by K. L. Slater
Just before Jesse’s funeral, lonely and utterly bereft, I’d reached out to Jill Billinghurst. I’d dialled her landline number and then cut off the call before it connected. I did that what seemed like a thousand times before finally plucking up the courage to allow it to ring.
‘Hello?’ Her voice had sounded as empty as my own.
‘Jill? It’s … it’s Bridget,’ I’d said hesitantly.
‘What do you want?’ she snapped.
‘Look, we need to talk.’ I was sure she must have thought the same thing herself. As two grieving mothers, we had to gather strength from each other. We’d been friends for too long not to find a way through the tragedy together. ‘Talk about everything that’s happened.’
She’d been my closest friend for fifteen years and yet now I’d finally drummed up the courage to make contact, I couldn’t seem to string a sentence together that articulated how I felt.
‘There’s nothing I want to say to you,’ she’d replied coldly.
We’d each known the other’s son as well as our own. We’d raised our boys together. I knew Tom’s likes, his dislikes. I knew about the strawberry-shaped birthmark on his left shoulder. I knew he’d had two wisdom teeth removed and that, up to the age of about fifteen, he sometimes used to sleepwalk when he felt anxious about anything.
I knew Jill was capable of reeling off similar personal knowledge about Jesse.
We’d loved each other’s sons and so we definitely had things to say to each other.
I’d grasped the phone so tightly that day, my fingers hurt. My skin pulsed hot and damp, my mind swirling with a maelstrom of powerful emotions I didn’t know what to do with. My entire body felt limp with hopelessness one moment, while the next, adrenaline coursed through my veins so forcefully I struggled to control my rage.
Over the years, Jill had always seemed to have lots of acquaintances, friends and neighbours – people who I knew would rally round to support her. She had Robert. For all his faults – and she had always talked as though there were many – he was there for her. And most important of all, she still had Tom. He was still alive and they would be together again one day.
‘I just need to talk to you,’ I’d whispered. ‘I’m going mad, stuck in the house on my own. I need to make sense of it all, and you’re the only person who knows what I’m going through.’
‘I warned you about the danger for years. I told you Jesse was out of control, that it was going to end badly, but you refused do anything about it.’ Even now, after all this time, just thinking about how coolly she’d said those words made me shiver. ‘This might have all been avoided if you’d listened.’
‘Hang on! I—’
‘He was your son, Bridget, your son. Not your best friend, or someone to have a laugh with or hang around with.’ The bitterness in her voice gave her words a tinny, harsh edge. ‘You had a responsibility to Jesse, and to the people around him, to rein him in. And you failed on every single count.’
‘Please don’t tell me how I failed as a mother when it’s your son that’s charged with—’
‘Jesse had a knife that night and he threatened my son …’ Jill’s voice cracked, and I imagined her closing her eyes and clutching her hands into fists the way she did when she got angry. ‘Tom only lashed out because he’d felt forced to defend himself. And now his life is in ruins and Jesse is dead.’ And then she’d put the phone down.
I’d called her back immediately, ten, twenty times, but of course she didn’t pick up.
I’d rampaged around the house like a banshee. Smashing, tearing, breaking things.
Finally I’d folded myself up into a small ball and sobbed until my throat felt raw, until my limbs ached and my chest burned.
Her cruel words had taken root in my head. The way she’d spoken about Jesse as if he’d brought his death on himself. I tried to speak to her about it a few months later. I went to the house but Jill shut the door in my face.
And now, ten years later, here we were.
In a matter of hours, I’d be starting a new life with my young husband. The man who had loved Jesse like a brother but also taken his life. Tom and I had agreed that his parents would pick him up on his release and he would tell them when they got back to the house.
We were under no illusions. Getting Robert and Jill Billinghurst to understand the decision Tom and I had made felt like an impossibility.
But they had two choices.
They would accept that we were a married couple and we’d all try to get along; or they’d refuse to do so. And if that was the case, then so be it.
Tom and I were in full agreement. They would forfeit being part of our lives at all.
Six
Jill
‘You shouldn’t be here this morning!’ Audrey scolded me lightly when I got to the shop just fifteen minutes after she’d opened. ‘I’m sure you’ve got enough on your mind with Tom being released.’
‘I’m not stopping,’ I said. ‘I’ve got all morning to kill and I just came to get away from Robert’s negativity. I feel better popping by just to check you’re coping OK with the new deliveries.’
‘Listen to me.’ She enunciated her words with comical exaggeration. ‘I can manage fine without you!’
‘I’ll make you a coffee before I leave; at least let me do that. It’ll help allay my guilt.’
Audrey laughed. ‘Fine, if it makes you feel better. Make yourself one too and we can have a quick chat while it’s still quiet.’
Second Chances charity shop was situated right in the middle of town on a busy side street off the main pedestrian shopping drag, West Gate. We enjoyed a steady buzz of custom most days. Audrey was a choosier manager than most, and I laughingly collected her worst opinions about stock. ‘We don’t want any old rubbish,’ she’d tell people shortly if their donations fell short of her expectations. Last month there’d been a toe-curling rebuttal for a customer trying to offload a well-worn mac: ‘If you think it’s too tatty to wear any more, what makes you think our customers would want it?’
Cringeworthy comments aside, the obvious advantage of her candour was that our stock was of consistently good quality, always keenly priced, and we now had a small army of regular customers who came from far and wide to browse, hoping to grab a bargain. Audrey was at the stage where she knew some of our regular buyers’ tastes and would even call them if we had something come in she thought they might be interested in.
At that moment, a customer entered the shop, so I went through to put the kettle on. There were three rooms back here: a kitchenette, the staff office and a small cloakroom. I filled the kettle and set it boiling, then went into the office. It surprised me to see the lights already on in there, with the computer monitor displaying a spreadsheet and paperwork spread all over the desk. Audrey had an inherent dislike of admin, particularly anything involving numbers, and usually left any updating of the stock inventory or maintenance of our simple accounting software to me.
I leaned forward to peer at the monitor. I couldn’t see properly without my reading glasses but I hoped she wasn’t making a mess of the inventory. That job had taken me weeks to get ready to submit to head office.
‘Oh there you are!’ Her voice rang out directly behind me, making me jump back from the desk. ‘Everything OK in here?’
‘Fine,’ I said with a grin. ‘Just making sure you’re not messing up my hard work.’
‘Kettle’s just boiled.’ She inched past me and pressed a few buttons on the keyboard. The monitor instantly went black. ‘I was just checking we had everything up to date. My contact at head office tipped me off the auditors are visiting various premises, and I didn’t want us to be caught out.’
‘Was it the stock sheet?’ I said as she quickly scooped up the paperwork. ‘I finished updating it last Monday.’
‘Yes, I remember you saying now.’ Audrey slid the papers into a folder and headed for the office door.
‘Is … is anything wrong?’ I said faintly, notin
g the harassed look on her face.
‘What? No, no, nothing’s wrong,’ she said quickly. ‘Now, where’s that coffee you promised me?’
I shrugged off an uncomfortable churning in my stomach. Had I done something I shouldn’t have? Maybe I’d made a costly mistake and Audrey didn’t want to worry me. She was definitely being evasive.
I took our coffees through to the shop.
‘So,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling? Goodness knows you’ve been waiting for this moment for long enough.’
‘I’m … OK. I think.’
She peered at me. ‘You look a bit peaky. Nerves, that’s all it’ll be. Perfectly normal.’
I took a sip of my coffee. ‘I’m the world’s best worrier, you know that. I keep fretting whether I’ve done the right thing.’
‘In what way?’
‘You know, getting everything organised so Tom can hit the ground running. So he doesn’t have to worry about a job and money.’ I let out a sigh. ‘You know what I’m like, planning the hell out of everything. Robert’s already had a go at me.’ I grinned, but it was only to stop the emotion getting hold of me.
‘Just go easy on yourself, love. You’ve moved mountains finding Tom a job and a flat. You can ease up now.’
‘Thanks, Audrey. I just have to feel in control. Getting things ready for him is the only way I can handle the stress of it all. Robert thinks I’m overkill, but then he always does.’
‘Well forgive me for saying, but what you’ve done for Tom is a hell of a lot more than Robert ever has. Is he still acting a bit weird? I know you said he’d been distant lately.’
‘He seems fine now,’ I said, thinking about Robert’s odd behaviour. Shutting himself away in his office until late and going for long walks alone. I suspected he was worried about money but I didn’t know why. We’d always been comfortable financially with modest savings. ‘I think it might be Tom’s release that’s on his mind. Robert detests anything affecting his routine, but for all his bluster and snide comments, he may have actually been fretting that everything would work out, you know?’ I didn’t realise until I’d said the words that this might be a valid observation. ‘He likes to play the hard man when it comes to feelings, but if you go deep enough, he has got a soft centre.’
‘Hmm, well I’ll take your word for that, Jill. I don’t know much about deep mining,’ Audrey quipped, and I couldn’t help laughing.
But I knew she got it. We’d met on the first day of college, where we were both studying English and sociology A levels, and had been firm friends ever since.
Audrey put her mug down on the cash desk. ‘Right, I don’t mean to rush you but I really must get on. Sorry.’
‘No problem,’ I said, ignoring the grumbling worry that something might be happening behind the scenes she wasn’t sharing with me. ‘We can catch up soon.’
‘Good luck and enjoy your two weeks off.’
I felt like she was rushing me to leave and I had another compulsion to ask her if everything was OK but instead I moved towards the door.
I’d got enough to deal with right now. I didn’t need another crisis on my hands.
Seven
Tom
After lunch, Tom pushed his small toiletries bag into his rucksack and buckled it up.
For a long time he’d imagined this moment over and over, like Groundhog Day, and he’d assumed that when it finally arrived, he’d be bouncing off the walls, sick with nerves but desperate to get out and taste sweet freedom.
Now it was actually here, he didn’t feel any of that – except perhaps the nerves bit. The whole experience seemed completely surreal. He felt as though some pompous official might arrive at any moment and inform him there had been a terrible administrative error and that he had a few more years to serve before they were able to release him.
They’d brought him down from his cell late morning and into this small holding space, the exact spot he’d arrived with a vast ten-year stretch ahead of him. He turned in a slow circle to take in his surroundings one last time, staring at the stark white walls and the minuscule window set high to give tantalising glimpses of the sky.
He wouldn’t miss a single thing about this hole.
From the moment he’d arrived, every day had been virtually identical with nothing to set them apart. For the first few weeks, time ran on one unbroken linear track with nothing to distinguish one hour from the next. He’d never felt desperation like it.
As someone who’d always regarded suicide as a selfish choice and the coward’s way out, he’d quickly come to understand how people might feel hopeless enough to take their own life. In here, at least.
With each sunset and subsequent sunrise, every fibre of him believed he couldn’t physically withstand another day, that his heart would surely stop of its own accord. And, when he did survive, he truly believed he wouldn’t make it through the next twenty-four hours.
But slowly, very slowly, he came to learn another lesson: how tenacious and indomitable the human spirit was.
From a place deep within him, a place he’d been completely unaware of, he’d felt a change gradually come. A quelling of the fire of injustice that raged in his heart, giving way to patience and finally – most importantly – an acceptance of the situation he found himself in.
This process had taken years, but after that, things became more tolerable.
Life on the outside and the family he’d left behind seemed like a fiction to him, a good story he’d once read and enjoyed. He found comfort in the pastel-coloured memories of long ago. His mother and her home-made tiramisu; the bitter-sweet memory of the clock repair workshop his dad had set up in the garage when Tom was a kid. He missed the times way back when he and his father would sometimes do stuff together. Before things became difficult between them.
His mum had visited him like clockwork in prison, twice a month. His father, grudgingly, once or twice a year. There had been times he wished she’d come less often, because it was so difficult looking into her eyes and seeing the hurt, the denial and, more than anything, the pure desperation to have him home again. She couldn’t accept that he had done the crime and must serve the time. Even now, ten years later, her viewpoint hadn’t budged an inch.
In all that time, nothing had really changed in here aside from the language the officers used. Prisoners were no longer ‘convicts’ or ‘inmates’. Now they often referred to them as ‘residents’. The concrete box he’d been living in was apparently a ‘room’, not a ‘cell’, even though he’d never been in a room so bleak and soulless.
Prison had largely been a desolate, miserable experience – until the last couple of years of his sentence at least. And then, about twenty months ago, in this place where nothing new ever happened, something had happened. Something that changed his outlook, his life and his entire future, thanks to the love and forgiveness of Bridget Wilson.
The news of their marriage would be a terrible shock for his mother, and that worried him, as her health had suffered with him being inside. She was on medication to treat both anxiety and depression.
But he refused to let that stop him from making a stand and putting an end to certain things that had gone on so long he almost didn’t notice them any more.
Like the way his mother talked to him as if he were a fifteen-year-old kid who needed her help, protection and care. What Tom really needed was to be given the space to build his own life again. During her last few visits, Jill hadn’t once asked him what he wanted from life in the future. Instead, she’d talked incessantly about her plans for him on his release.
She meant well, he knew that. She was trying to help him, the only way she knew how. But it was still hell to just sit there saying nothing and nodding in all the right places. Bridget had told him how she’d telephoned Jill and even called at the house a few months after Jesse’s death but his mother had put the phone down on her and shut the door in her face. Jill had never mentioned that on her regular visits; the only time she’d sp
oken Bridget’s name was scornfully, berating her for the publicity she was courting as a grieving mother who ran a charity.
Bridget had already told Jesse’s ex, Coral, and his son, Ellis, about the wedding.
‘How did they take it?’ Tom had ventured, almost not wanting to know.
Bridget had shrugged and said simply, ‘They’ll get used to it. They just need time.’
Telling his parents the news on the day of his release had seemed the obvious choice a few weeks ago, but now it was upon him, he felt apprehensive. A small part of him hoped that if he explained everything to his mother, she’d somehow find it within herself to give their marriage her blessing.
The visitors’ hall had definitely not been the place to tell her what he’d done. It had to take place outside the prison. He’d look her in the eye and explain why he wouldn’t be needing her help after all.
His life had transformed in ways he could never have imagined, and it was all thanks to Bridget and her unconditional love.
The door to the room opened and a security officer he hadn’t seen before appeared.
‘Ready, Mr Billinghurst? Your parents have arrived to take you home.’
It was the moment he’d dreamed of for so long. The moment he’d envisaged himself punching the air and yelling out in pure ecstasy at regaining his freedom.
Instead, with a fluttering sensation in his stomach, he picked up his rucksack and walked out of the door.
It was time to put the past behind him.
Eight
1994
It was the third week Bridget had attended the playgroup with three-year-old Jesse, and in that time, she’d been spoken to just twice. There had been the mum who mumbled ‘Sorry!’ as she’d dragged her small daughter away when the child ventured too close to Jesse, then the mother who told her when she arrived that the seat she was about to sit on wasn’t free because she was saving it for her friend.