Beyond All Evil

by June Thomson

  The sound of a car arriving. Time to go. Time to say goodbye. My sons came for me. I clung to Shaun and Ross. We did not speak on the journey to the crematorium. Such a crowd had gathered. So many people. It was a beautifully warm day but I didn’t care. There was no comfort to be found in the warmth of the sun.

  I was helped through the throng. I tried to offer greetings to those nearest to me but I fell silent as I entered the chapel of the crematorium, passing the floral tributes that spelled the names of my children. I took my seat and a hush fell as the minister, the Reverend Wilma Cairns, took the podium.

  Her voice was bright and clear.

  ‘Ryan was a typical wee boy,’ she told everyone, ‘a livewire, always running about doing things at top speed. Michelle was a bright and bubbly, happy girl who loved sparkly clothes … and chocolate.’

  As she talked at length about my children I smiled in spite of myself. For days now I had been fighting to retrieve the happy memories that had been subsumed by the horror. For a few seconds I was winning them back. In the darkness one takes comfort from even a pinprick of light.

  My mind flew back to just a few weeks before they died. Ryan had come home from his youth club with an elaborate chocolate egg. It was a thing of beauty and he decided he wanted to keep the egg for Easter morning.

  ‘Put it in the fridge,’ I told him. ‘It will be safe there.’

  He placed the egg in the fridge and closed the door. Easter Sunday must have seemed so far away to a little boy but, as it turned out, the egg would not survive until that special day.

  We hadn’t legislated for Michelle sneaking into the kitchen like the proverbial thief in the night – and eating it! On a bright, clear Easter morning, Ryan discovered his treasure had been plundered and he ran to me in tears.

  ‘My egg’s gone. Michelle’s eaten it. I know it was her. Michelle’s eaten my egg,’ he howled.

  Ryan hauled me to his sister’s bedroom where the evidence was plain to see – the crumpled box and torn foil wrapper had been discarded on the floor. There had been no attempt to hide her nefariousness. Michelle laughed and clapped her hands.

  ‘It was good! It tasted really good, Ryan.’

  She was incapable of telling a lie. Her laughter was often an admission of guilt. Ryan forgave her, of course. He always forgave his sister.

  I was still hugging that memory when the funeral service came to an end. My hand reached out involuntarily, a vain attempt to stop my children disappearing from my sight when the curtain closed around their coffins. They were gone. I walked from the chapel into the sunlight. Hands patted me, arms embraced me. Voices, soft and soothing, spoke to me. A need to be alone carried me to the garden. No one followed.

  And now, here I was, sitting with the dead, in this place of remembrance.

  The smell of the sea came to me again, invoking so many happy memories of the children playing on the shore; carefree days spent away from Rab. I knew then where we should say our last goodbyes. But not quite yet.

  In the days that followed, I kept them close to me. I had been given their ashes, which were held in two separate urns. What was left of them in death was a paltry substitute for what they had been in life.

  It was also a time of dreams. Each night my children visited me, told me they loved me. Those were the good dreams. In the others they were always beyond my reach, out of sight, trapped in a darkness I could not penetrate. I kept losing them all over again.

  But then I was given the little signs: the echo of Ryan’s voice from another room; the tinkle of the wind chimes above the window, which so reminded me of Michelle’s laugh; the fleeting glimpses of them from the corner of my eye, which seemed to be so much more than just my imagination.

  These strange goings on didn’t scare me. They were crumbs of solace, a semblance of peace. I realised then that my children would always be with me. Perhaps it was time to let them go.

  Early summer had replaced spring. I awoke one morning and I knew it was the day. I ran to Linda’s room.

  ‘We have to go on a trip, go to the beach,’ I told her.

  Linda was at first discomfited. I hadn’t shown such purpose for weeks.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked in a worried voice.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I said. ‘I want to take them to the sea.’

  I was almost manic.

  ‘The sea?’ Linda said.

  ‘Michelle and Ryan! I want to take them to the sea. Phone Jim and get the girls ready.’

  I knew my brother Jim would want to join us. It would be me, Shaun, Ross, Linda, Abbi, Beth, Jim, his wife and their young son.

  But it was such a spur-of-the-moment thing that I couldn’t get hold of Ross. I knew he would understand. I couldn’t wait. I had to do it now.

  Shaun was staying with me for a while, but Ross had moved into a new flat. Muiredge was out of bounds to all of us. None of us could have returned there anyway.

  I ran back to my bedroom. I was swinging between agitation and exhilaration. I snatched up the urns. I removed a portion of the ashes from each one and put them in two tiny, silk bags. I placed the bags carefully in my box of memories, a collection of precious things associated with their lives.

  ‘Jim’s on his way,’ said Linda, who had come into the room.

  ‘Are the girls ready?’ I asked.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ said Linda. ‘But what are you doing with those?’ she asked, indicating the silk bags.

  ‘I’m keeping some back, to scatter at special places.’

  Linda hugged me.

  ‘I’m so glad,’ she said.

  I didn’t need to ask her why she was relieved. She knew, as I did, that I had turned a corner in my grieving. Within ten minutes the living room was filled with the sound of Abbi and Beth’s voices. The girls were now dressed and ready to go. Eventually I heard Jim at the door, and when he entered his face expressed puzzlement.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he asked.

  ‘We’re going to let them go,’ I told him.

  I could see the relief on his face – and the secret look that passed between him and Linda. He, too, knew that I had made a breakthrough. Since I had lost my children, Jim and Linda had watched helplessly as my world fell apart. I had run screaming into the night. I had barricaded myself in rooms. I had wailed like a wounded animal. They were, at times, terrified I might never be pulled back from the brink of madness. Now, they could sense I was starting to heal.

  ‘The car’s outside,’ Jim said, adding, ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘I want to take them to the beach at Kirkcaldy. They loved it there,’ I told him.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said, and I saw him smile for the first time in weeks.

  Even today I cannot fully express the emotion of those moments when I felt my burden ease, if only a little.

  We ran down the path of the house and piled into the car.

  Abbi and Beth chattered incessantly on the way to the seashore, the long, beautiful stretch of sand where my Michelle and Ryan had run wild so many times. It had been a place of such carefree joy.

  When we arrived I felt as if they were with me. As I stepped from the car, the breeze caught my face. I was right. This was where they were meant to be. On the journey I had clutched the urns to my breast. I held my children as tightly in death as I had done in life.

  I walked onto the sand, looking for the special spot where we had picnicked and played. I found it. I turned in the direction of the sea and walked towards the water.

  I was about to open the urns when I felt my sister beside me. She gently took one of them from me. Linda would be by my side. I looked behind me and saw that my nieces were following us. Shaun, Jim, his wife and their son waited on the sand.

  Linda and I walked out to meet the waves that lapped at our feet. On we went, up to our knees, to our thighs. Our trousers were soaked, clinging to our legs, but we didn’t feel the cold. The water had no power over us. Nothing had any power over us any more. We paused, steadying
ourselves against the motion of the tide. Linda and I eased the lids from the urns and slowly sprinkled the ashes onto the water. They settled for a moment in a dusty veneer. And then they gave themselves up. The pull of sea carried them away from us.

  Linda and I began to walk back. When we reached Abbi and Beth we took their hands. We stood in a line, joined physically, emotionally and spiritually.

  Abbi and Beth were saying, ‘Bye bye, Michelle; bye bye, Ryan.’

  The emotion of that moment will stay with me until I draw my dying breath. In my mind I heard again the last words Rab had spoken to me, when I left Michelle and Ryan with him at Muiredge.

  ‘What will you do, June, when you are alone with no one to love you? What will you do then?’

  As I said goodbye to my children I knew in my heart that Rab had been wrong. I would never be without love. My children were gone, but they were not lost.

  The love I shared with them is a love that will last forever.

  Chapter 25

  In the Arms of an Angel

  ‘Ash wanted to ensure that Giselle had nothing left.’

  Ian Stephen

  Giselle: As I laid my babies to rest, I thought of you – the only other woman who could truly know how I felt.

  Silence and darkness.

  I was swallowed by a darkness so complete I could not conceive of how I would ever again reach the light. Faces. So many faces – beside me, around me, lining the streets, merging together. The solemn expressions of children not yet old enough to appreciate the full horror of what they were witnessing. Grannies, mothers, daughters, all crying unashamedly. Glasgow hard men who had forgotten their reputations for a moment to weep openly. A river of tears was carrying my babies to their rest.

  The cortège moved at a snail’s pace along Royston Road, crawling behind an escort of police cars and motorcycle outriders. The traffic lights were switched off, blank circles no longer changing from red to amber to green.

  Shop fronts were shuttered. Workers and customers were crammed on the pavement, standing shoulder to shoulder. Every window of every house was open. People looked from them with expressions carved from stone. Below them, the taxis and cars were drawn in to the kerb, their drivers standing by the vehicles with their heads bowed.

  Royston was a community at a standstill.

  I saw everything and nothing. I sat in the car wedged between my father, my sister Katie and my brother Tam.

  Thank God, I thought, that Ma had passed away before she could see this. She could not have borne such a burden. The hearse was in front of us, carrying my babies in a single white casket that looked so small. They were in each other’s arms. I knew Jay-Jay was safe in the embrace of his big brother Paul, protecting him in death as he had tried to do in life.

  They had been gone for nearly three weeks. The physical, emotional and spiritual pain of my loss consumed me. If anything, it was greater, more acute than it had been on the day he killed them. That pain had struck like a blow from a sledgehammer. This pain had reached into my very heart and soul.

  My arms felt empty. There was no one to hold.

  I could no longer smell their hair, their skin. Their laughter was merely an echo. Now I had to give them up to the cold, hard ground. I sobbed.

  My poor Da. He sat beside me. He had lost Ma and then he had been robbed of two of his grandchildren. He was inconsolable. The man had tried so hard to offer me comfort while his own heart was breaking – a bear of a man who had held little Jay-Jay with such delicacy.

  ‘There, there,’ he said to me, as if he were talking to a child.

  Katie took a tighter hold of my hand. I was lost. I was a child again, as young and vulnerable as my babies had been.

  ‘Da,’ I said. It was a plea.

  ‘There, there,’ he said again.

  He was weeping, this big man who had been the anchor of our lives. I had seen him cry twice – today, and the day my mother passed away. He – all of us – had been weeping since before the service, when we arrived at the funeral home to help prepare my babies. I brought the clothes I had chosen for them to wear. I also had with me toys and keepsakes. I wanted them to be dressed in their favourite outfits, for them to be surrounded with tokens from their lives.

  I believed in my heart that they were bound for Heaven and that Ma was waiting for them. They needed their special things for the journey. As we pushed open the door, we were enveloped by the perfume of the flowers. Katie and Tam turned to me. They were amazed.

  The flowers were a carpet, covering almost every inch of the floor, a riot of colour, from the smallest posy to the largest of wreaths. Some were traditional in shape, while others were fashioned into the most elaborate of designs. I had chosen a yellow Bob the Builder ‘helmet’ for Jay-Jay and a Spiderman motif for Paul. Tam had chosen the letters P and J. My oldest sister, Janie, had sent a teddy bear made from flowers.

  The tributes were festooned with messages of sympathy from family, friends, neighbours, and the teachers and pupils at Paul’s school. So many people wanted to let us know that they were sharing in our grief.

  A pathway bisected the floral tributes. A woman came from behind a desk and took my hand. No one needed to tell her who I was.

  ‘So many flowers, Giselle,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen so many. People have been coming and going all day. There isn’t anyone in this community who doesn’t have you in their thoughts.’

  I murmured my thanks.

  ‘Giselle,’ a man’s voice said.

  It was the funeral director who had appeared from his office.

  ‘Come this way,’ he added gently, taking my arm.

  He was visibly upset. Poor man. I felt so sorry for him. He was more used to dealing with the passing of old people who had lived long and fruitful lives, not two little innocents who had been snatched away.

  ‘Is that their clothes?’ he asked.

  I nodded, handing over my precious bundle. I had chosen dressing gowns and pyjamas for both boys – Bob the Builder for Jay-Jay and Spiderman for Paul.

  ‘I’ll take this,’ the funeral director said.

  He paused. There was clearly something else he wanted to tell me. I looked at him.

  ‘Giselle,’ he said, ‘we’re going to put little scarves on the boys’ necks.’

  I knew why. It was to hide their wounds.

  ‘I’m sorry, Giselle. I had to tell you, so you’d be prepared.’

  His voice was gentle, caring, but his words stopped my heart for a moment. The awful realisation of how their lives ended hit me all over again, but later, when I saw them in their white coffin with its silver handles, I knew their pain was over.

  Paul’s face still held a vestige of the fear I had seen in the mortuary, even though the funeral director had done his best to restore him to serenity. Jay-Jay still looked as if he were asleep and that he might wake up at any moment.

  Of all things to think about in that second, I thought of Ash. And his Bible. I remembered how he used to want to know why I didn’t read the Bible.

  ‘I read the Bible every night, you know. I am a true Christian,’ he would boast.

  How could any man who believed in God have done this? To his own sons? To anyone’s sons? I was suddenly revolted by his false piety. He had not only committed every sin in the book. He had committed the worst of them all.

  If I could have sat him down in front of me I would have told him that he would rot in his God’s hell for what he had done. I silently made a promise to myself that if I was ever given the chance to exact retribution, I would send him to that hell.

  But for now, I dragged my thoughts back to what I had to do. It was time to say goodbye to my babies. I laid Jay-Jay’s favourite ‘dummy’ by his head and stroked his hair.

  I turned to the funeral director and said, ‘Paul likes his hair spiky. Promise me you’ll do it the way he likes it?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Giselle. It’ll be lovely, I promise,’ he replied.

  ‘The fami
ly will be here to see them,’ I said. ‘I want the boys to be remembered the way they were.’

  The family came, one after the other, silent but for their sobs. Da was devastated, his chest heaving, and he was shaking with emotion. He looked as if he had aged ten years. The sight of his grandsons made him moan.

  ‘My little boys. My little boys,’ he said in a voice so unlike his own.

  Katie sobbed. Tam sobbed. Katie’s son Paul looked at the coffin and fled to the other side of the room, where he wept uncontrollably.

  Somehow I found the strength to look once more at my babies. I had still to give them their special toys and messages from the family. I placed my keepsakes carefully beside them. Finally, my mother’s ashes were placed in the coffin with Paul and Jay-Jay.

  Strong arms held me as I leaned down and kissed them for the last time. I felt the same arms easing me away from the coffin.

  I had chosen a humanist ceremony. The minister, Alastair Douglas, had come to see me and we talked for hours about my boys. I told him of their devotion to each other, and of how Jay-Jay so often thought that he was the big brother. Paul was timid and gentle; Jay-Jay was a roughie-toughie.

  ‘Night, night, mine baby,’ Jay-Jay would say to Paul.

  Paul would look up at me and say, ‘Mummy, Mummy, I thought I was the big boy. Why is Jay-Jay calling me the baby?’

  I would laugh and ruffle their hair, telling them they were both my babies. And now they were gone, and I would never say those words again.

  The minister had asked me to choose a special piece of music for the funeral. I decided on a Barry Manilow song – ‘Cant Smile Without You’. The song had come to mean so much to me, summing up the wonder and happiness my babies had brought me. At the end of the funeral service, the words flowed around me.

  When the song ended the funeral director and his staff removed the silver-framed picture of my babies from the coffin’s lid and gently lifted the coffin onto their shoulders. The family followed in procession and we watched as it was placed in the hearse.

  We set off on that slow journey through Royston. I had asked the funeral director if he could ensure that the route of the cortège would take us past Royston Primary School, where Paul had been so happy.