You would have thought, we all did, now the third point of the triangle had been rubbed out, that my mother would have taken up with the drain man without fear or guilt. No one would have blamed her, she was thirty-seven and still bony, wild and attractive. But when the tree went, so did her desire to be with the drain man. They were all part of the same structure. He belonged in the same equation as Dad, and when Dad was removed the sum fell apart.
My mother had used them both, in a strange way. Her relationship with the drain man allowed her to keep a part of herself in the land of the living. He was the balance, and Dad’s opposite, that was his attraction. He possessed everything my father did not. But when Dad left, the drain man had no counterpoint. He was just a man, a mortal. What had seemed like superhuman power before became very mundane. He was just alive, and, compared to being dead, it wasn’t that interesting.
I doubt if my mother was conscious of this; we certainly weren’t. It was only years later that I understood. She never talked about it, how they finished, but I remember the night. It was a few weeks after the storm and we assumed she was leaving a respectable gap between Dad and taking up permanently with the drain man. The phone rang, it was him, I could tell by the way she kicked her shoes off while she was talking to him and dragged the phone into her room like a teenager. She sat on the bed and entwined her legs while she pulled the telephone cord through her fingers.
The four of us were watching television, it was a Friday night, one of the last Edward spent with us. He had just shaved for the first time, not that he had a lot of reason to, but he was impatient to move on to the next phase of his life, the world of aftershave and girls. For him the answer to the last year was looking forward not back. I wish I could have done the same.
We all slumped knowing what the phone call meant: Mum was going to take up with the drain man and our lives would be over. Immediately we started arguing over a bottle of Coke and some bags of crisps. She got off the phone, said she was going out and went straight to the bathroom, yelling through the door at Edward for leaving such a mess and using her razor. Not long afterwards the drain man arrived. He sat on the sofa beside me while Mum was colouring her mouth in with red lipstick. I was so exhausted, I couldn’t move.
‘What’s on, guys?’ he said, not at all nervous. I thought we were within our rights to expect him to show some fear or anxiety at taking over from my father, but he didn’t. I thought, you cocky bastard, think you can just walk in here and take our mother away from us. I said nothing else, neither did he. Then nothing for fifteen minutes, we watched the television in silence. When the programme finished and there was still no sign of her, he went off to see what was wrong. That felt like pure antagonism, how did he get the right to go into the bathroom to see if our own mother was all right? Of course she wasn’t. She was on the floor clutching her lipstick. She couldn’t do it. They didn’t end up going anywhere. They sat on the floor in her room instead, drinking beer.
Her room was a building site, there was no verandah, no windows, but there were four walls and a roof and a mattress on the floor. The romantic aspect of the room didn’t escape us. There was no electricity in there, so they lit a candle and burnt it on to a plate. We waited up, assuming this was my mother’s last episode of regret and remorse before they actually spent the night together in our house. We had accepted the inevitability of it, we all wondered how long it would be until we were forced to meet his children at some hideous suburban beer garden.
Then an odd thing happened, he left. There were no dramatics from my mother, she wasn’t yelling after him and throwing bottles. There was shuffling at the front door as she maybe kissed him before he left. But I’d learnt the sounds of a long passionate kiss and a short perfunctory peck, and this was the latter.
I was lying in my bed running for joy, my legs cycling through the covers. He’s dumped her, I thought. Gone back to his wife. They always do, according to my mother. But it wasn’t the case, my mother had called it off.
We couldn’t believe the attraction between them had just died. They had a look about them when they were together, they were meant to be. We had prepared ourselves for a stepfather. Then when it didn’t happen, when she called it off, we couldn’t believe our luck. We kept thinking the next weekend he would show up, then the next weekend, that maybe she would change her mind and call him, but she didn’t. In the months to come, I shocked myself, I changed my mind, I prayed he would come around again because my mother was as miserable as sin.
But we eventually realized he wasn’t coming back. With the death of the tree had come the death of my mother’s feelings for the drain man. The silence seemed to fall on her and I hated seeing such a passionate woman frozen in her stride. Sometimes it would fire out of her and she would be mad and crazy and yell at us and dress in purple for a week, but a lot of the time she was just normal, life’s most hideous crime.
That was the end of that era. Life wasn’t always full of grief, sometimes we forgot Dad for ages, occasionally then we were torn apart by the memory of him, then it would go away and in time return sporadically, just like an old friend.