Jane Shilling - The Stranger in the Mirror

The precipitate growing of my son threw the sense of domestic normality into chaos. It wasn’t just the size of him that was disconcerting – the way he filled rooms just by sitting in them – but his sheer physical heft. Entire doors came off in his hand, their brittle old cast-iron hinges snapped like glass as he heaved them open; inexplicable dents appeared in the brass doorknobs; the fixings of the banister rope sprang out of the wall where he touched it; the small, stout, iron key to the Victorian wardrobe in his room bent mysteriously in half. The wooden slats of his metal bed-frame rattled to the floor at the sound of his footsteps, as though they knew they couldn’t bear the weight of him as he flung himself down on the mattress.

One dreadful November afternoon I was on the way home when my phone rang and I answered it to the sound of wrenching male sobs: he had been using my laptop (there was a rule forbidding this; naturally he ignored it) and somehow it had fallen to the floor and was broken – the screen a dramatic composition of jagged black slashes with rainbow edges behind which, somewhere, lay this book, imperfectly backed up.

Nothing in the fridge or food cupboards was safe. A trip to the supermarket that used to last us a week began to vanish in a couple of days, with the curious detail that he left behind the empty packaging of what he had consumed – so I would find a multi-pack of crisps filled with a rustling void; a packet of cheese that (moments ago, surely?) had contained a huge slab of Cheddar now vacant but for a few gnawed crumbs; a biscuit tin, the lid ajar, harbouring an airy flock of coloured wrappers.

I couldn’t work out if the leaving behind of the wrappings when the food was gone was a sort of joke – like the fresh-air eggs we used to make when he was little, turning the empty shell of the boiled egg upside down in its cup so it looked as though he hadn’t begun to eat it. Or whether some kind of magical thinking was at work and he hoped that if he left the packaging I would fail to notice that the food had gone, like the idiot humans in Naomi Mitchison’s children’s book, The Fairy Who Couldn’t Tell A Lie , stupidly unable to tell that the delicious fairy fruit gums and bull’s eyes on which they were gorging themselves were knocked up from old sycamore leaves and wood shavings.

Whatever the impulses behind the splintered furnishings and vanished food, I began to share the apprehension of Beatrix Potter’s Mrs Tittlemouse, a spinsterish woodmouse who returns one day to her fastidiously kept mousehole to discover an unwelcome male presence – a considerable toad, Mr Jackson, who has made himself very much at home in the parlour, where the mouse finds him ‘sitting all over a small rocking-chair, twiddling his thumbs and smiling’.

Spurning a snack of cherry stones with uncouth cries of ‘No teeth, no teeth, no teeth!’, he wanders the narrow passages in search of honey, leaving large damp footprints everywhere as Mrs Tittlemouse follows him, twittering with distaste. When she finally gets rid of the damp malodorous masculine intruder, she fetches twigs and partly boards up the front door, to prevent his ever entering again. Henceforth he can only peer wistfully in through the window.

There were times when I felt that I should have liked to do the same. Half child, half man, my son roamed the house after his shower, leaving large damp footprints everywhere while I stabbed spitefully at my keyboard and implored him to get dressed.

We had always been tactile, the drama of family life played out in a pantomime of hugs and kisses, smacks and flounces, turned backs and affectionate reconciliatory embraces. Until now my superior size and strength meant that I’d been in control of these exchanges. Now the physical balance had shifted. Often his embraces were more in the nature of an assault – what began as a hug would end with his twisting my wrist or (especially horrible) pinching my Achilles tendons.

Conscious that the feel of him in my arms when we hugged had become almost indistinguishable from an embrace I might bestow on a lover, I grew wary and began to detach, avoid, even fend him off as he blundered hugely after me and I retreated. His nanny, when he was small, used – to my astonishment – to kiss him on the lips. I felt very glad now that I hadn’t followed her custom. Absurdly, I found myself still smacking him when I was cross, using my elbows to fend him off as I would have done with some large, disobedient horse.

I was expecting his adolescent rebellion to take the conventional form that I’d read about in books and the family pages of the newspapers: outlandish clothes, horrible music, offensive posters, unsuitable friends, violent rejection of all the values I had tried to teach throughout childhood, heart-stopping excursions to alien destinations (music festivals, the summer beaches where teenagers flocked) and attendant disastrous experiments with sex, drugs, alcohol and reckless tattooing and piercings.

Though pretty well kept down as a teenager, I had nevertheless contrived to get through everything on that list, except the drugs and the tattooing (the latter an omission that I always regretted). I also developed a black, brooding persona of toxic malevolence with which I could poison the household atmosphere or reduce a entire school classroom to a state of silent gloom. When my son showed little inclination to smash, subvert, disrupt or defy in these obvious ways I was rather gratified; I took it partly as a tribute to my success in raising him, and partly as a sign of a kind of grace or luck.

Physically, his transformation from boy to young man was quite gracefully accomplished. His sparse tendrils of gilt beard sprang from a complexion only a little coarser than his child’s skin had been. I was astonished by the gruffness of his friends’ breaking voices – unmodulated troll’s roars emerging from windpipes that used to produce only treble fluting – but his voice just slid down the scale to a pleasant baritone, then stopped. I began to feel stirring the glorious pride of being the mother of a fine-looking, clever young man. I took his academic success for granted. He read books avidly. How could he not do well?

It was true that he had some difficulties at school. His handwriting was chaotic, his confusion in maths and science abject, but under the guidance of teachers who relished mild eccentricity he flourished. After years of lonely turbulence, I prepared to relax into the delicious spectacle of watching him succeed, sweeping through GCSEs towards A levels and the glorious rewards beyond.

It was a shock when his school reports began to come home larded with angry complaints: inattentiveness, forgotten books, missing homework, general hopelessness, dumb insolence. His head of year, Mr Jones, a mild young man with the wary expression and nervous hypersensitivity of a small prey animal, began to email and telephone me on a daily basis. This couldn’t go on, he said. My feelings precisely, I countered. We were each inclined to blame the other for Alexander’s academic collapse but settled instead on blaming him. He was impervious to our efforts to get him to engage with his schoolwork. He wasn’t defiant, didn’t appear angry, resentful, or especially unhappy at school. Separately and occasionally together, Mr Jones and I renewed our efforts to reason, cajole, persuade, shock or threaten him into understanding the importance of the examinations for which he was now studying.

When that didn’t work I took to describing the bleak future that he could expect without qualifications: unemployment, boredom, loneliness and destitution while his friends went on to university, well-paid jobs, sexual fulfilment and starter mortgages. To all our approaches he seemed quite amenable. He agreed that it would be for the best if he were to pass his exams, promised to do better in future. For a day or two, he would appear to be trying. And then he would revert to his old habits of implacable chaos.