The Mother (6 page)

Despite the valerian-vodka cocktail, I'm still awake an hour later, but when I hear Lloydie sneaking into our room, putting on his PJs as quietly as he can in the dark, I feign sleep. I do not move when I feel him slipping into the bed, careful not to touch or wake me. It is only when he turns his back to mine that I realize I am already crying.

THE NOISE OF THE SHOWER
wakes me. My head feels groggy, maybe because I had the two valerian capsules or too much vodka, or both. It feels early, but a glance at the clock radio tells me it is nearly nine thirty. I open the drawer beneath it, dig out the packet of paracetamol, and take two with water from the bottle permanently on the side. My routine morning assessment; this is a bad day. I close my eyes again, put my head back down. After the funeral, Lorna insisted I get my doctor to refer me to a bereavement counselor; in fact, she said we should both go, Lloydie and I, but he wouldn't. Lorna was right, it was exactly what I needed; Jenny, her name was, such a lovely woman, with the eyes you would expect of someone who does such a job and does it well, brimful with empathy. I was furious with everyone at the time. My grief had made me fixated on blame, apportioning it as if it made any difference to what had happened. Tiny details were exaggerated in my mind till I was filled with rage for everyone including Lloydie, because of those boots. She helped me to
get things in perspective. Seeing her then probably saved my marriage, such as it is.

One of the things that came out of it was my strategy for dealing with days like this; don't expect too much from yourself. Itemize what needs to be done and tackle them one by one. Complete each thing in order before moving on to the next. Keep your list short. If I cannot make myself begin, my day will be spent here in bed. It is a hard desire to fight but I will, not because I have anything specific to do, but because I know from experience that the longer I lie here and do nothing, the longer it will take me to find the strength to get up. If I do not force myself to get moving, I could be lying in my bed for days. Mentally, I make my list.

I will only lie here till Lloydie comes out of the bathroom and back into this room.

When he does, I'll ask if he intends to come to court at all, or if he is just planning on sticking his head in the sand for the whole trial.

I will accept whatever answer he gives me then get up, brush my teeth, and have my shower.

I will get dressed and comb my hair—ha-ha.

I'll drink my tea.

This is doable.

Except Lloydie doesn't come back into the bedroom. I realize at some point that the paracetamol is kicking in and that it has been some time since the shower stopped running. Eighteen years and I know my husband's habits as well as I know my own. He has his shower, comes out, sits on the edge of his side of the bed with his towel underneath him, and creams himself before putting on his deodorant and getting dressed. I even know the order in which he gets dressed. His boxers are
first, then the socks, followed by his vest, his trousers, and his top last of all. When I hear the sound of a canister hissing I know he has taken the day's attire and all his toiletries into the bathroom with him. I wonder if he will be forced to return to collect his shoes from under the bed, but when he unlocks the door, I hear him crossing the hallway to the stairs and, from the sound, know his shoes are already on his feet.

I get up. I push my own feet into the slippers under my side of the bed and tie my dressing gown tightly around my waist. If he will not come to the bedroom, I will speak to him downstairs. I am halfway down when the doorbell rings. I retreat to the landing as Lloydie opens the front door and I hear familiar voices, Pastor Meade from the church at the top of our road and a couple of the sisters from his church who have been fairly regular visitors since the event, have given us much support. It is another of the things that have changed in our lives, the public forum our world has become. Really, truly, it is wonderful to know others are thinking of us, to know of all the people out there who want to help in some way, to be there for us, but sometimes it feels as though I have no privacy anymore, no longer an entitlement to choose who I spend my time with, where and for how long. Some days, like today, it's not condolences and sympathy I want, I just want to be allowed to do what I feel like, to stay in my jammies all day if I wish, to lie on Ryan's bed, to speak to my husband about what remains of our marriage and the commitment he made to me.

As Lloydie invites them in, I tiptoe back across the landing to our bedroom. He doesn't have a religious bone in his body but he's happy to fill our home with anything that means he and I will not be alone or in a situation where there is the
opportunity to properly talk. He has taken them into the kitchen. I hear the sounds of chairs scraping the floor, them settling in. I pick up the phone and call Lorna's landline. There is no answer. I ring her mobile, hoping she has maybe only just left and I'm not too late to go with her to Nottingham. Her mobile goes straight to voice mail. She's probably already zooming down the M1 motorway. I leave a message for her to give Leah a hug and kiss for me. Then I grab my towel and go to have my shower.

Lloydie is putting my cup of tea on the side when I return to the bedroom. He looks slightly sheepish, is probably annoyed with himself for the mistiming that has meant he has found himself alone with me when we are both awake and alert. He looks at me without speaking.

“Aren't you gonna ask how it went?” I ask.

It's not the question I intended, too in your face, accusatory. I didn't want to start the discussion here but it's out now, I can't take it back.

His tone is dutiful. “How did it go?”

“It was hard. Listening. Seeing that boy, his mother. Very hard.”

He sits down on the bed, bows his head, and cups his face with his hands. His hair hasn't fallen out. It is as full as it has ever been, but the last seven months have bleached it near white. If he didn't care, if he were unaffected, it might have made my response to him less complicated. Instead I know how impossibly hard this is for him. I know he blames himself and how much of that is down to me. But my empathy is matched by my anger, which wants to insist on more from him yet is frustrated by his fragility, the acute sense of attack
ing a helpless creature, which in turn fuels the rage that I have been made to be wrong in this, wrong to expect anything at this time from my husband;
my husband!

“I don't get it,” I say. “What the plan is. Are you just gonna dodge me and hide till this is all over?”

“Over?” he asks. “It's already over.”

“So the boy who killed him, you don't think he needs to pay?”

“What difference does it make?”

He's talking about Ryan and he's right; this trial won't bring him back, but should we all down tools, find a corner somewhere to sit and hold our heads?

“You should want to come.”

He says, “I can't do it, none of this, I can't.”

“But I can? You can't, but by some magic it's all a doddle for me? The strength just appears to me miraculously? You can just opt out and leave me to deal with this stinking shitty broken mess on my own?”

He doesn't answer. My voice has risen, is too loud, bordering hysterical. There are people downstairs. I sit at the dressing table, take the towel off my head, open the hair grease, rub a small amount between my palms then on my head, and look at myself in the mirror. I hardly recognize my reflection, hardly know who this person is, this balding screaming banshee; hardly recognize the people we've become.

He used to kiss and cuddle Ryan when he was a baby, but he started pulling back from physical affection almost in proportion to the rate at which our son grew, not because he did not love him, but because he did; he loved our son as much as I did, still does. But the image of fatherhood in Lloydie's mind is without words or caresses. It is a silent movie where he
can be seen repairing Ryan's bed frame, leaving pocket and dinner money on the edge of the kitchen table daily, tightening the brakes on his bicycle, checking the air in its tires. I know this about him, have always known it. But I gave Ryan enough of the soft things, enough openly demonstrative love to compensate for spaces where there would otherwise have been a lack. I never pressured Lloydie to dig deeper within himself, and it is probably one of the reasons our marriage worked, because Lloydie has no reserves to dig into, they simply don't exist. Our son's death has left him completely emotionally crippled. Unlike me, discovering internal resources I never imagined from the depths of my being, he can't deal with any of this. He's not lying.

“Those people downstairs, I don't want to talk to them. I'm getting dressed, then I'm going out.”

He doesn't look up. “Okay.”

“Will you be here when I get back?”

“Was gonna go to the allotment . . . I don't know.”

“Then I'll see you later . . . maybe.”

He finally releases his head and stands. “Okay.”

I wear a scarf on my head when I go out, drift down to the market, wander through the peopled space from stall to stall. It strikes me again just how many beautiful black boys there are in the world, how little I noticed of life with my old eyes. They saunter past me beatboxing aloud, wait outside butchers' shops beside trolley bags for their mums, are leaning against shopfronts or cavorting on the green, showing off and at the same time pretending not to notice the girls. They distract me, these young boys, cocoa-, demerara-, and vanilla-skinned, small and tall, confident and awkward, with
skiffles and afros and cornrows and futures, years filled with football and Wii, jerk chicken and study, hours spent peering into mirrors and carrying out the meticulous investigation of new baby hair on cheeks and chin. There are so many of them, so strong and dark and beautiful, alive everywhere, and their presence occupies me like an obsessive-compulsive disorder that breaks the heart.

When I leave the market it is without having bought anything, more of a resignation than an ending. The weather is holding up and so I walk in the direction of the park. The high street is busy with Saturday shopping traffic, the roads and pavements and bus stops are heaving. I stop at the corner of a block where it is possible to jaywalk rather than walk to the lights that you're meant to use to cross this busy road safely, notice once again that it is the perfect spot to die.

I wait there, watching the buses as they leave the stop about two hundred meters up the street. The traffic lights are another hundred meters past where I am standing. There are no zebra crossings or humps or reasons for a busy bus to slow and so they always pick up speed along this stretch. When Ryan was young, I read that a jeep traveling at thirty miles an hour that hits a child will almost certainly kill him. It stands to reason a bus maybe ten times that weight traveling at a similar speed is enough to kill an adult. I watch the bus that is at the stop fill with the queuing passengers and their shopping and bags, close its doors. It departs slowly, pulls from the curbside to the center, begins picking up speed. Precision timing is the key to ensuring the only life you take is your own. A person who stepped out too early would be seen by the driver, who might attempt to steer around them,
possibly crash in the process, and others might die. There is a point about five meters away at which, if the driver has his foot down, you could simply step off the curb in front of the bus and be instantly killed. I can see it is traveling fast enough already. As it gets closer, I begin to make out the features on the driver's face. It is almost at the perfect spot . . . nearly there . . .

I am stunned to feel the top of my arm being pulled, to hear the blare of the bus horn, to feel the gust of turbulence as the bus passes me, raising a whirlwind of street dust in its wake, and turn around to face a woman who isn't familiar, staring at me, scared.

“You okay?” she asks.

I blink furiously, wipe my left eye, can feel grit in it. My heart is pounding. I collect myself and nod. “Yes.”

She says, “You're the mother, aren't you?”

“Sorry?”

“Of that boy who got stabbed. The one who died. I read about it in the papers when it happened. It's terrible. My sons go to the same school. I don't know what I'd do if anything happened to them.”

She lied; she does know. She didn't just recognize me, she also saw the trail of my thinking. She knows too well what she might be moved to do, but lucky her, it wasn't her sons, it was mine. I don't want to discuss this, so I simply wait in the hope she'll move on.

“Are you sure you're okay?” she asks again. She doesn't want to leave me here, will not go.

“Yes,” I say and walk away. I hate unnecessary rudeness, and I'm acutely aware of just how rude I'm being, but I can
not talk to her, cannot talk about it. I walk away quickly in the general direction of the park.

I buy myself a cookie and a coffee from the café near the park entrance and go inside. I find a bench close to the swings, take a seat, observe the children playing, and listen to them laugh. I watch the mothers more critically than I ever did before, upset when they exhibit the same impatience I exhibited when my Ryan was young enough to be taken to the swings and old enough to be uncooperative.

That woman on the high street asked me if I was “the mother.” I don't think I am. The second Sunday after Ryan was taken was Mother's Day, and I don't know how I got through it, can hardly bear to think about the next. If it was possible to die of grief it would have happened that day. The worst part was trying to work out whether in addition to losing my son, I had lost my “mother” status, didn't know whether I still qualified, was unable to satisfy myself or be satisfied by the responses from Lorna and Leah and the masses of people who visited to help me make it through that wretched day. In the end I looked it up in the dictionary, found the definition. It said that “mother” is the relationship of a woman to her child. I have three dictionaries at home and I looked it up in each of them. None of them explained whether that status was rescinded if there was no longer a child for such a woman to have a relationship with. So am I a mother? I don't think I am, but it is too complicated to explain to every person I meet, too loaded and depressing. When people ask if I'm okay, it is exactly what they do
not
want me to elaborate on, another issue I cannot discuss, one more thing to swallow and hold down.