Someone Else's Son (33 page)

‘Did it take long?’ Carrie asked coldly.

Dayna frowned and found herself caught up in the woman’s eyes again.

‘To die. Did it take long for Max to die?’ she continued.

Dayna saw Max’s face as it happened. Yes, she thought, and he knew he was going to die.

‘No,’ she whispered. Then she was shaking her head. She felt the dizzy waves behind her eyes as the shakes grew stronger, travelling down her neck, her shoulders, her back and arms and legs and everything was trembling and not her own and she thought she was going to throw up from the pain in her guts . . .

Dayna leapt up and ran across the kitchen – straight into the glass partition that separated Carrie’s perfect interior from the outside world. She splayed her arms up against the glass, smearing her palms down the barrier while her face pressed against the cold.

She sobbed.

She slid down to the floor.

Then someone was holding her. Cold glass on one side. A warm person on the other.

Max’s mother. A part of him.

He was everywhere.

His mother was rocking her, sobbing also.

Together they became one in their grief – Carrie Kent breaching her perfect white existence, and Dayna spilling over from the grim life that she would never escape.

Carrie looked up and swept back a strand of Dayna’s hair. ‘I loved him, you know. I really did. The tragedy is I don’t think he knew.’ Her eyes were ringed with red circles. ‘I am so glad he’d found someone to love.’

And Dayna couldn’t help but add in her head what she knew Carrie was thinking:
even if it was a girl like you
.

 

She couldn’t have done it alone. Somehow, having her there made it more bearable, as if they were just looking for something, or waiting for Max to arrive home from school. Carrie went in first although she wanted nothing more than to shove Dayna inside, slam the door, and hope the girl would deal with the ghosts. She had clearly been close to her son, but the anonymity between herself and Dayna helped – as if she’d hired someone sympathetic to clean up the residue.

She needed to do it but couldn’t have faced it alone.

She stepped inside. The girl followed behind, sniffing into her tissue.

The room smelt faintly sweet – a mash of dirty clothes, several plates of half-eaten food and lack of daylight. Carrie flicked on the light and screwed up her eyes – not from the pain of the bright bulb but from how it illuminated everything that was missing from her life; had
always
been missing.

‘It’s big,’ Dayna said. ‘And messy,’ she added with another sniff that, in better times, might have been a laugh.

‘I haven’t been in here for . . . for ages,’ Carrie said. It was easy to confess this to the girl. She probably wouldn’t ever see her again.

‘How come?’

‘Does your mum come into your room?’ Carrie stepped forward tentatively, almost wanting to reach out and take Dayna’s hand. A pair of pyjama bottoms lay on the unmade bed, each leg bent in opposing directions. They reminded Carrie of the crime scene at the school, where Max’s body had been marked out on the tarmac.

‘Yeah. Sometimes.’

Carrie felt herself shoved down another rung of the parental ladder. Even this girl’s mother was better than she’d ever been.

‘Do you get on well with your mum?’

Dayna laughed. ‘No way. She’s a cow most of the time.’

Carrie felt both deflated yet somehow exonerated. She wanted to tell the other mother to patch things up, make friends, spend a day together – hell, no, a
year
together – not to waste any more time. All this flew around in her mind as she tried to absorb what her eyes were seeing. Her son’s bedroom. She felt overwhelmed. She reached out and gripped Dayna’s arm.

‘This is so hard,’ she admitted. The young girl put her hand on Carrie’s. It was some comfort. ‘It’s not real.’ They stood in silence.

‘He had a lot of posters,’ Dayna finally said. ‘And books.’ She turned her head sideways and scanned the titles. ‘We like . . . liked the same things.’ She pulled out a battered copy of
Romeo and Juliet
. ‘We were doing this in English.’

‘Is that why you were picked on?’ Had sending Max to Denningham for all those years made him too smart, just too different for the real world? Although no one, surely, could ever label the dreadful institution that was Milton Park as the ‘real world’.

‘God, no. No one cared about that.’

‘Then what? What was it?’ Carrie’s voice caved and crumbled. ‘Max was a good boy. He didn’t get into trouble. He didn’t wear weird clothes.’

Dayna hung her head, shaking it slowly. ‘He just wasn’t like other kids. Neither am I.’

But you’re still alive
, Carrie thought, fighting off the urge to say it. ‘Why?’ It was a whisper.

‘He just didn’t fit in,’ she answered. ‘It’s almost like they’re scared of you. They see you as the enemy and fight back, even though we didn’t do anything wrong.’

The shock of that admission hit Carrie square in the jaw. ‘But—’

‘It’s gang culture. He was unlucky.’

‘Unlucky?’ The sharpness of her voice made the girl flinch. Carrie picked up the pyjama bottoms and pressed them to her face. She tried to draw breath through them, to harvest the last remnants of a son she thought she knew. But she was unable to breathe. There was a laundry basket in the corner of the room. She lifted the lid and let the garment fall on top of the other clothes. ‘As if I’m ever going to wash them,’ she said softly, turning away from Dayna.

 

There wasn’t any point explaining further, Dayna knew that. She felt sorry for the woman, sure, but she felt sorrier for herself. She walked round Max’s room looking at his stuff. It was as if he’d left her a legacy, another side of him for her to discover only now, after he’d gone, after it was too late.

‘I already miss him,’ Dayna said. ‘We used to smoke and talk and laugh together.’ She saw the look on the woman’s face. ‘It’s all right. Everyone smokes. It’s no big thing.’

Carrie Kent’s eyes narrowed and Dayna thought she was going to explode out of them. But then there was nothing. Just such a deep sadness which made her want to throw her arms round her – something she didn’t ever feel like doing to her own mother. She didn’t think she looked very well. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

She was standing with her arms slightly lifted away from her sides; a hopeless stance. Her feet were apart and she was swaying, as if she was hearing some distant tune.

‘Sit down and look at all this stuff with me. He loved doing these, didn’t he?’ Dayna grabbed a bunch of papers lying on the floor. Why hadn’t he ever brought her here?

‘What are they?’ Carrie gave in and allowed herself to sit on the bed.

‘Magazines. Clippings from newspapers. Flyers and notes off the internet and telly.’ Dayna leafed through them and handed over a couple of cut-out forms. ‘You know, the competitions.’ The magazines sat shiny and cool on her legs.

‘What?’ Carrie asked vaguely.

‘He loved doing competitions. It was like he was addicted or something.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Dayna watched as she leafed through the half-completed entry forms. Max’s handwriting was spidery and he’d obviously used a pen that had been about to run out of ink.

‘He won loads of stuff . . .’ She trailed off, biting her tongue so she didn’t say anything else. Another legacy, she thought.

‘He won things?’

Dayna imagined the neat stash in Max’s shed. He’d won all sorts. He’d told her that he’d had some of it for ages; that he didn’t know what to do with it. ‘He was just lucky, I guess.’

Dayna watched Max’s mum think about it all. A hundred questions jostled on her lips, but she’d never ask her – she was just a kid, a wretch off a council estate that no one liked. What would she know?

A long silence hung between them until it was broken by remorse. ‘It was horrid.’ Dayna picked her nails. ‘I’ll never forget the look on his face when it . . . happened.’

‘Do you think that makes you special?’

Dayna jolted and cried out as her head was suddenly shaken back. Carrie had her by the shoulders, digging her nails into her.

‘Do you think that because you saw him die, that because you were there at the end, he loved you more?’

‘No, I—’

‘Well, I was there at the start. I was the one who made him and gave birth to him and the one who fretted at night when he wouldn’t sleep. I was the one who worked myself to death so he could have the best of everything, I was the one who—’

‘Stop!’ Dayna yanked away, her eyes wide, her mouth tingling. It was all there again, screaming through her head as if the whole lot had been chucked in a blender. Flashing lights, sirens, kids wailing, the blood, the smell of chips, their white trainers, the jeering and jibing as the gang fled . . .

Before she knew what she was doing, Dayna raised her hand and slapped Carrie’s face. The rage, that liquid anger, was boiling over again. ‘It just
happened
,’ she screamed. ‘There was the knife. It came from nowhere. Then it was over.’

Trembling, she stared at Carrie. One of her cheeks was scarlet.

‘You will tell me who killed my son.’ Each word was a threat; each syllable a direct hit. Without any of the persuasive skill she used on
Reality Check
, Carrie sent bolts of fear through Dayna. Carrie put her hand against her red cheek. ‘You will tell me the truth.’

Carrie didn’t think she’d ever felt nervous in her entire life. Unsure, certainly – her father’s unpredictable mood had seen to that most of her childhood; apprehensive, of course – she’d taken a risk by ditching her career as a journalist and launching into television; anxious, often – she’d fretted constantly at the responsibility of caring for a son. But nervous – never. Except today. She was interviewing, live on national television, a man whom police suspected had killed his entire family.

They wanted a confession.

It was the end of the decade and
Reality Check
was only in its third month but the series had been green-lit way into the new millennium by executive producers and senior commissioners after only the fourth show. Ratings had already overtaken most other popular programmes aired at the same time and Carrie, a virtually unknown presenter, had become an overnight success. Her face was in all the women’s weekly magazines, she’d been interviewed by the tabloids and told her story at either end of the day on breakfast TV and early evening chat shows. She was exhausted. She had a sore throat and her ankle was playing up – new-found fans had pushed and shoved outside the stage door, it was raining, she’d slipped; they’d bayed above her, pressing pens and paper against her, touching her hair and her face.
They don’t know me
, was all Carrie could think as her bodyguard parted the crowd in a surge of swinging arms and barging shoulders. He hoisted her to her feet and tucked her inside the car. She had been too shocked to say anything, but on the journey home to her family, her ankle had swelled so that she had to remove her shoe.

‘I can’t possibly wear those,’ Carrie told her stylist an hour before the show. The make-up artist flicked a huge soft brush over her cheeks. He caught her eye by mistake. ‘Get me something flat.’ It was the first time ever that she’d sounded even vaguely impatient. Carrie woke every single morning and counted her blessings and good fortune at having her show idea explode into such a massive success. She didn’t want to blow it all by earning herself a brattish reputation. ‘I just can’t walk in them, that’s all.’ She coughed. It hurt deep in her chest.

She pulled off the cream court shoes with their impossibly high black patent heels. They were gorgeous, she admitted, but not what she needed for today’s show. Earlier, she’d caught sight of the man she was going to interview –
interview
? Unravel was what Dennis had suggested. Her heart had pounded as she’d walked past the guest make-up room. Through the mirror, he’d stared at her blankly, coldly, a face without life or expression. But then his wife and two daughters had just been burnt alive.

‘And I don’t like the neckline on this. Isn’t there something more flattering? I look like a frumpy school teacher.’ Carrie waited as several pairs of hands swiftly undid the buttons on the pale silk blouse. They pulled at the necktie and slipped the garment off her shoulders. A robe was draped round her.

‘How about this? Or this? Or this?’ The stylist obediently held up half a dozen blouses and tops that would sit perfectly over the pale grey trousers she was wearing. The number of designers who virtually threw their latest clothes at the style department of the show had outstripped any other production that she’d worked on, the experienced woman had told Carrie. ‘Makes my job easy,’ she’d said. She selected a baby-blue blouse and held the hanger against Carrie’s shoulders.

‘I hate it,’ Carrie said. ‘I won’t wear it.’

The stylist stepped back and frowned. ‘But the colour—’

‘Is horrible.’ Carrie marched up to the rail that held over a hundred items. They were changed every week. She riffled through, shoving garments sharply to her right one by one with increasing speed. After a minute, she pulled out a black T-shirt. Further down the rail, she knew there was a pair of dark jeans. She’d worn them last week when she’d had to get some air and time away from the studio. She clutched both items against her chest and sighed.

‘Pass me those boots. The grey slouch ones.’

The stylist moved in slow motion but did as she was told, staring all the while at Carrie. ‘I don’t think Leah will—’

‘Leah
will
,’ Carrie confirmed in a deep voice, nodding and striding into the changing cubicle. She emerged looking as if she was going to the supermarket or to pick up Max from school. The stylist gasped and ran after Carrie with a robe as she strode down the corridor. ‘Drop it, Sue. I’m done.’ Carrie flung her hands in the air, leaving a warning trail in her wake. Round the corner, alone, she stopped and spread her palms flat against the wall, the other side of which was studio four, home of
Reality Check
.