Robert and the Breasts of Doom

Robin hated it when his mother asked him if he was ready for church. There, under the hard strip lighting, all neat and combed, he couldn’t see his own reflection clearly. All he could see was that time he’d looked at Tommy’s algebra answers, the smell he was sure never left the palm of his hand and the general sense that he was a terrible person and that some day they’d find out, some day they’d know, which made it impossible for him to be objective about how he looked. His mother had no time for his uncertainties. You were or you weren’t, she said. Just like you were or weren’t a good Christian, she added. Robin knew what she meant. Every Sunday his mother pursed her lips and her coat as their car passed the Donaldson’s house. They were Heathens. They didn’t go to Church. From his seat in the back, on the right, Robin could see how his mother’s knuckles went white as if she wanted to give the Donaldsons what-for. She must never know, he thought, as his stomach turned at the exact same time as it always did.

Robin had a secret and his secret was under the mattress in his room. On Mondays his mother put the wash on so he had to be careful and move it to the bottom of the old toybox, but then on a Tuesday it would need moving back to the mattress, just in case she was tidying up and found it. Mickey from up the road had given it to him and he had never asked for it back. No way was Robin going to bring it up. Breasts. Page upon page of breasts, sometimes with a smiling face attached and sometimes just there, filling the entire spread in all their breasty glory. The magazine was so wonderful that the first week, he walked the streets in a daze, sizing up the many varieties of bosom and rushing home to discover what they looked like unclothed. Even those that were saggy or misshapen in beige jumpers and mackintoshes, those that you wouldn’t want to see fully exposed (and these were few and far between) merited a furtive glance. On the morning journey to school, Robin’s mood for the day could be determined by how close he could manage to sit to Susan from the year above. She was well-endowed, as his father might euphemistically put it, and as the bus juddered to a halt every few minutes, so did her chest. Turnings in the road sent them veering to the right or left and when they picked up speed, they seemed to bounce in time with his heart. Then back that evening, he would skip through the rest of the magazine like a connoisseur and head straight for page twenty-one. His favourites. Susan’s, he thought, would be just like these. Almost perfectly round and smooth, it was almost a marvel that they could belong to the human body that he knew to be flawed, and hairy, and weird. The boys came to regard him as something of an expert on breasts and, when questioned, when asked what they were like, he replied with an air of gravity, that they were blobby.
‘Blobby? What the heck do you mean?’ the kid from up the road asked.
‘Just that. They’re blobby. All of them. They can be big or small or round or long but they’re all blobby’
The boys returned to their mother’s kitchens, mystified and pale.

But the weekly guilt became too much. Robin knew it was wrong and, besides, although his favourite breasts remained firm, despite the repeated fingering the page had seen, the magazine was beginning to get a little tatty. The question of how to dispose of it puzzled him for weeks and, when he finally solved it, it made him wonder why simple algebra was so out of his mental reach. Several options could be rejected straight away. The neighbourhood cats frequently fought and upturned the bins in the yard so that was out just in case his mother came to hang up clothes on the line and was confronted with sheet upon sheet of glorious pink skin. Taking the full magazine out in one go was impossible, with the way his mother made them sometimes turn their pockets out. So he smuggled it out, page by page, and dumped it a good ten minutes’ walk from school. He used a different bin each time and delved down, tearing and screwing up the shiny paper as much as he could, just so that no-one would ever see. Some bits he burnt. It took weeks but soon the familiar bulge that he felt under his back as he lay flat on the bed was no more. Apart from one small half-page. The best breasts. Robin couldn’t let them go so he kept them, folded in half, tucked inside the Bible in his bedside table. Like one of Superman’s lumps of kryptonite, he felt their invisible glow whenever he entered the room.

Then his grandma Morris came to stay. His dad put up the camp bed in the living room, grumbling as always, and then sloped off down the pub. Robin was upstairs doing his homework when he heard her arrive. Now that he was almost a teenager, he felt able to have the mood swings his brother had been claiming for several years and so he remained in his room. Robin was ashamed to admit that he had once regarded visits from Granma as a treat. He began humming loudly to himself so that he might have an excuse but even they could not block out the slow and deliberate tread on the stair. His mother lurched into the room with a heavy flowery suitcase which she dropped, with a thud, next to his bed.
‘Did you not hear your Granma arrive?’ she asked.
His mum was a small woman but she pretended she could lift anything. When he was a kid, it fooled him but now he could spot the way she had to stop and have a rest and control her breathing afterwards.
‘No. Doing my homework, wasn’t I? Why are her cases in here?’
‘She’s staying here silly! You’re going downstairs’
The breasts glowed in resentment.
‘But… she can’t! I’ve got homework. Why? She always goes in the living room’
Robin’s voice, still right on the cusp of turning, wailed like a girl’s and his Granma shouted up the stairs in frailer tones than those he remembered.
‘Does he not want me there, Mary?’
‘It’s fine, Mum’ she shouted back down and turned to him, using the tight and angry whisper she used when she wanted to appear competent in front of the neighbours and her own family
‘You’ll go downstairs. Her back’s bad at the moment. We can’t put her down there. She’ll be in here and I want no argument, do you hear?’
As soon as she swept out Robin began to panic. His Granma and his mother would be in his room very shortly, and there were the breasts. He fumbled with the Bible and then the page slipped open and they lay shamefully in front of him. The women were just downstairs. He made for the bathroom but he could see from his door that it was locked. It would be another of his sister’s epic baths. His trousers had no pockets. Everything was in the wash. He could hear them on the stairs. He could tear the page up and eat them but, as he glanced at their peachy perfection, he knew he could never do that. The women reached the landing and, with the last ditch effort of the Olympic hopeful, he threw the breasts out of his bedroom window as hard as he could. Time seemed to stand still. Nothing to see. And then he saw them. Above his head. Of course, he thought, paper is light. I should have wrapped them around a stone. It was a windless day and the breast spun indolently and floated down, slow as you like, as his mother and Granma came in.
‘Hello, dear. Come and give me a kiss’ his grandmother said, smiling.
He didn’t move. Where were the breasts? What if a neighbour found them? His mother pursed her lips again. She’d be having words with him later.
‘Come on, Robin, don’t be difficult. I don’t know what’s got into him today; you know’
He came over reluctantly and submitted to a kiss. Later, when they were having tea, he risked another stern look by excusing himself to sneak outside and check where they were. The yard was empty grey concrete. He could find nothing. He searched every inch and then went upstairs for an aerial view. Feeling more confident by the minute, Robin scoured the view of the yards in their area and decided that they had flown away. There was some wind today, after all. And then he saw them. They had landed on the top of the porch and lay there, just a few inches out of his reach but close enough to make them alarmingly vivid, the coy pink contrasting strongly with the pigeon-shit-stained-shelf.

Initially, he felt that optimism that comes with a new project. Granma’s sight was bad so Robin didn’t worry so much about her. He told her he was bird-watching. And his mother thought it was nice of him to spend so much time with his sick grandmother. But despite his every effort the breasts remained out of reach, untouchable by stick, catapult, rod or any other method. The morning after she left it was suddenly winter and raining heavily. On waking, he ran straight to the window, hoping they’d been washed away but they were just stuck down more heavily, the glossy paper contrasting strongly with the dead sky and broken street lights. Each Sunday the sermon seemed to be about Sin. His Dad decided to paint the bedrooms and Robin spent a whole weekend sat on the windowsill guarding the view out.
‘Give us a hand, will you?’ his dad would ask and Robin solemnly shook his head, even though his arse was killing and the smell of paint was making him feel sick. He tried to use some to cover up the picture but kept missing. After a week, it became part of his everyday routine: trying to cover up the breasts, and worrying that they might be found. Sometimes happy days would pass and then he would remember the breasts and fall on his bed in despair, every type of weather came and went and still they stood strong, and he couldn’t enjoy the fleshier magazines that were doing the rounds for fear that the same thing might happen again, and then he tried to camouflage them by dropping mashed potatoes and ketchup over them, but his mother found the food in the yard and gave him a right talking to, and the weight of the ketchup acted as an anchor and just emphasised the main picture, and it ruined every time he looked out of the window, and so it went on, until everything, everything was breasts and nothing else. It put him off girls for good.

SDW