The Mother (5 page)

Lorna hands me a tissue. I wipe my eyes. I hear someone else blowing their nose. It is one of the jurors, the older woman, the final juror. She looks like a grandmother, an indulgent grandma, wiping her eyes now because she is crying too, and she is not the only juror brushing tears aside. But Tyson Manley is not crying. As I watch, he yawns. He makes no effort to lower his head or cover his mouth, just yawns as he might do while perched on the edge of his prison bunk, and the opening of his mouth is accompanied by a stretch of his arms into the air, and when he brings them back down, he rolls his head around on his neck like he's a doing a warm-up. He adjusts his tie, loosens it, undoes the top button on his
shirt, then settles and is as he was before. He doesn't do it to annoy, to wind me up or offend the court, it is a natural act. He's been sitting in that chair all day and his limbs must be screaming from the stress of such a lengthy period of inactivity. I'm sure he's genuinely feeling stifled, yearning for a little fresh air. He must be, because I am. He is heedless of the jury members watching him, and it is clear from their expressions that that yawn has cost him.

Kwame continues. No breathing into my baby's precious airways or compressions to his failed heart could bring him back, though Kwame did not give up till the paramedics arrived, then watched as they tried themselves and likewise failed. He gave a statement to the officers at the crime scene where he named Tyson Manley, and the following day he went to the police station where a full statement was given and signed.

By the time Quigg has finished asking her questions, it is almost four thirty, and the judge adjourns the case until Monday morning at ten. Ms. Manley is the first to leave, snatching up her belongings, leaving the gallery swiftly without looking anyone in the eye. Though she is only a few seconds ahead of us, there is no sign of her in the corridor outside the gallery entrance. She obviously has the art of the clean getaway down pat. Perhaps I would also be an expert at leaving fast if I had raised my son to kill.

The cameras of the media flash mutely from the other side of the street as we leave with Lorna. Nipa drops the two of us back at my house, where I hug her before she departs, for everything, picking me up, coming along, being a solid and uncomplicated support to my world. I let myself in through
the side door that opens directly into the kitchen. It feels warm and smells of recently cooked food. It is almost six. I take my coat and Lorna's out into the hallway to hang them up and shout up the stairs, “Lloydie? Lloydie!”

On the mat inside the front door there are a few letters, which I leave, apart from one, obviously a card delivered by hand. I open it. On the front it says “Thinking of You.” It is from my neighbors, a very elderly couple who live next door, Rose and Dan. Ryan used to knock every evening to check if they needed anything. When he was younger, I used to remind him to knock, but as he got older, he took responsibility for remembering and popped around happily. With my mother in Montserrat and Lloydie's father so disconnected from our lives, they were the closest thing Ryan had to grandparents and they loved him to bits. They cried like close family when they found out he'd been killed. They are in their eighties and I'm confident his death has taken years off the finite number they had left. Amongst the things I wish, I wish Tyson Manley could be made to meet them, to explain to them how best they might accommodate their grief. Presumably he is able to compartmentalize his life, to detach the death inside it from the living parts. I wish he could see the life he's left me with, the way those two parts have been forged into one.

I read the card. A simple hope for the strength we need to get through this. I feel a lump forming at the back of my throat. It is always these little things that undo me. I swallow and take the card back into the kitchen with me, put it up on the window ledge beside a photo of my son.

Lorna is holding the raised lid of the doving pot in one hand and pops a piece of meat into her mouth with the
other. She looks at me, closes her eyes. “Mmm . . .” she says, “that's good.” Then, more of a statement than a question: “He's not here?”

I shake my head. Sit down. She goes to the cupboard, takes out two plates, opens the pots, and dishes up dinner for us both. I pull off my shoes, flex my toes, take off my scarf, cardigan, wig.

“Different people deal with things differently,” she says.

“He's not dealing with anything.”

“This is his way of coping.”

“He's not coping.”

“He's doing his best, Marce. Sometimes it's hard to see but most people are just doing the best they can in the circumstances they find themselves in.”

I wave a hand dismissively. “Give it a rest.”

“Do you want me to put yours in the microwave? It's kinda lukewarm. I'm happy to have mine like that, but I know you like your food nuked till it's too hot and you have to blow and wait for it to cool down for two hours.”

“Yes, please,” I answer. She's trying to fill the space with normal chatter, and I want to rise to it, to meet her partway, but it requires energy I cannot find. As she puts my plate into the microwave and her own onto the table and goes to collect cutlery for us both, I get up, take out an opened bottle of vodka, grab a couple of tumblers and a carton of cranberry juice from the fridge, and pour. Lorna puts my plate in front of me, sits down, starts eating.

“This is one of the advantages of having a husband, coming home to find the dinner's cooked.”

“It shouldn't be the only advantage.”

“Marce . . .”

“I know. Okay.”

“Don't you think there's a kind of natural progression between seeing your brother gunned down in front of your eyes and growing up to be a killer?”

“It's very sad.”

“It's heartbreaking. Y'know, some of these kids' lives are like a war zone. They see things that would give adult soldiers PTSD and it's like somehow they're just expected to absorb it and carry on; rinse the blood off your jacket, go to school, play football, skate. I bet that boy never received a day's counseling in his life.”

“I have to admit, I forgot to inquire.”

“And there's still another younger brother coming up.”

That's true; another sibling who has had his eldest brother shot dead, the middle brother a killer himself. What a legacy. What must that child be like?

Lorna asks, “Aren't you going to eat anything?”

“I'm not really hungry.”

“Got space for the vodka though.”

I take a deep breath, look at the plate she has placed in front of me. She has given me a chicken thigh, which will need to be cut. I look at the table knife lying innocuously beside the fork, know I can't do it. Sitting through the case today has brought me close to images in my mind of knives slicing through flesh that need internalizing again, and distance. I put down the glass, pick up the fork, move the piece of meat to one side, feed myself a mouthful of rice with gravy, resist the urge to open my mouth after swallowing, extend my tongue, show Lorna that the contents of my mouth are truly gone. I look away as she begins sawing easily through the breast on her own plate.

“I wish I could stay,” she says.

Leah has a cat, Ashanti, that she hasn't taken with her to Nottingham, that requires feeding, watering, letting in and out.

“It's fine. Wouldn't want your ear to the wall while me and Lloydie were getting our groove on. Probably be off-putting.”

“I think you mean off-putting for me.”

I swallow the food in my mouth, take my time responding. “Whatever.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Have a long bath. Watch telly. Stroke the cat.”

“Fun stuff.”

Yes, fun stuff. I'll sit here alone in silence waiting for what's left of my husband to come home, even though I know he won't be back till late, because he knows what he's doing is wrong, but he can't do differently, and because of that can't face me. I hope my smile doesn't look like I feel. “Exactly.”

Lorna leaves after we have eaten, after the phone rings and she hears me say, “Hello, Mum,” indicating with her hands I shouldn't mention she is present, snatching her bag and planting a goodbye kiss on my forehead, then is out the door so swiftly that even if I'd wanted to, there is no time for me to press her to reconsider. I was always the obedient daughter and she was the headstrong one. Though younger than me, she left home before I did, using university as her vehicle. She doesn't share my sense of duty, does not endure anything with anyone, from partners who almost make the cut to mothers too set in their ways to bend.

“How are you?” I ask my mother.

She answers, “Alive. What happened in court?”

My mother retired to Montserrat, five years ago. She spent her working lifetime putting every penny she could into building a house there, working double, sometimes triple shifts around the clock and around us, then watched for over a decade the effects of the volcano on the tiny emerald isle, the evacuation of most of her old friends and family to the far reaches of the world; was grateful she had built in the north of the island, one of the areas least affected, that she still had a home in a hot place to retire to.

Speaking to her is not an emotive process. She is a woman who deals in facts. I use the language of the courtroom to tell her about today's developments and she listens, interrupting only to ask for clarification of the occasional detail. She has never been led by her feelings, in fact the only time I have ever known her to be overcome by her feelings was the morning, the day after Ryan was taken, when I rang and told her he'd been murdered. Even though I was in the act of informing her, I was still in a state of denial. I had been to the hospital the evening before and seen him, my beautiful boy. All the damage was to his back, and because he was lying on his back when I looked at him, he could simply have been asleep. So when I phoned my mother, the words were coming out of my mouth mechanically while a voice inside was screaming that he couldn't be dead, a mistake of some kind had been made, though it was impossible to fathom how and just what the mistake was. When I told her what had happened and she cried, it was the first time I'd ever heard her cry, and because of it, that was the moment I realized there had been no mistake, that Ryan was dead, that it was true. By the time she got here for the funeral, those feelings had been packaged and compartmentalized. She went into action directing, organiz
ing, sorting things out with Lorna, cooking and freezing so much food for us before she left that it took us months to eat it all. Her response to calamity is to get busy. Ironically, her lack of emotion has made her one of the easiest people to discuss Ryan with.

When I have finished with the day, she says she will phone back on Monday, and says to say hello to Lloydie. As I put the phone down, it rings again straightaway. I answer. It is Leah, my niece, wanting to know how it went and how I am. She is the opposite of my mother, talks about her feelings and wants to know about mine. She is upset to not have been with us today, explains to me, as though I don't already know, that she had to enroll, move her stuff, but is hoping to come back to London on Tuesday evening and come to court with us on Wednesday. I force a promise from her that she will not do this, that she will concentrate on her life, her course, her future. She can ring me every day and I will tell her how it's gone, but I don't want her compromising her studies one bit. Then she tells me about her day, her “cozy” bedsit, her en suite, the smallness of which she describes in such detail that she makes me laugh, blessed girl, properly, out loud.

When that discussion ends and I put the receiver back down, it immediately begins to ring a third time, and I am tempted to ignore it, in fact I do for a while, but it doesn't stop. We disconnected the answering machine in the weeks following the event. There were so many messages every day and I could hardly concentrate enough to listen to them, never mind return the calls. Many were from journalists, and people I barely knew. The answerphone became an additional stress so we disconnected it and have not reconnected it since. Because of that, people determined to get through
can hold on forever and what happens is what's happening now; instead of being able to ignore it, I start to wonder if something has happened, perhaps to Lloydie, wonder if instead of bending, he's broken, had a heart attack over at the allotment, is lying slumped facedown in his plot. That thought makes me pick the receiver up, put it to my ear.

I say hello, but no one answers. I repeat it and the caller maintains their silence. A third time, the same result, and I disconnect the call and place the phone back on the charger. I really couldn't say why I'm so convinced it's her, but I am; Sweetie Nelson, the only connection between Ryan and Tyson Manley. It was her I saw this morning and she is the person ringing me now, holding on without saying a word, I'm sure of it.

I run a bath and leave the door to Ryan's room slightly ajar for Sheba to come and go as she pleases. I take valerian, two capsules, to help me sleep. I pour a glass of vodka and cranberry, a big one, light on the mixer, knock it back as I lie in the bath. It is almost ten by the time I get into bed and turn off the light. About twenty minutes later, I hear keys in the front door, know Lloydie has arrived back home. He does what he has been doing for the last seven months; stays downstairs with the TV on till he thinks I have fallen asleep.

There has been no intimacy since Ryan died, and part of me is glad because I don't know how to feel joy in my son's absence, cannot imagine how to kiss and be touched, feel thrill with the pleasure rise, no longer know if I am entitled or have a right. But Lloydie was never a talker, never really demonstrative outside of our bed. That was the place our disagreements were concluded, the only time he felt able to put aside his role as provider and supporter, husband and
father, the only place he allowed me to see his vulnerability, the strong man who never hurt me once, even the first time, who sometimes cried when he came. The absence of that intimacy is not just an absence of the physical act, it is an absence of the emotional bond we shared. I lie with my eyes open and listen to him and the effect is like the sound of a sad song. If there is a route to rediscovering our middle ground I do not know the way.