Random Acts of Unkindness

by Jacqueline Ward

  It all came to a head in 2007 when that little girl went missing in Portugal. At first I was sure she’d be found, but when I saw her mother, with her empty eyes and her sadness, I recognised it straight away. That woman was like me, living a life, holding her husband’s hand, but the story running through her mind was a rerun of that day, wondering what she could have done better.

  They say she left the kiddies in a room while she went across the road for dinner. Well, I can tell you, I left Thomas in his cot while I nipped next door for a brew, but it didn’t mean I loved him any less. It just means that I’d underestimated the dangers. Dangers like child killers. We all knew they were there somewhere, but we don’t talk about it. No one did before, and no one does now.

  Just after that there was another case where the mother had faked an abduction. It started me thinking about how cruel people can be, how life is hard enough without these things happening. We never talk about them, those dubious situations where a little girl can be hidden in her uncle’s bed. What kind of woman would be party to that?

  The aspersions cast on the other little girl’s mother, the papers saying that her parents killed her. Life is so cruel, and the world is so beautiful. My mind goes full circle to her, an excuse for a woman, someone who could do those horrific things to who knows how many kiddies then blames love?

  I know better than anyone what the moor is like, its terrible beauty. After all, I nearly died there myself. How could she go there time after time and see the crushing beauty, yet know there was such horror? I guess that’s how she got her thrills.

  Somehow it seems more appropriate, more expected to say that about a man, but a woman? Hadn’t she been up there with her dog, something she loved, while they buried the bodies? Hadn’t she, a woman who could have been a mother herself in time, listened to a little girl scream for her own mother? People had still defended her, saying she was swayed by him, that he overpowered her, and maybe there was some truth in that.

  Later in life, though, when she found God and said she carried a burden of guilt and wanted to be forgiven, then, couldn’t she have just told the truth?

  It struck me, as I watched that poor woman whose little girl had been taken in Portugal get thinner and thinner and more drawn, suffering peoples’ comments about her parenting when her little girl was gone, and I realised that I had never told anyone the whole story of how I felt.

  I’d never had the opportunity, in forty years, to tell people I was shrivelled inside. That I still thought about Thomas all the time. No one’s attention span could stand it, because it wasn’t to do with them. It wasn’t their child. From time to time at the missing people groups, I’d still recognise the chilly shell around someone and we’d nod our recognition, but it was too hard to put it into words, and it sounded stupid no matter how you said it.

  There was no getting away from it, like so many others, I was just a body, going on day by day, with no hope for the future. I looked in the drawer of the dressing table and there were forty birthday cards and forty Christmas cards. I’d stopped washing Thomas’s sheets now, but I still laid the table for him.

  I still looked at young boys, only the other week I saw someone in Manchester who looked like Thomas and followed him up Piccadilly. Of course, it couldn’t be him. Because Thomas would be sixty-odd now. I was losing my grip and things were slipping. On the outside, I was the same old Bessy, but inside I was an old woman, confused and upset.

  I’d had to stop going to missing person meetings because I was falling asleep. The hospital had written to me and told me that I needed to contact the DVLA to have my licence retested, or I might not be driving legally.

  One sunny morning, after I’d been up the moor, I set off for the solicitor’s and gave him my instructions. I knew it wouldn’t be long now, I’d been online researching my options and how long people live, and I’d made all the decisions I needed to make about my future.

  All I could do now was carry on with my routine until the time came. Like I mentioned before, I’ve never been able to tell anyone all this before, that Sarah woman was the closest I came and she didn’t give a toss, she just wanted my money. It’s not such a bad world on the face of it, but if you scratch the surface you’ll find that human life is very shallow, and the best pleasures are in the depths of nature.

  We’ll Share the Moon

  So, I’m popping this in the box upstairs on my way to the airport, past the park where Thomas used to play, past Daisy Nook. Past the Market, and I can just see all those nosy buggers pointing and saying ‘There she goes, that Bessy, shirking her responsibilities.‘ I can see them now, Macs and headscarves all over the place, pecking at peoples’ misery like a kit of pigeons at dawn.

  Actually, they’re nearly all dead now, and so are some of their children. I keep a look out in the obituaries of the Ashton Reporter and they’re dropping like flies.

  I was never one for funerals so I never went to any of theirs. Why should I? They made my life a bloody misery, pointing and calling me and making out I was a bad woman because Colin left me. A bad mother because my son disappeared.

  If I could go back and have that time again, just after he went, I’d stand in the middle of the market and tell them how much I cared about him, about the clouds and the geese and the birds, and how I made his butties every day with more love than I knew I had.

  They wouldn’t have listened, though. They just wanted something to talk about, something to rip apart, before the days when we got all that from Eastenders and Corrie. I can remember the days when we had no telly at all, nothing to stare at all day, and you could count the people you knew and things you’d been told on two hands.

  Now, with the telly and that Internet, you can find out anything. Those women, they were a fickle lot. Some of them even called me mad, crazy, and said I should have been locked up. Happen they were right, because that’s what happened to most of the other parents with missing children.

  I’ve suppose you’re wondering why I’ve decided to go? Well, it’s partly because I got a letter the other day from the DVLC asking me to surrender my driving licence. It turns out I’ve got cataracts, and I had noticed that I couldn’t see as well at nights.

  They can’t operate because of my age, and Ben Hartley down the road had his done and he can’t see at all now. I’d been for my hospital appointment, sitting waiting in a room full of families. All the other old people had someone with them, their family or friends, someone sitting looking worried about the misty-eyed blurriness of old age.

  I suppose they were all standing on the edge of an abyss, wondering when their moment would be. Donkey’s years ago, just after Colin died, it seemed almost impossible that the day would come when I would too.

  In that hospital waiting room I could almost taste the moment. I had a bit of a laugh to myself, betting that none of these folk had football season tickets or holidays booked; most of them looked like they were falling to bits.

  They’d called me in and messed about with my eyes for a bit, and told me they couldn’t do anything with them. They’d stared at me for a long moment, expecting me to burst into tears or at least hold my hand across my mouth. I knew what I should do; I’d seen it on the TV on Casualty. A bit of hysteria, or some tight question would have fitted nicely, but as I’m already dead inside, I couldn’t make the effort.

  They asked me to sit in the waiting room, and as I walked through I wondered if anyone had popped off while I was in there. Half an hour later, they called me back in and that nice little Dr Hussein was sitting there. She’d taken my hand and shouted at me like young people do to old people.

  ‘Now, Bessy, are you all right? I’m glad I’ve got you here. You didn’t come back for your appointment.’

  I just shook my head and looked in my handbag for my car keys. But she carried on.

  ‘So. I’m going to send a social worker round to your house. You can’t carry on living alone, Bessy, not now your eyes are going. Do you understand?’


  I’d sighed heavily and looked at the door.

  ‘Can I go now?’

  ‘Yes. But we’ll send someone round as soon as we can. I’m afraid you’ll have to stop driving as well, Bessy. And we’ll find you a place in sheltered accommodation, with lots of company.’

  I got up and went, and I could see them, exasperated looks on their faces, silently agreeing with each other that I was losing my mind. I knew that what was actually happening was that I wasn’t agreeing with them. I suppose I could have sat in all day, staring at the television, just like a lot of other old people do, but it wouldn’t be the same. I’d made my life for myself, set it up a certain way, and at my age you don’t want any change.

  Anyway, I’ve put my car keys in with my house keys. I’ve sold the car to a nice young man at the end of the road, number 32, he’s agreed I can keep it ‘til I go; I told him I was going to live with my son, and I suppose in a way I am. If whoever could take it over to him I’d be ever so grateful. And the house. I’ve instructed my solicitor to make sure Mr Connelly knows after I’ve gone.

  There’s a bit of money put away and that’ll go to Mothers for the Missing. Hopefully they’ll use it to buy a bigger television for the community centre, and some proper coffee. They’ve gone global, now, you know, our little group. They’ve got a website and a Twitter and a Facey book. They can put pictures up what everyone in the world can see, so that wherever they are there’s a better chance of them seeing it and coming back.

  We can see other people too and it told us that there are still a lot of people missing, but most of them turn up. It’s just the people like me, and a small group of other mothers, who drop under life’s radar, suffering an unbearable torture inside while we try to act normally in our outside lives.

  Everything else can go to charity. I’ve packed up what I can from the bedrooms up and boxed them, they’re on the floor in the front room, and I’ve put address labels on them. Except Thomas’s room. I’ve left that as it is, just in case. I expect that if you’ve found the letters, you’ve found that poor little mite. But I hope you can see that there was no malice, I just didn’t know what to do. No. Not at all. I hope everyone understands that, I really do.

  The thing I’m most worried about is the birds. The little blackbirds in the back garden. I can’t bear the thought that they’ll be sitting outside my kitchen window, hungry and waiting for food. It makes me feel like when Thomas first went, and the other one in the phone box, as if I was abandoning someone.

  I can’t stop them coming, either. They know where the food is, where to look. I like to think that from the first one I made friends with, Jack, then Jill, these are all their family. Over the years they’ve come back, and I’ve helped to bring them up, like I could have with my own if it hadn’t have been cut short.

  One year I found a baby bird, it’d fallen out of the nesting box, and I took it inside. It was so small that it was all heart, a visible beating in its chest while it lay still, occasionally opening its mouth for a bite to eat.

  I fed it with a little dropper and wrapped it up in some tissue paper in a box. It grew and grew into a bigger chick, then I’d let it out on the kitchen table and it walk about, chirping and eating bits of bread. It was tiny and at first I thought it was a wren, but then it grew a red patch on its chest and I knew it was a robin.

  One day, when I was feeding it some birdseed I’d bought from Schofield’s hardware specially, it hopped up to the sink. I thought it was after a drink from the water I left there for the blackbirds, but it flapped and fluttered and flew up to the open window.

  It sat there for a minute, then glided onto the holly bush, making a perfect Christmas picture in May. Then it flew away. It never came back, and somewhere inside I felt a little bit better because I knew it could survive without me. And I suppose Jack and Jill’s kiddies will. I’ve left a note with the estate agent to tell anyone he shows round about them, but I don’t expect he will, because I could tell by his face that the ravings of a mad old woman would put the buyers off.

  You know, I like to think of someone as doing what Thomas would do when I’m gone. It’s one of the things that’s made me put this off, the thought that everything would just be left. I found out about it last year, when it was on the telly.

  I’d thought about it lots of times, especially since that day at the hospital, when I realised that one day I wouldn’t have to wake up to this. I’d heard a story that someone who did it went to hell, and although I’m not a believer, I’m backing my odds both ways—how do I know that Colin and Thomas aren’t up there waiting for me? Knowing my luck, it’d go wrong anyway, and it’d just be another thing to weigh on my mind, another thing I’d failed at.

  So I’d rung them up, and it took me a while because it was a foreign number and I had to get the dialling code through BT. When I did get through, I made an appointment in Manchester for the next week. The man was very nice, and he explained to me what I would have to do, the aeroplane and all that, did I have a passport, where I would go and how much it would cost.

  I met him five times over the next couple of months, and by then I was convinced. So I went home and filled the forms in, wrote a cheque for £9,247 and pressed the envelope closed, but the next day when I went up on the moor I got a funny feeling that it was going to happen anyway soon. After all, I’m in my eighties, and I can’t go on forever. I’d decided against it while I was up there, as if it was wrong, because although it was so bleak and dull, it was alive in another way, and I was a part of it. I was walking through it every day and without me there it just wouldn’t be the same, would it?

  I’d come off the moor that day and driven home thinking that I wouldn’t do it, I’d stay as I was and just wait for something to happen. I knew that some people lived until they were a hundred, and I just couldn’t bear another ten years or more living like this. On the other hand, I’d still have my blackbirds.

  When I got home that day, I let myself in and there were two women sitting in my living room. It’d been a shock at first, and my stomach lurched at the thought that someone had died, but then I realised that there was only me left. They’d come to get me.

  ‘It’s all right, Bessy. We let ourselves in through the back door. Did you know you’d left it open, love? Of course not. Let me make you a cuppa.’

  They were in the kitchen, touching my things. One of them snapped the window shut and I could see the birds outside on the sill, shut out of my world now, as the women moved my pots around.

  ‘We’ve had a bit of a tidy up, Bessy. We’ve ordered a home help for you, twice a week, until we find you something else.’

  I sat down heavily. If I was weary before, I was desperately tired now.

  ‘I don’t need anyone here. I’m all right. Can you just go, please?’

  They ignored me, tutting at the brown rings on my white kitchen surfaces, the smell of bleach cutting through the ciggie mist. I took one out of the packet and lit it up. One of the women turned.

  ‘Could I ask you not to do that, Bessy? This is our workplace and we reserve the right to be respected in our workplace.’

  She turned back to her scrubbing, the other one pulling a mop out of a bucket, breaking the cobwebs and scattering dust everywhere. Respect. That was a good word. Where was my respect?

  All I wanted to do was live here quietly until the day I didn’t wake up in the morning. I just wanted to carry on with the deep groove I’d driven into the world, my routine, my time.

  I’d managed to keep out of sight mostly for the biggest part of my life, hiding in my home, visiting the usual places, no variation because it always ended like this. The normal people, those who were charged with the care of us slightly imperfect human beings, taking over and shovelling hardcore into the groove we have ordered our lives with, smoothing over the crack with whatever means they can.

  I know they mean well, and I know it’s their job. I know that they do deserve respect in their workplace, as they’re no
w calling my home, so I stub out the cigarette.

  ‘You shouldn’t leave that door open, Bessy, someone might come in and steal your things.’

  I snigger at the thought of someone stealing piles of old newspapers and Thomas’s clothes from the sixties, and they look knowingly at each other. I could almost see them ticking the dementia boxes on their sheets, neither of them having asked me anything at all about my life, what I’d been through, or anything.

  ‘We’ve had a bit of a tidy up and we’ve brought some forms with us, applications for sheltered accommodation, where you’ll be with other people your own age. They have bingo and even karaoke.’ She makes a swaying movement with her body and they both laugh. ‘They’ll make your meals and you’ll have some limited cooking facilities, a shared laundry, and suchlike. Is that OK, Bessy? Do you know what karaoke is, love?’

  I nodded and sipped the tea they’ve made. One of them is telling a story about how her sister is good at karaoke, and I was dying for a ciggie. I open the window again and one of the birds flew in and sat on the sink. I broke up a cracker and sprinkled it on the side. The woman in blue stood behind me.

  ‘Shoo. Out, go on, out. Bessy, that’s not very hygienic. Birds in your house. And all those crumbs.’ Her hands were on her hips and she turned to her friend. ‘We’re going to have to action this sooner rather than later. I’m gonna have to ring social services.’

  They got their coats on and the other one smiled at me.

  ‘It’ll probably take a couple of months to set you up, Bessy, and sort this place out, but in the long run it’ll be better for you.’ I just looked at the floor as they opened the front door. She turned back quickly. ‘Oh, and that letter on the mantelpiece, behind the clock, I’ve run up the road posted it for you.’

  The door slammed shut behind them and I thought, ‘Well, that’s that, then.’

  Someone else had made the decision for me. I was glad in a way, because if she hadn’t posted the letter I’d be in the old people’s home by now, or the bottom block if they had their way.