EQMM, May 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

And then there's a blog called Naked Authors (www.nakedauthors.com). As much as I hate to disappoint you, it's not a calendar site. Instead, it's another group blog, and it presents “the naked truth about literature and life.” The Naked Authors (fully clothed in all the snapshots on the blog site) are best-selling writers Paul Levine, Cornelia Read, Patricia Smiley, James O. Born, Jacqueline Winspear, and occasional guest bloggers like James Grippando and Kate Flora. You might get a discussion of football players’ names, something about an author's current novel, or a photo of banjos. That's one of the entertaining things about reading blogs: You never know what kind of surprise is going to show up on one of them, and there's always something new.

  Sandra Ruttan's first novel, What Burns Within, will be published in May. She calls her blog On Life & Other Inconveniences (sandrablabber.blogspot.com), and she writes about whatever strikes her fancy or, sometimes, whatever makes her angry. She also writes about her novel and her editorial work on Spinetingler, a mystery webzine. She's always passionate about what she's discussing, and that's what makes her blog one to check regularly.

  Bill Crider's own blog can be found at billcrider.blogspot.com.

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  Fiction: MOTHER DEAR by Robert Barnard

  In 2003 Robert Barnard received the CWA's Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for Lifetime Achievement. The many other awards he's received over the course of his career as a novelist and short story writer are too numerous to mention, though it's worth noting that his two most recent honors were nomin-ations for the Agatha and Macavity awards for his 2006 EQMM story “Provenance."

  Our mother bore six children at a time when large families were rare, and in a small town where they were commented on with pursed lips, or accompanied by a salacious leer. I say “my mother bore” not because we arrived from her womb (though, unlikely as that seemed to us, we did) but because our father played no part in our early lives that we can easily recall: He was always “at work” or “down the allotment,” whence came shrivelled greens and carrots, gnarled turnips, and potatoes scarred by spade marks. Our mother was our life, and I suppose that, just as a dog on a lead has his owner on a lead as well, we were hers.

  She was not, I emphasize, a motherly person: Nor, I imagine, did she participate joyfully in the process by which our existences were set in train. She was dour and hard, the sergeant-major of the house. I never remember her embracing me or kissing me, or any of the other five, for she had no favourites. We were her life because she organised us: As soon as we were capable of doing anything around the house we were taught it and then kept at it. Kept at it, in fact, all the hours we were home from school. Teaching these home duties was done by slaps or worse on the bare legs, or cuffs around the head. Threats kept us at our tasks, and the threats were always carried out if our efforts fell short of her expectations in any way. Our hours at school were our times of pleasure. During our hours at home we were worked as hard as any mill child or young chimney-sweep in the nineteenth century.

  If my mother had been a literary person one could say she had modelled herself on Mrs. Joe Gargery. Hair drawn sharply back into a bun, hard features, her ruling us by her feared hand—certainly she could be said to have brought us up by hand. In fact she never read—not book nor even newspaper, which our father would often doze over. Her joy was in organising, and she spent all her spare time doing that.

  Our only pleasure at home was sometimes listening to the wireless. Not while we were working: That would mean our minds were not on the menial tasks she had ordered us to do. But later, just before we went to bed, she might put on the Home Service, and we might hear part of a play, the news, or a light concert. I formed my love of operetta then. It enchanted me because everybody seemed so happy. If my mother had not been tone deaf she would have turned it off as a bad influence.

  And she would have been wise to do so. It was a bad influence from her point of view. It confirmed for me what I had sensed from school, that there was another way, that other families were not organised into a monstrous regiment of children, that happiness in other families, while not constant, was at least possible.

  I said this to Annie, my elder sister.

  "We're not like other families,” I said.

  "I know."

  "They have fun. They have mothers who love them."

  "I know they do."

  "What should we do about it?"

  "I don't know."

  That was not a very satisfactory conversation, but I remember it because it brought the subject out into the open for the first time. Of course we had had conversations—at night before bed, on the way to school—in which we said how much we hated Mother. But this one aired the possibility that something might be done about it. We considered complaining to the Social Services or the police, but we knew nothing about the former, not even where its offices were, and we thought we might simply be taken “into care,” which sounded vaguely threatening, like the devil you don't know. We occasionally saw a policeman or woman on the beat, but the thought of going up to him or her and complaining that our mother worked us like slaves every hour of the day, every minute we were home, was too daunting to give serious consideration to: He (or she) would probably laugh at us, and ridicule is something children hate. Or if they did see there was a problem, they would most likely call and talk it over with Mother. The consequences didn't bear thinking about.

  "I don't see there's any alternative,” said Annie one day. “We'll just have to kill her."

  I thought, then nodded, and said nothing more. The idea incubated, took on strange forms, ballooned, but the main thing was, it was there, and the next few weeks saw a great deal of discussion, vague plans.

  The plan Annie and I discussed most often was one in which all of us children had some part in the killing, so that no one of us (we thought) could be convicted of the crime of murder. For example, Mother was to be poisoned, and one child was to procure the poison, another to procure the strong drink it was to be administered in, another to put the poison in the drink, another to lure her to taste it. As a discussion topic it was admirable. We realised quite soon that we could not go into a chemist's and ask for poison over the counter, let alone one unknown to Western science (something I felt was ideal). We then talked about a break-in at the pharmacy (break-in had a nice sound involving physical action rather than a special skill) but the plan fell through when we started to talk about what it was we were trying to get hold of. We had no idea what was a poison and what was not. We might just choose a drug that would give her diarrhea, which would be funny but wouldn't do anything to change the situation.

  "We could push her over a cliff, or out of a high window,” said Annie. That would have been fine if we had not lived in a small town in Lincolnshire—county of low-lying fens. There was a distinct lack of high-rise buildings as well.

  We had got no further than deciding we would say our mother had gone to help her sister in Middlesborough who was suffering from an inoperable (we used the word fatal, and had to explain that to the little ones) cancer when it happened. I say “it happened” because that's how it felt. We had, after all the discussions, no plan, and it may have been that it was that that caused the welling up in me of a sense of frustration, of impotence, of a mother-directed rage....

  It was about seven o'clock on an autumn evening. Our father had eaten his “tea,” and after a snooze had gone down to the British Legion Club, which he always did on Friday nights. He asked me to put his tools away in the garden shed, and told my little brother Martin he could put the piles of weeds that were dotted around the flower beds in the back garden onto the compost heap. Martin was—is—the best of us, the most sensible, the most brain-alive. If he had been older he would either have thought up a plan for Mother's murder or slapped down our plotting as sheer childish delusions.

  It was when he was coming back from the compost heap that it happened. He had filthy hands, and not only that: He had slipped, fallen, and his short
trousers were brown with leaf-mould. Mother appeared at the kitchen door. Probably she had been looking through the kitchen window, awaiting disaster.

  "Just look at you! Filthy child!” She grabbed from the window-ledge where it always lay a little bundle of twigs with which she always beat our bare legs to relieve her feelings. “I'll teach you to get yourself all over muck."

  She grabbed him to her. He sobbed and worked himself out of her grasp, leaving his pullover in her hands. “You just wait, you little monkey,” she yelled, and started after him.

  But she never reached him. I was collecting up Dad's garden tools and I had just taken from off the path a heavy spade. I was a strong fourteen-year-old—made strong not by athletics or team games but by slavery around the house. I raised the spade and brought it down with all the force at my command on Mother's head. She fell forward to the ground, then rolled over, her eyes looking vengefully at me. She repeated her last words:

  "You just wait, you little—"

  Then she died.

  I felt nothing as I looked down on her. Not grief, not guilt, not even exhilaration. Annie, as usual, chimed in with my reactions. She appeared at the front door and after a moment, seeing the stillness of the body, she said: “Go and get a blanket and cover her up."

  I fetched a blanket from the top shelf of the wardrobe in our bedroom. We wrapped her in it and pulled her to a dark corner down the side of the house that had never been a home. Then we talked about what we should do when Dad came home (always, in the days and weeks ahead, we talked about our next move, never looked further into the future).

  The result of this discussion was that when Dad came home we told him that we'd had a telegram from Auntie Kath in Middlesborough, and Mother had gone by train to nurse her through cancer. Our father thought for a bit, and then said, “Oh aye?” and settled down to read the front pages of the daily newspaper.

  Before he went to bed, he said: “It's funny, your mother never had a good word to say about your Auntie Kath."

  Annie, who was proving a tower of strength, said: “But it's cancer. That makes it different, doesn't it?"

  Our father thought. “Aye, ‘appen,” he said.

  That night at 2 a.m., in total silence, Annie and I buried our mother in a patch of earth at the bottom of the garden which my father had tried to turn into a vegetable patch but had given up when the soil proved too poor and too often waterlogged. With her we buried a small suitcase which our mother always kept packed with emergency things for if any of us suddenly had to go to hospital. We added two dresses of hers, a cardigan, blouse, and skirt, and a great deal of unattractive underwear. The parental bedroom was at the front of the house and Dad slept on, as did the scattered neighbours. By three o'clock Annie and I were in the two undersized beds we called ours in the bedroom we shared.

  Next morning Annie cooked for our dad his usual fried breakfast. “I'll have to help with the cooking,” he said, ‘'while your mum's away.” He never did cook more than about once a month, but he did pull his weight by doing all the heavy shopping, the bill paying, and his usual gardening, avoiding almost all the costs of vegetables. The rest of the running of the house went like clockwork. It always had, but we did what we'd always done with much less frequency, and with a much lighter heart. The younger children were a bit of a problem at first. We enjoined on Martin that he was to say nothing to any of them about what he'd seen. The young ones told everyone that Mummie was away, nursing Auntie, and then they forgot about her in the blessedly free and contented atmosphere that was evolving in the house.

  The first problem that emerged was what to say about our mother's absence. Dad didn't mention her for days after she “left,” but as the days stretched to weeks I decided we had to make the first moves. “I thought we'd have heard from Mum by now,” I said one night when the little ones were in bed. “Never a great one with her pen or pencil,” said Father.

  "She could telephone Mrs. Cowper down the road,” I said, mentioning the only household nearby that was on the phone. “They were never great friends,” said Dad. And that was true. Our mother had no female friends, and certainly no male ones either. It was Dad who made the next move.

  "I begin to doubt your mother's coming home at all,” he said one day. “'Appen she likes being free of us."

  That was a turning point. Henceforth Mother's return was an “if” rather than a “when.” We heard from friends at school that down at the British Legion our father had speculated about whether she'd “found a new bloke.” We sniggered at the unlikelihood of it, but not while Dad was around. Soon we became a different family unit, one with a dad, an acting mum in Annie, and a cooperating family coping with all the duties of the household. We were a happy home. One of Dad's “sayings,” things he came out with regularly, was “I don't think your mum knew how to be happy.” Now we did. Her death had released us.

  And we all did well. In our way we were a successful family. Martin went to university at Leeds, and later became a lecturer at Durham University. He specialised in Law. Clare, the second girl, became a nurse and went out to Australia, where she married and had a family. Vince, the second boy, became a motor mechanic and was famous in the neighbourhood as one who could fathom and nurse back to health any make of motor engine. Paul, the third boy, became manager of a large bookshop. Annie—dear, “without whom” Annie—became a primary-school teacher, and had a large and wonderfully happy family.

  We had reunions for many years, which sometimes even Clare managed to attend. They always made me think back to the early years of our “liberation,” when in the evenings we sat round the wireless, and eventually (a thrilling day in the family's life) the television set. We could bring friends home from school then, and Dad emerged as someone who loved having children around him. In the summer we had little treats—usually excursions: to Skegness, Cambridge, and, most excitingly, to London.

  I sometimes read crime novels and they never have a happy ending. Not a really happy one. Ours did. I shudder to think what would have become of us if we had spent all our childhood in the shadow of our mother. As it was, the liberation was quick and almost total: Within a week or two laughter was heard in the house. Quite soon after that we children had spells when we were positively boisterous. That murder freed us, allowed us to be natural, allowed us to be happy.

  Dad said that once, towards the end of his life. “By ‘eck, it's been a happy home, has this one,” he said. I thought he wanted to say more, get close to the reason why it had become happy, but all he followed it up with was: “It's been happy for you, hasn't it, lad?"

  "Yes, Dad,” I said. “I've had a very happy life."

  I haven't said much about me because I was the one who stayed at home. I became an accountant, and Dad and I shared the work of the house that we couldn't get done by a cleaning lady. I knew I couldn't leave the house, not with that thing buried down the end of the back garden. And I couldn't bring a wife there, have children there. Anything could have happened while I was out at work, what with Dad's passion for gardening and kiddies’ love for buckets and spades. It was better as it was. And there was no guarantee I could have got a wife if I'd wanted to. I was presentable enough, when I was younger, but accountancy as a job did not stir many women's blood.

  Dad had a long and happy retirement. When he died of prostate cancer at the age of seventy-seven I was just fifty. He lay in the hospital bed, trying to conceal his pain, often thanking me for all I'd done for him, as he put it. One day he said:

  "It turned out all right, lad, didn't it?"

  "Our lives? ‘Course they did, Dad."

  "No, I mean ... the business with your mother.” The nearest occupied bed in the hospital was some way away. I swallowed.

  "Mother? What did you know about that?"

  ” ‘Appen more than you knew. I checked on the night she disappeared that there was still the case she packed should anyone be rushed off to hospital. It was where it always was, in that old wardrobe on the landing.
And I checked next day as well and it were gone. And I knew that the spade you put away in the shed had earth on it, though I hadn't used it at all the day before. And I was bound to see where the earth had been turned over.” He took my hand, shook it, and then kissed it. “You did a good job, David. The best thing you ever did. Don't let anyone tell you different."

  I nodded. When I thought about it, I decided the final tally concerning what I had done was not too bad: five children growing up to be fine adults, a man rescued from a hideous marriage. If I was the exception, it was because I was the one who did it. I was and am a special case. All the time I was nursing Dad I was having funny visions of bars growing inside the windows of our house, felt that the open prison I had lived in up to then was turning into a high-security one. Dad's death, when it came, would not release me, nor did it. I had no friends, though the family who were still around in the neighbourhood were friends, and those are the best kind.

  Now I am retired, and I work in the garden, though notthere, and listen to the radio, watch a bit of television. I like to know about other people's lives. But I like to know about them from afar: I have grown so used to my house, and sometimes it seems to me that I have always been old in it. And now I know I have come to love it. Here is enshrined everything I have achieved. I am a prisoner who has come to love his cell. Nothing is left of the David who might have been. I am watching from outside, as if I was dead. I killed our mother, and she in her turn has killed me.

  (c)2008 by Robert Barnard

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  Fiction: THE PROBLEM OF THE SECRET PATIENT by Edward D. Hoch

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  Art by Laurie Harden

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  It seems that EQMM's editors are not alone in their admiration for Edward D. Hoch's Dr. Sam Hawthorne series. The latest Hawthorne collection has placed fifth on the list of the year's best translated mysteries in Japan. The notice appeared in Kodansha In-Pocket magazine. Other authors who placed high on the list: Michael Connelly, Carl Hiaasen, Ann Cleeves,and Patricia Cornwell.