Mother’s Day
by Writer 3

The last time I saw my mother was fifteen years ago, here in this wet, Welsh coastal town. At least, that was the last time I saw her alive.

She was walking the front with two of her girlfriends, drunk, loud, a whirl of colour against boarded up shops. They laughed their way past Gruffydd, his long body laid against a stop sign, his clothes patches, like his life bursts clumsily sewn together. Gruffydd slid a comment through a grin of missing teeth. Mum raised a finger. It was for him to spin on. My mum.

Mum saw me and with a screech hurried over. At sixteen years old I had just moved out of her house. She kissed me, leaving a lipstick map of her mouth on my cheek.

“Out looking for girls,” said mum’s friend Amy, streak of piss thin and as weathered as the hills she sometimes retreated to when drunk to speak to God in Welsh.

“He’s got his run of girls.” My mum’s voice, boasting on me, was cigarette smoke and cider and babycham bubbles as she hugged me around the neck.

“He can have his run of me,” encouraged Sian, all curves that had never quite gone to fat.

“He’s not for you,” said mum. Then, placing her small, square form between me and them: “Meet you at Donovans. I got to spend time with my son.”

“Mother fucking Theresa,” said Sian, turning.

“She didn’t have kids,” said mum. Then, to Amy: “Leave us a couple of cans.”

Amy fished two cans of cider out of a carrier bag. She added a can of beer: “For the boy,” then, arm in arm with Sian continued along the front toward Donovans. I watched them go, as bright and sweet as the lollipops my mum smuggled into church; she dragged me along there when she was too sad for anything else.

“Let’s sit down,” said mum, leading me to a bench on the sea-front.

The bench, like everything else in town, was worn down. It complained as it took our weight.

“So what have you been up to?” Mum handed me the can of beer.

“Not a lot.”

She lit a cigarette, puffed it once to get it going, handed it to me, lit one for herself, opened the cider.

“Still going to school?”

“Yeah. Or the library.” The central library, built when the town was fat on coal and steel, now its grandeur seemed embarrassed to find itself in this ruin of a place.

We drank and smoked as the day slipped under the skirts of the world.

Gruffydd, denied access to the pubs on the front, started shouting. Obscenities and soldier tales from his past, and what he was going to do to who and when and how they deserved it. To no-one, just into the air from which the light was bleeding.

“Spaso,” I said.

Mum looked at me.

“What? You like him?”

“He’s a good man. He’s just carrying some damage.”

The last can of cider we shared, mum sipped, I sipped. The stars undressed before us like a lover.

“Do you know when we look at the stars we look back in time?” It was something I had learnt from one of the thick books I had borrowed from the central library.

“Will you look back at me?” asked mum.

“You’ll always be around.”

She smiled her lipsticked smile behind the glow of her cigarette. “Not for always.”

We looked at the stars some more.

End of Mother's Day