Wronged Sons, The (6 page)

“So I should stab someone and waste my life in prison then, would that be better, Kenny?” His cheeks exploded in a rainbow of reds as he banged both fists on the table.

“You know what I’ve got? Respect. And you can’t buy that.” And before I could process what was happening, he’d thrown his chair to one side, and I was six inches off the ground, pinned to a wall by an arm the size of an anchor.

“You ever look down your nose at me again and I swear to God, I’ll fucking kill you,” he shouted as bread and potato bullets flew from his mouth and sprayed my face.

“Kenny no!” shouted Doreen finally. She came towards us and tried to grab his arm. He swivelled around and her cheek took the brunt of the back of his hand. It sent her sprawling to the bare floorboards.

“Leave her alone you bastard!” I yelled before he punched me in the stomach, winding me, and then clamped me tighter so I struggled to breathe.

“Stop it, you’re hurting him,” pleaded Doreen, smearing a trickle of blood from her lip across a ghostly pale face.

“Maybe this’ll teach him a lesson,” he replied, pulling his arm back to punch me again.

“You can’t do that to your own son!” she screamed. He hesitated for a moment before letting me drop to a heap on the floor.

“I told you then to get rid of him,” he fired back before storming out of the dining room. The front door slammed as I fought for breath while time temporarily stood still.

“Why did you say that?” I gasped, utterly confused.

“I’m sorry,” she sobbed.

“He isn’t my father; Arthur’s my dad.”

“You have two, Simon. I just wanted you to get to know each other.”

Doreen attempted an explanation but I refused to listen. The truth was out, and so was I. I hadn’t even unpacked my suitcase when I picked it up and left. She ran up the street behind me, begging me to stay, naively believing Kenneth and I could work through our differences. But as always, she was fooling herself.

Arthur knew something had gone terribly wrong when I called from a telephone box at Northampton station begging him to pick me up the same day he’d dropped me off. But he never inquired as to what had happened and I never volunteered a reason why. I think he knew but secretly, he was just grateful somebody else’s son had returned.

I didn’t reveal to anyone the truth of my heritage. I locked Kenneth in a box inside my head and didn’t allow myself to think about him again him for twenty years.

Doreen reappeared a few months later on the eve of my fourteenth birthday. As three disconnected souls gathered in our hallway, my father and I knew we were too exhausted to go through the charade again.

I ran to hide in my bedroom without speaking to her and sat on the floor, my back pressed against the door, listening. Downstairs, Arthur turned down her request for forgiveness. She begged with all her heart but for the first time, he refused to relent. Eventually the front door closed and he retired to the kitchen, quietly weeping.

Later that night, I left the house and found Doreen waiting for me at the end of the garden when she thrust a green box into my hand.

“This is for you,” she said calmly, and tried to force a smile. “Always remember your mum loves you, no matter how stupid she is.” Inside the box lay a handsome gold Rolex watch. But by the time I looked up, Doreen was already walking away. I didn’t try and stop her.

With my mother gone for good, I sat on a bench in Caroline’s parents’ garden when Catherine caught sight of me from her bedroom window.

“Are you alright, Simon?” she asked, and I began to cry for Doreen and everything we’d lost. But I never told her about Kenneth. I promised myself there and then that I would never let Catherine down like Doreen had me. I would never deceive her, fail her, disappoint her or abandon her. I knew she would never hurt me, wound me, disillusion me or disappoint me.

And for nineteen years, I was right.

4.40pm

My feet must have grazed every road and cobbled avenue in the East End before I chanced upon where my mother once lived. But the square’s name wasn’t the only thing to have changed over time.

A looming tower of concrete flats had ousted her row of dilapidated houses, casting a bleak shadow over an already grey landscape. Everything I’d deplored during my fateful last visit had been demolished and replaced by a more contemporary, but equally hideous version of the same thing.

Disappointed, I gravitated towards a greasy spoon café to contrive a new plan of action. I ordered and an elderly waitress with a raven black beehive and a soup-stained apron carried a cup of tea to my table.

“Excuse me, are you from around here?” I asked as she shuffled away.

“All my life, darlin’,” she muttered over her shoulder.

“I don’t suppose you remember a woman who used to live in a house where those flats are now? Doreen Nicholson?”

“Hmm,” she thought. “I knew a Doreen, but Nicholson weren’t her last name. What does she look like?”

My father had never taken a photograph of my mother, well if he had, none had ever hung on a wall inside our house. I could remember how she smelled, sounded, laughed and sang. I could picture the hint of grey hiding in the roots of her hair, how her large gold earrings made her lobes droop and the Bardot-like gap between her two front teeth. But for years I struggled to put the pieces of a mental photofit together and create a whole woman.

“Ash-blonde hair, around five foot four, olive green eyes, quite a loud laugh. She lived here about twenty years ago.”

The waitress headed towards a wall of framed photographs behind the counter, and unhooked one from the wall.

“This her?” she asked, handing it to me. Instantly I recognised one of the four women standing in their uniforms around a table.

“Yes, that’s her,” I smiled and swallowed hard.

“Yeah, darlin’, I knew old Dor, she lived around the square on and off for a while. Worked here with me, ooh, a good few years back now. Poor cow.” Goosebumps spread across my arms. “Did something happen to her?”

“Yeah, she passed away, darlin’. About fifteen years back.”

“What happened to her?”

“That bloody fella of hers gave her one pasting too many. Bounced her head off the walls, the Old Bill said. He was a vicious bastard… gave her brain damage. She was in a coma and on machines for weeks before she went.” I closed my eyes and exhaled as I muttered his name. “Kenneth.”

Yeah, that’s the one. How did you know her then?”

“She was my mother.”

The waitress put on the glasses hanging from a copper chain around her neck and squinted. Then she sat herself down opposite me with a thump.

“Well blow me, of course you are… you’re Simon, ain't you? You have her eyes.” I was surprised she knew of my existence, let alone my name. “Ooh darlin,’ Dor said you was a handsome little bugger,” she cackled as I offered an embarrassed smile.

“She talked about you a lot, you know. She had a baby photo of you in a little locket round her neck. Well, she did till he made her pawn it. Never forgave herself for letting you go.” For a fleeting moment, I felt warm inside.

“What happened to Kenneth?”

“Locked him up again, didn’t they? Told the coppers she went for him and it were self-defence but the jury didn’t believe him. Got banged up in the Scrubs for life this time.”

The waitress introduced herself as Maisy, and lit up an unfiltered roll-up cigarette as she filled me in on missing pieces of my mother’s life. She recalled how Doreen and Kenneth began courting in their teens. When she fell pregnant with me, her parents and Kenneth insisted she had an abortion. But when Doreen stubbornly refused, he pummelled her in the hope nature would force her to miscarry. Even then, I was a resilient soul.

The first of her many swift exits began with a stay at a cousin’s house in the Midlands. Then Doreen met Arthur and he fell hopelessly in love with her. And aware she was pregnant with another man’s child, he offered to take care of us both. It was all the security an unwed mother-to-be with a bastard inside her needed. Doreen had love for her new husband, but he was unable to capture the heart of a conflicted creature. And after I was born, she knew a sedentary family life would never equal a passionate one.

So she returned to Kenneth, alone. The abuse continued, and when it became intolerable, she rotated between the three men in her life.

“Please don’t blame her, luv, she couldn’t stop herself,” added Maisy, despairingly. “She was a smashing girl, but she had a self-destructive streak. I got a feeling her old dad messed with her when she was a little ‘un, if you know what I mean. I don’t reckon she thought she deserved to be loved. She tried so hard to make Kenny a better fella, but he was born evil. You can’t change nature.”

No Maisy, you can’t, I thought, catching my reflection in the café window.

Doreen reappeared in London for her final swansong, soon after we’d rejected her. “She had nowhere left to go,” said Maisy. “She knew Kenneth was gonna be the death of her so she just held on as long as she could.”

And after the inevitable happened, her friends were unaware of where Arthur and I lived. With no savings to pay for a funeral, they clubbed together to offer her a respectable send-off instead of a pauper’s grave.

“I still think about your old mum,” added Maisy, her eyes moistening. “Always wished I could have done more to help her.”

“So do I, Maisy; so do I.”

*

The grounds of Bow Cemetery were laid out in square blocks, making my mother’s plot easy to navigate. ‘Doreen Laing – 1935–1976. God Bless,’ was all her substitute family could afford to have engraved on the concrete headstone. ‘Laing,’ I repeated out loud. I hadn’t even known her surname.

I tore out buttercups and long grasses and flattened stray pebbles with my hands. Then I lay on a bench close to her and soaked up the troubled tranquillity around me. I made up my mind to keep her company that night – my mother had spent too many evenings on her own.

My two fathers lived in contradictory worlds, but shared common ground when it came to her. They’d loved her too much but handled her rejection in very different ways.

Doreen and Kenneth. I’d fought to be so different from the people who’d created me, but I’d ended up exactly the same.

June 8, 3.10pm

“What the fuck do you want?” he began with a derisive snort. I didn’t reply. I sat calm and motionless; my palms face down on the table, staring at him, unafraid. “Well? You expecting an apology or something? Cos you ain’t gonna get one.”

Kenneth Jagger had planted himself behind a metal table in the visitors’ room in Wormwood Scrubs prison; his arms folded defiantly. Only there was little for him to be defiant about because he was a different man to the one I’d last encountered.

A merciless cancer had ravaged his bones and cut his body weight in half. His cheeks were sunken and hollow and chemotherapy had reduced his teeth to brown crumbs. The tattoos that once shone proudly on his tough, leathery skin had blurred and sagged as his muscles deflated. Doreen’s name and a heart were barely distinguishable under a layer of raised welts, like he’d tried to cut her out of him with a blade. Eyes that once craved esteem were now drained by fear.

“Don’t waste my time,” he spat.

“You don’t have much left,” I replied. He shot me a look that would have petrified the thirteen-year old me.

“Last chance. Why are you here?”

I was there because I wanted to know if my rotten apple hadn’t fallen far from his decaying tree. I’d dedicated much energy in trying to erase our biological link, but in the end, I was a chip off the old block.

“What did it feel like, killing my mother?” I asked.

He paused. Of all the things I could have asked, that wasn’t the question he’d expected. ‘Why did you do it?’ or ‘What’s wrong with you?’ possibly. But not an enquiry into the emotions involved in severing a human life.

“It was self-defence,” he finally replied. “The bitch tried to knife me.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

He frowned, puzzled of what to make of his flesh and blood. So I repeated myself.

“I asked you what it felt like to kill my mother.”

“Why do you wanna know?”

“I just do.” His faded, squinting eyes burrowed deep into mine.

“What happened to you?” he asked.

“I’m not scared of you anymore.”

“Well you fucking should be.”

I shook my head. “Kenneth, look at you - you’re no threat to anyone. Your time has been and gone. You’re a pathetic, dying old man who’ll only ever be remembered for bringing misery to people’s lives. Now answer my question please. What did it feel like killing my mother?”

He tried to pretend my words hadn’t rung true, but his fallen expression betrayed him. From the corner of my eye, I watched the second-hand of a wall clock rotate twice before he spoke again. And when he did, his bravado crumpled like a house of cards. His shoulders slumped and his arms unfolded.

“It was the worst feeling in the world, and I’ve done a lot of bad shit in my time,” he replied, choosing his words carefully. “It was like someone else was killing her and I was watching but I couldn’t stop them. I loved her so much but I never really had her. She was gonna leave me again and find you.”

“Why?”

“It tore her up not being part of your life. I told her she weren’t going, but she wouldn’t listen. My Dor never bloody listened. She started packing her bags instead.” His eyes became watery but no tears fell.

“I grabbed her and pulled her away but she reckoned she’d ‘wasted too much of her life’ on me. She was always saying it but this time she meant it. So I smacked her one, and once I started, I just kept going. I couldn’t let you have her.”

I sat in silence and digested Kenneth’s words. I felt no anger towards him; I’d invested too much time in hating the woman I’d built a life with to have any spare. Instead, I understood him.

“Thank you,” I said, finally. “I have something for you.”

I rolled up my shirtsleeve, unclasped the watch Doreen had once given me and held it out towards him. He looked at it suspiciously.