Mother and Child

by Annie Murray

  He nods, chewing.

  ‘Any luck finding new people for the job?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s not hard, actually.’ His voice is flat. ‘Quite a few lads in need of work and there’s an older bloke looks good. I’ll give him a try.’

  I watch him as he twirls more pasta round his fork. Where are you? Where have you gone?

  Seventeen

  Over the next few weeks I can’t seem to stop looking at websites. I read every word I can find about Bhopal, about what happened on that chill December night in 1984 and what has happened since.

  It fills my mind and it’s a relief to have something else to think about other than my own misery.

  I read about people’s suffering – the dead who fell to the ground convulsing, frothing at the mouth and unable to breathe; the women miscarrying as they tried to escape, the burning eyes and lungs.

  And I read about what happened afterwards: Union Carbide in the USA, who built and kept a controlling share in the company in India, would not release the name of the poison gas for days – it was, in fact, methyl-isocyanate, one of the most dangerous and volatile chemicals in the industry. One of its components is phosgene – one of the gases used in the trenches of the First World War. In the face of that, medical staff trying to help had only basic eyedrops and antibiotics.

  I read about the man who, ten years later in 1994, came to Europe looking for help when many people thought everything was long over and sorted out in Bhopal. Then, Union Carbide and its dance troupe of lawyers insisted that it had done all it had to do. It had paid out its miserly sum for sick survivors to live on, decreeing that that was ‘enough for an Indian’. And still, there was no proper medical help. An appeal was set up, the Bhopal Medical Appeal, a clinic built called Sambhavna, which means ‘possibility’ and ‘esteem’ and ‘togetherness’ in Hindi.

  I can’t seem to stop thinking about those women. Those children.

  That night.

  Senseless. It’s a word I seem to be forever reading to describe a death. A ‘senseless death’. A death which lacks timeliness, is impossible to fit into any scheme of meaning that says it is about something more than raw loss. There is no story about it that can be made comforting. It was his time. She was suffering. It was a release . . . No, no, no.

  After Paul’s GCSE results, Ian and I sat down with him and we all talked about what next.

  ‘I dunno.’ Paul looked out sideways from under his fringe. It hung in a thick layer almost covering his eyes so that in order to see he often had to give his head a sideways jerk to flick it out of the way. He was quite tall by then, at sixteen. I was often startled by how big his hands were.

  ‘You don’t have to stay on at school,’ Ian said. He was impatient with schools, with anything academic, had not been able to get out fast enough himself. ‘Come and work for me if you want?’

  I could hear the hesitation in his voice and Paul must have heard it too. Paul was not handy, not the sort to get on well as a mechanic. It was just so hard to see, at this point, what would be the best thing for him.

  He shook his head, though not angrily, more defeated. ‘No. Thanks, Dad. Don’t think so.’

  We explored with him. Did he want to go to a tech? Leave and try to find a job? Any thoughts of him being steadily academic had disappeared a long while back. Did he want to work in a shop for a bit and wait and see? He didn’t seem to know.

  In the end he stayed on at school for want of any other ideas. I supported him. I’m a teacher. The more qualifications you can get under your belt the better, supposedly . . .

  He lasted most of a year. I started to notice marks on him, as if someone had been beating him. I kept advising him to keep out of their way, went to the school to talk to the staff. It took me a while to grasp that Paul was putting himself in their way, bringing it on, somehow. And in the early summer, something else began.

  I noticed the wound because the weather was too hot to be muffled up. A raw, red scar across the inside of his right arm. Paul was left-handed. There were other, older marks.

  If things had felt difficult before, this was the beginning of our four years of hell. Soon after that he dropped out of school and we set off, without realizing we were doing it, into the new, for us, land of mental ill-health. It was like reaching an unknown country full of unforgiving, frozen mountains, pits stumbled into in darkness, unseen swamps and no map available. And on that journey, I did not, for very long, feel that I was walking hand in hand with Ian. He and I were blundering about in the dark, occasionally crashing into each other. Mom and Dad were hopeless. The only person who helped – with no real idea but with an instinctive sympathy – was Dorrie.

  Paul would catch the number 50 bus out to Maypole to visit her sometimes and she was always pleased to see him, asked no questions, got him to do odd jobs for her and fed him cake and cups of tea which she got him to make for her. There was some kind of, not understanding exactly, but a comfort between them. Paul knew he could just be with Dorrie, be somehow free with her, and that was that.

  But there were the drugs, prescribed, then changed, the periods of self-harm, the counsellors and psychologists, all of which in the end I sorted out for him on my own. Ian worked and worked. He did seem to listen when I told him things, sometimes, anyway. But over all, I felt alone – abandoned. Perhaps he felt the same. I was so wrung out trying to help Paul that I had no energy left to find out.

  One day, I came home from work and found the house quiet in a way that felt wrong. Upstairs Paul was on his bed, seemingly asleep: except for the bottle of gin, the empty packets of paracetamol. We got him to Selly Oak hospital just in time. He had a stay in a psychiatric ward and came out seeming a bit calmer. For a while, he made various attempts at getting a job – in WH Smith, for a bit, and then in a bakery. Then one day he gave up, saying he couldn’t do it, and he mostly stayed around the house, where he seemed to feel safest.

  ‘I wonder,’ Dorrie said, during this period, ‘whether he’d like a dog? I’d get him one, if you like.’

  I almost laughed at this. It seemed such a simple, children’s story remedy. But any remedy might help at this point.

  ‘What d’you think, Paul?’ I asked him. ‘Dorrie says would you like to have a dog?’

  He turned his head and with more animation than I had seen for a while, said, from under his hair, ‘Yeah. A dog. Yeah.’ Nodding. For the first time in months my heart sang a little song.

  We got Scraps from the dogs’ home. Paul said he wanted a dog that someone had given away, just as he had been.

  ‘Given away to someone who wanted you more than anyone in the world,’ I told him for the umpteenth time. But there was no getting around the fact.

  Scraps was a rambunctious Jack Russell, one ear black, one brown, and with odd patches of both colours dotted over a white body and a black-tipped tail – you could see where he got his name from. He chewed everything in sight, he wee’d on Dorrie’s carpet, he barked and yapped whenever there was any noise outside and generally caused havoc. But, for the first time in ages, he made Paul smile and Ian took to him as well. I adored Scraps for both those reasons.

  Towards the end of those four years, Paul really began to surface. Over time, Scraps got him into regular habits. He slept in Paul’s room and dragged him out of bed to feed him. He had to be walked regularly and Paul got a key to the little private park and walked round the lake every morning. In the afternoon they went to Highbury Park in Kings Heath. He was not instantly better, but something in him lifted, very slowly, week after week. Soon, I started thinking, he’ll want to get in touch with his friends again, maybe start looking for a job.

  And then Scraps disappeared. He went off into a corner of Highbury Park one day and just never came back. We waited, thinking he had wandered and would, knowing survivor Scraps, just amble home one day. But he never did. It was a mystery and I was horrified by what this would mean for Paul.

  He did not, as I expected, tilt back downwards. He
was strangely philosophical.

  ‘At least I didn’t see something horrible happen to him,’ he said. There had been no screeching of brakes outside the house, no rushing to the vet.

  I was still afraid his days would slide back into the shapeless twilight of his depression, but instead he suddenly announced he was going to take up jogging.

  ‘I’m used to being out early with Scraps. I like it. I’ll just have to go on my own instead.’

  ‘That’s great,’ I said cautiously. ‘Although it might be a bit sad. You’ll miss him.’

  ‘I’ll miss him but I won’t miss picking up his poo,’ Paul said. And he gave what was almost a grin.

  I stood for some time after he had left the room, in wonder at what had just happened.

  This was the summer of 2012. Paul took up jogging. He teased me, saying I ought to come too.

  ‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘Wild horses wouldn’t get me out running about like that. Anyway, I’d hold you up.’ I didn’t say, After the past few years trying to look after you, to make you want to live and to be happy, I feel weary to my bones, to my very cells.

  But that was when Ian and I started saving for a trip. Things eased, even between us. We started to find each other again, more relaxed, able to joke.

  ‘You always said you’d never been anywhere,’ I said to Ian. ‘And we’ve never taken Paul anywhere much. Where shall we go?’

  We never quite decided. The USA? Australia? A safari? We wanted something that would excite Paul, enlarge his world.

  Paul got a job. It was in a pub up the hill from where we lived, along the Moseley Road. The landlord was a big, no-nonsense, reassuring sort of bloke and Paul worked a few shifts a week. It wasn’t all that far – not even a mile away – and he could do late shifts and easily walk home.

  By the time the summer of 2012 was laying itself down into autumn, that lovely interval of slanting light and the smell of leaves trodden on the paths, the terrible heaviness of the past four years began to lift. Not a day went past when I wasn’t scared. I felt as if I was almost holding my breath, waiting for everything to fall apart again and ruin this respite of at last having some sort of routine, of having my son back – and my husband.

  Paul no longer had that permanent look of being shut in, lost to us behind a shield of sadness. He was almost cheerful some days. He started talking about the future, about doing something at college – maybe something to do with social care and working with the elderly? He would be wonderful, we all told him. Dorrie told him.

  Autumn came and the weeks when the days shorten and those decaying leaf and gunpowder smells fill the air, when it seems that the whole city is letting off fireworks for days on end, the night sky crackling and flashing. At school I’d be teaching kids about Guy Fawkes, about Diwali – the Festival of Lights symbolizing the triumph of light and hope over ignorance and fear.

  That Friday night, Paul was working an evening shift, staying until closing time. The clear-up afterwards often took quite a while, Paul chatting with one of the girls and the landlord. I was glad – it was good for him, being with the other staff, getting along. He was a likeable lad and it felt as if he was beginning to like himself a bit more. He had smiled as he left for work that evening, something I hold in my heart, that I never want to let go of.

  I always listened for him coming in afterwards, his feet on the stairs by midnight, his bedroom door opening and closing, and then I would be able to sleep. But that night, I realized later that I had already fallen asleep, exhausted after a day at school. And did I, half-dreaming, hear the ambulance tearing along the Moseley Road? When the phone rang by our bed, I jolted awake hardly knowing where I was for a moment.

  ‘Yes?’ I sat up, groping for the light switch, Ian stirring now, muttering, Who the hell at this time of night . . .

  ‘I’m calling from Accident and Emergency at the Queen Elizabeth hospital.’ The woman’s voice sounded gentle, careful. ‘We have a Paul Stefani here in A & E . . .’

  ‘Oh!’ I cried. ‘Oh, my God – what’s happened? I’m coming, hold on, we’re coming . . . Is he OK?’

  ‘Well, he’s been brought in after an accident.’ She sounded young, but well trained. ‘I think the best thing would be if you come. We’re doing everything we can.’

  We were fumbling out of the house into the car in minutes, barely knowing what we were doing.

  ‘How did they get our number?’ Ian kept saying, driving like a madman, and I didn’t stop him.

  ‘Well, he’d have told them – or maybe . . . well, the number’s on his mobile – or in his wallet . . . ?’ We made fractured guesses until we were halfway there and then we were silent, tearing along the night-time Bristol Road, just desperate to be there, come on, come on . . .

  All I can really remember is walking into the hospital from the car, which we left slewed to a stop. It was very bright and we were trying to find the right place and there were people all around, and other faces which ironed out their smiles into something more careful and solemn when we came near and they heard our name.

  And Paul on a trolley. They told us he had died soon after the ambulance brought him in. I wanted them to be mistaken, for it not to be him. But it was him, his lovely dark waves of hair in the sterile cubicle, the length of him, his cheeks, mouth and eyes, closed as if asleep.

  ‘Paul?’ I leaned over him, stroking his forehead. His face looked strange, discoloured.

  I looked at Ian and never will I forget the look on his face, the helpless, loving horror.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Stefani?’ The doctor, a white lad not much older than Paul, with kind, exhausted eyes, came into the cubicle with us. ‘We really did do all we could.’

  We found out, gradually. As Paul was walking home that night, a driver, at least three times over the limit and in a stolen BMW, had come roaring up the Moseley Road, lost control on the bend and mounted the pavement.

  Afterwards, I wondered, did they arrive at the hospital in the same ambulance, Paul and his killer? Was Lee Parry, that feckless, selfish moron who killed Paul, in fact lying in a cubicle nearby when Ian and I went in? And was he still lying there, alive, as we walked out to that car park again, propping each other up as we had to leave our dead son behind, our lives ripped open?

  Eighteen

  ‘Hello, love – how’re you?’

  Rolling out my yoga mat on the hall floor, I look up and make myself smile.

  ‘All right, Sheila? I’m OK, thanks.’

  ‘Good.’ Sheila touches my shoulder, holding my gaze for a moment, and I’m touched. She doesn’t say anything but it’s sincere, the caring way she looks at me. Coming to the class, week after week, I’m beginning to feel at home. Usually it’s just the seven of us, counting Fred, and it really feels like a group I can trust. There are not too many demands and I can tell that by just turning up, week after week, there will be kindness and a gradual building of friendship. For a moment I feel a twinge of sadness over Ange. Have I let Ange down – or is it her who let me down? Either way, that’s something else that seems to have died with Paul.

  Sheila rummages in her bag, pulling out a sky-blue blanket and a bottle of water. Pat and Fred come in, Fred saying, ‘Hello!’ and, ‘All right!’ jovially to everyone. Soon his laughter sounds round the hall as a small group forms, chatting, over the other side.

  ‘Sorry to hear about poor Herbert,’ I say to Sheila. I have heard, over a cup of tea with Pat, that the old dog has somehow managed to break his front left leg and is all strapped up. ‘How’s he going along?’ It’s good to have a dog to talk about. A sweet, devoted old fellow who, when he finally dies, can leave you with a pure, uncomplicated grief. And today is a better day for me than some. Ian and I had a normal, on the surface, sort of chat before he left and I feel able to look out of myself, to ask about other people.

  ‘He’s feeling very sorry for himself,’ Sheila says. ‘There’s him going about, dot and carry one – and now Roy’s gone and broken his toe. Heaven knows
how, messing about in the garden . . .’ She gives an exaggerated shrug. ‘I’m surrounded by suffering males.’

  I’m surprised at the sound of my own laughter. ‘Suffering in silence?’

  ‘Oh, I should be so lucky,’ Sheila says with one of her eye rolls. ‘Anyway – it’s the Red Cross tonight, so I can leave them both to it.’

  I go over to Kim to pay for the class. Then Hayley arrives and sets herself up in the space next to my mat. She’s wearing tight Lycra leggings in pale blue and black which seem to sculpt her legs into an even more beautiful shape than they no doubt are already, a tight electric-blue vest under a black zip-up top, and a swinging ponytail. She also goes over to Kim to pay, fluid on her bare feet. She comes and sits back down, cross-legged, her back effortlessly straight. Beside her, I feel suddenly aged and lumpy.

  ‘Hello.’ She gives her lovely smile. ‘How’re you?’

  ‘I’m OK, thanks,’ I say. ‘How’s it all going?’

  ‘All right – I think.’ Hayley puts her head on one side, serious now. ‘I’m trying to sort out my college applications. But my nan’s been a bit under the weather.’

  ‘Poor thing. How old is she, Hayley?’

  ‘Oh, she’s getting on – she’s seventy-six.’

  I almost laugh. Hayley’s nan, who she talks about as if she is as old as Methuselah, is not much older than Sheila.

  Hayley stretches, legs straight, reaching for her toes. She is extraordinarily bendy.

  ‘I don’t know what I’ll do,’ she says, ‘if she . . . when she, you know, passes. She’s been everything to me, Nan has.’

  I’m surprised and touched by this admission.

  ‘I expect she’ll be around for a good while yet, love.’

  Hayley smiles and leans back on her hands. She looks like a model, but seems sweetly unaware of quite how beautiful she is.

  ‘I expect you’re right. She just seemed a bit, I dunno, older today. It’s because she’s got a cold.’