by Marrs, John
I always said Billy had the smell of pink roses about him. So you dug up a patch of land under the kitchen window and planted six rose bushes there, one for every month of his life.
It was a place where I later grew to find peace, to just sit near to or to inhale through the open window while I washed the dishes. It was just what I needed for my healing to begin.
May 22, 7pm
When I was so completely, utterly empty that there were no tears left to fall and nothing left of myself to hate, there was only one direction left for me to go.
So I gradually opened my eyes and allowed myself to slowly fill up with the love that had surrounded me for months, but that I’d shunned.
The love from my family; the love from my friends but mostly, the love from you.
***
Northampton, Twenty-Five Years Earlier
January 3, 5.50pm
I paused under the architrave behind Robbie and James, riveted by the pain that forced your body into awkward angles as you endeavoured to bring life to a little body for the second time in six months.
Billy lay wet and motionless on the floor, his eyes still sparkling but completely lifeless. I’d often caught myself looking into them and wondering what they saw when they looked back at me.
It was the second time I’d been in the bathroom in the space of a few minutes.
When you’d called me to keep an eye on him, I’d been in Robbie’s bedroom airing his blocked radiator. I heard your muffled conversation behind our bedroom door as I made my way to the bathroom. Billy was playing with his smiley-faced boat when he saw me and offered a gummy grin. I gave him nothing.
I watched him throw the boat too far to reach with ease, and he looked at me, expecting me to sail it back. I didn’t move. Frustrated, his arms, still just doughy rolls of skin, reached out to bring it closer.
Then he fell slowly and silently, face first into the bubbles.
His head made a gentle thud against the bottom of the bath and he lacked the strength and coordination to push himself back up. But instinct even in one so young caused his arms to flap uselessly by his side, panicking without knowing why. I remained stationary as eighteen foggy months began to clear.
I knew what I was supposed to do, what anyone with an ounce of humanity would have done. But I was no longer that person. You had drained me of my compassion and left a cold, cold man in his place. Billy was the wrong son. We were both the wronged sons.
My reaction was the fault of Billy’s abhorrent chromosomes. And I couldn’t live with them in my home, pretending to be like those I loved any longer. So I watched as he slowly and quietly drowned; the helpless leaving the helpless to flounder in a fight only one of us could win.
As the last bubble of air left his lungs and bathwater seeped in, I glided out of the room as quietly as I’d arrived.
January 18, 11.45pm
I would lie with you in the darkened cocoon you’d created in our bedroom, listening to your agony until you fell asleep. Then I would replay the moments in my head that destroyed you.
“Oh God,” you’d repeated before yelling my name. “Oh God. Oh God.”
I ran along the corridor, and stood behind Robbie and James as you pulled your dead flesh from the bath. And suddenly, I woke up from my blur and the consequences of my inactions became clear. I panicked, and needed to take back what I’d allowed to happen.
I pushed the boys out of the way and began CPR, attempting to take back the madness of those five minutes and to repair my damage.
Billy’s mouth tasted like fairy liquid as I struggled to get a firm pinch on his nose and give him back the life I’d allowed to slip away. I felt sick with adrenaline and fear as his first rib broke in my heavy-handed desperation.
‘You were wrong,’ I heard my inner voice tell me. ‘You could treat him like your own.’ A second rib snapped. ‘It will take small steps, but you could spend more time with him; buy him a bigger and better boat; teach him how to ride a bike like you did with the others; watch him from the sidelines as he scores the winning goal for his football team… yes, you could do all of that if you were given a second chance. But you won’t be.’
In the time it had taken me to watch him die, I had mapped out our next 18 years together as father and son. My son. Not biologically, but my son nonetheless.
Even when the ambulance men appeared from nowhere, I refused to admit failure. But inside I knew it was too late. Billy was dead and I had let it happen.
I stroked your hair as you lay deep in the floor sobbing your heart out, your baby by your side. Your world had been shattered and you were injured by rubble and ruin. The hurt you had caused me was nothing compared to what I had done to you.
March 20, 11.45pm
For weeks you did little but blame yourself; my decision condemning you to an intolerable purgatory. Being unable to reveal the man you loved had been responsible for your son’s death cast a shadow over all our lives.
Each time you chose sleep over reality, I’d put on my running shoes and sprint as fast as I could until my legs folded beneath me. I deliberately chose hard surfaces so I could feel every jolt of concrete jar my knees and spine because the physical pain eased the mental one.
Each time I hurt myself I’d hope it would take some of yours away, but there was nothing I could possibly have done for that to happen.
May 12, 8am
To the outside world, I was the portrait of a consumate husband. But inside, I was in bedlam. I dragged myself through the motions to keep the family engine running… I became an expert in forging smiles and convincing the concerned that everything would be all right in end, given a little time.
I made myself responsible for all the children’s needs when you were too empty to cope. I’d be the face that friends saw when they turned up on our doorstep to see how we were.
I took a leave of absence from the business to take charge of the everyday tasks like shopping, housework and gardening. I cooked all our meals, made sure the children had clean school uniforms and I kept them occupied when you needed to be alone.
We spent hours together pretending to fish in the stream near the cottage. Sometimes I’d stare into the water, convinced I could see Dougie’s blood caught in a whirlpool and unable to float downstream. We took drawn out walks through the fields searching for Snaggle Waggles or in the garden playing board games. At a time I should have been close to them, I’d never been so far away.
I juggled so many balls at once and only I knew what the repercussions of dropping them would be. I saw the consequences of my actions in you every day. And it helped me to understand that it wasn’t just remorse over Billy’s death I was feeling, but towards the death of you and I. Opportunity had presented me with a chance for revenge I’d never considered. Yet once my mission was complete, I felt nothing. It hadn’t healed me like I thought it might; we were broken with or without him.
I’d been weak when I’d tried to bring him back to life. Filling his lungs with a stranger’s air would not have helped me long-term. Even with his blood on my hands, I still felt the same kind of rawness as discovering your affair. All I’d done was make four people feel as worthless as myself. And my misery didn’t love company.
I reminded myself it was your duplicity that had provoked my reaction. You had brought this on us. There was no punishment more fitting than to watch the one you love suffer, only you were too wrapped up in your sadness to see it, and I was too locked into mine to reveal it. So I watched in silence as you floated without aim through the house, unable to associate yourself with the world.
The pressure on me to keep up my facade was immense, as I had nobody to share it with. So I took to sitting in the woodland near to the man buried below the blue towrope. It was the only place where things made sense.
I’d talk to Dougie like I did when we were innocents. He understood me and I believed that wherever he was, he knew what he’d done to me was wrong. I became envious of how easy it was for him
to accept it and how uncomplicated things were for him now he was resting beneath a carpet of dirt.
It would be so much simpler if I too were six feet under.
June 3, 5.30am
For six long months, you remained in darkness. Then gradually, the sun began to reveal itself and you rose from the bottom of the hill and navigated your way back up it.
We were sat watching ‘The Two Ronnies’ when you unexpectedly laughed at a sketch. We all turned sharply to look at you, as it was a sound we’d not heard for so long.
“What?” you asked.
“Nothing,” I replied, and I knew it was my time.
As you slowly healed, my disintegration was almost complete. My wife was on her way home, but in doing so, she was leaving me behind. You had learned to live with what you thought you did. But I couldn’t live with what you’d done to me.
My trips to the woodland copse grew more frequent. I’d pick up the rope from the ground and feel my way around it, tugging it until it was taut. Then I’d face the canopy to search for the strongest, sturdiest looking tree branch. Several times I thought I was ready to kill myself, then I’d make an excuse as to why it didn’t feel like the right day to do it. Each time I’d walk back home, cursing myself for not having the strength to go that extra mile.
‘Tomorrow,’ I’d tell myself. ‘I’ll be able to do it tomorrow.’
And eventually tomorrow came.
***
Today, 8.20pm
She shook her head vigorously. She was adamant it wasn’t true.
“No, your Alzheimer’s is making you confused,” she began faintly. “Do you have any medication with you, Simon? If not, I can call Edward and he can come back from the golf club and help you.”
Until now, making someone else aware of his secret existence was the last thing she had wanted to do. But hearing him acknowledge that his confession was actually confusion became a much higher priority for her. She raised her eyebrows and nodded her head at him, beckoning him to follow suit. But he didn’t, and he glared at her with a transfixed, watery glaze. Her stomach began the first of many somersaults.
“Simon, I was there, don’t you remember?” she continued, gently coaxing him. “I left Billy alone, not you. I was the one who found him and shouted for help. It wasn’t your fault; it was mine, wasn’t it? Remember?”
He gave her the weakest, withering, most apologetic look she’d ever seen, but still she could not believe him. She did not want to, because over time, she had learned to accept her pivotal role in Billy’s death. It was an accident.
For it to have been deliberate… for her husband - the boy’s father - to have allowed him to die… that was so much worse than her negligence. It was evil. She raised her voice in a last ditch attempt to persuade him to concede he was muddled.
“I accept you’ve done a lot of wicked things,” she continued, “but the man I loved back then would never have let that happen. You could never have held me and dried my tears and kept our family together like you did knowing it wasn’t my fault. So I’m begging you to tell me now that you’re confused and that you didn’t let Billy die.”
He couldn’t have answered even if he’d wanted to. The stranglehold guilt had on him was so tight it barely allowed him to breathe. He couldn’t move yet he swore he felt his body convulsing.
She sank deep into her armchair while she evaluated what it all meant. She had never gotten over Billy’s death because no parent ever does when something so tender and inculpable is wrenched away from your arms without warning.
But gradually, his lifeless body submerged in the bath wasn’t the first image that came to mind when she thought of him. It was of his warm, toothless smile in photographs she’d taken during his first and only Christmas. She’d poured over them hundreds of times since.
And every year on his birthday, she’d lock herself in her bedroom away from everyone, take his tiny blue satin booties from the crushed velvet box in her wardrobe, and rub them gently between her fingers like she’d done as a child with her mother’s clothes. She’d hold them to her nose and inhale deeply in the hope of picking up a long faded scent.
Only now she’d learned Billy hadn’t died because of her careless parenting, but because of the misdirected spite of his own father. She pictured him standing over Billy like the Grim Reaper, captivated by the panicking infant drowning before him.
It enraged her. She wanted to kill him.
He was oblivious to the escalating fury before him. He’d been used to finding ways of justifying his aberrations by blaming other people. But now there was no one left to blame. Kenneth was right when he told his only son he was a monster.
The first physical contact in twenty-five years between Simon and Catherine Nicholson came after she jumped from her chair with such speed, it terrified him.
“You bastard!” she screamed, as her fists pummelled his head, over and over again. He had little time to raise his arms to protect himself from her blows. He struggled to push her away at first, but when he succeeded, she came back more ferocious than before.
He grabbed her arms, so she kneed him in the groin. He bent double in excruciating pain as an onslaught of slaps and scratches began. She caught slivers of flesh from his cheeks under her fingernails as she fought like a cornered wild animal. She yanked at his hair and pulled out clumps as if trying to scalp him.
Finally he was able to muster up the strength to grab her arms and twist them behind her back. She shrieked in pain.
“Kitty, Kitty, please,” he begged, trying to catch his breath and calm her.
“Get off me!” she screamed and squirmed to release herself from his grip, but to no avail.
“I’m sorry for what I did to Billy and for not trusting you. You have to know that.”
“Don’t you dare use his name! You aren’t fit to use his name!”
“I know, I know, but I had to tell you the truth before my disease made it impossible.”
“Am I supposed to be grateful? How could you let me spend my life believing it was my fault when it was you who’d killed him? His own father!”
She tried to jab her elbow in his stomach but it wouldn’t budge against his clutch. The last time she’d been forcibly restrained by a man, she’d eventually given in and accepted her fate. She would not make that mistake again.
“Please, please forgive me,” he cried, “Don’t let me die knowing you couldn’t find it in your heart to accept my apology.”
His desperate hope filled the room as it fell silent. Finally, she replied in a voice so fuelled by venom, he barely recognised it.
“Never.”
Her response immediately drained him of his energy and she wriggled until one of her arms came free. It flailed around behind her, trying to hit anything that felt like him. A fingernail scraped across his eyeball and instinctively, his hand reached to cover it.
While he was temporarily blinded, he failed to notice her grab a metal picture frame of his children before it smashed against the side of his head. He fell to the sofa, dazed, but moved just before the orange glass vase from the fireplace shattered against the wall above him.
“Kitty, please,” he yelled, but she would not listen. A man capable of such evil did not deserve to be heard.
As he opened his mouth to beg for her forgiveness one last time, she reached for a brass poker from the fireplace and swung it above her head. He backed away but not fast enough to avoid the brunt of its force on his wrist. They both heard the bone crack, but he felt nothing as he fell to the floor.
Then as she raised the poker again, he didn’t flinch or try to protect himself. Instead, he lay there, sodden and shaking, accepting his fate, and as weak and pathetic as she’d ever seen a man. With a final lift, the poker was as high as she could carry it.
Then she threw it against the fireplace with all her might.
“You don’t deserve the easy way out,” she spat. “I want your disease to slowly eat away at you until your one and on
ly memory is of the son you killed. Now get out of my house!”
He used the wall to support him as he slowly rose. He backed away from her towards the door while blood poured from the open wound to his head. He touched his temple to stem the bleeding and pricked his finger on a shard of glass that jutted out from it.
He opened his mouth to make one final apology but his vocabulary was barren. And when she glared at him with such menace he knew, unlike Dougie, he would not be afforded the gift of atonement.
So he fumbled for the handle, opened the door and stumbled down the gravel path, his heavy feet shunting stones in all directions.
He didn’t hear the door slam behind him, or see her slump to the floor and wail like no other person had wailed before.
EPILOGUE
Northampton
Today, 8.40pm
He steadied himself against the church railings while he lurched through the village, his body as traumatised as his mind.
He failed to notice the school he’d once attended; the Fox & Hounds where he’d tasted his first pint of beer or the village green where he, Roger, Steven and Dougie had spent so much of their youth playing.
Finally, when he reached the graveyard, he could breathe again. He scrambled as best his shaking legs would allow from grave to grave, hunting for the plot that housed an unhinged soul so many had thought they’d known. But they’d never understood it had abandoned his body long before he’d left them.
His eyes prickled from the tears of regret he shed for lives lived, lives wasted and lives taken. And he cried for the forgiveness he had no right to expect and would never receive.
Catherine had deserved the truth no matter how much it had hurt her. He’d wanted her to apologise for what she’d done and for her to understand why he’d allowed Billy to die. Before he left Italy, he’d convinced himself that when she learned she was equally to blame, then she would forgive him like he had forgiven her. Then he would return home to Sofia and Luca and await the day he could take Luciana once again in his arms.
