by Kate Bradley
‘Please.’ I tried for firm, but of course it’s obvious I’m near crying. I know she’s not going to let me in and wait for her father. There’s no help here. My mission has failed. I realise the truth: out here, in the night, no phone, no shoes, no map, it’s an impossible task to save Jack now.
I rethink quickly and accept plan B. I realise I now have no choice, because I’d rather lose custody of Jack, if it means his safety. If I’m prosecuted for snatching him, then so be it. If there isn’t to be any rescue by me, then it’ll have to be the police. ‘Can you please call the police then, if you won’t let me in, please call the police, please.’
She raises an eyebrow and takes a step outside, without letting go of the gun. I can see her clearly now, her clear cheekbones, Ramones T-shirt and nose piercing. A line of disdain sits heavy on her forehead like she’s used to defiance. ‘You’re talking shit.’
This is not what I thought she’d say. I take a deep breath. ‘Look, I’ll come clean. If you don’t help me, there’s a little boy’s life at stake. My grandson’s. He’s only a mile from here –’ I turn and point in the direction of my cottage – ‘we only live just there. We’re your neighbours. My feet are filthy because I’ve just run across the fields to get to you. My son is there, he’s . . . a person who has done bad things. I totally accept responsibility for that, but he’s got a son, Jack, who’s gorgeous, only eight years old, and his dad, when he had him, was . . . well, let’s just say it’s not a happy story. So I took him and brought him here and we’ve been living at that little cottage together for the last year, so happy. But tonight my son has found us and he attacked me and . . . ’ I look down at my wrists and hold them up to her, encouraged that she’s angling her head to see. Do I see a softening in her face? Hope flickers. ‘He knocked me out and I woke up on my kitchen floor about an hour ago. He’s got Jack and –’ I think of the closed bedroom curtains as I was leaving – ‘and this is all a game to him and I hate the fact that he’s dangerous but he is –’ I think of Sunningdale and my mother – ‘and I need help.’ I push my wrists a little closer to her as if they evidence my point.
‘He burnt you?’
‘No, I had to do this. He tied me up and I had to get free. I used the gas cooker.’
Her top lip rises in a sneer: ‘You did this to yourself on your gas cooker?’
I realise how ridiculous this sounds to her. ‘When you’ve got a kid, you’ll do anything for them. I can’t let my son harm my grandson. I didn’t want the police, because . . .’
I want to jump over this bit, but she simply waits for me to explain.
‘Because legally he belongs to my son, but it’s me who’s raised him since he was a baby. He’s my child, too. And if you don’t help me, he could die tonight.’
I’d hoped this last point would make her feel shamed into helping, but instead she says: ‘He’s not even yours? You took your son’s boy? No wonder he knocked you out – I’d knock you out if I had a kid and you took it.’ She shouts: ‘Go away, you loon!’ She’s shutting the door.
‘Please! The police! Will you call them?’
‘Fuck off!’
I’m panicking. How can she not call the police for me? I don’t have a plan C. I drop to my knees and hold my hands out to her, and I think I’m crying or begging or both, but she’s still pulling away, and the rectangle of light thrown out is starved to a line and then that, too, is finally gone.
forty-four:
– now –
The farmer’s front lawn is cold under my knees. I get up, shaking, confused. Somehow, I played this wrong. I know I will spend a long time going over the conversation in my mind, checking and rechecking what I said, analysing and reanalysing the mistakes I made. But I haven’t got time to do that now. There is still a small boy in danger.
I need a plan C. Now.
I could go on to Cleasong like Erica said. I could call in at the Red Lion and ask them to call the police. I’m not sure I have any other option: my son will now be looking for me.
Reluctantly, I consider going on. I’m tired and the dark will slow me, as will the lack of shoes, but at a push – because for Jack I can just be heroic – I could get there in realistically fifty minutes. If the police come to the Red Lion immediately, that will take ten minutes, and then I’ll have to tell them my story and then we will travel to the cottage – at best, that’s another twenty minutes.
But maybe the Red Lion won’t help me, maybe the police will be too busy on a Saturday night to respond quickly; maybe they’ll try and resolve it in some unseen way. Even if they do arrive quickly and we get there, perhaps Jack might be retrieved easily and quickly . . . but maybe not.
I can’t risk Jack’s safety.
The breeze plays against my face and my thoughts flutter between possible ideas. The only one that resonates with any power is the idea of my getting hold of Erica’s shotgun.
I think of how that would just change everything for me – for the better. I need it. With it, his power would tilt to me and then I’ll have the control to take Jack back. It’s the perfect solution – much better than getting the police involved. Simpler. He is the boy’s father, after all. I have no legal rights.
It occurs to me, standing there at the farmhouse’s shut front door, that perhaps I’m not the most vulnerable person when choosing between me and him. Of course, Jack is – indisputably – the most in need of protection. But it suddenly seems to me that perhaps I haven’t finished my job of being a mother to my son. Yes, he’s twenty-five and yes, he doesn’t want me to parent him. But his anger makes him so vulnerable. And as his mother, I haven’t stopped wanting to help him.
I hated my own mother being in prison and I would hate for my son to be there. The way he’s going, perhaps it’s inevitable. But if I could get Jack away from him, make Jack safe, and if I could find a way of making my son listen to me, perhaps I could – perhaps – still make a difference. I want to throw apologies at his feet. I want to beg forgiveness. I want to explain about myself, about my childhood, about my struggles. I want him to hear me.
I want him to know that I see him.
But none of that will happen if he gets a choice. The gun is perhaps the answer because it might force him to listen to me. A crazy, terrible answer, but perhaps the only one available. I still want to save him, despite what he has done. I still love him. I thought when I saw the cage that my love had finally died, but it seems not. It seems that it can withstand anything. My love for him is Teflon.
Still – still – I have to try to save him. Perhaps the gun offers a way to turn this around, perhaps there’s only one plan that means I can still stand a chance of saving both my son and my grandson.
I look up at the farmhouse and realise I need to find a way to break in.
forty-five:
– before –
To rescue my grandson from the monstrosity, I realised I needed a weapon. Time was short and I had to get Jack out of this horror show of a flat.
I ripped open cupboards, pulled out drawers. The cupboards were almost empty of food – what did they eat? The kitchen was in reasonable shape so it only took seconds to find the knife drawer and choose the one I wanted.
Jack had turned his back to me, Bunny pressed up against his face.
I sawed up and down, seeing the black tape fray. After a minute, Jack turned his head and said: ‘D-D-D-Daddy w-w-w-w-won’t want you doing that,’ but I didn’t answer.
Instead, fragments of memories raced in my head. I thought of Nick kissing me under the mistletoe at Christmas, that very first time we were together over two decades ago, so young, so happy. I thought of being pregnant, my hands gripping the toilet bowl as I vomited. I saw my mum holding my baby when he was newborn, her face soft with a love I hadn’t seen before and thinking: Is that what you feel for me? I saw tablets in blister packs, fat and promising. I saw the smooth paintwork, but with the hairs trapped forever in the paint. I saw Issy, Nadia and Nessa i
n our favourite café, laughing for a photo, all with their babies balanced on their laps as they posed. I saw the A & E nurse’s face as she pulled away from examining the deep bite on my ear and telling me that it would need plastic surgery, trying to hide the concern in her eyes. I remember seeing my dad dead in bed, pale-faced, motionless; the smell of blood as it edged out, winking its lewd suggestion of the horror puddle beneath and the terror as I picked up the phone to call the police. And then the handcuffs on my mum as they led her away.
Then I saw what I’d missed: that the gaffer tape was wound differently in two corners, meaning it was hinged. I could just lift up the top playpen.
I saw a question in Jack’s eyes that hadn’t been there before. But what else could I do? I was a cornered animal, unable to do anything other than follow my own instincts. If I called the police and social services, they might leave him there with my son whilst they did assessments. I certainly couldn’t guarantee they would place Jack with me rather than somewhere else, and even if they did, I would be obliged to stay at the same address like a sitting duck.
My son would come looking for us – that wouldn’t work.
The trouble with love is that you can never walk away. And no one knows that better than my son because I never left him, even, perhaps, when I should have. But to save Jack, I would now need to do what I’d never been able to do before: I’d need to finally leave my son.
I lifted the top and reached in and slid my hands under Jack’s armpits. I pulled him close to my chest and knew he was the most precious thing in the whole wide world. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for him. I held him tight.
‘Hold on to Bunny – we’re leaving.’
No, you’re not – you’re not going anywhere. I so expected to hear his voice behind me, I swear I did. I felt like an actor in a movie, waiting for the madman to jump out from a shadowy hiding place and attack us.
Eyes wide, heart thumping, I turned round with Jack in my arms: but no one was there.
In the hall, I knew I should’ve run towards the front door as fast as I could, but I couldn’t. Instead my legs remained immobile, keeping me in the dark with Jack on my hip and Bunny on his, waiting.
I could almost hear an imaginary audience screaming: Get out! Why don’t you run?! But fear does strange things. Standing there, I became convinced – convinced – that my son was behind the furthest bedroom door, listening.
Perhaps, after getting my text, he’d laid a trap for me. Perhaps he knew I’d be nosey. Perhaps he was just waiting for predictable, neurotic, untrusting me to walk right into his flat and snoop around. And was I here, doing just as he predicted?
Impossible.
No – not impossible.
If he was going to come for me, I wanted him to do it now. I didn’t want to have my back towards him as we ran for the door – if an attack was going to happen, I wanted to brace myself for it.
I felt something then. I shut my eyes as Jack nestled a sleepy head into my neck. I leaned my head gently back against the door and felt . . . him. It’s true I missed him so much. It’s so hard to even accept myself, but no matter what we had been through, he was still my son. I knew that when – if I was able to – I walked out that front door, I might never see him again. We had been adversaries for so long, but in that moment, I just felt him and his malevolent quiet through the door.
I felt the weight of sadness that I was leaving him alone for the first time. He had always been the one to leave – but I was taking that choice away from him now.
‘Are we going home?’ Jack whispered his question.
It was only later, when I replayed this scene over in my mind, as I had a habit to do, checking and rechecking all my decisions, that I realised he had whispered. I would’ve loved to have asked Jack – did you think he was behind that door, too? Did you whisper because you too thought he was listening?
But at the time I didn’t answer, because as I stood there, I knew it couldn’t be ‘home’ for us, ever again. I knew my life was about to pivot on a point and change completely, forever.
Mostly, what we do is the same old, same old. We go to the same place of work; do the same things; talk to the same people. We drive home the same way; eat the same thing for dinner; click on the same sites on our phones; watch the same things on TV. Go to bed at the same time and start again. Ad infinitum. I had been doing the same old for a long time.
But now it was going to change.
I didn’t answer, because I knew he was listening behind the door. Does the mouse tell the cat his intentions? Because I knew this was now the start of an age-old game.
My son had always liked hunting. At fourteen, his school friend introduced him to the world of snares and rabbiting and although I refused to allow him to have a ferret, he bought one anyway; it fidgeted up and down his sleeves and was the first and only thing I ever saw him show public affection for – until he picked Jack up from school, that is. But I think he killed the ferret, because one day I noticed the hutch he kept it in was empty. ‘Where’s Arrow?’ I’d asked him.
‘Who?’ He looked up from his computer game.
‘Arrow, your ferret.’
He gave a little half-shrug, his eyes cool blue, innocent. ‘Got out. Gone.’
By then, I’d started feeding Arrow because Jack often forgot. I’d learnt to ignore Arrow’s lithe, snake-like body built for killing and instead, enjoyed his black, bright eyes and smoothing his fur. He was cute and smart too – I could hide a raisin behind my ear as bait and he would come and search it out, wet-nosed and quick. ‘Gone since when? I saw him yesterday.’
He ignored me, until I raised my voice in an I’m-not-going-away-until-you-bother-to-answer-me tone and then he gave another half-shrug. ‘This morning. When you were out at work.’
I thought of Winston then, lovely Winston whose memory I had buried deep. I remembered his brown eyes and it seemed as if Winston and Arrow were friends, although by this time, my son was fifteen and Winston had been dead a decade.
‘Have you looked for him?’ I knew he hadn’t; I could achingly see what his lack of interest meant, but I was annoyed, not just for Arrow who might be dead somewhere or worse, but what it meant about my child – what I already knew. I bugged him then, asking about Arrow until he shouted at me that he didn’t ‘fucking care, so why don’t you get lost?’ and I felt better to hear the truth, because standing there, watching him engrossed in his stupid game just made me sick. I finally faced up to what I’d always known but had run from: I finally accepted that I’d raised a psychopath.
Like grandfather, like grandson.
Oh, Daddy dear, you would be so proud.
And standing there, thinking about Winston and Arrow made me feel very, very anxious, not just because I knew that what had happened to Winston had happened to Arrow, but because I knew what had happened to my father and I feared the same for my son.
And now, all these years on, I was standing in his flat and perhaps I was now Arrow. I cared desperately about him, but my son had love for nothing and definitely not me. I couldn’t leave Jack because the public affection was just a set of behaviours he wheeled out because he knew he should and it was just a way to get what he wanted. When he got tired of the demands of something else, he simply got rid. Selena, who had suddenly died of an overdose (I’m not thinking about that, I’m not, I can’t), Winston, Arrow – and I couldn’t risk Jack placing one demand too many on him.
But maybe this was a game he was in charge of. Perhaps to take Jack from the cage was me doing simply what he’d known I would and this was all a big, nasty amusement and he was hunting us now. Jack was the bait to draw me out and now we were in his snare. When I left, carrying Jack out of this flat, I knew the hunt would begin.
So I knew, as I turned away from that closed door, and walked down the hall towards the open door, that we weren’t stepping to freedom, but towards something so much less clear.
forty-six:
– before –
Free from the flat, I ran with Jack in my arms. The wind whipped our hair; my footsteps echoed accusations.
By the time I reached my car, I’d already started to doubt my certainty that my son had laid a trap. Perhaps he wasn’t there, behind the bedroom door, perhaps I would plough straight into him in the street.
We made it to the car. I eased Jack into his car seat, feeling strangely disassociated from the here and now. I just couldn’t believe what had happened. I’d arrived looking to get a sense of their home, but had left with Jack. I had imagined many scenarios, but could never have imagined this one.
I started driving – anywhere and everywhere, simply taking turns without seeing them, just thinking, thinking. My son had always been scrupulously neat – not with his appearance, but with his belongings. Perhaps the only thing we shared was that we were, by nature, fastidious in our housework. We’d clashed when he was a teenager over just about everything, but we’d never had arguments about the state of his room, because, like me, he was almost neurotically tidy. So, why was he living in a mess now? Not just a mess, I corrected myself, he was living in filth. It just didn’t make sense. I glanced up in the rear-view, where Jack was dozing off. ‘Is Daddy always that untidy?’ I asked before I could stop myself.
Jack’s eyelids fluttered. ‘Mmmm?’
‘Daddy’s flat was very messy. Is it always like that when you visit?’
‘No.’ No stutter I noticed.
I had to know. ‘The poo . . .?’
‘D-d-d-d-d –’ He paused, silently blocking, then tried again. ‘D-d-d-d-d –’ Again he tried: ‘Da-da-da-da-d-d –’ but then his face crumpled to tears.
‘Don’t worry, Jack! You’re so tired. Let’s get you a treat!’ Feeling terrible, I drove him to the nearest McDonald’s drive-thru and bought him a Happy Meal, which placated him much too easily. I watched him after, when he was asleep, wondering if he would speak more about his experiences when he was fresher – his stutter was always worse for being tired.