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Skittles: Shortbread's Light Bite

Published 9 months ago

I was first attracted to today's Light Bite by the title, and although this story is not about rainbow flavoured sweeties, it did not disappoint!

Skittles by Desmond Kelly

There’s an old piece of film showing my mother during the eighties, skittling around.

I say skittling, because she finds it hard to keep her legs and is tottering.

She has very good legs, lean and long. In the film she’s wearing a short skirt that show’s their full extent. I don’t mean explicitly, but to their advantage. She’s also wearing a bodice style jacket with lapels and shoulder pads. Lot’s of strappy buckles down the front, almost like a strait jacket, and under this a white frilly blouse coated with some form of sparkling decoration.

I suppose it's right for the period; she looks extremely young with back combed hair, and made up face, but the eyes are vacant – especially the pupils. She say’s it was the look, but I think it was alcohol – it’s why she’s skittling around. I suspect she was using drugs as well – it’s another reason she can’t walk straight; why she skittles.

She’s talking to the camera, but the vocal track has never worked and I can’t make out what she says; I can only imagine. Periodically she smiles, or attempts to smile, but halfway through seems to forget why she is grinning and it slides off her face leaving behind a kind of baffled stare.

The film lasts for about twenty minutes, and during that time she does it quite often, and when I was little used to think she was happy, but dazed, then as I grew older saw she wasn’t happy at all. She was really quite sad, and if I questioned her she’d deny it. Say it was my imagination, but I could see the lie behind the smile and wondered why.

She refused to admit the truth and for years it left a gulf I filled with stories of my own. Little girls have vast imaginations that become more poignant as they grow older or until they learn the truth.

After I reached the age of ten there were no more men in my mother’s life and I think she was relieved – but just as often frustrated or afraid, warning me.

“Don’t trust them – boys. They’re all the same. Don’t trust them.”

After which, for a while, I grew nervous if a boy came too close but that all changed when I was thirteen and received my first kiss. From then on I was hooked, and it was all I thought about.

By the time I was fourteen I was able to answer back. (I had some experience to draw upon by then).

“Do you want me to become a lesbian? Is that it – you have no fun, so no one else is allowed to?”

I was wearing black eye liner and face paint. A fully paid up member of the teenage warrior clan, and my friends were a mixed bunch into all kinds of activities, and I never wanted to sit still or be lectured to. No one could tell me a thing. I was hot, and I was strong. In demand, and bound for a different kind of life to the one Mum proposed.

After a period of attrition Mum stopped doling out the warnings, offering advice and guidance instead. Some of it I listened to, but most went unheeded.

“You’ll find out,” she warned on one occasion, after we’d argued for most of the morning.

I couldn’t tell her that I already knew, and that it felt ok and I was prepared for whatever came my way. I believed myself invulnerable.

There was a man on the piece of film from the eighties – in fact there were a whole group of people – friends, she described them, though I’d never met a single one. This man smiled a lot and wore a herringbone jacket with wide lapels that I supposed was in fashion back then. Mum always swore he wasn’t my Dad, but I liked to think he was. He wasn’t bad looking and seemed attracted to Mum, and kept holding her upright and whispering into her ear. I could see she enjoyed the attention, even while she kept pushing him away.

There was another man that came around to the house up until I was about five; he brought sweets or a little present, and would settle me onto his knee as he talked to Mum, and he smelled of something woody, but I can’t hold his face in my memory. It’s gone, and there are no photographs.

“That was your Dad,” Mum confirmed, but I never detected affection for him in the way she spoke, and if I asked her to describe what he looked like she said she only wanted to forget. And by the time I was old enough to want to find my Dad she refused to discuss him altogether, or in what circumstances they had got together.

It left me feeling curious, even when I understood her motive for wanting to forget, but I felt denied and a little confused.

One story she often told (probably as a warning) was of a drunken evening followed by a light headed experience. I thought she meant romantically, but it was spoken with such deep regret I had to wonder. And when questioned, she’d say it was a mistake, and that set me worrying that maybe I was the product of this mistake.

She was at pains to reassure me.

“No, you were the best thing to ever happen in my life.”

Sometimes I believed her, sometimes not. And if I felt placated at all, did so mainly to allow her to believe I felt she was sincere.

But I knew she loved no one and especially not herself.

When I turned sixteen we shared a bottle of wine, and Mum opened up. It felt like a biblical flood in the way it all came out, as if she’d been saving it for this moment and I wasn’t to be spared the gory detail.

It really started on the day before because we’d been having another in a series of arguments. Boys again, but different now – I had a proper boyfriend, but she refused to allow him inside the house. I knew why, and accused her of trying to pretend I wasn’t grown up – that she thought I was still a little girl, but I wasn’t. I had a woman’s feelings, a woman’s hopes and dreams. She should treat me differently.

It was this final statement that must have done the damage as on the following evening she asked me to share a glass of wine.

She started out by saying that she supposed I knew by now what women went through. We both knew she was talking about sex, so I confirmed for her there and then that I knew precisely. I’d had sex and enjoyed the experience, and no amount of warnings about dire consequences was ever likely to put me off.

She listened thoughtfully and didn’t lose her cool, weighting her words in response before disclosing what she thought I needed to hear about her own life. I have to admit to not being prepared for what came my way.

Essentially, she had always been a pretty girl, with long legs and a pleasant disposition. (I knew this of course.) The boys came early, and there were many experiences (not always pleasant) and soon she was taking drugs and drinking to run with the crowd, imagining she could control it, until it began to take over her life. Even then she thought she was still having fun, but after a time it rarely felt enjoyable and maybe the piece of film I had seen confirmed what I had always suspected. It was the dazed expression, the skittling walk and the poor attempt to smile in an effort to disguise her true feelings.

She told me that when she felt unable to contain this deep sadness, by losing herself through drink or drugs or sex, she grew easily depressed and grew suicidal. She had been saved once or twice – she didn’t want to admit to detail, or scare me with what she’d done, but I needed to know everything.

It wasn’t an original story, and parts of it were like bits from tv or what I’d seen in movies, but this was my Mum talking, and it felt real. It felt true and deeply worrying.

When a boy she was fond of died, another took his place but she felt unable to care about him in the same way. Her feelings were far too damaged and she no longer trusted her emotions. That one left and in spite of swearing she would not repeat the same mistakes found another, and then another and so it went on until she realised how totally confused she was, too scared to try to work out what life had become.

She tried to leave – tried to get clear, but wherever she went there was a similar scene and she found the story repeated, with similar people in similar roles until it felt like she was trapped in a nightmare that had no solution.

I saw clearly how she might have felt, dealing with a situation in which she felt trapped, but then she dropped a bombshell.

When she fell pregnant, her first thoughts were to get rid of the child. She did some terrible things in an effort to cause an abortion, and it was a miracle I hadn’t been flushed down the loo. Once I was born, a long period of post natal depression followed, coupled with withdrawal symptoms from the drugs she’d been using. She admitted to feeling unable to cope with a new born baby, let alone engage and it was only through the support of a strong minded worker in the drugs programme she’d been enrolled into that she grew to care, learning to love again.

I listened in horror, far too shocked to say anything even though I was shaking and crying. Mum could see the effect it was having on me, at pains to stress that once she’d got clear of drugs and grown used to a dependent child in her life her sole purpose was to love and protect me.

To accomplish this, she broke away from everyone she’d ever known, and even when the father tracked her down she refused his offer of support as there was never going to be anything between them. It was the main reason she’d never wanted to talk about the man.

I asked, if now that we were talking openly, would she tell me who the father was, but still she refused, and I didn’t like to say I’d already uncovered a birth certificate that gave all the details necessary.

I knew the man’s identity, and profession – at least what he was doing at the time of my birth – and his age, twenty three, and that he lived about half a mile from where our house was situated. He would have moved on, I knew, probably married by now with a family of his own – and could perhaps have a daughter like me, that maybe I’d seen at school or even spoken to.

I couldn’t hold it in forever and told her that I already knew.

Mum looked away, removing her hand from the tight grip with mine.

“Well, it’s your right to know, but don’t ever bring him into this house. I’ve nothing to say to the man.”

I didn’t intend to but was forced to promise that I wouldn’t attempt to reintroduce him into our lives, even when I knew that I might, inadvertently. Mum knew it too; I could feel it.

Following the wine, and the disclosures, and the assurances that we made one another we fell into an uneasy truce.

She continued to refuse to allow me to bring my boyfriend into the house, and after we broke up seemed relieved not to be forced to deny me.

“You don’t need men,” she announced.

“Yes, I do.” I countered, secure in my own belief.

I could see that her heart wasn’t in it for the kind of argument this usually induced, and I think she said it more as a means of release – for me, if not for her – from whatever anger she believed I felt towards her following the break up.

It didn’t matter; she knew as I knew that I would find another boyfriend, and she would remain dead set against him if I tried to bring the man home, and we would certainly argue, but that was how life had become.

Sometimes, I’d make the effort to talk to her about what she had gone through as we watched that piece of film again trying to discover what it had felt like for her back then.

She’d smile and ask. “Why do you want to know – live your own life? It’s all you can do.”

We’d snuggle against one another the way it was when I was little, and she’d put on a movie which was usually something from the eighties. We’d sit in silence, staring into a past she apparently regretted, but I wondered if she really did, or was she instead still trying to make sense of things – the way they had become and what might have been?

Sometimes, if I thought I detected a tear at the edge of her eye I’d grip her hand, but she’d smile defensively.

“You can’t protect me – I’ve already experienced the worst.”

“I love you Mum,” I’d protest.

“Love you too,” she’d snap back, the echo sounding as if we’d spoken as one. And I believed her. I wanted to; she was all I had and she was Mum.

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