Andrew O'Hagan - The Illuminations

‘Cold out there,’ he said.

‘Well, that’s November for you.’ She looked down to see her newest grandchild padding in behind her father. ‘And look at this wee lady with her chubby face. Ah, Bonnie. Come here till I see you, darlin’; take your shoes off now, there’s a good girl.’ Bonnie came waddling forward in her winter wraps with her fingers out like twigs, and, when she lifted her, a real smile broke over Maureen’s face. She patted down the fluffy hair and smelled the winter on her granddaughter’s cheeks. ‘Have you been a good girl? Have you? Have you been a good girl? Well, Bonnie, my wee pet, I’ve got a treat for you, so I have. Yes I have.’

‘Don’t give her sweets, Mum,’ Ian said.

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘No. We don’t give her sweets.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly. Just a wee sweetie, eh. She deserves a wee sweetie just like any other kid.’

Ian wondered why she didn’t just say ‘fuck you’. It would’ve

been easier in a way if she had. Fuck you and your plans and your decisions that are different from mine. Fuck them. And fuck you for coming in here thinking I should respect them, because I don’t, I think they’re nonsense. As well as that I think you lot are all out of touch with normality. All children want a sweetie and what kind of grandmother would I be if I denied my wee granddaughter a sweetie? It’s you and Esther. You’re that stressed you can’t let your kids be at peace.

Why didn’t she just say it and be done with it?

She pulled open the drawer and picked out a bar of Highland Toffee and a Kinder Surprise. She didn’t hand them to Bonnie but placed them on top of the chest of drawers next to a framed picture of Stanley and the children at Butlin’s in 1973. She turned to Ian to see what he was going to do about it and he flushed before he spoke.

‘Mum,’ he said. ‘There’s a reason we don’t want the kids to have these things. It’s because we had four or five fillings each before we left primary school. And because our dad had his first heart attack at the age of fifty-two. So it’s not really a matter of whether Bonnie

deserves

a wee sweetie, because what she deserves much more, my daughter, is to not grow up with a mouthful of scabby teeth and then have heart disease at an age when healthy people are thinking about running a marathon. That’s my choice as a parent. Okay? Is that all right with you?’

‘Oh shut up, Ian. I’m not in the mood today.’

Bonnie emerged from the bedroom with the chocolate egg and Esther could see that Ian and their mother had already had an argument. She noticed the slow progress of Maureen’s befuddlement and a slight limp as she made her way to the kitchen counter and handed the plates to Jack. She wished she could just go

and hug her mother and tell her this was a happy occasion but it was years too late. That’s what happens. She looked at Maureen as if she suddenly had a clear idea of her and took the plates herself from Jack. ‘I’ll help you, Jigger,’ she said.

‘This Parmesan’s smelly,’ Scott said.

‘Don’t say smelly, Scooter.’ That was Esther. She didn’t like the boys to use words like smelly or toilet. Something could smell strange or you might visit the loo, but smelly was definitely out of bounds and so was belly when you could say tummy.

‘It was all they had in Tesco’s,’ Maureen said.

‘You’re better buying it fresh,’ Scott said. He always got more sophisticated when his father wasn’t there. Esther considered it a sign of maturity or something, probably meaning he would cope better at university. They sat down. Maureen wasn’t eating what was on her plate. At times she thought she should have tried much harder to keep Stanley. Tried much harder to please him and make him happy. When it came to it, she let him go as if her disappointment in him — her sudden hatred — was simple confirmation that men weren’t worth a button. She liked to tell herself that everything would have been different with the children if she’d had a man in the house. Perhaps Stanley would’ve protected her against their need to be special all the time.

She lifted a fork. ‘I don’t know why you wanted Italian,’ she said. ‘Every time you have your lunch nowadays you’ve got to decide which country you’re going to.’

Esther looked at her mother and chewed her food a few times more than was necessary. ‘There’s certainly a lot more choice nowadays,’ she said.

‘You call it choice. I call it harassment,’ Maureen said. ‘It’s like the bloody Olympic Games in that Tesco’s. Italian. Chinese.

They’ve got a whole bloody aisle of Polish stuff.’

‘Well, there’s a lot of them living here,’ Ian said.

‘Too many,’ replied Maureen.

‘I don’t know where we’d be without them. Half the building sites would be lying empty for a start. And taxi drivers. You couldn’t get a British guy to get out of his bed on a Saturday morning if the town was on fire. These Eastern Europeans will work all night.’

‘Taking jobs,’ Maureen said. ‘And bringing their giant jars of vegetables over here. And biscuits. It’s not even biscuits they eat. Those things are like bars of soap. You’d get bubbles in your mouth if you sat down to eat one with a cup of tea.’

Over the years, Ian had come to accept her complaints as a kind of sickness, a complete resistance to the idea of forward movement, and he only blew up when it seemed directly to affect his own child. Esther, on the other hand, had an obvious pact with Scott and Jack, to be themselves no matter what Maureen said or did, but Esther could get nervous. She knew, for instance, that her mother would find it difficult when she began a story about the cocktails they had every weekend at tea time.

‘Cocktails,’ Maureen said. ‘You all think you’re film stars and this is Scotland, not bloody New York.’

‘Dad made me a mojito,’ Jack said.

‘A mosquito?’ said Maureen.

‘There was hardly anything in it,’ Esther said.

‘Well, if you want to get them started on drink that early, it’s up to you. I’m just telling you it’s the slippery slope.’

‘It was just a bit of fun, Mum.’

‘That’s how it started with your brother.’

‘Let’s not go there,’ Ian said.

‘Take it from me,’ Maureen said. ‘Giving drink to young men is not a wise move. Alexander was at it far too young. And your father, the great man, was giving him pints of lager when the boy was about fifteen years old. Somebody saw him down the street the other day with a bottle of vodka in a plastic bag. The middle of the afternoon when all the men are at their work. Vodka! I was mortified.’

Esther looked at Ian. She knew it was going to be like this. She knew she would be sharing looks with her brother, rolling her eyes at the dawning of impossibility over the lunch table. She sipped her fizzy water and saw that her mother would never change and that the healthiest prospect was just to love her as she was. And that’s how she played it. She mustn’t be brutalised by her mother’s frustrations and she counselled herself always to seek new ways to think well of her. Love is hard work and you don’t get anywhere just by feeding your resentments. She thought she could steal a little goodness back just by stopping to remember how lovely her mother had been to the woman next door. She once read a paper that said if you love someone then you’re always ready to let them start again.

Maybe they’d like the ice-cream, thought Maureen. People always cheer up when it comes to the sweet. ‘I’m sorry I’m not very good at these things,’ she said suddenly to them all at the table. Ian and Esther smiled and said everything was great and both of them seemed relieved to see her relax enough to say what she’d said. Sometimes you just have to accept that the people you care about are different from you, thought Maureen, but walking to the kitchen she realised she had a tear in her eye. The visit wouldn’t last for ever and neither would her nice memories of Stanley, but there it was. As she opened the fridge she knew she’d