The Mother (12 page)

“You set him up, didn't you? What do they call them? Honey traps? Is that what you were, some kind of honey-trap girl?”

She shakes her head. “I would never've done that. I know you don't believe me, but I swear to God, cross my heart and hope to die, I loved Ry. I loved him.”

“You didn't even come to his funeral.”

“I wannid to come, you don't know how bad I wannid to.”

“But?”

She looks at me a moment, then away. “I never had nothing to wear.”

I can't bring myself to respond to that. What would be the point? She needed to look good, to pose even there, and had nothing new or expensive enough to do that in. I will not sink to her level, will not have a discussion about the fact she could have turned up in anything, or point out it wasn't actually a rave we hosted that day; the people who showed up were there to support us, to bury my son.

I say, “I want to know what happened.”

“He left a message. On my phone. Tyson heard it. I told Ryan not to call me. I told him to leave me alone, but he never listened. I warned him, but he was different . . . like there was too much trust in him. He never even wannid the knife . . .”

“You gave him a knife?”

She nods, because that's the kind of gift people like her give to those they love, not aftershave or champagne or forget-me-nots, they give metal gifts, murder weapons. If Tyson Manley had walked up to Ryan and faced him like a man, if he'd given my son the smallest fighting chance, Ryan could have whipped out her gift and used it to defend himself, maybe killed Tyson Manley accidentally instead of being killed himself, and I could have been sitting in court this week exactly where I've been sitting, except instead of staring at Tyson Manley wondering how he could have done it, I'd be looking down at Ryan gazing out from behind the glass. This is the thinking of people whose lives end too early and badly. I shake my head.

“And now you're gonna lie, go into court and tell them you were with Tyson when it happened so he can get away with it and next time you find some other patsy, you can give them another knife and he can kill them as well?”

“You don't know what it's like . . .”

“I know about the ridiculous code you all live by, the wall of silence, no one grassing, no one coming forward to tell the police the truth. It doesn't make things better. It's not noble. It's not cool. All it does is let people who've done wrong get away with it.”

“Cool? You think I'm tryin'a play it cool? I go in there and say what you want me to say, you think that suddenly everything's gonna flip right? That I get to carry on like nothing went down?”

“If you tell the truth he'll go to prison. That's the reality. That's where this will end.”

“If I tell the truth this'll never end, never! Man, you don't know the people I'm dealing with. You don't know my life. There is no
end
. Ain't no cavalry on the way, you get me? Ain't no one out there rescuing people like me! If I weren't dead by the time they finished, I'd wish I was.”

All those things I did for Ryan, putting the safety locks on the kitchen drawers so he couldn't get at the sharp utensils that could harm him, the safety wheels on the back of his bike so he wouldn't fall off, and the helmet, so if he did he wouldn't crack his skull and die, walking him to school every morning till he was ten so no one could abduct him, because if he wasn't abducted, he couldn't be hurt; all those precautions and she slipped in anyway, bringing with her the boogeyman of my nightmares that I told my son did not exist.

“So you're really gonna do it, stand there and lie?”

“I have to.”

“No. You choose to.”

“Listen, I don't choose! I do what I gotta do.”

I look at her, shake my head in disgust. “And this love you say you have for Ryan, that's how you show it? Telling lies to protect his killer.”

“They know where to find me. I got no place else to go. You got no clue the things they'd do, the things they've already done . . .”

She looks up as the bell above the door chimes and two young women enter the café, about her age, with that look about them that I associate with Sweetie. I see on her face an expression of total fear and simultaneously she stands, lifting her side of the table with both hands as she does so, and everything on top of it, my coffee, her hot chocolate, the salt and pepper and condiments and menu fly off the table onto me and I tumble backward off my chair onto the floor, where I am too surprised to do anything other than look up at her in shock as she screams, “I'm warning you, you better stay the fuck away from me!”

Then she passes them as she walks out, and they watch her do so, before giving me a long hard stare, turning around, and leaving as well, without having purchased anything. The waitress, as stunned as I am, runs over, helps me up. Two other customers right the table and chairs and pick up the other items spilled across the floor. The manager asks if I am okay as I pull my purse out of my bag and struggle with fingers shaking so badly I am unable to pick out the coins. I give up, pull out a note instead, hand it to him, answer, “Yes.”

When he gives me my change, I take it then find myself hesitating. Instead of leaving, I look out of the window, check
ing the street to make sure I can't see them anywhere, that those girls have actually gone, before opening the door and venturing out. I walk away from Hulya's on legs that are little more than jelly.

I catch a cab to Lorna's house, bang on her door.

“What's happened?”

I tell her pretty much word for word everything Sweetie said. I read from notes hastily scribbled on scraps of paper from my handbag while sitting in the backseat of the cab on the way over, trying to write it all down while it was still fresh in my mind.

“We've gotta ring Quigg and tell her,” I say. “Even if Sweetie refuses to tell the truth, I will. I'll tell the jury what she told me. No one's gonna believe her word against mine.”

“Are you mad?” Lorna asks. “You think you can just tell Quigg you've been meeting with witnesses, discussing the trial? They'll throw the bloody case out! And if by some miracle they didn't, why would they believe you? You're Ryan's mum. That defense QC would have a field day. He'd make mincemeat out of your impartiality. No, you can't tell anyone.”

“So what, just let him get off? Keep my mouth shut as well and let that murderer walk? There is no evidence against him, not a single piece of evidence that links him directly to the murder, you know that.”

“That boy's got no chance! Not only are they gonna convict him, he's gonna get a longer sentence than he would've if he wasn't black. The conviction stats don't lie.”

I look at my sister in astonishment. “Are you totally insane? I want him convicted because he's guilty! I want him to be given
the longest sentence they can give him because he's sucked the air from my life! What I want is justice, not racism, justice!”

“Marcia, he did it! We know he did. Every piece of circumstantial evidence leads to that conclusion. He's not going to get away with it.”

“So your advice is to do nothing, say nothing? I don't know if I can.”

“I'm telling you you can and you must,” my sister says. Worse, I know she's right. I have to suck it up. Another thing to swallow and keep down, just one more thing to be silent about when I'm already so full I could burst.

Lloydie is at home when I get back. He is sitting at the kitchen table with Pastor Meade, who is speaking to him about strength. Erin and Paloma are also there, my line manager and colleague, friends from my years at the call center, just passing through, they say, and stopped off to see how I was getting on. They have brought us flowers, a beautiful bouquet that must have cost a fortune, and a huge card from the people I work with, filled with messages of support, reminding me that everyone is thinking of me, that Lloydie and I are in their prayers. I try to keep up a front, the practiced front of married couples to the world, hiding the separateness that has grown between me and Lloydie, presenting the unity it has become my sole responsibility to exhibit, but it has never been harder to do than it is at this moment. My emotions have been on the roller-coaster ride of their life. I tell them a bit, some of the details of the trial. My heart isn't in it, but I tell them anyway, because they're here and I can't get out of it, and while I do, from time to time, I gaze at Lloydie to see if he's listening and he
doesn't look like he is. He gives the impression of being so engrossed in what the pastor is saying to him that he cannot focus on the latest developments of the police and the judicial system and their efforts to bring the murderer of our son to account.

I listen to myself from a distance, hear the sound of my own voice, my words, wonder how I am managing to speak to them, to carry on. Erin and Paloma, Pastor Meade, they just want to help us somehow, to do something, anything, but civility feels like a Herculean task, one that this evening is almost beyond me.

Finally I just have to tell them I'm truly exhausted and my head is pounding, that I need to have a bath and lie down. After the women go, I leave Lloydie and Pastor Meade to talk alone, and take valerian and vodka and paracetamol then get into the tub. I hear the front door open and close while I am in there and I wonder if Lloydie has gone out, but when I come out of the bathroom he is sitting on the bed with his face in his hands. He looks up at me. I am doing all I can to hold it together. On the outside, I am looking after myself, wearing my wig, plastering over the gaps and defects, creating a facade for the world that cloaks the anguish inside me, the circuits that no longer work, the bits that are broken, the pain.

Lloydie looks like I feel. It's all there; the anguish in his eyes, despair in the slump of his posture, anxiety in the prominence of the veins that crisscross his bony arms and hands, and it makes me angry, his collapse, because it sucks from me the right to have any expectation of him, makes me feel cruel for expecting more when he looks so pathetic, is being so pathetic. I go around to my side of the bed, sit on the edge of it to cream myself so I do not have to look at him
and feel guilty, so I don't have to try to find surplus strength to compensate for his, when I can barely find my own.

He says, “I don't know how to do this. I just don't know.”

As if there is a book, an instructional DVD that tells people how and what to do when their son is murdered, a manual that takes them through the process chapter by chapter, step by step.

“I had a plan. It wasn't big. It was a small one, but it was mine.”

I say, “It's been seven months, Lloyd. You can't just keep going round it . . .”

“I reminded him . . .”

“I can't do this again.”

“It's all I think about . . .”

“This isn't your fault.”

He says, “You should never have married me.”

And I ping from anger to open fury. I can't do it, can't do it for us both. I can't repair myself, and he's asking me to repair him. As though it comes from outside. As though self-repair is a wall hanging you can simply take down and wrap around yourself. As though you can do nothing, just wallow and surrender and somehow it can all be made good. His is the wish of a child; if I'd never married him, we would never have had Ryan, and he would never have had this hurt. But this pain is the evidence Ryan existed, was here, that for sixteen years he filled our home, our lives, with joy. I do not want this pain either, but if I were forced to choose, forced to make a choice between having my son followed by this pain or not having him at all, I would choose Ryan, always Ryan, every time.

“Well, I
am
your wife. And you're a man. Try acting like one!”

I know as soon as those words leave my mouth how cruel they are. I regret them even before my mouth closes, know I
should take them back, apologize, that I have hurt him terribly when he is already finding it impossible to cope. I feel his movement within the mattress beneath me, know he is standing on the other side of the bed. He doesn't take a step, just stands there. Maybe he has things lined up to say, is trying to put them into an order or arrangement of some kind. Maybe he is trying to think of a response. Perhaps my words have cut him so deeply he can think of no response, because in the end he doesn't say anything, just gently pulls the bedroom door in behind him as he leaves.

Instead of running after him, I put on my nightie. Instead of apologizing, I get between the sheet and the duvet. Instead of saving my marriage, I turn off the bedside light. Then, having condemned him in my mind for wallowing and doing nothing, I lie alone in the darkness and cry.

The next morning when I wake, there is no cup of tea on the side and Sheba is curled up at the bottom of the bed.

Kwame has come along today, sits in the gallery behind us, beside Luke and Ricardo, whom he knows. I am really happy to have him here, hope somehow Ryan knows, can see, the Ryan who belonged to me and not to Sweetie. Last night in my dreams, he kissed me goodbye at the kitchen table, and as he turned to leave, I heard the sound of a small heavy object as it hit the laminated floor, looked down to see he'd dropped a knife. When I looked back up at his eyes, he had closed them. I need to reconcile the son I loved so carefully with the one who carried the gift from the girl without a proper name.

The court session starts with a legal argument over the body-mapping images before the jury is called in. The body maps show a number of injuries to Tyson Manley's body when
he was arrested, but St. Clare points out that the police used an amount of force when they arrested Mr. Manley and that some of the injuries can be referenced to the arrest. His concern is that the jury might erroneously conclude that the injuries were attributable to the incident with the deceased when in fact they were not. He makes it clear there is no suggestion the police had beaten the defendant in some improper manner, but it was a violent arrest and injuries were sustained. Quigg agrees it would be an artificial exercise to try to marry up each injury, but these were the injuries on the body of the defendant at the time of the arrest and they can be presented to the jury with an explanation of the circumstances of the arrest so that the evidence is not misleading.