by Gary Fry
About a week later, he turned up with another cross-fertilized specimen: a cauliflower combined with a white cabbage, its skin all bulbous and brain-like, the core simply layers of crunchy vegetable.
Mum, previously encouraging, looked aghast on this occasion. “Where have you got this from?” I remember her asking, or certainly words to that effect. Dexter appeared contrite in response, even though I spotted him concealing an arched smile, imperceptible to anyone who didn’t know him well.
Our mother refused to cook this latest offering, perhaps lending grist to the mill of my brother’s dislike and mistrust of her. Then he descended back into his man-made pit and presumably got to work on his next weird act of magical transformation, each involving nature’s most common elements.
There were other things—a lemon that looked and tasted like a lime, which had appealed to our unsuspicious dad as an accompaniment to his regular evening drinks; an apple that looked like a peach, its cider flavoring mediated by furry flesh—but none I cared to examine closely at the time. I was just glad that, nearly in his teens now, Dex had chosen to restrict himself to the basement almost permanently. Family life seemed so much easier that way, however much I loved the boy and realized he appeared to be steering himself toward damnation.
But none of this was in the same league as what came later, as what my brother—I mean, half-brother—got up to as he made his way through chemically complicated puberty.
13
By the time I’d reached my mother’s house, it was nearing four o’clock and the sky had dimmed to the color of a wound: dark blood detectable behind a fragile layer of skin. I parked in the roadside, took a deep breath, got out of my vehicle and then advanced up her short driveway.
She’d purchased this property after Dexter had settled up with my parents, offering a one-off payment in exchange for the house in Dwelham, a sum that, split two ways, was enough to offer new accommodation to both a single man and a single woman. Hers was a bungalow with a small garden, located on a quiet street neither ostentatious nor too squalid to risk unruly neighbors. My impression was that this area—unlike the city-suburb pad my dad had chosen up in Newcastle—attracted little attention or trouble, which was the way my mum liked running her life, with pleasing anonymity.
I could hardly question this decision; despite holding down a job and suffering all the hassle that came with it, I felt similar about existence and was determined to keep a low profile until I could afford to withdraw from the hectoring mainstream. I guess many survivors of arduous circumstances end up with a need for detachment from others. All this reminded me that, however deceptive she’d been in the past, I shouldn’t enter my mother’s home with self-righteous bluster, demanding to be told what my brother and I had been denied for such a long time.
I’d always had an informal arrangement with my mum, letting myself inside her property without announcing my arrival; I even had a key to her front door. I didn’t require it this day, however, simply pushing down the handle and making my way over the threshold. The hallway was scented by air freshener, a marked improvement over the foul odor in my brother’s home, but I didn’t want to think about that, let alone those weird footprints I’d spotted on his muddy lawn. I had a more important issue to address.
I found her in the lounge at the front of the house, watching TV and drinking what appeared to be a mug of coffee. She’d closed the curtains and clearly hadn’t seen or heard me arrive in the gathering dark. I wanted to believe this was due to the quiz show’s volume, but suspected she’d added a nip of something intoxicating to her beverage.
Mum had resorted to alcohol toward the end of her marriage, mainly because, in the absence of kids to torment, Dad had transferred his terrors to her. By the time she’d plucked up the courage to leave him, I think the habit was permanent, however much she tried to convince me it was under control. Bad memories were an indelibly inscribed form of menace. But was I about to add to hers?
Once she’d greeted me with sluggish surprise, I sat on the couch opposite her armchair and refused the offer of a hot drink. I wanted no complicating stimuli in my brain, not even caffeine.
Eventually—following a lengthy pause during which my mum, perceiving my unease, turned down the TV’s volume—I began to speak.
“You remember at the party yesterday when the phone rang in the lounge and I went to answer it?”
“Yes, dear.”
She’d spoken with apprehension; I had a feeling that Mum’s central nervous system permanently awaited more disappointment. But there was no way of saying it other than directly, and so that was what I did.
“It was Dexter calling, Mum. He asked me to visit him today, and that’s where I’ve just been. And…and now I know as well as he does that he’s actually my half-brother.”
I guessed there was an element of sadism involved in the oblique way I’d announced the news; the sad truth was that I was annoyed by the fact that this knowledge had been kept from Dex and me, another example of the secrecy always involved in our family.
My mum registered my revelation with alarm, her hooded eyes widening and body language edgy. Reaching for her drink, which steamed in the chill room but hardly ruled out what I believed it contained, she slurped surreptitiously and then returned the mug to a coffee table beside her. That was when she retrained her gaze on me.
“How did you find out? How did he?”
I explained about the adoption certificate my brother had discovered in the attic, but didn’t mention the furtive treasure Dex had located years earlier: those sadistic hardcore porn magazines. I’m not sure my mother would have been surprised by this find, but I didn’t think it was relevant to the conversation that must follow.
“I’m sorry you had to learn about it this way,” she said, sounding almost tearful, “but the fact is that, what with all the other problems we suffered back then, I couldn’t think of a way of telling you both—well, Dexter most of all.”
As hostility between my brother and my mum had predated even my parents’ divorce thirteen years earlier, I could understand her point of view, the tricky situation in which she’d been placed. But what role, I wondered, had our dad played in her silence? How had Dex come into being? And why had he ended up living with us, anyway?
Emotional discomfort mangled my questions, made them all come out in a rush, but when I rounded up by asking, “Why don’t you tell me the whole story?” my mother seemed to welcome the opportunity to unburden herself at last.
“Your dad wasn’t always such a rotten man. When we first met—he picked me up in his car back in the seventies, while I was hitchhiking from Manchester to Durham to attend a music festival—he was quite charming. At the time, he worked as a miner, in a colliery near Middlesbrough, but he wasn’t the usual blokey type you find in such professions. I mean, when we got married about a year later, he even wrote me a poem, which I still have to heart.”
I was astonished by this information. Could she really be talking about the same person, the one who’d taunted my brother and me for most of our childhood lives, hitting us with rolled-up newspapers while mocking our solitary natures and slurring our sexualities?
Despite my lingering bitterness, however, it had been encouraging to see my mum’s face brighten a little, as if such recollections were the only positive material she’d retained from her otherwise nightmarish marriage.
“Can you tell me that poem, Mum?” I suggested, keen to keep this discussion as nonconfrontational as possible. It wasn’t about blame; it was about understanding. I thought even Dex might realize that…eventually.
Mum blushed, reached for her mug again, but then halted in this maneuver, drawing back her hand and glancing back at me. That was when she began to quote from memory.
“I dig all day and sometimes at night / To make enough money to limit my plight / But when I chanced upon a jewel like you / The darkness lifted and my efforts felt true.”
I was so amazed by these words that I repe
ated them several times in my head, as if inscribing them in memory for future scrutiny. Sure, the poem was crude in sentiment and technically inept, but that wasn’t the point here. The mere fact that my father had once penned this verse made it as extraordinary in my mind as anything written by the greats.
“I find this hard to believe, Mum,” I said, swallowing dry emotion stuck in my throat. “I mean, he called you a…a jewel and suggested that you—what was the phrase?—that you lifted his darkness.”
I hesitated, watching my mother’s face. She remained impassive, even borderline tearful. But then I went on.
“He also said that his efforts—presumably digging all day and sometimes at night—were about more than money, and that you…you made him feel true.”
“I know, Harry.” Now she did take her mug, gulping briefly from it. “Are you beginning to realize how confused I’ve been all these years, and why I…” She glanced at her drink with confessional discomfort. “…why I drink this poison simply to get by?”
“But what happened? I mean, how did…how did he move from that kind of character to the only one I’m familiar with? Well, Dex, too, of course—probably him more than any of us.”
If Mum took umbrage at the suggestion that my half-brother had suffered more than she had, she didn’t show it, simply put her booze-laced coffee back on that table and then spoke again.
“One day—before even you were born, Harry—your dad suffered an accident while working down a pit. I’m not sure what happened, he never wanted to talk about it afterward or even later in life. All I know is that a mineshaft had collapsed after a controlled explosion, when your dad was alone upfront. Some guy working near him said he’d heard a…a roaring down there, after the detonation, but medical examinations carried out later showed that anyone within a hundred feet of the incident had suffered hearing problems—punctured eardrums, mainly—and a shock so powerful that it affected balance and sleep for days.
“From that day forward, your dad changed, Harry. He suffered nightmares and often woke up at night screaming or calling out words I didn’t even think were English. They all had too many—what do you call them?—too many consonants clustered together, and vowels in all the wrong places. He wasn’t violent to me, not at that stage, but it wasn’t long before that began. And it was after we moved into that house—the one Dexter now owns—that he got much worse.”
I was aware that following their marriage and before I’d been conceived, my parents had lived in the heart of my dad’s native Middlesbrough. I’d always believed that Mum had wanted to move somewhere more secluded, maybe because that was how she’d grown up in Lancashire, in a rural village outside Manchester. But had there been more to their relocation than that? In light of her husband’s recent injury and the effects it had had on his behavior, had she insisted on such a relatively peaceful location to keep him out of trouble?
Despite a stack of questions growing taller inside me, I remained silent, allowing my mother to continue at her own pace. This was clearly difficult material to address and it would be unreasonable of me to steer it in any self-serving way.
Before long, perhaps appreciating my lack of interruption, she continued.
“By the time I was expecting you, Harry, your dad had been working in a different job for about a year, drawing on his training in the colliery but involving different machinery. Being a printing engineer meant a lot of nightshifts, and your dad was often away in those early days, staying in a spare room offered by a colleague who lived close by. To be honest, that was a great relief to me, because although his bad dreams seemed to have settled—or perhaps he’d learned to control them—his problem had moved to other areas, including…well, including hitting me.”
As I’d experienced much of the same for over a decade of my boyhood, I could sympathize with my mum’s awkwardness, the way her voice wavered and eyes evaded mine.
“Are you all right, Mum? Do you want to stop now?” I hesitated, realizing that although it was only right that my brother and I—especially Dex—learned the truth about our respective ancestry, this shouldn’t be at any cost. “I could come back another day, if you’d prefer to think it all over first.”
“No, it’s time you both knew what happened,” Mum replied, steeling her tone with determination. “I assume you’ll be going back to see Dexter soon. And if that’s true, I want to make sure you have the story right, warts and all.”
I didn’t care for her final phrase—it put me in mind of some hideous hog in near-human form, growths protruding from its bloated body as it thundered around my brother’s garden in the dark.
But I pushed aside any such nonsense, and—realizing that in her particular way, my mum must still care for Dex, even though he’d been the product of an illicit tryst I’d surely now hear about—I simply said, “Okay. Go ahead.”
Then she did, her voice less unstable than it had been moments earlier.
“You remember how I said we’d met—your dad and me? He’d picked me up while I was thumbing for a lift up north. Well, just after you were born, it turned out that I wasn’t the last young woman he’d collected in his car that way. One of them was someone whose name you now presumably know, if you’ve seen that damned certificate.”
“You mean Sara Linton? Sara with no h.”
“Yes, that’s right. Sara with no h. You know, that detail always struck me, too. It’s funny you should pick up on the same.”
Well, we share half our genes, Mum, and perhaps can’t help thinking alike, I reflected, but decided it would be unwise to articulate this observation. She didn’t give me chance, anyway.
“I have to tell you something private now, Harry, but I don’t want you to feel bad about it.”
I felt my body stiffen on the couch, sitting more upright with autonomy, my fingers clenching like animal claws. “Go on,” I prompted, hardly knowing what was about to be related and how it could involve me feeling bad.
Mum smiled thinly, an attempt to belie her obvious pain. “There were complications during your birth, Harry, and I ended up…well, I don’t want to go into details. Let’s just say I ended up barren, unable to have more children. Do you understand where I’m going with this?”
“You mean…you mean what Dad did with Sara Linton was…planned? That you knew all about it prior to the event? That you wanted another child and the woman was willing to help?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that.” Mum pinched her lower lip and took a deep breath. “No, it was definitely an affair. Your dad had apparently collected her from somewhere called Norwood—I’d never heard of the place, but believe it’s in the depths of the North York Moors, on the route back from York to our old house nearer Middlesbrough.”
Norwood. I’d never encountered this village or small town either, but that was hardly surprising: the national park was full of such locations, many off public transport routes and whose residents were reliant on private vehicles.
But Mum was talking again.
“In fairness to your dad, he confessed what had happened soon after the event, once the woman was confirmed pregnant.”
“So how…well, how did you end up taking on the child—taking on Dex?”
My mother had never used the truncated version of her adopted child’s name, and I wondered whether there was a deep-rooted reason for this, whether she’d been unable to give herself fully to the boy. That would make sense of a lot, too.
“You’re right about me wanting another child—a girl I’d hoped for; I naïvely felt that a daughter might even revive my marriage—and I was surprised when your dad said he’d be willing to take one on, too. I mean, his commitment to fatherhood in terms of caring for you was limited, but once I’d calmed down after learning about his affair, we discussed the issue, and he was happy to go along with it.
“The thing was that Sara Linton didn’t want a child and was hardly shy about her intentions. Let me put it this way, Harry—she was determined to abort her son or daughter unles
s…”
“Unless what, Mum?”
“…unless we found ten thousand pounds and paid her to go through with the pregnancy.”
The full story was beginning to fall into place, and true to my hunch, it hadn’t proved as obvious as it had first appeared. There was subterfuge here, and with my dad involved, that didn’t surprise me. But then I found myself feeling less negatively about the man—after all, he’d done the most honorable thing even in such seedy circumstances. Whatever mistakes he’d made both prior to and after taking on that errant woman’s child, he’d certainly acted more decently than she had.
This chimed with my later experiences of him, the way he’d taken an interest in the birth of mine and Olivia’s daughter. And so he couldn’t have been all bad; he and my mother had come together to produce me, hadn’t they? There must have been some aspect of that poetry-writing younger man still inside him. His accident during his mining days might have simply knocked him off course, turning love to rage.
And if he and my mum hadn’t got the daughter she at least had hoped for, that was a risk they’d both taken, a consequence of participating in a game the seemingly ruthless Sara Linton had played: blackmailing an infertile couple with a threat of terminating a child. How low could anyone stoop?
“I take it you found the money?” I said, still struggling to come to terms with all the new strands of this dark history.
“We got a loan from a bank, but disguised its purpose, saying it was for home improvements. The adoption agencies—we were determined to make at least part of the process official—wouldn’t have looked kindly upon what essentially amounted to an illegal inducement.”
“Dear God,” I said, realizing what a sinister origin my brother had had in life. Was it any wonder he’d turned out the way he had?
Sensing the story was reaching its conclusion, my head felt full of fragments of that surprising poem—“…dig all day…sometimes at night…make enough money to limit my plight… chanced upon a jewel like you…darkness lifted…efforts felt true”—and after thanking my mum for all her information, I asked whether there was anything else I needed to know.
