The Mountain in My Shoe

by Louise Beech

  ‘Um, I saw your bags.’ Ruth nods at them, standing at their feet.

  ‘Ah,’ says Bernadette.

  ‘Don’t tell him you’re leaving him,’ says Ruth again.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘When he comes home, you should stay. He does love you. He really does.’

  Angrily Bernadette says, ‘You know nothing. Now please go.’

  She opens the door. There are no more words. One full story and one summary have been exchanged. Ruth walks down the stairs, heels click-clacking, and Bernadette keeps the door open so the light guides her. When she has gone Bernadette closes and locks it.

  Then she goes into the bedroom, sits on the bed and pulls off her shoes and puts her face in her palms and waits and waits and waits.

  And then she cries.

  49

  The Book

  Hull Social Services Report – Yvonne Jones (Social Worker)

  Home visit to Conor Jordan (D.O.B. 10/11/01)

  Date: 01/02/2011

  Summary

  I visited Conor at home, where he has been living with Anne Williams for three and a half years. He presented as a happy, mature and healthy nine-year-old boy who spoke with me at length about his schoolwork and latest drawings, which he collects in a big folder. Anne expressed how proud she is of his progress, and told me how close they are. Bedwetting hasn’t happened since the months following the death of younger brother George, who he had only seen twice.

  Access

  Conor continues to see his birth mother Frances regularly at her home in Doncaster, where she lives with her two-year-old daughter Kayleigh. He recently began seeing her twice a month. Anne reported that he looks forward to these visits, though he expresses how he is annoyed by all the supervision and wishes they could spend time together alone. I assured Anne that this is something we will look into once Conor is twelve. Conor still shows affection for his mother while also getting angry that he doesn’t see her more. I feel that this relationship is a positive one in Conor’s life and that visits should continue at this level.

  Schooling

  Conor is now in Year Four and making good progress. With Anne behind him, he enjoys the work and is improving in all main subjects. He was a big part in painting the scenery for a school play after school and talked animatedly about this to me.

  Assessment

  I am happy with Conor’s progress in this placement. There are no plans to change it. Twice-monthly access with mother Frances will continue. Future meetings with brother Sam are to be discussed since the last one did not go well. George’s death has affected them both deeply.

  50

  Conor

  I’m home.

  Didn’t like being in hospital. Was glad when I woke up and Anne told me the doctor was going to see me and do some paperwork stuff and I’d be leaving. I asked if she had heard anything about my dad. I actually said it like that – my dad. Anne shook her head. I told her that old people always say no news is good news, and asked if it was true. Anne said it depended.

  Adults always say that when they can’t think of an answer.

  Anne said my mum had rung. That was nice. She wanted to know if I was okay. She knows all about who my dad is and how he knows Bernadette. She’s back home with Kayleigh now. I’m glad. I hope she’s not in trouble. It was really cool to hang with her last night. Even with all the big drama stuff going on it was dead good to be on my own with her finally. That’s my special private stuff that I’ll think about when I’m in bed.

  I won’t tell anyone about it.

  Maybe just Sophie.

  Mum told Anne to tell me she’s real sorry for shouting in the car and she wants to make it up to me. She’s going to see if they will let her take me and Sam to Hull Fair. I couldn’t sit still to put my shoes on when Anne said that. All of us together. Ace.

  Anne ruffled my hair then and said, I know you saved up to take your mum on holiday. She told me. You’re a lovely boy, Conor, you really are.

  So I’m home now. Anne’s house looks kinda different. Not on the outside. That just looks like normal. There’s the front garden with some flowers at the edge and the wall I always climb on cos it’s just the right height and a gate that squeaks when you swing on it.

  But inside everything looks bigger and brighter. It’s like this time when Anne took me to Scarborough to see these sharks in a museum and on the way back she said there would be a surprise at home and there was. Her daughter Amber had painted my bedroom. Bright new-jeans blue. Was just white before that. Everything else seemed better just cos of the walls. My stuff looked brand new. More interesting.

  But nothing has been painted today. I even check. Still eggy yellow kitchen. It’s still toffee beigey brown in the front room. Minty green in the hallway. And my new-jeans blue bedroom is the same, just how it was when I went to school yesterday morning.

  I stand in the doorway and that seems like it was weeks ago.

  Anne shouts up that she’ll make me a cup of tea and see what cake’s in the tin and says I can have a nice warm bath soon. I just want to be in my room a bit. Get my brain around what’s happened.

  It’s Friday today. Everyone will be at school later. They will be well jel that I got two days off. Bet they’ll all wonder where I am. Anne said last night they were worried about me. Her and Yvonne and Bernadette and the police. I was officially missing. Kind of cool to have been missing. Like an unsolved CSI episode. Everyone searching and analysing the evidence.

  But I wish I hadn’t upset Anne and Bernadette. And I feel so mean that I swore at Anne last night in the hospital. I swore at Mum too, in the car.

  Can’t help it sometimes.

  Those words won’t stay inside all the time.

  I’ve never seen Bernadette on any day but Saturday and it’s definitely never been in the dark. I can sort of remember last night when I was out of the water and I saw her face and it was all kind of shimmery to me, maybe cos of this silver thing I had round me. Thought for a minute she was an angel. Scared I’d died like poor George. But then there was Anne and my mum and these ambulance misters and I thought, We can’t all have died.

  I lie back on my bed and get my Muhammad Ali book from under the pillow. I always read it before I go to sleep. It’s not like a book you buy. Better than that. It’s one I made. A bit like my Lifebook.

  So I thought I’d do the same thing for Ali. A Lifebook. Its pages are the best kind, all crinkly and make this scrunchy sound when you turn them. Most of the pictures I drew myself. Some I cut out of magazines. I stuck articles in too and wrote my own stories, what he means to me and that. I did a real good bit about his match with Frazier that they called the fight of the century, and how it was his first time really losing.

  I would’ve told him you never lose in my eyes. He only had fights with people that wanted to fight and that’s important. There was this big war he wouldn’t go in cos he said he wouldn’t drop bombs on innocent people.

  But the best thing in my book is the autograph Bernadette got me for my birthday. He actually wrote it himself. His name. His own pen. Maybe when I’m eighteen and I get my Lifebook I’ll send this one to him.

  Anne brings me my Doctor Who mug with tea in and a bit of carrot cake and I look through my book. I heard Anne once telling Bernadette that she thought I saw Ali as a father figure. They didn’t know I was listening. Never knew what they meant. He couldn’t be my dad. He’s black and I’m not. But then I figured out that they meant I looked up to him like that.

  But now I have a real dad to look up to. Now I’ll be able to find out about him. I can remember how his jacket smelled last night. I remember the moment he said he was my dad and it was as if I had known all along. And he jumped into the water to get me out and didn’t let me go. He only did that when Mum had got me.

  I can’t wait to say thank you to him.

  Anne suddenly shouts up that someone’s here to see me. I jump off the bed. Have they found my dad? Is it Bernadette?
I go to the landing and in the hallway is Sophie.

  She’s grinning and wearing her white coat with the fur hood that makes her look like an Eskimo and I reckon her mum made her do her hair cos it’s plaited all neat, which she hates. She’s got her school bag wrapped round her and it’s covered in badges and doodles I did on it. Anne tells me she can come up for a bit and then she’s got to go to school at ten.

  In my bedroom Sophie looks at me all weird and says I look different. And I say, I know, I thought the house looked different! She looks like she’s been polished. We sit on the bed and grin at each other. Then we don’t say anything else for ages. We’re just with each other like after one time I got upset cos my mum cancelled our meeting.

  Then Sophie tells me dead serious, I never ever told the police you rang me. She says after I rang her from the service station she didn’t even tell her mum. She just went upstairs and tried to go to sleep but couldn’t. She was worried about me but knew that friends keep secrets for each other no matter what.

  Did you get to see your mum? she asks me. Who was the mister that took you there? How come you fell in the river? Did you really go in an ambulance?

  So I tell her it all.

  Sophie’s eyes get big like two shiny moons. When I say it out loud it sounds better than when it actually happened. I love telling it. It’s a bit like how I feel when I draw. It must be how writers feel when they do stories. I don’t even have to make stuff up cos the drama is better than on Casualty. Sophie finishes my cake and sips my tea and listens and listens. When I’m done my voice is all croaky.

  I’m so happy you have a dad, she says. It’s brill.

  And I just nod. I feel as proud as I did when I won this Ferens Art Prize thing. But then little George died and I would have given it up in a minute if I could have made him alive again. Poor George. When I think about him – cos really I didn’t know him at all – I feel more than sad. Want to go back in time and tell all the social workers I want to see him more.

  Don’t look so gloomy, says Sophie. This is happy news.

  I tell her I was just thinking how poor George died without knowing his dad.

  And she says, But I bet he’s happy for you up there in the sky.

  Sophie always says the right thing. I don’t even mind that she scoffed all my cake.

  Anne shouts up then that Sophie has to go now.

  You’re so lucky to miss school, she says. I only get to miss first lesson. Mum said I could come and see you for an hour and then go in.

  I tell her I’ll be back on Monday.

  She says she’s going to tell everyone how I got rescued out of the river but not the rest cos that’s just between us.

  I can’t wait to tell Stan Chiswick about my dad though. Tell him he can stop saying my family is weird cos it’s just like his now.

  Downstairs Sophie puts on her Eskimo coat and I watch her go down the path. She waves and says, You are ace, Conor Jordan! I laugh loads and when Anne closes the door I miss her already. I hear her shouting them words even when she’s gone.

  You are ace, Conor Jordan!

  Maybe I am.

  51

  Bernadette

  Bernadette must have fallen asleep because something wakes her.

  The bedroom is light; she’s sure Ruth’s perfume still lingers on the air, proof that she was really here. Sitting up, Bernadette rubs her neck and remembers. There was a dream; in it she, Richard and Conor were walking along the foreshore, hand in hand. Instead of being its usual coffee brown, the river was all shades of red, like someone injected it with food dye. Conor ran towards it and Bernadette warned him about the dangerous currents. Still he ran. He cried out that there were leaves, lots of leaves. The leaves are leaving! Richard walked away and when Bernadette called after him, asked if he was going to rescue his son again, he turned and said, ‘Now it’s your turn.’

  What has woken her? The dawn light?

  No. A soft tapping on the door.

  Richard? Perhaps he’s exhausted, unable to knock any harder. Despite the dream in which he appeared gentle, like the early days, Bernadette feels sick with nerves; even a weakened Richard is daunting. She goes to the door, opens it slowly, heart hammering.

  It’s Ruth.

  Bernadette blinks, wonders if she’s dreaming still.

  ‘I had to … I couldn’t…’ Ruth stammers.

  ‘Couldn’t what?’ demands Bernadette. ‘Haven’t you said enough?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’ Ruth pauses. ‘I haven’t told you everything.’

  ‘Everything? How can there be more?’

  ‘I’m sorry for any hurt I’ve caused,’ says Ruth, looking back down the shadowy stairway.

  ‘That’s what you came back to tell me?’ asks Bernadette.

  ‘No. But I am. Please, just give me one minute, and then I’m gone. I had to come back. I was…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Afraid.’

  Sighing, Bernadette opens the door. ‘Five minutes,’ she says.

  They return to their places in the lounge. Ruth doesn’t sit. She swallows, hard, then says, ‘Richard knows.’

  Bernadette frowns. ‘Knows what?’ What’s left to know? He knows she has gone behind his back with Conor. He knows he is a father. He knows about the Lifebook. What more is there?

  ‘He knows you’re going to leave him.’

  ‘He knows…’ Bernadette drops onto the sofa. ‘How?’

  ‘He senses it. Told me on Saturday when I went with him to fix the computer. Said you’re different. Withdrawn like. There was nothing he could pin down exactly, no proof, he said. But he knows. He said your heart just isn’t there anymore. He can’t stand it. It’s breaking him.’ Ruth looks at Bernadette. ‘I wanted to say, earlier, but I…’

  Bernadette thinks back to the previous morning at Tower Rise; how she studied Richard’s morning ritual for clues of his possible knowledge that she was leaving. There had been the strange question – ‘What will you do today?’ – that she’d simply dismissed. The almost kiss. The one she was sure he thought about giving. It makes sense. Richard knows. And Bernadette knows now that he would not have let her leave if he’d come home at six.

  ‘He said…’ Ruth starts.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘No, nothing.’ Ruth goes to leave.

  ‘What did he say?’ demands Bernadette, jumping up and grabbing her arm.

  ‘Look, he might not’ve.’ Ruth runs both hands through her crimson hair. ‘We all say stuff when we’re upset, don’t we? I can’t be absolutely sure he meant it. I tried to tell you not to leave him earlier, in case…’

  ‘In case what?’ Bernadette shivers. Tower Rise seems to wait with her for Ruth’s reply. The wind drops. The trees still.

  ‘In case … he killed you both.’

  ‘What?’ Bernadette laughs; it is shrill.

  ‘He said…’ Ruth sits now, as though a weight has been lifted from her. ‘He said he’d never let you leave. He said he’d kill you both rather than lose you. The river. He said … it would happen … there. From the bridge.’

  The words are ludicrous, the threats of a mad man. But much as she tries to resist them, they do not surprise Bernadette. She wants to defend her husband, scream her outrage at the audacity of this prostitute saying such things. But she can’t. The words make sense. They enter her heart with ease. They sting but they do not lie.

  ‘He told me about this hedgehog he looked after when he was a kid,’ says Ruth, looking to the empty glass on the mantelpiece as though hoping for more whisky. ‘How he loved it to bits and then it just left him anyway. Said that wouldn’t happen with you. He wouldn’t let it.’

  Bernadette shivers. Richard is the real monster; he is the creature she goes hunting for when sounds wake her in the night. Though he sleeps beside her, perhaps some part of him wanders the huge rooms of Tower Rise, making sure she hasn’t escaped.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ says Ruth. ‘I should’ve said earlier but ju
st didn’t want to scare you. I kept thinking, no, he was just mad, he’d never really do that. Then when you said he was in the river … well, I thought he won’t be in any state when they find him. So she’s safe. I tried to tell you not to say you’re going! Then after I left, I thought, but what if he comes home, and he’s fine, and…’

  ‘It’s been hours,’ says Bernadette, suddenly exhausted.

  ‘Yes. But … well, what if he managed to get out of the river ages ago and he’s…’

  ‘Wouldn’t he be here by now?’ Bernadette is trying to convince herself more than Ruth.

  ‘Maybe. Are you okay? Should I stay? Shall we call the police?’

  ‘No, no.’ Bernadette sits next to Ruth. ‘What would I tell them? They can’t act on some threat. And he only said it to you. Not to me directly.’

  Ruth looks at Bernadette, her face kindly, make-up cracked at the corners of her eyes. ‘You know him best of all,’ she says. ‘Do you think he’s capable of … of that.’

  Bernadette’s head says no; no, in his own strange way Richard loves her. But her heart. Her heart says different.

  ‘Maybe you should go and stay somewhere else,’ says Ruth. ‘Just until he’s back.’

  Bernadette shakes her head. ‘This is the only place anyone can get hold of me. It’s okay, really. I’ll lock the door, leave the key in, put the chain across. I’ll be fine.’ She thinks of Conor suddenly. Pictures him running along the foreshore, arm raised to throw stones into the water. Will learning of his existence have muted Richard’s rage? Will meeting him today, spending time with the boy, have softened him? He tried to rescue Conor; surely he wouldn’t still want to hurt her after that. Would he?

  ‘You go,’ Bernadette says to Ruth. ‘All I can do is wait here for news.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’