Nativity

"Morning Mrs. M!" I called out as I was crossing the street. Terry's mum looked up, she'd been pushing her wheeled shopping basket up on to the curb, and waved. I hurried over, nearly slipping on a patch of ice, then nearly tripping over a paving stone that the days of freezing and thawing had lifted. "Need a hand, Mrs. M?" I said, skidding to a halt.
"Oh thank-you dear, you can push the trolley. We're just waiting for Terry, now."
"Oh, is he with you?" I had mixed feelings about seeing Terry again; shortly after the exchange student had left he'd asked me if I liked manacles, and I really hadn't liked the suggestive tone the conversation had taken.
"He will be shortly dear, he's just picking some things up for the church."
That startled me a little, neither Terry nor his mum were particularly religious as far as I knew.
"Oh, are you helping out this year then?" I tried for diplomatically neutral, but even to my ears I sounded nosey. Terry's mum kindly answered anyway.
"Well, it wasn't my idea," she said, pointing to the bench at the bus-stop and indicating that she intended to sit down. "Agnes down at the WI has been mithering me for weeks now to do something to give back to the community. I've told her, over and over again, that I do plenty for the community but that it goes unnoticed."
I wasn't sure that bombing crack-dens and forcing talk-radio presenters into nervous breakdowns actually went unnoticed for all they gave back to the community, but I wasn't about to interrupt Terry's mum when she was explaining.
"So when she brought the new vicar in to pester me as well, I felt I'd better step up and do my bit."
She smiled at me, doing her twinkly-white-haired-old-granny-how-lovable routine and not fooling me for an instant. The new vicar probably hadn't had anyone warn him what a bad idea it was to involve Terry's mum with projects, and wouldn't have heard about her relic-collecting trip to Italy that's still causing international incidents every three or four months.
"So what are you helping out with then?" I said, looking around for Terry.
"The nativity scene in front of the church."
I saw Terry. Walking quite quickly, looking very nervous, holding a baby. He checked the road and hurried across, spotting us at the bus-stop. He looked relieved to see his mother, and turned white a sheet when he saw me. He kept on coming though.
"Mum," he said, holding the baby out like it was red-hot.
"Put it in the trolley, dear," said Terry's mum. "Did you get the right gender this time?"
"This time?" I couldn't help myself, the words just escaped from my lips.
"Oh yes, the last two he's picked up have both been girls. Fancy, as if baby Jesus was a girl! I told him, if he gets it wrong this time I'll take him down to the maternity ward and make him pick one out from there instead."
"Mrs. M, isn't this... isn't this, well, kidnapping?"
"No." She stood up and started pushing the trolley away. "Kidnapping would require me sending a ransom note, or never returning the child. I'm just borrowing it, for Christmas, and starring it in a nativity scene. If anything, this is just movie-making."
Terry tugged my arm, so that he and I fell slightly behind his mother.
"She's had me steal reindeers from the zoo, too," he whispered. "And there's three confused old men from the local shelter in the living room."
"Terry, you can't let her steal babies!" I was trying to whisper, but I was getting worked up. He shushed me.
"She isn't really. The baby'll go into the nativity scene this evening, just before the carol service, and then I've got to tip the police off. It'll be back with it's parents before the end of the day, and the new vicar will be doing all the explaining."
I stared, first at Terry, then at his mother.
"Your mother's a wonderful woman," I said heavily. "I'm sure there's a good reason for everything she does, and I'm so glad it rarely involves me."

Talk radio

I let myself in through the kitchen door of Terry's house, intending to make the coffee myself before he could offer to microwave me some and found him sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands, looking almost asleep. Seizing the opportunity, I checked the water level in the white electric jug kettle and flicked the switch to turn it on before saying hello.

"You look knackered, dude," I said. "Is your mum keeping you on your toes?"
Terry's mum, Mrs. M to me, had bruised her hip during a riot at the post-office a few days ago and had been advised to stay in bed for a few days by her doctor. Much to the surprise of us all, she'd been doing so as well.

"Mum's not too bad," said Terry, his eyes barely opening any wider. "I'll have a cup if you're making it. But between her and the exchange student and the job I don't seem to get much time for anything else anymore."

The kettle boiled quickly, and I pulled two cups from the dishwasher and looked for the jar of coffee.

"Is the student still in the manacles?" I said carefully. Terry's mum had taken in a Polish exchange student a few weeks ago in order, she'd said, to augment her pension a little. I had been a little surprised to find out that that was why Terry had been installing manacles in the spare room, and then felt I'd been told too much when I learned that the student was mostly kept chained up and in a gimp mask while he was in the house. Apparantly this was part of the arrangement.

"Yes, well, he likes it, doesn't he." said Terry, and there was something furtive about the way he said it that made me realise that the student wasn't the only one who liked it. I decided it was better to be ignorant and content than aware and trying to wash my brain out with carbolic soap.

"So, what's your mum doing while she's confined to bed? Has she had a lot of visitors? I know she's popular down at the WI," I said. "Although it was a bit weird, where those crack dealers tried to land-mine the driveway and blew themselves up."

"She's phoning radio talk-shows," said Terry, and there was a new note of depression in his voice. "I had the social services round here two days ago, because they'd traced her number. She'd phoned up one of those radio agony aunts and convinced her that she was being held in the basement of a nursing home as a sex-slave for geriatrics."

I burst out laughing, and because I'd just picked the kettle up to pour the water, I splashed boiling water all over the counter-top. I looked for a dishcloth to mop up the spill.

"Of course," he continued, "I couldn't let them look round, because they'd have found the exchange student and they'd get the wrong idea, and mum's bedroom still has all the bones in from when she was in Italy, so in the end I slipped some of mum's Valium into their coffee and drove them out to the Copperfield estate and left them there. I'm not proud of that."

"Did any of them get out alive?" I was shocked, this kind of thinking was what I expected of Terry's mum, not Terry.

"They've not been back. But she keeps phoning the stations and winding them up."

"Worse than pretending to be an old-age sex slave?"

Terry sighed, and took the cup of coffee from me, and turned on the radio on the shelf behind him.

"...well, Joanne, I've been scared of open spaces for a long time now, and I've not been out of my little flat since November last year," said a familiar voice. I looked at Terry, and mouthed your mum! and he nodded back. "But then recently I'd started to feel a little bit confined. You know, when you're looking at the same walls all the time, you start to get itchy feet."

"Well yes," said the soft tones of the radio show's agony aunt. "So, have I got this straight? You've been agoraphobic for a while, and last November it got so bad that you no longer wanted to leave the flat?"

"I don't know about the agriculture thingy, but yes, that's right. Only now I'm not very comfortable staying in the flat."

"Well, how do you feel about going outside?" said the agony aunt. "Have you tried just opening your front door and looking at the outside from the safety of your hall?"

Suddenly we heard a banging sound on the radio, echoed from upstairs. I looked at Terry, and I could see tears in his eyes. He just shook his head, so I carried on listening.

"Oh there's someone at the door," said Terry's mum. "I hate the hall, it's so small, and I feel like the walls are closing in on me when I'm in there. Hang on while I see who's there."

There was a pause, and then she spoke again, sounding frightened. "Oh Joanne, there's men hammering nails into boards across my door!"

Terry reached up and turned the radio off again.

"She did this yesterday as well," he said. "She's going to tell that poor woman that she's being boarded in, and then a petrol bomb will come through the letter box, but she'll be too scared to leave the house, and too claustrophobic to hide anywhere in the house that might protect her. The one yesterday had a nervous breakdown on air.

I finished my coffee in one gulp and put the cup down on the counter top. "Your mother's a remarkable woman, Terry."