‘Intergenerational’ SHORT FICTION CONTEST RUNNER-UP

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Intergenerational

It was around 2pm when we arrived, the roadworks puncturing the main road like great gouged wounds and sending us down the winding country lanes instead. “Lunchtime,” she’d said, which generally meant 12.30-1.00pm. We braced ourselves for the silence – no confrontation, never words – and almost in preparation, neither of us spoke during the final few minutes of the drive.

“I can still see your lipstick,” said Mum, glancing sidelong at me as we turned up the long driveway and the house came slowly, solemnly, into sight. “There’s wipes in the glove compartment.”

Women shouldn’t wear makeup. It’s ungodly.

Amy had bought me that lipstick. “Lover’s Kiss”, the shade was called. I, naïve and grateful, gave her my copy of Little Women in exchange, and she had to spell it out for me two weeks later as we settled on the stained sofa in her halls’ common room: “I like you, you idiot. Like like you.”

I wiped it wordlessly, the pale pink somehow more violent than blood as it smeared across the material, the scent of chemical cheapness filling the car.

“Better?”

“Better.”

God-fearing men don’t like women who wear makeup.

What about if women don’t wear it for men? What about other women?

When I was eight, I’d wandered into Mum’s bedroom and rummaged through her makeup bag.

Everyone else’s mothers wore it in abundance – the school gates were a safari of colour, birds of paradise laughing and fluffing and preening. My mum looked like a sepia photograph out of time. Even her makeup bag, when I found it at the bottom of her dressing table one afternoon (having crept stealthily, and with an enormous sense of my own narrative importance, into her bedroom) was greying.

I opened the zipper with my clumsy child hands, sticky with the sugared contents of a juice box, and silently monologued my adventure like I was the precocious heroine of some kid-friendly American movie, all dimples and Girl Scout cookies. I had eczema and hayfever and a burgeoning case of lactose intolerance; Mickey Mouse club I was not.

Similarly disappointing were the contents of the bag. It didn’t contain much at all – moisturisers and Tampax, mainly – and certainly held no glimmering, colourful secrets, nothing to suggest she secretly glammed up in front of the mirror when I was asleep. I was disappointed; I not only had a drab mum, but she didn’t even mind being drab.

Peeved and disheartened, I rummaged dispiritedly through a layer of old tissues and flicked an empty Nivea tube aside, and at the crinkly off-white bottom of the bag, found a photograph facing up at me. Big Eighties hair and double denim, and the unmistakeable stain of scarlet across smiling mouths – this couldn’t be Mummy, I thought, and I took it down to her, clasped in my clammy little hands.

“That’s not for you,” she said, and snatched it from me. She thrust a damp flannel at my face and scrubbed with a frenzied vigour at the citrus stickiness around my own lips as if it would somehow wipe the war paint from hers. I tasted sour milk and mouldy cotton fibres for hours afterwards.

We never spoke of the faded lipstick kiss on the back of the Polaroid.

We crunched up the driveway in unison, a show of military precision and political unity, Mum and me, me and Mum, the way it had always been, two gawky women with our grey eyes and straight brown hair, wrapped in our muted autumnal-hued jackets even as spring sighed and flickered and coquettishly unfurled all around us. The immaculate windows with their fresh flowers and the flurry of twittering activity at the bird table in the back garden all spoke of a cosy little house where any little girl would be lucky to have her childhood.

The door opened.

“Hello,” said Grandma, and we hugged. She was frail but steely – the grey eyes seemed to pass down the maternal line, and it felt like looking back – and forward – at myself every time we met, an Unheimlich in a pleated skirt. “How are you?”

I’m happier than I’ve ever been, Grandma. I met this girl at uni – Amy, she’s called – and we get on so well, it’s like I’ve been looking for her my whole life. She’s got green eyes, Grandma, like Grandad had, and she’s from Cornwall, like Great-Grandma, and she laughs like Mum does with that laugh that sounds like a crackle, a lovely little fireside crackle in winter.

“I’m fine, how are you?”

“Yes, fine, thank you. Hazel?”

“Yes, I’m fine too.”

Round one of conversation exhausted, she took our jackets and hung them on the hallway hooks with painful care and attention – like it mattered, like any of it mattered – and the three of us moved as one, wordlessly, to the kitchen.

The table was laid; gingham tablecloth that had seen better days but retained a quiet, pitiful pride in its shabby cleanliness. She was a woman of precision, and the salad, retrieved from her ancient fridge-freezer in time for a prompt 12.30 lunch, was wilting in much the same way as my silent resolve.

She poured tea that had cooled into cups that didn’t match the saucers. I thanked her and took a sip, and wished for sugars, sweeteners, even a splash of honey would have helped. Anything.

“Can I use your bathroom, Grandma?”

It always sounded so silly when I said it aloud – what are you, three? – but she wasn’t the sort of woman whose bathroom you just used without asking. She quavered a little before she answered, a kind of quiet wheeze escaping thin lips.

“The flush is broken in the family bathroom,” she said. There hadn’t been family there for years. The three spare bedrooms gathered dust, and I bit my tongue every time I thought of the refugees or homeless people she could have housed, if only she practiced the kind of religion she preached. “You will have to use mine, just off my bedroom.”

I’d never been in there before. The wallpaper, baby pink but yellowing at the edges, guided me on a geometric journey up the stairs and through her perfectly neat bedroom, the king size bed with its ruffle-edged satiny eiderdown a magnificent relic of days gone by. The side on which she slept looked no different to the side where Grandad had slumbered until ten years ago, the fabric unrumpled and the pillows artificially plumped. It was as if heterosexuality – sexuality of any sort – had never lived here.

The bathroom was pink too, pink and white like the marshmallow filling of the wafer biscuits at my childhood birthday parties, pink like the dresses of the Barbies she begrudgingly bought me – I conducted weddings between them in secret long before it was legal. I sat on the toilet with my skirt hitched up and pissed out a whole car journey’s worth of Fruit Shoot.

She had a dressing table just by the door to her ensuite, and as I left, closing the door behind me, I accidentally knocked a talcum powder pot onto the floor, sending it rolling beneath the chair.

Retrieving it, my sleeve caught on the handle of the lowest drawer, and it slid open with surprising ease. I looked in, of course I did – and she looked back.

There she was, my past and future self, my mother once removed, grey eyed and grey skinned in the monochrome of the Fifties. The high-waisted checked skirt suited her – I imagined it even had some colour – and the smile on her face as she hung adoringly on the arm of a bespectacled girl with ringlets had a strange sheen to it – an almost painted, glossy quality.

What about women who wear makeup for other women? What about women who wear it for themselves?

It was cold to the touch, and I flipped it over, half hoping for the perfect synchronicity of a faded lipstick kiss adorning the back of the image. There was nothing, just Grandma’s initials and those of a G.H alongside them. I wondered what had happened to G.H, who she was, what she’d said to Grandma to make that smile shine so bright.

Had they painted each other’s faces, swapped lipsticks in secret, laughed like crackling fires at private jokes the world could never steal?

Perhaps not. I always was a sucker for a sentimental story.

I replaced it and closed the drawer, then the door behind me, retreating down those rickety, faded old stairs. They were still in the kitchen, stilted meteorological small talk just about audible from the staircase. I reached into my pocket and pulled out Lover’s Kiss, applying it blindly without a mirror. I didn’t need a mirror. I didn’t need to see my reflection when two of them sat waiting for me, cowed and colourless, behind that wooden door.

“Hi Grandma,” I said, taking my seat at the gingham-draped table. “I want to tell you about my friend Amy.”

Chloe de Lullington (she/her) is an author and screenwriter based in Manchester, UK. Her debut novel, Cacoethes, a queer satirical sugar baby comedy, will be published with Northodox Press in June 2025, and she has had short fiction and poetry published in The Word's Faire, Bullshit Lit, Powders Press, and For Page & Screen Magazine. A lifelong outsider looking curiously in, she is drawn to the offbeat and eccentric, and the minutiae of peoples' lives that might mean everything - or could mean absolutely nothing at all.