Worst. Person. Ever(71)

“Lovely.”

“Don’t be such a prig, son. I spent half your childhood trying to coax a poo from you. My God. I may as well have been trying to pry a hooker’s tit from your father’s claws. The way he’d lay into a woman? Jesus and Mary, it was like a peregrine falcon making off with a fluffy little duckling while its mum screams from the reeds. Mind you, that kind of manhandling has its merits—or you wouldn’t be here today! Har, har har!” Mother coughed up a fetal pig and horked it off the bleachers into some crabgrass. “Oh, look at me and you, Raymond, a million years later on a glamorous South Seas island, like two peas in a pod. Nothing like family, I say, nothing.”

We all stared down at the contestants. At the purple-coloured picnic table, Tammy [Dental Hygienist, Texas] was about to guzzle a soup bowl full of hostile earwigs—who could object to watching that? Tammy furtively held a wriggling horned thingy up to her starving lips, and suddenly Mother went ballistic, shouting, “Oh, my dear God, Jesus, no! Stop!”

Everybody stared at her as she carried on screaming. “Good God, girl, what are you thinking, putting those nasty creatures down your throat?”

“Mother—”

“This is all part of America’s undeclared war on science! I can tell!”

Time stopped as we all tried to figure out what she was on about.

“Mother, that makes absolutely no sense. The insects here are delicious and protein-rich, raised in hygienic farm-like environments.”

“Eco-friendly and green,” added Tony.

“When Tammy or whatever her name is eats them, she’s actually receiving all the EU-sanctioned daily dietary recommendations,” I said.

Mother looked fed up with me. “Raymond, she’s a ho eating a fucking bowl of bugs. Don’t you talk down to me, son. I’m just saying that the Americans don’t like science anymore and are trying to get rid of it as quickly as they can. That young woman eating bugs over there would have been an astrophysicist if her country hadn’t shipped their entire economy to China. Her life could have had dignity; instead, she’s eating worms to pay for an endless string of abortions.”

(You’ll note that Fiona stayed silent during all this. And that my mother knew the word “astrophysicist”—who would have guessed?)

“Well, whatever, Mother. This is a TV show. It has endless minutes that need to be filled with endless amounts of footage. If you make any further outbursts, the PAs will drag you off to some forgotten lagoon where those people I mentioned a while back who gave you your brand-new tits will take them back with carpet knives as they squeal with glee.”

“You can’t blackmail me over my implants anymore. Tabitha told me while I was eating that once your implants are in, they’re in forever and can never be removed no matter what, like a band of travellers taking over your backyard while you’re at church.”

“Mother, you’ve never been to church in your life except to pilfer sedatives from the purses of those Presbyterian women who run the thrift sales.”

Stuart stalked over to us. Fuck.

“Potter, what the fuck is going on here?”

“Just chatting with my mum is all, having a lovely time watching some attractive young people eat insects.”

“Can you tell your mother to please keep her fucking voice down?”

“How dare you swear at my mother!” As though tasered by some unseen force of filial duty, I dove off the bleachers head first at Stuart and knocked him to the ground. “Nobody talks to my mother like that!”





45


If you’ve ever seen a fight erupt in public, you’ll know that nobody ever dashes in right away to stop things—even nuns and vicars want a dab of free blood. So there I am hammering away on Stuart, with him hammering away on me, with grit in our eyes and countless dozens of entertained eyeballs staring at us, cast and crew yelling encouragement, when in my blurred peripheral vision I see Mother crabwalk down the bleachers, screaming, “Kill him, Raymond! Kill that nasty fucker who swore at me! Kick him in the teeth! Kick him in the bollocks! Kill that fucker! Kill! Kill!” I have to admit, I felt just the tiniest whiff—just a kitten fart, really—of love for the old woman.

Fiona was also on her feet, chanting, “Get him!” I had no idea whom she was supporting.

And then, when we had started to slow down a bit, a couple of the more burly PAs pulled the two of us apart to Mother’s chorus of “Fucking pussies. Fucking he-pussies is what you are!”

Stuart pulled free of his PA and started brushing the coral dust from his khaki trousers. “Potter, you are FIRED from this show.”