What I Did

by Kate Bradley

  But I did love him. I did still love my son so very much.

  More than perhaps I realised at the time. At the time I worried about the wrong things: the mess; the noise; the lack of control.

  But it all changed. The wind picks up and it’s cold against my cheeks. I realise that I’m crying.

  Perhaps that’s why I hold his son so close. Perhaps that’s why I breathe in his skin as he sleeps. Perhaps that’s why I graze my nose across his cheeks. Because I think of his daddy when he was young. Because I wish I had done that with him. Because none of us can truly go back and change the things we got wrong, but when baby Jack was born, so like his father before him, and when Selena died leaving my son needing me for the first time since he was a child, himself now bewildered and overwhelmed with the responsibility of being a lone parent, it was perfect for all of us for me to step in and take over the main parenting role. After all, some mothers are the same age as me when they have their babies. As I pushed his pram, everyone just assumed I was his biological mum and – somehow, between the wanting and the needing, it became an almost truth.

  And he needs a mother: I am his mother now because Selena is gone. I think of her as I stare at the cottage that contains her partner, my son, and her child – now my child.

  I forget how it was that she came round one day, when Jack was at work. He’d got a job doing something he wouldn’t discuss, but was making good money. Perhaps she was lonely – perhaps she knew I knew how it felt but after that initial time, she’d started to come round every day. I was happy to encourage her; it gave me access to beautiful Jack. I’d put a chair in the garden for her and I would hold Jack while she smoked. She smoked a lot. She’d watch me through the kitchen window. I always thought she cut a lonely figure, sitting there, watching me from the outside, looking in. I tried talking to her, but unlike Mungo, she was reluctant to engage in conversation. She didn’t want to talk about anything, she just wanted to watch me look after the baby and smoke, silently, the cigarette always so twitchy in her hand.

  The closest we came to having a meaningful discussion was once when she was watching me feed him baby food. I’d been making new recipes – not in the ‘I need to be perfect’ way that I had done for my son, but more relaxed, enjoying using butternut squash and other veg I didn’t have easy access to when my Jack was a baby. I marvelled at how easy it was, uncertain as to why I had found it so stressful the first time round. It wasn’t as if I didn’t have a baby to look after – Selena came round at nine in the morning and stayed until five. But as I made the food and then spooned it into his beautiful mouth, it was good for me to laugh at my previous self, to see me as I was and how out of proportion I’d got things.

  The person it may not have been good for, was Selena. She graduated from sitting in my garden, to sleeping on my couch during the day. She was the silent, ever-present shadow in the house, a ghost – there, but not really there. I thought it was because she was up during the night breastfeeding, but she became sleepier the older Jack got. She got thinner in front of me and slipped further away from the living, day after day.

  Perhaps it was drug abuse. Perhaps . . . something else.

  As I stand looking at the cottage, carrying a gun that might make her son an orphan tonight, I realise there’s sinning not just by action, but also by omission. I might not have really known much about her, but I could sense that Selena was unhappy and I didn’t do anything about it. I had lived with my son and I knew – better than anyone – what he was like and I didn’t check in with her. I had the power, perhaps, to change her situation and I did nothing. We didn’t talk but that wasn’t all it was, it was also that I didn’t want to risk her not bringing Jack to see me anymore. And now she was dead.

  The coroner ruled that she’d overdosed after injecting oxycodone after a long history of heroin abuse. I think of the long sleeves she used to always wear, even when it was warm. The coroner noted she’d switched to oxycodone, but there were no details available as to why. At the time, I wondered if she’d lost her usual supply, and desperate, stolen them from my own internet-ordered hoard.

  I think of Mungo in the woods. I think of Winston. Images of so many awful things flash through my mind. I feel a huge, overwhelming sense of sorrow infect me. With it is an understanding more terrible. Something I had stubbornly ignored.

  But now I think of it, I can no longer ignore it: they both died of drugs which I keep myself. This can’t be a coincidence.

  The hardest thing I have ever had to do, is to accept my son for what he is.

  I have an aching in my chest that means I accept him now. I recognise what I think he might’ve done. But the trouble with accepting his past, also means recognising what he is still capable of.

  I look at the cottage and know I am about to go inside. I know, in there, the only thing that stands against Jack’s safety is my own son.

  My finger finds the trigger.

  sixty-two:

  – now –

  I know I’ve only got to cross the lawn and that will be the end of the journey. As soon as I break cover of the rhododendrons, I’ll be at risk of being seen.

  He will be waiting for me. He has set the trap.

  I bathed him as he sat in the kitchen sink. I loved him then and I love him now. I suspect I might falter.

  I remind myself that, in the middle of us, there’s a child who needs me to be brave. My finger caresses the trigger like a lover’s touch, as I think of Jack’s light freckles on the same too-cute nose his dad had when he was the same age. I think of his dad at that age. I shut my eyes briefly, head swimming with head injury and Ativan and Valium, remembering, reimagining.

  He grabs my sleeve in the park as he wants to go on a swing, his lovely face turned up to me like a sunflower to the sun, and says: ‘Mummy?’ The colour, the grass smells and the pull of his hand, makes it feel like I’m there again. But this is different – the same but different. It occurs to me suddenly: ‘Jack, can I ask you a question?’

  He raises a quizzical eyebrow and gives a little shrug.

  ‘What should I do, Jack, to save your son from you?’

  His smooth forehead creases and he tilts his head like a quizzical dog. ‘I don’t understand what you mean, Mummy?’

  I don’t understand it either: but it feels right. I try again: ‘If Daddy was chasing us, say he was super cross with us, what would you want me to do?’

  ‘Get away, of course.’

  ‘But say that we couldn’t. Say I had to choose between you, a little kid or Daddy, who I also love? I’m stuck because I love you both. It feels like I have to choose between you. I don’t want to – I love you both.’

  Jack wrinkles his nose. ‘You need to do your best.’

  ‘But what if that means a fight?’

  He shrugs. ‘Just do your best, Mummy. That’s what you always tell me. Your best is your best and no one can ask for more,’ and he runs for the swings.

  I open my eyes. To be back, standing in this dark garden, outside the cottage that is twenty years after the park I used to take my son to, is just too strange. I was there – I swear it. It was daylight and now it’s night again. I blink, swaying in the cold wind. It might be my head injury, but even as I try to tell myself it is, I know that it’s not the first time that I’ve had these . . . space-outs.

  Not for the first time, I promise myself that I will give up the painkillers. I have to get a grip on it, I vow. After this, I tell myself, I will be clean again.

  Before I change my mind, I start to run.

  It takes seconds to cross the lawn. The door is half-glazed and as I draw nearer, the opaque glass shows there’s a figure standing behind the door. It’s tall, broad: it’s him. He might see me.

  He’s been waiting. I must not falter.

  My heart is whamming in my chest. I’m going to throw up.

  Before I can reach it, the door is starting to open. The light is spilling out. I blink, the light is so bright. I raise t
he gun up. I’m not yet holding it right; I’m panicking. I need to bring it up and press it into my shoulder – I remember Mungo helping me do this – but my hands are suddenly shaking so much. The gun is against my open burns and they are screaming, screaming; the pain is overwhelming.

  My breathing is short and shallow. I can’t kill him. I just won’t – no matter what. I know it – I’ve always known it, it’s just been crazy bravado – instead he will kill me. I don’t mind dying but what about Jack?

  There’s no answer to this, I understand. What happens is out of my hands. I still run towards the door, but the gun is already sagging in my grip. I don’t want it. With an overwhelming sense of relief, I place it on the ground.

  I will do what I’ve always done, I will do my best, but I won’t hurt my son. Because I can’t.

  The door is opening more and it’s just as it was with Erica; I can’t see him properly because it’s so bright in the kitchen and he’s a silhouette. My eyes hurt as they strain against the sudden light.

  Then I manage to focus. I blink, once, twice.

  The man is standing in the back doorway with a look of disgust on his face.

  But it’s not his face. It’s not my son.

  I’ve got this wrong – all wrong.

  Staggering back, I think:

  It’s.

  Not.

  Jack.

  sixty-three:

  – before –

  I know why my son, aged only five, killed our beloved dog Winston. Why he hit him with the broom and snapped his back. It’s because of what he heard his father say the day before.

  By this time, any hopes that starting school would help improve Jack’s behaviour were already sunk. He was currently suspended and I was dearly hoping that, as the letter confirming his expulsion hadn’t yet arrived, the school might relent and he’d be allowed back for one final chance.

  I dearly hoped, but I didn’t believe it. Cutting an earlobe off another child because you want ‘to know if it would snip easily’, was not the action of a treasured student.

  I’d not worked during his suspension, but the day before Winston died, I had. The agency called and they were desperate and promised to pay double time, so I’d agreed and Irene had kindly offered to have Jack for the day.

  I’d just got in from work. I’d said hello to Jack, offered him a snack and come into the kitchen to cut up an apple for him, when Nick uncharacteristically put a cup of tea in front of me. When he spoke, his voice was strange – a harsh whisper. ‘Lisa, listen to me. We’ve got to talk. We’ve said this before, but I’m saying it properly, properly now, and I want you to understand what I’m about to say. I want you to hear me.’

  ‘Honey, what?’

  ‘There’s something badly wrong with Jack.’

  I thought about the teacher telling me that they had to command Jack to give back the snipped earlobe. ‘Wrong with him? I think we know that already—’

  ‘No.’ He glanced at the door, his voice a low, urgent husk: ‘I mean, I’m now frightened.’

  My knife paused mid-air. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s not normal the way he attacks everyone all the time. We always said he’d grow out of it; we just thought he was a late developer. We’ve always made excuses to each other, but we have to face up that he’s no tantrumming toddler now. ’

  ‘I’m hardly going to argue with that, am I? But we always said that—’

  ‘I know what we always said. But he’s not growing out of it. Nothing we have done has ever worked. So, I don’t think we should just talk anymore, I think we need to do. We need to face that he’s not getting better, but getting worse. Much worse.’ He passed a hand over his face. ‘Mum’s had enough. She refuses to look after him on her own anymore.’

  I couldn’t breathe. This felt different. When I cried about Jack, Nick always tried to cheer me up. When Nick raged about Jack’s behaviour, I always tried to calm him down. Between us, to try and cope, we each interchangeably played different roles of anger and sadness and optimism and even humour.

  But neither of us had ever admitted to being frightened.

  Fear meant lack of safety and lack of safety meant . . . a whole new level.

  And what Nick didn’t know was that today I couldn’t counter his argument. Today I had to agree.

  I felt cheated because I really wanted Nick to reassure me today, tell me that everything was going to work out fine, because every time I went to our hall to see if the letter had been delivered, my own nerves became increasingly torn.

  I couldn’t believe it was happening again. I’d had to move Jack from nursery to nursery, but as the paying customer, change always felt like an option. School was different. If he failed in his first few weeks, what did that suggest about the likelihood of success for his next school? And what if he failed the next school after that?

  My fear started to get ahead of me and I’d stared at the empty doormat as I’d let myself in from work and had a nightmare image of being forced to homeschool him. If his lovely school wanted to kick him out in his first year and his own grandmother, Irene, didn’t want to look after him, what did that suggest about the future? I could see a reality where I’d have to give up work and all that meant. (No more drugs pilfering! No more independence money!) Worse, the thought of trying to homeschool Jack all day and then look after him in the evenings made me feel fraught.

  I looked forward to Mondays like some people longed for the weekend.

  How had these two things happened on the same day?

  Because he’s getting worse. The line on the trajectory was still going down: sharply. Where would it stop?

  I suddenly felt Nick’s terror: I’d been fooling myself that this was under control. We looked at each other. He’s going to keep getting worse until . . .

  When?

  ‘He’s going to kill someone one day,’ Nick said, answering my unspoken question.

  For a moment I didn’t say anything. But I dismissed it as soon as I found my voice: ‘Now you’re just being dramatic.’ Repelled at the spoken fear, I turned back to the counter. I picked up the knife and started chopping. I didn’t want to think about that. I didn’t want to think this was going to go on for years. I didn’t want to think where this could end. How would I cope?

  I still had my back to Nick, the tea next to me on the counter untouched. I could tell from his voice, and the scrape of the chair, that he’d sat down at the table. He was here to stay.

  I carried on chopping again, but slowly. I’d nearly run out of apple. I tried to think. Finally, I asked: ‘What did he do to Irene?’

  ‘He bit her.’

  ‘That’s bad,’ I said, actually shuddering with relief that it wasn’t worse.

  ‘Lisa, stop chopping that bloody apple into a pulp and turn around.’

  The apple was mush now. I put the knife down and pressed my hands flat against the worktop. I couldn’t do this, I wasn’t ready. A bit of me even wanted Jack to come in so that I didn’t have to have this conversation.

  There was a gasping sound, and then Nick said something in a voice so unlike his, my bladder twitched. When I turned round, I saw he was crying.

  I held on to the countertop, so unsure, so shocked. I wanted to do the right thing and comfort him but it was so strange – so alien – to see this big, strong man cry, that I stood motionless, so unsure. Just how bad was the attack on his mother?

  ‘She had to go to hospital, Lese. Didn’t you wonder why I was home from work with him?’

  In truth, I hadn’t. All I could think about when I came home from work was checking the doormat for the letter, and after I saw it was empty, could only think about checking the space by the toaster where we put the picked-up letters, and when I saw that was also empty, I finally relaxed a fraction, took 2 mg of diazepam, and then said hello to my son and made him a snack. There was no space in my head for anything else other than the letter, Valium and Jack.

  ‘What did he do?’
Defeated, I sank to the chair opposite him.

  ‘He bit her on the cheek.’

  ‘He bit her . . . on the cheek?’

  Nick’s jaw tightened. ‘Yes, Lisa. Wake up, will you? You’re always in such a fog. He bit her so badly on the cheek that she had to have stitches. It’s going to leave a scar. She’s a mess. She loves him but she doesn’t want to look after him on her own, anymore. The hospital were giving me right funny looks and I had to get him out of there really quick in case they got a social worker involved or something. I kept telling them he hadn’t done it before, I even –’ he put his face in his hands and his shoulders shook – ‘I even lied and told one of the doctors that my mum is too sharp with him and that it must’ve been her fault.’ His shoulders shook, then he looked up, eyes wide with panic. ‘She doesn’t know that! Don’t tell her!’

  ‘No, Nick, I won’t tell her.’ I didn’t know what else to say. I was so struck by how sad Nick was – was he always sad?

  I think it had been a long time since we’d talked about anything meaningful. I realised that recently we hadn’t even tried to cheer each other up – it’d started to feel too false to try. Instead I took my feelings to my therapist and to the sympathetic ears of codeine and Valium. I definitely couldn’t remember thinking about Nick’s feelings in any substantial way. Jack took everything meaningful from both of us.

  Nick reached out across the table, palms open. It’d been so long, it took me a moment to realise he wanted to hold my hands.

  He pulled them towards him and cried over them. Eventually, he let go and sat up. He dragged his sleeve across his eyes. ‘What are we going to do, Lisa?’

  ‘Do?’

  He flushed red. ‘Of course! He’s out of control!’

  I shook my head a little – only a little, more from confusion than denial. I didn’t understand the question: What was there to do? We’d both tried the doctors and got nowhere. Nick didn’t know I had tried private counselling for Jack so couldn’t even share the disappointment that it hadn’t worked. After months with my own therapist, I hadn’t managed more than agreeing to pack a go-bag in case I needed to leave. But even that was challenged now, because how could I leave him with Nick? Nick had a job and any fantasy that Irene would just slip in and fill my empty place was now dead.