Mother

by S. E. Lynes

  ‘No one is born unable to hug,’ I told him. ‘It can be learnt, and I’ll teach you.’

  I thought I could teach him everything. Confidence, that was all he needed, I thought. A sense of his place in the world. But I could not give him that.

  * * *

  At ten years old, Christopher was moved into the loft, into a room made by his father.

  ‘Your brother needs his own space,’ his mother said, by way of explanation. ‘He’s gone two.’

  Fine by Christopher. Jack Junior was a pain in the neck, a whinger. The sooner they stopped sharing, the better.

  The box room became a nursery for Louise, who was getting on for fourteen months by then. Christopher, already taller than his mother by this point, wasn’t far off being taller than his father. He could not straighten up to full height in his new bedroom without banging his head on the eaves, but the floor space was bigger than the one downstairs.

  His father built the windows for the loft room, put the electrics in and lined the walls with fresh woodchip, which he painted cream. His mother ran up curtains from fabric she’d found at Lancaster market, made him a valance sheet with what was spare. His parents bought him a new pine wardrobe from MFI on hire purchase.

  The trapdoor was left as it was – with a U-shaped handle. Whenever Christopher went up to his room, he would take the long hook from its holder on the landing wall, loop it through the handle on the trapdoor and pull. With a heavy metallic clatter, the stepladder would come shuddering down like a magic staircase summoned from tin clouds. At ten, this made the room feel like a den; later, like a temporary guest room.

  And later, when he did start to look at it in that way – that is, with the seed of bitterness he wished were no part of him – he would think about how nothing had ever truly belonged to him. Nothing had really been his. To and from school, he would tread as lightly as he could so as not to wear out the soles of the shoes that would be Jack’s – try not to suck thin the grey cuffs of his school blazer.

  ‘Try and keep it nice for your brother, can’t you?’ His mother, Margaret, shaking out his father’s work shirts over the kitchen table. ‘We can’t be buying new blazers every five minutes.’

  It seemed to Christopher sometimes that his life was spent trying not to ruin anything, trying not to bite his nails, not to put his elbows on the table, not to pull out clumps of his own dark hair. By the time he was twelve, his eyebrows were no more than black tufts where he had plucked out patches along the length. They never grew back, not completely.

  And always the knot, always the rope.

  I will say this: things were different then. People had different ideas. People went to church every week, went most places on foot, often came home from work to eat at midday. No exception, Christopher walked the half-mile from St Luke’s Primary home for his dinner at 12.15 p.m. sharp: something like boiled potatoes, mince or battered fish, peas, carrots followed by steamed pudding with custard or white sauce. His mother, flushed from battle with the twin tub, muttered: ‘I feel like I’ve been through the ruddy wringer…’ unwrapping her pinny from her thin waist – ‘Don’t have time to be running a restaurant…’ pulling the turban from her forehead – ‘Call that hand washed? Go and get some soap on it now before I give you a thick ear…’ fixing her hair in time for the stomp of his father’s boots on the path.

  Five around the table, heads bowed, the smell of carbolic on his praying hands. For what we are about to receive… After dinner, or lunch as they call it now, his father grabbed his tool bag and returned to work. Christopher wandered back to school, while his mother pushed the pram from the butcher’s to the grocer’s and on to the baker’s. There was no rest for the wicked.

  In 1972, the black-and-white television was replaced by a colour set. By then he was at Morecambe Grammar. Lemon-curd crust and a glass of milk in hand, he sat cross-legged on the floor after school and watched the Clangers or Blue Peter or Bewitched. Then he would go up to his loft and study to the soundtrack of the week’s Top 40, which he taped without fail every Sunday night on his radio cassette player. Homework complete, he would climb back through the hatch – the clank, clank of those metal steps – and watch the news with his parents.

  ‘You’ll get square eyes, you will,’ his mother would say, his father muttering behind his paper about the brain-rotting capacities of the idiot box. But then, his father didn’t like books much either.

  Christopher never understood what square eyes were, though by the age of fourteen myopia had furred his world like the inside of an old kettle. His mother took him to the optician, and two weeks later, spectacles were pushed onto his face, adjusted around his ears. And there they would stay, in various sizes and subtle variations, for the rest of his life: his world clear now but gated off in dark tortoiseshell.

  He worked hard, always. He made no apology for that. Caught the bus to school, stayed for dinner, played British Bulldog sometimes on the tarmac. ‘Rubbish’ at woodwork and art, ‘all right’ at English and history (he excelled, though he would never say it). Loved to read, loved music. The seventies brought decimalisation, all mod cons, though Morecambe still seemed a decade behind, judging by the clips on News from the North. The seventies were happening elsewhere, just as the sixties had, but news of them still came through the television. A tide of change: IRA bombs in London, Margaret Thatcher knocks Edward Heath off the Conservatives’ top spot, a prostitute murdered in Leeds.

  Like any sixteen-year-old, Christopher was more concerned with youth club on Friday nights in the church hall, watching but not speaking to girls whose pastel dresses had been replaced by flared trousers and low-cut T-shirts stretched tight, girls who threw back their heads when they laughed, who smoked in dangerous blue clouds; boys with long hair who, unlike Christopher, knew what to say. Sundays at Mass, an altar boy, a chorister, his alto broke, turned baritone. Having no distractions at home above the distant whoop of his siblings downstairs, his schoolwork progressed apace. Three A grades at A level – a place at Leeds University to read history.

  ‘What do you want to go there for?’ his father asked, sipping tea from his mug in the kitchen. He meant university, not Leeds. He set aside his newspaper, peered down at the results sheet as if it were a secret code, up at Christopher, then back down at the sheet. ‘That a trade, is it, history?’

  So, you see, his father might not have let him go to university at all, might have steered him into a steady job doing real work for real money, money he could chip in for rent. University of Life! Christopher might have ended up with an apprenticeship like most of his peers, were it not for the maintenance grant.

  He might never have opened that suitcase.

  * * *

  Christopher picked up the fallen torch, pulled the case from the eaves and into his room. There he dusted it down with an old inside-out vest and into it placed the clean clothes his mother had left folded on his bed along with his books and the new brushed-silver fountain pen she had given him for university. After that, he unscrewed the handles of his skipping rope and tied it around the case to be sure it wouldn’t pop open again. He carried the case downstairs and left it in the hall.

  In the kitchen, his mother and father and Jack and Louise sat together around the table. Christopher handed his father the piece of paper. His father took it from him, his expression no more than that of mild enquiry. He pushed his reading glasses onto his nose and studied the letter for no more than a second, his expression changing instantly – nothing anyone would have noticed if they were not watching closely; no more than a clench of his jaw, a flare of his nostrils. He placed his forefinger and thumb to his brow and, handing the letter in silence to his wife, dispatched Jack Junior and Louise upstairs to their rooms.

  To Christopher he said, ‘Go and wait in the front parlour.’

  Christopher sat on one of the armchairs, firm, almost hard, the raised pattern of the fabric running like Braille beneath his fingertips. His teeth chattered. The front room was
cold. He had only ever seen one other person’s front room – his school friend Roger’s, when they’d laid out his grandfather’s body. And here, now, with no corpse to speak of, he felt death in the room just the same. In his chest, the rope tightened.

  Long minutes later, his father came in, followed by his mother, who brought a tray with three cups and the teapot, a jug of milk, the sugar bowl, and set it down on the low table, as if the ritual of tea could protect them from the chaos Christopher felt coming.

  ‘Christopher.’ It was his mother who began, skinny knees pressed together, hands bunched on her fraught lap; his father, beside her on the settee, smoked his pipe in silence.

  ‘Me and your dad,’ his mother said. ‘That’s to say, we’re your parents, of course we are.’

  ‘Yes,’ Christopher said, falling towards what she had to say, helpless as a stone pitched down a well.

  His mother looked towards his father, who sucked on his pipe and nodded for her to continue. Trusted her with so little usually but now appeared content for her to take charge. Seeing no shift from her husband, no move to help her out, Margaret returned to Christopher, her glance flashing like guilt itself.

  Don’t say it, he willed silently. Don’t say what it is you are about to say. Let us drink our tea and say well here we are and shouldn’t we be going and don’t want to miss that train. But they did not drink their tea, and they did not say those things. Instead, his mother said the words that were already travelling up her windpipe, forming themselves on her tongue, which now pressed itself to the floor of her mouth to let in the gulp of air she took to ready herself and say:

  ‘Christopher, you had another mother and father.’

  And like that the rope uncoiled, snaked wildly in the sudden vacuum.

  A girl in trouble. This was all they knew. This, and more, he heard through the electric buzz in his ears, a white heat searing the cave of his chest. His parents – familiar strangers who sat in front of him now and looked anywhere but at him – these people had picked up his infant self from a convent on the outskirts of Liverpool. They had brought him home and called him Christopher. Here in their semi-detached house with its back patio and its converted roof space, that baby had grown, had learnt to skip, to read, to not spoil things, to not claim things for his own. And somewhere along the line, the natural child that had been denied them had come after all. He had come, and they had called him Jack.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he asked.

  ‘You had opportunities here,’ said his mother, pressing on, deaf to him. ‘Dread to think what would’ve happened if we hadn’t taken you. We left a note for her, told her we’d look after you. Yes, truth be told, you were much better off here with us.’

  Here, where his black hair had never been mentioned as anything unusual – or indeed as anything at all. He thought now it must have been a subject everyone avoided. His height? No more than a handy attribute when a jar was needed from the top shelf of the pantry.

  ‘Happen that’s where the brains came from,’ his mother added with a merry laugh that choked on itself and died. ‘Goodness knows they’re not from me. And your being so tall, like, what with us being short and that. We were going to tell you on your birthday, but we didn’t want to upset you, did we, Jack?’ She cast a glance towards his father, but it landed short. ‘We wanted to wait until you were old enough. We thought that were best. But then…’ She brought the lumpen handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed her eyes. ‘I don’t know. It’s not an easy thing to say, love, and it just seemed to get bigger, and then it was too big. You’re our son, Christopher, and that’s all there is to it.’

  How quiet his mother’s voice was, as if the silence in the house were yet one more thing that must not be ruined. Christopher. Even his name had not been his own. Jack Junior had been given his name, the best family crystal; Christopher the lesser glassware: serviceable and of reasonable quality – nothing you could complain about.

  ‘We’ve told you now, at any rate.’ His father’s pipe had left his mouth but hovered near, just in case. ‘Doesn’t change anything as far as I’m concerned.’

  He coughed into the thick roll of his plumber’s fingers, his other hand cupping the bowl of his pipe. He did not take his wife’s hand, though she looked like she might shatter for lack of touch. Deep creases ran across her forehead, her mouth set in a soft rectangle of angst. On the mantelpiece, the carriage clock chimed quarter past the hour. The shiny palm leaves that grew in patterns up the wallpaper seemed to sprout from his father’s head.

  Father? The word stopped Christopher’s thoughts dead. But his mother was already standing, brushing at her skirt.

  ‘Yes, well,’ she said. ‘Happen it’s better to know than not, eh.’

  But as he said to me, he’d always known. And this is really what this story is all about.

  Chapter Two

  Nurse just came. She stands over me while I take my meds.

  ‘There you go, my darling,’ she says. She is Irish, middle-aged, a no-nonsense type. That’s what you become, I suppose, if you’re dealing with broken people all day long. Can’t waste your time getting sentimental – where’s the use in that?

  ‘What’s that you’re writing there?’ she asks. ‘A book, is it?’

  I shrug.

  ‘Well now.’ She eases the little plastic dish from my hand. ‘I’ll leave you to your book.’

  Part of me is sorry when she goes, sorry that I didn’t extend the basic courtesy of talking to her. Writing, not talking, is preferable. I don’t want to hear the words coming out of my mouth. And if I write it, I can burn it without ever having uttered a syllable.

  I’d always known. That’s where I’ll start today. I asked him once what he meant by that. He’d taken me to the pub – he had a thing about pubs. It was the Traveller’s Rest on the hill, as I recall, and we sat in the little side room with the log fire. It was late afternoon and we were the only ones in.

  ‘What I mean is…’ I added when he didn’t respond. I was worried I’d pressed on a nerve, that I’d upset him. ‘Do you think that feeling came from actual concrete events, or was it something… I don’t know… more of a sixth sense?’

  He picked up his glass and, without taking a drink, placed it back on its coaster. He picked up another coaster and tore off the corner.

  ‘I think it started with my brother,’ he said, tearing off a second corner. ‘When my mum was in hospital having him. She was away for ten days. That’s an eternity to a child, and I began to feel distressed.’ Christopher talks like that – quite formal in his way of expressing himself. ‘Towards the end of that period, I actually began to believe that she’d died and no one was telling me.’ He sipped his bitter and licked the froth off his lip. ‘She wasn’t dead, of course, but the feeling never went away. Was it concrete? No, but I could breathe it in the air. It was a secret, but it wasn’t a secret because a secret is something one person knows or maybe two or three. It was the opposite of a secret. It was something everyone knew but no one said anything about.’ All four corners of the coaster torn away, he began to worry it between his thumbs and forefingers.

  ‘But surely that’s paranoia?’ I said.

  ‘Paranoia, yes.’ He shrugged. ‘I came and went on that for years. But later, I knew it wasn’t, and it wasn’t one single event either. It was a multitude of little things – chance remarks, sudden silences if I came into a room, glances exchanged between my relatives. And I don’t know exactly when I knew it absolutely – maybe only when they told me – but I’d felt it long before.’ He stared at me, his eyes shiny and dark as treacle.

  ‘I can remember Margaret coming home with my brother,’ he said. ‘She told me to go and say hello to him. He was in a basket on the living-room floor by the fire.

  ‘I crossed the carpet in pin-steps. I could feel her eyes on the back of my neck. I looked at our Jack, little Jack Junior. He was all red, snarling even though he was asleep, with tight fists raised above his head
like an angry little boxer. I didn’t know how I was supposed to say hello to a baby, so I reached over and prodded his forehead with my finger. He started crying.

  ‘ “Careful, Christopher!” Margaret shouted.’

  He had mimicked her and now stopped to laugh, though not happily. ‘Margaret could never keep the irritation out of her voice,’ he went on. ‘But she always spoke to me that way, so I was used to it. “You have to be gentle with babies, Christopher,” she said.’

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked him.

  ‘I ran out into the yard. There was a spider’s web I’d been watching for days and it was still intact, stretching across from the roof overhang down to the drainpipe. The spider was a big one; it had a body the size of a raisin – you know, one of those spiders that have knees. I’d shown it to my friend Roger the day before and he’d said it was a whopper. So then I ran my finger down the edge of the web and pulled the whole thing away.’

  ‘And the spider?’

  ‘Went scuttling – but not fast enough. I caught it. I could feel its little body frantic in my hand.’ Seeing the horror cross my face, he laughed. ‘It was only a spider! Anyway, I crouched down and let it out onto the patio stones and… and I crushed it with my foot.’

  He picked up his glass and drank. I said nothing.

  ‘A week or two later,’ he continued, ‘Margaret told me off for nearly suffocating Jack. I told her I’d been trying to tuck him into his blankets, but I hadn’t. I’d pushed the blankets over his face and held them there.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked him.

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I can’t say I wanted him dead. It wasn’t as clear as that. I just wanted to hold the covers over his face and…’

  ‘But you were just a kid.’

  He shook his head – no. ‘There were other things too, when I was older. When I was fourteen, they gave him my Scalextric set. They didn’t ask me, they just gave it to him. I wasn’t playing with it by then, but that’s not the point. It was mine.’ His voice had hardened; he had become agitated. He bit down on his bottom lip then drank. On the tabletop, the coaster lay in frayed pieces. ‘So later, when no one was looking, I took his teddy bear from his room and put it in the compost heap. I dug down and put it in with all the smelly rotten vegetable peelings, and I covered it over and thought: there, take that.’