The Mother (7 page)

It is ironic there is so much I can no longer talk about when inside I am filled with speeches. I want to get up and talk to those impatient mums, want them to know how fragile is the gift of children that has been given them, how easily and irrevocably they can be taken, how precious every moment is, every second and hour and day, the infinite joy in their possession already, the exact value of which can only be precisely measured in its dearth. I want to teach them to rejoice that they have no difficulty answering when someone asks as simple a question as “You're the mother, aren't you?” But of course, I don't. I just watch them and sip my coffee and eat my cookie. And I listen to the laughter and occasional cries.

From where I am sitting I can see the blocks of social housing where Tyson Manley's mother lives, where he lived before he was in prison, really just a half-hour stroll from my home; a group of quick-build low-cost boxes, a Lego town occupying the ground between the entrance to the railway station and an imposing block of luxury apartments with floor-to-ceiling windows and huge balconies from where the view is no doubt spectacular, overlooking the park. There are places in the world I would never travel to, war zones where people live in daily fear for their lives, where families are all too familiar with violent death, the random bloody loss of those they love. They are the parts of the world I have never visited because I didn't want to face that kind of danger, the risks were too high. Instead I lived here in the UK, bought a cozy house in a quiet street and satisfied myself for years that I was lucky for it, and all the while looked sympathetically at charity adverts or snippets on the news of those victims of warring and genocide, and felt sympathy, as if I with my safe life in this safe land were exempted from it, truly believed we were.

The sun has gone behind the clouds, my hot coffee is now cold and the air chilly. I get up and begin to walk toward the estate. I don't know why. Perhaps to see whether I enter something like a scene from a Hollywood action film, gangsters on the corners and armed police with loudspeakers shouting, “Put your weapons down!” It is nothing like that. It must be about one now and the estate is quiet, peaceful even. The homes are a bit worn, slightly dilapidated; the railings and doors and windows could be improved with a fresh lick of paint. There is some graffiti, but it is not excessive, play equipment that looks like it's been in place for two decades, green areas gone brown. It's not perfect, but I've seen worse. I work out which house the Manleys occupy and I walk past it slowly, just looking. Their address was in a document I saw long before we went to court, had not been redacted on a report from social services, and it always surprised me, the close proximity of their home to mine, like the scene from
The Godfather
where a man wakes to find a horse's head in his bed, way too close for comfort.

The Manleys have an iron gate fitted over the front door, grilles on the windows downstairs. I look around and notice that almost all of the houses on the estate have these, and at once it makes the environment more sinister, more like the kind of place where special provisions need to be made to keep your family safe. The front gardens are tiny fenced areas, more of a container than an outdoor space, just about big enough for a wheelie bin and a recycling box. The recycling box outside the Manleys' is a black crate on the ground to the right of the door. It is almost full. I can see beer and empty cans inside it, newspapers neatly folded, an empty brandy bottle, carrier bags, the plastic packaging of frozen vegetables and oven chips, and I am stunned.

I continue to the end of the estate, turn around and walk back, check again, notice an empty toilet roll tube and some used tinfoil I didn't spot on my first pass. I walk back to and through the park and try to understand it, the notion that Ms. Manley would be concerned about recycling, that she would be actively trying to improve her carbon footprint, reduce energy, that she would wash out and set aside her empty glass bottles to reduce unnecessary waste going to landfill sites, that the mother of at least one son who kills people would go to the trouble of collecting and neatly folding the daily papers, conscientiously disposing of them, doing her part to save trees, protect habitats and endangered species. The logic of it defies me.

When I get home I find Lloydie has left and those visitors are gone. Though it is still fairly early, I make myself a vodka, drink it, pour another, sip the second one more slowly. I do not want people around me, yet my life is so full of space I hardly know how to fill it. I want something to do, to discover Ryan's mess somewhere. I want to find the milk for his cereal boiled over onto the plate inside the microwave, solid lumps of toothpaste cemented to the bathroom sink. I want my son, not just those moments that were so glorious but all of it, the upsets and frustrations and angst, everything that came as part and parcel of being his mother, his being alive. It is an impossible wish, and so I go to his room.

Sheba is already in there, curled up on the center of the bed. She looks up at me when I enter, is unimpressed, puts her head back down again, and drifts off. It is bright enough outside to see but still I draw my son's curtains, inhaling deeply while I do it because Ryan's room is losing his scent. At some point it will be completely gone and this
room will smell exactly like what it is; unoccupied. For the time being, however, I can still raise faint traces of the old smell through a couple of means, one of which is drawing the curtains, shifting them so they trap a pocket of air and billow. It is really hard to describe how I feel as I inhale and catch that scent. It is purely emotional and concentrated in the heart. There is a sweet sharp joy, piercing, exquisite. In equal measure there is an excruciating sadness that is physical, like the pain behind the eyes when you stare directly into the sun. The moment lasts a few seconds only, two or three at the most, then is gone.

I turn on Ryan's bedside lamp. It casts a feeble circle of light a meter in diameter against the darkness. I lie on his bed carefully, arranging myself around Sheba as he did, so she is not disturbed. I lie on my side facing her, put my hand onto her soft warm back, and stroke. She unfurls beneath my fingers lazily, tries to rub the side of her face against my hand, purring like a diesel engine. She was always Ryan's cat, slept in here with him every night. Ryan wasn't a tough guy, a macho man in the making, he was soft and gentle and feely. Wherever he was in the house, Sheba would invariably be close by because she was guaranteed his time, attention, and affection. Even though he is no longer here, she still sleeps in his room, and sometimes I think she is the only living creature who remembers him with the same intensity that I do.

There was a day, about a fortnight after the event, when I had some laundry on the kitchen floor that I had finally sorted into piles after weeks of inactivity. I had run out of soap powder and walked to the corner shop to pick up some more. When I returned, Sheba was lying on one of the piles of washing. There was a pair of Ryan's boxer shorts in that pile
and she was rubbing the side of her face into the crotch and purring as blissfully as if it were catnip. I just sat down on the floor beside her and cried as I watched. I could understand it so completely, the way his absence amplified her need to connect with him, even if it was only through inhaling his scent; in fact, I was jealous. Propriety stopped me, but I wanted to do it too, lie on the floor, push her out of the way, rub my face into his pants in her place, deeply inhale.

Those were mad weeks. All I could think about was connecting with him. I read his schoolbooks, every word of every essay and answer and sentence he wrote, searching for his essence. I listened to the same boog-a-boog house music I'd spent years asking him to turn down,
please!
I watched the programs he'd loved that I had told him were polluting his mind, spent time in his room, sat at his desk, lay on his bed, pored over his image in photographs. I even went up into the attic, brought down boxes of memorabilia; an envelope containing every baby tooth he ever lost, bar one which he swallowed accidentally and cried because he worried his carelessness had cost him the hard cash the tooth fairy would have left for it (it didn't, still earned him in its absence two pounds); fingered the blue baby band placed on his wrist within an hour of birth, the wretched dried stump of his umbilical cord and peg, all the things I had collected that I imagined I would one day present to him, maybe when he was twenty-one or when he had a child of his own, or that he might discover in the attic after I had died, never dreamed I would need these worthless precious items so badly, that they would be all I had left of him, all I had left, otherwise I would have collected more, videoed every moment, recorded every word, bubble-wrapped every item he ever touched if
I'd thought for a second that he would be taken from me so early and they would be all I'd have to console me for the rest of my life.

I want my son. Want him so badly it hurts. Remembering him is not enough. Being in his room is not enough. Catching his scent is not enough. I want my son.

Lloydie returns earlier than he did last night and cooks. It is easier to eat the dinner he has prepared on trays on our laps in the living room rather than at the kitchen table, so we can both stare at the TV screen as though deeply immersed, taking the pressure off the silence between us and creating the appearance of being a normal married couple spending a regular evening at home.

I am angry with myself for wanting more from Lloydie, not because it is unreasonable to want more from him under the circumstances, but because my expectations are unfair. He cannot speak of feelings, never has been able to. It's part of his psyche. His father was a hard man, brutal with Lloydie and his sister. Their mother died when he was six and he grew up with a man who clothed and fed and disciplined them, nothing more. He never had a mother cuddle him when he was ten or twelve or twenty, never spoke while he was growing up with his father about feelings or emotions or life. One of the first things he told me when we were courting was that when he had children he intended to be better than his father was, that he would never lay a hand on them in anger, and he never did. He threw out those things from his own upbringing that were the worst and unacceptable, but he didn't replace them with positives, maybe he didn't know how, and I always accepted it, accepted every shortcoming for better or worse.

How he is sitting here this evening is how he would have sat here eating dinner a year ago. What made the difference was that Ryan and I would have filled the silence. This barrier is not of his making, it is mine; I'm the one who has changed. Impotence has closed down the one channel of emotional communication that was open to him before, and that he cannot communicate with me and cannot cope with listening to me talk about Ryan, when the only thing I want to talk about is Ryan, has meant I have stopped communicating as well. But how can I? How do I talk about those things that mean nothing to me? What do I do with all the other words stuck in my throat, my stomach, my heart? How do I ignore or simply bypass them?

I leave him downstairs afterward to watch TV on his own till he thinks I've fallen asleep, go up to my bedroom, and phone my sister. She is back home now and fills me in with the details of her day, the seven-bedroom student flat my niece now shares, the disaster of Leah's first attempts to cook unsupervised, the breadth of the campus, the drama of its autumn landscape, its beauty, how safe it makes you feel when you are there, and I love her for this as I listen to the subtext, know she is trying to reduce my anxieties, to allay my neuroses around rapists and killers and people who slip into the world of those you love most when least expected, to destroy everything you thought you had with but a thrust. I tell her to come tomorrow and have dinner with me and Lloydie, and she reminds me about tomorrow afternoon's Family Day. I had completely forgotten about it. She asks if Lloydie is going with me.

“I told him about it weeks ago,” I say. “He hasn't mentioned it. He's probably forgot.”

“You should try to convince him to go with you. It'd be good for him.”

There is much that would be good for him, but he's just not interested in any of it. I say, “I'll try.”

“I'm gonna be here,” she says. “Phone me if he's not going and I'll come with you.”

I say, “Okay. Thanks.”

“But try him first. Try your best to convince him.”

I say, “I will.”

“Don't go in all guns blazing. Be gentle with him, okay?”

I say, “Okay.”

I wake up when Lloydie turns the shower on, drift back off, and wake again when he comes out and goes downstairs. Once again he must have taken everything with him to the bathroom to avoid returning, being here alone with me in our room, yet another new routine to chip away at the supporting foundations of our marriage. A few more and it will be impossible to distinguish what remains of us two beyond the rising cloud of dust.

I remember the Family Day. It is an event organized by a charity that works with people who have lost someone close to violence. It was Nipa who put me in contact with them. I want to go to it, want us both to go, but I know he will be reluctant. I need to time it perfectly, warm him up in advance. I begin by smiling at him when he brings me my cup of tea. He says he's popping out to the supermarket for some bits for us and also Rose and Dan. I say if he'll wait, I'll go with him. I can see he is surprised. He agrees to wait. I have a wash and get ready quickly. He's standing by the front door with his coat on by the time I get downstairs.

We take the bus to the supermarket, passing our car, parked outside the house in the same spot it's been in for months. Despite my sister's advice that every woman should be able to drive, I've never learned, was happy to be dropped off and collected, and Lloydie was happy to add the chauffeuring around of me and Ryan to the job description of husband and father that he has always kept in his head. But he can't drive now, like he can't talk or come to court or go to work. He's been on sick leave from his job as an estate manager for over six months now. He can't concentrate for long on single tasks, except those that can be carried out on autopilot or involve his allotment. I think the best thing he could do for himself is to go back, bring some structure to his day, force himself into everyday discussions and conversations, begin the process of normalizing his life again, but he won't. He has opted out of every part of the life he had before, and unless something inside him shifts, unless something happens to make him want to, he will remain as stagnant as the Audi sitting on the curbside outside our home, lacking purpose.