Wronged Sons, The (2 page)

On our way home, Emily and I took the dirt track past Harpole Woods where Simon’s runs sometimes passed. Emily was naive as to how worried I was and became frustrated that our make-believe safari had failed. She kept throwing Flopsy, a now threadbare toy bunny he’d bought her, onto the path. I’m ashamed to admit I lost my temper and shouted at her to stop it. Her face scrunched up and she bawled, refusing to accept my apology until I carried her home.

Even Oscar had grown sick of being walked, and dragged his heels behind us. I must have been a strange sight; a perspiring mother with a screaming toddler in one arm, dragging a knackered dog behind me, and all the time searching for Snaggle Waggles and my husband’s dead body.

5.50pm

‘Six o’clock,’ I told myself. ‘All will be okay at six o’clock because that’s when you always come home.’

It was Simon’s favourite time of the day; when he could help bathe the kids, put them to bed and read them stories about Mister Tickle and Mister Bump. It eased his guilt for the missed parents’ evenings and the weekends he’d spent hunched over a drawing board. I’d have to keep reminding him it was a means to an end.

Robbie and James already announced their return from school by bursting into the kitchen and raiding the biscuit barrel. James tried to grab my attention to explain something about his friend Nicky and a Lego car but I wasn’t listening. I was too on edge.

I threw some fish fingers under the grill and set the table for dinner. But every couple of minutes my eyes made their way towards the clock on the wall.

When six o’clock came and went, I could have cried. I left my food untouched and stared out of the window, into the garden.

In those gorgeous summer months we often finished the day on the patio, poured ourselves a couple of glasses of red wine and enjoyed the life we’d made for ourselves. We’d talk about the funny things the children had said, how his architectural business was coming on and how one day we’d have enough money to spend the rest of our days in our own Italian villa. The only interruption might be from Oscar’s excited yelps as he chased startled frogs around the rocks by the pond.

I hurried the children through their bedtime routines and explained that daddy was sorry he couldn’t be there but he’d gone away for work and wouldn’t be home till late.

“Without his wallet?” asked James as I tucked him in. I paused.

“Daddy’s wallet is on the sideboard. I saw it,” he continued. I tried to think of a reason why he wouldn’t need it. There wasn’t one.

“Yes, silly Daddy forgot it,” I replied.

“Silly Daddy,” he tutted, before wrapping himself between his sheets.

I dashed downstairs to check if he was right and realised I must have passed it countless times throughout the day. It was always the one thing Simon remembered before leaving the house, even when going out for a jog.

And it was that moment I knew for sure something was wrong.
Really, really
wrong.

I called his friends to see if he’d gone to one of their houses. I was sure the click of each receiver was followed by me being the subject of pity once more, even if it always came from a place of concern. I flicked through the phone book for the numbers of local hospitals. I found three across the county and called them all, asking if he’d been taken in. It pained me to think he could have been lying in a hospital bed all day without anyone even knowing who he was.

I anxiously tapped my pen on my thigh as receptionists trawled though admittance forms in search of his name but there was nothing. I left them with his description, just in case he turned up later, unable to speak for himself.

My last resort was to phone his dad and Shirley. When she confirmed he wasn’t there either, I made up another excuse and told her I must have mixed my days up as I thought he was popping over. Of course she didn’t believe me. Simon wasn’t the ‘popping over’ type where they were concerned.

I was so desperate I even contemplated trying to contact…
him.
But it had been well over a year since his name had last been mentioned in our house, and I wasn’t even sure how to find him anyway.

My fears were interrupted by the phone’s ring. I banged my elbow on the sideboard and swore as I raced to pick up the receiver, and then let out a disappointed sigh when Steven’s wife, Annie, spoke.

“Is there anything I can do? Do you want me to come round?” she asked, concerned.

I said no and she told me she’d call later but it was my husband I wanted to hear from, not my friend. All I could think about was that Simon had been gone for the whole day and nobody knew where he was. I was angry with myself for not being alarmed when Steven had first called in the morning.

What kind of wife was I? I hoped Simon would forgive me when we found him.

9pm

By the time Roger and Caroline arrived a few minutes after my call, the day had suddenly caught up with me. My body and brain were frazzled.

The first thing they saw when the front door opened was me bursting into tears. Caroline hugged me and walked me back into the lounge where I’d spent most of the night waiting by the phone. Roger had known Simon since infant school, but switched hats from family friend to detective sergeant as we tried to piece together how he might have spent his final moments in the house.

We exhausted every possible scenario as to where he could have gone and who with. But when it came down to it, neither of us had the first clue. Reluctantly, we resigned ourselves to the fact he’d vanished.

Thinking that was hard; hearing his best friend echo my thoughts was harder. And making it official made it all the worse. Police protocol meant we had to wait twenty-four hours before we could report Simon missing, but Roger was willing to bend the rules and called his station to explain.

“God, Caroline, what’s happened to him?” I asked, my voice trembling. She couldn’t give me an answer so she did what she always did when I needed a best friend and told me what I wanted to hear.

“They’ll find him, Catherine, I promise,” she whispered and hugged me again.

I was trapped in a horrible nightmare that happened to other people, not to me, not to my family and not to my husband.

***

Northampton, Twenty-Five Years Earlier

June 4, 5.30am

I quietly rolled onto my side and glanced at the pearly white face of the alarm clock on the bedside table. Half past five, it read. It had been eighteen months since I’d last managed to sleep any later than that.

Our backs were connected by barely an inch of flesh but I still felt the delicate rise and fall of her spine as she slept. I pushed myself away from her. I watched as a fragile sliver of creamy orange light gently illuminated the bedroom through a curtain crack and gave life to near-invisible specks of dust hovering mid-air.

I pulled the cotton sheet from my chest and gazed at the sun as it rose over the rape fields that enshrouded the bleakness of our cottage under a golden blanket. I dressed in clothes thrown over a chair and opened the wardrobe, careful to ensure the creak of its hinges didn’t wake her.

I fumbled for the watch that had spent most of its life hidden in a green box on a dusty shelf, before fastening it to my wrist. It clung tightly but I’d become familiar with discomfort. I left the box where it was.

I moved carefully and quietly across the floorboards and closed the door with little more than a whisper. As I headed along the corridor I paused outside James’ bedroom. I turned the handle and began to open his door before stopping myself. I couldn’t do it. It would do me no favours to see my son… to see any of my children.

The staircase groaned under each passing footstep and startled the slumbering dog. His amber eyes opened wide and he struggled to coordinate his sleepy limbs as he lolloped towards me.

“Not today boy,” I told him, offering an apologetic smile. His head tilted to one side, confused then disappointed at being deprived of his daily walk. He let out a deflated sigh and returned to his bed in a huff, burying his head under his tartan blanket.

I unlocked the front door and gently closed it behind me. I chose the quiet of the lawn over the crunch of the gravel pathway, opened the rusty metal gate and began to walk. There was no final stroke of a child’s hair; no delicate kiss planted on her forehead or a last glance at the home we’d built together. There was only one direction for me to go. Their world was still in sleep but I had woken up.

And by the time they roused, there would be one less tortured soul amongst them hanging on by his fingertips.

6.10am

The house behind me had already faded into my past by the time I reached the dirt-track lane that would carry me into Harpole Woods.

My thoughts were blank but my legs were pre-programmed to take me to where I needed to be. They lead me beyond the perimeters of the horse chestnut trees, through stubbly bracken that tried to tear the legs of my jeans and into the woodland’s belly, where the faded blue towrope had laid for months as a marker.

I picked it up from the ground and repeated the familiar pattern of feeling my way around it and tugging it until it was taut. The elements hadn’t broken through its fibrous body and I wished I had remained that strong.

Then I sat on a long felled oak trunk and looked above, earmarking the strongest branch in the canopy.

7.15am

I couldn’t remember a time when I’d last engulfed myself in such beautiful silence.

Two hours had passed since I’d removed myself from the swim. No children clattered around my feet. No radio blared pop songs from the kitchen windowsill. There was no constant spin of the washing machine drum on another endless cycle. Nothing to distract me from my thoughts – just the gentle hum of motorway traffic in the distance.

I knew it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d remained in that house another week, a month or for the next fifty years. After all the punches and kicks I’d taken and inflicted, I could not return.

I picked carelessly at clumps of dry moss flourishing on the trunk’s damp bark, as I recalled the day it had all become too much for me to bear. I was standing motionless in the bathroom as the echo of her cries escaped from behind our closed bedroom door.

Her noise was gradually becoming louder and sharper until it pierced my skin and barrelled its way through my veins and up into my head. It felt ready to burst, so I clamped my sweating palms over my ears as if to stop it. But all I heard was the rapid beat of my own wretched heart - a hollow, despicable ticking inside a soulless carcass.

Then it hit me with a force so sudden that I collapsed to the floor.
There was a way out of all of this.

I could rid myself of my torment if I accepted my life had run its course and committed suicide. Immediately the throbbing in my head began to ease.

If I’d forgiven her or she’d forgiven me or if we’d made a Faustian pact to forget everything and everyone that had come between us, it wouldn’t have mattered. It was simply too late; we were irreparable. Stones had been cast and glasshouses lay in shards all around us. Inside I was dead; it was time for my exterior to follow suit.

I let out a long breath I wasn’t aware I was holding. A decision of such magnitude would be perceived as drastic to most, but to the desperate it was obvious. It would mean I could finally gain control of my life, even if it was only to end it. Now I understood the sole purpose for living was the planning of my death; I felt my burden rise from my shoulders.

Like her, I too had mourned, but silently and for different reasons. I wept for what she had done to us all; I wept for the future we should have enjoyed together and for the past she had worked so hard to destroy. We had wept together and apart for so long, grieving for contradictory losses. Now she would weep alone.

Over the following weeks, I wore my supportive husband, stable parent and loyal friend masks convincingly. But underneath, I remained preoccupied with being the master of my own demise. Searching for the right time, the right place and the right means to my end became obsessions. I mulled over options from an exhaust fume filled garage to acquiring a shotgun licence, from leaping off a motorway bridge to tying breezeblocks around my ankles and throwing myself into the Blisworth canal.

But for the sake of the children, first, I had to tend to her, as she needed to regain the tools to resume her journey before the wind was knocked out of her sails again. So I took control of the day-to-day nurturing and support of our family until her physical and mental health gradually improved. And as she began to blossom, my decay continued.

There would never be a good time for her to discover her husband had taken his own life. But I knew even at her lowest point, she was stronger than me. Eventually she would rise from my ashes to raise our children to the best of her ability. What she would tell them of my death would be for her to decide. I had loved them dearly but they weren’t wise enough to see who their father really was or to identify his flaws. I hoped she might keep it that way.

Meanwhile, I’d settled on a method and a location I knew like the back of my hand. A place where one of my darkest secrets lay buried - the woods near to our home.

My plan was simple. I would climb a tree, loop the towrope over the branch and affix a noose around my neck. Then I’d let myself drop and pray the severing of my spinal cord would accelerate the speed of the inevitable. I hoped my life wouldn’t slowly drain away from its stranglehold instead.

It was what I had to do. What I had planned to do. What I had been to the woods many times to do.

Only when it came to the crunch, the end result was always the same. I couldn’t do it. Five attempts over a fortnight finished with me facing the canopy with the rope in my hand but unable to take that final, fatal step. And after a time, I’d return home to her as broken as when I’d left.

It wasn’t the act of killing myself I feared because there was little in the world left to scare or scar me. Nor was it guilt at leaving my children without a father because I’d already disconnected myself from them without anyone noticing.