I get off the bus and Mam is waiting for me. We look nothing alike. She is a literal foot shorter than me.
‘For goodness’ sake, Rini,’ she says, pulling me down, smearing a sticky lip-glossy kiss on my cheek. ‘Do you really need to wear heels? It’s no wonder you’re single if you spend your life looking about six foot four. You could at least have your hair flat; you don’t need the extra height.’
It takes her a moment to notice the bruise on my cheek. I tried my best to colour correct it; I used an industrial grade foundation in the hope of covering it. It’s the foundation she goes to complain about first, asking me if I’m going to my own funeral, before clocking the red mark on my cheek glowing through the makeup.
‘What on earth have you done to your face?’ she glares. ‘You are far too old to be getting in fights, Irina.’
‘A drunk woman got me at work. I was trying to throw her out.’
‘What, yourself?’ I try to walk a few paces ahead of her, but she always catches up, even with her daft little legs. ‘That was stupid of you, Irina. You’re not a bouncer! Where were your bouncers?’
‘Well, I was in on my own. It was yesterday afternoon, Mam. We’ve not got any bouncers during the week, never mind during the day.’
She’s not satisfied. On the walk to the branch of Ask Italian she likes to eat at, she says I shouldn’t get involved with unstable people. She complains that it’s embarrassing her: me, walking around, with a bruise like this. She says I look like I’ve been fighting, or battered, and either way that’s common.
At the restaurant, she’s unhappy with our seat by the window; she doesn’t like being seen to eat. We share an antipasti board; she eats the meat and cheese, I eat the vegetables. She tells me she hates my nails. They are long, red and filed to a point.
‘Now they are common. With the bruise, as well. People will think you’re a working girl. And a sad one, one that gets hit.’ A beat of silence, while I watch the gears turn in her head, searching for a final critique. ‘Plus, you’ll take your bloody eye out.’
I imagine myself as a sad, one-eyed working girl. Mam says my name. She demands a response, like there’s anything I can say to that she won’t use to drag me into an argument.
‘Well, I just had them done, so I’m keeping them like this.’
‘I didn’t say you can’t have them, I just said I hated them. Am I not allowed an opinion?’ she asks.
‘I didn’t say you weren’t. But they’re my nails, and—’
‘I know they’re your nails, I just hate them, Irina. Why are you arguing with me?’
‘I’m not fucking arguing with you!’
‘Well, there’s absolutely no need to lose your temper. You’re spoiling lunch,’ she says.
I feel warm, and jittery. I stammer, and fail to say anything, knowing that trying to get the last word in will just make it worse. I nod, and I sneak my fork under the table and jab myself in the thigh with it. My breathing evens out. I change the subject.
‘How’s Dad?’
She rolls her eyes.
‘Sunderland were relegated last week, so you can imagine.’ We laugh at him. ‘He threw one of my good candles at the telly.’
‘Serves you right for marrying a Mackem, doesn’t it?’
She agrees with me, and does not speak for a moment, instead treating me to a glimpse of that glazed, thousand-yard stare she sports when she remembers she’s going to die having only ever been married to my dad. Sometimes, when she drinks, she tells me about the other （poorer, but better looking） bloke she was seeing when she first started going out with Dad. She refers to it as her Sliding Doors moment, even though her relationship with my father significantly predates the release of the film.
I fiddle with my belt. Mam snaps out of her fantasy timeline with the handsome husband.
‘You should have gotten the next size up in those trousers. I thought before, they look really tight on your bum,’ she says.
‘They’re supposed to be tight. And if they were looser on my bum, they’d be very loose on my waist.’ She doesn’t admit that I’m right – she has been distracted by a woman she has seen out of the window, limping out from a Brexity pub called The Dame’s Garter with a vape dangling from her puckered lips, which are as brown and wrinkled as an unbleached arsehole. Her hair is scraped back from her forehead, silver roots and brassy red ends, which are thin and stringy. A clown dangles from a gold chain on her leathery neck.
‘Did you see her?’ says Mam. ‘I went to school with her. She’s younger than me. Can you believe it?’
‘Really?’
Mam is well preserved, well dressed, and skinny. She sports a permanently unmoving forehead, and lips as plump as my own. She had worry lines for about a week in 1997, and put a stop to that very quickly.
‘That’s what happens when you smoke, and you don’t moisturise,’ Mam says. ‘She was always dead common – the whole family. They lived on my estate. Even by our standards, they were scum.’
Mam is rude to the waitress when she brings our salads, and I pierce the fabric of my trousers with the fork. She complains about everything in front of her. The salad is too oily, her lemonade is too sugary, her friend has cancer and keeps posting about it on Facebook.
‘Wow, what a cunt,’ I say. I’m too exhausted, too irritated, to keep a lid on it now. I drop my calm-down fork.
‘Irina.’
‘No, I’m serious Mam. What a cunt, talking about her cancer on Facebook. She should just fuck off to Dignitas and get it over and done with, shouldn’t she?’
‘You always have to escalate everything, don’t you? You can never let anything lie; it always has to be this big drama with you. You’re very extra, Irina.’
I’m extra. She’s extra. And if I’m extra she’s the reason I’m so fucking extra. I no longer want to eat my own salad （which is, admittedly, far too fucking oily）。 She has this shitty look on her face now, like Ooo, I’ve got you, that’s shut you up!
‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘how’s work?’
‘Fine.’
‘And the photography stuff? How’s that?’ she asks, sounding bored. I smile. ‘Well, don’t just sit there looking smug, Irina, what is it?’
‘I got invited to take part in a pretty big exhibition today. Hackney Space want my photos and a film as part of this big retrospective they’re doing on UK fetish art. So, you know, all that hard work finally paying off I suppose.’
‘Is that what they call hard work nowadays? Fetish art.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘Honestly, Irina, I wish you’d take some photos I could hang up.’
‘Lots of people hang up my photos.’
‘Yes, lots of strange gay men, and sorry if it makes me a homophobe for not wanting photos of willies all over my house.’ I feel like I’m at lunch with a fucking Daily Mail comments section. ‘I miss when you did your nice drawings, Rini. You’re so good at drawing.’
This is something she’s totally made up: that I used to do nice drawings, and that she ever liked them. She told me once that a picture I drew of Galadriel looked like a burns victim （I was, like, twelve）。 She told me if I was naturally gifted, I’d be better at drawing, and you can’t really do anything with art if you’re not naturally gifted with it.