W
e sit on the
settee, his pyjamas
covered in crumbs;
Spiderman obscured
by something sticky.
Jam, maybe. We’re watching TV,
lounging together. The jam, if that’s
what it is, is on his hands too, clinging
in patches on his palm and the backs
of his knuckles, catching on the skin
of my own hand, in which his smaller
one nestles, hot and alive.
Sunday morning.
He should probably be doing
something else. Something creative,
instead of staring at the telly. He
should be outside in the mud,
poking sticks in the dirt; picking
gravel out of his father’s tyres, his
boy’s mind meandering. But here we
are full of buttered toast watching
last night’s X Factor; watching two‘What’s an auditions?’ He twists
his hand out of mine and looks up
at me. I can see dark flecks of blue
in the lighter ocean of his eyes.
‘An audition is where someone
sings for the judges and the judges
decide if they’re good enough to be
in the competition.’
‘Oh.’ He turns back to the
television, relaxing against me. His
hand finds mine.
His fingernails, his hands.
The smell of his head; sweat and
pheromones, a deep dusty smell
made from a billion cells held
together by who knows what;
created from somewhere, some act
of love, a smell that fills me up and
makes me feel more like a mother
than a hundred school pick-ups,
a million t-shirts ironed and put
away. Motherhood is this smell;
connecting something deep inside
me back to myself, to origins. I want
to hold him to me forever.
I know I can’t.
His sister – my eldest – is curled
up in the chair beside us, reading.
My little bookworm. Their father is
upstairs, it being his turn for a lie-
in. We’re good at that, sometimes.
We take care of each other in these
small ways. Even though we fight
over cutlery in the sink and time
spent in the bathroom and lack of
desire and how long are you going
to be on the phoneto be on the phone and and when are
you going to fill the hole in that wall
and is this even working anymore?
But today he is lying-in, dreaming,
maybe of being somewhere else
not quite so noisy, not quite so
demanding-consuming-draining.
But my baby’s hand is still in mine
and I can feel his sweat cooling on my
palm, where the creases mirror his.
On the screen there’s an emotional
backstory playing out. The brothers
have had it rough: busking the
streets, neglect and loss and death
already behind them, packed tightly
into their short lives and then into
ten minutes of television. I know
what the producers are doing. I
shrug inside.
‘What do you think, baby?’, I say
to him, ‘Do you think the judges
will like them?’
‘I don’t know’ he says. A new
tightness has crept into his voice.
‘Are they going to win Mum?’ Heby Amanda Marples
CREATIVE
NON-FICTIONCOMPETITION
1st place
£200
Empathy
32 NOVEMBER 2019 http://www.writers-online.co.ukboys – brothers – singing with
acoustic guitars and rapping.
Badly, I think.
I can never anticipate what might
interest him, this boy of mine. I
look down at our tangled fingers.
His nails need cutting. They are
dirty, and he really ought to have a
bath, get that baby smell back that
I love so much. But I love his real
smell, even without the talc and the
no-tearsno-tears shampoo. The smell of his shampoo. The smell of his
head in the morning, it lasts until
lunchtime. I tilt my head down,
feel his hair on my lips, breathe
him in. He lays his head on my
chest a moment, two moments, in
semiconscious response.
‘Love you, little boy.’
‘Love you too. Are they winning
Mum?’
‘No. This is just the auditions.’