A mother's love

Chapter 18

Just as there were things Brian didn't know about Brenda there were things Brenda didn't know about Brian. At school he was still being called welfare boy. They did so seldom and discreetly but the name had very much stuck. For the remainder of his school days Brian would be welfare boy. He also didn't tell her about the confrontation he'd had with his mother that had ended with her lying on the floor bleeding.

The morning after she had discovered his room deserted she confronted him angrily demanding answers from him as to why he hadn't been at home at 11 p.m. Groggy from having only gotten three hours of sleep, Brian chose to ignore his mother and reacted in no way to any of the invectives she slung at him from behind his back while he was in the kitchen preparing his school lunch and his morning coffee ready. Reena didn't get as much as a cursory glance over the shoulder from him. Furious with his indifference to her, Reena stomped into the kitchen and stood next to him facing him, refusing to tolerate being ignored by him.

"Are you really not going to say anything?! You go out late at night without telling me where you're going and you have the nerve not to answer me when I'm talking to you! Don't forget that this is my house! You are living under my roof! You owe me the respect of telling me why you weren't at home last night!"

Brian was unperturbed in the face of her apoplexy, and his indifference served only to inflame her. She grabbed a glass out of the sink and threw it down to the floor, shattering it. Brian stopped what he was doing, turned to his left, looked at his mother directly for the first time and saw that he had underestimated the depth of her rage. She had worked herself up into a manic state that he knew from experience it was pointless to try to extricate her from. He stood silent and motionless and watched as she grabbed another glass out of the sink and threw it to the ground at her feet, and listened as she projected verbal abuse into his face from close range.

"Do you think I'm just going to let you ignore me like this?!"

Another glass was hurled to the floor.

"I am your mother! You cannot treat me this way! You cannot treat me like I'm nothing!"

A mug this time was hurled to the floor.

"I am not nothing! I am not someone that you can treat like I'm shit!"

She threw another glass to the floor, stared at him for a few seconds with dilated and trembling eyes and turned away from him to leave. With her first step she slipped on the soapy water she had dropped on the floor every time she had removed a glass or a mug from the sink and fell onto all the shards they had shattered into. Witnessing the sight of her falling onto all of those sharp shards of glass and hearing the cry of excruciating pain that she emitted, Brian was shocked into paralysis. The helplessness of his mother, epitomised by the image of her lying on the floor bleeding from self-inflicted injuries, worsened his paralysis. Looking at her lying on the floor, crying and in pain, Brian felt suffocated, the bars of the prison in which he was kept by his mother's helplessness looked inescapably thick.

When he went to help his mother he didn't spring into action, the position that she was in required the utmost delicacy. He pushed the shards that weren't underneath her away to a safe distance with his feet, stooped down over her, slipped his arms under hers and lifted her up to her feet. There were still glass shards all over the kitchen floor that he hadn't cleared away; to protect her bare feet from them Brian lifted her up into his arms and carried her out of the kitchen and into the living room, where he set her down gently on the sofa. While in his arms she clung to him, and once on the sofa she cried tears of fear and despair, exacerbating his image of her as his lifelong dependant.