Walking with Ghosts

infection.’
    ‘Christ. This is my honeymoon, Sam.’
    Sam smiled. ‘Didn’t expect to spend it with me, eh?’
    ‘No. And I didn’t want to. I still don’t want to. Specially if you’re gonna be sarky.’
    Sam sipped at his coffee. Sighed. ‘OK. Sorry. I can see I’m no substitute for Janet. Tell me about the mother-in-law.’
    ‘What I don’t understand,’ Geordie said, ‘is why she’s like she is. I mean my mother pissed off with the landlord and left us behind, not a word, just a note I couldn’t even read. And now all my life from that day I’ve been wishing she hadn’t done it, or that she’d come back, because everybody else in the world except me’ve got mothers that look after them, or that you can give a card to on Mothers’ Day. You can buy flowers for your mother, even after you’ve left home and got married, you can visit her on Sunday afternoon, have some roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Hell, Sam, you know what I mean.’
    ‘Yeah. It’s a dream. It’s a load of old bollocks, and you know it’s a load of old bollocks, but you dream it anyway, because it’s a substitute for not having a mother.’
    ‘Yeah, it’s crap when you haven’t got a mother or, even worse, when you had one but she didn’t think enough about you to stick around. Not even enough about you to send you a card, ever, in your whole life. A postcard with a second-class stamp on it and two words: “Hello. Mum.” Not even that. I mean, what’s the good of a mother like that? I tell you, Sam, there’s times when I think it would’ve been better if I’d come out of a test tube. Then at least I wouldn’t have all these thoughts in my head, like can I remember what she looked like, or am I making it up, grasping at ideas of what she might have looked like if she’d been a proper mother?’
    ‘You’re not gonna get morbid on me, are you?’
    ‘Fuck off, Sam. It was your idea. You said you’d listen for an hour. We haven’t had ten minutes yet. If it’s too much, you can get up and walk away.’
    ‘Sorry. I’m all ears.’
    ‘So when Janet said her mother was gonna stay with us, I thought it’d be like my mother as well. That we’d get married and sort of share her. You know what I mean? But what happened was Janet’s mother came and she didn’t look at me. I was there when she got off the train and she looked at Janet and didn’t even glance at me, and it was obvious she’d made up her mind that I was a pile of shit before she’d even met me.’ He picked up a sugar lump and crushed it between his thumb and forefinger. ‘It brings it all back, for Christ’s sake, all the things I used to think about my own mother, but since I met Janet I haven’t been thinking about her so much. Now it’s all come back. There’s been times these last three days when I’ve thought about breaking her scrawny neck. It’d be so easy. I could do it with one hand.’
    ‘Just as well she’s going home then.’
    ‘So what is it with mothers? Celia told me in Islam they say paradise is under the feet of your mother. Where does that put me, Sam? I’ve only met two real mothers in my life, mine and Janet’s, and both of them were crap. I look at these pictures they have in galleries, Christ and his mother, motherhood, fuckin’ angels flutterin’ around them, and it’s like a huge confidence trick. Same as the Tories. Or any governments.
    ‘All these painters, Reubens and Raphael and all those old guys, somebody must’ve paid them to paint angels around mothers and babies, because I reckon it never happens in reality. What happens in reality is your mother ups and goes with the fuckin’ landlord as soon as he gives her the eye. Or if she doesn’t get the eye she hangs around for ever and makes your life a total misery. There’s no paradise under her feet. There’s nothing under her feet. She might have shit on her boots. That’s a possibility. But no paradise. That's what I think.’
    ‘Yeah,’ said Sam.
    ‘Yeah, what?’
    ‘Yeah, I don’t agree with you.’
    ‘Nobody’s allowed to agree with me. I know nobody’ll agree with it, because everybody’s been brainwashed with the fuckin’ propaganda. First of all history’s full of it, with the painters and the angels, like I just told you. And that’s in place, waiting for you even before you’re born. Like an animal trap, that one. Then when you’re born she’s there. Your mother. Got to be, right? Like most of the time I bet if she