Sex stories, incest, mom and son, Son takes mum’s old bike out of storage… My mountain bike was upside down and in pieces round the back of the house and I was bent over it, my arms streaked with oil, making some odd adjustment or other when my mum breezed past me. I closed my eyes and waited for that delicious scent which I knew would inevitably follow in her wake, and…mmm, there it was. Don’t ask me to name it, you don’t give names to things which defy description. She held a basket of washing to her hip before putting it down onto the grass to prepare it for hanging.
“Mum, we’ve got this thing called a spin dryer for that. Why are you giving yourself more work?”
“Eddie, if you’d look up from that (I know she wanted to say ‘bloody’…) bike of yours, you’ll see what a glorious day it is. Believe me, there’s nothing more satisfying than the smell of fresh washing drying out in the sun.”
I smiled and thought back onto that scent I’d just experienced as she’d passed by, but thought it wiser not to mention it.
“D’you need some help?”
“What?!? Look at you, you’re filthy, I’d have to start all over again!”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. I’ll be out of your hair in a bit though, I’m going to take the bike for a spin later and make sure there’ll be no last problems.”
That’s what I was doing. Myself and a couple of mates, we’d decided we wanted to do an epic bike ride after Uni. The original plan had obviously been to get into the Guinness Book of Records by trying something like biking the whole length of the American coastline, North AND South, but had rapidly adjusted our plans to a leisurely tour of Europe. We were all enthousiastic, but we knew we weren’t athletes. So to prepare, we thought we’d do Wales over two or three days during the next week.
Mum was standing there in a dream.
She said, “You remember when your dad and I used to take the gang of you kids out on the train with our bikes to Hayfield and we’d ride around in the countryside and have a picnic and all the sheep would decide they wanted to share in the sandwiches as well?”
She was giggling, my mum, just like a little girl.
Of course I remembered it. My dad had taken photos of mum, in her sleeveless thin summer dress, trying to shoo away the sheep by wafting the bottom of her dress at them. We and the sheep thought this was kind of hilarious so she’d decided to up the ante and chase after them, only to come a cropper by tripping over a branch. Dad, in his infinite wisdom, had decided to preserve the moment for posterity by taking another picture before rushing over to help her up. What a picture. He couldn’t have taken a better one if he’d posed her a thousand times over. The look of surprise in her eyes, her hand raised to push back the hair that had come loose over her face, the dress up around her thighs, showing just a glimpse of the white panties we knew she was wearing anyway (that summer dress had been very thin…) and that gorgeous expanse of leg….. I knew the picture by heart, and if for some reason I’d want reminding, I could always look at it again because after dad had died and mum and I had spent an evening going through heaps of old pics and feeling sentimental, we’d come across it.