Guilty One (41 page)

By the time Daniel reached the farm, he was out of breath. His hands were relaxed and heavy but he felt his fingers tremble. Sweat beaded at his hairline and he ran a hand through his hair, wiped his palm on his T-shirt and hooked his forefingers into his back pocket. He stood on the crest of the hill, watching the house until his breathing returned to normal. The stillness of the day was disarming. He walked up to the front door.

He turned the handle and the door yielded with a short creak. Blitz was getting older and no longer ran to greet guests, but Daniel
could hear the dog’s nails on the linoleum as he stepped into the hall.

The dog turned his head with ears raised, then came to him, head down and tail wagging. Daniel did not kneel to pet the dog, as he would have normally, but he bent to feel the velvet ears and scratch, momentarily, Blitz’s white chin.

‘Hello, boy,’ he whispered.

He looked in the direction of the kitchen, feeling his heart beating harder now, in anticipation of the confrontation. The sun streamed through the window panes.

He saw her outside, backside in the air, brown skirt riding up to reveal her unlaced brown tackety boots. She was fixing part of the chicken run and pulling stray weeds out of the yard as she did so, tossing them on to the compost heap.

She was standing in the yard with a metal pail and a brush in hand when Daniel raised the latch on the back door and stepped outside. He watched her from the door, some part of him still pleased to see her after the months apart. The yard was beautiful to him suddenly, with its whiff of dung and the grass bitten to bowling-green neatness by the goats. The kids were long grown and one of them was even larger than the nanny. He felt a pain in his throat to acknowledge that this was his first real home, and his last.

Still she didn’t see him and Daniel considered waiting until she turned and saw him in the doorway. Blitz sat down on the doorstep beside him.

‘Minnie,’ he called out.

Minnie,
not
Mam.

She turned and dropped the pail and the brush and put both hands to her cheeks, as if surrendering, relinquishing her arms.

‘Oh, my
love … what a surprise,’ she shouted.

Hand on her bad hip, she made her way to him, with a smile so broad that her blue eyes almost disappeared. She walked towards him with a hand up in front of her face to shield it from the sun. He knew she was not able to see his expression. He imagined himself, a dark cut-out in the doorway.

She laughed, and Daniel inhaled. Her laughter had been so important to him, and he was conditioned to appreciate it. She dusted off her dirty hands on her skirt.

‘To what do we owe this honour?’

She drew near him, took her hand away from her eyes and stepped into the cool shade where he stood. Her hands were stretched out to take his, but then their eyes met.

‘Are you all right, love? Is everything all right?’ – a hand on his arm in comfort. She was frowning with concern, her worried lips dimpling her cheeks.

‘No, not really,’ he whispered, twisting his arm away from her, walking past her into the middle of the yard. One of the goats nibbled at the hem of his T-shirt and he snatched it away, stamping the ground once, twice, until the animal started.

She walked towards him. Blitz was at her heels, skipping to and fro, standing in front of her, looking up at her face to see what was wrong. He whimpered a little, scratched the ground. Minnie put out her fingers to touch the dog’s head, but did not take her eyes off Daniel.

‘What is it, love?’ she asked again. ‘What’s happened?’

Daniel’s heart was beating hard now and his palms were moist. He tried to find the breath to say it to her quietly, but his mouth was too dry. He meant to tell her about the thinking he’d been doing, about his urge to find out what happened to his real mother,
now that he was over eighteen. He had planned to tell her about the register office, the death certificate and the graveyard with the white marble cross, and the paint already flaking off the letters in her name. He had planned to tell her that his mother had been clean when Minnie told him that she had died. She had been getting clean for him, and only overdosed when she thought he would never come looking; that he had forgotten her. It was too much for him, and so he screamed at her:

‘My-mother-died-last-year.’

He was surprised that tears sprang suddenly to his eyes. He could feel the vein at his temple swelling and the pain at the back of his throat. It was the tears that angered him most. He didn’t want them. He hadn’t planned on them.

‘Last year,’ he shouted, picking up the metal bucket. He aimed it at Minnie and thrust it forward in a fake throw, to try to scare her, but she didn’t flinch. He hurled it then, two yards to her right, so that it crashed on to the doorstep in a clatter that sent the goats to the corners of the yard and set Blitz on to his haunches. He picked up the broom and threw that too, then took a spade that was leaning against the chicken run. He brandished it, feeling the tears spill, enjoying the easy weight of the spade in his hands.

He bit his lip. ‘You-lied-to-me,’ he whispered.

She stood before him, hands at her sides and a look on her face that he remembered from his childhood: calm, determined.

He tossed the spade in his hand, watching her. ‘What do you have to say to me? What do you-have-to-say-to-me, eh?’

The rage bit again.

‘Eh?’ he shouted.

He took the spade and raised it above his head, took a step forward
then smashed it hard into the corner of the chicken shed. He stabbed and swung with the spade until the shed buckled. Chickens fussed in his wake. He swung the spade around and knocked over a bucket with feed and a collection of bedding pots she had stacked near the shed. Blitz was at first startled, then positioned himself next to Minnie, crouched on his forepaws, barking and growling at Daniel, running forward and then back as if to nip – disciplining him as he would a wayward sheep.

‘I have her … death certificate. I saw her
grave.
She died last year. I could’ve seen her. Could’ve …’

The tears were hot on his cheeks. He didn’t wipe them away. He wasn’t looking at her face. The back yard was a whirling mass of images: the broken shed, Minnie before him, one hand in another, the frightened goats and the dog protecting her with teeth bared.

‘Let’s go into the house,’ she said. ‘Let’s sit down and talk about it.’

‘I don’t want to go into the house. I don’t want to talk about it. I wish you were dead.’

He dropped the spade. The dog jumped back and then resumed snarling. Daniel covered his face with his hands. He could taste salt on his tongue. He felt her hand on his arm.

‘There, love,’ she was saying. ‘C’mon, let’s get you a cup of tea.’

He pulled his arm away from her with such force that she lost her balance and fell, hard on her side in the yard. Blitz skipped forward and back, snarling and then whimpering. Minnie looked up at Daniel. He thought she seemed frightened for a moment, but then the look washed away and she wore the expression she always had, as if she could see right through him. He remembered watching her through the living-room door, watching her tears drip from
her chin on to the ivory keys, her bare feet on the pedals, and wanting to understand her in the same way that she seemed to understand him.

‘Get on your feet,’ he shouted. His tears had evaporated, the sun had vanished behind the house and the yard was in shade. ‘Get up.’ He kicked at her boot, which caused Blitz to snap at him then back away. Minnie rolled over on to her knees, got one knee up and then slowly rose to her feet.

He stood looking at her, hands on hips, breathing hard as if he had run to Brampton from Newcastle. She turned and walked slowly into the house. He thought of hitting her with the spade, of knocking her off her feet again, of taking a fistful of her grey curls and smashing her face against the side of the crumbling farmhouse. The dog followed her, standing at the door when she entered, as if to warn Daniel not to follow.

Daniel took a deep breath and a look around the yard. The goats returned to nibble at his pockets for treats. The chickens stopped fussing and began to peck at the weeds. He followed her into the house.

She was not in the kitchen. The bathroom door was open and Daniel looked inside, at its long thin sunlit stretch, and the porcelain butterfly still on the shelf, in full wing. Daniel looked away.

She was standing in the living room with one hand on the piano and another on her hip. She was still frowning.

Daniel looked around the room, as if he was seeing it for the first time. On the fireplace was the picture of herself as a young woman, with her husband and daughter. Beside that were three pictures of Daniel, two in his school uniform and one which had been taken at the market.

Daniel stood with his hands in his pockets. It felt strangely familiar to
be enraged with her again. It reminded him of all the other times as a boy. He felt too tall, too broad now for such anger, taking up the doorway while she stood by the piano. He remembered feeling like this so many years before: angry, distrustful, alone. He had been so much smaller then. She could pin him to the floor with her weight, but no longer. Now he was stronger.

‘Do you want a drink?’ he asked her.

Minnie said nothing but shook her head.

‘Why not, ’bout time isn’t it?

‘Obviously you have something which you want to discuss.’

She had the voice on; the one she used at market for people she didn’t like.

‘Aye, like why you-lied-to-me.’

He felt the tears in his throat again. The dog was between them, confused, looking from one to the other, tail wagging one moment then between his legs the next.

‘You were a young boy. You needed stability. You needed the chance to settle, to love and to trust. I just gave you a chance not to run for a year or two. I gave you a chance to be …’ She was whispering. Daniel had to strain to hear her.

‘Be with you?’

‘To be, to just be you …’

‘You make me sick.’

She shrugged. Her hand swept the surface of the piano, as if to remove dust.

‘What was I? Just a fucking replacement for her?’

Minnie turned to him. Her chest swelled but she said nothing.

‘You were no replacement. You are my son. You
are my son.’

‘So you wanted me so bad that you had to kill my mother off five years
before her time? I could have seen her one more time. I could’ve …’

He put the back of his hand to his nose. She was still looking at him.

‘What you needed was space not to think about her. To …’

‘What? So I could think about you,
Mam?’

‘So you could think about yourself for once, be a boy, not have to look after anyone.’

‘Why was putting you to bed any different from putting her to bed?’

That riled her. She set the guard over the fire and picked up papers that were scattered on the sofa.

‘Just stop it,’ she said. She sounded tired, as if there was no fight left in her any more, but she raised her chin and spoke in a calm voice. The firm gentleness of it leeched his violence, as it always had. ‘I know you’re hurt. I understand that. Maybe I should have told you when you went away to university, but I didn’t think that was the time to distract you either. I’m sorry she’s dead. I thought maybe when you were older, I would explain. You’ve no idea the change in you when you didn’t have her to worry about. Just look at you now. God willing you’ll be a lawyer soon. Your mother would have been proud of you. You were a good, kind boy, but you needed to be free of her so that you could choose for yourself for once.’

Daniel spoke to her through his teeth:

‘I came all the way here to tell you, to-your-face, that I will never see you, never talk to you again. I don’t want a penny from you. I don’t want to hear anything about you. I hate you.’

Minnie stood up straight, one hand on the arm of the sofa. Her face was washed with grief. Daniel remembered nights when she had been
crying and had that same look in her eye. She swallowed, her lips parted.

‘Son, please. Let’s talk about this again when you’ve calmed down. You’re upset. I want you to understand why I did it. It wasn’t for me. You don’t understand how she was ruining you. Your mind was torn with thoughts of her and once she was gone, it was as if you could concentrate. Look where you are now, and it was all because of those years of peace knowing that you didn’t need to run to her.’

‘But
I did
need to run to her, don’t you understand. She’s dead and now it’s too late.’

Daniel took a step towards Minnie. She raised her chin as if she expected him to hit her. He shivered, the muscles in his neck tight with the tension.

‘I’m sorry, then,’ she said. ‘Maybe it was wrong of me. I was doing it for your own good, but you’re right that I shouldn’t have lied to you. I’m sorry.’

Daniel’s throat was aching from holding back the tears. He bit his lip and pulled the cuff of his sweatshirt over his hand. With one sweep, he knocked the pictures off the mantelpiece. They fell on to the hearth and the dog jumped back and barked when the glass smashed.

Minnie was covering her mouth with both hands.

‘No, you shouldn’t have lied to me, but what’s done is done.’ He walked towards her, arms at his sides. ‘This is the last you’ll ever see of me. I wish you were dead.’

He left, tears hot again on his cheeks as he opened the door and walked down the hill.
Please come back,
he thought he heard her call.

His legs
felt weak as he walked down the hill. He staggered, as if wounded, but the sun was warm and reassuring at his back. He wiped a palm over his face to dry it, knowing that all the warmth and the love he had known in the world was also behind him. And he was leaving it behind.

29

Back from
his run, Daniel showered and stood with a towel around his waist, shaving. Normally he would be in a rush, and would smooth the shaver over his jaw before eating breakfast standing up in the kitchen. This morning he had plenty of time, and so he soaped up. Irene’s application to the judge had been successful. Today Sebastian would give evidence. It was possible that by the end of the week there would be a verdict.