by A. D. Koboah
“Good morning, baby boy.” I yawned and released him.
“G’ moorrnin,” he said and snuggled up to me once more.
It was like the start of any other day and I had lain in bed with Dante in my arms and watched daylight slowly steal into the room and lift the veil of darkness that had transformed my bedroom into a landscape of sinister shapes and shadows. When the tinny chirping sound of my alarm clock sounded, I forced myself out of bed and began the sometimes chaotic routine of getting myself and Dante ready to meet the day.
Recalling that day is agonising as I remember every step, every detail and the million and one things I could have done to make that day end differently.
I should have stayed at home and not left the house to go to my lecture.
I should have left my car behind instead of bundling Dante into it and pulling away from the relative safety of our impoverished little flat.
If I had been better organised and left the house earlier, I wouldn’t have hit the traffic snaking its way down the long busy road to my mother’s house. If I had stayed on that route instead of taking a detour in order to avoid the traffic, I wouldn’t have seen them.
And most of all, if I hadn’t spent the past few years pining over Mohamed, their presence wouldn’t have affected me so, and I wouldn’t have continued the journey in such a distracted state of mind.
At first, the man and woman I saw as I slowed the car down to a stop at the traffic lights were simply another couple. It was only when they began to cross the road that his tall frame, deep, dark complexion and that familiar saunter of his had flicked a switch in my head.
I watched as they passed the car, registering how slender she looked beside him and the way she would break into a half-jog every few steps in order to keep up with his long, easy strides.
It was only when Nicola and Mohamed reached the other side of the road that I realised it was them. The way she looked up adoringly at him whilst she talked, the fact that her hand was firmly gripping his arm and a few other things had told me they were a couple.
Quick flashes of the conversation we had exchanged in my bedroom when I had told her I was pregnant, the way she had looked at Dante the last time I had seen her and Jason’s reaction when I told him I had given her a picture of Dante to give to Mohamed raced through my head.
It all made sense. The only thing that didn’t make sense was how I hadn’t seen it before this point even though all the signs had been staring me in the face.
Betrayal sucked the air out of my lungs and breathing; a function I previously did unconsciously suddenly became a painful effort of consciously forcing my chest to expand to take in air and then forcing it to retract and expel the air back out again.
The beeping of car horns behind me broke through the fog of memories and I jumped violently, realising that the lights had changed back to green. I attempted to move off and the car jerked forward before it stalled abruptly. By the time I started the engine again, the lights had changed back to red.
“Fucking wake up!” I heard someone shout from one of the cars behind me, but I barely heard him.
I had driven off in a haze once the lights had changed back to green, distractedly looking out for Mohamed and Nicola, my emotions in turmoil that the sight of him could hurt me after all this time and that Nicola had betrayed me so callously. I had eventually given up looking out for them but remained lost in my thoughts. So it took a few minutes before the sound of his voice broke through my haze.
“Mummy, Mummy!”
“Yes, babe?” I looked over at Dante and then quickly turned my attention back to the road.
A wave of guilt settled in the pit of my stomach when I realised that I had been ignoring him for at least five minutes.
“Dwink, Mummy. I wan dwink.”
“Babe, I’m so sorry,” I said.
We were nearly at my mother’s house, but I felt so guilty that I turned into the side street near her home and parked outside a newsagents. “Mummy’s sorry, Dante. I’ll get you your drink.”
I sat in the car with the engine turned off for a few moments and tried to compose myself. Wiping away a stray tear, I stared ahead of me and tried to make sense of what I had just seen.
“Why Mummy sad?” Dante asked from his car seat, his brow furrowed and looking as if he was getting ready to cry himself.
The question made me catch my breath and I quickly forced a smile onto my lips even whilst sniffing loudly.
“No, babe. Mummy’s not sad. Mummy’s happy. Are you happy?” I asked, repeating a question he sometimes asked about a million times a day. His face brightened instantly.
“Of course!” he said sharply and I smiled, marvelling at the assumption only a child could have that there was no state of mind other than that of a happy one.
“I’ll be back with your drink in a minute, sweetie.”
I opened the car door, stepped out and closed the door behind me.
Thinking about that day, it is always at that point that I wish I could have gone back in time and added the extra minute it would have taken for me to walk around to the passenger side of the car, release him from the car seat and take him with me into the shop.
But I hadn’t done that. I had walked casually into the shop with my thoughts dominated by the image of Mohamed and Nicola walking across the road in front of my car, oblivious to me and Dante.
Once in the newsagents I had quickly picked out a carton drink, and then out of guilt for being too distracted to hear Dante earlier, I picked up a packet of crisps, something I normally didn’t allow him to have.
I don’t know what it was at that moment that made me stop. Stop with the carton of drink and packet of crisps. Stop, turn and walk back to the shop entrance. Stop, walk to the shop entrance, step out of my normal, dreary humdrum existence and into some kind of alternate reality, a twilight zone in which nightmares could leave the confines of the dream world and step into my present.
I arrived at the shop entrance just in time to see a tall, thin white man dressed in jeans, a grey tracksuit top, a red cap, which had mousy brown hair peeping out from under it, and a cigarette tucked behind his ear.
The opportunist. Seeing an opportunity before him, he reached for the door of the unlocked car, slipped into the driver’s seat and locked the door securely behind him.
I have never known fear touch me as acutely as it did at that moment.
The normal street noises had disappeared and I only heard the car door close behind him with a thud. I saw nothing other than the car in this eerie twilight zone in which only three people existed. Me, Dante and the man now sitting beside him in the driver’s seat of my car. My heart was beating wildly, the blood racing through my body as I watched him in the car with Dante.
“No.” My body sprung into action and I took a step forward. “No! What are you doing?”
My voice sounded hollow, seeming to have no power in this world and it seemed as if only I could hear it as the man in the car didn’t even look back. I took two more steps forward, feeling as you do in a dream when you’re trying to move towards or run away from something, but you’re moving in slow motion.
My flight to the car was halted by strong hands which seized me by the neck and upper arm from behind, and pulled me backwards erasing one of the steps forward that it had taken so much effort to make. It really seemed as if I was in a twilight zone until I heard, “Get back here, you thief!”
I realised then that it must have been the newsagent pulling me backwards and I realised that I was very much in the real world.
“No!” I cried, trying to turn to face him. “No! I’m not stealing, take it. Take it!” I screamed throwing the drink and crisps back at him. “My car! My baby!”
“It’s too late for that. I’m calling the police!”
His grip tightened on my neck and with what felt like an inhuman strength, he pulled me farther back, taking away from me the rest of the steps I had made toward the car and Dante. My a
rms desperately flailed out and I managed to catch hold of the doorway to try and halt the progress he had made as he dragged me back into the shop.
“Let go of her!” I heard somebody shout from behind us. “Somebody’s trying to steal her car. Quick, let go!”
I was free. I propelled myself forward and ran to the passenger side of the car to Dante. He was crying and had his hands up to his head in a helpless, bewildered position I have never been able to forget. He was calling out for me. I saw relief cross over his features when I appeared at his side of the car, but when he saw the look of sheer horror on my face, he began to cry louder.
“Just let me get him out of the car!” I screamed when I heard his muffled cries and heard him say, “Mummy” again and again.
I was frantically pulling at the car door handle and banging on the window whilst the man calmly and steadily worked on the wires beneath the dashboard.
“Your keys! Where are your keys?”
The newsagent was beside me, banging on the car door. His words freed my brain and I dug my keys out of my bag.
A small crowd had gathered by this time. Some people merely stood there staring in shock and fear, others were banging on the driver’s side of the car and pulling at door handles.
When I was finally able to open the car door, Dante’s terrified screams immediately filled my ears, driving me to act quickly. I reached into the car and unbuckled the car seat. My hands were around him. I had lifted him out of the car seat and almost had him pressed to my chest when the car lurched forward and he was snatched out of my grasp.
It was as if time slowed down in that moment with him in the air, half out of the car, and I thought that fate had intervened and frozen him in mid-air, keeping him safe.
But I was wrong and time sped up again, bringing his body hurtling downwards.
He hit the ground.
I thought there could be nothing worse than the sight of his fragile body being flung to the ground like a lifeless rag doll, but I was wrong. Unbelievably, there was a sight more horrifying when I saw that one of his legs was entangled in the straps of the car seat. He hit the ground again and again and again as the car careered down the road with one or two people running after it.
The car was now too far away for me to hear his cries, but of course, he had fallen silent way before the car had gotten that far down the road.
Instead I heard a strange noise, an unsettling howl that sounded like it belonged to a wounded animal. The sound got louder and louder, drowning out everything else and I didn’t even realise that the awful noise was coming from me.
Darkness came hurtling into me and a deep blackness mercifully took me away from my waking nightmare.
***
The next thing I remembered was waking up in a bright white room, surrounded by unfamiliar faces. I looked around me in confusion, unsure of where I was and why so many people were around me. I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, a malignant doom that told me something was terribly, terribly wrong. It was when I saw my mother sitting to one side, sobbing uncontrollably, that it all came rushing back to me.
The car, Dante…
I screamed as all the images came rushing back to me.
No one needed to tell me at that time that he was dead.
I knew it.
I could feel it in every pore, every inch of me.
My beautiful little prince, my life, my heart, my soul was dead.
As my anguished screams grew louder and I started thrashing out at the people who were instantly by my side trying to keep me from tearing at my face and hair, I felt a pin prick in my arm and slowly succumbed to the warm fuzzy blackness that wrapped itself tenderly around me.
But before it could take me away completely from the nightmare I couldn’t wake up from, I thought I heard Barbara’s voice, strained and tearful, asking a question I have since asked myself again and again.
“Why did she leave him in the car?”
***
The next thing I knew I was waking up in my bedroom at my mother’s house. My old doctor was standing by the door talking to Barbara. I tried to listen to what they were saying, but found myself drifting back into warm, soft darkness. I don’t know how many days I spent in that state with the prescription drugs I was being given acting like a sheet of ice sitting uneasily over the dark, turbulent waters raging beneath.
His funeral came and went with me in that state. I drifted through it, wrapped in the numb, foggy world I was living in and I observed the small, white coffin being led through the sea of people in black from what felt like a very distant place. We were all gathered beneath a clear, breath-taking blue sky and were bathed in golden sunlight that looked like diffused gold. I don’t think I have ever seen such a beautiful day since. Even though the world had effectively ended for me, the sun shone defiantly as they laid Dante into the ground, seeming to mock us and our grief.
I observed his burial through a veil that let me see what was going on, but shielded me from the heart-wrenching horror of the day.
On the way out of the cemetery with my mother, my path had been blocked by a small man, whose face like so many others around me, was heavy with a tide of emotion. He stood before me for a few seconds before he was able to speak, and when he did, his voice was choked with emotion.
“Miss Osei.”
“Yes,” I answered after a short pause.
“I’m…I was at the shop that day. I own that shop you came into.”
“Yes, of course,” I said, recognising him as the newsagent who had tried to stop me leaving the shop.
“I…I’ve come to pay my respects to your son.” He stopped talking to dab at his tears with a ragged looking little handkerchief. “I wanted to let you know that I’m sorry about the part that I played in...in his...”
It grew too much for him to finish and he looked at me helplessly whilst I returned his stare with a confused one of my own, the veil not allowing me to comprehend what he was trying to say.
“Why are you sorry?”
He paused and hung his head, no longer able to hold my gaze.
“I...I...stopped you from getting to him in time. If I hadn’t assumed…” His words trailed off.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said from that distant place. “It was mine. I shouldn’t have left him in the car.”
I heard my mother say something, but didn’t really care enough to listen. I was led gently away from the man into a waiting car. My mother got in beside me and Barbara got in a minute later on the other side.
“Why did you tell that man it wasn’t his fault?” she asked once the car had moved off.
I stared blankly at her, not understanding her accusatory stare or the fierce anger in her eyes.
“You shouldn’t have let him off so easily,” she continued. “If it wasn’t for that bastard Dante would still be alive.”
“Barbara, I don’t—”
She cut me off sharply.
“If it had been a white woman instead of a black girl in the shop that day, do you really think he would have treated her the same way he treated you?”
The question hung in the air.
“Barbara, Barbara,” my mother said, interrupting her tirade. “You are just looking for someone to blame. There is no one to blame for this.”
Barbara had turned away from us and stared out of the window for the rest of the journey, her hand coming up occasionally to wipe away angry tears.
My mother had been wrong though. Someone was to blame. It was my fault Dante was no longer with us.
Chapter 20
“So did they catch the person who stole your car?” Eva asked after a few seconds of stunned silence.
“No.”
“No?”
I watched her horror give way to complete and utter devastation.
“So he got away with what he did?” she eventually whispered.
I didn’t answer, but instead lay back on the bed. I was exhausted. This was the first time I had wil
lingly sat down and told somebody what happened that day.
“Peace, why didn’t you tell me any of this sooner?”
I shrugged and looked away from her, no longer wanting to think about that awful day.
“You said to me once that I wouldn’t believe what you’d done, or something like that. What did you mean? What do you think you did?”
It took me a few moments to answer.
“I left him alone in the car. It would’ve taken a minute to take him out of the car and with me into the shop. I didn’t even have to stop at that newsagents and buy him a drink when we were minutes from my mum’s house. Instead I drove him to that newsagents and left him in the car with the doors unlocked.”
“Peace, what happened wasn’t your fault. The person who killed your son is the man who stole your car that day. That’s the person you should be blaming for what happened to him. Why are you still blaming yourself after all this time? You can’t live like that, Peace. You can’t keep carrying all this guilt around with you. It wasn’t your fault. You have to believe that.”
I stayed silent for a few moments, trying to think of a way to make her understand.
“On the day of his christening, after the church service, we were having a get-together at my mum’s house. I remember trying to avoid her pastor because I was expecting him to be judgemental about the fact that I’d had a baby so young and no one seemed to know who the baby’s dad was. He eventually cornered me when I took Dante out into the garden for a few minutes and do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘My dear, why do you look so burdened?’ When I didn’t answer, he took my hand and said to me, ‘You have to remember that God has given you a gift. He has given you a soul to care for. He wouldn’t have trusted you with this special gift if he didn’t know that you are capable of this task’.
“His words stayed with me and the first thing that came to my mind after Dante was killed was that I didn’t take care of him. I left him defenceless in that car. I killed my own son, Eva.”
