Free Another Mother's Son by Janet Davey Page A

mirror when my phone rings. The cupboard doors are open and garments strewn on the bed. My legs are bare and I am wearing old socks. I am practised enough to see beyond the immediate aesthetic disaster and make a judgement. Hideous. These sessions that might or might not fill a carrier bag for the charity shop prove what I do not quite believe, that we are a succession of selves rather than a single identity. I am not the woman who bought that skirt.
    â€˜I’m about five minutes away.’ There is a whooshing sound of traffic in the background. It is Randal.
    â€˜Make it ten.’ I gaze at myself in the mirror.
    â€˜Whatever are you up to, Lorna?’
    â€˜Nothing. I just need the extra minutes.’
    There is a slight pause. ‘Oh, OK then. I’ll take the scenic route.’
    Although the days and the times of Randal’s visits vary, his appearances at Dairyman’s Road are as much reiterations as my callings-in on my father at the Winchmore Hill flat. The randomness, over a given period, feels almost the same as a fixed routine. Randal presses his face to the glass of the front door – something he has always done. After dark his silhouette is light against black and in the afternoon, the reverse.
    I call up to Ewan to tell him that his dad is on his way and send Ross a text. I take off the skirt and add it to the pile of clothes on the bed.
    I put my jeans back on and attack my hair with a brush. It is now long enough to pull back into a stubby knot. I snap a band around the clump and fasten the loose ends with clips. Seconds later the doorbell rings.
    â€˜Hi, Lorna. Happy New Year.’ Randal kisses me casually on the cheek; one side only. The chinstrap beard that was in evidence when he delivered the Christmas presents has gone.
    I return the greeting and tell him that Ross is out with Jude and that I do not know when they will be home.
    â€˜Ewan?’
    â€˜In his room.’
    â€˜How is he?’
    â€˜Same.’
    â€˜I’ll go on up then. See you shortly.’
    Randal goes up the stairs two at a time and stumbles, as he generally does, at the point where the matting is loose. I hear him hammer on Ewan’s door.
    He is up there for about twenty minutes.
    â€˜Hmm,’ he says when he reappears. He is a scientist and has his own thing going. He pretends to be less enmeshed in parental emotion. In any case, he no longer lives at Dairyman’s Road.
    He looks around the kitchen as if viewing it for the first time. The greasy cooker hood, a half-eaten banana on the table, Ewan’s never-to-be-thrown-away painting of an auroch.
    â€˜What are you looking at?’ I say.
    â€˜Sorry. Just making shapes.’ He doesn’t immediately comment on Ewan. Sometimes he doesn’t.
    â€˜So, the girlfriend’s still on the scene. Splendid. How old did you say she was?’
    â€˜Seventeen. Same as Ross.’
    â€˜You like her?’
    â€˜She’s lovely. She’s half Dutch, did I tell you that? Her parents are doctors. They’ve lived in different places. Leeds, Utrecht, London. Jude’s well-travelled.’
    â€˜Where does she sleep?’
    When he realises I am not going to reply Randal walks over to the back door and peers through the glass at the unmatching pieces of garden furniture, the barbecue fire pit without a grill rack, the collection of old bikes. The tree is the main feature. It stands tall and straight with its domed crown high above the suburban rooftops; the bark cracked into jigsaw-puzzle shapes of light and shade. An earlier owner gave up the struggle to grow anything and paved over the entire plot. It is an expanse of moss-encrusted grey, partly hidden by fallen sycamore leaves. We had a long-term plan to break up the paving and redesign the space in a more pleasing way but years went by and we did nothing. I shall probably continue to do nothing.

22
    OLIVER AND ROSS faced their father’s departure to North