by B P Walter
Chapter Ten
The Mother
May. Three months after the attack.
Alec doesn’t talk much on the way home. He just lets me talk. And God, do I talk. I’d left the house, helped out by Alec and Denise, borderline screaming. Screaming all manner of words I wouldn’t normally scream, especially not at a tasteful dinner party, but I couldn’t stop myself. No amount of words, no amount of promises of violence and revenge would match the anger that soared inside me when I read those messages on Jessica’s phone.
‘He is a fucking murderer,’ I spit at Alec as he drives through the winding suburban streets towards the motorway. ‘I want him dead, do you hear me? I want him to know exactly what he did, exactly what he’s done, exactly how much he’s hurt me.’
‘Hurt us,’ he says quietly. I ignore him.
Back at home, Alec makes me a mug of hot chocolate as I sit and sob on the sofa. It’s the first properly kind and generous thing he’s done for me in months and I’m not really sure how to cope with it when it arrives. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ He takes a seat next to me as he says it; another change. Usually he’s standing over me or pacing somewhere out of reach.
‘Yes. No. I don’t know. I want to scream.’
He takes a slight breath in, as if he’s about to say something, then stops. Eventually he says, ‘I can understand your anger, Caroline. I mean, believe me, I’m angry too. But I don’t think this is really going to help anything. I don’t think… well, I don’t think it matters.’
I almost spit out the tentative sip of cocoa I’ve taken. ‘Doesn’t matter?’ I can’t believe he’s just said it, so simply, as if it’s obvious. ‘Of course it matters. This is… this is a breakthrough.’
‘In what sense?’ he says calmly. ‘In what way is this a breakthrough? It’s not as if Jessica’s death was part of a big mystery…’
‘It was a big mystery, one that I have now solved!’
He carries on, speaking over my shouts: ‘She wasn’t the victim of an elusive serial killer the police have been hunting down for months. We know who killed her. Jessica was killed by a member of ISIS. A twenty-year-old lad from Birmingham, who was part of a group of Islamist extremists. She wasn’t killed because a boy decided to blow off a date. That boy didn’t open fire on all those people. That boy didn’t purchase an illegal weapon to slaughter innocent people or detonate a bomb in a shopping centre. They did that. The terrorists.’
I gape at him. Surely Alec, a man who has for months been clawing around, looking for someone to blame, would be cheering at the thought of finding an actual candidate. Not the masked sociopaths who were killed at the scene. Someone who is actually alive, living a presumably normal life free from punishment. ‘Maybe you don’t want the boy to be blamed because it takes the attention away from blaming Muslims.’
I see his eyes flare at this. ‘I’m not getting into all that,’ he says quietly. There’s a tight edge to his voice now. ‘I’m just saying that if we’re going to blame everyone who merely caused someone to be in the place of an atrocity, where does it end? What about that nine-year-old victim? Melanie Robbins or Robberts or something – is it her mother’s fault for taking her to the Westfield shopping centre, where she worked, because she couldn’t afford to take time off when the kid had a cold? She’ll blame herself for the rest of her life, but is she really actually to blame? Or that young couple from America on their honeymoon who had gone to see the Olympic Park. They were supposed to be travelling back the day before, apparently, but due to a confusion with their booking at the airline, they ended up having to stay an extra day. Would it be the fault of a member of staff at British Airways that they died? If he or she hadn’t made a mix-up with their flights, they would probably be alive right now. But of course it isn’t the fault of the airline, or the fault of Melanie’s mum, or the fault of this random boy our daughter was off to meet. It was the deliberate action of a group of sociopaths.’
I wait for him to finish his little monologue then muster the strength to fight back. ‘And ours. It isn’t just the boy I’m blaming. It’s our fault too. We always told her she could tell us everything, and said how important it was to know where she was if she was dating. And she kept secrets. That’s what she said to me, the day before… she said… she said she was tired of keeping so many secrets, and I can’t stop that spinning and spinning around in my head. She lied to us. She lied about where she would be. Why couldn’t she tell us that she was going to meet a boy?’
Alec holds his hands up, shaking his head. ‘She’s a teenager… was a teenager. They do things like that. I’m sure I did.’
‘That’s what Fareeda said,’ I mutter, partly to myself. I feel myself starting to cry again and lie back onto the cushions of the sofa, wishing I could just sink into them.
‘I think she’s probably right,’ he says softly.
I let a few beats of silence pass, then say slowly, ‘You’re trying to exonerate yourself. You feel guilty, too. And so do I. But the main bulk of guilt – it’s with him. It rests with him.’
He sighs again, then moves away from the sofa, giving up. ‘Drink your hot chocolate,’ he says, as if he’s the responsible adult in the room and I’m a moping, weeping child. Regardless, I do as he says for half an hour, watching the late-evening sun turn to darkness as the clock ticks its way towards 9pm. Eventually, after I’ve drained the last thick drops of chocolate from the bottom of the mug, I stand and walk slowly towards my office. I’ve got pins and needles from how I’ve been lying on the sofa and my back clicks as I straighten up. The ordered calm of my workspace is comforting to me, reminding me of my day-to-day routine before everything ended. Before I became ‘grieving mother’ rather than ‘successful screenwriter’. I would come in here as early as 6am some days and answer emails from my agent or the producers I was working with, getting the admin out of the way first, before doing a bit of light social media. I’d then see off Jessica as she left for school, reminding her to take her packed lunch with her and checking what extracurricular activities she had that night – piano, violin, Latin club, netball, book group, swimming. Then I’d return to my office to start the real work, the writing, before stopping for lunch at around 1.30. I’d either pop into town to lunch with friends or find something in the fridge and take it into the garden, or watch a bit of TV if the weather was bad. The afternoons I usually reserved for going over what I’d written and making phone calls and other admin.
I’ve only been back in my office a couple of times since the disaster, and that’s only been to get blank envelopes or stamps. I haven’t worked. The deadline for my next project passed weeks ago. I haven’t tweeted or bothered to respond to emails, other than essential ones from my agent, Jane, and those I did from my phone. Now, opening my laptop for the first time in months, it feels strange to see my desktop there as normal – all my apps and minimised windows glinting at me as if nothing has happened and barely a second has gone by since I closed it. Right now, though, I’m not here for working. I navigate to Facebook and type ‘Michael Kelley’ into the search box. It takes a little while to find him, but since he’s a mutual friend of Jessica’s it isn’t too hard. His handsome face stares back at me, almost tauntingly, as I save the image to the computer and then follow the options to print. The A4 sheet comes out of the machine to my right a few seconds later, his face filling it, slightly pixellated, the resolution of the Facebook profile picture not coping well with the enlargement. I then scroll down his page, looking at the type of things he likes. Nothing very remarkable. A couple of superhero films, a few bands I’ve never heard of. He doesn’t post much, either. Nothing at all this year, in fact. I hoped to see a stop in all activity from February onwards, after the terror attack, but he didn’t seem to use Facebook much even before that point. The most recent post is from a few summers ago – of him and a girl on a beach, him playfully licking her cheek and her caught mid-shriek. It didn’t look like an exotic location – too British – and th
e geotag proved me right. The photo had been taken in Southend, Essex. That explained the lack of sea and expanse of mud.
After a few more minutes of fruitless stalking I close the laptop and journey to the kitchen with my print-out. There, on the door of the fridge, above the ice button so I know Alec will definitely see it, I stick the photo of Michael Kelley, keeping it in place with two magnets at either end.
‘Fuck you,’ I say, staring at the photo, surprising myself slightly by the strong language. But it feels right. Fuck him.
Chapter Eleven
The Mother
May. Three months after the attack.
I immediately think of the boy the moment I wake up. I stare at his face as I silently crunch through a bowl of cereal, sitting at the breakfast bar in the kitchen. I then spend the rest of the morning cleaning the kitchen to clinical levels of cleanliness, even though our cleaner Kate only came three days ago. And after every swipe of the surface wipes, every tug on the hoover handle, every close of the dishwasher, I look up at his smiling face, and hate him that little bit more each time.
The afternoon changes everything. I pick up my phone to order some groceries and my hand accidently nudges the screen over to the Apple News stream.
I almost scream. I can feel the panic rising. The world turning, knocking me into the cool glass of the oven doors.
‘Alec!’ I call out and he runs into the kitchen.
‘I’ve just heard,’ he says, breathlessly. ‘Piccadilly Circus. It’s on the TV.’
‘I don’t think I can watch.’ I glance through into the lounge, taking in the TV that’s playing, muted, a special BBC News report.
‘I’m going to. Let’s sit on the sofa. We’ll watch together.’
I shake my head. ‘I can’t,’ I say, stepping away from him and running up the stairs.
Alec follows me. For almost a minute, we sit on the bed in silence. Then I move to the left side of the bed, leaving a spare side for him to get on properly. He takes up the invitation, pulling his shoes off and lying down. Then I reach for the television control. It’s strange, us lying on a bed fully clothed in the middle of the day, watching a terrorist attack unfold in front of our eyes. My hand is trembling and Alec takes it. It surprises me. Comforts me, slightly.
The BBC reporter is in full flow. ‘The bus to Hackney Wick was passing through the busy tourist hot-spot of Piccadilly Circus when the bomb detonated. As you can see from the images on the screen right now, the top level of the bus was blown off almost completely, in images chillingly reminiscent of those of the 7/7 attacks in 2005.’
I watch the screen, showing footage captured from what must be a helicopter, and see the lumpy long bundles with material over them on the floor. I try to think of them as bodies – as people, someone’s daughter, son, girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband, sister, brother, mother, father – but my mind protests and they go back to being bundles. I didn’t think news reports showed such things. I thought they’d wait for them to be cleared away before their cameras swooped in from helicopters to capture the scene. But apparently not. It’s almost like war photography. Only the warzone is now our doorstep, not some faraway place we can all conveniently forget about and label as somewhere ‘foreign’ and nothing to do with us.
Alec is crying silently; I can only tell by the way he keeps raising his hand to his eyes. The camera now shows part of the Tesco Metro on Piccadilly Circus, at the top where Lower Regent Street turns into Jermyn Street. Its entrance has been partially destroyed and there’s someone’s shopping, left discarded on the pavement outside, with what looks like milk spilling from the plastic carrier bag. I wonder where that milk was destined for. A mug of tea in a nearby office or shop staffroom. Or maybe for the fridge back in someone’s house, to be poured chilled onto their cereals tomorrow morning. Now, it’s trickling down Lower Regent Street, never to see a mug or a bowl.
We sit and watch in silence for another half an hour, neither of us able to say anything. Alec speaks first.
‘I’ve taken that photograph down. The one of the boy you put up in the kitchen. It’s not healthy.’
I have trouble digesting what he’s saying at first. The news crew are currently in the middle of an interview with a young American woman who works at the nearby Waterstones store, describing the loud bang they heard and the way the windows shook when the bomb went off. I turn to Alec and see him looking at me, watching to see if I react to what he’s just said.
‘You haven’t thrown it away, have you?’
He nods.
I lean forwards so I’m no longer lying next to him. ‘I wanted that there. I put it there for a reason.’
He closes his eyes, as if in pain or discomfort, and wipes a tear from his face. ‘Caroline. Please. What good will it do? Having us staring at his face every morning over breakfast from now on. I can’t do it.’ He’s talking quietly and slowly, as if keen to promote a sense of calm. Calm is the opposite to what I feel and my voice gets high and loud.
‘Well I’m sorry you “can’t do it” but I’m afraid it isn’t up to you. That boy is integral to our lives now, don’t you see? He’s the reason—’
‘The reason Jessica’s dead, I know,’ he says. He sounds almost bored now and this infuriates me further. ‘Don’t you feel this is all a bit predictable?’
I gape at him, confused. ‘What are you talking about?’
Alec shrugs a little, turning his eyes back on the TV. ‘Just you acting like it’s all the fault of a man. As if all men are evil or something.’
I let this sink in, feeling my blood start to burn underneath my skin. ‘Get out.’ All memory of the comforting feel of his hand as he slipped it into mine has vanished. I’m enraged. ‘I mean it. Leave me alone.’
He swings his legs off the bed. ‘Well, if you’re going to be like that…’
‘Like what? Upset? Don’t you think I’ve got a right to be upset? With you making cruel jibes at me – on a day like this!’
He turns to face me, ‘I admit maybe I made a few mistakes. And I regret that Jessica found out… what she did… But I think a lot of this is to do with your own prejudices. Your own complex about your dad, and your mum’s deranged response to him, and the fact you’ve never been able—’
My eyes widen, flooding with tears. ‘Been able to WHAT?’
He sighs, ‘Able to truly satisfy me. The whole idea of us… you and me as a couple… not being enough for me. For either of us. That’s it, isn’t it? We’re just not enough for each other.’
I throw the remote control at him. It misses – hitting the door of the en suite. He doesn’t say anything, just bends down to pick up his shoes from the floor and pads out onto the landing and into the bathroom. I hear him turn the taps on, which makes me suspect he’s gone there to cry without being heard. Not for the first time, I’ve found myself wishing I could pity him more. Understand him more. If I’m honest with myself, I’ve come to terms with the fact we’ve never really been on the same page about things, even at the start. Sure, when we first met there was a spark of something. I was accompanying a friend to a corporate awards ceremony at a posh hotel in London and he was seated at the same table as us. We certainly fancied each other. But maybe that was it? As the years went on, I became scared of facing up to the fact that I just moved in and then married him because it was ‘the thing to do’. Perhaps my troubled teenage years and my complicated relationship with my parents had something to do with it. A need to make my life tidy and tick off the important milestones. And if that’s the case, some of the blame has to fall on me for letting myself get this far – to the point where we had a child, then lost that child, and the two of us are now so irrevocably damaged, nothing we can do can solve it.
Thinking about our marriage has made me feel even more het-up and unsettled. I slam the door so he knows I’m not in the mood for reconciliation when he comes back out of the bathroom, and then I settle back down onto the bed to cry some more by myself.
I thi
nk I always knew I’d gravitate back to Jessica’s phone and the messages she sent him. Love messages to a boy I never knew existed. I’ve kept it on charge by my bed since I found it, Alec never being observant enough to notice on the rare occasions he comes into my room now. As the sun sets on another beautiful summer’s day, I sit huddled under a duvet, the air-conditioning turned up to max so I don’t overheat, scrolling through Jessica’s messages to him. Michael Kelley. Some of them make me cry again, particularly the ones where she mentions me:
I went out shopping with Mum to get a new sports bra. Netball tournament soon. Yay for nerves and pre-match nausea!
And:
Mum and Dad are currently reading, both of them buried in big hardbacks. Don’t get me wrong, I fucking LOVE books but sometimes I feel like I live in a library.
There are also some exchanges that one can only describe really as ‘sexting’ although mercifully without any photographic contributions from Jessica. There is one from him though, although in the grand scheme of things it’s fairly tame – neither his face nor any explicit nudity is shown, just a photo of his underwear-clad crotch area. It’s her response (Hmm maybe show me what’s underneath?) that bothers me more than the picture itself. Thankfully he didn’t acquiesce to her request. What he replied does interest me though:
Come and meet me now. Just get a train down. It wouldn’t take long. We can go to the beach for ice cream. Then maybe I could show you more in person?
