In the park she said: ‘Tell me a story.’
He looked at her round red face that had once suggested an arse. Then he had fallen in love with it, and all he could think of were apples, strawberries, ripe fruit, things sensuous to the tongue. Lately though a falling off, and rotting and withering slithered about his brain.
‘There was a man who considered his life was like a jigsaw.’
‘That it?’ she said.
‘You want more, Rebecca?’
‘Have you got more in you?’
‘A couple lunched out on a death anniversary. He, Bren, was thinking of a childhood conversation with his late mother. “That’s Nanny in Ireland,” she’d said as a sound like a distant earthquake rumbled in her belly.
‘“She’s got a funny voice,” the infant Bren had replied.
‘“Isn’t it travelling all the way from Kerry, darling,” his mum’d said.
‘Bren’s wife, Kath, pushing her finished plate away, broke into Bren’s memory: ‘”Expect she’s creating good vibes upstairs.”
‘True enough, Bren thought. Even that old cumudgeoun God will be snickering into his hoary whiskers when Mum becomes electric with chat. His mother had been gorgeous right until the end: blonde hair which with age silvered. She could cause male heads to turn like a Federer serve. Maybe it was the sky in her blue eyes, her stick of rock slimness, or simply her personality which rose before you like the head on a just poured stout. She left her thumbprint on folks’ imaginations.
‘“She told me once she was a completed jigsaw but for one missing piece. I always assumed she meant you. I took you away and she wanted you for herself, didn’t she?”
‘“She’d have liked a daughter to go with her three sons: that’s what she meant. She wasn’t jealous of you at all.”
‘“Is there a missing piece in your life, Bren? Just asking.”
‘Bren felt a tickle in his stomach. Not the curry, no, but his mother telling him: “You’ve got all you want. Be satisfied!” “We’re OK, Kath,” he said eventually. “I weaned myself off Mum long ago.” ’
‘Not much of a story!’ Rebecca scoffed. ‘Who’s the mummy’s boy? It’s you isn’t it!’
Rebecca was giving him that snear more and more recently. Nineteen years of age, pretty as a supermarket punnet of peaches, and yet her face was smeared with the war paint of ugliness. She’s developing a nasty feeling for me, spitting venom on my weak points, he thought.
‘Oedipal Bren’s my father, actually.’ Rebecca was too dumb to get the story. His initial take on her face had been right. She’d the imagination of a pair of dumping buttocks.
‘So what’s your missing piece, lover boy?’
He surveyed Rebecca the way a carpenter might study a rusty screw. ‘You. As of now.’
He got up and walked away, not looking back at the park bench. Rachel was the surplus piece the manufacturer had unnecessarily put in his box; the unwanted extra. He was complete now, surely?
