Mother and Child

by Annie Murray

  Ian shrugs sadly. ‘Yeah – me too.’

  Twenty-Two

  The next morning, at nine-thirty, I tap on Dorrie’s door. It’s actually locked for once and I let myself in with the key, calling ‘Hello!’ as I close it behind me.

  There’s no answer. No one in the front room. I stand for a few seconds in the doorway, staring stupidly at Dorrie’s empty chair, her blanket folded neatly on it, the unlit gas fire. And then I go cold.

  ‘Dorrie?’ I tear up the stairs, my heart pumping horribly hard. Don’t let anything have happened, no, please, no . . .

  As I rush into her bedroom I hear a little sound – Dorrie stirring in bed.

  ‘Is that you, Jo?’

  ‘Yes. It’s only me.’ Thank God, thank God . . . ‘You all right? It’s not like you to have a lie-in, Dorrie.’

  ‘Why? What time . . . ?’ Dorrie pushes herself up on one elbow to look at the clock and gives a chuckle. ‘Oh, my word – it’s getting on for ten o’clock! Well, fancy – what a lazy old thing I am these days.’ She lies back, her olive skin and white curls exotic against the pillow. But she seems quite chirpy.

  ‘I didn’t sleep well early on – and I got up to spend a penny some time – I don’t know, about four, I think. And then I fell asleep – and d’you know, I’ve had the best sleep. I feel like champagne.’

  ‘Well, I could nip down to Sainsbury’s for a bottle if you like.’ I grin at her, bubbly with relief myself.

  ‘You know what I mean. But I must get up, idle old sod.’

  ‘No, you stay there. This is your big chance for breakfast in bed – not that you couldn’t have it every day if you wanted.’

  Despite Dorrie’s protests, she sits tight, seeming to enjoy the treat. I bring up her usual Weetabix and a slice of toast and fill the brown crock teapot. I still feel light, celebratory with relief. Last night I lay for a while, thinking about Dorrie, wrenching my mind away from its usual loop: Paul, the night of the accident, Lee Parry’s pale, blank face. I found myself wondering about Ian’s mom and dad, about what had happened. But it feels impossibly difficult just to ask her. I think of those ink lines scored deeply into that cheap little sheet of paper.

  The heating is on and her room’s cosy, with a faint smell of the hand lotion Dorrie uses – something fruity. There’s a kind of sensual pleasure in looking after someone else and I arrange Dorrie’s pillows as she sits up, then put her mauve cardi round her shoulders and swing over her little table round with the tray on it.

  ‘Well,’ Dorrie says, seeming amused by all this. ‘You going to sit with me?’

  ‘Yes. Someone’s got to help you get through this enormous pot of tea.’ I move Dorrie’s clothes carefully from the wicker chair and sit down.

  Dorrie nods. ‘Nice to have you here, bab.’

  She eats her Weetabix surprisingly briskly and starts on the toast. We chat idly, and soon she indicates that she has finished with the tray.

  ‘Thanks, bab. I’ll have another cup of tea if there is one.’

  ‘Oh, there is!’

  Settling back in the chair after tea duties, I look up to find Dorrie watching me beadily.

  ‘Dorrie?’ I hold my mug close to me, two-handed. ‘I read everything in your envelope. It’s taken me a while, I know, but . . .’

  Dorrie nods. ‘No rush.’

  There is a silence.

  ‘I don’t quite understand –’ I feel my blood speed up, not sure if I am about to say all the wrong things – ‘why you showed it to me and not Ian.’

  Dorrie draws her legs up and hugs them with her arms. It’s a youthful kind of movement, making her seem almost like a girl. She sighs.

  ‘I don’t know either really. It’s the shame, you see. Well, it was then.’ She shakes her head. ‘Though what in God’s name any of us had to be ashamed of. But a boy – his father . . .’ She seems to stall for a moment, then sits up, bracing herself. ‘I do want you to know.’ She starts to talk, still clutching her legs, staring ahead of her.

  ‘After we were married, as I told you, Tom and I moved over to Dudley – near there anyway. He wanted to get away from Old Man Stefani – his dad, Luigi I mean, more than old Giuseppe. He and his dad never saw eye to eye – on at each other all the time. I don’t know what it is with men, fathers, sons – they can be like flaming stags, banging their what-d’you-call-’ems together. Anyway, the pay was better there – he hadn’t much experience but they took him on and he soon learned. It was a rolling mills. It’s heavy work – you need to be strong and tough. And Tom was that. There was lots of Indian lads working there then – hard workers all of ’em.

  ‘He’d been there, oh, best part of three years. What they did there, see, they take these big billets of steel and they heat them, red hot, and they go on to rollers, on sort of tracks, like, to be made into other shapes – longer or thinner or rolled flat, whatever’s wanted. It’s hot, filthy work – Tom used to have a thirst on him when he came home. “Get me a bucket of water – I want to drink the well dry!” he used to say.’ Her lips smile, but the smile doesn’t get as far as her eyes.

  ‘He didn’t mind it there but he used to say he was a right fool to leave the Italian quarter. “I could be selling gelato or chips, like Ma and Pa, not breaking my back in there,” he’d say. But he knew he wasn’t going back. “This’ll do us for a while, Dor – we’ll save up a bit and get ourselves a nice little place, a little business of our own.” He worked with some nice fellers though, good blokes. He made friends easily, my Tom. And weekends we’d go out somewhere, take Ian to the countryside, breathe some better air. It’s bad in the Black Country – always has been.’

  She pauses. I stop breathing for a few moments, flex my spine, remind myself to take another lungful of air.

  ‘Anyway, this one Monday he went in. Course, I didn’t know anything had happened until after. His mate had to come round and tell me. Bill Riley, his name was. He was more of a pub pal, sort of thing.’ She stops for a second, as if bracing herself. ‘When I saw him on the doorstep . . . I only had to look at his face and it was, “What’s happened? It’s Tom, isn’t it? Is he dead?” He looked that bad. “No, Dorrie,” he says, “no, he’s not, but there’s been an accident. A bad one. They’ve taken him over to the infirmary on Dudley Road.”

  ‘They’d been working over the weekend, some of them, and I heard later they’d had trouble – it was the nine-inch mill, they said, and the metal was twisting as it came off – wrong like. It shouldn’t have done that. On the Monday they started up and Tom was standing close to it, adjusting summat. The billet that was passing through veered off, came off the track – red hot, of course. It just came up at him and kept coming. It caught my Tom right in the belly, took him up in the air –’ She motions upwards, then winces at the pain in her shoulder. ‘It drove him right across the factory before he dropped to the floor. Bill said a whole group of the Indian lads ran over and picked him up and someone called an ambulance.’ She stares ahead of her. ‘They was all ordered back to work, but they refused – the lot of them. Production stopped. They were all too upset at what had happened – that no one had seen to it that the machine was fixed properly.’

  I sit completely still, listening.

  ‘Thing was, Tom was badly injured – very badly. You should’ve seen him.’ She stops. She’s all hunched up now, arms folded close to her, behind her bent knees, as if the memories have chilled her blood. ‘But he did sort of recover over the next few weeks. They sent him home. But he was never my Tom again, not really. Course he’d hit his head when he fell, but when he tried to talk about it . . . I kept hoping it’d all just sort itself out, but thinking back, it’s clear it did summat to his mind. He’d banged his head hard, of course. But there was summat else. It was the force of it. He tried to say to me what it was – like being taken over by summat too big to reckon with, like an electric shock. If you ever get a little electric shock . . .’ She looks at me for a second. ‘You think, how would a really big shock
be? And this was like that – that’s what I think. This great big inhuman thing, coming at you and the force of it, it plays on your mind. It did summat to him, like a sort of torment he was in but he could never really explain it.

  ‘It was summer when it happened, just before the factories went on holiday. I was expecting Cynthia and Ian was little. Tom came home from hospital at the end of September. I thought he’d get better like, you know – it was early days. He was home for about five weeks . . .’

  She stops talking for so long that I think she must have said all she wants to say. She shakes her head gently a couple of times.

  ‘I was worried he’d have to be buried in unconsecrated ground,’ she says. For a moment her voice seems to have lost all strength, is barely a whisper. ‘That was how it was back then. But Tom was Catholic and the priest said they wouldn’t deny him a funeral . . . We went back over to the parish near his family in Birmingham . . . So his grave is in Lodge Hill Cemetery. But in them days it was . . . I never wanted to tell Ian, you see. There was what other people would think. And it felt as if it was all wrong, as if I was wrong, as if I hadn’t looked after him right . . .’

  I’m only just beginning to take in what she’s telling me. What does this mean? Was it a heart attack that finally killed Tom Stefani – or what?

  Dorrie stares down at her knees, speaking so softly that I have to lean close to hear her.

  ‘He wasn’t right – not right at all. Terrible nightmares he had and he did go back to work after a couple of weeks. But he was like a shell, sort of thing. I kept telling myself it would be all right but he was a stranger to me really, the things he said to me. And then he . . . I . . .’

  I wait, hardly breathing. Almost, I don’t want Dorrie to say it.

  ‘I found him. I’d been out, taking Ian to play with another little lad. When I came into the house there was a feeling. I don’t know – just how quiet it was . . . He was upstairs. There was blood everywhere. He’d never have done it – not done that to me – if his mind hadn’t been affected. Not my Tom.’ She keeps shaking her head. ‘That wasn’t him. Not the husband I knew. My Tom had gone and someone else had taken his place. It was his shaving razor – he’d stropped it sharp and cut his throat, you see. And I couldn’t . . .’ She gulps in a breath. ‘Over the years, I mean – how could I tell Ian and Cynthia that?’

  I find myself shaking. As I pull myself to my feet, my already stiff legs will hardly hold me. But I go to Dorrie, sit on the bed and wrap my arms round her. Dorrie is shaking as well. We sit for a long time, me holding on to her, and neither of us speaks.

  Twenty-Three

  ‘Jo?’

  ‘Oh, hi, Hayley!’ I’ve got the phone tucked into my neck. ‘I’m just getting my trainers on. Are you all right?’

  ‘No – well, yes, I’m OK.’ Hayley’s lispy voice sounds even more childlike over the phone. It warms me that she’s called me, that Hayley will run and spend time with people old enough to be her mother – or older. ‘I’ve gone and sprained my ankle. Had to go to hospital after work in the end. It’s not broken, but it’s quite a bad sprain. I’m so-o-o fed up with myself.’

  ‘Oh, you poor thing – how did you do it?’

  ‘I just sort of – I fell down a step in the pub. Went right over on it. I thought it was all right to begin with but then it really hurt – and then it was agony. I’m not in plaster, but it’s all strapped up so I’ll be out of action for a while. I’m so frustrated!’

  ‘Well, you’ve got a head start on the rest of us, that’s for sure – but we’ll be sorry not to see you.’

  ‘I’ll get to Sheila’s on Thursday,’ Hayley says. ‘Have a good run, won’t you? No slacking,’ she teases.

  ‘No, all right – no slacking!’

  The air holds a touch of spring now March has arrived. Daffodils jiggle in the breeze in front gardens and the park is full of birdsong and sunlight.

  ‘I have news,’ Sunita says, as soon as the three of us get there. She’s looking mighty pleased with herself. With a little twirl, hands on her tummy, she says, ‘I have lost four kilos in weight.’

  ‘That’s fantastic!’ I say. ‘That’s loads, Sunita!’

  Sunita is looking trimmer, more alert somehow.

  ‘What’s that in real money?’ Pat says.

  ‘About eight or nine pounds,’ I suggest.

  ‘Wow.’ Pat runs her gaze admiringly over Sunita’s slightly less portly figure. ‘I just can’t stop eating. I get to ten at night and I want a cheese sandwich! Where’s Hayley got to?’

  I explain.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Pat says as we wander across to our starting point, she between me and Sunita. ‘Well, she’ll soon catch up, bless her. Shall we go?’

  As we settle into a gentle jog, I say, ‘Where does she work, anyway?’

  ‘Not sure,’ Pat says. ‘Some pub in town, I think.’

  ‘She’s a nice girl, a good girl,’ Sunita says. ‘Very caring. Looking after her grandmother.’

  ‘Yes, she’s unusual,’ Pat agrees.

  We string out into single file for a moment to let a dog walker pass. The dog, an elderly boxer, stares as if mesmerized at our legs.

  ‘Fred wants a dog,’ Pat says, when we are all in a row again. ‘I keep wondering whether to give in.’

  ‘Have you told him you’re running yet?’ I ask.

  ‘No.’ Pat’s quiet for a moment.

  ‘What is his problem?’ Sunita says bluntly.

  ‘Fred? Oh –’ Pat sounds weary – ‘I don’t know really. He finds any sort of change difficult – anything he doesn’t understand. I sometimes think I’d have done a lot more things with my life if . . .’ She stops herself. ‘Don’t get me wrong, he’s a good man, Fred is. Heart of gold and I love him to bits. But things have to be within what Fred can sort of cope with.’

  ‘Is that why you work as a childminder?’ I ask her.

  ‘Partly. It fitted in with my own kids, of course. But, I don’t know . . .’ She sounds wistful. ‘I never really questioned it. We’ve had a nice life and Fred always brought in enough money. But I wish I’d branched out a bit more.’

  We are silent for a few yards, all feeling the increasing pull on our lungs. I enjoy the tingle of the winter sun on my face and the fresh, cool air. My body is getting used to this, gradually, but getting warmed up for each run is always hard work. Slowly I’m feeling stronger, hungrier – and even despite having to get over the guilt of eating, of living and nourishing myself, I’m beginning to feel much better for it.

  ‘I told Ian,’ I say eventually. Ian didn’t take much notice. It’s just something I do when he’s out of the house so he doesn’t see it as affecting him. ‘I just said I was going for little runs with some friends. I didn’t tell him what for.’ Just another thing I don’t seem to be telling him. How can I pass on to him what Dorrie has told me? How would it help him to know?

  The image of the boy in the magazine passes through my mind again, that sad, closed expression. I see Paul’s face and then, of course, Lee Parry in the dock – the usual loop of thought that I can never seem to get away from for long.

  ‘What about your husband, Sunita?’ Pat says.

  ‘Oh, he’s all right,’ she says. ‘He thinks it’s good for my health – he was teasing me about getting fat. He’s quite easygoing really. And he’s sponsored me!’ She takes a few more breaths and then starts humming for a moment. ‘What about these songs then? Our Hollywood-Bollywood songs?’

  Once again, she sings a few scraps of a tune, as her breathing will allow, and falls into one or two little dance moves. The tune is so catchy that we can’t help joining in to the rhythm, though we can’t make head nor tail of the words.

  ‘What’s that, Sunita?’ I ask her.

  ‘It’s from a film,’ she pants.

  ‘There’s this one tune I can’t get out of my head when I’m running,’ Pat says. ‘It’s quite annoying . . .’ She la-la’s a few bars of the tune.

  �
�Oh, “Candy Girl”,’ I laugh. ‘That’s a blast from the past!’

  We are running on the path between the trees at the far side of the park and there’s a pause in the conversation while a whole clutch of fluffy dogs, of varying sizes, goes charging past.

  ‘Come on, ladies,’ Sunita says afterwards. ‘If we can run, we can sing. Very good words, that song. It is all about having troubles and if you walk with someone else, your troubles are halved, before they are double-double.’

  ‘Oh, I heard you say double-double – I just thought I got it wrong!’ Pat laughs.

  ‘Double-double,’ I say. ‘Well, at least we can manage that bit.’

  Sunita starts humming again. For a moment she whirls on the path, dancing on her short, plump legs.

  It’s strange how Lee Parry has become a part of my life even though I’ve only set eyes on him once. Like today, during our run, I find myself thinking of him.

  Before we went to court, I had built him up in my mind. All I knew to begin with was that he was still in his teens and at the time of the accident had been driving a stolen BMW. My mind was full of images of the flash, swaggering, shameless monster who had killed our son.

  Lee Parry in the flesh came as a shock. He was eighteen, it was true, but looked younger. He had obviously dressed up to come to court, in a black suit and a shiny pale-blue tie. He kept pushing a finger into his shirt collar, tugging as if it was too tight, whereas the suit looked too big on him. His mousey hair was cropped convict short even before any sentence was passed and he had fishy-white, terribly pimply skin. He sagged in the dock as if he had never developed muscles in his limbs.

  On the night of 26 October, when he had stolen the car, drunk God knows what and was driving at almost eighty miles an hour up the Moseley Road, the police were already on his tail. He didn’t even seem to be very good at stealing. If he had been anyone else I might have been wrung with sorrow for him, the pitiful little runt. He cried, standing there in the dock, snivelled like a lost child. You can cry now, can you? I thought, then. That’s it, cry – try and get time off your sentence, you little bastard. All I could think then was: this pathetic specimen is here, alive, and Paul is not.