The Kindest Thing

by Cath Staincliffe

  ‘I wore it,’ she said, ‘and Neil wore it.’

  Words stuck in my throat and a flare of irritation shot through me. Veronica knew we had no intention of getting the baby christened. We weren’t going to raise the child in any religion. Neil was adamant. He was an atheist now and he’d no intention of being a hypocrite. He had already told her this; they had argued about it. Now here she was ambushing me in my own kitchen.

  While I was searching for a response that wouldn’t completely destroy our fragile relationship (I didn’t think, ‘You sly old bat, if you think you can guilt trip me into this then you don’t have the measure of me yet’ set quite the right tone) she followed up with her coup de grâce. ‘It would make Michael and me so very happy to pay for the christening party – our present to the baby.’

  ‘We’re not having it christened,’ I said rudely, my cheeks aflame with embarrassment and irritation.

  ‘Well, who else will use it?’ she cried, a spark of temper from her and a swift nod at the gown. She took a quick fierce breath, the prelude to a scolding, but said nothing. She picked up her shopper, pausing at the door. ‘What harm can it do?’ she demanded.

  She left the robe on the table, like an accusation.

  Later Neil was sure she’d whipped the holy water out at some point and done a DIY baptism on the babies, protecting them from limbo if they died. She would have believed implacably that our selfish defiance, as she saw it, robbed both of our children of the prospect of ever entering heaven.

  Jane was nonchalant about it when I told her the story. ‘If you both think it’s a load of old tosh,’ she said, ‘then does it really matter if the baby gets baptized or not? Isn’t it an irrelevance? And if it makes them happy . . .’

  I stared at her. ‘Neil won’t do it in a million years. And I don’t like the idea. If she practised voodoo or was a Moonie or a Jehovah’s Witness and she wanted me to initiate my child in the one true path, then what would you say?’

  Jane waggled her head, screwed up her mouth, allowing I had a point, maybe. ‘You could do your own thing – a naming ceremony or something.’

  I groaned. ‘That would be like rubbing their noses in it. Besides, I don’t want to do anything. I want to have this baby and it to be all right and just leave it at that.’

  Of course, we won. There was no way Neil was going to cave in to his mother’s pressure. He told her himself that he wasn’t going to change his mind. After that she never mentioned a christening. Neither did she make any suggestions about schooling when the time came to put Adam’s name down for a place. By then it was clear that we weren’t part of her community. As the children got older and stayed with her and Michael, she would take them along with her to mass. They were fascinated the first couple of times, coming home full of questions that we had to answer tactfully, qualifying many of our explanations with ‘Grandma and Grandpa think . . .’ or ‘Grandma and Grandpa believe . . .’ and often ending with ‘and other people don’t’.

  Whatever our religious differences, the children brought us closer. The four of us shared the love and pleasure of Adam and then Sophie, and had so much in common there, a mutual sense of joy and privilege and a similar way of caring for the kids that, thankfully, overrode those divisions.

  Day three of my trial and the drizzle has cleared: a fierce wind has pushed all the clouds away and the sky is a piercing blue, bright enough to sting my eyes as I’m transferred from the prison to the van.

  Travelling into the city centre, I look up out of the small rectangular window in my compartment at the buildings. I spy the light grey modern British Telecom building, at Castlefield near the Mancunian Way, and then the imposing brick bridges that carry the railways across the end of Deansgate. The railway arches have been converted into bars and clubs. Further along, there are old banks and warehouses, insurance companies and office blocks, most of them raised in the Victorian era during the cotton boom. They bear witness to the craft of stonemasons, with their fine carving and columns, finials and trims. The window is too small for me to see the top of the Hilton skyscraper. Halfway down Portland Street and way up high on one building, I notice words, cast in brick, bas-relief: ‘honesty’ and ‘perseverance’. Admonitions to the city’s workforce. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

  And then we are at Minshull Street and pull up alongside another prison van. The back entrance that we use is solid oak, studded and imperious. Either side of it frolic gargoyles and demons, legs splayed like lizards, faces contorted with sadistic glee.

  Today I am in a different cell at the opposite end of the corridor. It is ten o’clock. The courts begin each day at ten thirty. There is a lot of waiting about. Between the paralysing tension of the courtroom there are interminable stretches of dead time when it’s hard to find anything to do. I should like to sketch but I am not permitted to carry a pen or pencil in case I use it as a weapon against myself or someone else.

  Tension gathers in my back. I stand and stretch and roll my shoulders to try to release it. I am on my feet doing side stretches when the viewing panel in the door slides back and the guard tells me Ms Gleason is here to see me.

  We sit on the bench.

  ‘How are you?’ she asks. ‘Did you get any sleep?’

  ‘Some,’ I answer.

  ‘We’re expecting Mrs Draper this morning and possibly Dolores Cabril. It’ll depend on when the judge decides to break for lunch.’

  Dolores Cabril is the psychiatric expert for the prosecution. She is my greatest threat. If she convinces the jury that I was sane when I helped Neil die, they will have to return a guilty verdict. Dolores is aptly named as far as I’m concerned – Spanish for ‘sorrows’. She threatens to bring me grief. But at the moment I am more worried about facing Veronica.

  ‘And that’ll be the end of their witnesses?’ I check with Ms Gleason.

  ‘Yes.’ Her clothes are smart today. She’s made an effort, or perhaps just had a chance to do some ironing. There are a couple of short white hairs on her lapel. When did I get to be so fussy? What does it matter? Compared to Mr Latimer and his scuzzy wig, Ms Gleason is perfectly groomed. Should I point it out? I do.

  ‘God,’ she huffs. ‘My dog’s moulting. Black’s a nightmare.’ She picks the hairs off.

  ‘Does anyone ever wear anything else?’

  ‘At their peril.’ She releases the tips of her thumb and finger, lets the hairs float to the floor. ‘Tradition is all,’ she drawls, in her laconic, fruity Bolton accent.

  When she has gone, the usher sends for me and a guard escorts me up to the courtroom. The barristers are already there, like so many crows pecking over their papers and dipping their heads together for a quick confab.

  Glancing up to the public gallery as I make my way to the dock, I see Adam and Jane in their places. Then my eyes fix on the row behind. There is Sophie. Sophie and her grandpa, Michael. A pain burns in my heart and for a moment I lose my balance, stumble slightly by the steps. I think I might faint but the dizziness eases and I am left with nausea. The back of my neck and the back of my knees are damp.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that after giving her evidence Sophie would attend the trial. And why shouldn’t she? She wants justice for Neil. I have no idea where Michael stands in all this, whether he agrees with Sophie and Veronica’s desire to see me prosecuted.

  And my children? How are they faring? Sophie has her grandparents and Adam has Jane. Looking at him now, Adam’s face is like thunder. Is this because Sophie is there or because his grandma is due on the stand? Or is it nothing to do with the trial? Maybe he’s getting ill again. I feel so bloody helpless and make a mental note to ask Ms Gleason if she can find out how he is. While I am on trial I cannot have visits so I won’t be able to see him for myself.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When Adam first became ill, he was in the third year of secondary school. He was fourteen. The change to a bigger school had seemed to go fine at first. Neither of us expected him to be top of the c
lass – he was too lazy, too disorganized, to be a high achiever. The school had a programme in place to support his dyslexia and although he muttered darkly about being bunched in with the other special needs ‘saddos’, his reading and writing were clearly improving. He had friends too: Jonty and a bunch of others, who steered a careful line doing just enough work to avoid trouble and spending every waking minute they could hanging out with each other. They moved from household to household, grazing through the freezers, a lanky, clumsy, well-meaning, deodorant-drenched herd. Now and again, I smelled smoke on Adam, but I hoped he was only trying it out and would outgrow it. Then in the third year, year nine, as Neil would remind me it was now called, the glow went out of Adam. We heard from school that he was missing days. When we challenged him about it, he was surly and close-mouthed.

  ‘Adam,’ I insisted, ‘we need to know what’s going on.’

  ‘Nothing,’ he repeated.

  ‘You should be in school,’ Neil said. ‘And if there’s some reason why you’re deliberately missing it then tell us about it.’

  ‘It might be something we can sort out,’ I added.

  Adam raised his eyes long enough to shoot me a look of utter disdain, then let his head fall back down between his shoulders. We got nothing out of him but things seemed to settle for a week or so. Then I came home at midday, after a meeting with a client, to find him in bed.

  ‘I feel sick,’ was his excuse.

  I didn’t believe him. ‘Have you been sick?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, don’t eat anything and we’ll see how you are in the morning.’

  He languished in his room till we were all in bed and then I heard him roaming round the house. Was he becoming an insomniac like me? The next morning he was still ‘ill’. I decided to test him. ‘I’ll make a doctor’s appointment, shall I?’

  ‘’Kay,’ he replied dully.

  Halfway through the morning, I went into the house to empty the washing-machine and called up to see if he wanted anything. My own behaviour was lurching from maternal to authoritarian and back. Did he need nurturing or a kick up the bum? I’d no reference points. My own adolescence had been trouble-free, as far as my mother was concerned. She’d had no idea what I got up to outside the house and I was canny enough to keep it concealed from her. As for my brother, Martin, he didn’t have a disruptive bone in his body. He was shy, very reserved, anxious only to blend in. The childhood memories I have of my big brother are of helping him with one of his methodical games, lining up toy soldiers in serried ranks, the way his face clenched if I knocked any over by mistake, though he never said anything by way of reproach. Martin didn’t like dirt or clutter or playing with other kids much, while I was never happier than when I was breathless, my windpipe burning and cheeks hot from running, mud-smeared, twigs in my hair, the glory of a day-long game of cowboys and Indians. Building dens from giant stalks, beating them hard to dislodge the earwigs. Martin was happier with his books and his Airfix kits and he cherished the daily routines that I carped against. We were like lodgers sharing a home but each independent of the other.

  When I got no reply from Adam and found his bed was empty, I was puzzled. What was he playing at? He waltzed in at half past five that afternoon, his eyes bloodshot. When I tried to remonstrate with him, he began to giggle. He was stoned. Without even waiting to consult Neil, I told Adam that he’d get no pocket money until his behaviour improved and he was in school for all his classes.

  He shrugged and went upstairs.

  That night he prowled the house again. I got up to investigate. He was by the back door when I went into the kitchen and whirled round, startled.

  ‘It’s only me,’ I said. ‘What are you doing?’

  He looked pale, bleary with tiredness. In an old ‘And on the sixth day God created Manchester’ T-shirt and baggy pyjama trousers, his hair tousled, he was my little boy again. ‘The police,’ he hissed at me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re outside the house, out there.’

  I went towards the hall but he called after me, ‘No, the garden, they’ll be waiting in the garden.’

  Ice froze my spine and chilled my guts. ‘Adam, it’s all right, there’s nobody there.’

  ‘There is!’ His teeth chattered and he gave a little jig of fright.

  ‘I’ll check.’

  ‘No! You can’t open the door – you can’t! Please, Mum, please.’ The terror in his cry tore at me.

  ‘All right.’ I held my hands up to placate him. ‘Come and sit down.’

  My mind was whirring. He was being paranoid. It reminded me of student days: a girl at an all-night party had dropped some acid and spent hours insisting the SAS were on the roof, and the more wound up she got about it, the more inane giggling she received from the others. I tried to calm her down, tried to get her outside to fresh air, but she wasn’t having it.

  Was Adam tripping?

  ‘Have you taken anything, Adam?’ I held my voice even.

  ‘What?’

  ‘LSD – acid?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Dope? Cannabis?’

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘What was it? Grass, sputnik, what?’

  ‘Just weed.’

  ‘It’s making you anxious, that’s all.’

  I stood up.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Panic in his voice.

  ‘I’m making you some hot chocolate, and toast and honey. Eating might help.’

  He ate and drank. I asked him whether he had felt like this before. He swung his head away from me. ‘I don’t want to talk about it. It just makes it worse.’

  ‘Okay. But I want you to see the doctor.’

  Later that morning he was at it again: checking doors, peering out of curtains, under siege from his nightmares. It took another week to get him to the GP. Andy Frame referred him to a specialist, who told us that Adam had cannabis-induced psychosis.

  We’d not heard of it. There were various theories about the phenomenon. Some people were thought to have a predisposition to mental illness and the use of cannabis triggered biochemical changes in the brain that prompted the illness to develop. Then there was talk of the modern-day strains of the drug being much stronger than in the past.

  It was hard to believe that the drug Neil and I had enjoyed with impunity, that had a reputation for being benign, soft, non-addictive, that was linked to peace and love, John and Yoko, festivals and Rastafarianism, to fits of giggles and the munchies, was the same drug that had so damaged our son.

  The judge comes in and everybody stands. Once he is settled he invites Miss Webber to continue with her evidence. ‘Will the court please call Veronica Draper,’ she says.

  The usher walks to the door, ‘Call Veronica Draper.’

  The witnesses wait in a room set aside for them. Veronica comes in and all eyes are on her as she makes her way to the stand. She is straight-backed but the pace she moves at and the way she lists to one side betray her age. Her hair is iron-grey, styled to give it some volume and rolled under in a short bob. She wears a pleated navy skirt and a cream blouse with a cream cravat. She looks tiny on the stand. When she swears on the Bible her voice is tremulous. I see she is terribly nervous and I feel a rush of sympathy, even though I’m angry that she is speaking against me. That brisk efficiency has vanished. Here, in an alien domain, in an agonizing situation, she is passive, a victim.

  ‘Mrs Draper,’ Briony Webber begins, ‘can you tell us how you first heard the news of your son Neil’s death?’

  ‘Sophie rang me.’ Her voice is soft; her Irish accent blurs the consonants and we strain to hear.

  ‘Sophie rang you, not Deborah Shelley?’

  ‘No. It was Sophie.’

  ‘And you went immediately to the house?’

  ‘That’s right. We were in Tesco’s at the time and we just walked out.’

  The judge leans forward. ‘Mrs Draper, can you speak up a little? It is difficult to hear you and it is extre
mely important that the jury hear everything you have to say. And if you can direct your answers to the jury instead of to Counsel.’

  Expressions of sympathy ripple across the faces of Hilda and Flo, the Cook and Mousy. I’m sure they imagine themselves in her shoes – having to speak about terrible things in front of strangers.

  ‘And when you called at the house on the fifteenth of June, what did Ms Shelley say had happened?’

  ‘She said she’d gone upstairs and found Neil, that he was dead.’

  ‘Was this a shock to you?’

  ‘A dreadful shock.’ Veronica loses volume on the last word and her mouth spasms.

  My guts clench as I will her not to break down.

  ‘At that stage did you have any doubts about what Ms Shelley told you?’

  ‘Not then, no. It was just the shock of it, you know, that’s all there was then.’

  ‘Some days later, on the twenty-fourth of June, your granddaughter Sophie came to visit you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did Sophie tell you?’

  ‘She said she didn’t know what to do. She thought her father hadn’t died of natural causes, that unless he had had a heart-attack he couldn’t have gone so quickly.’

  ‘And what did you tell Sophie?’

  ‘That perhaps that’s what did happen – a heart-attack.’

  ‘Was she satisfied with your answer?’

  ‘No. She said she thought her mother had helped him take his own life.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  Veronica pauses, struggling to speak. ‘I slapped her,’ she says quietly.

  My hackles rise, a rush of heat at the thought of her striking my girl. Hurting her.

  ‘You slapped her?’ Miss Webber echoes, in case any of us missed it.

  ‘Yes. It was an automatic reaction, from the shock. I couldn’t believe what she was saying, that he would be part of something like that. It’s against everything we believe.’

  ‘You are a Catholic?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Neil was raised in that faith?’

  ‘Yes.’