by John Marrs
4.40 p.m.
My feet must have grazed every road and cobbled avenue in the East End before I chanced upon where my mother once lived. But the square’s name wasn’t the only thing to have changed over time.
A looming tower of concrete flats had ousted her row of dilapidated houses, casting a bleak shadow over an already grey landscape. Everything I’d deplored during my fateful last visit had been demolished and replaced by a more contemporary, but equally hideous, version of the same thing.
Disappointed, I gravitated towards a greasy spoon café to contrive a new plan of action. I ordered, and an elderly waitress with a raven-black beehive and a soup-stained apron carried a cup of tea to my table.
‘Excuse me, are you from around here?’ I asked as she shuffled away.
‘All my life, darlin’,’ she muttered over her shoulder.
‘I don’t suppose you remember a woman who used to live in a house where those flats are now? Doreen Nicholson?’
She stopped, turned around. ‘Hmm.’ She thought. ‘I knew a Doreen, but Nicholson weren’t her last name. What does she look like?’
My father had never taken a photograph of my mother – well, if he had, none had ever hung on a wall inside our house. I could remember how she smelled, sounded, laughed and sang. I could picture the hint of grey hiding in the roots of her hair, how her large gold earrings made her lobes droop and the Bardot-like gap between her two front teeth. But for years I had struggled to put the pieces of a mental photofit together to create a whole woman.
‘Ash-blonde hair, around five foot four, olive-green eyes, quite a loud laugh. She lived here about twenty years ago.’
The waitress headed towards a wall of framed photographs behind the counter, and unhooked one from the wall. ‘This her?’ she asked, handing it to me. Instantly I recognised one of the four women standing in their uniforms around a table.
‘Yes, that’s her.’ I smiled and swallowed hard.
‘Yeah, darlin’, I knew old Dor. She lived around the square on and off for a while. Worked here with me, ooh, a good few years back now. Poor cow.’
Goosebumps spread across my arms. ‘Did something happen to her?’
‘Yeah, she passed away, darlin’. About fifteen years back.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘That bloody fella of hers gave her one pasting too many. Bounced her head off the walls, the Old Bill said. He was a vicious bastard . . . Gave her brain damage. She was in a coma and on machines for weeks before she went.’
I closed my eyes and exhaled as I muttered his name. ‘Kenneth.’
‘Yeah, that’s the one. How did you know her then?’
‘She was my mother.’
The waitress put on the glasses hanging from a copper chain around her neck and squinted. Then she sat herself down opposite me with a thump.
‘Well, blow me, of course you are . . . You’re Simon, ain’t you? You have her eyes.’ I was surprised she knew of my existence, let alone my name. ‘Ooh darlin’, Dor said you was a handsome little bugger,’ she cackled as I offered an embarrassed smile.
‘She talked about you a lot, you know. She had a baby photo of you in a little locket round her neck. Well, she did till he made her pawn it. Never forgave herself for letting you go.’
For a fleeting moment, I felt warm inside.
‘What happened to Kenneth?’
‘Locked him up again, didn’t they? Told the coppers she went for him and it were self-defence, but the jury didn’t believe him. Got banged up in the Scrubs for life this time.’
The waitress introduced herself as Maisy, and lit an unfiltered roll-up cigarette as she filled me in on the missing pieces of my mother’s life. She recalled how Doreen and Kenneth began courting in their teens. When she fell pregnant with me, her parents and Kenneth had insisted she have an abortion. But when Doreen stubbornly refused, he pummelled her in the hope nature would force her to miscarry. Even then, I was a resilient soul.
The first of her many swift exits began with a stay at a cousin’s house in the Midlands. There, Doreen met Arthur and he fell hopelessly in love with her. And aware she was pregnant with another man’s child, he offered to take care of us both. It was all the security an unwed mother-to-be with a bastard inside her needed. Doreen had love for her new husband, but he was unable to capture the heart of a conflicted creature. And after I was born, she knew a sedentary family life would never equal a passionate one.
So she returned to Kenneth, alone. The abuse continued, and when it became intolerable, she rotated between the two men in her life.
‘Please don’t blame her, luv, she couldn’t stop herself,’ added Maisy, despairingly. ‘She was a smashing girl, but she had a self-destructive streak. I got a feeling her old dad messed with her when she was a little ’un, if you know what I mean. I don’t reckon she thought she deserved to be loved. She tried so hard to make Kenny a better fella, but he was born evil. You can’t change nature.’
No, Maisy, you can’t, I thought, catching my reflection in the café window.
Doreen reappeared in London for her final swansong, soon after we’d rejected her. ‘She had nowhere left to go,’ said Maisy. ‘She knew Kenneth was gonna be the death of her, so she just held on as long as she could.’
And after the inevitable happened, her friends were unaware of where Arthur and I lived. With no savings to pay for a funeral, they clubbed together to offer her a respectable send-off instead of a pauper’s grave.
‘I still think about your old mum,’ added Maisy, her eyes moistening. ‘Always wished I could have done more to help her.’
‘So do I, Maisy; so do I.’
7.50 p.m.
The grounds of Bow Cemetery were laid out in square blocks, making my mother’s plot easy to locate. Her name, the years of her birth and death, and ‘God Bless’ were all her substitute family could afford to have engraved on the concrete headstone. ‘Laing,’ I repeated out loud. I hadn’t even known her surname.
I tore out buttercups and long grasses and smoothed down stray pebbles with my hands. Then I lay on a bench close to her and soaked up the troubled tranquillity around me. I made up my mind to keep her company that night – my mother had spent too many evenings on her own.
My two fathers lived in contradictory worlds, but shared common ground when it came to her. They’d loved her too much but had handled her rejection in very different ways.
Doreen and Kenneth. I’d fought to be so different from the people who’d created me, but I’d ended up exactly the same.
8 June, 3.10 p.m.
‘What the fuck do you want?’ he began with a derisive snort.
I didn’t reply. I sat calm and motionless, my palms face down on the table, staring at him, unafraid.
‘Well? You expecting an apology or something? ’Cos you ain’t gonna get one.’
Kenneth Jagger had planted himself behind a metal table in the visitors’ room in Wormwood Scrubs prison, his arms folded defiantly. Only there was little for him to be defiant about, because he was a different man to the one I’d last encountered.
A merciless cancer had ravaged his bones and cut his body weight in half. His cheeks were sunken and hollow and chemotherapy had reduced his teeth to brown crumbs. The tattoos that once shone proudly on his tough, leathery skin had blurred and sagged as the muscles beneath them deflated. Doreen’s name and the heart were barely distinguishable under a layer of raised welts, like he’d tried to cut her out of him with a blade. Eyes that once craved esteem were now drained of hope.
‘Don’t waste my time,’ he spat.
‘You don’t have much left,’ I replied.
He shot me a look that would have petrified the thirteen-year-old me. ‘Last chance. Why are you here?’
I was there because I wanted to know if my rotten apple hadn’t fallen far from his decaying tree. I’d dedicated much energy to trying to erase our biological link, but in the end, I was a chip off the old block.
&
nbsp; ‘What did it feel like, killing my mother?’ I asked.
He paused. Of all the things I could have asked, that wasn’t the question he’d expected. ‘Why did you do it?’ or ‘What’s wrong with you?’ possibly. But not an enquiry into the emotions involved in severing a human life.
‘It was self-defence,’ he finally replied. ‘The bitch tried to knife me.’
‘That wasn’t what I asked.’
He frowned, puzzled as to what to make of his flesh and blood. So I repeated myself.
‘I asked you what it felt like to kill my mother.’
‘Why do you wanna know?’
‘I just do.’
His faded, squinting eyes burrowed deep into mine. ‘What happened to you?’ he asked.
‘I’m not scared of you anymore.’
‘Well, you fucking should be.’
I shook my head. ‘Kenneth, look at you – you’re no threat to anyone. Your time has been and gone. You’re a pathetic, dying old man who’ll only ever be remembered for bringing misery to people’s lives. Now answer my question please. What did it feel like, killing my mother?’
At first, he tried to pretend my words hadn’t rung true, but his fallen expression betrayed him. From the corner of my eye, I watched the second hand of a wall clock rotate twice before he spoke again. And when he did, his bravado crumpled like a house of cards. His shoulders slumped and his arms unfolded. It was as if suddenly he was too tired to fight against the world any longer, like he’d realised I was the only person left who cared what he had to say. And he was almost grateful for my ear.
‘It was the worst feeling in the world,’ he said at last, his voice ravaged. ‘And I’ve done a lot of bad shit in my time.’ He cleared his throat and raised his eyes to mine. ‘It was like someone else was killing her and I was watching but I couldn’t stop them. I loved her so much, but I never really had her. She was gonna leave me again and find you.’
‘Why?’
‘It tore her up not being part of your life. I told her she weren’t going, but she wouldn’t listen. My Dor never bloody listened. She started packing her bags instead.’ His eyes became watery but no tears fell. ‘I grabbed her and pulled her away, but she reckoned she’d “wasted too much of her life” on me. She was always saying it, but this time she meant it. So I smacked her one, and once I started, I just kept going. I couldn’t let you have her.’
I sat in silence and digested Kenneth’s words. I felt no anger towards him – I’d invested too much time in hating the woman I’d built a life with to have any spare. Instead, I understood him.
‘Thank you,’ I said, finally. ‘I have something for you.’
I glanced around the room to ensure I wouldn’t be seen by a guard, then rolled up my shirtsleeve, unclasped the watch Doreen had once given me and pushed it across the table towards him. He covered it with his hand.
‘Take it.’
‘I don’t want it.’
‘She bought it for you, correct?’
‘No, I got it myself.’ I assumed that meant he’d stolen it.
‘And she took it, without you knowing, to give to me.’
His head fell and he looked away. I realised I’d been wrong to presume.
‘You wanted her to give it to me?’ I asked. He remained inert. ‘But you disliked me . . . You wanted her to terminate me.’
‘I didn’t wanna kid because I didn’t wanna turn them into someone like me. I ain’t got anything to show for my life but you. You’re the only thing I’ve ever done that was any good.’
I allowed him to embrace that illusion briefly before I spoke again.
‘You’re wrong, Kenneth.’
Then I leaned across the table to whisper something in his ear that no one else in the room could hear. I sat back on my chair while he scowled at me, confused and dismayed.
‘So now you know the only good thing you ever did isn’t just a little like his father,’ I said. ‘He’s worse.’
‘You fucking monster,’ he muttered.
‘Like father, like son. Keep your watch and I hope they bury you with it sooner rather than later.’
Then I turned my back on my father and left the room.
CATHERINE
Northampton, twenty-five years earlier
6 June, 8.45 a.m.
I unscrewed the lid from a bottle of wine and poured it into a dirty mug, which had been lying in the kitchen sink along with the rest of the unwashed dishes. I opened the kitchen cupboard, took three aspirin from a bottle on the top shelf and swallowed them in the hope they’d get rid of the pounding headache brought on by a second sleepless night. The bottle rattled when I shook it. It sounded nearly full, and for a moment I wondered how many pills it might take to kill a person.
I glanced wearily around the room and sighed at the mess it had so quickly become. It was in good company. The rest of the house was a mess, the past two days had been a mess and I was a mess.
I tried so hard to be positive in front of everyone else, but when I was alone, the doubts set in. I couldn’t tell anyone how sick I felt each time I thought about what might have happened to Simon, that I jumped with every ring of the phone or footstep on the path, or how I was surviving on adrenaline and caffeine, my brain fighting against a body begging to go back to bed.
The only part of me keeping sane was the part that put the children’s needs before mine. Everyone knew Simon was missing except for his own flesh and blood, and it was my job to keep it that way. But it was hard, because many of their friends’ parents had taken time off work to join the second day of the search. It was only a matter of time before the kids found out. Then what would I tell them? Parents are supposed to be the ones with all the answers, but I had none.
According to Roger, the first seventy-two hours are the most important in the search for a missing person, as that’s the time frame within which most turn up. Any longer than that and hope begins to fade. Simon’s clock was ticking.
So I clenched my fists and prayed it would be the day they found him. I swear WPC Williams had stifled a smile when she warned me that if they’d not turned up anything by nightfall, they’d have to call off the search. I wondered how many loved ones I’d have to lose in my lifetime before God gave me a break.
Suddenly I was aware I still had hold of the aspirin bottle, so I threw it back in the cupboard, ashamed of something I’d never do. I finished the rest of my wine, put the mug back in the sink and headed upstairs to shower.
As I stood under the warm jet, I crumbled. I cried and cried until I couldn’t tell whether my body was wet with water or tears.
3.35 p.m.
It may have been inevitable but it still caught me off guard.
‘Amelia Jones says Daddy’s lost,’ cried James as he ran to meet me at the school gates. ‘Is he?’ His green eyes were wide and troubled. Robbie, too, looked as anxious as I’d ever seen him. I knew they deserved my honesty.
‘When we get home, let’s find your fishing nets from the garage and we’ll go to the stream,’ I replied calmly. ‘And then we’ll have a chat.’
The late-afternoon sun hid behind a large dragon-shaped cloud as the four of us and Oscar walked in single file towards a wooden bridge over the water.
I chose a place they associated with their daddy, as if it might soften the blow a little. It was somewhere he’d taken them many times to pretend to fish. They’d catch imaginary minnows and crayfish, throw them inside pretend buckets and bring them home to me, where I’d play along and pretend to be amazed by their haul.
We sat down, cast our imaginary lines and skimmed the surface with nets while I gently explained we might not see him for a while.
‘Where has he gone?’ asked James, his brow narrowing like his father’s did when he couldn’t make sense of something.
‘I don’t know.’
‘When will he be back?’
‘I can’t tell you, honey.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I can’t. A
ll I know is that Daddy’s gone away for a bit and hopefully he’ll come home soon.’
‘Why don’t you know?’ pushed James.
‘I just don’t, I’m sorry. We don’t know how to find him. But I know he’s thinking about us all.’
‘But when we don’t tell you where we’re going, you tell us off,’ reasoned Robbie. I nodded. ‘So are you going to tell Daddy off?’
‘Yes,’ I lied, but I wouldn’t tell him off. Instead I’d wrap myself around him and hold on for dear life.
‘Has he gone to see Billy?’ asked Robbie, his face beginning to crumple.
I swallowed hard. ‘No, he hasn’t.’ I knew he hadn’t. I prayed he hadn’t.
‘But how do you know?’ scowled James.
I looked into the distance where the stream melted into the fields and said nothing. The fishing continued in silence and they caught nothing while their little brains digested what I’d said, as best they could. None of us wanted to imagine a life without him.
8.10 p.m.
I sat on a patio chair, wrapped in Simon’s navy-blue chunky Aran sweater, and waited for the day to merge into dusk. The cordless phone I’d asked Paula to buy for me was never more than a foot away. But it was as silent as the world around me. Only the moths clamouring around a candle’s flame in the Moroccan lantern kept me company. Directionless and unsteady, we had a lot in common.
I tried to cheer myself up by thinking about all the silly things he used to do to make me smile, like giving the dog a voice, dancing around the kitchen with me to old Wham! songs, or putting on one of my dresses to make our friends laugh in the middle of a dinner party. He could be so silly sometimes, and I desperately wanted that man back.
I poured the last trickle from a bottle of red wine into my glass and waited. That’s all I’d done for three days – wait.
When I was inside our house I was homesick for a place I’d never left. But it had become claustrophobic without Simon, and I dreaded the nights. Because without the interruptions of friends stopping by or me trying to put a smile on the glum faces of the confused kids, I had even more time to think about him. I missed him, yet inside I raged at him too, for leaving me like this.
