The Mother (19 page)

The boy on the left steps forward, picks up the gun, checks the cylinder, says to his accomplice with a laugh, “And there's bullets in it an' all, bro.” They both laugh. He clicks the cylinder back into place, presses the cold metal muzzle against my temple hard, and says, “Playtime's over. Where's she gone?”

I don't answer. It's not just my arms, my whole body is violently shaking. I hear a click beside my ear, which at first I think is the sound of the gun firing, then realize I'm still alive, he's merely cocked the hammer;
I'm such a novice
. All those action films I sat through with Ryan, and I still forgot when I was holding the gun that before you can shoot, the hammer needs to be cocked. He presses the gun harder against my head. Now it hurts.

“This is your last chance; where's she gone?”

I say the only words I have in my mind. “If I was your mother, I would've loved you.”

The expression on this young boy's face shifts from anger to confusion to sheer astonishment. His accomplice asks him, “Wha'd she fucking say?”

And perhaps because he can think of no appropriate response, the boy in front of me pulls his arm back and swipes me across the head full-force with the gun and the power goes down. The blow stuns me. My legs give way and I feel
my body weight hit the floor. My eyes are closed. The pain is intense, and I can feel blood running across my face, warm, sticky, and plentiful. I lie there and wait for him to finish me off. Now is the moment for my life to flash before my eyes, but the life I see is not mine, it's Ryan's; newborn, just lying there, eyes wide and unfocused; as a toddler, eating finger paint, his mouth a cave in the middle of an azure lagoon; running barefoot across the sand, his dragon kite figure-eighting the skies; meticulously wiping the earth from his hands above a newly created mound. I am ready.

Death is a roaring baritone howl that hurtles through a tunnel toward me, so loud and unexpected that I open my eyes, see Lloydie with a kitchen chair in his hands above his head, watch him bring it down with all his might onto the head and arm of the boy holding the gun. The gun discharges with a bang, flips from his grasp, crosses the laminated flooring in a clatter to land in the corner. I hear the disintegration of plaster and glass. The stunned boy collapses to the floor. His accomplice raises his hands defensively as Lloydie takes the chair up again, three-legged now, brings it crashing down onto him in turn. The first boy, behind him on the floor, gets up, leaps onto Lloydie's back, and I watch Lloydie begin to buckle under the weight, stumbling backward frantically till he comes to a hard stop, the boy on his back crushed between Lloydie's weight and the wall behind them both, and as Lloydie turns around and lands a powerful punch to his stomach, the boy falls to the floor in a winded heap clutching his waist, rolls over, moans. Lloydie turns around, begins heading back to the accomplice, on his knees now, disoriented but rising to his feet. As Lloydie reaches for him he takes a step back, a drunken stagger, shakes his head,
and maybe clears it, because he turns and bolts, legs it out through the side door and is gone. Lloydie charges after him, gets to the door, stops, looks out, looks to me, then his gaze comes to rest on the boy still on the floor.

The boy's response is panicked. He tries to shuffle backward, away, but there is nowhere to go, nothing behind him but wall. Lloydie grabs him by the back of his top, hauls him to his feet with one hand, uses the other to pin him fast against the wall with a hand gripped hard around his throat. The boy's words are a choked gasp. “I was just gonna scare her, I swear to God!”

And he is transformed in an instant, not a member of an organized criminal fraternity, not some sophisticated mercenary or old-style East End hard nut, just a young boy, eyes bulging wide, looking exactly like what he is; a terrified kid.

Lloydie pulls his arm back for the punch, and I see in his expression that this man, whose strong hands have never hurt a living soul, has inside him this moment the capacity to kill. “You like scaring women, do you? Try me! Go on, scare me!”

I hear my voice shouting, “Lloydie, no!” I don't know how I've gotten up or crossed the floor, but I am behind him, my hands locked around his elbow, pulling it back, crying, shouting, “Stop, please stop!”

He is much stronger than I am and as he jerks his arm back hard, I lose my grip and stagger backward, falling clumsily across the kitchen sink unit, hear the contents of the dish rack falling, spilling, breaking, bang my hip hard against the edge of the countertop, cry out in pain. Lloydie turns, and I see in his eyes that he finally
sees
me. He releases the boy's throat, runs over, lifts me from the floor. The boy behind him collapses to his knees for a second only, spots his chance, and
takes it. He is out through the side door in a flash. Lloydie lets me go, runs after him, gives chase. I hurry to the side door also, praying he doesn't catch him, that the person who ends up sitting in the anger management circle in prison doesn't turn out to be my husband. I am relieved to see he has stopped at the gatepost, glaring in frustration down the street, presumably watching that young boy flee. Abruptly he turns around, walks back fast, passes me, is in the kitchen again.

“They've gone,” he says, pushing the door closed behind him, discovering it no longer remains closed, wedging another of the chairs beneath the handle to make it secure. “Are you okay?”

“I'm fine,” I say, touching my head, and it's true. “I'm okay.”

He picks up the landline, begins to dial.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Calling the police. They brought a gun into our home! A gun!”

I take the phone from him. “Stop. Wait.”

“For what?”

“I can't think.”

“He's getting away!”

“They didn't bring it. The gun was already here.”

“What?”

“
I'll tell you everything in a moment, Lloydie, but right now I have to call my sister.”

Though I play down what has just happened, on the phone to Lorna, I have to tell her so she is not caught off guard as I was. Neither Kwame nor Sweetie has arrived at her home yet, and she tells me not to worry about her, that they will be vigilant and she'll call me back later once the baby's been picked
up. Then I have to reassure her that Lloydie and I are okay. I don't tell her about the gash on my head that I'm pressing a clean tea towel against as we speak. Lloydie tidies up, rights the table, begins to sweep up smashed crockery and glass. He stops to pick up the gun with a screwdriver through the trigger hole, like a police officer concerned about contamination of evidence, looks around wondering where exactly to put it, pulls out a freezer bag, drops it inside, and places the bag on top of the fridge. He is impatient, waiting for me to get off the phone to explain to him what on earth's going on. When I put the phone down, I do.

I tell him about my meeting with Sweetie and her evidence, sitting on a chair as he cleans the blood from my scalp and face. There is a gash above my ear, bruising around it, but crucially, no splintered bone or gray matter. As he dresses it, I tell him about the baby, and he has to sit down. I present the information to him stressing how unlikely it is that she's Ryan's, in order not to get his hopes up unnecessarily, but the effect it has on Lloydie is the effect it had on me. He can hardly believe the possibility exists, the chance, however minute it may be. He has to get the calendar down from the wall, work out when Ryan died, when she came here for that first visit, count the weeks forward ending two weeks ago.

And then he can't talk about it anymore, as if the mere speaking of it, the airing of his wish, the statement of his hope, might be enough to jinx it, so I tell him about Sweetie's visit earlier, leading up to the moment he arrived back home. That brings our discussion back to our starting point, and the fact that Lloydie still thinks we should call the police.

“But if we go to them, we're gonna have to lie,” I say. “There's no way we can tell them that gun was already here.
Where're we gonna say it came from? We can't say Sweetie brought it.”

“We'll leave her out of it. Why can't we just say you were attacked?”

“And supposing the police actually catch those boys? What if they come clean and tell the truth? What if they deny it? Are we going to go to trial and get up in court and lie? That's perjury, Lloydie. Are you prepared to do that?”

“If we do nothing, then they just get away with it,” Lloydie says, and I remember my discussion with Sweetie at Hulya's, where from the privilege of my position outside her world, I told her pretty much the same thing.

“They haven't gotten away with it,” I say. “You beat them up. Way the law works, for all I know, they can probably do you for assault. My biggest worry is if they come back.”

“Back? Here? I hope they do so I can finish the job!”

My head aches. I take a couple of paracetamol, and some cranberry without the vodka, go into the living room, and lie down while Lloydie gets his toolbox out and begins to repair the hinge side of the door frame, listen to the whir of his electric tools as he secures our home. I wake up when the phone rings. It is Lorna. Kwame and Sweetie are back safely from the hospital with the baby. They don't think anyone was waiting or followed them.

“So everyone's okay, then?”

“Yes,” Lorna says. “You should see this baby, Marce; she's so diddy and gorgeous.”

After speaking to her I get up, go into the kitchen, where Lloydie is repairing the chair he virtually smashed to pieces on those boys. He looks up, meets my eye, connects. Chaos
and disorder and confusion, threats and violence and damage, and here we are on the other side of it, and while it may be too early to hope for the long term, for now, this moment, my husband is back.

“They're all at Lorna's. Everyone's fine,” I say. “I'm going upstairs to lie down, unless you need me to do something . . .”

“You go. I'm just gonna finish up down here, then I'll be up.”

I say, “Okay.”

I turn the bedroom light on then off when I enter the room, go over to the window, stand back a little from the net curtains, and look out into the street. It looks like the street. Quiet. Calm. Unthreatening. It is unbelievable, everything that has happened in this one evening. I change into my nightwear and lie on the bed.

I am asleep when Lloydie gets onto the bed beside me, feel him adjusting the covers, pulling them up to cover me, getting under them himself. I have my back to him and he adjusts himself so that his front is pressed against my back. His arm goes around my waist and I take the palm of his hand in mine, hold it. It is enough.

The next time I awaken, though it is still dark outside, I hear birdsong. Lloydie's desire is a hot pulse wedged against the base of my spine. He trails a hand gently over the side of my body from hip to waist, then again. I turn over to face him, can see in the dark room his opened eyes, put my arms around him, and hold him. He kisses me. It is not a chaste kiss, nor is it the experienced kiss of a man married for eighteen years who has kissed his wife a thousand times; it is a request, a gentle kiss that seeks permission.

It is strange, our consummation, like a blues composition put together by two individuals with differing styles. I am desperate for this connection, pull hard at his pajama top, impatient to remove it, feel buttons pop. And he is the opposite, slow, meticulously careful to cause no harm through haste, no accidental hurt in a moment driven more by need than thought. His undressing of this new body of mine is slow. His mouth follows his hands, exploring each part as it is exposed, not just those bits directly connected with the act, but everywhere, my scarecrow's neck, the deeply hollowed blades of my shoulders, grazes the insides of my elbow with the tip of his tongue, uses it to measure the crazy pulse racing below the parchment-thin skin. He is intent on rediscovering every nook of this body that has been through so much, changed so much, which has been untouched for too long, and this voyage for him is a voyage for me, I who thought the part inside me capable of feeling passion might have been taken from me forever alongside my boy.

When it comes, the release from this agony of feeling is violent, all-consuming, a million shattered pieces brought together in an implosion that leaves me shocked and my husband lying on top of me sobbing, shaking like an addict marooned from his drugs, or maybe an addict who was marooned and has just discovered a life raft. I hold on to him fiercely, say over and over, “It's okay, Lloydie, it's okay,” and I think perhaps it may be. What we have done was not so much making love but making life in the After. I hope that if Ryan is out there somewhere, if he can see us both right now, he would not only understand; he'd be happy.

THERE IS A CUP OF
tea on the side when I awaken. Lloydie is not in the room, neither is Sheba. I ring Lorna while I drink the tea. I want to tell her about our enormous transition, but it feels like something a teenager would do and too complex to talk about just yet, immature and premature. But she hears something in my voice anyway because she asks, “What's going on with you?”

I laugh. “Mind your own business. I'm just checking you guys are okay.”

She tells me they're all okay. Sweetie and her daughter are both sleeping. It was nearly ten by the time they got to hers last night, and the baby didn't settle down till after midnight. She takes a bottle, so Lorna fed her this morning around five. She says, “Kwame stayed over.”

“Really?” I say.

She can hear raised eyebrows in my tone, I think, because she adds, “On the sofa.”

“You don't need to explain anything to me . . .”

“He's staying today as well, with the two of them, while I'm at court, just to be on the safe side.”

I say, “That's good.” I have finished drinking my tea. “Really, it is.”

After I have my shower and return to the bedroom, Lloydie is sitting on his side of the bed, dressed in suit pants and shirt and tie, buffing his shoes. He smiles at me. I smile back.

Nipa manages to perfectly conceal her surprise when I get to the car with Lloydie. A passerby might have thought we were in the middle of a weekday routine, us three. He gets into the backseat and I get into the passenger seat beside her. We make small talk on the journey there as if the three of us have been making small talk every day of the last week. But there is a moment at a set of traffic lights, while we are waiting for them to change, when it is silent and she gives me a sidelong glance and a smile that says “Bloody marvelous.” I give her one back. It is.

Almost as soon as we take our seats in the public gallery, a waft of fragrance as intense as the inside of a perfumery announces Ms. Manley's arrival, on time again for the second day in a row. After years of ticking idly, her alarm clock must be in a state of shock. She has with her the young guy who was here on Monday and an even younger boy, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old, who looks so much like Tyson Manley, he has to be the brother, her youngest son. They crowd into their end of the front row and we are seated at ours; Lloydie in the seat Lorna has been occupying, me sitting beside him, Lorna next to me, and Nipa on the other side of her, creating the human barrier between us and them. The seats behind
us are filled also, with Ricardo and Luke sitting amongst a group of other young people I recognize as friends of Ryan's from school, and the elderly theater couple eagerly anticipating their grand finale. As Tyson Manley enters the witness box, the younger brother watches with the excitement of a child who has gone to watch his elder sibling on the stage. He is smiling. Tyson notices and looks up at him, gives him the nod of acknowledgment customarily reserved for his mother, and the younger brother looks at his mother as if to say “He's seen me. Did you see that nod? He knows I'm here.”

It is Friday morning. Term time. Unless there has been a teachers' strike, that boy should be in class. I can't even begin to imagine how the conversation went. Had he been asking all along to come? Had he been harassing her from the beginning to attend court so he could watch his brother's murder trial? Did she weigh the pros and cons of keeping him off, apply the argument of parents who take their children on family holidays during term time, decide education comes in various forms, that he'd learn more being in this courtroom today than behind his classroom desk following the national curriculum?

“I bet he's not in school either,” Lorna whispers. “The apple doesn't roll far from the tree.”

I just don't understand it. “Collateral damage” is what she said to me, my son was collateral damage in the war that's raging outside. But this war she speaks of, does she question her role in it? If Tyson Manley had gone back to her home instead of Sweetie's, would she have put his stuff into the washing machine for him, added double portions of stain remover, ensured she put the wash on a high enough temperature to get rid of the forensic evidence, every last trace?
Is this her youngest son's tutorial in How to Take the Stand, prepping for the future, so he'll know what to do when his turn comes? Maybe later they'll analyze Tyson Manley's performance, dissect it over a spliff and a glass of brandy and Babycham, work out which parts of his testimony worked to greatest effect, where he went wrong. What kind of mother is she? This is not the thinking of a woman in her right mind. She's right, there is a war going on outside, but she is not a victim of it, she is a misguided general preparing her troops to charge into it, to die.

“Poor boy,” Lorna whispers. “Poor, poor child.”

That poor boy's only surviving elder brother stands in the dock now, being sworn in, hand on Bible, swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him God. He is wearing another suit today, black, befitting the solemnity of the occasion, with a pastel shirt beneath it and probably the least flamboyant tie he owns. I wonder if St. Clare spoke to Ms. Manley about her son's attire, whether he showed her photographs side by side of a courtroom and a VIP room at Stringfellows, explained to her that at each, a different type of smart dress is appropriate.

Tyson Manley seems less comfortable today standing in the witness box, though it can't be for lack of experience. If it was based on his courtroom experience alone, he should be as comfortable as the custody nurse practitioner. It's not being on the stand that makes him feel uncomfortable, I think it is the suit itself; it's not the kind he would have chosen to wear. He stands in the box and, once he's finished swearing the oath, jams his hands into the front pockets of his jacket just as he would have jammed his hands into the pockets of a sweat top he was wearing, pulling the sides and
front into messy bunched tucks, and I get again that juxtaposition of boyishness and manhood that so forcefully struck me in court on the first day of this trial, the same as the transformation of the boy in my kitchen. He has lied, raped, and murdered, yet there is no getting around the fact that he is still a child. I am a citizen of the wealthy first world society in which this boy has been allowed to grow up with no moral compass. What is being done to help people like him, people like that young boy Ms. Manley has deemed it appropriate to drag along to observe these proceedings today? A hand in my lap feels for and takes mine. I look down expecting it to be Lorna's, but it's Lloydie's. I look at him. There are fine beads of sweat across his forehead despite the coolness of this space. His expression is ghastly. I squeeze his hand, give him what I hope passes for a reassuring smile.

St. Clare appears more confident this morning than when last we saw him. His questions are easy enough for Tyson Manley to answer and designed to give us a sympathetic picture of his life and background. The court hears that he has recently turned seventeen, having had his last birthday a month ago behind bars while on remand. We learn he grew up with his mother and two brothers, Vito and De-Niro, that he last saw his father when he was eight years old and has had no contact with him since, that Vito's father is dead and De-Niro's is currently serving time.

He is polite, says “sir” at the end of some of his responses. His voice is quiet. He meets St. Clare's eyes with every answer. If I hadn't been here listening to the evidence over the last week, if I did not know who he was or what he'd done, if I had simply met him on the street and had a short interchange with him, I would probably have thought he was a nice boy,
and if it had happened in the last seven months, that thought would have been followed with
lucky mum
. I think I expected his voice to roar through the courtroom, that the capacity inside a person that permits them to rape and maim and kill would be evident in his mannerisms, the way he spoke. I expected the walls to shake, the stand to spontaneously combust, expected his speaking to have the impact on the room around him that his actions have had on our lives. Instead I am listening as he quietly, politely explains that he thinks Vito was the most affected by his dad not being around when they were growing up, that he was the one who kept getting into trouble with the police, the one his mother could not control. His own life was apparently sitting neatly on the right tracks till Vito was shot and killed in front of him in the park near their home, the killer never brought to justice by the police. He talks about his brother's murder as calmly as if he were describing a scene from a play. I look over at De-Niro. His elbows are on his knees, his palms cup his chin as he leans forward. He looks sad. Interested but sad. His mother, on the other side of him, her eyes concealed behind her large sunglasses, sits ramrod straight in her seat, and presumably she is an expert at concealing her feelings, because she appears entirely unmoved.

“You began getting into trouble after the death of your brother, did you not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Within four months, you had been permanently excluded from school.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And were you able to start attending a new school straightaway?”

“No.”

“Precisely how long were you out of school?”

“Musta been six months.”

“And how was that time spent?”

“Hanging 'round. Playing Wii.”

“How would you describe that period in your life?”

“I was bored outta my box. Only things I could do cost dosh I never had.”

“And it was around this time that you were arrested for the first time?”

“Yeah.”

“And what was that for?”

“Possession of marijuana, sir.”

“You were convicted for this, I believe?”

“Yeah.”

“Would you like to tell us about that conviction?”

He's relaxed, I think, in control. After a pause he says, “The police are always down my estate, always stopping and searching us when we ain't doing nothing or causing no trouble. They say they stop and search the black youth 'cause we're the ones committing the most crime, but at the end of the day ain't it gonna look like we're committing the most crime if it's only our houses being searched, only us being frisked, only our underpants they're looking down? I had a little draw on me, next thing they're saying I'm some big weed dealer, which I weren't. Couldn't convict me for that 'cause they never had the evidence, but they still convicted me for possession. You know how many people get a caution for smoking a spliff? But I got a conviction.”

Lorna leans over, whispers, “I really hope his defense isn't gonna be that he was framed by the police 'cause he's black.”

I'm hoping in fact it is, a silly defense easily seen through by the jurors. Yet I think about what he says, try to imagine Ryan out of school for half a year, hanging around all day on the streets, wonder what he, the best of boys, would have gotten up to. The point of the compulsory education system we have is that it creates order. Whether each child comes out at the end of it with a barrowful of qualifications is another matter, but it promotes structure and discipline. It does actually usefully occupy young people. It provides the reason to set the alarm and get out of bed, put your uniform on, show up and focus to some extent on the day. What do you do in the absence of that structure, outside the rules, outside society? Was he expected to sit at home educating himself online? One day with nothing to do would have had Ryan climbing the walls;
six months
?

St. Clare has him talking about his mother, how hard she struggled to bring up the three boys on her own, bouts of homelessness, debt, and depression, how difficult it was for her coping with Vito's death. He says it is only recently she has begun to function again, and I hear the subtext loudly; this is a poor guy from a messed-up family, whose mother already has a lot on her plate, and sending this son down, the next one in chronological order still alive, will probably push her over the edge. I think about Ms. Manley, about that single occasion in the toilet, the two of us alone. I know exactly how it feels to have a son killed; of course she's traumatized, of course it took time to get back to a place where it was possible to function, but I look over at her all dolled up in her designer gear, reeking of perfume, half her face concealed by those ridiculous sunglasses, the little skin you can see made up to the nines, and I see nothing that speaks of softness or
fragility or sadness. I see instead a woman with something skewed in her value system, something wrong with her priorities. If our circumstances were reversed, I could never have said the horrible words she said to me.

But then I can't determine the extent to which I have the right to judge her, and not just to judge, but to judge on my terms, in comparison with the life I've led. I've never had to bring up three boys on my own. I had one son, who had two parents, and raising him was still a hard task. My mother worked hard to provide, and Lloydie and I have worked hard to provide. We've never been loaded, never not had to concern ourselves with how much money we had coming in, but we have never been destitute, never been without a place to live or been dependent on the system to house and clothe and feed us. Lorna has been a single mother for most of Leah's life, she has done a grand job raising my wonderful niece, and she has done most of it singlehandedly, worked and grafted and raised her child to understand right from wrong, but she has never been without a solid support network. Did Ms. Manley ever have anyone to lean on, to help when she needed it most, someone to take the kids off her hands, occasional respite? And what difference does any of this make anyway? Am I suggesting she is blameless insofar as Ryan's death is concerned, that shitty life circumstances are a form of absolution? Because that's rubbish. Calling my son “collateral damage” wasn't the act of a person who is traumatized, it is the ignorance of a woman who does not know herself what's right or wrong.