by S. E. Lynes
In the bathroom, I unscrew my mother’s peach bath foam and inhale its familiar synthetic smell. Back in my own room, the weak pre-dawn light filters through curtains my mother made from thin floral fabric from Widnes market. She made the quilt cover too, from the same fabric. Must have got it cheap. On the landing window ledge, there is a glossy porcelain Victorian lady holding a parasol over one shoulder. My colleagues would scoff at such an ornament. They would see tat. But I see her. My mother. This house is full of her, the loving attentions of her life, the touchstones of my life, of my brother’s life.
In the spare room, there is a double bed and a travel cot. Graham’s daughter Jade and her husband stay here sometimes with their little boy, Connor. That Graham is a grandfather is something I still have to bend my mind around. He had his daughter so early, I had kids so late – another difference in our dramatically different lives. It doesn’t escape either of us that we ended up on opposite sides of the law. But what went wrong came right in the end. Carol lived to know five grandchildren – Katy has twin boys, sandy-haired terrors with the cutest freckles. She doted on all her grandchildren, of course, followed their every swimming certificate and qualification, was the first to hold Connor after Jade, up to that hospital before you could say great-grandchild, and the thought brings a small note of happiness to me now. A woman keeps her daughters but loses her sons, they say. A wise woman befriends her son’s wife – not sure who said that, if anyone, but it strikes me as true. The fact that Tracy and her family are in our lives at all is down to my mother. When Graham got Tracy pregnant, she must have seen history repeating itself in the worst possible way. She could have abandoned them, as her parents had done to her. But when Graham went to prison, she took Tracy and Jade into her home. She and Jim looked after them, helped them find a flat close by. And when Graham got out, he doted on his daughter with a devotion that was almost unbearably moving to witness. And now, with his grandson, there is such tenderness in the way he is with him that it brings tears to my eyes if I think about it too much. My brother’s only ambition, I sometimes think, was to not become his father. For years, he could not escape that legacy, but eventually he did. Much of that is down to Richard Crown, and to my mother, of course.
I pad downstairs and wait in the living room, staring out of the front window, unease in my belly. Graham has something to tell me. This something must relate to my mother’s death. It is something he has not been free to tell me until now.
The street is deserted, the sky a muted navy, the street lights still on. I am glad Graham is coming. Jim got him a job on the rigs when he left prison, and for a while they worked opposite rotations. But Jim missed my mother too much, and once he’d saved some money, he gave up the roughneck life and set himself up as a handyman and decorator. He can turn his hand to electrics, plumbing, anything practical, and he’s never been short of work. A certain bearish bulk, the accent and an easy smile can’t have hurt. Graham stayed on the rigs for a while but left once he had the money together to train as a youth worker. He runs a centre now, specialising in keeping kids off the streets, educating them about drugs, knives and life choices in general, and providing sports facilities. He manages the football team too, and tells me they are the best in the county.
My mother moved into office work and eventually became an account manager, a job she did until she retired eight years ago. A few people who didn’t know her so well said that it was a shame she didn’t have much time to enjoy her retirement, but I know she loved her job and that she was as happy as anyone, happier than most from the moment Graham came out of prison. Happier for having lost it all and got it back. She used to say that all she wanted was for me to escape, to make it to college, but I know that all she really wanted was a family. It was what she got in the end: a huge higgledy-piggledy family.
Graham’s semi-electric car whistles up the drive. I wonder for a second, madly, if Tracy is home with the kids, before remembering that Jade is in her thirties now, that I have nieces and great-nephews that, in my forties, I don’t feel old enough to have.
Graham gets out of the car and raises his hand. I dart towards the front door, my insides heating with anxiety. I thought he had told me everything. But he had not. There is one last thing.
I open the door.
Fifty-Six
Nicola
Graham is sitting on the sofa, a little apart from me. His spread hands are on his knees.
‘Nicky,’ he says, my name almost a sigh. ‘So, me and Mum, right, we knew we … we thought we would never …’ He stops, appears to gather himself. ‘You know, when things were bad. We were … broken, back then. After Dad. She was a wreck and I was … well, I was hell. I was in hell, anyway.’
‘It’s OK.’ I lean forward, stroke his arm, lean back.
He glances up at me, meets my eye with a wary gaze. ‘The first thing you need to know is that I d-didn’t kill Barry.’
‘What?’ My body stiffens. I sit tall, rigid on the couch, as if the violent removal of this long-held truth has stripped out the very skeleton of me. I have to concentrate just to sit straight, to not collapse. ‘What do you mean, you didn’t kill Barry?’
‘I didn’t kill him, Nick.’
‘You didn’t kill him? What? But—’
He holds up his hand – wait. ‘After I’d had that fight with that lad and Barry had legged it and all that stuff you know about, I ran down to Barry’s, like I said, to deck him or at least give him a mouthful, like.’
I bite my lip. I know all this. But I can see that he needs a run-up to whatever it is he has to say.
‘I didn’t know this, but while all that was going on, Mum had come up to ours to persuade me to come home.’
My throat tightens. A nasty taste fills my mouth. It is the taste of my childhood, the taste of dread.
‘So Barry says to come through to the kitchen like nothing has happened. And I follow him and he’s joking around and that, asking me if I want anything, like if I need anything, you know?’
I nod.
‘So I ask him what he thinks he’s playing at, intimidating girls and that.’
Graham stops, rubs his head, exhales. He looks out of the front window and then back at me. I don’t know what he sees in my eyes, but whatever it is makes him falter. He looks down at his knees and begins to talk again. ‘And next thing he’s got this kitchen knife … well, it was the knife, you know, from the trial … and he picks it up and he’s waving it around at us, trying to frighten us or something. And he sort of lunges and cuts my arm, and he lunges again and cuts my cheek.’
Again I nod. There is still a pink line, no bigger than the imprint of a fingernail now, under his left eye.
‘Which, obviously, I’m glad he did ’cos just by doing that he got me less time inside, ironically.’
‘Irony’s ironic.’
‘Yeah. So. I mean, I thought I was hard, Nick. I’d always been hard, like, you know, at school and that.’
‘I know. My big brother was the Graham Green.’ I smile at him, remembering the surprise on the other kids’ faces, the ill-disguised shock in the eyes of the teachers when they put our surnames together.
‘Well, we fought, as you know, me and Barry,’ Graham continues. ‘Every bruise he laid on me was one year less in jail – well, figure of speech. He had me on the ground. And he still had the knife. I was squeezing his wrist, trying to get it off him, and … I can’t remember if I did get it off him or if he threw it down, but next thing he’s strangling me, he’s f-f-f … he’s strangling me, Nick – well, you know that.’
‘Yes.’ These too I remember, the strange red finger marks on Graham’s thin neck when we went to visit him in custody. ‘And then you grabbed the knife.’
He shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Just … just let me …’
‘Sorry. Go on.’
‘I thought I’d had it, Nick. Seriously felt myself going, do you know what I mean?’
I nod. I have no idea what it fe
els like to almost have the life choked out of you – that is an experience he and my mother share – but my focus is not on how he felt then but on how I feel now, listening. Over the years, my job has given me a spider sense for lies. But there are no lies here. And the urgency with which my brother is speaking is that of a certain kind of truth, a final truth that rushes out when all impediment is removed.
My mother was that impediment.
And at that thought, another dawns. My mother.
I clap my hand over my mouth.
‘Mum,’ I whisper between my fingers.
Graham nods slowly, his eyes dark and on mine. ‘Yeah.’ He shakes his head, as if to right himself. ‘She’d been up to ours. But I wasn’t there, obviously, so she ran down to Barry’s. I must’ve left his door open when I went in, because next thing she’s there. I saw her over his shoulder. She said afterwards that my face had gone blue.’ He stops, meets my eye again.
‘She grabbed the knife,’ I say slowly.
He nods. ‘And she … she sort of lashed out at him. She was clumsy with it, like.’
We are holding hands. I can’t remember when this happened or who reached out to whom.
‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘It’s all right.’
The little brass clock on the mantel strikes six. There’s only us here, my brother and me. We are the only people who exist.
‘And I think in the panic, she shoved it in his neck. The tip went right in. Well, you know what the injury was. The main artery. The knife was sticking out of his neck. She jumped back and Barry started screaming. He let go of me. I just … I pulled it out. The knife. It was all so fast, I can’t remember exactly how it went, but next thing I had it in my hand and then there was blood everywhere. He went to get off me but I pushed him; I pushed him over and pinned him down on the floor. There was blood gushing out of his neck. I told Mum to run. I was like, get out, get out. The blood had sprayed all over me but there was nothing on her. Nothing on her, like. Barry was on the floor and he was screaming. I was shouting at her to get out. I told her I’d sort it. She wouldn’t go. She wouldn’t go, Nick. She was crying. We were both panicking. She was going to call the police. Barry was bleeding out. Well, you know that. There was loads of blood, Nick, and it was all on me. All on me and on him and on the floor. But it wasn’t on her.
‘I just kept shouting go home, like. “You can’t go down for this,’ I said. “What about our Nicky?”’
‘What about me?’ I ask. ‘What has this got to do with me?’
He traces his thumb across my knuckles. ‘It’s all about you, Nick. Don’t you get it? All of it. That’s why I didn’t want you visiting me inside. I wanted you to get out. Me and Mum, we had to get you to uni. You had to do well. It was the only way for you to … for you to fly, do you see what I mean?’
I am blinking, but I cannot see. For so long I thought I understood, but I had not grasped the facts of the case. My brother, my mother. Their conspiracy. For me, all for me.
‘She went in the end,’ he says. ‘I told her she had to look after Tracy and Jade, that I couldn’t, but she was still like, “I can’t let you go to prison for me. I can’t let you do that.”
‘So I promised her I’d get clean. Inside, like. I told her it was what I needed, some time out. It was the only way. I promised I’d sort myself out and come back.’ He lets go of one of my hands and wipes his eyes before returning his hand to mine. ‘She didn’t want me to go down, obviously. But she knew that of the two of us, she was the only one who could get you on to better things. And she knew she was the only one who could look after the family; well, she knew I couldn’t. I promised her, Nick. I promised her I’d sort myself out inside. I almost didn’t do it, but then you wouldn’t stay away until I’d promised to get help. Do you remember? I had to practically tell you to piss off.’ He glances up, meets my eye. A sheepish grin. ‘I found Richard. And he helped me sort it. Myself, I mean.’
In his eyes, I see him pleading: believe me, accept what I have told you, it is the truth. He is my big brother. He has looked after me in ways I cannot even imagine. It never occurred to me to look after him.
Without Graham, my mother would have gone to prison. Without my mother, all would have been lost. My brother took the hit. He was innocent, but he served a prison sentence. He did this for Mum, for me. For our family. I always thought that it was my mother’s determination that got me to where I am now, but I see now that my life, the way it has gone, is down to both of them.
‘You sorted it,’ I say softly. ‘You both did.’
‘You didn’t waste it.’ His voice is choked. ‘You didn’t let us down.’
‘I hope not.’
‘What d’you mean, soft girl? Of course you didn’t. You made it. You’re a posh twat now.’ A laugh escapes him; he wipes his face. ‘You made it, Nick, and we were so proud, like, you know? It was … it was everything.’
We don’t hug, not then. We hug later at the door, when he leaves.
‘Don’t be a stranger,’ he says into my ear. ‘Posh bird.’
‘Bird?’ I say. ‘Upgrade.’
He waves into the rear-view mirror as he pulls out of the driveway. After he has gone, I stare at the street on this housing estate where I grew up. My mother raised us, mostly here, under the most difficult circumstances, circumstances I have only now come to understand completely. That night when she returned from Graham’s flat, the torment she must have been in. All I remember was her checking in on me, her feet on the landing, the run of the bath. And of course, she tried to protest to the police officers – It was me. I killed him. The officers, myself, all of us seeing only a mother desperate to protect her son, to take the rap for him out of love. I took her turmoil for despair at what Graham had done. A kind of grief, regret, even a sense of failure. But she could tell no one the truth, not even Jim. To do so would have destroyed the ragged remains of the family she had risked everything to save. My God, to have held that secret, to have borne that guilt. And yet she did it, silently. My mother.
Opposite the living-room window, beyond the driveway, is a bank of grass, the grey kerb that borders the road. Graham used to stand on the far side when we played kerby. He made me stand on the pavement nearest the house so that I didn’t have to cross the street. The fact that it might be dangerous to throw the ball into the road and run after it didn’t occur to us. We were just kids. I was a little girl, caught in the specific wonder that came whenever my big brother chose to spend time with me.
I lost him, that big brother. From the moment we left my father, he receded, became every day a paler ghost. I was only eleven when he came into my room late one night and lay spooned against me in the dark. That’s the only reason, the only justification I can give for what I told him, what has lain at the dark heart of me all these years. What I did is my bogeyman, my guilt, my regret.
My big brother had come back to me that night. And I had to find a way to keep him. In that exquisite darkness, the bedroom floor rumbling with the dull notes of my mother talking with Jim MacKay, this man we didn’t know, had never heard of, and who had appeared from nowhere, Graham and I spoke of my father. I told him I knew about the violence. It made me feel grown up to tell him that. It made me feel included. And he held my hand and asked if my father had ever hurt me.
‘No,’ I said. ‘But he shouted. He was scary.’
‘He was.’ Graham squeezed me tight. He was mine again. I could chat to him and feel safe and loved and protected. I was happy. I could not let go of that happiness, could not let go of him. I had missed him; I missed the old him who would sleep on the floor and play Name That Tune until we fell asleep because I was afraid of the dark. I’m justifying it, I know, but I was only a child. So when my brother asked, ‘And Dad never … he never touched you or anything, did he?’ I nodded and said, ‘Yes.’
I said yes.
I remember Graham sitting bolt upright in the dark, the loss of his warmth, the air cold at my back.
�
��What?’ he said. ‘Where?’
‘In my private place,’ I whispered into the delicious darkness. ‘Don’t tell anyone.’
I was so young, too young to understand the potency of words. I understood it years later, but by then, admitting to it was impossible. I will never know what part I played in helping Graham in his descent. By the time disaster struck, it was too late to tell the truth. How do you admit to someone, someone you love, that you told a lie that may well have contributed to their wretched fate? It’s possible that it made no difference, that he was already on that path, but it’s possible that it made all the difference, and that’s what haunts me still.
Looking back, and with a vast experience of dealing with troubled families, I realise that this was a terrible time, the worst – those months after we left. I can see that the trauma of it was not apparent to me as a child. On the surface, I was happy. I worked hard at school, I washed my face and braided my hair and folded my school uniform at night. I took pride in all of that. It was my role as I understood it, my place in the family. If you’d asked me how I was back then, I would have said, ‘Fine, thank you for asking’ like my mother told me to. I have held this darker memory at the edge of my consciousness whilst all the while being fuelled by the force of it. My lurking shadow.
I have no clue where I got the idea from. Maybe from a kid at the shelter, maybe from television, I don’t know. My father had never done anything of the kind. He was scary, yes. He shouted, he beat my mother. He was sick on the floor sometimes. He would stagger around like a wounded bull, too big for the house, his mouth slack and wet, and yes, that was terrifying for a child. But he didn’t touch me, not like that.
I know I must forgive the little girl that I was. I know it was no doubt a bid for attention beneath the construct I had made of my mother’s too-clever-for-me daughter, a deeper need for sympathy or love or something like that from my beloved but lost older brother, who was stroking my hair and shushing me to sleep as he held me tight. I know that I can never tell him; that if it was too late before, it is certainly too late now.