by Bev Thomas
There’s a pause when she goes to the kitchen. She hands me a glass of water and a cup of sweet tea. I put them on the table. My hands are shaking.
I sit paralysed as I listen to what I now know she’s going to say. The man takes over. Perhaps it’s because she hesitates or perhaps they have planned it that way. But it is he who tells me the details. The facts are unembellished, pared down. It is up to me to fill in all the emotions. The fear. The pain. The terror. The feeling that dominates is the feeling that belongs to me alone. It sits heavy as lead, the weight of my own guilt.
*
In the weeks and months to come, I will learn the full and horrifying details. That Dan (or Stephen) was in the flat when they came home. That he had neatly and deftly cut his way through the glass panel in the back door. While I have never been to their flat, over the months of the trial, I will come to know it like my own. The position of the lamp, the dining table in the middle of the lounge. The exact distance between the sofa and the windows overlooking the garden, and the number of paces that it will take to get there. I will be shown photographic evidence. And as I look away from the things I don’t want to see, I will see other things that I might one day have come to know about; the pattern of the curtains, the slate-coloured coasters, the pink of the roses in the garden.
Their flat was arranged over two floors, on the basement and raised ground floor. It was part of a large rambling Victorian terrace with shared communal gardens. It was the back door in the basement that was his entry point. He walked through the kitchen, took the knife from the drawer and climbed the stairs. He was waiting for them in the lounge when they came back, armed with the four-inch blade.
I will learn that Julie had taken Nicholas to Monkey Music, a local singing and music group she’d once told me about. A weekly class where he spent the session grinning and laughing away as he bashed at a cymbal. ‘Totally out of time,’ she’d laughed, ‘but he does seem to love it.’ I can imagine her pushing the buggy into the hall, unclipping Nicholas’s straps, lifting him out and him crawling to his toy box. The exact sequence of events is not entirely clear, but between the crime scene report, forensics and the statement from the neighbour, police were able to piece together the story.
There was an initial scuffle by the sofa in the lounge, which then moved over to the window. The evidence suggested that Julie had engineered this movement to the window, in order to save her son. There was an unequivocal belief among investigators that Dan had come for the boy. That his primary intention was to harm Nicholas. Little Nicholas. The boy he saw me swing up into the air. The boy who pressed his cheek against mine. The boy who brought me joy. The boy who took his place, just like his brother had so many years before. The baby boy who sucked up all the love.
A neighbour in the adjacent basement flat, working at his desk, gave an account of what happened next.
There was the sound of screaming, then breaking glass and I saw an object fly down onto the grass. I thought it was a large ball or something. It was only when I stood up from my chair that I saw to my horror it was a baby. My neighbour’s little boy. Nicholas. It was then that I rushed outside to him.
The police report concluded that it would have been obvious to Julie at this stage what her assailant’s intentions were. She managed to keep Dan talking long enough to find a way to get over to the window, smash the glass and hurl her son down onto the lawn. The post-mortem revealed that the injuries Julie sustained in the attack were instantly fatal.
While the drop from the window was high enough to cause injury, Nicholas’s age and size worked in his favour. He rolled himself up like a ball. He suffered a few minor scratches from the glass, and a bang to the knee from a stone on the lawn, but was otherwise unharmed. The press reports of the incident made much of his miraculous escape – and of Julie’s bravery.
One can only imagine the horrifying ordeal for this young woman. In her final moments, her thoughts were for her son, as she made efforts to save him from their frenzied attacker. Sacrificing her own life, for the sake of her child, embodies the greatest and most unselfish act of motherhood. It’s a tragic loss of life, but her bravery will, one hopes, be some comfort to her partner, Frank, and her young son, Nicholas, in the years to come.
Twenty-four
The desire to hurt myself is visceral. And for the first few weeks, it’s overwhelming. It’s not something that creeps over me, it arrives straight away, like a visitor at the door, presenting itself as an answer to my responsibility and guilt. An answer to the pain of this terrible ending. The outcome that I had been part of.
Once the visitor has arrived, it steps forwards at different times, giving me alternatives, showing me the things on offer. The things I could do. I allow myself to look. I stand by the roadside of a dual carriageway, watching the lorries as they thunder past, and I wonder what it would be like to step out and feel that hard metal against the softness of my flesh. Or when I cross the footbridge over the main road near our house, I wonder what it would feel like to simply drop down, my arms outstretched and have my limbs break, or my face smash against that hard, black tarmac.
These aren’t suicidal thoughts. I don’t want to die. I just want to hurt myself. To make the pain go away. In the early days, I am wired and jittery and unable to sleep. Robert comes around most days. Sometimes he just sits, as I pace up and down the kitchen, and on other days, when I feel lifeless and heavy, he reads to me, as I stare vacantly out into the garden.
Guilt has left a metallic taste in my mouth, and my stomach feels lined with acid. One afternoon, in the early days, before David comes to stay with me, I’m in the kitchen, making a cup of tea. The sky is a watery grey and the last of the white flutes from the magnolia have fallen, littering the grass with brown faded petals. As I stand in front of the kettle, the steam rises in great majestic swirls, and there’s a gentle rattle as the water comes to the boil, I reach across, and press my hand flat against the side. The steam billows, the kettle roars and the blue light clicks off.
I watch the skin on my palm turn red. It’s not enough. Not nearly enough. It doesn’t touch me. Two large soft blisters that I press and poke with my other hand. It’s nothing.
If people have been negligent, they deserve to be punished, was what Dan said.
The decision about what I need to do floats up, out of nowhere. And of course, once it’s there, it’s the most obvious thing to do.
If the nurses at the care home are surprised by my change in visiting hours, they say nothing. It’s only Claire who wants to know. ‘Are you on holiday?’ she asks, when she sees me for three days in a row. I tell her I’m on extended leave from work.
‘I’m so pleased to be able to spend it with my mother.’
I visit every day from two o’clock and stay until six. Sometimes my mother says nothing the whole time I’m there. Sometimes she is lucid and the conversation is benign and non-controversial: the weather, the décor, the woman in the room next door. Other times it’s like being battered by a raging sea, great hurling waves of fury and resentment that lash across my face.
In the afternoons, all the residents are wheeled into the day room. It’s an oddly opulent setting, with a grand antique table and red velvet curtains. The wheelchairs are lined up to look out over the gardens, a wide sweeping lawn, with red roses in the flower beds.
Mostly the people stare out misty-eyed and vacant, hands constantly fidgeting in laps, as if searching for lost things. When I have settled my mother down, a blanket over her knees, she leans towards me, her hand pressing into my arm.
I usually arrive after lunch, but today I am there for ‘tea’ at five o’clock. Over the last few months her mobility and dexterity have deteriorated. She can no longer feed herself, and a more recent problem with her stomach lining means she can’t keep solid food down. Her food is mostly pureed. Depending on her mood, it can be a painstaking process. I prefer it when she’s irritated, resentful and full of spite. The other days are worse. The days wh
en she sits small and bird-like in her chair, her face set in an ache of need. Her thin hair adrift, like cotton wool, so I can see the flaky skin of her scalp. Her pleading watery grey eyes are locked on mine, as I spoon the food into her mouth like a baby.
The first time it happens, the nurses are surprised.
‘It never happens at other mealtimes,’ Claire says, shaking her head. ‘She’s usually really regular. And good with the commode – never has accidents.’ She fusses about. She’s embarrassed, as if her own child has let her down.
They try to usher me away, back into the day room. ‘It’s fine,’ I say, ‘I can manage. Just show me where everything is.’
I wash my mother down. I clear away the mess. Help her into clean underwear. Still the eyes are fixed on mine. Her ‘accidents’ at teatime become a regular feature of my visits.
I wheel her to bingo in the day room twice a week. She stares vacantly at the numbers as I move them on the board. Sometimes, she finds enough movement in her arm to swipe it across the table and the small plastic squares are scattered over the floor. She is quiet and still, as she watches me on my hands and knees, picking them up from the carpet.
I bear the foul putrid smells. The disinfectant. The stale, stagnant air. The heavy anaesthetising air freshener that covers up the smell of body fluids. The sight of those shrinking bodies, papery thin and leaking. I swallow down my nausea. I let my mother rest her claw-like hand on my arm. I bear the forced jollity from the nurses. The fact that time seems frozen, punctuated only by the menial tasks of a mealtime, a trip to the toilet, or a visit to the day room. In between these activities, there’s a vast slow expanse of nothingness, when minutes seem like hours and I have to ration the compulsion to look at my watch. I bear it all because people who have been negligent deserve to be punished.
Negligence. It can mean so many things; doing too little, looking the other way, staying in a state of denial. At other times it can mean doing too much, and taking on a God-like responsibility over others. Over the years, I have been guilty of both; a kind of wilful myopia when it suited me, and an over-zealous desire to control when I felt that was called for. Somewhere in the midst of all this were other people’s lives.
*
Julie’s funeral was a small private event for family and close friends. I was not told about it. I didn’t ask to come. I did write to Frank to express my condolences. No doubt I was looking for forgiveness. Some nod, some recognition of my own sorry situation. He didn’t want to see me. I sent him books and links to organisations for support. Help for him, but mostly information on early childhood trauma for Nicholas. He didn’t return my calls, and after the third parcel I sent, he returned it with a short note.
Please do not contact me again. We are leaving London. We are moving to Scotland. I have family there. I want to build a new life for Jess and Nicholas.
He didn’t say he blamed me. He didn’t need to. I have family there. I thought back to our one meeting at Nicholas’s birthday. He was polite and civil and made conversation, but there was a guardedness, a wariness about him. No great warmth. He couldn’t have been delighted about my appearance out of the blue. And who could blame him? A connection to his girlfriend’s missing one-night-stand? His mother she met by accident, who ended up getting an invite to her son’s first birthday party? How did Frank feel? I wonder. I don’t think I gave much thought to him at all. So preoccupied was I with my own joy, my own sense of entitlement. My own need for gratification. If he’d had his way, I’m sure he’d have preferred to have nothing to do with me. Been happier if Julie and I had never met that day in Balham High Road. And of course, given how things turned out, he’d have been right.
When David discovered what had happened, he was incredulous. ‘Julie?’ It was so painful to see his sadness. It would have been easier if he’d shouted, had admonished me for what I’d done. When he discovered the news about Nicholas that had been hidden from him, he merely paced up and down the kitchen with a look of total incomprehension on his face.
‘Grandparents have rights,’ he insisted, much later on.
Poor David, he never even knew he had a grandson, before he was quickly whisked away.
I looked back at him. ‘I know they do,’ I said, ‘and if that’s something you’d like to pursue for yourself, then you must. But for me, this is the end.’ I shook my head. ‘I have no rights.’ David was silent. His face slack. He didn’t disagree.
Carolyn wanted to come back from Australia. I told her not to. ‘It’ll all take ages. You’ll be back by the time his trial starts.’ And she was. While she was away, she sent me letters and pictures; sketches that she’d drawn on the boat; giant sea turtles and latticed sea fans in purple and red. The legal process involved months of preparation. Delayed court dates, witness statements, psychiatric reports, meetings between solicitors and barristers, an endless back and forth. When the trial began, the press coverage was extensive. There was interest in the trauma service, both as an NHS organisation and as a prestigious unit with a distinctive therapeutic approach, and this added another dimension to the normal salaciousness of a murder trial. There was also the nature of the case itself.
When people do terrible things, we want to understand. After unspeakable acts, we want answers. A gunman shooting innocent students on a campus, two young boys killing a toddler, a young man with a knife, lying in wait for a woman and a baby he has never met before. We want to know why. Of course we do, these acts are abhorrent and shocking. They make no sense at all. And in the search to understand them, there’s an intense wish to move away from the dreadful act itself, so it has no connection to us any more. A diagnosis or a label can offer us some refuge. It sets the person and their actions apart. Makes them abnormal. Alien. It offers some relief. I understand all this. I have felt this pull many times. But while I know these acts are not normal, I know, too, that things are more complex than the black and white categories of ‘mad’ or ‘bad’. Most things are a murky wash of grey. Over the course of my career, I have seen ordinary people do extraordinary things, both good and bad. I have come to understand that life is complicated. That chance encounters and fierce emotions can come together. In Dan’s case – there was me, of course. My actions and inactions. But there were others: his mother, Michael, Tom, Julie and Nicholas, small unconnected shards of a kaleidoscope that twisted together into a final tragic shape.
In the numbness of those months, whenever my name was in the press, I sometimes allowed myself to imagine that somewhere out there in the world, Tom was in a café, casually reaching for a newspaper. That he’d read the story, and feel propelled to pick up a phone and call us. But the call never came. Even as the thought sparked a tiny glow of light, it quickly blew itself out. I knew it was the stuff of fantasy.
It took Carolyn coming back from Australia for me to see the house through her eyes. The empty space where David’s desk had been. His missing coats and shoes. The books that had been removed. Perhaps it was the state of the place, and the combination of my aimlessness and her restlessness that led to the suggestion. ‘The kitchen’s looking tired,’ she announced, ‘I think we should redecorate.’
The very idea exhausted me. But with no legitimate reason to refuse, I let myself be swept along with her proposal.
When she asked about colours, my mind went blank.
‘Greens? – something neutral?’ I shrugged. ‘Or maybe grey?’
‘Not grey,’ she shook her head.
In the days that followed, the kitchen table was awash with strips of paint cards and swatches of material, small and neat like dolls’ house tablecloths. I had no interest in any of it. It took an enormous act of will not to hand it over completely, so I could slump back, and watch from the sidelines. But I made myself sit at the table, poring over the different colours as we whittled them down to ten. The next day, she brought home sample pots that she painted onto the wall; a mosaic that morphed from dark to light green, then into shades of stone-washed colours. I t
ouched the chalky paint under my fingers as she read the colours out loud. We laughed at the names: Elephant’s Breath, Sager Than Green, Skimming Stone. She left out piles of home styling magazines for me to look at, pages earmarked with orange Post-it notes and scribbled messages. This lamp by the bookshelves? or What about these? with an arrow pointing to a pair of oatmeal-coloured cushions. Her plans made no mention of the old navy blue sofa under the window. It was the place Tom liked to sit and I was grateful she didn’t suggest replacing it or getting new covers for the wellworn cushions.
The whole project could have been completed swiftly, but there was an unspoken decision to linger. It was good to have something to occupy our minds. Something to focus on during those endless months of waiting. A distraction from conversations we didn’t know how to have.
Before we started painting, we cleared out the big wooden cupboard by the window. It was like opening a museum from the twins’ childhood. Together, we sifted through pictures and drawings and misshapen clay pots. Carolyn studied school photographs, trying to identify the names of long-forgotten classmates. We found boxes of toys and games; a half-grown crystal from a kit; a semi-constructed cardboard castle; dried-up paints; and an unopened box of science experiments. I lingered over these things, unfinished childhood projects that littered the journey of motherhood.
Carolyn was oblivious, caught up in reading little scraps of paper she unearthed from the drawers. At one point, she sat cross-legged on the sofa, totally absorbed in some written pages. She laughed out loud as she reached the end.
‘What’s that?’ I asked, looking up.
‘A story Tom and I once wrote,’ she said. ‘Can I keep it?’ she asked.
‘Of course,’ I said quietly, and stopped myself from asking to see it as she folded away the words.
