Free Send Me A Lover by Carol Mason

euros, I don’t hold out much hope. Notice how he’s not washed his hands. And I’d like to bet he didn’t wash them after he went to the loo either. Hepatitis here we come!’
    ‘Angela,’ my mam glares at me. ‘Are you going to be in a perverse mood all week or are you just having a perverse day just to get it out of your system in one dose? Because the latter I can handle, but the alternative, I can’t.’
    ‘I’m getting it over in one fell swoop,’ I tell her. ‘To do you a favour. Bear with me, I’m coming round to being in a good mood again.’ I smile at her exasperation.
    The salads arrive, along with half a litre of white wine. The vegetables are sweet. The feta is creamy rather than salty. And the olives worth moving to Greece for. For eight euros we’re full, satisfied and ever so slightly pissed. The Greek man goes back to sitting outside again, from time to time watching the non-events of the street, and occasionally watching us.
    ‘You know, we’ve never gone on holiday together, have we? Not since you were a little girl.’
    ‘When did we ever go on holiday when I was little? I only remember tedious trips to South Shields beach!’
    ‘Don’t call them tedious! There were us as a family having a good time!’
    ‘Well they were tedious! Don’t you remember? We had to take three buses to get there because unlike everybody else, we never owned a car, because Dad drank all the money he should have spent on driving lessons.’ Or smoked it. I vividly remember him rolling his Old Holborn cigarettes. The cough before breakfast. ‘And as soon as we got there he’d make a beeline for the first pub, and we’d have to sit there while he got wasted… It was always what he wanted to do, never us.’ Yet he wasn’t a bad man or a bad father. ‘Yeah, it was one of life’s real joys.’
    ‘Don’t say that!’ she berates me with a guilty chuckle. This tells me she thinks she somehow let me down as a parent because I’ve only got memories of tedious holidays instead of good ones. ‘Anyway, he only did it because, like all men, he was selfish. He didn’t actually mean any harm by it, Angela.’
    Jonathan wasn’t selfish. But she’s right about my dad; he never did mean any harm to anybody. He was just easily entertained and he assumed everybody else was.
    The Greek man watches us closely, as though we’ve perked up his day. ‘Don’t you remember Blackpool? When your dad bought you those yellow sunglasses that you never had off your face, and he took you up in the Ferris Wheel? And I wore my coral sundress...’ She smiles coquettishly, remembering herself. ‘And I had shoulder-length dark blonde hair back then—like yours—and I used to keep it in soft roller curls, and it was windy and the wind blew my dress up. And there was a man with his wife and little girl… And he couldn’t take his eyes off my legs. He was just fascinated with them. He was walking away and looking over his shoulder at me as though he had his head on backwards.’
    ‘Oh! That time! Of course. Your legs, and that man with his head on backwards! How could I forget.’
    ‘You remember!’ she says, thinking I’m being serious. Then she growls, realising that I’m not. ‘Angela! Don’t mock the afflicted!’
    I shake my head at her and try very hard not to love her so much that it breaks out of my every pore.
    ‘Mock me all you want, but back then there really wasn’t much excitement in my life. I was married to a man who couldn’t even give the pub a miss the night I brought our new baby home from the hospital.’
    ‘Why did you stay, Mam?’ It’s something I’ve always wanted to ask her.
    ‘Where was I going to go? I had you. You loved him. He was your dad.’
    It saddens me now to think that my mother never had what Jonathan and I did. And that she stayed with my dad because of me, when she wasn’t happy.
    ‘Why didn’t you have an affair?’
    ‘I had lots of them.’
    ‘Huh?’ I just about