It was quiet few days for the three of us; Tim and I trying to find a few minutes to be together and Mum detecting something in the air; I'm not sure whether she picked up on the sexual tension between us or if it was a new feeling of... closeness?
It must have been that. Previously it had been about sex or the excitement of the build up to it. But it was becoming more and more evident that we just enjoyed each-others company.
Our relationship had been OK up to our teens. After all, once taken away from Dad and the rest of our family, we were all that we had. My hormones came along when I was twelve and I became a woman; moving away from all those closest to me had made me grow up quite quick anyway.
Tim's on the other hand were very, very late and, while he was eventually to be extremely well endowed in later years, his hormones came five or six years after mine, and two kids that had been really close drifted simply because one had her adulthood thrust her while the other spent much of his mid teens still reading comic books and dreaming about the model railway that was actually in the attic all the time.
But I was away for the time when I should have been around, and could have helped Tim growing up and getting out into the world. This was thanks to my desire, no NEED to put distance between Mum and I. I only saw him four or five times a year; then after graduation and our falling out I was totally estranged from him and Mum for about eight years while they carried on their very own strange way of life.
When Mum had her first stroke, we hadn't talked or exchanged so much as a birthday card. I knew by that stage that any cards I sent Tim would end up in a shoe box in the loft so sent them to him via the student union office at Manchester Polytechnic, then the Arts department were he'd got a job. He reciprocated on my birthday and we kind of stayed in touch though Aunt Veronica.
It was thanks to Ron that I found out about the stroke.
By that time Tim had grown into a man, had gone through adolescence, matured up to a point and had basically 'caught up with me'. Once we had 'cleared the air' between us, it was like the intervening years had disappeared and we just started where we had left off a bit less than twenty years ago on that day my period started. I had met an old school friend, some guy I'd not seen since childhood and was seeing him in a new light.
It turned out we laughed at the same jokes, liked that same movies (while Mum was in hospital we occasionally went to the cinema to watch them) read the same books and had the same social outlook on life. Mum didn't and resented that we did. I think she had an inkling that my relationship with Tim might have moved in the same kind of direction that hers had and for that reason she was desperate to regain her access to upstairs to find out.
This now left the matter of where I was going to sleep. The previous week I had said to them both that I did not want to sleep on the sofa again as it was so uncomfortable. On a personal note neither did I want my room back as it would mean that if Tim and I wanted sex at any time we'd lose the benefit of a floor and a noisy stair lift to let us know Mum was on the prowl.
It was decided that the front room would remain a spare room, much to Mum's chagrin. She whined that Tim should put his model railway back in the loft so I could have 'my' room back; back to normal, readily under surveillance and just how she wanted everyone.
Tim came up with the perfect option. The large, high orthopaedic bed he'd purchased for her would be brought upstairs. Mum's old bed (and Tim's copious semen stains I worked so hard to spread over it) would go to the rubbish tip and he would buy one of those folding sofa beds for the downstairs sitting room, to bring it back into daily use after all this time.
Mum, I could see, was struggling with that. To try and cheer her up Tim said he would put another TV in their so they had the option of not having to watch the same programme, (she loved soaps and he hated them) and she could use it as a day bed.
Other than not being able to find out what we were doing to each other, the main reason Mum was having such an internal battle was the remnants of her lower middle class English concept of 'The front room', which was the best room, never used, kept for high days and holidays and not to be entered for any reason. Which is what it had been for my whole life, in fact, when I came home to visit her in there it was the first time I'd so much as seen the pattern of the terrible wallpaper in there. Fortunately Tim had removed it and repainted before he installed Mum in the room.
That was that; We threw ourselves into action that first weekend. He phoned a music shop in town and sold the upright piano that had sat unplayed and untouched for all of my life. Mum tried to complain but Tim simply said there was no room and it was pointless keeping it if we could money for it. She shut up for the time being.
The men collecting it smiled and expertly wheeled the thing out of the house, and while the tail-lift was lowered the older of the two men unlocked it, played a few dramatic chords that were slightly flat then announced it would take a bit of a retune but had a fantastic tone. It was the first time I'd ever seen the lid lifted and for the life of me I could never understand why we'd had it. I expect that Grandma Lawrence said that all 'nice' houses had one.
Next we went to a large furniture shop with a very ungracious Mum in tow we ordered a fine looking sofa bed. Mum complained about the price but I said that as I would be using it most I would pay for it. She grumbled something like 'about time you paid for something' but I let it go.
On Thursday I took Mum out as promised to buy a new rug and Tim put the fuse back into the chair lift. By chatting with a college maintenance man he'd also worked out a method of fitting a small buzzer to the power button so it gave out a low warning buzz when ascending or descending. Tim's explanation would be that the stair width meant that the engineer had to fit a buzzer for reasons of health and safety. Even I thought it made sense and I knew it was rubbish!
Tim took her orthopaedic bed to bits and used the lift to carry it upstairs in time for the council to come and collected the old one.
Once back and 'you've JUST missed the repair man', we laid the new carpet we'd bought, and finally put in the new sofa, a big second-hand colour TV complete with a video player. The dark dingy 'best room' had gone and I finally had my own space in my childhood home again after all those years.
While this was going on Mum, sitting on her chair like she was the Queen Mother, still bitching about the loss of her 'best room', complaining about the buzzer and that it would be enough to give her a headache, ascended.
Tim had told her the story that the engineer had said that it was a legal requirement and the lift would stop working if it was deactivated. This also had more than a smack of reality about it as the man from the gas company had told her that it would be against the law if she used her gas heater with the 'drafty' air vent blocked again, and had left her with a form explaining all about carbon monoxide.
"I suppose it makes good sense," she said with extremely bad grace, as she whined her way to the top of the stairs for the first time in over six months. The light and space hit her full on and I don't thunk she knew whether to be happy or sad. The miserable green, browns and creams the house had been decorated in for the last twenty years had gone and were replaced with yellow, white, blue and apple. But she finally realised that her reign over her family had ended, and what was worse I looked likely to be the if not the Queen at least the King's chosen consort.
Listening to her tut-tutting and sighing from upstairs we talked excitedly about our first movie night - I even suggested renting some porn, something neither of us had even seen before!
Having taken my last pill a couple of nights before I hoped desperately that my withdrawal bleed would hold off one more night so we could christen the new bed. I'd felt the familiar gentle glow within my womb and the tiny patch of light brown discharge in my knickers that told me the next day I would come on in earnest.
