talking about. I didn’t understand the syrupy smiles or the coy allusions. I couldn’t imagine anyone being so desperate that they needed me to look after them. I just didn’t get it.
    But later, when I saw my mother weeping without any apparent reason on the stairs of the little house where I grew up, when I saw her heart breaking while my father tried to comfort her, then I started to get it. The cute talk from the over-confident neighbours had abruptly stopped. I wasn’t going to have a brother or sister. My parents were not going to have another child. Not this time. Not now. And, as it turned out, not ever.
    I wondered where they were, my unborn little brothers and sisters. Were they in heaven? I tried my best to see them in my mind, my little brothers and sisters, but they were never real children to me, not like the other children at school or in the park, and not like the brothers and sisters of my friends.
    These unborn siblings seemed more like an idea that someone had once had, an idea that had been thought about and then quietly put away. But I remember my mother weeping on the stairs, I remember watching her heart break, I remember her weeping as though those children were as real as me.
    She loved me. She loved my father. She was very good at it. When we had hard times – when my dad was trying to write his book while still working full time, when I lost Rose – my mum was our rock.
    But no matter how much love she gave us, I always felt that she had more to give. I am not saying that’s why she worked as a dinner lady at Nelson Mandela High. But all that unused love is why my mum can look at all those unlovely children and feel a genuine affection for them.
    “We’re giving him a birthday party,” she says, putting on her coat. “Don’t tell your nan. Or Lena. Or him.”
    “I don’t know, Mum.”
    “It will do him good to celebrate his birthday,” she says, and for just a second there I catch a glimpse of the woman who, at fifty-four years of age, still breaks up fights in the playground of Nelson Mandela High.
     
    The work is not going well for my old man.
    When the work was going well, the door to his basement study was shut but you could hear music blasting out of his stereo. It was always the old school soul music he played, music that is full of profound melancholy and wild exuberance, music that was the sound of young America thirty years ago.
    When the work went well, my dad played all the mating calls of his twenties – the Four Tops, Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Stevie Wonder – but now the work is going badly, or not going anywhere at all, there is only silence in his basement room.
    Sometimes I see him sitting at his desk, staring at his computer, a pile of fan letters by his side. People are always writing to his publishers to say how much they loved Oranges For Christmas , how