‘But such things don’t belong together,’ Dr Janice told my Mam.
My Mam said that Dr Janice got angry and even started swearing. She wasn’t angry at my Mam. But when she mentioned the flytrapping, Dr Janice said, ‘And what was it, Shelagh? In truth, what was it? Just a few lads playing with their plonkers and dreaming up a bit of disgusting business with a few flies. That’s all it was. It was nothing, until an appallingly pathetic jerk of a headmaster got hold of it and managed to turn a splendidly ingenious if, admittedly, mildly mucky canalside game into an act of scandalous filth and obscenity.’
Janice nodded at my Mam. And Dr Janice’s voice was really angry then as she told my Mam, ‘But that’s all just fucking bollocks, Shelagh!’
My Mam said she just sat there with her jaw dropped open. She’d never even heard a doctor say ‘bloody’ before, let alone ‘bollocks’ and the ‘f’ word.
‘Total bollocks!’ Janice said again. ‘Just some fucked-up headmaster who might have been a damn sight better if he’d once waved his own dick around and caught a fly or two!’
My Mam said she was just sat there blushing all colours. But Dr Janice didn’t seem to care. And she told my Mam, ‘But you don’t question that headmaster, do you, Shelagh? No!’ she said, with the anger still in her voice. ‘Because you have been living in dread! You’ve been waiting for exactly this kind of abomination. Because you’ve been walking round for years with the idea that Raymond’s father was some kind of mental case. And all that time you’ve been waiting … waiting for some sign that Raymond himself might turn out to be … not quite all there. And when, finally, he gets into a bit of bother with this flytrapping business, it’s almost some kind of relief to you because here at last is the confirmation of the dread you’ve been carrying around for all those years. It doesn’t fit, of course. It doesn’t fit remotely. But that doesn’t matter to you, Shelagh, because you’ve got the fear and the sticky glue of fear can make anything fit together. So you take the flycatching’ – Janice was holding up her hand as if there was something in it and my Mam sat there staring at the fist full of filthy goings-on – ‘and what do you do with this flycatching business, Shelagh?’ Janice lifted up her other hand and told my Mam, ‘You put it with this. You put it where it doesn’t belong, mashing and mixing it all up with the family fear, where it doesn’t belong, with your ex-husband’s eccentricity, where it doesn’t belong! And the next thing is, Shelagh, you’re sticking all kinds of things together. Your son comes out with a bit of smut in front of his cousin. It’s nothing. What’s that, kids and a bit of smut? When was it ever any different? But you don’t see that, Shelagh. No, what you see is more of the same. You see a lad who suddenly needs to be taken to see a psychotherapist. You see dirtiness and badness and you see a son who’s shaping up to turn out much more seriously doolally than his dad ever was! And when he ends up back at that canal, you see a son who was intending to kill himself.’
They stared at each other, my Mam and Janice. My Mam sat there looking slightly bewildered and Dr Janice breathing heavily and staring at my Mam.
Until, very quietly, my Mam asked her, ‘Wasn’t he? Wasn’t he trying to … do away with himself?’
Dr Janice shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘not in my opinion.’
My Mam said that that’s when she started crying, with all the relief that flooded through her.
‘It was an extremely dangerous thing that he did,’ Dr Janice said, ‘and the end result could easily have been … But if we’re talking about intention, no. I don’t think for a second that Raymond had any intention of trying to kill himself. In his own way it was a sort of … rational thing, trying to find his way to being nice again.’
My Mam sighed and dabbed at her eyes with her hankie. And then she asked Dr Janice, ‘Will he ever do something like that again?’
Dr Janice looked at my Mam and she said, ‘Shelagh, I’m a psychiatrist, not a prophet.’
My Mam just nodded. And then Janice said, ‘But … well, as a psychiatrist, I shouldn’t even be talking like this … But, no, I don’t think he will do it again. If … if you can help him get it into his head that you’re not … blaming him any longer, then no. With a bit of luck I think you’ll both be able to put all this behind you.’
‘And all that weird stuff he was coming out with last night,’ my Mam said, ‘saying he wasn’t really my son … and he was the wrong boy …’
Janice smiled then as she got to her feet and started leading my Mam out of the office and into the corridor. And as they walked along, Dr Janice said to my Mam, ‘You know all those comics he’s always got his nose stuck into, you know his Marvel comics, have you ever looked at them?’
My Mam shook her head.
‘Well, you should take a look at one or two,’ Janice said. ‘Dual characters, they’re full of that sort of stuff; characters who mutate, characters who become inhabited by different personalities, characters who have twin forces within them, the good and the bad. I’m not saying he’s deliberately taken something from such a comic. But with the kind of imagination Raymond’s got, it’s not too difficult to see how he could have come up with a concept like the Wrong Boy.’
Janice put her arm around my Mam then and she said, ‘Just take him home. Go on. Go and get him and take him home. And try to remember what we were saying, Shelagh, about sticking together things that don’t belong.’
My Mam nodded. They’d got to the end of the corridor. My Mam said, ‘It’s all my fault this, isn’t it? It’s me that’s caused all this.’
But Janice shook her head and told my Mam, ‘Fault doesn’t come into it, Shelagh. It’s not your—’
‘No, listen,’ my Mam interrupted her. She nodded her head and said, ‘You’re right. What you told me before … about always having this … dread. You’re right. I’m afraid. I’ve always been afraid. And being afraid is what’s caused a lot of this, isn’t it?’
Janice just shrugged. And my Mam said, ‘Well, I’m promising you here and now, doctor. You’ve got my word that from now on, I’m going to do my best not to be afraid, because you’re right and I’m grateful and I can see that I’ve been stupid about all sorts of things.’
My Mam said, later, that it was funny but as she watched Janice walking away down that hospital corridor she wanted to run after her and stay with her and keep Janice with her all the time. Because, my Mam said, there was something about Janice that made my Mam feel safe.
But my Mam knew it was a stupid thing, wanting to stop a person, a doctor person you didn’t even really know, just so that you could still have that person near you.
So instead my Mam just stood there for a second and repeated the solemn promise she’d made to herself; the promise that she’d do what Janice had told her to do, and that from now on she was going to try not to be afraid and not to be worried and not to let all the things get glued together and made into something that lay heavy in the pit of her belly.
And when I turned around in my bed I thought it was one of the nurses come to see me. But it was my Mam. And she was carrying my clothes and smiling and looking at me like she loved me again.
And she said, ‘Come on, son. We’re going home.’
And that day, when we walked out of the hospital, it felt like it was a new beginning. My Mam told me that she understood everything now and that that headmaster had been a bastard the way he’d put all the blame on me.
‘And all those mothers and all those bloody kids of theirs,’ my Mam said, ‘all of them, treating me and you like dirt! And it wasn’t even nowt worth talking about in the first place, the doctor said, Dr Janice. And if a young doctor like that can say it was just a bit of kids’ malarkey, that’s good enough for me. So they can all sod off, the Mrs Weatherbys and the Bradwicks and the bloody Donna Duckworths.’
My Mam linked her arm through mine then and pulled me close to her. ‘Sod them, love,’ she said. ‘Sod them all. Me and you, we’ll be all right, won’t we?’
I
looked up at my Mam and I nodded my head because I knew everything would be all right now because my Mam understood and she was my proper Mam again because she wasn’t looking at me like I was a wrong boy any more.
I can remember exactly the way the sun was slanting through the trees that day when we walked down the hospital drive, and the shards of bright yellow that cut through the gaps in the avenue of trees were like shafts of light that shined down from heaven. I didn’t really believe in heaven, not like it was in the Bible and RE lessons and assembly. But my Gran always said there was a kind of heaven and it was here on earth, even though that was sometimes difficult to imagine when you had to take account of the appalling fact of things like the Arndale Centre and organised religion and Rolf Harris.
‘But if you’re alert to it,’ my Gran said, ‘and all your vision doesn’t get used up and wasted on the not-worth-botherin’-with, and doesn’t get wearied and worn out by the capacity for cruelty that’s in each and every one of us, if y’ can keep y’self open to it, you’ll find that there is a kind of heaven, Raymond; if you are alert to it and you’re lucky enough, you might even be rewarded by the tiniest fleeting glimpse of it one day.’
And I did see it; I saw a kind of heaven, that day when I was with my Mam and we walked together through all the halos of the sycamore trees. And I think that my Mam must have seen it too; because as we got to the end of the hospital drive, I looked up at my Mam’s face and she was smiling, as if her soul was all filled up with serenity. And I knew that the tears spilling down from her eyes were nothing to do with sadness or worry, but just some of all that serenity spilling out from her. She laughed when she saw me looking at her. And I laughed and all. Then she stopped and took out a hanky and said to me, ‘Listen! How are you feeling?’
I told my Mam I was feeling all right.
‘You’re not too tired,’ she said, ‘or worn out with what’s happened?’
I shook my head and my Mam linked her arm through mine again. ‘Right then,’ she said, ‘come on! We’re not going home yet! We’ll go to town,’ she said, sounding dead excited. ‘Come on, we’ll go to Pizza Pacino’s and have the biggest pizza in the place, with twenty-five toppings if we want. And then we’ll go to the pictures. And after that we’ll go … we’ll go … ten-pin bowling! And we’ll have chantilly milk shakes and gooey doughnuts and splash out on a taxi ride home. Let’s go,’ she said. ‘Me and you, we’re giving ourselves a treat.’
It was lovely, the day out I had with my Mam. And the best part of it wasn’t the pizza or the ten-pin bowling or even going to the pictures. Because the best part was just seeing my Mam being so happy. We stopped off at Urdu’s so that she could have her hair done. And as we were heading up King Street towards Pizza Pacino’s my Mam stopped for a second and glanced at a frock in a boutique window.
And I said, ‘Why don’t you go in an’ buy it, Mam?’
But my Mam laughed and said, ‘Listen to you!’
And she said women of her age didn’t go buying dresses in boutiques full of deafening disco music and slips of girls as slender as summer. She said they’d all be wondering why such an ancient person as my Mam wasn’t shopping in Dorothy Perkins where she belonged. I frowned at that because my Mam wasn’t ancient at all. And when I had friends who came round to our house, they always used to say that my Mam didn’t look like she was a mam at all because she was dead pretty and she could be a film star or a model or something. And even though it made me a bit embarrassed sometimes to hear my friends saying that, it made me feel dead proud and all, having a Mam who didn’t look like a mam.
So I said to her as we stood outside the boutique, ‘You’re not ancient at all. You should buy that dress.’
But my Mam just smiled and shook her head and we started walking up King Street again. Then suddenly, without warning, my Mam just stopped, right in the middle of the pavement. And she looked at me and said, ‘No! You’re right, son! You and Dr Janice, you’re right. We’ve had enough of being afraid, haven’t we. Come on,’ she said.
And she turned right round and marched back to the boutique.
She got new shoes as well as the new dress. And she asked the assistant to wrap up her old shoes and her old dress because she was leaving the new ones on. She looked fantastic, my Mam. She looked much better than all the slender girls as slim as summer. And when we were in Pizza Pacino’s, the waiter with the pepper-grinder and the handlebar moustache kept winking at my Mam and saying, ‘Ciao, bella,’ even though you could tell he came from Prestwick or Stockport or somewhere like that. My Mam said he was a bit too forward for her liking and she felt a bit uncomfortable. But you could tell she didn’t really. And even though normally I’d be a bit fed up and frowning at somebody winking at my Mam and saying ‘Ciao, bella,’ I wasn’t that day. I was just glad that my Mam looked happy. And pretty. And as young as she truly was.
And when I asked her which film she wanted to see, my Mam looked at me like she was all shocked and said, ‘The Return of the Jedi of course!’
She surprised me, saying that. Because my Mam was always dead bored with all the Star Wars stuff and the last time we’d gone to see Return of the Jedi she’d even fallen asleep. And that was only the fifth time we’d seen it!
So I said it didn’t matter and we didn’t have to go and see a Star Wars film and my Mam could pick the picture if she liked. But my Mam wouldn’t have it and she insisted and said, ‘No! I want to go and see Return of the Jedi.’
I thought perhaps she was being nice and putting up with it because I’d just been in the hospital. But it was like she was really really interested and when we came out of the pictures and even all through the ten-pin bowling and the gooey doughnuts, my Mam kept asking me all sorts of questions about what you had to do to become a Jedi Warrior and why the Wookies and the Ewoks didn’t have light sabres. And she never looked bored for a single minute. She even got Obi-Wan Kenobi’s name right so I know she must have been really genuinely interested. Because before that, whenever I’d be talking about Star Wars to my Mam, she’d get it wrong and call him Obi John Kenobi or something stupid like that.
On that day though, the day she collected me from the hospital and took me out to town, the day she looked young and lovely and said that from now on she was going to be brave, on that day, there was nothing remotely stupid in anything my Mam did or said.
That day, all the stupidity was happening somewhere else; where things were going on; things that I didn’t know about, not then. Things I’d only ever find out about years and years later.
I was in town with my Mam. And before that I’d been in hospital. So I’d never even heard about it. And the night before, my Mam had been so worried about me that she couldn’t be doing with the television or the radio. So neither me nor my Mam had watched the North West News or heard the broadcasts on GMR. And so we never knew about the little girl who’d gone missing; about a search, in the park, about sheds and back alleys and garages being scoured. We never knew about the sandal that had been discovered at the side of the allotment, the scuffed brown sandal with the broken clasp.
Neither me nor my Mam had heard anything about that.
Just like we’d known nothing about the press conference and the parents, the father with his arm around his wife’s shoulders as he appealed for anyone who had any kind of information to come forward and assist the police in their search for his beautiful, beloved, happy-go-lucky little daughter. He broke down crying then. His wife didn’t cry though. His wife just sat there looking like she was a dead person. And, as the detective sergeant told the interviewer, that’s what it does to you when you suddenly have to live a nightmare, like Mr and Mrs Patterson were living a nightmare; the worst kind of nightmare, the kind of nightmare that every parent dreads.
It cut to pictures of the vigil then; the neighbours, the mothers who knew the child, all of them gathered outside the house, holding candles in the dark and vowing they’d stay for as long as they had to, telling the lady fro
m Granada News that they’d stay for ever if need be, staying and praying for the little girl who always had a smile on her face and was such a happy fun-loving child. And the lady with the microphone turned to Mrs Machonochie and asked her if there was one particular word with which she could sum up little Paulette for the viewers. Mrs Machonochie choked back a sob, wiped her eye with a tissue and told the viewers that there were so many lovely words which could be used to describe little Paulette. Then Mrs Machonochie broke down in tears and was comforted by Mrs Kershall as the lady with the microphone nodded her sympathetic understanding, and the camera tracked in, lingering on the anguished face of Mrs Machonochie as the interviewer handed back to the studio where they went into the commercial break with a picture of the little girl dressed in a sort of school uniform; smiling, slightly anxious perhaps, but smiling, doing her best to look like a nice little girl.
We never saw that picture though, my Mam and me.
We hadn’t seen the telly or listened through the night, like the neighbours had, pursuing their candlelit vigil and listening in to the hourly news bulletins, feeling some kind of personal betrayal as, during the night, the lead story slid from pre-eminence, becoming merely another news item, jockeying to hold any kind of position at all as it competed with fresher tragedies, more up-to-the-minute dramas.
And then, when, as Mrs Keogh had said, ‘It was starting to look like the bloody world out there had forgotten poor little Paulette,’ on the 6 a.m. bulletin from GMR, the name of Paulette Patterson suddenly topping the news once more, the announcer’s voice adopting a note of appropriate gravity as he reported ‘new developments’ in the search for the missing child.
The Wrong Boy Page 18