Mother and Child

by Annie Murray

  Although I’ve cooked I don’t feel like eating so I leave the food for us to heat up later and go back to the front room. I pad around barefoot, switch on the TV, flit through channels but can’t concentrate on anything and then switch it off again.

  Has he gone in to see Dorrie maybe? But he wouldn’t stay this long. I don’t want to go down there though, because it would worry her.

  Eventually I pick at a bit of the food I’ve cooked, watch some TV, keep checking my phone, still telling myself not to be ridiculous, even though all the time my nerves are on alert for any sound. Ian’s never deliberately nasty or tricky, I tell myself. Some emergency has come up or his battery’s died – or he’s gone to the pub and forgotten to take his phone.

  Which works quite well until pub closing time, then more than enough time for him to get home, and all the panic I’ve been trying to keep under control starts to take over. Where the hell is he? There’s still no message. He’s got the car, otherwise I’d go out and drive round everywhere – the garage, the pub. And then it’s nearly midnight and there is still no sign of him.

  I don’t know what to do. I feel sick, the blood pounding round my body, and I’m back in that night when Paul didn’t come home and there were fireworks and sirens and all at once the skin of our life, which had been slowly healing over, was ripped into unrecognizable shreds.

  ‘Where are you?’ I’m whimpering. I’m way beyond anger – just really scared. I go to the front door and stand looking out as if this will bring him driving up the road, or walking – anything so long as I see a living person come back to me. My ears are pricked for the horrible sound of ambulances. ‘Come home. Where are you?’

  I can’t call the police, not this soon, can I?

  There’s no way I can just stay in sitting here, so I pull a fleece on and head outside, striding the mile to Ian’s garage along the dark, almost silent roads. The air smells of summer night – cooling concrete, grass, the exhaust of passing cars. The garage is all locked up, of course. I go along the alley at the side, hearing something crunch under my trainers. There are no windows, no sign of light.

  I stand there for a while, obsessively calling his phone, sending texts. Where are you? I rack my brains trying to think who else I could call. I have no number for Carl and there really isn’t anyone else I could ask – not at this time of night especially. And if there was any trouble, if he was in hospital, they would ring me, surely?

  Next I try a couple of pubs. I’m hardly even sure where they are but I just keep walking until I find them. They’re all locked up as well and by the time I get home after nearly two hours pounding the pavements, my blood sugar has sunk and I feel shaky and weepy.

  He’ll be home by now! I think, half-jogging the last stretch of our road to the house, despite feeling so wobbly. Hands shaking, I push the key into the lock.

  ‘Ian?’ In the hall.

  But there is only silence.

  Eventually I go upstairs and lie on the bed with the light on. There is no sleep to be had – just a half-waking state in which I keep jerking up, grabbing my phone to see the time, to check for messages, my body jangled with fear.

  By eight the next morning, I am round at the garage again, still in last night’s clothes and my trainers, waiting by the kerb. My body is in a state of emergency, beyond hunger or tiredness.

  Soon, a rescue truck drives up with a small silver car strapped on to it. I see a man, who must be Carl, at the wheel, dressed in bottle-green overalls. He’s in his fifties, a lean guy with curly grey hair and a tanned, humorous-looking face. His expression, however, is not particularly jolly at this moment. He eyes me as if I’m a challenging job he’s got to deal with, brakes, switches off the ignition, gets a sheaf of papers off the passenger seat and finally climbs slowly out.

  ‘Morning.’ He has a deep voice with a smoker’s gravel in it. He doesn’t seem all that surprised, as if there is something predictable about my standing about on the pavement at eight in the morning.

  ‘Where’s Ian? I’m Jo, his wife – where’s he gone? He never came home last night,’ I gabble at him. I’m near tears, but there is something about this man’s dignified demeanour that makes me want to keep my cool.

  He looks at me as if judging what to say. ‘Has he not been in touch?’

  ‘No. I kept phoning and messaging him – I’ve no idea where he is.’ My voice starts to crack. Don’t, I scream inwardly at myself. Just hold it together.

  Carl puts his head on one side and the pitying impression this gives suddenly makes me want to go up and punch him, scratch his face, anything. You know where he is – tell me, you bastard.

  ‘Thing is,’ he says finally, weighing his words. ‘I thought he was going to be in touch with you. He should have done that.’

  ‘What d’you mean? Just tell me where he is and stop messing about!’ I’m shouting, waving my arms. Carl holds up a hand.

  ‘He’s all right. Don’t fret – he’s fine. He just said he wanted a bit of . . . well, space. Time away. Nothing to worry about. He’s been a bit down, like, and he just wanted to sort his head out, I think.’

  ‘D’you know where he is?’

  Carl’s eye wanders. ‘Only in general terms.’

  I go up close to him. His overalls have been ironed, creases down the front of the legs. He must have a very efficient wife.

  ‘Carl, please – what’s going on?’ I’m caught between worry and fury with Ian. Here I am, worried sick, exhausted – just before our run, so that I wonder whether he’s done it on purpose even while I’m concerned about him.

  Carl shrugs and I see that he really doesn’t get it either, not really.

  ‘Tell him to get in touch with me – will you? Tell him to text me back. Please.’

  ‘I will, bab,’ he says.

  And he sounds kind now and this undoes me. I turn to walk home, cold and deflated, tears running down my face all the way.

  Twenty-Nine

  At home I make black coffee and sit in the kitchen sipping it, asking myself if this is all my fault. Then I get angry and decide it’s all Ian’s fault. And then I rock realistically into the middle of these accusations and decide it’s all part of shit happens, that I do need to worry about him but that the stupid sod still should have texted me . . . Has he any idea what he did to me last night?

  Tomorrow I am supposed to be going to London and the day after that is the race. At this moment, overwrought and exhausted as I feel, with a missing husband and sense of catastrophe, this now seems impossible.

  I’m about to phone Pat and say . . . what? That I won’t be coming? That one of the Bhopal Runners of Hollywood is going to pull out . . . ? Or just, Help me . . . But then I hear my phone beep and grab it immediately.

  Ian. Sorry. Am fine, no worries. Just need to get away for a bit. Will be in touch.

  You bastard, I think, flushed with relief. I message him: Are you coming back today? I should put, Are you OK? Something kind and concerned. But I’m too angry. I have to stay here. I have to feel all this. What the hell is he playing at?

  Seconds later the phone beeps. I don’t know. Probably not.

  This drives me to my feet. Right. Fine. If that’s how it is I’m not going to just sit here in case he deigns to turn up.

  As I cross the room, the phone rings and I run back like a maniac. My mother – oh, no, please . . .

  ‘Jo? Oh, good – I’m glad I’ve caught you,’ she says, as if I’m some busy tycoon who never has time to answer the phone. ‘How are you, love?’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine,’ I say manically.

  ‘Well, good for you.’ She sounds reassured. ‘Nice to hear you sounding so cheerful. It’s about time.’

  I grit my teeth.

  ‘Now, I know we haven’t been over for a while so your dad and I were thinking maybe we’d pop over tomorrow afternoon and see you both? Come late afternoon so we can see Ian after work as well – maybe have a barbie or something? If you haven’t got one we could
bring ours over?’

  ‘Mom,’ I say. ‘I won’t be here tomorrow.’ As I say it I know with sudden certainty that I won’t be here. Whatever Ian is up to he’s not here and I have something that I very much need to do.

  ‘Oh? Where’re you off to then?’ Her tone is coy, as if she thinks perhaps Ian and I are off for some kind of dirty weekend. As you do when you’ve been together for over thirty years and your only son has died.

  ‘I’m going to London with friends. We’re doing the run on Sunday morning – it’s the London 10K, for charity – for the Bhopal Medical Appeal.’

  ‘Oh!’ She sounds astonished. ‘What? Since when has this been on the cards? What’s the . . . the what appeal?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Mom,’ I say coldly. ‘Anyway, as I say, we’re going down tomorrow and I’m staying with my friend Sunita’s brother.’

  ‘I see.’ She very clearly doesn’t. ‘Well, all right. So we’ll make it another time, love. Is Ian all right? Business doing OK and everything?’

  ‘He’s fine.’

  ‘Oh, good. Well, we’ll see you soon, pet. Let me know if there’s anything you need.’

  How do you spend the day when your husband has gone missing, you have no job and no child, and you have already sorted out every inch of your new house? For a start you call on your mother-in-law and pretend everything is fine. Then you do what any self-respecting person would do which is to get on a bus – with a kind of exhausted defiance, needing to be ceaselessly moving, needing something but not really knowing what – and head into the Bull Ring.

  The day is hot and in town, all around me, are colourful sleeveless dresses, saris and head wraps and guys strutting in jeans and T-shirts – an atmosphere almost of carnival because the sun is shining for once.

  I wander amid the fruit and veg and shouting vendors, buy bananas and peaches from a stall where all the fruits are portioned out in plastic bowls, then walk up the ramp and mooch aimlessly round the shops for a couple of hours. I don’t buy anything, don’t really see anything because I’m thinking about Ian – where is he, what’s he doing? And Paul. Trying not to go down that path that says, Now you’ve lost everything . . .

  I drink a cup of coffee looking out at St Martin’s church while the shoppers go milling past outside. I have deliberately left my phone at home, daring myself to detach, not to be waiting minute after minute for Ian to call or text. Maybe I need some space as well . . .

  But now, feeling very low, I sit wondering, in an unbelieving sort of way, whether Ian has actually left me. Whether I have, in fact, lost everything.

  Knots of dread twist in my stomach. I begin to sink. I take deep breaths and tell myself not to do this. Not to assume the worst. But has he? The worst can happen – it has already happened. Is this Ian’s cowardly way of just going, not even telling me or dealing with anything? Images start to fill my mind, tender memories of all our past – meeting Ian at Sam Wellers, the first days when we moved into our house, full of ‘happy families’ excitement, our lovemaking and teasing, all that lovely day-to-day life, so easily taken for granted. And the days when we first had Paul . . . It’s only seconds before I can’t stand it and I get to my feet, almost overturning the table in my rush to get out, so that people turn to look.

  I start striding towards the stop for the bus home, but I’m forced to slow down by the crowds in the city centre. I find myself thinking about Dorrie and all she has told me. I stop and turn round. Why go home? All I’ll end up doing is sitting there by myself, waiting and fretting. Why not try and think about something else?

  After making my way down past the spire of St Martin’s church again, I cross over Digbeth, the main road leading out, eventually, towards Stratford. Deritend, the neighbourhood where Dorrie grew up, is somewhere I have only been once or twice. It’s one of the few bits of Birmingham that still looks almost unchanged, at least from the outside.

  The blue brick arches of the viaduct straddle a number of the streets, casting cool shade in summer and a dank gloom in winter. And the streets are a mixture of factories and a few tightly packed rows of terraces. No one lives in back-to-back houses on yards any more. The last ones, about a mile away, have been turned into a museum. But there are still small firms here, where you can hear radios playing and the turning of machines, glimpse sparks from soldering, hear men’s raised voices. A lot of the businesses seem to be something to do with car repair now, rather than making things, but there’s still an atmosphere. It’s mainly men about the streets, with oil-black hands and overalls. The only women tend to be in offices or running the cafés on the corners of streets.

  Desperate to push away thoughts of Ian and me, I turn along Floodgate Street, under the cool of the viaduct. Soon I reach Milk Street, where Dorrie spent her early years. I don’t know much about the history of how it all used to be, and there’s nothing much here to show me now. I walk along the street, which is flanked on each side by a mess of little factories, some brick, some more modern, ugly, as well as parked cars, rolls of razor wire atop walls and fences, graffiti. There is nothing much left in the way of housing. Even here, where everything is not yet all glass and concrete the way the city centre is going, it is hard to find the ghost of little Dorrie, or the horses and carts and gas lamps, the neighbourhoods of back-to-back houses packed full of factory workers.

  No one remembers old Brum now, Dorrie said. I’ve come here to try and think about someone else but, walking in this neighbourhood which has been bombed and knocked about and rebuilt into an undistinguished confusion of functional buildings, begins to drag me down as well. Change and decay in all around I see . . . All the lives that were once here – and soon, all the Dorries who can lift a corner of our version of the present and show us another city, a city crammed with industry in an age of barrel organs and flat caps, milk carts and children playing all along the street – will be gone for ever.

  As I sit on the bus home, the heartbreak of change and loss settles on me. I have to make a huge effort to shake it off. You can spend your whole life thinking about what has been lost.

  By the time I get down from the bus, it’s three o’clock and I am now frantic to check my phone. I end up tearing along the street with my bag of fruit. Inside, I stare, heart thudding, at the phone’s blank screen: no message, nothing. Of course, he must be at work. I could just walk back to the garage. But how would that be? Desperate and pathetic – especially in front of that Carl bloke, who knows Ian wants to get away from me.

  So I go and see Dorrie again for tea. Thank the universe for dear Dorrie.

  Back home, later, I am trying to decide how to get through the evening when Ian texts.

  You OK?

  I carry the phone to the living room, sit on the sofa and stare at the message for a long time. Those two words make me feel so much better. Some sign that he actually cares about me, that he’s not just locked up in his own head, has not just gone off for ever. I’m not sure what to answer. Eventually, I text back:

  OKish. I’m going to London tomorrow – leaving home about 4.30. You’ll need to go in and see your mom later on.

  There’s a long silence. I sit waiting. Then I text again: R u ok?

  I can’t stand it any longer when there is no answer and add, Are you ever coming home?

  The silence goes on. He must have switched his phone off after the first message, as if he can’t cope with any more from me. Or maybe his battery’s died? Reasons, there must be a good reason.

  An hour later, when I’m certain he is not going to reply, I send a last text: Please, Ian – come to the race on Sunday. Ends Whitehall – near Charing Cross Tube. It’s only for a few hours. It’d mean so much to have you there. Xx

  Thirty

  FAMOUS FOUR

  ‘Jo!’ Pat comes trotting along the platform, weaving through the other waiting passengers. She’s wearing cornflower-blue cropped trousers and a crisp yellow shirt, and has a small rucksack looped over one shoulder. ‘The others are up here
– we decided to get out of the crowds.’

  We had arranged to meet on the platform because New Street station is in the throes of being rebuilt and it’s mayhem. Following her in the shadowy light of the platform, I catch sight of Hayley’s blonde hair scooped up into a knot at the back. She’s in a strappy sundress, white with big sunflowers on it, and Sunita in cerise trousers and a bright orange top. They see us coming and both of them wave.

  ‘Oh, I’m so glad to see you lot,’ I say. Even though my emotions are very up and down, I’ve decided to be as cheerful as I can. A better night’s sleep has helped and it’s great to have this to take my mind off things. I shan’t say anything about Ian. He’ll come to the race – I’m sure he will. No one needs to know what has happened. ‘I’ve spent the morning getting more and more nervous.’

  ‘I know,’ Pat says. ‘And Fred’s been fluffing about non-stop. “Have you got this, have you got that . . .” I felt like telling him the train was two hours earlier than it really is!’ We all laugh.

  ‘You’ve got a lot of luggage there, Sunita,’ Pat says. While she and I each have a little rucksack and Hayley’s got a sports bag on one strap over her shoulder, Sunita has an entire wheelie suitcase and a bulging carrier bag.

  ‘Oh, well . . .’ she says vaguely. ‘You never know . . . Anyway, I bought presents for the kids, and –’ she lifts the bag, which seems to contain various plastic boxes – ‘a few snacks for the journey.’

  We’re almost like kids ourselves as we settle into seats next to a table. It feels like a school trip. The others don’t go anywhere much and it’s been a long time for me too. In fact, as I was putting everything in my rucksack – overnight things, my running clothes and the race number and pins – I felt suddenly excited, in contact with my younger self – the Jo who used to pack a bag and take off across the world.