“Love me, love my kids.”
That was my mother’s insistence when she was dating in London in the nineties.
I look at what I was like and feel sorry. I was a jealous son, protecting the memory of my dad. Nobody would be better than the unit I had always known.
She divorced dad because it wasn’t working but also because she had an idea of freedom that she had never lived. She married him still a teenager in the summer of love. What sort of life did she miss?
She got the men to treat us as well when we were around. “I come with two children.” That’s a lot to bite off, but she insisted that it helped sort the wheat from the chaff. So often I was there on “dates”. These men… I gave them such a hard time. They were looking at mum. That was hard enough: brittle and forthright, beautiful and kind, easily put off, totally aligned with her own value. Then they had to get in with these two precocious neurodivergent children.
You’re on a date and they’ve brought two kids. One of the kids is watching you, deliberately challenging your bullshit, naïve and gauche but thinks he’s clever, protective of a mother he has habitually had to pull out of deep sadness. The other is mostly uninterested in you but for how you fit into the system that makes up the world, observing and interacting with you with a scientific eye, examining your behaviours generally and responding to your suggestions based on his assessment of your value in a grand scheme. Where do you take them before they suck your soul out?
It’s a miracle any of them stuck with dating her, but mum? She was worth it.
I went to Wimbledon Centre Court for the Becker vs Edberg with one guy. Many of them took us to all sorts of events or walks or experiences. And one of them took us to Bibendum. He was a (perhaps celebrated) cartoonist, about twice mum’s age but charming and louche and I liked him as I found him unusually honest. He wasn’t pretending. I like that in life. He also took the brief from mum and gave me some attention. “Draw me when I’m fifty,” I requested when he said he would do me a sketch. He drew a monocled rogue grinning with a moustache and pinstripe jacket largely bald but with some sticky up hair, catching my nose and my twinkle with a few lines of biro, evidently in the same seat at Bibendum with cigar and red wine, mid conversational flow. “Alexander at 50” dashed off above it, and he signed it. I had it on the wall in my room at school for a year or so.
Mum never saw him again with me but he won my vote by avoiding safety. I lost the picture, but I wonder who he was. I think he was with a newspaper.
I haven’t been back to Bibendum since.
Alexander is close to fifty now. Still no monocle, and he quit smoking. This evening was the first time he went back to Bibendum since he was fifth wheel when an artist dated his mum. I went with Justin.
Justin and I haven’t hung out for years but we are old friends. These days I find it easier and easier to forget the passage of time. It didn’t feel strange to go and eat at Bibendum together even though we haven’t seen each other properly for decades. He’s got kids now so I know that these things are harder for him. I figured a sexy restaurant made more sense than Pizza Express. He was on board. We both have expensive tastes.
It was lovely to see him. We didn’t sit inside so I didn’t quite lay the ghost of the mum-artist-date thing. Mum rarely seriously dated artists. Too unpredictable. In retrospect it is no surprise I approved of him.
We sat, Justin and I this evening, and we both saw how we have peace in our various crafts. He is a writer. I am mister pretendyface. Both of us are happy and have carved out… something.
We mostly talked about life and family. We covered a lot of ground. He’s a good man and it is great to see that there’s still a friend there. Time is an illusion. This evening we were both sixteen again, but without the bullshit that goes with being sixteen.
AlBarclay 