by Sarah Till
Ellis rubbed his chin.
“When I was a child, I went to church every week. Every Sunday. No one made me go. It gave me a sense of structure. My brothers and sisters were close family at home, but when I got out there in the cubs and the scouts, I got a chance to do things I wanted to, with other people. Set my own bar, you know. I carried on going until I left home then it just trailed off. Sometimes, when I feel desperate, I think about going to church to pray. So, I’m not alone. Obviously, I’ve got you, Jinny, but before I met you and when we’re going through hard times, I feel alone. That’s when I do it. That’s when I pray and hope someone or something’s there. Don’t you ever feel alone?”
I nodded.
“Yes.”
I spoke the word slowly and avoided his eyes.
I never wanted Ellis to know how often I felt alone. How often I was trapped in a vacuum where even he could not reach me. I loved him very much, but when I felt he was not there for me and I reached out for something, anything, there was only a void before me.
We ate dinner, watched a DVD with Morgan Freeman followed by an older film about a woman who couldn't speak, both of which I hardly took notice of because I couldn't drag my mental gaze away from my mother's death. Then went to bed. For the first time in weeks we made love. It was passionate and intense and went on for hours. I didn’t worry about having to go to work the next day, or the funeral the day after. I was contained in the moment and nothing else mattered except Ellis’ hands on my breasts and in my hair as we writhed together, occasionally rolling off the bed and giggling like teenagers. I whispered that I loved him as he groaned with pleasure. Eventually we lay still holding hands.
I fell asleep and woke still feeling happy from the endorphins of lovemaking. Just after dawn, I breezed around the house for five minutes before the impending doom engulfed me again. Sticking to my morning routine, I managed to ignore the chasm of sadness that threatened to close around me. I was out of the door and heading towards the tube before Ellis exited the bathroom.
Truth
I rounded the corner to the station and rushed to the tube station steps. I skipped down like a teenager and hurried to the barrier. Passing my card quickly over the button, I clicked through the turnstile. The previous evening’s events that had weighed so heavily on me now merely hovered around my head like an angry wasp. As I met my conscience in the anonymity of the crowd, I felt slightly guilty for rounding on Ted Sloan and for baiting DI Payne. I knew that they were getting the brunt of my anger and, after all, they were only around because my mother was dead.
I approached the platform and sat down. I let the first train pass as it was very busy and I had time to spare. Ellis’ words about being alone had troubled me and I wished that I had his faith. I started a mini-debate with myself about why I didn’t have any faith, beginning with the ‘scientific evidence’ argument, travelling down the spirituality route and finally satisfying myself with the ‘each to his own truth’ theory. I argued with myself for a little while about how this theory could be true if it denied truth itself and approached the familiar territory of words. Words with meanings and words that conjure up a picture. Words like ‘grief’. Words like ‘appropriate’. Words like ‘should’. Words like ‘faith’. Words like ‘mother’. It certainly was confusing. I considered myself a good person with sound intentions. Of course, I had my own meaning for these words, but the question was, why were these so seemingly different from other people’s? Why did I feel like their template for grief, appropriate, should, faith was one that I could not fit into? My good fit was from my soul. I would always, without exception, be polite and gracious until I was pushed. Then, when I feel like I am being oppressed or bullied into a certain way of thinking, I would speak up.
This was the point where the word ‘appropriate’ would rise up and shake its gnarled finger in my direction, pushing me into a mode where my soul sobbed for mercy. Then ‘should’ would form a huge shadow cloud over me and piss heavily on my parade. Should I kneel and pray appropriately? Should I mourn and wail? Would it be appropriate to completely lose my sense of irony or - strike me down with a plague of locusts - my sense of humour until my grief was over?
It was no good. I was convinced that I should stand up for myself and not be bullied. Therefore, I would feel how I felt, not how others thought that I should. I knew that this made logical sense, that it was reasonable, but even so, I had the police and a vicar viewing me as an inferior species because I wasn’t in a flood of tears, or because I might say what I think. So, the burning question was: who’s the selfish one? Is it me for sticking to my guns no matter what, or is it them for trying to make me do what they wanted, the common denominator of which was to shut up?
I saw the train approach and my heart pumped hard. Surely it was obvious to everyone that we are all different, with different coping mechanisms. Why would anyone want to influence, nay, force me to be like them? Was there no one who could resonate with me?
Chapter Five
What a difference a day makes. Yesterday I was the star attraction, complete with whispers and stares. Overnight it seemed that someone else had become the object of attention because she had been thrown out by her boyfriend after having an affair with a colleague. Stacey Turner and Dominic Burrows had apparently been having sex in the stationery area and someone had told her partner. Now the spotlight had turned on her and I was free to walk unobserved through the typing pool and into my office.
I sat at my desk and stared at the storyboards that lay on my desk. All the basic ideas of my prayer campaign were there, but my heart just wasn’t in it. It was always the same before a family event: my stomach would turn and I would feel restless. It made sense to stay in my office just in case I had a bolt of inspiration, but my mind was wandering. Ellis had made it clear in the last twenty-four hours that I was spending too much time wallowing in the past. I knew that he was right but at times like this I could hardly think of the present, even with such an important campaign barking at my heels. Ellis knew better than anyone that my present and my past do not mix well, and often recall can plunge me into a spiral of desperation. Lots of people, including him, had suggested counselling, but I could not imagine what this would achieve. I could neither imagine paying to make myself suffer nor gaining anything from trying to reframe what was out of my control. My relationship with my family was firmly entrenched in a deep channel of ingrained helplessness on my part. I rested my chin on my hands and considered, once again, how this had happened.
It was simple really. Swiss Steve had taken over. He had taken my two small children and, almost unbelievably, trained them to value material possessions and financial wealth above anything else. It was as if he had plugged them directly into his own moral, or immoral, code and turned the power on full. As tiny children, I had adored the pair of them. No matter how unbearable my life, I fulfilled their every whim. Well, almost every whim. I was fair but firm. It soon became crystal clear that Swiss Steve and I were playing good cop, bad cop with the children. No sooner had I whipped an extra Jaffa Cake, stolen from the cupboard from Jupiter's fat toddler fist, Swiss Steve would arrive with an over-sized Easter egg and allow him to gorge on it. Shiralee's tantrums in a shoe shop and my holding firm and buying the school shoes instead of the patent sandals was tempered with Swiss Steve's near consecutive production of a full outfit of hand-made clothes and an even prettier pair of sandals. I would try to tell him that they would be spoiled if we gave them too much, spoiled for the later world where they would have to work for a living and where reality rarely met expectation. He would nod and smile, a metaphorical pat on the head, and I thought that he hadn't heard or understood as he showered them with everything. It soon emerged that he had listened. It soon became evident that not only was Swiss Steve going to make sure they got everything they wanted and more, he would show them how to get it. This never involved the work ethic or material value that I had been taught as a child. Instead, he taught them to steal.<
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Shiralee first, then Jupiter, had become obsessed with possessing as many things as they could. Like Swiss Steve, the origins of these possessions did not matter, or were described in a complicated blur of circumstances and coincidences. Shiralee would arrive home with armfuls of new clothes and makeup and explain that a friend of a friend had given them to her. Jupiter would appear with expensive headphones and hundreds of CDs and comment that someone was selling them cheap up the market. Swiss Steve would nod and grin and punch their shoulders in an act of camaraderie that never failed to annoy me. In public, I would argue for hours with Shiralee and Jupiter about the origins of the new item, but they never winced or changed their stories, even when I accused them outright of stealing.
I often thought about secretly telephoning the police and informing on them. I sat for hours in the evenings, when Swiss Steve was out, debating with myself over the ethics of doing this. Inform on my own family; it didn't seem right. Informing on criminals, however, seemed like my moral duty. I was trapped in a narrow corridor between love and duty and there seemed to be no escape for me. On top of this, I worried about them getting caught. Shiralee had grown up into a beautiful young lady, tall and petite. She had a confident but quiet air about her and an ability to absolutely control her facial expression that surpassed any of Swiss Steve's criminal allies. I had caught her lying more than once and faced her with evidence, yet she would hold her expression and tell me that black was white, her huge brown eyes staring directly into mine from below her lashes. She brought her first boyfriend home when she was fifteen and I was afraid that Swiss Steve would throw him out of our home. In the event, he smiled serenely and winked when Shiralee announced that Adam would be staying over. I made a bed up in the spare room, but it was never slept in. Seething with anger, I confronted Swiss Steve and he shrugged his shoulders.
“He's the son of a colleague, working on a job for me. I've had a word with her, told her to be gentle with him. Don't worry, I've had her at the doctors.”
I had turned my back on him before he saw my tears. In a final insult, Swiss Steve had completely usurped my role as mother and taken Shiralee to the doctor for contraceptives. No doubt this doctor wouldn't be our GP, but one of Steve's countless dodgy colleagues. I was under no illusion that, at fifteen, Shiralee was aware of her alliance with her father and at least some of the implications of it. I would scream and shout at the top of my voice about truth and honesty and she would stare fixedly at me, then drift quietly out of the front door before the final syllable had escaped my lips. I still loved her, but it was difficult to like her. I tried to pass it off as 'teenage troubles' but I knew deep down there was a river that ran much deeper into the criminal underworld.
Jupiter was a different matter. Almost from birth, he had been at Swiss Steve's side as much as possible. He had already adored his father so the bribery with toys, clothes, gadgets and money was an easy transition for him. I had actually caught Swiss Steve playing bank robberies with a seven-year-old Jupiter, a game where the robbers were commended and the police vilified. He had questioned this, telling us that at school his friends and teachers had told him that stealing was wrong and the police were there to stop it. Swiss Steve merely whipped him away from this influence and placed him in a different school, one where many of his 'colleagues' sent their children and where the teachers were briefed appropriately about their particular brand of moral stance. Unlike Shiralee, who would deny any involvement in Swiss Steve's business and directly lie in the face of evidence, Jupiter revelled in the celebrity of crime, openly talking about escapades he had been involved in. Much like Swiss Steve, he would embellish the stories until they were almost unbelievable and although this made him look like a fantasist, he never got caught because, quite simply, no one believed him.
My feelings for my children became complex and painful. I loved them deeply and worried constantly about their safety and I cried myself to sleep when I had argued with them as teenagers. Yet I couldn't warm to them, or them to me. I had witnessed plenty of other families, mother and daughter going on shopping trips, mother and son going for lunch. Because Swiss Steve provided everything, there was never really an opportunity to spend time with them choosing clothes or buying school books. His constant direction and overriding influence resulted in a barrier between us, and I never had the chance to become their friend. I knew that they saw me as the ever-moaning mother who denied them even the smallest luxury in life which, according to their father, they fully deserved. It was a dialectic too far and they became less like the children I so wanted to be friends with and more like casual acquaintances who, for some reason, had to endure me on a daily basis. Even so, I never gave up and spent each day wondering if this was the day one of my children would end up in a police cell.
In private, I argued for hours with Swiss Steve about the example he was setting his children and the trouble they could get into. His answer was simple. He always, without exception, explained that he had taught them never to get caught and if they did, deny it. In the end I realised that it would never matter what I said. They were in it together and I varied between, at best, a bystander and, at worst, someone who was policing not just my children but all three of them. As young adults, the distance had grown so wide between me and them that I often walked into a room of uncomfortable silence after listening to them giggling together from behind the closed door. From the time the children reached their teens until now, they had never worked. They had both been to university, but neither of them had found jobs afterwards. Both lived in smart apartments not far from me and I could only assume that they continued their immoral union with their father when it came to obtaining the means to survive.
This, amongst other things, was the reason I parted from Swiss Steve in the first place. It had been simple. I was scared of him. He had killed a man. He was corrupting my children. I could do nothing about it. For years I had wavered between staying and going, constantly telling myself that I loved him, then arguing with myself that I could not love someone who could take another life. Of course, had I known that he was also colluding with my mother in her plot against my father, I would have divorced him immediately. As it was, I waited until I was sick with guilt at my own implication in his criminal activities, that of silence. Despite my private moral battle with myself, I could have tipped off the police at any time to what, compared with his previous occupation, was petty crime. I knew that if I did expose him, I was also exposing Shiralee and Jupiter. To what degree I did not know, as any business dealings were conducted outside the home while I sat waiting for the three of them to fall through the door giggling like schoolchildren and high from their criminal activities. Eventually, it got too much for my conscience to bear and I ended it. I threw out Swiss Steve and with him went my children. Their rooms remained the same, as they didn’t take any belongings, but they spent all their time at his new plush apartment with Swiss Steve’s constant parade of young women. By the time they each left for university they were almost complete strangers to me.
My chin slipped from my hands as the phone rang. I saw Martina signal me from the next office that it was a personal call that she would transfer. My heart beat at double speed for a moment as I expected to hear DI Payne’s voice on the line revealing some other detail about my mother’s death. Martina announced the call.
“Mr Baxter for you.”
“Thanks, Martina. Put him through.”
I heard a gentle click and someone breathing.
“Hello? Virginia? Is that you?”
John Baxter’s gentle voice smooched out of phone’s earpiece. I tried to sound business-like.
“Hi, John. What can I do for you?”
“Well, I just called to update you really. I had DI Payne round here and he was asking about some woman coming around to the house in the afternoon. I cleared that up. It was my mother, she was just dropping something off with Sally.”
I thought quickly.
“Weren’t you at
your mother’s, John? Why would she want to call round when you would be going home the next day?”
John’s relaxed laugh caressed my ears and I found my suspicion easing.
“Oh, they were friends. Great friends. She probably just wanted an excuse to drop in. I was working up the road from my mother’s house during the day, and I stayed the night. But I expect the police told you that? Mum just wanted some company, I expect.”
The line was silent for a long few seconds. His explanation sounded reasonable and I remembered Ellis’ words the previous day. I should be less suspicious. After all, anyone could have killed my mother.
“Yes, yes, of course. Sorry, John, I’m a bit mixed up. Of course they were friends. What was I thinking?” My mind’s eye pictured the three of them laughing over their china tea cups and home-baked biscuits. John, Sally and John’s mother. Another little group I was excluded from. I changed the subject. “So. Tomorrow. The funeral. I had the vicar round yesterday and we chose a hymn.”
“Yes, he mentioned it. I expect it will be a short but moving service. Will Ellis drive you?”
“I think we might come on the train so we can both have a drink. There will be a wake, won’t there?”
John coughed and I wondered if my tone was too light and he was hiding his emotion. He recovered and his voice was thick.
“Yes. A wake. In the cottage. If that’s OK. Actually, I was wondering about, well...”
“What I intend to do with the cottage?”
Silence again. When John spoke, I detected an urgency or irritation.
“Yes. Yes. Only I have no immediate plans and I’m sure Sally would have wanted me to stay on for a while. There’s the garden and the furniture, surely you don’t want to leave that to ruin?”
I thought for another moment. I didn’t really want to discuss this now.