There are bound to be more questions coming my way and, sure enough, one arrives almost immediately.
“What happened to bring it on?”
I groan with the agony and whisper, “I noticed you were a woman instead of just my mum.” I’m not looking directly at her but still see her wince from the corner of my eye.
I can also see her shaking her head. “Oh Jesus,” she mutters.
“I’m sorry,” I mumble.
“If I can ask…?”
She pauses and I look at her face, but my mother isn’t looking at me. Her eyes are angled down at the floor, her profile troubled. I see her internal struggle, lips moving as she mutters something I can’t make out.
Then, after gathering her resolve, she turns her head and her eyes confront mine.
“If I can ask,” she repeats. “Just what was it exactly?”
It’s an excruciating sixty seconds or so, but I explain about the tanlines, stuttering and hesitating as I endure the telling.
I finish and she starts to ask, “And do you…?” There’s another pause before my mother finishes with, “Well, you know…”
The hand gesture confirms what I’m thinking. The closed fist and jerking action leave me in no doubt.
I’m humiliated she’s asked and don’t want to admit to fantasising over my mother, especially not to her face.
“Do what?” I ask, incredulous. I’m stalling while struggling to come up with a way out of this hideous confrontation. I’d get up and leave, but I’m nude under the sheet.
“Touch yourself, Sean. That’s what I mean.”
I can hear her exasperation, but we’re in territory I’m not prepared to venture into so I gasp, “Mum, please … Jesus!” My eyes flick back to her face and then quickly move on to a point on the wall over her shoulder.
Meanwhile, her gaze is relentless.
She surprises me by laughing and saying, “It’s perfectly normal. Everyone does it. Even I I do it too,” my mother informs me.
I groan and close my eyes and turn away to roll onto my side. It’s more than I can take.
But Mum isn’t having any of I, she’s determined, voice stern when she pokes me in the back with her elbow. “Oi, no, Sean, no curling up to hide, she tells me. “This is part of the problem. We don’t talk about things enough. We’re embarrassed by sex. You never used to be bothered by seeing me nude. It’s just sex makes it awkward.”
“You’re my mother,” I say. “There are some things we shouldn’t talk about.”
I sense her shrug as she says, “Why not? It’s just us. There’s nobody else to get in the way. Maybe we should talk about it all freely. Who knows,” adds my mother, “it might make you feel better.”
I lie there and hope she’ll just go away.
She won’t, of course, but I still hope.
She plays me with silence. My mother lets me lie there, her weight on the bed a signal she’s prepared to wait as long as it takes.
Damn, she’s so stubborn!
The pressure inside me cranks up as I try to prove I’m as capable of holding out as she is.
But, in the end, with great reluctance and a heavy sigh I have to concede. I decide to save myself the torment. Better a quick bullet than suffer the torture.
“All right,” I breathe, rolling over. “Let’s talk about it. Let’s get it over with and then you get out of my room and leave me alone.”