What I Did

by Kate Bradley

  Holding this gun makes me think of my son but it also makes me think of Mungo, because Mungo and my son were connected by a shotgun. As I run, there’s little to focus on but the past. I can see where I’m heading because of the black swell of the hill against the indigo sky, but the feel of the stock in my hands reminds me of the thin, friendly boy, with his shock of black curls, looking at me from the chair in my son’s room, as he held the stock of his shotgun like a pet.

  After Jack went to the local comp, the only friend he made was Mungo. It was Mungo who introduced him to hunting; it was Mungo who introduced him to ferrets and guns. Mungo used to visit every day, always very grateful for the cups of tea with three sugars I made him. I’d see him with Jack, showing him how to make nooses for snares and showing him articles in his endless hunting magazines.

  When Jack was fifteen he bought a second-hand shotgun; I went bonkers, but he said he’d just joined a shooting club. I don’t know where the club was, how he found out about it or how he got there, but the gun was carried around in a bag on the rare occasions it wasn’t in his hands – oh, how easily Arrow was replaced as the thing to be caressed!

  At first, I hated him having the gun. It was the year after the brutal, high-profile murder of young school children in America; watching the news reports chilled me. When he got it, I remember I lived with a deep, deep sense of panic and unease.

  I try not to think of Mungo; even instead trying to think of the rawness in my wrists. But it’s Mungo who charmed me enough once, wanting to include me in their gun cleaning, and then later, asking me to drive them to where they used to practise. Even my son was a little friendly to me about it – I remember once he even put his arms around me as he tried to help me hold it right. He showed me how to press the stock against my cheek to get a good cheek weld and develop a decent gun mount, as well as aim and fire.

  Sometimes, after a few months of him having it, I would even take them to buy cartridges. I didn’t like it, but by the time he was sixteen, I think we were done fighting.

  I try to ignore the past and instead concentrate on running on the uneven ground in the dark with a loaded shotgun – the last thing I need is an accident.

  Each discordant step feels like it could just bump the gun out of my arms; every memory seems to bump in my head with a new understanding.

  The fog seems to have dropped without me seeing it. Afraid, I stop. Looking up before, I could see the stars, but now I can see nothing above and nothing around me. I can see no edge of the field, it’s only grey.

  I wonder if Mungo died in the fog. At the time – there, I’m thinking about him again now – I thought Mungo had killed himself. That’s what the coroner decided. When he was seventeen, he was found hanging from a tree in the nearby woods. On his phone, there were lots of hits on websites related to suicide in the days preceding his death. Despite his family arguing against it, saying that he’d lost his phone the week before his death, the police thought it was suicide and told the inquest that they’d found his phone in his pocket.

  Fog has its own smell, damp and heavy. It turns and twists, mesmerising like mystic hands, warning me not to go back into the past.

  It’s impenetrable now, and I wonder how it could’ve fallen so swiftly within minutes. Because I’ve been thinking about Mungo, thinking things I’ve kept blocked for years, I realise I’ve just been plunging on towards the cottage, not noticing my vision was fading in the fog. Now I grasp that I have to stop or I could get lost.

  I stop running, turning and looking for something I can fix my bearings on. But as I gaze into the night, I remember something I didn’t think about before. Perhaps I was too stoned on codeine, perhaps I was too busy with life and work, perhaps I just didn’t want to face it, but now, in the crazy way the brain works, I realise what I have missed. Devastated at his death, wanting to support my son, I attended the inquest with Jack.

  Mungo must’ve had very few friends, because there was only one other teenager present – a sallow-skinned girl, thin, with straight blonde hair, she sat just behind Mungo’s parents. I only noticed her, and then barely, when she turned to look at Jack; she mouthed something at him I didn’t catch. But it wasn’t her who really caught my attention, but instead my son, because in response he did something I rarely saw him do – and standing in this damp, fog-smothered field, I remember it now with goosebumps – he smiled back at her.

  And Selena, Mungo’s girlfriend, the following week became Jack’s girlfriend.

  fifty-four:

  – before –

  I didn’t move in my mother’s tiny hall: I stood so still I daren’t even breathe. I was listening. I think I stood there for two minutes before I realised what my behaviour meant: I was acting like she was dead.

  To contradict myself, I called out: ‘Mum? Are you there?’ My voice was too loud in the small space. It was like déjà vu from yesterday evening. What I found then, in my son’s empty flat, was terrible. Now, the silence seemed to foreshadow another something awful to come.

  The door to the living room on my left was open. The door to the bathroom in front of me was ajar. I pushed it open; inside it was empty.

  The door on the right was her bedroom. It was shut. I opened my mouth to speak again but I didn’t like that she hadn’t answered me. The silence in the flat felt . . . oppressive.

  And not like my mum.

  She always had noise somewhere. The radio, the TV, something. I’d find the TV on and say: ‘Are you watching this?’ And she’d glance at the screen and say: ‘No, I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘Can I turn it off then?’

  ‘I like the noise,’ she’d tell me, shaking her head. She was a woman of noise: singing, tapping, talking.

  She is a woman of noise, I told myself.

  But already I believed the past tense.

  Already I knew.

  I put off going into the bedroom; instead I pushed open the half-open door to the living room. It was a long, bright room with a kitchenette, opening up to the lounge with its French doors onto the shared gardens. The room was empty; the doors shut, curtains pulled. I snapped the light on. The radio was off; the TV was off.

  What had happened here? I thought of the expression on Mrs Dale’s face – ‘Anyone could’ve got in’ – before I accepted that the answer was behind door number three.

  And that was the bedroom.

  As I reached for the door handle, I noticed that my hand was shaking violently.

  fifty-five:

  – now –

  Away from the farmhouse, I am lost. Now I turn in the field like a weathervane trying to find my north. The fog hugs the ground, smothering me. I have no stars, no wind, no lights, not even from the farmhouse. My ears strain for the sounds of something – anything like a road that might help me place myself.

  Nothing.

  I want to cry out: to rage. I want to scream. But I can’t.

  How could I lose my way?

  I wish my mother was here.

  I think I even whisper her name in the dark. I think I call to her through the fog.

  She doesn’t answer.

  fifty-six:

  – before –

  ‘Mum? Are you in?’ I was back in my mother’s tiny hall, my steps mouse small and timid to her bedroom door. I leaned in close, knuckles murmuring a knock against the door. My held breath finally exhaled against the wood, warming only my face. In the stillness, only silence whispered back.

  She did not answer.

  I went to try again but the words dried in my mouth.

  I didn’t want to think back, my thoughts bridging time between then and before. But I did, because I thought of the times I used to hide outside my parents’ bedroom, when my father was still alive.

  Despite the years, my thoughts were blurred, but I still knew that when I opened the bedroom door I wouldn’t see my mother with the knife in her hand, the blood on the sheets, my father struggling to sit up – but only for a moment because t
he air went out of him like a punctured balloon, leaving him sinking back down onto the bed. I ran from the room and did what my mother had taught me to do when he was attacking her: Ring nine, nine, nine and tell the operator: I need the police. She’d taught me to give my age: eight. And my address: 3 The Greenfields.

  It felt like the right thing to do.

  When I did it before, they would always come and give him a telling-off and then it was quiet for a while, before it started again.

  It always started again.

  And that’s how I thought it would be that time. I thought that it was bad but that it would go back to normal for a while and then it would start again.

  But it didn’t.

  The police came and they didn’t just give a telling-off, this time there was handcuffs and my mother shouting and being led away and this time my father didn’t shout back. This time he just lay on the bed with his eyes open staring at the ceiling and he was finally, finally quiet.

  I wanted to ring 999 again, because standing outside my mother’s door, it was too quiet. My fingertips reached out and pressed against the cool wood and I tried to brace myself as it opened, because I knew the world was going to stop again.

  And as I peered in, much of my mother’s bedroom looked just as it should.

  The beige carpet and brown curtains that came with the flat had never been replaced. But everything else, all the additions, were my mother’s. Purple silk scarves pinned to the ceiling to create a boudoir. Incense dripping ash into painted, clay receptacles. Artwork loud and brash, created by friends I’ve met before and don’t care to meet again.

  The light was on but the garishness clashes with the silence.

  But I was thinking about the wrong thing. As much as I wanted to think that the room was much the same as it always was, I knew it wasn’t. There was a big difference. Huge. I already knew the room was wrong, so wrong and I was simply delaying the inevitable of accepting that.

  Because I had found her.

  fifty-seven:

  – before –

  My mother was face down on the bed. I could see no sign of a struggle, but I remembered April – ‘I didn’t leave the door open, Lisa – it was already wide open’ – looking frightened in the hall. Did she know something about what happened here? Was my son here before me? Or was it just the fright . . .? Yes, of course, that’s all it was. It would be shocking to anyone, the discovery of their friend dead.

  I stared at my mother’s body; she was fully clothed. She had jeans on, socks, and her favourite ivy-coloured cardigan that belts like a dressing gown. She always called it a housecoat and I knew what she meant – in colder months she would come in, take her real coat off, and put the long, thick cardigan straight on. I don’t think I’ve seen her wear anything else in the evening. She was never a wearer of ballgowns but if she were, then I think she would’ve just popped that over the top. It looked dreadful: tired and worn, a hole laddering one elbow, a dropped hem and a missing pocket all meant that it begged to be binned.

  It was not fit to be seen by anyone except her very nearest and dearest.

  My brain was sluggish with shock; it ruminated on this essential fact like it was important. It was that the housecoat screamed out to me, its tired, synthetic voice rising shrill above the silence of my mother’s bedroom.

  It was its very ugliness that made it so important. My mother was not a vain woman, but she had her standards. She wouldn’t wear make-up, but she would always brush her hair if she knew someone she didn’t know was coming to the flat. And she most certainly, definitely wouldn’t wear her cardigan in front of even a delivery driver.

  And yet she was wearing it now.

  Whoever she let in, she knew well enough not to take her cardigan off for. Someone who had already been buzzed in from the front door.

  I know it was him. I know it was her grandson. After I took Jack, he must’ve either come here first or gone straight to Sunningdale before coming here. She let him in and then . . .

  Did I really believe that? My son, the arsonist murderer?

  – The door was open wide –

  I reached out, and with a butterfly touch my fingertips landed on her skin above her sock, below her rucked-up trousers. I had to know and the warmth of her body instantly told me what I didn’t want to understand – she was alive very, very recently. I didn’t need a pathologist’s graph of heat loss from a body – I’ve worked around more dead bodies than most after a career in elderly nursing, and certainly enough to know that my mother was alive within the last hour or so.

  Despite – or perhaps because of this discovery – my thoughts wound back over the years. Standing there, I was surprised that of all the people I should think of in that moment, I thought of Issy. I thought of her in the café, clutching at my hand which I tried to withdraw but failed, because her grip was like my manners – too strong. I thought of her trying to be a good friend, trying to get me to leave Nick: ‘We’ve seen the bruises.’

  I thought about how it would’ve been if I had left Nick then, just like Issy wanted. Was that the moment I should’ve acted – the defining moment that was the trail of breadcrumbs in the forest and the only path out of the nightmare? When I finally left the busy café, was I rejecting the only route to safety, the one that meant that my mother would not be dead now? Or if I’d found a way to keep Nick in my life, would our son be a very different man? Or was it, that no matter what I did, all paths in this nightmare would’ve led to the same terrible conclusion – that he’d still have grown into what he’d become: the man who killed my mother.

  And did I truly believe he had done this? I looked around the undisturbed room. The only motive in killing her was, what, to inflict pain on me?

  ‘We’ve seen the bruises.’

  Although I hated that he named his son after himself, when it was clear in the immediate weeks after he was born that Jack’s mother, Selena, was going to be a truly dreadful mum, their sharing the same name made it easier for me to move in and take over. It felt natural to hold the little baby in my arms and call him Jack – they even looked the same. It was like I had gone back in time. I felt that I could push the pram onto North Road in Brighton, straight to our favourite café, and find the rest of the NCT gang. That I only had to walk the same route, push the door open and I would find them there, fleshed-out ghosts of my past, drinking coffee, and they would raise their hands in greeting: ‘Lisa, over here!’

  Of course, they were long gone. Their own kids would now all be in their mid-twenties, grown up and elsewhere, birds on the wing.

  But it felt glorious to hold baby Jack to my face and breathe in his newborn smell and remember what had been before. I loved the idea that it felt possible to go back. He became a door which made me feel I could just open and return to where I had been before it all went wrong. For it to feel possible felt just so freeing, so empowering, it became intoxicating. I even thought I might get another dog. I wouldn’t have called him Winston, that would’ve been so . . . gauche, but I liked the idea that I could do.

  When Selena died suddenly, it felt tragic for Jack – but like I was now Jack’s proper mum.

  I reach out and touch my mother’s foot; my finger grazing her heel.

  Of course, my mother never liked the bond I had with Jack. She said I was living in a bygone fantasy. She said only ghosts, ghouls and fools lived in the past. She said that survivors looked to the future and that was where I should set my sights.

  But I couldn’t. My son was just as awful as a father, and Jack was simply just so good! He was so different to his father at that age, endlessly smiling and sleeping like he was on a timetable. I couldn’t take her advice to butt out: ‘Mind your own, Lisa. You’ve got a new role now. Find it, embrace it. In it, you will find all that you need.’

  My mother was often full of shite too.

  ‘Sorry,’ I whispered, still only looking at her foot. I smoothed the bedspread from around her. ‘I wish . . .’ I
said, my voice a whisper in the silence, I wish I had smiled at you more. I wish I had taken you to lunch sometimes. I wish we had watched comedy films together – even just one.

  I’m sorry I called the police.

  I am so sorry about that.

  I’m sorry she had to spend so long in prison for me.

  I’m sorry I killed my father and I’m sorry I didn’t speak up for her. I was only eight and I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought he was going to kill her that night, but he didn’t. Instead he fell into a drunken stupor, but I was frightened about what he would do when he woke up. I’d heard his threats. I wanted to save my mummy.

  ‘Mummy,’ I say softly, my hand still on her foot. What a terrible daughter I’ve been. Trying to save her – but in the end, not saving her at all.

  And now I have to be sorry about this. I’m sorry she let in my son and I’m sorry I made such a bad job of him, that he wanted to do this because of me.

  She always defended him. ‘He’s not that bad,’ she would tell me when I raged about him and then ignore what I had to say. ‘He’s just a bit troubled; he’ll grow out of it.’ Even when he got Selena pregnant when he was only eighteen, she was the first to stick up for him: ‘The baby will be a blessing, you wait.’

  When I complained that he’d called Jack after himself, my mum laughed and told me that if he was self-indulgent then he only got it from me. And when I refused to listen, she put her hand up and said: ‘I liked the name Jack when you picked it for your son and I like it now he’s picked it for his. Besides, I’m now so senile –’ she said, when she was nothing of the sort – ‘that I wish everyone was called Jack’.