by S. E. Lynes
After tea, Nicola goes upstairs to her books. At least this house is at peace for her to do her studying. Although if Carol brings Graham here, all that will be lost. A groan escapes her. It’s so bloody difficult. Can’t do right for doing wrong. In the hallway, she sits down at the little table and picks up the phone. Immediately she puts it back in its cradle.
‘Bugger.’
Jim is offshore. She can’t call him, not until next week. Next week might be too late. By next week, Graham could be …
The phone rings, sending her shooting out of her chair. One hand to her chest, she picks up.
‘Hello?’
‘Carol? That was quick.’
‘Jim? I was just about to phone you. I’d literally just this minute sat down.’
‘Why didn’t you then?’
‘Because I remembered you were on the rig.’
‘True. The supervisor let me use his office phone, but I don’t have long.’
‘You better hurry up then.’
He laughs, as he always does, as she does too whenever he says the slightest not quite funny thing. Should she just go for it, she wonders, ask him to come? Or wait and see how the conversation goes? She puts her hand over the receiver to hide her sharp intake of breath. Her head spins. It’s impossible to ask him to come. How could she ask anyone to come down to all this, let alone a lovely man like Jim? She would be asking him to step into hell. And just because she knows by now that he would, that he wouldn’t hesitate, doesn’t make it right.
Jim is talking. She realises she’s missed the first bit of what he’s saying.
‘I mean,’ he says, ‘it’s the twenty-third by the time I get off, you know? Practically Christmas Eve. So how would that be? Just for a day or two.’
‘Sorry, love, what’re you saying?’
‘Me coming down next week? Just for a day or two, like. For Christmas.’
A grin spreads across her face, a grin she can’t shift despite the horror of the day. It pushes at her eyes, at her ears; her jaw begins to hurt, but she has no control over it.
‘I mean, I could go back on Boxing Day; I don’t want to ruffle any feathers.’
‘Jim. I was going to ask you, but …’ She’s not even thought about Christmas. But yes, he’s right, it’s nearly here.
‘That’s great. That’s magic.’
‘Jim, stop.’ She feels her face slacken as the grin leaves it. ‘It’s not great or magic. I mean, it is. You are. You’re … But things are not … I was at our Graham’s flat today. I need to tell you; it wouldn’t be fair not to … You might feel different once I’ve finished.’
An hour later, she hangs up and presses her fists to her cheeks. Jim is coming. Despite everything – because of everything – and after all this time, he is coming back to her. Sounds like you need a wee bit of backup, he said. That way he has of giving so much, all the while making it seem like it’s nothing. He asked her to dance that first night because he knew about her situation. But you cannae be sitting here on your own all night were the words he used, as if her problems began and ended there. What’s heavy with him becomes light.
But she won’t wait for him to sort this out for her. She will go to Graham’s tomorrow. Hopefully she can get him home, get him into bed. She’ll buy a lock for his bedroom door and nurse him through the heebie-jeebies. Yes, she’ll nurse him as she did when he was little. Tracy can look after the little one, Nicola can go to one of her friends’ houses to get on with her swotting, and her and Tracy and Jim – Pauline and Tommy as well if needed – between them they’ll get Graham back on track.
It’s a plan.
The only thing she can’t figure out is how to physically get him home. But she’ll cross that bridge when she gets there.
She leans her head back against the chair, half of her lost smile returning. Jim coming makes all the difference. He gives her faith, confidence, and she knows she does the same for him. His life was nothing, he has told her. His life means nothing without her. He loves her, has done from the moment he met her. She never thought she could offer him anything at all; she thought he wanted her only as something to fix, but she sees now that it is loyalty that he needs, someone who will never do to him what his ex-wife did, who isn’t capable of such a thing. But still, even with proof, she almost daren’t believe it, this love – the surprise of it, the way it came from nowhere at all at the darkest point of her life. It is a miracle, that someone like Jim would love someone like her. Ted did, had. It was just that his love was a different kind. Maybe love comes in different flavours, like ice cream. And maybe she, Carol Green, is allowed a second scoop.
Forty-Six
Nicola
2019
Some memories are harder than others. You can push the harder ones aside, over and over, like bogeymen in nightmares, but they are insistent, there at the periphery of your vision. Tonight, the bogeymen are here. They are edging in and will not be refused.
It was a little before Christmas that my mum muttered something about my brother not being well and that she was going up to see him – 1987, this must have been. I would have been about fourteen.
‘Will you be all right on your own?’ she said, head round my bedroom door, as ever not wanting to disturb.
‘Course,’ I said.
‘There’s Kit Kats in the cupboard if you want one.’
‘Hmm.’
Hmm, like that. Hmm. Barely noticing her. I knew she and Graham had argued at Sunday lunch a week or two earlier. He and Tracy and baby Jade hadn’t been to our house since, though I knew my mum had taken a cottage pie up to their flat the day before, but honestly? I didn’t take too much notice. As usual, my schoolwork took what remained of my attention after the latest U2 album or Andy Curtis, fourth year’s answer to Brad Pitt. I was lost in a world of boys, discos, fledgling gossip about who did what to whom behind the community centre, who was a bastard, who was a slag. Like any normal teenager, I was self-obsessed, oblivious, almost, to what was going on behind the scenes. Graham was simply no longer on my radar. He wasn’t very friendly, he wasn’t very nice. He had been my lovely brother, but he wasn’t lovely anymore. I had not yet pieced together the details, was not yet able to shine the light of maturity on my own part in his decline. He had moved out, he had a family. These were the basic terms I’d have used if anyone had asked. If I had thought harder, I would have missed the old him too much. And so I didn’t think of him.
My mother protected me from the reality of Graham as she had from my father. Later, she said only that she was absolutely dead set on me getting to university, or college, as she called it.
‘You had your bedroom all done out,’ she said later – one of those boxed-wine evenings, stolen cigarettes in the back garden. ‘You had your desk and your lamp and that. All I had to do was keep that door closed and let you get on.’
She kept so much hidden from me, as she had from her family and friends when Ted was alive. Keeping things bottled up becomes a habit, I think. You reach the stage where even if you want to tell someone something, you can’t. Did she long to tell me how difficult things were, I wonder? Did she ache to get that weight off her shoulders and at least share it with her daughter, now that her daughter was almost a young woman? Did she hover in her loneliness outside my door, wanting to knock but not wanting to disturb? My studies were sacred to her, my exit from her world her life’s aim. Education was the ticket.
And so she waited on me hand and foot, kept the television low in the evenings, brought cups of hot chocolate to my room, silent as a servant.
I took it all as my due, of course. Now, I wish I could thank her one last time for shielding me from the truth while she still could. Over the years, I have thanked her with words, with gifts, but I wish I could thank her with time itself, an hour spent together, a day in Liverpool trying on clothes, going for lunch at Casa Italia on Matthew Street, the only restaurant I know that still has a dessert trolley. Without her, I would not have excelled in my G
CSEs, later my A levels when Graham was in prison. I would not have reached university. Without my heritage, I would not have become interested in family law. Without my guilt-fuelled determination, I would not have become a barrister. A girl like me has much stacked against her; it takes sheer bloody-mindedness to make it through. What she did, what she gave, every day of her life, formed me every bit as much as my education did. I did not know that then, growing up.
I did not know the half of it.
I was in bed when she got home from Graham’s. I heard her downstairs in the kitchen, the roar of water in the kettle. A little later, the shush of my bedroom door opening over the carpet, the amber light from the landing.
‘Nicky, love?’
‘Hmm.’ I kept my eyes closed in the half-light.
‘You in bed, then?’
Any of my friends would have answered, Er no, Mum, I’m at the zoo, or given out some equally crap teenage sarcasm. Where I come from, it was simply the way we spoke. But whilst I never acknowledged or even saw my mother’s devotion to me, at least I can hold on to the fact that I never spoke to her with disdain. Something about our life before prevented me. Perhaps it’s because, as a child, I had known in a real way the fear of losing her. I think I knew that my father might kill her, if only on some subconscious level, through processing what I heard through the walls, saw in marks on her skin, intuited from her cowed demeanour. I was always, again subconsciously, grateful to have her there.
‘How’s our Gray?’ I asked simply, mouth thick with sleep.
‘Couldn’t find him, love. Out on the randan, I expect.’
‘Thought he was ill?’
‘Aye, well. Must be better, mustn’t he? See you in the morning anyway, all right? Just off for a bath.’
The shush of the door, the landing light narrowing to a thin line, her footsteps, the bathroom door closing, the clatter of the lock, the thunder of the water. Sleep. Oblivion.
Until a little before three a.m. I can remember checking my digital alarm, the red glow of the numbers – 02.57. I can remember the pit in my stomach. No one calls with good news at three a.m.
By the time I’d pulled on my dressing gown and gone out onto the landing, my mother was running down the stairs.
‘Mum,’ I called after her, following her down. ‘Don’t open up.’
‘Hello,’ she said, ear cocked to the door.
Behind the bevelled glass, two figures in black. I knew it was the police. And on an instinctive level, I think I probably knew it was to do with Graham.
‘Mrs Watson? It’s the police, love. Can you open the door for us, please?’
My mother opened the door. The rest followed so quickly, so slowly. In they came: a man and a woman whose faces I can no longer bring to mind. I can remember sitting down on the sofa next to my mother, the warmth of her body next to mine. I can remember taking her hand as they told us.
‘Mrs Watson, your son Graham’s at the station. Has he called you yet at all?’
My mother shook her head.
‘I need to tell you that your son has confessed to a murder. He says he stabbed Mr Barry Simmons at approximately ten p.m. A body believed to be that of Mr Simmons has since been found in Mr Simmons’ residence at the Globe flats. His injuries were consistent with Mr Watson’s story. Pending fingerprints and identification of the body, they’ll be charging him.’
My mother was still shaking her head. Her hand trembled as she raised it to her mouth.
‘Our Graham would never kill anyone,’ I said. ‘Our Gray wouldn’t hurt a fly.’ But even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. I knew in my guts that he’d done it.
‘No,’ my mum said. ‘It was me. I killed him, this Barry chap. It was me.’ She held up her hands. ‘Go on, put the cuffs on. I did it. It wasn’t our Graham.’
The policewoman shook her head. She crouched down in front of my mother and spoke to her softly.
‘Mrs Watson, we have the murder weapon. Your son’s prints are all over it. The victim’s blood was all over his clothes. I know you’re his mum, but he’s turned himself in and that’ll count for him. I understand where you’re coming from, love, but you can’t help him this time, all right?’
‘I did it.’ My mother’s voice was quiet and high and trembling. She turned to me, her eyes desperate. ‘Tell them, Nicky. I was out, wasn’t I, at that time? I don’t have a whatsit, an alibi, do I? Tell them.’
I was crying so much I couldn’t speak. I collapsed against her, sobbing into her chest.
‘We’ve spoken to his partner, Tracy Adams,’ the policewoman went on. ‘She said you went to see your son, but that when he wasn’t there, you came home. She says that was around 9 p.m. Can you confirm that for us, Mrs Watson?’
My mother nodded. ‘Yes. But then after that I killed Barry. You can’t take my son. He’s just a boy. He’s had a lot to deal with. He’s … he’s not well.’
The policewoman was still on her haunches. She nodded, her brow set in sympathy. ‘If you’ll just come with us, we’ll take a statement. Do you think you can do that, Mrs Watson?’
‘Can you wait a moment? I need to make a phone call.’
The policewoman helped my mother up. I watched her stagger into the hallway.
‘Please,’ I said to the policeman. ‘Sit down.’
‘Hello.’ My mother’s voice came from the hallway. ‘I need to put in an emergency call. To Jim MacKay. He’s offshore.’
We waited. Minutes passed.
‘You can come to the station with your mum,’ the policewoman said.
The carriage clock on the mantelpiece struck quarter past. I met the policewoman’s eye and she smiled her sympathy at me.
‘Won’t be long,’ my mother called through, then an urgent ‘Hello? Hello, yes. Jim, yes.’ Her voice lowered to a whisper, but still we heard everything she said. ‘No, I’m OK, I’m all right, I’m … It’s our Graham. Jim, listen. Graham’s been arrested. They’re saying he’s killed someone. Can you come? Can you come, please?’
* * *
It was no use. My mother could not protect Graham from justice. The evidence against him was overwhelming. It seems to me now that my brother was always heading for that moment, that his tumbling towards it was unstoppable from the moment we left my father. It was my father’s legacy: damage, seen and unseen, bruises and broken bones, physical pain and mental chaos.
I visited him in prison, but he was taciturn and I always left discouraged. The third or fourth time I went to see him inside, he told me not to come back.
‘I’ll see you when I get out,’ he said, realising that he’d upset me. ‘G-go and s-study, will you? That’s all I want you to do, all right? You have to. Otherwise there’s no p-point in any of this. I d-don’t want you to be c-coming here all the time. I’ve got nothing to t-tell you.’
‘But that doesn’t mean—’
‘N-Nick, listen. L-listen to me.’ He took both my hands in his. His grip was tight. ‘Y-you better make something of yourself, all right? Otherwise, it’s all just …’ He looked about him, his mouth strange with anxiety. ‘P-promise me. Promise me you’ll g-get a g-good job, yeah? Make p-plenty of m-money. Make shitloads. Look after Mum.’
I nodded, blew my nose. ‘All right.’
‘I’ll see you when I get out, yeah?’
‘Will you talk to someone?’
He shook his head. ‘I’ve g-got n-nothing to say.’
‘Well if you won’t talk to me or Mum, talk to someone in here. There must be a counsellor or someone. There must be someone who can help you. If you don’t come out a …’ I almost said better but caught the word just in time, ‘a more peaceful person, then this has all been for nothing, hasn’t it? So I’ll keep up my side if you keep up yours.’
He shrugged. ‘Up yours.’
‘Don’t joke, Graham. You can’t joke your way out of everything in life. Just talk to someone. Or I … I won’t stop visiting. I’ll make this trip every week and I’ll probably fail e
verything.’ I forced him to meet my eye. ‘Gray? Promise me. Then it’s fair.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘All right. P-promise.’
Forty-Seven
Richard
1993
Graham rubs his face, scrubbing at an imaginary mark that, it seems, will never come off. His eyes shine, but he rubs at them too with the same gruff sweeping motion. ‘Have you ever done anything you really regret?’
Richard feels for his Bible. ‘Yes.’ He wonders whether he should tell Graham how he let a girl believe in him for years, didn’t tell her what he knew to be true. How, so caught up in his infatuation with Andrew, he didn’t get on a plane until it was too late. But actually, it occurs to him, he’s not done anything he regrets. His regrets come from all that he did not do, all that he did not say.
Graham continues, leaving him feeling strangely interrupted. ‘W-we were just so skint, you know? I promised Tracy I’d look after her and the baby, but I didn’t. But it wasn’t my fault.’ He shakes his head, stands up and goes over to the window. He leans back against the sill and begins to scratch his forearms with opposite hands. Richard has never seen him do this before. ‘I’d finish a shift and I’d say to myself, “Look, Graham, lad, go straight home.” And I always thought I would. I’d even get as far as our front door sometimes. Then I’d just carry on past, back down the other stairs to the ground floor to Barry’s, like. I couldn’t help it.’
‘So you became addicted?’
‘Everyone was on something in them flats. Barry gave me everything – meth, crack, coke, temazies, you name it, other stuff. I thought I had it all under control, even when I lost my job, because Barry told me I could make loads more selling for him.’ His arms are tracked with red where he has rubbed them with his blunt, bitten fingers; other marks too, faded dots that Richard hasn’t noticed before.