Random Acts of Unkindness

by Jacqueline Ward

  ‘Bessy’s here, love. Look, it’s Bessy.’

  He turned his head slowly and our eyes met.

  ‘Bess. Bess.’ His hand reached weakly across the bed, and Lizzie took his other hand. ‘Have you found him, love?’

  I felt dizzy. I thought he’d forgot about us. After all these years, he remembered. Me and Thomas.

  ‘No, love, not yet, but I will.’

  ‘He was a good boy. You’ve done well by him.’

  Lizzie was sobbing on the other side of the bed.

  ‘So did you, Col. You were a good dad.’

  Lizzie looked panicked and I realised I had said ‘were.’ But we both knew.

  The blips got slightly faster and he turned his head toward Lizzie. I turned to leave and there was just a constant beep. The nursing staff ran in and Lizzie cried out, but he was gone. I sat in the waiting room, waiting for her to come out, to make sure she was all right. I wasn’t sure that it was any of my business, but I couldn’t leave her in here alone. At first I was upset, I cried a little, but then I realised that this was what would happen to me.

  I felt a little spark of excitement in my stomach, a feeling I hadn’t had since before Thomas had gone. It made me laugh out loud. I put it down to shock, but as I walked out of the hospital and left Lizzie in her son’s arms, I heard a strange, but familiar sound. I could hear birds singing.

  I looked around the hospital grounds, and a song thrush was calling out. I’d heard the blackbirds singing, Jack and Jill and all their ancestors, singing in my yard, but outside my little circle of safety, the world had become flat and joyless. Dangerous. Suddenly, it was alive with birdsong. I hadn’t heard that bloody birdsong for donkey’s years.

  I walked back through Ashton and over to Daisy Nook. I could smell the grass and hear the trickle of the steam, and of course, the birds. They were everywhere, and a big goose came to see what I had in my bag. I giggled like a schoolgirl and gave it a polo mint.

  There was a spring in my step when I walked up Ney Street, a sense of excitement for the future, because now I realised there might not be so much of it for me. Less suffering, less torture, less madness, less worrying. The end was in sight and I was delighted.

  She’s gone

  I’m getting to the end of it now and funnily enough, this is the bit I can’t remember as well. I can remember forty years ago like it was yesterday, but the past few years, well?

  Anyway, Colin was dead and I made friends with Lizzie. She’d come round sometimes and we’d have a cup of tea. She’d always look around the house, like she was imagining Colin there, and at the same time I was imagining I wasn’t there.

  Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t suicidal or anything like that, I was just weary of it all. I did the same thing every single day. I’d got up at dawn for years, first light. This was different in winter and summer, because of the length of the days. I didn’t wear a watch or have a clock in the house. Why would I need one?

  Like I said, I did the same thing every day. The rhythmic tick-tock of life kept my feet moving through the daylight, stopping me from stopping, the ever-present moon spurring me on, the knowledge that a person can’t just disappear completely and somewhere, even if it was in his mossy bed, with the heather duvet, Thomas was bathed in the same moonlight as I was.

  I’d go up to the moor and do what I had to do there, then I’d go home and in the afternoon I’d walk up to Daisy Nook. I might call on the market or go to a supermarket, but usually I got enough food for the week in one go.

  Over a long time I realised that my visit to Wardle Street when all this first happened might have turned out to be wrong, as all the reports released by them said that the first kiddies had been murdered somewhere else, in a house they had lived in at Bannock Street. I went there quite often and sat outside, wondering if Thomas had been here. There was a kind of yearning in me, a calling out to whatever was left behind of someone.

  I was sure that there was a trace of him somewhere, a kind of thread between mother and son that I was holding one end of and Thomas the other. He was lost and if I shouted loud enough, and pulled the thread as hard as I could, he’d find me again.

  Occasionally I’d be walking somewhere and I’d remember me and Thomas being there together. A different feeling would flood me, a sort of happiness and love, tinged with desperate sadness. I suppose a lot of the reason I kept going back to those places was because of that feeling. It was like being with him again, his smile and the way he stood, his voice, I could see it all clearly, then it was gone again.

  I’d also met up with a group of people, mostly mothers, but some fathers and friends, whose children friends had gone missing. Mothers for the Missing. Some of them had disappeared in the sixties, around the same time as Thomas, but there were lots of people who had missing relatives over the decades. Turned out to be run by John Connelly’s son, Sean. Never met him, but they’re a good family, that. They even carried on giving us a party on Bonfire night, in the same place. John’s factory went to the dogs a long time ago, but Sean kept his memory alive every year with a big bonfire just outside the gates.

  A woman called Pat organises them these days. Her boy went missing at the same time as that Harold Shipman business. Poor bugger. Never found him, and it’s made her hard. She always reserves a special place for me at the meetings, because she told me that Thomas was the first case she ever knew about. She told me that load of people had gone missing on the estate over the years, more than we think. Loads. Some of them came back.

  But she seemed to think that if it were a young lad who went missing, that would be the last we’d see of him alive. Funny really, she always looked like she was trying to work something out, always troubled, always asking questions. Happen she thought she knew something, but if she did, she never let on.

  We’d sit around and talk about things our kids used to do. Pat’s wonderful; she organises charity walks and all sorts. She even gets speakers from down South to come and tell us about dredging rivers and forensics. I went to meetings and helped to post out posters and flyers for them.

  You could always tell when someone was new. They’d be crying and wondering what would happen. Then you’d see the shell build up around them, just like it had with me, and they’d become quieter and more reserved about it.

  Some of them stopped coming to the groups, but others came every week. I’d get a phone call from time to time asking me to come to the community centre where we’d all crowd around a TV, watching the news. It was usually Sky news, as they have all the coverage. A presenter would talk over a scene of a body being removed from a shallow grave, and we’d all be half praying it was our loved one, so we’d know what had happened.

  It was one of those times when I found out. There’d been a rumour that a decomposed body had been found in a railway yard, so I made my way to the community centre, and we made a pot of tea and sat down, all in our individual little cells of sadness, fixed on the screen and sat. About halfway through the report a picture of her flashed on the screen and I moved my hand unexpectedly, spilling tea on my skirt.

  ‘Moors Murderer has died in hospital from a serious chest infection following a suspected heart attack two weeks ago.’

  A slow hand clap began, but I was listening to the report. She’d been given last rites by a Catholic priest. She had a mother. I’m not sure why that surprised me. I wondered what sort of terrible life her mother had, knowing what she had done? And her family?

  I didn’t feel sorry for her. I started to cry, but it wasn’t for her, it was for me, and Thomas, and Colin, I suppose. It horrified me that she might be in the same place as Colin and Thomas now, and I was still here.

  I’d gone home and sat crying for hours. What hope was there now? She’d been my only hope. I needed to ask her if she’d picked Thomas up that day, if they’d thrown his Billy can over the wall, if they’d done heaven knows what to him and then killed him and buried him on Saddleworth Moor.

  I vomited twice in
the kitchen sink and then sat on the back doorstep to get some air. My latest blackbird, who I called Kylie, even though he’s a male, hopped along to see me and I threw him some bread. He’d fly up and sit on my hand to eat it, fluttering about.

  It was November 16th and soon there’d be a gap until spring. Blackbirds don’t really migrate; they sometimes just go where it’s warmer. Kylie might come back, or it might be another one, but the blackbirds, and many other kinds of birds, focused on my tiny back yard for goodies such and bacon rind and seeds.

  When I was buying them specially in the market I’d imagine they were for my grandchildren, like sweets or little trinkets. I think that’s why I named them all, they were my adoptive grandchildren, sent by Thomas so I wouldn’t be alone.

  I’d bought some little plants for the backyard, some heather and some mosses, especially from the garden centre. I’d brought a few little plants back from the moor as well, just to keep the new ones company.

  I had them in some half barrels that Colin had brewed some Poitin all those years ago. If I saw old paint cans dumped in the ginnel, I’d grab them and wash them out and plant sunflowers and all kinds of plants.

  Over the years it had become a bit of a sanctuary and I’d made a trellis for each of the three yard walls and grown clematis up it. It made it all a bit more private. I could sit out there in my pyjamas or in my slip, smoking cigarette after cigarette and throwing bits to my little bird children.

  I tried to find out where her funeral was, so I could go and ask her mother if she had said anything about Thomas. I’d realised by now that the police wouldn’t tell me anything. I’d written letter but they were always returned unread by the prison. They were also wise to the missing people group and wouldn’t tell them anything.

  By this time there was a quarter of a million people going missing every year. Quarter of a million! A woman from the agency told me this, and she said that most of them turn up sooner or later, but it could be years.

  I met her in a café one day, trying to find out what was happening now she was dead. It was the same woman I’d met years before, she looked heavier now and she told me she’d had a baby.

  ‘Aw, that’s lovely, pet. Now you look after it. Is it a girl or a boy?’

  She smiled.

  ‘A little girl. Emily.’

  ‘Oh, lovely, how wonderful.’ I sipped my tea. ‘Where is she now?’

  She was shuffling paper and I suppose I looked quite relaxed.

  ‘Oh, in childcare. We both work full time. We have to.’

  I snorted.

  ‘Well you look after her. You don’t know what might happen to her.’

  She stared at me and tapped her pen on the table.

  ‘You know, Mrs Swain, this isn’t an evil world. There are lots of people just going about their daily business and enjoying their lives.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I know. Sorry, it’s just that one bad person can ruin a lot of peoples’ lives.’

  ‘Mmm. But people recover, don’t they? And I’m here to help.’

  My face was red now, and I could feel the heat.

  ‘Recover? From losing your son? Can you imagine if Emily just disappeared when you got home? If you never found her again? How would you recover from that?’

  Her eyes misted a little.

  ‘But she’s in trusted childcare. And, if I might say, Bessy, your life’s gone on, hasn’t it? Since all this happened.’

  I could see my reflection in a sugar dispenser. I looked a lot younger than my years and I had a round, smiley face. I didn’t look mad or diseased, or even odd. I just looked like a normal person.

  ‘Not by choice. Because it had to. It just does, doesn’t it, day after day? At first it was because Thomas needed something to come back to. Now it’s just because I wake up each day. I expect that will end soon and I can’t say I’ll be sorry. Not that I’ll bloody know about it.’

  She wrote a note down, no doubt some rubbish about me being depressed or suicidal. There must be a whole forest of notes about me somewhere, all about what I’m like, but I bet none of them say heartbroken, or dead inside.

  ‘I’m sorry you feel like that, Bessy. I am.’

  She was, I could tell. It didn’t help though. I got to the point.

  ‘The thing is, with her dead, I’ve got no one to ask about Thomas. I wondered if I could have a copy of the police files about him, and the files you have, you know, the letter I wrote and all that? I’d like to just go through them and see if I can spot anything.’

  Her expression was blank.

  ‘Erm, not really, they’re private.’

  ‘But I can have them. I’ve looked into it. The data protection act. I can have anything to do with me. You have to let me.’

  ‘But they’re not to do with you, Bessy, are they? They’re to do with Thomas.’

  ‘What do you mean? I’ve written letters and given statements. That’s to do with me and my son.’

  ‘And you can have anything back that you’ve contributed. But you can’t see Thomas’s files.’

  A niggle of irritation was wriggling inside me now and I knew she was going to say something I didn’t like.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, in some cases, and I’m not saying this is the case with Thomas, when we contact the missing person, they indicate that they don’t want any contact with the person who makes the enquiry. It’s their right as an adult to do this. And we have to respect their rights. Going missing isn’t a crime. They haven’t done anything wrong.’

  My mind wandered back to Colin’s mother and Colin, both dead now, and their mocking, telling me he’d run away because I was a bad mother. The market gossips, headscarves tight under their nasty little chins, picking at the sore of my desperation, pointing me out as the woman whose son and husband both left.

  ‘So there’s a chance that the police, and your people, have known all along where he was and because he said he didn’t want contact, I’ve never been told?’

  She looked at her notes. Now she couldn’t even look me in the eye.

  ‘A possibility. But I don’t know if this is the case here. I can’t say.’

  ‘But the police have told me that it’s a missing person enquiry until they find a body and they haven’t been able to find Thomas. That’s as far as they’ve told me. Could there be more?’

  ‘They work on the premise that it’s so difficult to hide a body that someone would have found him by now, if he was dead. And I know that there’s the Moors connection, which sort of makes a mockery of it. But if they had found him alive, and he’d asked not to be identified, then they won’t tell you. Try to look at it from Thomas’s point of view. He’s entitled to that privacy, isn’t he? They’re his human rights.’ Of course, she was right. I’d just thought it would be simple, they’d find him and tell me. I’d never thought seriously that he might not want me or his dad. ‘Of course, that might not be what’s happened here.’

  I stared at her for a too long time.

  ‘What do you think? Do you think he’s dead? Off the record, as a mother?’

  ‘That’s not fair, Bessy. You shouldn’t ask me that.’

  ‘Well, I am asking. What do you think?’

  ‘OK. Off the record, but I’ll deny it if you repeat it. I’d press the police to search the moor again. I’d never give up. Not unless he turns up.’

  It was cryptic, and I couldn’t work out if they really knew where he was or not. I spent a long time after that weighing up if I had done anything to make him leave. Was it the arguments with Colin? Did he really hate me like he had said?

  That led to torturing myself with what had happened if he had run away. Had another woman took him in and fed him? Did he call her mum now? Did he still look up at the moon, our moon, and tell his children, even grandchildren now, about how he had another mum somewhere once?

  I’d started smoking even more and I was on sixty-odd a day by now. I’d rub lemons on my hands and teeth to try
to get rid of the brown stains, and use an air freshener spray on my clothes before I went out.

  The walls in the house were brown, and when Lizzie came round we’d fill ashtray after ashtray wondering about the world. We never broached the subject of our children, the children Colin had brought up. Except Thomas. We talked about Thomas and what had happened. But not the other children. Hers were still around, producing grandchildren for her to love and spoil. I had my birds and a dead daughter upstairs.

  The more we reasoned, the more desperate I became. With her dead and him mad, the police saying nothing and not letting me see my own son’s files, I let my mind run over the is he dead/is he alive more than I probably should have.

  Lizzie was talking to me one day and she told me about her friend whose husband had run off, and how she’d been to see a psychic. I told her that I didn’t believe in that sort of thing, but in the back of my mind it kept reappearing. It was as if I had a head full of sticky notes, yellow Post-its that kept jostling to the front of my thoughts. I couldn’t forget about the psychic, and I ran through every possible scenario.

  What if I could get in touch with my dead son? What if I could? Or at least someone who knew? And that’s how I met Sarah Edwards.

  The day of reckoning

  I’d never really been what you would call religious. Me and Colin had got married in church and I suppose I had some beliefs, but matters had been confused for me when Thomas went missing, mainly because it made me wonder why God would do this to me. But I hedged my bets both ways, because I wanted to think of Thomas in heaven if he was dead. And her in hell.

  The idea of going to see a psychic had grown inside me and eventually it burst out at the missing group. As we all sat round looking sad, clasping out teacups, and talking about the next campaign, as they now called their searches, I broached the subject.

  ‘I was wondering if any of you had been to see a psychic? You know, someone who gets in touch with the other side.’