by Bev Thomas
In the end, she helps me out.
‘It was just the once,’ she says, ‘what are the chances? I was sixteen weeks pregnant when I found out.’
‘Oh,’ I say quietly. I don’t trust myself to say anything else.
‘Tom and I were friends. I really liked him. That day – after the accident – he was really upset. When he came over, he looked so lost,’ she shrugs, ‘I just wanted to look after him. I made him some food and we hung out …’
She looks away. ‘We slept together. Just that once.’
Tom slept with Julie?
When she looks back at me, she tells me she knew it was a mistake. ‘As in,’ she adds quickly, ‘we were good friends. Anything more – I didn’t think it was a good idea. Besides, I was going away to college.’
‘And Tom?’
‘He agreed …’ She pauses. ‘But I had a feeling – well, that he might have liked it to have been something more.’
I feel a dull thud. A pain in my chest.
‘When he asked to stay—’ She looks away. ‘I – well. I didn’t know—’
‘It’s OK,’ I say, ‘it’s not your fault.’
She looks startled. ‘I know.’
I feel my face flush.
‘You weren’t much older,’ I say. ‘How did you manage?’
She nods. ‘It was tough, at first,’ she carries on, ‘being on my own. But look at him,’ and she speaks with such warmth and pride, ‘I wouldn’t change a thing. And my sister really helped.’
‘What about your parents?’
‘My dad has Parkinson’s. He’s quite frail. And my mum, well, she died when I was young. So, no grandparents on hand, but I have some really good friends. We do OK.’
No grandparents. And I feel the rush of something, a wave pooling into a sand hole on a beach.
I have to battle with myself to stay silent. Not to reach across the table for those thin shoulders and shake them. I want to blurt out, why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you let me help? Why didn’t you let me see my grandson?
I don’t say any of these things. We both remember the last time we spoke. That day, when she came over with Tom’s things. I was desperate. The bitter recriminations. I said awful things in my fury. I blamed her for Tom’s departure. I blamed everyone for Tom’s departure. Why on earth would she have called me? Why would she have wanted me in her life?
‘I am assuming—’ and of course I don’t finish my sentence, my eyes feasting on this sandy-haired boy.
‘What is it they say?’ she smiles. ‘A baby is designed to look like the spitting image of its biological father. Ensures the survival of the species – nature’s way to make men stick around – and be monogamous. Not that that applied to me and Tom,’ she laughs, then looks embarrassed. ‘I’m so sorry.’
She doesn’t need to say it, but she does. ‘It’s his. There was no one else.’
It’s mesmerising. Magical. Like I have a small video camera in my hand, and I have the chance to watch and play back Tom’s early years. I’m utterly transported. And yet, at the same time, it’s another feeling. This is not my son. This is my grandson. And I feel awash with love for this delightful small innocent boy while simultaneously feeling full of sadness for Tom, that he too isn’t sitting here with me.
‘And what about Tom?’ I ask, again trying to sound casual. ‘Any news since then?’
She shakes her head. ‘Nothing.
‘When I heard he’d gone, well, I needed to move anyway. I had a friend round here. She managed to get me a housing association flat. It wasn’t an easy time for me,’ she says carefully.
I nod. I understand.
I look down at Nicholas. ‘How old is he?’
‘He’ll be one in a few weeks. A May baby.’
Suddenly, she glances at her watch, ‘I’m sorry, Ruth,’ she says, ‘I have to go.’
I feel a sudden lurch of panic.
‘So soon?’
‘I have to pick up Jess from nursery.’
‘Jess?’
‘Frank’s – my boyfriend’s – daughter,’ she says. ‘We met at one of those baby music groups. He’s a single dad. We hung out. Kindred spirits, I guess. And then – well, we got together,’ she says simply.
Frank. I can see she loves him, but I have the feeling that she’s trying to downplay it all. Perhaps she’s thinking about Tom. Trying to protect me. I’m not really thinking about any of this, I am just panicking that this person is about to exit my life, just as quickly and unexpectedly as she has come into it.
My words sound clunky and clumsy, ‘I would really like—’ I look down at my hands locked in my lap. ‘I’d really like to see you and Nicholas again.’ There’s a pause. I feel desperate and exposed and acutely aware of the circumstances of our last encounter. I wince. She’ll remember it as well as I do.
‘That last time,’ I say, ‘I’m really sorry I—’
I am fortunate. Motherhood has softened Julie. She shakes her head as she picks up his plastic beaker. ‘It’s a long time ago.’ She hesitates. She looks at me across the table, a knot of fingers in my lap. ‘Let me take your number,’ she says.
She doesn’t offer hers – and in the days that follow, I will admonish myself for not asking. How stupid of me, I’ll think. She doesn’t put it on her phone. Instead, she scribbles my number and email on the back of a leaflet she’d found in her bag.
I feel a lurch of anxiety watching her stuff it back into her bag. This small scrap of paper that could flutter away in the wind, or be accidentally thrown out with the recycling when she gets home. I say nothing. What can I say? By then, she’s distracted by Nicholas, who is pulling on the straps of his buggy, arms stretched out for the door.
‘Please,’ I say, ‘do get in touch.’ And then we hover awkwardly, not knowing whether to embrace; in the end, I reach forwards and give her a small jerky hug. I brush my hand over the soft hair of my grandson. ‘Bye-bye, Nicholas,’ and I wave. My grandson.
*
The train as it hurtles along the tunnel feels loud and dirty. The platform is full of people. I look at them all, reading papers, looking at their phones; I want to go up to each and every one of them and shake them, rouse them from the stupor of their own introspection. I am a grandmother. I have a grandson. Nicholas is my grandson, is what I want to say. Not say, but shout into their faces. Sing. Laugh. Run along the platform waving my hands above my head.
The train is crammed and I hear the child as soon as I step onto the carriage. It’s full, people are clinging to the handles, bobbing and jerking with the movement of the train, faces set into expressions of stoic resignation. The boy is small, no more than two, in jeans and a red anorak. If it wasn’t for the fact he was pulling on the bottom of her jacket, it would have been impossible to tell who he was with.
‘I. Want. Water. At. Home,’ he wails. He’s repeating the words, in between great hiccuping sobs. His tear-stained face is red with the crying.
I can remember travelling on the tube with the twins, caught out suddenly in those early years. Mistiming food or drink – and how quickly the situation could spiral into something intense and catastrophic. One of them starting to whine. Trying to comfort them, the other one starting to cry, me feeling embarrassed in front of my fellow passengers as they exchanged looks of discomfort.
This woman doesn’t look round at us. Her straight dark hair is tied back. Her face is pale. The boy is on the seat next to her, as she stares straight ahead, her face impassive. The tube rattles through the station. The doors opening and closing, people get off, more get on, we all shuffle up. The boy repeats the phrase over and over, his lips making a small circular shape, as he lingers over the ‘o’ in home. Still nothing from the woman. Only her stony-faced expression, staring out of the window opposite. His crying ratchets up a gear. More hysterical, more plaintive. Still nothing. I. Want. Water. At. Home. Some of us are exchanging glances. One man looks over, irritated by the noise, but it’s the mothers among us who feel
a sense of unity and camaraderie. I feel we’re joined in our incomprehension of the woman. Her poor mothering. Her negligence. Her ignoring the needs of her small child.
The anger settles in my chest. It creeps up to my throat. Without thinking, I scrabble through my bag. I find a bottle of water. Unopened. I hold it out to him.
‘Here,’ I say, ‘water.’ The little boy is stunned by the sudden movement. He stops crying. He holds his hand out and grabs for the bottle. His eyelashes are heavy with the next downfall of tears, and when he blinks at me, they tumble down his cheeks. ‘Water,’ he says, a look of glee on his face. I look over at the mother. I’m expecting a smile. Gratitude. A hand on my arm. A mouthed thank you, as the relief smooths across her stressed face.
But none of these things happen. Instead, she leans forwards, and snatches the bottle. By now the boy has his small fingers clamped round it. He’s holding on tightly. Shaking it up and down, delighted by the bubbles. With a quick deft movement, she prises his fingers off and holds it out to me. She says nothing. The boy is now stamping his feet. Waving his arms above his head, as if trying to bring the bottle back down towards him. ‘Water,’ he wails, ‘water.’
He turns his face desperately up towards me. His big brown eyes are pleading. The mother’s face is hard. Bitter. Mind your own business. How dare you?
Perhaps it’s my surprise, or the sight of the boy waving his arms, but I am slow to take it back from her. So slow, in fact, that she gives up waiting – and simply releases it from her fingers. It drops onto the floor. It rolls back and forth as the train shudders into the station. We all follow its erratic journey as it hits a man’s shoe, a suitcase, then rolls into the corner. The boy moves to run after it. The woman pulls him back sharply. More shrieking and sobbing. ‘Ow,’ he cries. Now everyone in the carriage is staring at me. The attention has moved away from the mother and her boy. Like I am the source of the disturbance. Another jolt of the train, and the bottle slams against the door. A man tuts. A sigh from someone behind me. The bottle seems to have a life of its own. Each lurch reminds the boy what he was given and has now lost and reignites a crescendo of sobbing. I make a quick grab for the plastic bottle and stuff it back into my bag.
I look towards the women who I had deemed to be allies. The bond that I read as camaraderie now seems judgemental. When the train pulls into the next station, I jump off and sink down onto a bench on the platform, my head in my hands.
By the time I get home, the earlier euphoria of my chance, life-changing encounter in Balham has dissipated. Having felt so full, I now feel utterly bereft. I begin to feel panicky at the thought that Julie may not contact me. Short of hanging around the Holland & Barrett on the High Road, I may not see her, or Nicholas, again, and the realisation sits like a lumpen weight in the pit of my stomach. In the days that follow, I wonder if I imagined it all. That I have conjured him up out of nowhere, because that’s what my mind does. Over and over, I admonish myself for not having asked how to contact her. The need to tread carefully overtook my need for certainty, to have a telephone number on a piece of paper in my hand. I feel stunned by the poor choice I have made.
The email appears a few days later. It’s short, non-committal, but friendly. I’ve attached some photos. A few milestones for you to see. I click on them, elated. I look at each one in turn. Amazed all over again by his small face, the likeness to my son. There’s one of Nicholas at a barbecue, with ketchup round his mouth. One of him in a park, a yellow bucket balancing on his head. There’s another of him laughing as he sits in a blue pedal car. The one I like the most is one of him on a beach. It reminds me of an almost identical one I have of Tom and Carolyn in the Isle of Wight when they were the same age. Nicholas is wearing swimming trunks with fish on them. He has on the blue and white gingham hat and he’s looking up, grinning and pointing at the camera with his small sandy hand.
I print them all out. I pore over them, my eyes scanning every inch of his face and body. I print out smaller versions. I scrabble about for magnets to display them on my fridge. I move them about, this way and that to make a collage. I stand back and admire them. I do this because I am full of pride, but also because I want to feel like an ordinary grandmother who puts pictures of her grandson on her fridge. All day, my eyes are drawn to these new smiley colourful additions. Whenever I come into the kitchen, I see them straight away, and when I do, I feel a new sense of warmth, of satisfaction, for their newfound place in my kitchen and in my life. I email Julie back and thank her.
In the morning, I pick the beach picture from the fridge and put it in my purse. I tuck it behind that plastic see-through part of the wallet. It’s what I see other people do. And, because I want to feel like everyone else, I do it, too.
Thirteen
That week my sleep is erratic. The pattern is the same. I fall asleep quickly, then get pushed awake by vivid dreams. That night, I’m out at sea. I’m on a small boat with a group of people wearing life jackets. We are there for a reason. There’s the air of purpose, but I have no idea what it is. It’s after dusk, and the sea is choppy, rocking us back and forth in dark navy water. I’m following the others, scanning the surface, but I don’t know what I’m looking for. All of a sudden, there are shouts, people point, and we swerve in that direction. As the boat dips and falls in the waves, I see the face of a child. It’s a baby. Nicholas. I reach out to heave him up onto the boat, but he slips through my arms. I call to him, then I feel a surge of horror as I see all the waves have small bobbing faces. There’s Tom, Dan and others I don’t know. There is panic. Mouths open. Arms reaching up out of the water. Their faces are pleading. Desperate. The people on the boat aren’t helping, they are talking – looking in the other direction. Each time I lean down, the waves roll over, and the faces disappear. I wake with a start, I sit bolt upright. My eyes pinned and alert. It’s 5.25 a.m.
As the week edges towards my session with Dan, I feel an increasing sense of dread. Just as he made references to being on a cliff edge, I too feel like I have been left hanging, as I await the next instalment in his dreadful narrative. Given his uncharacteristic level of self-disclosure at the last session, I have a strong feeling that he might not come, and I already know I’d feel both relieved and worried by his absence.
In the event, Dan arrives on time, and while I am prepared for a withdrawal, a retreat from me and the process we have begun, he starts with an attentive eagerness.
‘I was looking forward to coming today,’ he says, striding into the room. Then as he sits down, he makes a point of looking me in the eye. ‘I wanted to thank you,’ he says. ‘Last time I came, it’s the first time I’ve ever talked about that stuff – I’ve never been able to talk about any of it before. There’s something that happens – here with you,’ he shrugs, ‘makes it OK to talk.’
His gaze is still, intense, and I feel a rush of something. A kind of satisfaction. But in the next breath, he mentions something about college, then the name of a film that I don’t catch and immediately I feel him pull away from me. He sits forwards in his chair, drapes his hand over his forehead for dramatic effect, and in an Eastern European accent, he says, ‘Ich kann nicht wahlen. Ich kann nicht wahlen.’
He waits for a moment, then looks up at me expectantly.
‘Any ideas?’
I feel a stab of irritation, and before I can find a way to turn this into words, I feel the nudge of a memory. Being a student, sprawled out on the floor of the common room watching a film late at night eating spaghetti with garlic butter. The memory pushes back and forth, like a wave on the beach. Nothing comes. I stare back at him. My face is blank.
‘Sophie’s Choice,’ he says eventually. ‘She says she can’t choose,’ and he flutters his hand wing-like in the air between us. ‘But then,’ and he folds his hand into a fist that he bangs into the side of his leg. ‘She does. Her son lives. Her daughter is sent to the gas chamber.’
There’s an odd expression on his face. Totally unreadable. I feel a heav
y weariness.
I make a comment about the split between reality and fantasy. I talk about how perhaps it feels safer for him to be back in the world of films, the world of ‘make believe’, rather than in his real life – which sounded so painful.
‘The film references feel distancing,’ I say, ‘like you want to push me away.’
He reels back a little. ‘They’re important,’ he says, ‘perhaps if you paid more attention to them, you wouldn’t find them distancing – but quite the opposite.’
I feel stung.
He sits forwards again.
‘Sophie is in Auschwitz. She’s forced to make a choice. If she didn’t – both her children would die.’ His tone is educational, informative, like I’m a student in a class. ‘Most mothers don’t have this dilemma on a daily basis, but it illustrates an important point. A taboo.’
‘A taboo?’
‘Mothers have favourites,’ he says simply. ‘We have preferences for everything else in life, yet it’s such a taboo to think that applies to children. The party line is that parents love their children equally. Every parent will say they don’t have a favourite. It’s a lie.’
He pauses, looks at me pointedly, and again I have the sensation that he can see right inside me. That he’s talking about me. I feel uncomfortable. Exposed. As if he’s referring to Carolyn and Tom.
‘I don’t understand,’ I say, shaking my head slowly. ‘I thought you were an only child?’
‘I was,’ he says, ‘or thought I was,’ he corrects himself. ‘Turns out I had a brother. Michael.’
He speaks quietly, as he tells me what happened. Tells me he always had a sense of something hidden. A secret. And how one day, he climbed up to his mother’s wardrobe, where he knew there was a box. An old-fashioned hat box with candy stripes.
‘Hidden,’ he said, ‘but colourful, like a present waiting to be unwrapped.’
Inside, there was a small wooden box, where he found a pile of photos of a baby and a birth certificate for Michael who was a year and a half younger. There were lots of Michael with their parents. But only a few of the two boys together. He tells me that, in every single photograph, this baby was ridiculously happy. ‘Michael was joyous,’ he says, ‘like a ray of sunshine.’
