Mother

by S. E. Lynes

  ‘I just knew he was innocent,’ he said. ‘And sometimes you need lies, don’t you, to protect the people you love?’

  * * *

  That night, Adam was still at the police station. The next day, Thursday, a grim and familiar buzz went round the Leeds campus. He had struck again. In the Union shop, the newspapers shouted their headlines: Woman’s Body Found in Headingley. A student this time – a Leeds University student. It had to be Sophie. The front pages sickened Christopher to his stomach, made him feel anxious to his core. The very air was thick with talk and terror. Female students wept, huddled together, held hands. Christopher bought The Guardian, the Mirror and The Telegraph. Back in his room, he cut out the articles and glued them into his scrapbook with the others. The scrapbook was getting thick. He might even need another.

  On Saturday morning, he was about to head out to the library when, head down, shoulders low, Adam plodded into the bedroom. How different this Adam was to the cocksure lad who had come bounding in that first day.

  ‘I owe you my life, man.’ He sat on his bed and put his head in his hands. For a moment he said nothing, and it was only when a gasp escaped him that Christopher realised he was weeping. He dropped his canvas satchel and went to sit next to his friend.

  ‘Hey, hey, it’s over now,’ he said, noticing that his friend smelled strongly of body odour.

  ‘They took my blood, for Christ’s sake.’ Adam’s voice was hoarse, as if he had been shouting. ‘They said I was him. Where was I this night and that night and the other? How the bloody hell am I supposed to know where I was six months ago? Not like I keep a diary, is it? They threw me in a cell. I couldn’t call anyone – it was fucking terrible. I thought we were innocent until proven guilty in this country.’

  ‘They came here.’

  ‘I know. The barmaid backed you up apparently. Thank God we’re regulars, eh?’ He scratched at his scalp, violently. ‘Oh God, Chris, man, it was terrible, the way they look at you, the way they talk to you, trying to tie you up in knots. She’s dead, Christopher. Even when I thought it, I didn’t really think it, do you know what I mean? But there’s no denying it now. She’s dead. I can’t help thinking if I hadn’t got there late… but I didn’t think she’d walk off, if that’s even what she did.’

  ‘She might not have turned up at all,’ Christopher said. ‘She may have run into someone she knew. You can’t torture yourself. All you did was arrive a little late – that’s hardly a hanging offence.’

  Again Adam pushed his face into his hands. ‘The way the policewoman looked at me. Like I was him. Like I was some sick bastard who could do something like that. Poor Sophie. Poor, poor Sophie. I can’t believe it. I’ll never be able to thank you enough, Christopher. Never.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Dear Christopher,

  Your dad has had an accident at work. Nothing serious, he has broken his left wrist after a sink fell on him…

  As Christopher pushed on the gate, his parents’ front door opened and his mother appeared. He called a hello as he walked up the path and stepped inside. It was cold in the hallway. The smell of braised meat drifted out from the kitchen.

  ‘I saw you out of the window,’ Margaret said as he stepped inside. She did not kiss him or hold out her arms but stood back, rubbing her hands, in her face a worn sadness that made him too feel sad. ‘Your father’s upstairs.’

  ‘How is he?’

  She frowned. ‘It’s been a terrible business.’

  Christopher took off his coat and put it on the hook. He followed his mother into the kitchen. Her back curved more than he remembered it doing, as if she were cowering. She looked smaller.

  ‘You got here anyway,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ He sat at the kitchen table and chafed his hands together to warm them.

  His mother turned to the sink and ran the tap.

  ‘Why don’t you pop up and see your dad?’ she said. ‘I’ll bring tea up.’ She did not turn around.

  The stairs creaked underfoot. As he neared the top, Christopher found himself slowing down. At the door to his parents’ room, he stopped, his hand on the door handle.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘In here.’

  Christopher eased open the door. It brushed on the carpet, the sound like someone breathing on glass. His father was sitting in bed, fully clothed and with a white plaster cast on his left forearm. His legs were under the covers and his head was propped up by two pillows. If the hallway had been cold, the bedroom was like a tomb. His father was wearing a woollen hat, which was not pulled down and which made a strange bulbous shape of his head. He looked, Christopher thought, miserable and quite, quite mad.

  ‘You made it back then,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’ Christopher made to sit on the bed but, seeing the outline of his father’s thin legs, thought better of it and instead sat on the chair by the window.

  ‘Your mother was disappointed you didn’t come home for Easter.’

  ‘I’m home now.’

  To think, he had missed a Friday with Phyllis for this. On the bedroom floor was The Sun newspaper. His father must have followed Christopher’s gaze because he said, ‘Your mother reads me the paper.’ He held up his plaster cast, as if to explain. How a broken arm affected one’s eyesight, Christopher could not figure.

  ‘How is the arm?’

  ‘Hopeless. I’ll lose weeks. You know I’d had to take on a lad.’

  Christopher nodded. A reference to his own desertion. ‘Yes, Mum said in her letter.’

  ‘The idiot let go of the sink while I was on all fours welding a joint – and bang! Lucky I wasn’t concussed. Lucky I wasn’t killed, to be honest. Bloody idiot.’

  How being killed was any kind of tragedy for someone who took so little joy in life, Christopher struggled to see. ‘How come you’re in bed?’ he asked. ‘It’s just your arm, isn’t it?’

  ‘Agh.’ With his good arm, his father swiped at the air, as if to swat a fly. ‘Can’t see any point getting up. Not like I can do much, is it?’

  ‘You could watch television?’

  ‘Television’s rubbish. Absolute rubbish. If it’s not a bunch of idiots talking about things best left private, it’s some American detective twaddle.’

  His mother appeared at the door with two mugs in her hands.

  ‘Tea,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you.’ Christopher stood and reached to take both mugs but his mother gave him only one. The other she took around the bed and delivered wordlessly to her husband’s bedside table before creeping out of the room in silence, like a maid. Not that his father looked in any way grand. If anything, he too looked smaller, there in the double bed, wrapped in blankets, silly hat on. They had diminished, the pair of them. They were shadows even of the shadows they had been. Christopher wondered how Jack Junior and Louise found it here in the ticking silence, wondered if they longed to get out as he had done. Once university had finished, he knew he would never live here again. Twenty minutes in the place and already a heaviness had overtaken his limbs. He wanted to shout, to run down the stairs, put on a record – loud – and pogo around the living room.

  For lunch, his mother made him egg mayonnaise sandwiches. He took them on a tray with a glass of milk up to his loft room, where, in the afternoon, he studied. Later, his father conceded to dinner downstairs. Jack and Louise had by then come home from their respective friends’ houses and so there were five of them around the table once again. Jack Junior and Louise had changed too, even since Christmas; they were older, louder, bigger. They told him their news with an enthusiasm he had not experienced from them before, and he wondered if this was because he had not come back in so long. With distance, he had become a guest, a stranger before whom they put on a kind of performance of themselves. It wasn’t unpleasant – better, in fact, than indifference.

  He left the next morning, Saturday, refused his mother’s offer of a lift to the coach station but accepted a carrier bag of food.

  ‘
Thanks, that’s very kind of you.’

  ‘I made fudge,’ she said. She hovered over him in the dark hallway while he put on his shoes, blocking his light. When he stood straight and met her gaze, he found in it such terrible sadness that he wanted to take her into his arms and comfort her. But he did not.

  ‘There’s a half-pound of Lancashire cheese from the market,’ she went on. ‘It’s in the brown paper, watch you don’t squash it.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’

  ‘Take this.’ She was holding a pound note.

  He waved it away. ‘Don’t be silly. I’m fine, honestly.’

  ‘It was only coppers,’ she said. ‘From the jar on the window ledge, like. I changed them up this week once you said you were coming.’

  He had to look away.

  ‘Keep it,’ he said. ‘Dad said he’d not be at work for a few weeks.’

  ‘Aye, but we’ve got some saved.’

  ‘Please.’ Christopher opened the front door, and with one hand holding onto the door’s edge kissed his mother on the cool bone of her cheek. ‘I’ll see you soon.’

  Margaret nodded, pushed the money into her apron pocket and closed the door behind him. At the end of the avenue, he crossed the road and turned to look back at the house. His mother was at the window, hand raised, as if she were waiting to spot him in a crowd before she could wave properly, and it seemed to him he stood on the far shore, the road he had grown up in a river, its rapid waters too wide, too turbulent to cross. He waved, turned and went on his way, but as he came to White Lund Road, he was filled with the feeling of being followed. Twice he turned back but saw no one. Then, as he waited for the coach to pull away, the feeling came again. He looked out of the window but again saw no one – at least no one he recognised. He shivered and sat back in his seat.

  * * *

  A month later, towards the end of his first year – June 1978 – Christopher wrote to Margaret and Jack to tell them he had a job in Leeds for the summer, which was the truth – a truth that omitted his reasons for taking it. Adam had organised a rental house in Leeds 6, the student area near the uni, for the following academic year. They would be sharing with two lads from the electronic-engineering course whom Christopher knew from three or four pub crawls up the Otley Road. It was Adam who had blagged the job: bar work for both of them in the Fenton, a pub behind the university. He had bounced back from the shock of Sophie’s death, but according to Christopher had calmed down when it came to women. These days, he only had one on the go at a time.

  ‘It’ll be a good earner,’ he was saying now. They were eating dinner together in the cavernous university refectory – the smell of stew, steamed pudding, thin coffee, the deafening clank of cutlery on cheap china. ‘Free ale too. They’re always having lock-ins there, so you’ll get extra dough, and when we’re not on shift we can spread our wings a bit, get over to Chapeltown and Bradford. Apparently the clubs there are better. We have to pay rent over the summer so we may as well live in it, eh?’

  ‘Quite.’ Christopher shovelled in a mouthful of partially congealed lasagne. ‘Good thinking.’

  ‘Sorted then. You can give me a cheque.’

  ‘Right you are.’

  ‘You ever see that Angie?’ Adam traded his clean plate of what had been steak pie and chips for a bowl of apple sponge and garish yellow custard. ‘I thought you and she had hit it off.’

  ‘I walked her home a few times, nothing much to say really. All the women I meet seem to be terrified of the flaming Ripper.’

  ‘And that’s where we come in, my friend,’ said Adam, smiling. Christopher wondered how he could be so flippant, especially after his time at the police station, after what had happened to Sophie. ‘We can see them home safe, can’t we?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Christopher. ‘Safe.’

  * * *

  That summer, Christopher moved his meagre belongings to Chestnut Avenue in Adam’s fourth-hand Mini. Christopher’s room was at the top of the house – Adam had given him second choice on the rooms, and only after he had chosen did he realise he had opted for the converted loft space. There was comfort in familiarity, perhaps, even if that familiarity was becoming ever more unfamiliar. He decorated the room with posters of Marc Bolan, David Bowie and Fleetwood Mac (for Phyllis). A poster of Stevie Nicks he Blu-Tacked to the sloping eave above his bed, where she could watch over him and he could look at her. Although David could get him tapes of pretty much any album he wanted, Christopher planned to save and buy a record player. There was nothing like vinyl, the sweet caress of the needle in the groove, as Adam put it. And Adam had a record player – a vintage walnut Pye Black Box – so they could trade discs.

  In July, on the last Friday of the twins’ school term, Christopher made sure to go to Phyllis in the morning so that he could see her alone before the boys got home. He ran from the station to the bus stop, then from Heath Road by the town-hall grounds along to Langdale Road. He rapped on the door, looking up and down the street, checking for twitching curtains, like a thief under cover of broad daylight. The bubbles in the glass of the front door turned Phyllis into blobs of colour, and it was always wonderful when those colours cohered again to make her so clear, so young, this woman who always had a smile for him, who always threw out her arms and said: ‘Look who it is!’

  He fell towards her with gratitude and relief. There was no better place on all the earth, he thought, than here.

  ‘Hello.’

  She took his hand, as was her way, and led him into the kitchen. Once they were settled, she asked him question after question, as she always did, as if he were the most fascinating subject on the planet. How were his studies? How was Adam? Had he had any nights out? She fixed him with her brown eyes: ‘And your love life?’

  ‘Ah.’ He looked down at his hands, slack and useless in his lap. Memories of Angie’s naked belly flashed in his mind’s eye, the look of terror she had given him in their last moments together.

  ‘Good as that, eh?’ said Phyllis.

  ‘I’ve been pretty shaken up since Adam got taken in for questioning. It’s not just the women who are paranoid. The men are scared someone will think it’s them, and every woman you speak to, you can see in her eyes that she’s wondering if you’re a murderer or something. Not that I blame them.’ He was exaggerating his contact with the female student community, he knew, but he could not help himself. ‘But there was this girl. She seemed…’ He could not continue.

  ‘You can talk to me about anything,’ Phyllis said. ‘You know that.’

  ‘I think I mistook her intentions,’ he said eventually. ‘She seemed to want me to kiss her, and I did. She seemed to want, you know, more, but then… she said I should have stopped.’

  Phyllis took his hand, and he wondered if it were possible to become addicted to a person like you got addicted to cigarettes.

  ‘I think perhaps it’s me,’ he continued. ‘I don’t seem to be able to get these things right.’

  ‘Oh, love, it’s not that. There’s all sorts of reasons why these things don’t go right. And this Ripper has got us all frightened stiff, got us all looking at the men we know, thinking, Is it you? Not over here so much, but up where you are, no one knows what they’re up to. I heard from one of the other teachers at work that there’s women accusing their own husbands. Brothers, too. The police are inundated. It’s no wonder girls your age are jumpy – and it’s not just working girls he’s after now, is it?’ She bit her lip and shook her head, seemingly lost in thought, before returning to him with another squeeze of his hand. ‘And as for you, the right girl will come along – you’ll see.’

  She raised his hand to her lips and kissed his knuckles. ‘Some people are still kids when they fall in love or when they step into the world of, you know, sex and all the rest of it. I was fifteen, and look what happened there. That’s no good either, is it? Being made to give you up like that when you belonged with me. That’s cruel. So it may be for different reasons but I used t
o think the same as you – that I’d got it all wrong, that I’d not understood something fundamental about how these things work. Other girls seemed to be getting their kicks without getting into trouble, but muggins here believed him when he said he couldn’t wear a sheath. Allergic, I think he said he was. Told me not to worry, that he could control it – by which he meant pull out, I know that now, of course. And I believed him because, well, because he was older, he seemed experienced and of course he had lovely dark hair like yours and… well you can imagine.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, in wonder. She was so frank, so honest, so modern. He could not imagine Margaret talking in this way, to anyone. Phyllis was the best kind of friend. Brave and generous enough to reveal herself with no more reason than to make him feel better.

  ‘But then I met David,’ she went on. ‘I hadn’t realised there were men out there who let you take things at your own pace. But by then I was in my twenties, don’t forget. You’re still only nineteen, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There, see? Plenty of time for it all to come right. So don’t be worrying about all that. If this girl doesn’t want to talk to you, let her get on with it. There’s nothing you can do and it’s her loss. There’s no rush. You concentrate on getting your qualifications, and I promise the rest will fall into place, all right?’

  And it was all right. He felt all right. Phyllis knew what to say. Sometimes when they parted, or even when he put the phone down, it was as if there was a physical tearing of flesh, a ripping pain such that he imagined, if he looked, he would see an open wound in his chest, blood on the ground at his feet. This was how he once described his intense love to me. I wonder now if these violent images came from this intense love alone, or from the premonition that such a love could only end in wounding, in blood. In death.