Mother

by S. E. Lynes

  Ben was Billy.

  Once whoever it was had left the Gents, Christopher came out of the cubicle and washed his hands and face. He dried himself with the paper towel and leant in to the mirror.

  ‘You are Martin,’ he said to his reflection. ‘And no one is going to take her away from you.’

  * * *

  Billy was at the end of his pint. As Christopher approached the table, he looked up and furrowed his brow in question.

  ‘Where’ve you been, man?’

  ‘Upset stomach,’ said Christopher. ‘Think I must have eaten something that’s disagreed with me.’

  ‘You don’t look so great,’ said Billy. ‘You’re sweating. Do you want to step outside?’

  ‘Actually, yes. I think a breath of air would be good.’

  Outside, the sun had gone down. The day had darkened into the first hours of night. The air had chilled. Christopher took a cold lungful.

  ‘I’m afraid Rebecca hasn’t come,’ he said. ‘That’s disappointing. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sounds like she maybe didn’t understand, if she was as you said.’

  ‘Be that as it may, I left a note with instructions. There was a man with her who seemed all right. He said he’d get her here.’

  Billy thrust his hands into his pockets and kicked at the pavement. ‘Look, man. You seem like a real nice guy, but this Rebecca hasn’t shown up and I think I’m going to need proof.’

  ‘I have my birth certificate.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes. I can bring it to you tomorrow if you don’t believe me. And there’s something else. Come with me,’ Christopher said. ‘I have something to show you.’

  They walked towards the town and took a left towards the canal.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Billy asked as they crossed the grass verge.

  ‘I didn’t tell you the final part,’ said Christopher, thinking quickly. ‘The mother superior told me how you came to be at the convent. You and your mother were brought there by the police. Your mother had given birth to you by the side of the canal, here in Runcorn, under the bridge. She must have been desperate. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’ Billy had stopped and was looking out over the black water. ‘She must have been scared as hell.’

  ‘Not much to see here,’ said Christopher, pushing on towards the bridge. ‘There used to be barges along this far, but not so much now. They still fish here though. You see them sometimes with their big green umbrellas and their buckets of bait.’ He stopped, waited for Billy to catch up. ‘I’m so sorry she didn’t come. I tried, I really did. I wanted to help. I can show you the bridge if you like. I can show you where you were born at least.’

  ‘All right.’

  It was after nine. The shadow of the bridge was all but black. But Christopher could make out the oil drum, the old anchor, the rope. There was an all-pervading smell of damp that he hadn’t noticed before.

  ‘Here we are.’

  Billy stopped and looked about him.

  ‘Thank God they found you both,’ said Christopher before Billy could speak. ‘God knows what might have happened. You might have died here. As it is, you’ve had a good life, haven’t you? You have a good life over in America?’

  Billy said nothing. After a moment, he crouched and picked up a handful of gravel chippings. He stood up and threw them into the canal. The water wrinkled then flattened.

  ‘Do you know something?’ he said – and at the catch in his voice, Christopher felt afraid. ‘I’m still not sure I believe you.’ He pushed his hands into his pockets, then appeared to reconsider and brought them out again and crossed them over his chest. ‘It just doesn’t add up. These things are always cross-referenced. What’s to say it wasn’t you who made the mistake?’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Is it? I don’t think so.’ Billy stepped closer, his eyes catching a yellow glint from the street light. ‘See, I’ve always wanted to find my parents too. I had the same dreams you did. And the way I see it, I’m the one with the photograph. I saw the register. I have a birth certificate too, so I can’t see how there can have been a mistake. And if the mother superior was the same woman who handed me over, she would have remembered who she handed me to. And she did remember. She said she gave me to Mr and Mrs Bradbury, from the US. She said that.’ He stepped closer still. ‘She remembered.’

  ‘It’s not true. I’m Martin. It says so on my birth certificate. The only reason I call myself Christopher is for simplicity’s sake. And because my other family don’t know I’ve found my mother, my Phyllis.’ He grasped Billy’s shoulders. ‘Please. This is my whole life. This is who I am. Without it I have nothing, do you understand?’

  ‘I understand, of course I understand. But unless you can prove I’m wrong, I won’t stop until I get to the truth. That’s my right – and I have as much right as you do. Now let go of me, Christopher. Or is it Billy?’

  ‘Don’t call me that. You’re Billy. You’re…’ As Christopher pushed against him, he felt a numb punch that sent him reeling back, down, down onto the gravel.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  When I started to write this, I began by giving my own account of how things had gone. But I couldn’t get to Christopher that way. I couldn’t find him, couldn’t make sense of him. So I had to write him from his perspective, to try and explore moment by moment what he believed. What do any of us believe? How much of what we believe is in fact lies we tell ourselves, and how much is the truth? I’d had four precious years with Christopher and in that time he told me everything – not necessarily in the order I have written, but in the form of conversations, anecdotes, memories that I have pieced together. And to him, I was Phyllis, his Phyllis, but I guess you know that by now.

  The scenes I struggled with most were the ones in which I myself featured. But I couldn’t write them from my own perspective because that would not have helped me to understand. It’s only when we remove ourselves and our own feelings that we can fully concentrate on the other person. From my point of view, there was not one hint that he was lying. Not one flicker of doubt in my mind that he was my Martin. And to understand how he convinced me of that, I had to find a way to be him, or at least process his story through him. This has been part of my therapy. If I know he loved me before he knew me, it’s because he told me so. But it wasn’t me he loved, was it? It was the ideal he made for himself of his real mother. And Rebecca did not fit his ideal – she broke it. I was not his ideal either, I don’t think. I am not anyone’s ideal. But I was all that was left.

  And this is where I have to stop. If writing is therapy, then in its pages I am my own counsellor. And there are things I struggle to tell even her, my counsellor, myself. I hate myself. I hate her. I hate Phyllis. And now I must tell you the rest, the things I have not yet found the courage to say, even to her, to myself, do you see?

  * * *

  When Christopher came home that night, I was still awake. I was reading in bed. I’ve never slept well when David’s away – I never used to, at any rate, when we were still together. So I was reading to get myself to sleep. I wish I had been asleep. I wish I’d never heard him come in. Maybe things would have gone differently had we faced them in the morning.

  I knew from the sound of him that something was wrong. There was a heaviness to the way the door clattered against the wall, the thud of his footfall in the hall, as if he had fallen. I thought he was drunk. He’d said he was going out with Amanda; I thought maybe they’d had a few too many, ended up a little tipsy or something. Good for him, I thought. It did him good to shake loose from time to time.

  ‘Christopher,’ I called out to him. ‘Chris, love? Everything all right?’

  He didn’t answer, and this struck me as odd. He always called back a hello; in fact he used to say it was one of the best things about living with us: me calling to him, him calling back, like birds. He said it was the little things that made him feel at home.

  I set
my book aside and listened out. I heard the water run in the downstairs loo. I heard the chain flush, then the water again. More and more. I became convinced he was drunk. His footsteps came on the stairs then, and a moment later he was at the bedroom door.

  And it’s funny, because I remember thinking: he’s never been in this room, my bedroom. We decorated years ago, and the walls are apricot and we bought a peach-coloured bedspread to match, me and David, and when you turn on the bedside light, the whole room is bathed in this pink glow. It’s heavenly; not as in the day-to-day meaning – I mean it’s like what I imagine heaven’s light to be: a warm light, a forgiving light. And into that light he came, and I cried out in shock because he looked for all the world like he’d been in an accident. His face was clean but his clothes were covered in mud and whatever blood he’d washed off came fresh then: bright red from his nose and eye.

  ‘Oh, Christopher, love,’ I said, kneeling up on the bed. ‘Whatever’s happened?’

  He sank to his knees and began to cry. The sight of him crying is something I will never be able to shake from my mind. There are so many things that I’ll never shake from my mind.

  ‘Come on now, love.’ I climbed out of bed and crouched beside him and held him to me. He was sobbing like a child and I thought maybe he’d been in an accident – maybe he’d been attacked.

  ‘You’re safe now,’ I said. ‘Come on, my love. Come and sit with me.’

  Slowly I persuaded him up onto the bed. He moved as if he were in pain and sat down next to me. I pushed at his coat and he helped me pull it from him. Underneath, his shirt was clean but he smelled of sweat, as if he’d been running. I reached over and pulled a few tissues from the box on my bedside table. I dipped them in the glass of water I always take to bed with me and pressed them to his mouth.

  ‘Here, my darling boy,’ I said. ‘Hold these to your lip. And your eye, love, that’s it.’

  He laid his hand over mine and I put my other arm around his shoulders. He was shaking, still crying. It’s a terrible thing to see a man cry – any man, let alone one you love. I knew how much it cost him to let me see him like that. I knew it must have been bad, what had happened.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Tell me, tell Phyllis.’

  And he did. He told me everything. Between racking sobs, he told me how Ben had come to the house claiming to be my son, how he’d written to Ben pretending to be me. He told me all about Ben, how he lived in San Francisco, how he worked as a graphic designer, had a girlfriend called Martha. He told me how he’d been to the convent. The mother superior had seen him straight away, he said, and he’d told her there’d been a mistake.

  ‘I asked her if she’d had a visitor,’ he said. ‘A Benjamin Bradbury.’ He tried to smile at the memory but his mouth had set, would not move beyond the bare minimum required to speak. ‘I told her she’d given Benjamin my details. It took all my willpower not to shout at her. I told her I didn’t know how that had happened but that I’d been reunited with you, my birth mother, for some years now.

  ‘I told her I’d been through the official channels, that I had a birth certificate at home and letters from the adoption counsellor. “The mistake can’t be with me,” I said. “There must have been a mistake here at the convent. I’ve thought about it a lot and it seems to me it would require nothing simpler than documentation put in the wrong file or a missing file or a file not sent – something administrative. Or an ankle band put on the wrong baby. Or a label on the wrong crib.” ’

  I took more tissues, dipped them in water, pressed them to his bleeding lip. ‘What did she say?’ I asked him.

  ‘I was right,’ he said. ‘Turned out there were two boys born that day.’

  ‘So there was a mistake?’ I said.

  ‘She remembered you. She was Sister Lawrence.’ He looked at me.

  I nodded. ‘I remember her. She’s the one I told you about. The one I had to give you to.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I said. I told her you said she was kind. Anyway, I asked for the other mother’s address. She told me she couldn’t give it to me. So I stood up. I stood up because I know I’m tall and I knew that would intimidate her. My hands were clenched into fists and I pushed my fists against her green leather desktop.

  ‘ “I’m afraid you must,” I said.’

  He had stopped crying by now and he gave a loud sniff before carrying on.

  ‘I knew I’d made her afraid and I felt the weight on my soul. All through my time at college I’d been haunted by that monster who made women afraid, and here I was, standing over an old woman, threatening her.’

  ‘You did what you had to do,’ I said. ‘Then what happened?’

  He shrugged. ‘She gave me what I needed. Ben’s mother was called Rebecca Hurst. Her family came from Stockton Heath. She said Rebecca used to sing to him.’

  Christopher told me the sorry tale of how he’d found Rebecca, a poor, desperate woman, and how he’d given her friend the rendezvous time and place. How he’d met Ben in the pub and how when he tried to explain everything, Ben had half-closed his left eye.

  ‘And I knew,’ he said.

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘Knew I couldn’t lie to myself any more.’

  ‘What about?’

  He turned to me and held both my hands in his. ‘Oh Phyllis.’ He was crying again. ‘The mistake was mine. Ben is your son. He is Martin.’

  ‘What? What are you saying?’

  ‘Lies. I’ve been lying. I knew it the moment he came to the door – I could see he was your son. Oh God.’ He broke, his face in his hands.

  I waited, in chaos, for him to continue.

  ‘I couldn’t let you go,’ he said once he’d composed himself enough to speak. We were still holding hands. ‘I can’t. I love you, Phyllis.’

  ‘And I love you. Nothing can change that, Chris.’

  ‘But I’m not Chris,’ he said, his voice ragged. ‘And I’m not Martin. Don’t you see? I’m not your son. I’m Billy. I’m not your son. I’m no one.’

  And I knew it then too. I could not explain how or why, but when Christopher said it, it was as if I too had known. He had presented me with a truth I wanted so very badly that I did nothing to doubt or question its veracity. I didn’t want another truth. I wanted my son. I saw my son. But he was not my son.

  Yet he was not nothing. He was not no one.

  ‘Did I do wrong,’ he said, ‘to send him away?’

  ‘Is that what happened?’

  He nodded. ‘I told him he had to leave us alone. We’re happy, I told him, and he had to let us live in peace. We had a fight. That’s why I’m all muddy. But in the end, he accepted it. He thinks the mistake is his. He goes back to the States tomorrow. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I only did it because I knew if you saw him you would know and then where would I go? Who would I be? If he came and took you, I’d kill myself, I would.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t even let yourself think things like that. We’ll work this out, the two of us, I promise.’

  ‘I know where he’s staying. You can go there now if you like.’

  ‘No, love,’ I said. ‘I can’t leave you here like this.’

  I’ll admit I felt the pull to go, to see my son just once, to tell him I had not abandoned him, that I had loved him. But I was also speaking the truth – how could I leave Christopher like that? Ben was my son. But I loved Christopher.

  Christopher, whose despair was depthless. The pink light gave him a kind of halo, and his eyes were so deep and brown and he looked so sad and so innocent. He was a child, really. No more than a child. He collapsed across my lap and I stroked his tangled hair.

  ‘I’ve loved you since before I met you,’ he said.

  ‘And I you.’ We were both crying.

  ‘I’m Billy,’ he said softly.

  ‘Yes, you are. But I love you whoever you are, whatever you’ve done. I would forgive you anything, anything at all.’

  Through the crac
k in the curtain, the sky had begun to lighten. I checked the radio alarm and saw it was after four.

  ‘Then I need to tell you the truth,’ he said.

  ‘What truth? You’ve already told me.’

  ‘There’s more.’

  And then he told me the rest. What had really happened down by the canal.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  If I close my eyes now, I can see the whole scene play out. Christopher and Ben, down by the canal. Soon there will be footsteps clack-clacking over the bridge, giggles ripe with promise. The night owls are already hooting and staggering away to their homes, to alleyways, to back terrace walls. Skirts will be concertinaed against bare white thighs, flies will be unzipped in haste. Yes, it is late. The hour for drunks and geezers has come, the hour for sex, for murder. Is that what this was? Or was it a kind of exchange for him – one life for another where two could not be? Was murder the only way he thought he could secure his place in the world?

  Christopher pleads his case. Ben punches Christopher because he doesn’t believe him. Maybe he realises that Christopher has brought him here under false pretences. Whatever, they fight. Who is Billy, who is Martin?

  You’re Billy.

  No, you are.

  You.

  No, you.

  But Christopher is Billy. He knows that now. Billy is the bigger of the two, and when Ben’s punch floors him, he sits up quickly and locks his arms around Ben’s knees. Ben falls backwards onto the gravel. They roll, first one on top, then the other. At a certain point, Billy grabs the oily rope from the canalside and pulls it around Ben’s neck.