‘Well, she wasn’t a total recluse. Gabriel started to visit again, sporadically, and she got some help around the house at my insistence. She was no domestic goddess, Linda.’
‘Can you remember the name of her cleaner?’
‘A housekeeper, she called her. Alice, I think. Or Anna. No, that’s it. She was called Anna. Blonde hair, not natural but whose is these days? I only saw her once or twice. Can’t say she made any difference, this Anna woman, not that I blame her. She was a cleaner, not a bloody magician. Linda had so much junk in that house. I warned her I was going to put her forward for that programme, Obsessive Compulsive Hoarder, if she didn’t do something.’
‘Going back to Anna,’ Jonathan says, ‘did you know her full name, anything else about her?’
‘I’m afraid not. She was a relatively recent appointment. A bit shifty, I thought. I told Henry as much.’
‘Henry?’
‘Henry Sinclair. He’s a friend of Linda’s. A proper gentleman. She used to work with him. I bumped into him leaving her house one day. Can’t imagine she made him very welcome, judging by the look on her face. She could be like that. I had to go back to my car to sort out the parking and got chatting to Henry. He was worried about her, weren’t we all. Asked me to keep an eye on her.’
‘And what did this keeping an eye on her involve?’
‘Would you like a biscuit? Go on . . . Nothing much. We’d only chat now and again, he’s a very busy man. I told him she had a publisher and she was spending all her time on her book.’
‘I see. Did she tell you she had a publisher?’
‘Linda? You’re kidding, she wouldn’t have told me the time of day. No, I arrived one afternoon to find him there. Michael, he was called. Scruffy-looking type. You get away with that in the media, don’t you . . . Oh, I didn’t mean you . . . you’re very well put together . . . Anyway, Henry seemed happy that she was doing something productive with her time.’
Jonathan eased himself off the sofa, ‘You’ve been very helpful but I’m afraid I must get going.’
‘But you haven’t even finished your tea.’
December 1992
Gabriel, aged 8
My mum likes to solve people’s problems, which means everyone comes to her with them. Even when we’re in Sainsbury’s we can’t get past the bananas without someone springing out to tell her the playing field in Balham is being sold off and what is she going to do, or that their son is disabled and he needs a lift in their house, could she please arrange it?
Often, they’re quite rude but she wears her polite face and tells them, ‘I’d love to hear more about it at surgery. Please make an appointment.’
I’d like to tell them to get lost and leave us alone and for goodness’ sake let us choose our strawberries in peace, but that would be RUDE according to Mum.
I went to her surgery one Saturday and guess what, she isn’t even a doctor! Her job is to listen to people moan all morning and write the moans down and take them to work on Monday and pass them on to important people who run the country. She’s called a politician. ‘But then you become the moaner,’ I said.
‘It’s not moaning, it’s helping people.’
Today she shouldn’t be doing any helping. It’s half-term. Elena has the day off and Mum says I get to pick what I want to do. I know exactly what my choice is and so would she if she ever got off the phone.
I draw a picture of a clock and a question mark. How long? She glances at it and pushes it away then shoos me off. I can’t remember being this bored in my whole entire life.
I steal a custard cream from the cupboard and go upstairs. I’m not fond of them but beggars can’t be choosers.
In my room, I play with Mr Piddles. We make a stage on the floor and I give my animals a role each. Then we start dancing around. Not the sissy sort of dancing, these are cool moves like Tommy and me do. I have all the animals jiggling about with me to the soundtrack of The Bear Chronicles and I’m so lost in it that I don’t see my mum standing in the doorway.
‘We’re warming up for the film.’
‘What film?’
‘The Bear Chronicles, that’s what I want to do today.’ To strengthen my case, I do the bear dance along with a rendition of the song. Tommy and I have already learnt it off by heart.
At the very least I’m hoping for a smile or a round of applause, but my mum doesn’t do a thing. It’s like all the happiness has been scrubbed off her face and now it is just a blank. She can be weird like this sometimes. Her moods drop in and out like the signal on the car radio when we’re travelling to Gran’s house in the country.
‘Mum?’
She walks over to the window and hooks her eyes on the tree outside. It is naked, stripped of leaves, but she must find it very interesting because she stands there with her back to me for an age.
‘We could go to the soft play if you like,’ she says.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
‘Mum, I’m eight years old!’ Soft play is for babies, everyone knows that. Sometimes I think it’s a surprise to my mum that I’m getting older. As if she can’t keep up with the years.
‘What about the Science Museum?’
‘Bor-Ring.’
‘Or the zoo?’
‘The penguins stink and it’s raining.’
I look outside. The sky is mud. ‘I want to go and see The Bear Chronicles.’
‘It’s not appropriate.’
‘It’s a PG!’
‘I said no.’
‘But you said I could choose. You said it in front of Dad and Elena. I have two witnesses. You can’t break your promises.’
‘Gabriel, I’m sorry but we’re not . . .’ She reaches out to touch my head, my curls. When we sit next to each other watching TV she likes to spool them around her finger. ‘Get off!’ I hit her hand away. Smack, it makes the sound of my anger. Satisfying. ‘You’re a liar, a liar.’
‘Stop that right now.’
I can’t. My anger has broken free, become its own person, like the Incredible Hulk, turning green and bursting out of me. My mum’s shouts feed it and make it more powerful. It hits her. And again. And again. Serves her right. Keeps going. Can’t stop. Won’t stop.
Eventually she finds the strength to overcome it. She pushes me up against the wall and prises my arms apart. The Anger is still screaming at her, not words, they have melted into each other and become a long soundwave of fury. Tears rush down her cheeks and they make me cry as well.
Sometimes The Anger goes too far.
Later, she knocks on my bedroom door with a sandwich, a glass of milk and a biscuit. The biscuit lifts my mood because it’s a Kit Kat, which is as good as an apology. ‘Eat up and we’ll go out.’ Result! I wait until she leaves before I start humming The Bear Chronicles tune. I don’t want her to think I’m rubbing her nose in my victory.
When we walk past the bus stop I get the first sign that all is not good. ‘Are we walking all the way to the cinema?’
‘I thought we could go to the park.’
She has to be joking. A trip to the park is about as unspecial a day as I can think of. I gulp down my tears but they set really hard like bullets in my stomach.
‘But I thought we were going to the cinema.’
‘I said no, didn’t I?’
When we get to the park my mum finds a bench and I head to the swings, not because I like them but because they’re as far away from her as I can get. I push my legs in the air and tip my head back and watch as the sky bursts like a water balloon and pours rain down. ‘Let’s go to the café,’ my mum shouts, as if this is the most exciting thing and not some place I’ve been going to every week since I was a baby.
She buys me a hot chocolate with extra marshmallows and cream, which I presume is another peace
offering because in normal circumstances she would deny me the toppings on account of them being too sugary. I am in no mood to make peace. I choose a seat at the window. They’re steamed up and with my finger I write The worst mum in the world. When she sits down I add an arrow that points to her.
‘Is that what you think?’
‘Yes. I hate you.’
Tears now and they’re not even mine. She turns away from me, looks out through the window, through the words I wrote, their own tears of condensation washing them away.
She pushed me into telling that lie. She always does this, makes me behave badly, leaves me with no choice. I don’t hate her, I love her, but if I hadn’t said yes, no was the only other option and that would make me look like a loser. She’s not the worst mum by a long shot either. Shelley’s mum waits outside the school gates in pink pyjamas. And Simon’s mum doesn’t allow him any TV. Not even Inspector Gadget.
Silence sits between us as thick and lumpy as school custard. She’s edged away from me as if I might be contagious and twists her wedding ring one way and another. I want to break the quiet, say something nice, find words to mop up her tears, but nothing I can think of fits the shape of our argument. In the end, I give up. All I wanted to do was see The Bear Chronicles. What’s her problem? The characters are animals and there isn’t even any swearing. I shrink away from her and huddle as close to the wall as I can and we sit and wait until the rain runs out.
When we leave the café, I head into the tree house. It’s not my best move because the rain has made it stink like a swamp, but I’m trying to make a point. I suppose I’m hoping that she’ll come and find me here and we’ll make up and sit and chat like Dad sometimes does with his knees hunched up to his chin. My dad is way too big for the tree house but it’s nice that he squashes himself in just for me.
As it turns out, my mum doesn’t do any squashing. After a while she shouts, ‘We’re going home, Gabriel.’ I don’t move because I’m still mad. I want her to say sorry or at least give me a hug like she does when she knows we’ve both gone too far and one of us needs to make the first move.
‘Gabriel,’ she shouts again and again.
It goes quiet. I peep out of the house through the branches. My mum is looking around, ‘Gabriel,’ she tries one more time but softer and slower, as if her batteries are dying. Then she walks out of the playground. It’s the oldest parent game in the world and there’s no way I’m falling for it. I watch her shrink into a dot before she disappears into nothing at all. I wait because I know she’s coming back. There’s no way she would leave me in the park alone.
I count the seconds and minutes on my watch. Two minutes then three then five and ten. Ten worries me. Double figures make it more serious. She must have known I was here, she watched me climb the ladders.
Should I move? Leave the park and try to find her? I give it a second’s thought before deciding we could be lost to each other forever that way. I stay put, push back the tears. The light has misted. There’s only one and a half people left in the park apart from me: a bored dad pushing his baby on the swing. When he goes, I force myself down the ladder. The dark is playing tricks on me. It’s dressed the park for evening, turned it into a stranger. The trees laugh and the shadows try to eat me and the dogs have become wolves that snarl at me with foaming mouths and fang teeth.
The tears won’t be held back any longer.
I run, pick up speed as I hear the traffic noise come closer and closer. I run and run and run until I’m spewed out at a massive roundabout. I don’t know how to get across it so I wait but there’s no gap in the cars just one after the other, never stopping. In the end I have to count ONE TWO THREE and step out on to the road. A horn yells at me, there’s a screech of brakes. A man waves his arm and shouts. I retreat. I’m stuck in the park, cut off by a sea of cars and lorries and vans.
Back inside the park the night is so deep and thick I can’t believe morning will ever fight its way out again. I don’t care about The Bear Chronicles any more. I’m sorry I ever asked to see it. I’m sorry for being horrible. I just want to be back home with Mum and Dad and Mr Piddles and Pudding our cat. But I don’t think that’s going to happen because someone is sure to steal me out here and they won’t even need a packet of sweets or the promise of a litter of puppies to lure me away from safety because I’m all alone.
I walk on a little and trip over something, grazing my chin on the ground, but that’s the least of my worries. I look down to see a large stick, big enough to be a weapon but small enough for me to carry. I find a bench and sit waiting for something to happen, never letting go of the stick once.
I don’t remember falling asleep, the night and the cold must have swept me up and carried me off. But I must be asleep now because someone is trying to wake me, pulling at my hair and wrestling the stick from my grasp.
‘Get off me,’ I try to scream but it comes out as a weak cry.
‘Gabriel.’
He knows my name.
‘Oh thank God, thank God.’
It’s my dad.
He smells of fireworks and squeezes me really tight against his body.
I’m safe.
‘Dad . . .’
‘Yes, son,’ he says into my shoulder.
‘You’re suffocating me.’
When my dad opens our front door my mum runs at me like I’m a rugby ball to be caught. Tears have bloodied her eyes. A moment of silence squashes in between us before she says, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry,’ over and over again until I begin to worry someone has stolen all her other words and she can’t say anything else. My dad must be thinking the same thing because at the twentieth sorry he pulls her off and says I need a hot drink and a biscuit and some warm pyjamas, which I think is a polite way of telling her to do something useful.
Later, when he’s tucking me into bed I tell him about the argument over The Bear Chronicles and the lame suggestions of soft play and the zoo. We share a disgust of the penguin smell and I’m pleased to see the mention of it wrinkles his nose.
‘It was supposed to be my choice today,’ I say and then in case he thinks I hid on purpose I add, ‘I didn’t mean to get lost. I thought she knew where I was.’ I turn my voice down low as I can: ‘I think she left me because she doesn’t like me any more.’
My words unleash another bear hug and we lock together like two pieces of a puzzle. ‘She loves you very very much,’ he says, but there’s something about the way his voice wobbles that makes me think he’s not so sure himself.
‘Will you sleep next to me tonight?’ I ask.
‘Budge up.’
My dad is six foot three inches and he has to coil up like a snake to fit in my bed but he doesn’t once complain, he just strokes my forehead until I drift away.
Dad doesn’t wake me up for school the next morning. When I find him in the kitchen I tell him I’ll get a black mark in the register for being late.
‘You’re not going to school. We’re going to the cinema. If anyone asks, you’re ill.’
The Bear Chronicles is even better than I expected and because everyone’s at school the cinema is empty, which means I get to sing along to the songs without anyone complaining.
‘I didn’t count a single swear word,’ I tell my dad when it’s finished. ‘Why would Mum say it’s inappropriate?’
He shrugs like he can’t fathom it either. ‘Who knows?’
It’s only when I’m going to bed that I ask when Mum will be home.
‘She needs a little bit of time, Gabriel.’
‘Does she have a lot of work to do?’
‘Not that kind of time. She needs some time to herself.’
I bite my lip. I was right, she doesn’t want to be around me.
‘Will she be here tomorrow?’
He shakes his head.
‘Not tomorrow.’
‘Then when?’
‘A few weeks.’
Weeks.
‘I promise I’ll be better if she comes back.’
‘Oh, Gabe. She hasn’t gone away because of you. You must never think that.’
But what else am I supposed to think? She didn’t even say goodbye.
I mark each day she’s gone with a cross in my diary. It’s four weeks and three days until she returns. I’m playing football in my room when I see her standing in the doorway.
‘Hello, my darling,’ she says, like she’s just been out to the shops. I want to run to her and bury myself in her coat and cry and tell her I’ve missed her every single day, but the weird thing is I don’t do anything. I can barely look at her because I’m frightened that if I get it wrong she’ll disappear again.
We all have dinner together that night and I’m sure she’s going to tell me where she’s been or pull a present from her bag, ta-da! like she does when she’s been away with work. Instead she moves the cottage pie around her plate and squashes peas with her fork and says the garden shed needs painting and my dad says no it doesn’t at which point she sighs and asks me if I have any homework (no) and have I fed Pudding (yes) and would I like any more cabbage (as if).
‘No thank you,’ I say, and I draw a smile on my face like the one my mum has drawn on hers. Everyone gives up on talking after that, the only sound is of our knives and forks scraping against the plates. It’s like our shapes have changed and we don’t quite fit together any more and no one has noticed except me.
At bedtime, Mum kisses me goodnight. The kisses are wrong, they’re skimming stones that do no more than brush the surface. She’s here right next to me but I think it must be a magic trick for her to be this close and yet really far away.
On her way out she says, Love you see you in the morning and this makes me turn away and push my face into the cool of my pillow. How could she have forgotten? We don’t say it like that. We say loveyouseeyouinthemorning as fast as we possibly can so it rolls into one big happy word that’s all ours and ours alone.
An Act of Silence Page 4
