‘You don’t really cook much, do you?’
‘I heat the tin up on the stove here.’
‘You cook them still in the can?’
‘Yeah. I take the lid off first, otherwise they go bang. Only made that mistake once.’
I knew what I was going to do.
‘What food do you like?’ I asked.
‘Not fussy.’
‘But you must have a favourite.’
Vic shrugged, but I didn’t want to give up.
‘What if you were on death row and the guard came to ask what you wanted for your last meal,’ I said. ‘You could have anything. They could re-create any meal you’d ever had in your life.’
Vic thought about it.
‘Any meal?’
‘Any meal, exactly as it was.’
Vic put the can down.
‘Edie’s lamb roast. Do I get dessert?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then my mother’s Christmas trifle for afters.’
Vic had a small smile, like he was remembering those meals.
I told Vic I was going for a walk.
He lived in a cul-de-sac that was all brick houses with neat front gardens. A couple of places had tall palm trees. One driveway had a boat that said Liquid Asset on the side.
A woman two houses down was standing at her letterbox and staring at me. She had big blonde hair which was dark at the roots. I put my head down and kept walking, but I could still feel her watching me.
‘Why are you coming out of that house?’ she asked.
I pulled my hood over and ignored her, which only made her more aggressive.
‘Excuse me! Answer me when I talk to you, please! Who are you and why are you coming out of that house?’
She followed me for a couple of steps.
‘What’s your name young man?’
She stopped walking and I kept going. A few houses further down, there was a girl around my age walking home from school. She had thick shoulder-length curly black hair. She was short with brown skin and big dark eyes and a backpack that looked really big on her. She must have seen the woman harassing me, because she stopped and rolled her eyes.
‘Hey, don’t worry about her, she’s, like, pathologically rude.’
I looked over my shoulder. The woman was still watching me.
‘I don’t think she likes me.’
‘She doesn’t like anybody. Like, she’s always been a bit frosty, but ever since her husband went to prison she’s been fucking tyrannical.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Oh my goodness, it’s the craziest story. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’
I raised my eyebrows.
‘Are there any shops around here?’
She gave me directions and I thanked her. The girl seemed friendly. She said goodbye and went inside a red-brick house.
Fifteen minutes later I reached a shopping strip with a hairdresser, newsagent, chemist and a Foodland. I went into the supermarket and picked up a plastic basket. I looked around to get my bearings.
I saw a mother pushing a trolley with her daughter in the child seat. I thought about shopping with my mum, how each time was like a secret adventure. I gave the little girl a smile, and she waved back at me. Her mum gave me a dirty look and pushed the trolley away, and I remembered the mess I had left behind.
My mum was nineteen when I was born.
She didn’t realise she was pregnant because she was living in her college dormitory and going out every night, so she just thought she was hungover a lot. It was a few months in before she knew. By then she had dropped out of all her classes. Her parents were strict and had high expectations, so she didn’t tell them anything. When they found out, they were really angry.
They told her to get rid of me, but it was too late to do it legally. Her dad wanted to go to court and get permission, but my mum wouldn’t do it. They told her she was throwing her life away. My mum cut off all contact with her family and never allowed any of them to meet me.
After that she was on her own. She didn’t know who my dad was. She admitted to me that she didn’t remember much about that time. I used to invent stories about who he might be and why he couldn’t be with us. Sometimes I imagined him as a soldier or a musician or a pilot.
When I grew into my face a little more, my mum thought she recognised who he might be. She had met a man at a pool hall next to the Aberdeen Street Backpackers whose eyes had looked a bit like mine. She never knew his name, but she remembered he had an Irish accent. She only met him once and never saw him again. Sometimes I wished she hadn’t told me, because I never thought about him being a pilot or a soldier again.
For a long time, it was just me and my mum. We moved a lot. It always seemed to be the same one-bedroom apartment, just in a different suburb. A few times the landlord changed the locks with all our things inside. My mum would call her friend Dave, who was a locksmith, and he would get us back in. Then she sent me outside to play for an hour while she said thank you to Dave.
We never had any money. One of my earliest memories was sitting in the child seat of a trolley, watching my mum slipping food into her handbag. I didn’t understand what she was doing at the time, I just remember how tense she was.
When I got older, it became a game we played.
Sometimes I wore my empty school backpack. She would put some things in the trolley, and fill my bag up too. When we got near the cashier, I would have a big tantrum, screaming and kicking and knocking things off the shelves, then she scolded me and yanked me out of the store, apologising to everyone and leaving the trolley behind.
Sometimes it went the other way. She would fill my bag up, and put a couple of cheap items in the shopping basket. At the checkout, I would politely ask if I could have a chocolate bar, and she would count out her coins and say only if I gave the lady behind the counter a nice smile, which I did. Nobody ever suspected us. We never once got caught. In the car, she would tell me what a good job I’d done and I would feel proud.
Our gas or electricity got disconnected a lot. Once when we had no power, my mum pretended we were on a camping trip. We made a tent out of a bedsheet and we lit candles to be our campfire. We toasted bits of bread on the end of forks and imagined they were marshmallows. When it got late, my mum blew out the candles and howled like a wolf to scare me. I acted afraid because I wanted her to comfort me and tell me they weren’t real.
She left me on my own all the time. After dinner she would get dressed up. My mum loved clothes and she owned lots of them. I would help her select an outfit. We went through her wardrobe together and laid out the ones we liked on the bed. She narrowed them down to the last two, then she held them both up and let me choose.
‘Okay. The A-line or the slip dress?’
‘The slip dress. With your black heels.’
She nodded.
‘Thank you, Honeybee.’
Then she would put on make-up in the bathroom. I sat on the counter or the side of the bath and watched. I knew all the little rituals. The way she turned her face from side to side to check her bronzer, or how her tongue always touched the corner of her lips when she was concentrating on her eyeshadow highlights. She put her lipstick on last, then she rolled her lips together and pouted and put a tissue between them and pressed down. She gave the tissue to me because I thought they were pretty and I liked to collect them. I had a whole shoebox full of her kisses.