She mentioned taking her father for his plants when Alan was sitting eating his lunch. He grunted agreement, any day would do, just to let him know, then launched into a lecture about how her father was too old to be looking after a garden, it was too much. He, Alan, was nearly too old himself at seventy-one, a fit seventy-one, but at nearly ninety her father was past it and someone should tell him. Sheila ignored that. As if her father could be told to pack his beloved garden in. Impossible. But he’d missed Leo to weed and mow the lawn and dig. Something would have to be done about that, but not now. She would do a bit herself. Anyone could mow a lawn, it was just like Hoovering, no trouble. They’d have to get someone to weed and dig though, until Leo . . . She caught herself just in time. It was dangerous even to think of Leo being released. Dangerous from every point of view. She never, ever, said the words, ‘When Leo gets out.’ Her greatest terror was just that: Leo out, Leo back in their house, a stranger, secretly a wicked, violent stranger who’d be her responsibility, as he’d been since he was three years old . . .
Would Mrs Kennedy want to talk about that? Would she want Leo mentioned at all? Or was she coming to talk about her son, about Joe? Telling me things, Sheila thought, things I’d rather not know. Maybe she wants to reduce me to tears, not knowing I can’t cry, that I haven’t cried since Pat was killed. No tears. She might wonder at my lack of tears, think I’m hard. But she might cry, Mrs Kennedy herself, and then what would she do? Comfort her of course. That was what people did. When other people cried, comfort was called for and offered. When they didn’t cry the need for comfort wasn’t recognised. Nobody had comforted her. Alan and she had silently supported each other, just by being together, by keeping the surface of their life as unruffled as possible, but they hadn’t been able to comfort each other. Her sister had tried, she supposed, Carole had tried but only by baking her cakes she didn’t want and offering platitudes which were infuriating. Her father had been true to form – never had he comforted anyone. It was a luxury denied to all his children, a foreign language he’d never learned. The nearest he got to it was to say it was no good crying over spilled milk.
Pride. She had pride, that was how she coped, it was her father’s version of comfort – you held your Armstrong head high and dared anyone to pity or blame you. And she had done so. There had been no hiding away, however hard it had been to go into shops and walk in public places, feeling herself pointed out as his mother or grandmother, depending on how accurate the identification was. She’d wondered, often, what it would have been like if Joe Kennedy had been a girl. Worse, much worse, she was sure. Or if Leo had been only a little older and could have been named in the newspapers. Not that it had made much difference locally – everyone had known. But she was conscious that however hard it had been, and still was, it could have been a great deal worse. Joe Kennedy could have died. The knife wound could have been a little lower, near his heart, not in the shoulder. Or he could have been maimed for life, crippled. It was so near, the next wound, to his spinal cord. What if Mrs Kennedy wanted to go over what had happened? She wouldn’t be able to bear it. She never allowed herself to reconstruct the attack. The policeman had wanted them to read Joe’s statement but they’d refused and in court they had managed not to listen when it was read out. She knew enough. She didn’t want details. But maybe that was what Mrs Kennedy wanted, why she was coming, to shove the details down her throat . . .
All of a sudden, she felt panic-stricken and, leaving the table, she went to write another letter.
Chapter Four
HARRIET SAW THE anniversary creeping up and was determined to ignore it. It was silly to think of it as an anniversary anyway, inappropriate if technically correct. She had deliberately chosen not to note the actual date at the time and had succeeded so successfully that all she could now be sure of was that it had been in the first half of June. Light nights. No need to worry about Joe being out in the dark, not that she had ever worried much. There was no danger, and he was a boy. So many times she had thanked God she had no daughters, recalling with heavy feelings of guilt the agonies she’d put her own mother through. Only sons, about whom one did not need to worry in the same way, and certainly not in this small lakeside town. No clubs, no areas of danger. Everyone knew everyone else, except in the summer with the tourists and trippers, and the occasional invasion of gangs from the big towns, just looking for trouble.
But she watched the nights lighten, the days lengthen, and it was no good pretending it was not almost a year since her life had changed. Such a long time, such a short time. The drama of it all had carried them so far along – the thing itself, the recovery of Joe from the physical injuries, the arrest of Leo Jackson, the long wait for the trial – all that had taken months. Always, there had been something they’d been waiting for, something that had to be got over before the horror was done with. And between the crucial events there had simply been gaps which were somehow filled in without being real time. Real time had only returned so recently. Even then she was unconvinced. There was another boy, out there somewhere, never identified or caught. Perhaps he had been the instigator. Leo Jackson wouldn’t say, not even to shift some of the blame from himself. The defence counsel had tried to make much of that, had talked about her client’s sense of honour, but this had been quickly demolished by the prosecution. Honour? To do what he admitted he had done to another innocent boy younger than himself? No question of any honour. But still the fact of his accomplice getting away with it meant that even now everything was not completely over. There was what Detective Sergeant Graham called, with his love of clichés, ‘unfinished business’.
The worst part of this was Joe’s continuing fear. She knew he thought the other attacker might find him again. Against all reason, he had the idea that this other boy would want to do it again, exulting in the fact that he’d got away with it once, scot-free. This time he would be killed. The fear of death had been utterly real. Joe had only spoken of it once, eyes full of tears, shaking, weak after his release from hospital, overwhelmed to be home again and instead of happiness and relief more wretched than ever – ‘I thought I would die, Mum.’ The two knives, the strong arm round his neck, the smell of one of the attackers, beery, sweaty, and the words, the obscene language, the verbal as well as the physical violence, the demand for money, or else. He’d given it so quickly, willingly, only two pounds, maybe less, he didn’t know, it was all in small change, and then everything had got worse not better, he’d known they would kill him – one of them had said, over and over again, that he would – and he’d wet himself, the urine seeping hotly down the inside of his jeans, and . . .
‘No, no.’ Harriet said it aloud, alone in her little work-room. Never, never, did she allow this, no going over what had actually happened, it was disgusting to do it. But as the time of the attack approached she couldn’t help doing it, partly to see if it felt any less dreadful, whether she could imagine it just as acutely but find it caused her less agony, that the pain had faded just a little, that she could take herself through the whole half-hour and flinch a little less. But she couldn’t. The nausea still rose in her stomach, her flesh still crawled, the crying still welled up inside her throat. Nothing had got better in all this time for her, who had not gone through this, so how could it have got better for Joe? It was not proving true, that time healed, that the memories of even the most horrific things faded. Someone had mentioned the sufferings of those who, at Joe’s age, had survived Nazi concentration camps, who had suffered repeatedly far, far worse experiences and survived to rebuild their lives and be happy people. She’d hated that person. It wasn’t a competition in suffering, she’d told them, she didn’t want to hear about other victims, they had no relevance to Joe. What Joe wanted to do was forget and he couldn’t and neither could she. Ever.
The trouble was, others forgot so quickly. They’d forgotten at school, Joe said. Not that he talked much about it, but sometimes he’d repeat something someone had said and marvel at how
it showed that what he’d gone through had been forgotten. In class, they were studying A Clockwork Orange and were asked to write an essay on how the author conveyed terror with special attention to the use of language in the portrayal of violence. Joe had hardly been able to read the novel at all. He shook and cringed and felt sick but forced himself through it. Then when it came to writing the essay he read over and over again the descriptions of men and women being beaten up and the thugs, Alex and Dim and Pete and Georgie, enjoying it. He showed Harriet his essay, for which he had been given an ‘A’ with the comment, ‘Well done, an excellent appreciation of Burgess’s intention, quotes exactly right.’ She looked to see what he had quoted. ‘Dim was very, very ugly,’ she read, ‘and like his name, but he was a horror-show filthy fighter and very handy with the boot.’ And then a longer passage – ‘Pete held his rookers and Georgie sort of hooked his rot wide open for him . . . Georgie let go of holding his goobers apart and just let him have one in the toothless rot with his ringy fist and that made the old veck start moaning a lot then, then out comes the blood brothers, real beautiful. So all we did then was to pull his outer platties off, stripping him to his vest and long underpants . . . and then Pete kicks him lovely in his pot.’ Harriet couldn’t bear to read what Joe had made of all this, how he had earned his ‘A’. She sat, tears barely held back – Joe was so angry if she cried – and he told her how oblivious the teacher had been, and all of the class, of how, for him, this was no academic exercise. He was incredulous at how short memories were and how nobody related the descriptions in the novel to his experience. He felt humiliated, couldn’t stay in the room. And he couldn’t watch anyone being attacked in any film or video or TV programme – he had to dash out when friends laughed or cheered on the assailants. Violence wasn’t real to them, it was a story. They didn’t feel the blows, the pain, the edge of the knife. And they were always full, his friends, his contemporaries, of what they would do in similar circumstances, how they would have brought into play their Karate training or Judo moves, they’d have kicked like this, and twisted away like that . . . None of them understood.
Harriet saw how Joe’s whole nature had changed and was still changing as a result of such an experience so young. The young didn’t believe in evil, not really. They didn’t think the world a bad place, however much evidence they saw on television. That was the great comfort of being young, especially young in a loving and safe environment. But Joe had lost that. Not only did he now know the world was cruel and this cruelty random, he believed there was nothing else. He couldn’t see good any more, he had no faith in luck. His vision was black, he had proof that evil existed. It was no use expecting Joe to ‘get over it’. He could indeed resume, superficially, normal life, he had done it with impressive speed, but what he couldn’t do was recover his youthful ignorance and natural optimism. It had gone, nearly a year ago, in half an hour. Nobody seemed to understand this except herself. In her treatment of, and attitude to, her son she felt she had to keep at the forefront of her mind, always, that half-hour. Her patience was limitless because of it, her tolerance never-ending.
This was exactly what was wrong, Sam argued. She let Joe ride rough-shod over them, put up with his snarling bad temper, his moods, his lack of any kind of cooperation. She was condoning his absolute obsession with himself and it was doing him no good. That was how Sam always ended – ‘You’re doing him no good.’ Sam’s way was, as he put it, ‘to treat him as normal, as you used to’. To which, of course, she’d replied that Joe was not now normal, and Sam was fooling himself if he thought so. He’d pushed and pushed himself to act normally, and succeeded, but he was in no normal frame of mind. While his leg was broken, while he was recovering from his ruptured spleen and the knife wounds, Sam had been all sympathy, but now that Joe was battling with his broken confidence and his ruptured faith in life and his wounded self-esteem, Sam’s sympathy was evaporating. He said things like, ‘Joe is wrecking our lives,’ and, ‘Joe only wants to make us suffer because he did,’ and, worst of all, ‘Joe is making us into enemies.’ Enemies. It was not true. She and Sam could never be enemies. But she recognised some truth in what Sam had been trying to say – they were more separate. She was totally bound up in Joe and he was not. And Joe did indeed play on that, consciously or not. He had turned against Sam, moved away from him, and there was nothing she could do about it. For the moment, she was Joe’s.
Sam resented this quite openly. He didn’t agree with the way she treated Joe, he couldn’t match her overwhelming absorption in their son and nor did he want to, but he felt excluded and was envious, it seemed to her, of her dedication. It left him on the outside of the unhappy little world she and Joe had made their own. Even his strength, his physical height and weight, told against him in an obscure way. She and Joe were uncomfortable with it, uneasy when Sam did anything at all that showed how powerful he was. He almost wished he could shrink, become slight and unnoticeable. They seemed to look at him with such distaste when he carried heavy loads of logs into the house, or cut the big hedge in the garden. They made him feel brutish, just for being a strong man, and there was nothing of the brute in him. It was as though they were blaming him, somehow, and feeling this made him miserable. But his misery was not recognised as such. It came out in uncharacteristic displays of bad temper. The Sam they knew, and had depended on for his good humour, did not behave like that. He began to pick on small transgressions – Harriet’s failing to report the loss of her front-door key, Joe’s borrowing of his tracksuit bottoms – and blew them into major sins. He wouldn’t listen to explanations. His moodiness caused problems at work. There were four other architects in his firm and a great deal of shared work was done. Sam had always been the one who connected best with each of the others and also the one whose social skills with clients had been greatly valued. His new intolerance made him less reliable and, after a while, his colleagues resented this. He found he had to make a huge effort to appear to be his old self again, and the strain of doing so told when he was at home. But Harriet had no sympathy for him. Instead, she was harder on him, he felt.
Once, he had forgotten to pass on a message from Detective Sergeant Graham about the results of the DNA test carried out on Leo Jackson, and Harriet’s fury had goaded him into saying he was being ‘got at’. How she had sneered, how she had scorned him, claiming the only person he cared about was himself, poor, poor little Sam, being ‘got at’, how dreadful. They had a furious row, which in itself was so unusual that the effects were felt for days afterwards. Their whole relationship was based, in fact, on Sam’s refusal to argue. His method of expressing anger or resentment was generally to retreat into silence or literally to disappear, to go out of the house until whatever had brought him and Harriet to the brink of a verbal fight had cooled down. But when she taunted him at that point he was suddenly so furious and hurt that for nearly the first time in his married life he swore at Harriet. He called her a sanctimonious bitch, he accused her of deliberately turning Joe against him, and when she in turn said he was an insensitive brute who cared only about himself he almost hit her. He couldn’t bear her to think she was the only one who suffered, but she would neither acknowledge nor allow that he too had the right to his own brand of pain, no less severe in being different in kind from hers. He felt persecuted by them, by Harriet and Joe, and he didn’t understand why, what had he done?
Nothing. Harriet knew that Sam was guilty only by the sin of omission, of not allowing the attack on Joe to submerge all else in their lives. Once he had left the house each day, once he was working, she suspected the weight of their tragedy lifted for him. She wished it was as easy for her. Only for a short while was she able to put Joe if not out of her mind then at the back of it. At first, she’d thought she’d never work again. How could she, when her concentration was so fractured? She spent six weeks at home, nursing Joe, and her business almost collapsed. She’d had no one to whom she could delegate properly other than the girl she employed in the shop
, and she was incapable of doing more than keep that unimportant part ticking over. The real business, the designing, the supervising of the out-workers, depended on her, and without her it collapsed. And when she’d gone back into her work-room she’d thought herself finished, not an idea in her head, all creativity dried up, paralysed. She’d kept herself going only by keeping new designs embarrassingly simple. Even then, she’d been so slow, it had taken her days to print a poppy on a plain white scarf. She couldn’t see a poppy and yet that was all she could think of to use. A poppy. Blood-red. A symbol of suffering. It had taken her weeks to come out of this sterile phase and when she did, when the first few hours had flown and she’d forgotten about Joe for all of them, she’d felt guilty at how much better she felt. Whatever was in her was not dead, it still stirred, pleasure was there, pleasure and satisfaction and the old sense of achievement. She cried to feel it. If only Joe could feel it, but there was no sign of that kind of inner recovery, which, even at her most miserable, sustained her.
She wondered if Joe marked the date. He didn’t mention it. She didn’t. Nobody did, except her sister Virginia. ‘A year next Saturday,’ Ginny said, sitting in her kitchen. Harriet ignored her, turned away and took refuge, as usual, in being busy preparing food. ‘Don’t ignore me, Harriet. Why shouldn’t I say it? It isn’t healthy not to, you should talk about it.’
‘I’ll decide that,’ Harriet said.
She and Ginny had only recently, since their mother’s death, grown closer again, though they had always lived in the same place, the place in which they were born, and had always seen each other every week with monotonous regularity. Ginny had no sons. She had two daughters, one a year each side of Joe’s age. She’d been infuriatingly fond of saying, ‘Think if it had been one of my girls, I can’t bear the thought,’ and then going on to bear it, many times, aloud. ‘A year, and you’re thinner than ever,’ she went on, watching Harriet carefully. ‘You’ll wear yourself out, what with all this and work. You should have a holiday, get right away. I’ve always said so.’ She had indeed, over and over, like a litany. So had a great many other people, urging her and Sam to take Joe and get ‘right away’. No one knew how much she would have liked to think a simple thing like a holiday would work – sun, blue skies, different surroundings, why not? Because Joe didn’t want to. He wanted to stay at home.
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