“Anyone you know?” said Neal.
“You feeling okay, Ray?” asked Elspeth.
From around a coconut bush appeared the testicle-congealing slag known as my mother, dressed in the shabbiest of high-street summer style, smoking two cigarettes, her pair of bingo wings flapping, looking for all the world as though she’d just popped out the front door ready for a day of shoplifting with her best friend, Sheila.
“There you are, Raymond. Fiona said you’d be here.”
Fucking hell. This is just the sort of thing Fiona would do, the miserable bitch.
Neal and the two girls wore the innocent but entitled expressions of car passengers whose half-hour delay in stalled traffic has earned them a good long gawp at the blood-soaked crash that interrupted their journey.
“Hello, Mother. Welcome to Kiribati.”
“Look at you, Raymond, all dressed up like a pervy version of the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz.”
“Mother, this is Neal, Elspeth and Tabitha.”
Mother stared at the trio like a grifter assessing fresh marks. “Hello, then.”
“Has Fiona set you up in nice digs?”
“She’s done more for me in one day than you’ve done in a lifetime, useless son that you are. Brought me down here for a holiday, out of the kindness of her heart.”
“That’s Fiona, all right—give, give, give.”
Mother glowered at me. “Are you taking the piss?”
“Yes, Mother. I’m taking the piss.”
I heard Neal whisper, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?”
“Okay, then, Mother, if you’re finished …”
I could tell she was about to launch into one of her invectives in which politics and religion and utterly ambiguous personal foibles coalesce to create a sort of satanic meatball of misinformation. “I am not finished. By changing one vowel in the name ‘Harry,’ you desecrated the imagination of every child and of every child-grooming pedophile who ever entered the Potter universe of mugwumps and pixie-wixies or whatever else that that billionaire woman is always writing about. Childhood is sacred, Raymond, sacred.”
“Mother, that made no fucking sense. What do you want?”
“Fiona very kindly invited me down here for a leisurely South Pacific vacation, and all I’ve found so far is tinned luncheon meat and some ghastly fungus that has turned my minge into a Halloween house of horrors. I want my holiday, and I want it now.” She dropped her two dead cigarettes onto some highly endangered plant and crushed them with her heel.
Silence.
“Well, Mother, you certainly know how to win over a crowd.”
“Raymond Gunt, you are a bad, bad son. I rue the day I ever dreamed of bearing offspring.”
“Do you?”
“I do.”
“Well then, guess who is about to stop making payments on your breast enlargement surgery.”
“You wouldn’t!”
“Wouldn’t I?”
Neal said, “Ray, really? You paid for your mum’s implants? You’re a good son, you are.”
“Thank you, Neal.”
Mother was running scared. “Raymond, they can’t take my implants away, can they? They’re already inside of me.”
“Yes, Mother, yes they can. If I don’t keep paying, they will systematically hunt you down wherever you try to hide. They will pounce on you from behind, armed with Stanley knives, and they will rip you open right there on the cobblestones.”
Mother burst into tears.
“Christ, don’t bawl.”
“I love my breasts, Raymond! They’re the only things of mine withstanding the horrible hand of time!”
Though it went against all my instincts, I walked over and put my arm around her, causing my entire musculature to involuntarily shudder. “There, there. I promise to continue making the payments.”
She honked an oyster of phlegm into the coral dust. “Oh, Raymond, I take it all back—you are a good son. I’m just so stressed out from travel. Oh Lord, now I’ve farted—and my nose is running. I need a tissue.”
Elspeth gave up the Playboy Bunny fluff ball attached to her tender rump. Mother honked a cargo of deep-sea creatures into its pristine softness.
Elspeth, Neal and Tabs stood transfixed.
“Why you and Fiona never had children is beyond me, Raymond. You’d have made a fine father.”
“Thank you, Mother, but Fi’s not really the nurturing type.”
“You just never gave her a chance.”
“Mrs. Gunt,” said Neal. “Why don’t you stay with me in a proper house? You’ll like it very much.”
“Really? Neal, is that your name? Thank you very much. They put me up in a tent, without even a telly to keep my mind off my woeful situation. A house would be lovely.”