by Kate Bradley
As I got Jack back in the car, he asked: ‘Where are we going?’
With a crushing sense of sadness, I realised we weren’t going anywhere: we were running from. Instead I said: ‘To see Nana.’
He was so pleased and so was I: my mum would help us. She wasn’t afraid of anyone. Not even him. I thought of the light-hearted way she discussed him and thought: particularly not him.
It didn’t take long to get to my mother’s home. After she was finally released from prison, she had been allocated a small flat in a sheltered housing block by the local authority. She’d been quietly amused to be offered sheltered housing, declaring herself too young at sixty, but it’d turned out to be a good thing for her. She had been released on licence and the sheltered option had helped keep the probation service happy.
I found a space in the car park and turned off the engine. I suddenly felt a flicker of disquiet – what if he’d come here looking for us? The car park suddenly felt too secluded, the low morning sun catching on the shrubs and trees, casting long, dark shadows. I stared into them, watching for any flicker of movement. ‘Let’s go in and see Nana,’ I finally said, feeling irrational but spooked.
Jack picked up his bunny and I opened my door. I slid one foot out and stopped. My hand gripped the door handle. He’s here. The thought was so sure and clear that I felt it with an absolute certainty: He is here.
fifty:
– before –
I froze, half in and half out of the car. The morning air pressed like a cold cloth against my face. The light was too bright for my stress-addled brain, and I felt afraid. I believed that my son was waiting for me, somewhere out of sight, watching me, knowing – somehow – that I would come here now.
Jack had opened the car seat and was climbing down.
Get back into the car! I wanted to shout. But I didn’t; I couldn’t. I could hear Jack’s little footsteps on the tarmac. I squeezed my eyes shut, my heart seemingly squeezing too as I expected my son’s voice to shout: Gotcha!
But instead Jack just knocked on the window. ‘No sleeps for you, Granny!’
The feeling of paranoia was so strong. I’d got used to living with it over the years, exacerbated by the codeine, of course. But the paranoia started when I began to perceive that my son was different and wanted to cover his behaviour up. I suspect that many parents with children who bite, or with children who hit, or with children who cry more than others, will know what it’s like to try to hide how much of a problem their child’s behaviour is. But for most people, the behaviour passes. Eventually time steps in and handles the problem by moving them on a stage.
But that never happened for me. He just kept getting worse. And with it, so did my neurosis. In some ways, codeine stepped in for me; it gave me the ability to change when Jack couldn’t. Wrapped in a warm blanket, I didn’t worry so much what other people thought, I was able to live in the moment more, stop over-planning. Where some might indulge in too much wine, I found the codeine was better for me – it gave me more control, it was harder to detect and easier to stay at a certain point of equilibrium.
I don’t think I had ever missed it more than I did in that car park, with the charred bones of Sunningdale behind me and an uncertain future ahead of me.
Despite being clean, though, the paranoia was back with me then, playing with my mind, making me uncertain as to where my fear started and stopped being real.
I stretched out for Jack’s small hand waiting patiently for mine. So warm; so small. So gentle. I closed my hand over his and let him pull me out of the car. How could it be that this child could give me the strength to stand again?
It felt brave to fight the questions in my mind, to only walk towards the building – not run – when it felt that a sniper’s sight was silently moving with me, watching me.
Jack tugged on my hand, seemingly keener to get inside than me.
The sheltered housing block my mother lived in had two entrances; the car park entrance was to the side and the smaller of the two. The door was half-glazed, so after I’d pressed the silver button of the intercom, I leaned into it, glad to press my forehead against the cool glass; it felt like a soothing hand against the fever in my mind.
The hallway was empty.
I pressed again. Somehow, even the sound of the intercom ringing somewhere inside the walls, inside my mother’s cosy flat, made me feel better – like an umbilical cord, it connected me to where I wanted to be.
I refused to glance over my shoulders. It still felt like he was here, but he couldn’t be – could he? The fever increased in my head and I realised I was asking the wrong question: why wouldn’t he be here now?
I rang the bell again, suddenly impatient to be in. I wanted to be amongst my mother’s overfilled flat with too many throws, too many plants. The place stank of incense which I suspected she used to cloak the smell of pot, a habit no doubt she’d acquired in prison. I guessed Mrs Dale and she got stoned every night – Mrs April Dale, another ex-lifer my mother knew from her time in Holloway, lover of talking edgy politics and YouTube conspiracy theories of global control and now my mother’s neighbour. Probation must’ve settled loads of ex-offenders in this block. I wondered what the neighbours would think, if they knew.
Sometimes my mother and Mrs Dale were so tight, it irritated me. I wished my mum had made some new friends, people who were less ‘prison’ than April was. Now she was out, it seemed a shame that she was keeping the same habits and the same company. I wanted something different for her. A couple of times I’d tried taking my mother to one side to complain about April, asking her to send her home so as not to influence little Jack. But then there would usually be something like a scream of laughter and we’d peep round the corner and see April doing something irritatingly brilliant like playing cards with him, once chasing him with a beautiful orangutan hand puppet she must have brought for him, or reading to him in an attentive way.
And then I would typically just feel mean and childish and would promise myself that I wouldn’t do it again until the next time. My mother told me that I just didn’t ‘like sharing’ – that I never had. It made me feel like crying, because all I’d ever done was share her. The fact that April would’ve spent more time with my mother than I ever had, and that now she was her neighbour she got to spend every day with her, just felt like a massive injustice.
I pressed the intercom again and heard it ring – I felt desperate to see my mum. Right now, even April would be welcome.
No answer.
I felt skittish. It wasn’t unusual for my mother not to hear the bell . . . but still. My mother barely answered it on the first or second ring. She said she was always too busy to hear it but the truth was I think she might’ve been getting a little deaf and was too vain to admit it.
I don’t know what my mother was like before prison – I was only eight when she went in – but since she’d come out, she seemed very resistant to any kind of coercion. I suppose it was all those years of being told when to get up, when to turn your lights out, when to eat, what to wear, but now it was like dealing with an impossible teenager. Part of me indulged it – thought it funny, even – but now, standing in the cold, I knew I would never tolerate again her just not answering the door when the bell was rung. It was just so impossible – she was just so impossible.
How could she leave me out here, frightened, when I needed her?
I pressed the intercom button again: hard. It started to ring again in my mother’s flat, the noise expanding in the silence, into . . . where was she?
Anger was subsiding back again, beaten away by something more powerful. It was folding in like a sandcastle against the tide; overwhelmed by waves of panic. I wanted to fling myself against the glass and bang the door. Let us in! I wanted to shout. Mum!
How I have yelled and cried for her across the years. And she never answered, she never could. But I couldn’t yell for her now – I had to think of little Jack.
Instead I breathed
out really slowly, concentrating on my breathing the way the counsellor showed me a zillion years ago. Centre yourself, Lisa, I remember her saying.
Breathe.
I dropped a smile to Jack standing patiently at my side. His other hand was clasped round Bunny.
‘Is N-N-Nana not in?’ he asked in a smaller-than-normal voice.
I noticed on his cheek a new shadow. Perhaps it was nothing; perhaps it was a bruise that I’d somehow missed. My smile became so wide I felt that it would shatter into a million little pieces. ‘You know what she’s like!’ I said, hating my diamond voice.
The buzzer had stopped ringing, and without hesitation I pressed it again and again.
The fear was rising and gathering in strength and I was starting to reach and grasp for other ideas – any ideas that would lift me from this nightmare. I could go, get back in the car. I could leave and go . . . where? I was thinking through my options when I saw my mother’s door open. Relief suddenly soared high, then instantly dipped low when I realised it was April Dale. She stepped into the hallway, still dressed in her dressing gown.
I hammered on the glass. ‘Mrs Dale!’
She didn’t notice me. She was looking down the hall as if looking for something. Her back was still turned to me and I realised that she could turn and go back into her flat and never see me.
I hammered again. ‘April!’
She continued to stand in the hall and I wondered what she was doing – why was she just staring down an empty corridor? Why hadn’t she heard my incessant buzzing to the flat if she was in there? Why didn’t she react to my banging now?
I rapped on the door, hurting my knuckles, feeling the rising swell of anxiety forming into something else.
But still April didn’t turn.
There was something in the way she held her body; some stiffening. For someone who usually moved a little too slowly on account of the arthritis that she constantly complained about, she was just too . . . poised. On a woman her age it seemed . . . too alert.
Too . . . waiting for something. What was she waiting for? She turned back to my mother’s flat.
I’m almost ashamed to say that I had already started to shrink away. I wanted to help her, I wanted to see if my mum was OK, but I had Jack. He was only seven years old and he needed me to get him somewhere safe. My anxiety was rising into something bigger – a dangerous, rising swell.
Just as I took a step back, her body started to turn. I saw it as if it was in slow motion. Her shoulders swung round, but her head was the last to turn as if reluctant to stop staring at my mother’s open door.
I couldn’t breathe – I wanted to retreat even further, but as I started to pull away, Jack stood his ground. I tried to pull on his hand so she wouldn’t see us; she wouldn’t open the door to us and tell her what was on her mind.
Because I think I already knew and I did not want to hear it.
And then I noticed something I’d seen and not noticed, but now I saw it, it seemed so frightening: she only had one slipper on. Cold fear washed over me as I understood then that this woman was not herself, and then I finally saw her face. Her mouth was ajar and her mouth was formless, soft, slack.
Finally, finally, she saw me through the glass; her hands pressed against her cheeks and she shook her head, her eyes never leaving mine.
Sandcastles flattened, formless, and mountains became washed under seas, as my panic became a tsunami and finally overwhelmed everything.
fifty-one:
– before –
April didn’t greet me at the door or acknowledge Jack, she simply opened it and we followed her into the corridor. I held his hand and shuffled my own feet as I stood staring at hers. One was encased in a pale pink slipper mule and the other was bare. Brown and wrinkled, her foot suggested that she’d spent every summer since she’d been released tanning herself. It felt wrong to see it when the other was covered: too intimate.
I realised that that slipperless foot told me something else about that night, something about how suddenly she’d left her flat. (Or Mum’s. Maybe she left it in there!) I knew I should look up, re-establish eye contact. But I could only stare at her foot because I wanted to be the child; I wanted to hold someone else’s hand, someone bigger and stronger than me, someone who would take the lead. When I looked up, I’d have to be what I was supposed to be – the strong one – and take charge over whatever in my mother’s flat had caused April to feel so scared.
Perhaps she read my mind, because she took my hand in her own. It was warm and dry. ‘Lisa . . . your mum. I think . . . you should go in.’ Her tone was gentle, before it changed, becoming charged with imperative: ‘But not with the boy! He must stay with me.’
I wanted to snatch my hand back. I felt a sudden, almost absurd in its depth, stab of annoyance: of course I was going to go in. It was why I was here.
‘Now, before I call the P-O-L-I-C-E, shall I take Jack to mine and give him a biscuit?’ She had already dropped my hand and taken his before she finished her sentence. At the word ‘biscuit’, Jack had left my side and headed to April’s so familiar, many times visited, flat. She always laid pink wafers and Bourbons in a daisy pattern whenever Jack visited.
But she paused. With a sudden snake movement, her hand whipped out and grabbed my arm. ‘I didn’t leave the door open, Lisa – it was already wide open . . . anyone could’ve got in.’ And then she was gone.
I was left standing in the hall on my own, with no other option but to go inside.
fifty-two:
– before –
I didn’t want to go into my mother’s flat, not because of April, not because my mum hadn’t answered the intercom and not because I thought my son might be ranging around looking for revenge. The reason I felt sick as my fingertips touched the wooden door and paused was because my mum never left her door open. She was funny about it. Insistent, even. I would’ve thought after spending so many years in prison, she would’ve loved an open door, but she didn’t. She liked a shut door.
Always.
I knocked it gently. ‘Mum?’ I called in. The drop of dread hit my stomach, before I pushed the door slowly open and took a step inside the small, dark hallway. Somewhere inside, my mind screamed: Don’t go in, don’t go in!
But I had to, so I did.
fifty-three:
– now –
As I run across the field back to Jack, I dodge stones and dips, my breath cold in my lungs. As I run, I cradle the gun. It’s a struggle to hold – I’m afraid of it, but I’m glad of it. I can’t help but hold it and not think of Mungo, my son’s one-time best friend.
I don’t want to think of Mungo, because he was so much part of my family for a while and because it ended so sadly. So I don’t think of him, and instead think of Nick because that’s easier, and because it was due to Nick’s intervention into Jack’s schooling that Mungo even came into Jack’s life in the first place.
Jack’s schooling was always an issue. Over the years, I’d had to call on Nick for some of the bigger issues and he was always there in the background, always willing to helicopter in to help with our son when I needed him. He always paid maintenance – more than he should have really, and never late. He phoned every week and took an interest in Jack’s life.
When it went wrong at yet another school, it was Nick who forgot his socialist beliefs first and arranged for our boy to sit a scholarship exam for a prestigious private school. When he passed, it was Nick who paid for the gap in fees that the scholarship didn’t cover, as well as the uniform, the travel and all the little extras that added up to a lot.
Jack went to that school for two years and complained bitterly about it every day. From the age of twelve until he was fourteen, he was out of the house from 7.00 in the morning until 7.00 at night and when he came home he was angry, truculent and even more uncommunicative than ever.
I didn’t want him to leave, partly because of the possibility of opportunity it gave him, but
mostly because I felt he underestimated the change it would be to join a bigger school mid-year. Nick’s hunch that he was above-average smart had been confirmed when we got his scores from his entrance exam – he was incredibly bright. Unusually so. I expect Nick also felt a secret swell of pride – I know I did. I thought that he’d inherited it from my side of the family – my father was a doctor of literature and there had been rumbles that he’d be made a professor shortly before he died.
It came to a point when I decided that I had to go up to the school and find out what was making my son so miserable. It was either change whatever it was or change his school. He wouldn’t let me – he told me I was only a nurse so not posh enough and I’d embarrass him – but I persisted. When I picked up the phone to make an appointment with the school, he physically attacked me, taking the handset out of my hand and wrapping the cord around my neck. He was out of control, yes, but I detected something else, some deeper shame or fear or desperation, so reluctantly, it was one of the times I got Nick involved.
Nick – to his credit – drove straight down from Gloucestershire and the two of them went off somewhere and although I was nervous, they both came back in a good mood. Jack gave me a bunch of flowers and Nick stood there while Jack apologised. Nick then said that, if it was all right with me, Jack would like to leave his private school and apply to go to the nearest comp that would have him. I was surprised, but I also knew Nick well enough to hear the rivets in his voice, meaning that his request was just a show of decency – the decision had already been made and Nick was really asking if I’d respect that. Jack would be leaving with immediate effect.
Nick took leave from his job, checked into a hotel and stayed for the week it took to get it sorted out. By the time he left, Jack was going out the door in a new uniform.
I never found out what had gone on. Fear of what might’ve happened actually made me ill and so I begged Jack to tell me, but he wouldn’t. Nick wouldn’t tell me either, until I’d threatened to go to the school. He said he’d promised not to, but after a particularly tearful phone call, he relented and said he promised that Jack hadn’t been expelled for the third time, but it was still an urgent situation to get him out. What did that mean? I pressed. Nick said that he had virtually no relationship with his son, so couldn’t I just let them have this? So I never found out what had happened and instead put my mind to supporting Jack in the best way I could.