by S. E. Lynes
I don’t know how long I was there before I remembered the clothes. Christopher’s sweater and trousers were on the floor outside his room. I listened for a moment at his door but heard nothing, so I gathered up his things and brought them into the kitchen, put them into the washing machine. I was about to switch the machine on when I thought perhaps I should wash his coat too. I started to empty the pockets, and it was then that I found the letters, crumpled up. I dropped the coat to the floor.
Your son, Benjamin Bradbury.
My son. My Martin. The boy who had been taken from me, who had come all the way from America to find me, and who had put his heart on this page. He wanted only to meet me and he was now lying dead at the bottom of the canal. He had died thinking I didn’t want him.
I imagined him then as I have imagined him in these pages: no photos, no cine film, nothing to go on but two short letters – his life caught in no more than a glancing light. My Martin, whom I would never see, never know, never love with a love that was natural between a mother and a son. There was nothing left but mess. A man whom I had loved as a son had killed my firstborn child. He was a murderer. Whose mind, tell me, whose, could stay intact in the face of that?
I went into the hall and dialled 999.
‘You need to come right away,’ I said. ‘It’s about my son. He’s murdered two people.’
I gave them the address. They must have asked more questions and I must have answered them. I put down the phone and stifled the choking sound that came out of me.
I was sitting on the hall carpet, back propped against the wall I must have slid down. I thought I heard Christopher’s bedroom door open and close. Then nothing for a moment. I thought I must have imagined it. Then the grinding squeak of his window opening. I thought he must be hot, that he might come down and run a glass of water, but he didn’t come and there were no more sounds from upstairs. But there was a draught, now I thought about it, and I began to shiver. I pulled on Christopher’s coat once again – better to wash nothing now that the police were coming. I went into the lounge, switched on the gas fire.
I can’t remember anything about the time I spent waiting; I suspect I was in a kind of trance. At about 6.15 a.m., the police came: a man and a woman, both young. I can’t remember his name but I remember hers was Yvonne. I remember it because that’s what the other one shouted, later.
‘He’s upstairs,’ I said when they came in.
It’s frightening, having two uniformed police coming through your front door. At least, I was frightened. The policeman headed up while the woman waited with me. She was talking to me, I think, but I can’t remember what she said. I don’t think I was listening. I think I was listening for what was happening upstairs.
‘Christopher,’ I heard the policeman say, then knocking. ‘Christopher, can you open the door?’ Then he shouted down the stairs. ‘Yvonne! Can you get up here a sec?’
‘Excuse me a minute,’ she said and went out of the living room.
And then. And then. And then I was up there too, on the landing in my nightdress and Christopher’s coat. Both their backs were to me and they were fighting with Christopher’s bedroom door. I can remember my ankles were cold. I remember wondering where the cold draught was coming from.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked – and I wonder if I knew already what the matter was; when I remember it, that’s the way it feels and I know I felt sick.
‘The door’s jammed,’ the policeman said. He had his radio; he was talking into it, asking for backup.
‘Christopher won’t hurt you,’ I said. ‘If you knock, he’ll probably open the door.’
‘I’ve tried that.’
‘Christopher?’ I called out to him, as I always did when I heard him come home. ‘Christopher? Christopher?’
But he did not call back.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Christopher had fed his skipping rope through his bedroom window. The rope his father had made for him when he was a boy. He’d tied the other end to the leg of the bed and pushed his desk up against the door. What I’d thought was the door closing was the desk, I think, banging against it. When I’d felt the cold air, that was when he’d opened the window so he could lower himself out.
He’d been dead only minutes when the police found him. That makes sense, because when I held him to me, he was still warm. I can’t recall if I realised then or only later what that meant. But now, obviously, I know it means that he took his life in the moments after I’d made the call to the police, which in turn means he heard me call them. He heard me betray him. That is my weight to bear along with the rest.
They found Benjamin’s body in the canal. Martin, my son, who died never knowing how much he was loved. His body hadn’t gone far, tied as it was with an oily barge rope to a broken mooring post.
Now.
Here we are.
Everything I’ve told you so far takes us up to here, to this moment. Everything I have told you is as Christopher told me. I have tried to take Christopher’s point of view because of what follows in these pages. I have done this because I was trying to understand how much he believed and how much he knew was lies. I genuinely believe that he didn’t think he was lying, not in any conscious way. This was not a coldly executed deception. I believe he absorbed his lies on the deepest possible level because he needed them much, much more than truth. I believe this because I knew him, I lived with him, I loved him, and I never saw anything that made me think he was lying, even to himself.
I thought I’d understood him. But at the inquest, I realised, I’d understood nothing at all.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave.
Upon questioning, Mother Superior Lawrence revealed that Christopher had indeed been to St Matthew’s Convent to search for information pertaining to his birth. But he had not been there at any time during the days leading up to Ben’s death nor indeed at any point that year. When she consulted the records, she found an entry in the visitors’ book for him on Friday, 28 October 1977. She remembered him. His mother had visited the convent a few months before, she said, requesting the whereabouts of her son and she had been told she would be informed should her son wish to make contact with her. Mother Superior Lawrence and Christopher had enjoyed a cup of tea together in the visitors’ room, and once Christopher had shown her his ID, she had fetched the ledger for him.
‘We talked about the two baby boys born that day,’ she said. ‘Martin Curtiss and William Hurst. I remembered his mother, Rebecca. I told him she was troubled but that she’d always sung to him, always called him Billy. And that was it. I wished him luck in his search. He set off from here so far as I’m aware intending to pursue information via the official channels, which is what he told me he was going to do.’
They had talked for about an hour, she said to the police officer taking her statement. She had told Christopher that the other baby, Martin, had gone to America because the convent had links with a church in Virginia. Martin left the convent almost two weeks after Billy. Sister Lawrence insisted that she had given no information to Christopher regarding Martin’s adoptive parents. There had been no mistake there at the convent. There had been no switching of babies, no ankle band on the wrong foot, no incorrect entry of information at the Registrar’s office.
It was concluded that Christopher must have read the ledger book upside down, taken a mental note of Martin’s birth mother’s name and address, maybe written it down later. He had a great memory. He always could sing any pop song word-perfect right the way through; always knew the title, who sang it and most of the time when it was released. He had my name and my parents’ address; he was able to trace me that way. My parents have no recollection of him calling at their home. They think perhaps they might have received a telephone call around that time but they thought it was a marketing questionnaire. They couldn’t be sure and their statement was not included in the final report.
I too went to the convent. My name is in the visitors’ book along w
ith Rebecca’s and Ben’s and Christopher’s. It was Sister Lawrence who suggested I contact NORCAP, which I did, on the day of Martin’s eighteenth: birthday: 12 March 1977. And so, when Christopher contacted me a few months later, I had no reason to believe he wasn’t my son. He wrote to me and I replied with enough information for him to reflect back to me the image I wanted so badly to see. I informed his lies. And if he found evidence of his fabricated origins in me, then I looked for evidence of the boy I had lost in him. When I half-closed my eye, he saw and adopted the idiosyncrasy as his own. When he half-closed his eye, I remember thinking it was a family tic, something only the Curtiss family did – my sister, Miriam, does it; my own mother does it too. But it was nothing of the sort. He saw it and copied it and it became his. His height – who knows? It may have been his father, Richard, an odd man who apparently shared his interest in history. And of course Rebecca’s father, Claud, was tall and short-sighted, like Christopher. The black hair could have been from Mikael, I thought once, before remembering that of course it wasn’t, since Mikael was not his father. It was from his mother. His poor devastated mother.
But in among all his lies, as in most elaborate deceptions, were truths. It was true that he had traced his mother, Rebecca, though not through any official channels. He had indeed found her, not on the day he said but on another day, four years earlier, using the information from the convent. He had found and spoken with his grandfather at the family home in Stockton Heath – a lovely, decent man whom I met at Rebecca’s funeral. Under the most difficult of circumstances, he was dignity itself, as was his lovely long-suffering wife. It was Rebecca’s father who had given Christopher Rebecca’s details. Yes, this was all true, except for the fact that it happened in late 1977, not Easter 1981. By the time Ben arrived at our home, Christopher already knew his real mother’s whereabouts – he may even have kept tabs on her, given her money over the years – who knows? And so, sadly, the rest of that sorry tale is a version of the truth, albeit perhaps a few different occasions woven into one. Christopher had only to go to the address he had already visited years before and persuade her to meet him in the Wilsons, and thereafter accelerate her progress on her inexorable path to destruction.
They found the note from Margaret in Rebecca’s purse, the promise of one mother to another to look after the infant Billy and to call him Christopher, after St Christopher. When I think about that, I am filled with sadness. He was so particular about his name. All that love his adoptive parents had for him, love he was not able to see because it was not presented in the exact way he wanted. What is subject to hypothesis is that Christopher saw in Rebecca a mother he did not want and set about claiming one he did want. That is my hypothesis, which I have added to these pages. He was looking for me, or someone like me. He was looking for his ideal. But most of all, I think he was looking for himself. He was always looking for himself.
Back in Morecambe, there was a family in which he felt he did not belong. So he was adrift, searching for a place in this world. Aren’t we all? And perhaps, knowing that the other adopted baby had gone to the US, he decided to take that baby’s mother for himself. A calculated risk. He tracked her down. Her, Phyllis. Me. He found me, and upon finding me invested all his dreams. He saw a family he wanted, a home he wanted, a woman he wanted. He wanted it all so badly, he buried whatever troublesome truth stood in his way, enabling him to step into my home. And stepping into my home was all he had to do to fill a space I had already made for him. He stepped in and made my life his, in the process forsaking Margaret and Jack, who had done nothing but love him.
So what of Liverpool Council, of the friendly, businesslike Samantha Jackson and her wise, solid advice, her neat grey hair and sharp burgundy suit? Utter fabrication. Christopher never went through any official channel, never went to the Liverpool Council buildings, nor indeed to Liverpool, other than with me on shopping trips to buy clothes or with the family when we went to the Casa Italia restaurant on Matthew Street for one or other of our birthdays. He was too desperate to find what he wanted; he could not possibly have waited for official records. There was no Samantha Jackson at Liverpool Council in 1977 or indeed at any other time. I have no idea whether the offices dealing with adoption are even in Henry Street, but I had no reason to check. The day he told me he made the long, cold walk from Liverpool Lime Street to Henry Street was the day he went to the convent: Friday, 28 October 1977.
But this is the thing: when he told me how he’d found that letter from Samantha Jackson in his pigeonhole at the halls, for example, and that his heart leapt at the sight, I believed him and I still believe him. When he told me he’d known it would be there, I took him at his word as he gave me to understand it – that is, that he meant his sixth sense of things. And here again, I believe he meant it in that way, that his need to believe his own version of events was deep enough for him to deny the truth, which was that he knew in the literal sense that the letter was there because he had put it there. He had put it there because he had written it. But in the moment of seeing it, in the moment of plucking it from the pigeonhole, he had suppressed even this. His joy was real. His sixth sense, to him, was real.
I sometimes wonder if he took the name Samantha from Bewitched, a programme he told me he’d enjoyed when he was younger. He loved to watch television. He had written the letters from Samantha and stored them in the box under his bed, along with my letters and his birth certificate. The police found the postmark on Samantha’s envelopes to be Leeds. He had drawn official headings at the top of the pages, an almost childish coat of arms, before typing the letters himself. As for the court overseeing the adoption, he never contacted them. He did not apply for Martin’s birth certificate. He can’t have done, since birth certificates were a matter of public record, and had he done so, why bother to forge one? Of course I never saw it until the police searched his room and there it was, in amongst the fake letters from Samantha and the real letters from me: a sad attempt, typed up on pink A4 paper, the lines hand-drawn in red felt-tip pen. Who were they for, these letters from Liverpool Council, this pathetic, unconvincing fake birth certificate? Not for me; I would never have asked him for proof. Not for anyone but himself alone, the scaffolding for a fantasy he needed so badly to make real – as a lonely child creates an imaginary world, or a murderer fabricates an alibi.
And Ben, my son, whom I never got to meet or know. This is my fantasy, my need to create an alternative truth for myself. What I wrote about Ben came from the scant contents of two letters from a young man looking for his mother. He didn’t name his parents in his letters, so at first I called them X and Y until I found out from the inquest that they were called Dorothy and George. George was a lawyer and Dorothy a housewife, but she was not an alcoholic. I made her an alcoholic because I was jealous of her. Maybe I wanted her to have failed him as I had. In the story I created for Ben, I made him precociously successful – why not? In reality, he was working as a waiter at night, and was an intern by day. He was on his way though. He just hadn’t got quite so far as I would have had myself believe. Call it my indulgence, the exaggeration of a proud mother. And Martha, his fiancée, really is a primary school teacher. She wrote to me, sent me photos of herself and Ben. She seems lovely, and I choose to believe she is. Maybe one day I’ll go and meet her. In my version of events, she loved him very much and I like to think this is the truth. Of course she loved him. Who wouldn’t love a son of mine?
* * *
I don’t see Betsy as much now, but if she passes my door she always calls in.
‘Hello there, Phyllis.’
I raise my hand, even though she is already gone. ‘Hello, Betsy.’
They’ve taken me off suicide watch. They say I’m making progress. I have started to eat again. I answer in full sentences when they ask me a question. I can take a shower and get dressed by myself. I have written most of what I had to write. I had hoped that if I wrote it all down, it would help me understand. What do I understand?
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br /> I understand that I loved him, Christopher, not as a son but as a man. I understand that he killed his real mother because she was not the mother he wanted. I understand that he realised too late how cruelly and completely he had abandoned the mother and father who had raised him. He did at least recognise that. I understand that even after he had told me he’d killed my son, I still loved him. And I understand that whatever deception he carried out, he included himself in that same deception. None of this understanding makes any of it any easier to carry.
Why did I turn him in? Because he took lives, and that is a mortal sin. His poor mother, God rest her soul, is in a better place, but Ben, my baby Martin, died thinking that I had abandoned him. I will never come to terms with that and perhaps, ultimately, that’s why I betrayed Christopher.
But now it’s almost visiting time. David and the twins are coming to see me. David has been here every day.
‘Phyl,’ he says. He holds both my hands in both of his. ‘Come back to me. We can get through this, I promise.’
David. I always thought I loved him because he was good, a good person. But now I think it is because from the moment I met him he told me that I was good, and of course I wanted to see myself that way too. Because the thing is, when I gave my son away, I gave away with him all perception of myself as in any way good. It was David who restored me, restored that goodness in me. I believed him once, and if he keeps telling me, one day I hope to believe him again. I will go back to him and the boys. We will in time put all this behind us.