The morning after the night after the funeral, in which my mother and I had slept together, in both senses of the phrase, I woke up naked and alone.
I yanked on a pair of jeans and stumbled, bleary-eyed out of the door and found Mum in the flat's tiny kitchen chatting with Hal, my flat-mate. She was perched on a kitchen stool with her attractive nylon-encased legs crossed. She was jiggling her foot and a shiny black stiletto was dangling deliciously. Even in my zombified state of half-awakeness I could see the clear and definite physical evidence of our night-time frolics splattered in a dried streak down her thigh.
"Finally, lazybones!" She said, "Your friend has made me a nice cup of tea." 'Nice' was Mum's code-word for horrible. "Can you throw some clothes on and drive me home?"
"Urgumm, yeah." I coughed and rubbed my wiry hair.
"I raised such an eloquent son." She joked with Hal and thanked him for the tea.
We barely spoke on the drive back. A few miles from the edge of my old home-town Mum asked me to pull the car over. I found a place to park.
"Is anything wrong?" I asked her, switching off the engine.
"No." She sidled closer, "I just wanted to kiss you." She had the indescribably sexy look of someone who'd spent the night fucking like a demon. I was hoping I too had some of this allure although I suspected I looked more like a bear just emerging from six months' hibernation. She leaned over and pressed her warm lips on mine.
We kissed tenderly for a few minutes. She began to finish our heart-warming smooch with some delicate, tiny pecks that teased and excited me. Just as she lead me to believe we'd reached the end of our kiss she wrapped her arms around me and resumed her affections. We snogged like horny teenagers, my hand strayed down to her soft nylon thigh and I stroked her leg, my fingertips brushing over the dried spunk I'd shot last night.
After our long luxurious kiss she eventually broke free and said, "Okay, you can drive now." Her voice was breaking, seemingly she had been as affected by the embrace as I'd been.
Outside the house, we exited the car and looked up at the family home I'd escaped from. The place was haunted by years of misery. She hugged me and walked to the door. I followed her but she turned and put her hand on my chest.
"No, Jeremy, I've got to do this alone."
I wanted to protest but she looked at me with her eyebrows at such an angle that I knew she couldn't be argued with.
"Go on, get going." She walked inside and I drove home.
A week later I pulled up to the house to find the door and all the windows wide open. Inside I found the old place stripped bare. The furniture, the pictures on the wall, the carpets, everything was gone. I found my sisters and my mother arguing about a self-assemble bed. They were holding slats of wood and scratching their heads over a huge sheet of diagrams. A column of paint tins stood in a corner with various sized brushes scattered on the floor.
Mum looked so young and fresh, she could've been one of my sisters. I made my presence known.
"Here he is!" "Comes slinking in here when all the hard work's done." "Typical." "Perhaps he'll know how this fits together?" "Why, 'cause he's man?" "No, well, he is actually a man." "Huh! Are you sure?" "Don't look like any man I've ever known."
"And you HAVE known a lot of men." I snapped back and rolled my eyes at my sisters' mocking. I walked into the centre of this witches' coven and kissed Mum's cheek.
"Do you want me to help?" I offered.
"Oh, only if you want to. No pressure." This was my mothers code again, it meant 'Get your fucking arse in gear and sort this shit out right now!' so I took the sheet of instructions and studied them.
"What's happened to this place?" I asked as I discarded the foreign language versions of the diagrams.
"She's thrown it all out." One of my sisters handed me a slotted plank, "Even most of her clothes too. I had to lend her the teeshirt and jeans shorts she's wearing." I had been wondering why I'd never seen her wear these skimpy denim cut-offs before.
"And I've styled her hair," Another sister twirled Mum around, "Given her some highlights. Whaddya think Jezzy? A total MILF or what?!"
"You'd fancy her, wouldn't you?" Yet another sister piped up.
"Alright, that got weird quickly." Mum ended the parade and reminded the girls that they all had places to go, kids to pick up, jobs to get to and she ushered them out of the house, thanking them for all their help. We watched through the window as they jumped in their jalopies and disappeared. Mum turned to walk away but I caught her and put my arms around her waist. I slipped my hands into her back pockets and groped her sexy bum. I kissed her and she returned the kiss for a moment.
"Now, Jeremy, none of that. Be a good boy." She removed my hands from her jeans. "We've got some work to do." She was trying to look serious but there was an Adam Ant (google it, kids) style smudge of white paint across the bridge of her nose. I laughed and let her go.
We set to work. She was painting and I was attempting to build the annoying assembly kit by following the labyrinthine instructions. After a while Mum cracked open some white gloss to paint the skirting boards. I couldn't keep my mind on what I was doing as she bent over in those tight jeans shorts, displaying her gloriously ripe orbs to me. My brain, however unwillingly, was picturing her naked, bent over, presenting her hairy open red slit for my raging hard-on to ravish. Shit! A screwdriver tore a gash in my knuckle. A few minutes later I trapped a finger between two bits of wood because I was watching her bend over again. I swore and stepped back and clunked my head on a door handle.
Mum turned around.
"What are you doing!? It's like working with Mr Bean!"
I shook my wounded finger and rubbed the back of my skull.
"You're bleeding." She noticed. She put down her paintbrush and walked into the kitchen. Her voice called me in. "Come on, I've got some plasters in the drawer."
"It's nothing." I tried to sound manly but it was actually feeling very sore.
"Don't be silly." She took my arm and washed my hand under the tap, dried me, stuck a plaster on me. She must've done this a hundred times when I was growing up.
"When did you become so accident prone?"
"When you started wearing little Daisy Duke hot pants."
She blushed. "Am I too old for them?"
"Not at all. I can't keep my eyes off you, that's all."
"You... shouldn't say... let's have a cup of tea."
We sat out on the back step, enjoying the cool breeze after our sweaty exertions. Mum had put the radio on, a classical station was playing a jaunty Mozart tune, we both were humming along.
"I didn't know you liked this stuff." I said, trying to keep my eyes off her legs.
"He never liked it, so we didn't play it."
It was the first time she had mentioned my dead father, I watched her eyes darken. I felt a clawed hand twist my heart when I saw the pain it caused her. Let's get this over with, I thought.
"How did things get so bad with my old man?"
She looked at me and sipped her tea. She was thinking. How to condense two decades of an abysmal marriage into a single explanation. She picked at some paint splatters on her legs, I tried not to wish my hand was touching her.
"When we met he was quite charming. We had the whole world in front of us. He had a future. He was going to do stuff. He never did anything. He was a user. He was all talk." She paused and gazed off into her memories.
