My Mother

She said the cornflake cake made her day, she said a man cannot be blamed for being unfaithful: his heart is not in tune with his extremities and it’s just the way his body chemistry is. She said all sorts of things. We saw a duck pond and a man with a tub of maggots and a tub of sweet corn, we saw the walled garden and the old-fashioned library in the park, stopped for a cup of tea in a cafe where we had the cornflake cake cut into halves with the handle of a plastic fork. We saw yellow crocuses growing in a ring around a naked tree, the sky showing in purple triangles between the branches. We looked in the window of Butterworth’s at the bikes: they were beautiful, all of them. Gorgeous, she said. The sun was pushing through the iced air and landing on us on our heads and our shoulders and the backs of our legs. We bought nail varnish remover from Wilko’s, a bath sheet, and two Diet Cokes. She said she’d been talking to Jesus and God because she didn’t want to go to hell, although, she said, correctly, we’ve been through hell already, haven’t we. She said a woman should know her place, should wait. She lit a cigarette.