by Katy Regan
‘He can’t get it off,’ they were all saying, laughing. Luke was laughing so much he was crying. Tears were rolling down his face like a baby. ‘If you’re gonna start wearing a bra, then you need to know how to undo it, Jabba!’
I didn’t run then, not then. I just picked up my stuff and held the jumper in front of me so you couldn’t see the bra. My face and my stomach stung like crazy from all the little stones digging in and the bra was digging into my side too – the hard wires at the front were all twisted – but I was determined not to cry. ‘You’re just all tragic,’ I said and they copied me: You’re just all tragic.
‘Good luck getting your bra off!’ Aidan shouted. ‘It looks nice, though, and we’ve got it on video.’
And then I ran, faster than I’ve ever run. To the light, and the street. To home.
Chapter Thirty
Juliet
With just the two of us in the house, the dynamic can be intense. There’s nowhere to hide if there’s tension or an argument; no other parent or sibling to turn to, or moan at, to share the emotional load of just being someone’s parent, someone’s son. I’ve never felt that more than this week when, since Manchester and finding out that I lied to him, Zac has been so angry with me. He’s not said anything. It’s not Zac’s style to lash out, but he’s shown me in his defiant buying of sweets on the way home from school, not bothering to hide the empty wrappers in the pockets of his school trousers; his refusal to get up in good time for the bus, so that I’m rushing him and nagging him to get dressed and out of the door. I know he’s hurting but there’s no easy way out of this. If we were going to venture down this road, there was always going to be pain.
It’s like the weather knows about the turbulence in our house and in our lives, because it doesn’t know what to do. One minute, it’s the brightest spring sunshine, the sky china blue, making even our estate look like a place where good things can happen; the next, there’s a downpour – as heavy as if a rugby team were busy emptying buckets of the stuff from the sky. But the sunshine won’t stop; it just carries on blazing straight through that rain, as if competing as to who will win out.
It’s during one of these bizarre blazing sunshine-cum-torrential-downpours, a few days after we got back from Manchester, that I am looking in the cupboards above the wardrobe for some spare light bulbs of all things and I find the shoebox. I’d completely forgotten about it. I never really go in this cupboard anymore, but rummaging amongst Zac’s old board games and boxes containing everything from his old school books to an Ikea toolkit and (yes! light bulbs), I find an old Dolcis shoebox with Me, Pregnant scrawled across it in black marker pen. My heart jolts with the sudden collision of my past and my present. Zac won’t be home for twenty minutes or so, so I take it out, sit on the bed and open it. It contains, amongst other things, the little hospital wristband Zac wore when he was born: male baby of Juliet Hutchinson, it says, in blue pen. (When the midwife handed me this ten-pound, gorgeous bundle she asked me what we were going to call him, but at that time we couldn’t decide between Zachary and Elijah – ‘Since when were you bloody religious?’ Dad had said – and so the midwife wrote baby of … until our baby became Zachary James, which, of course, now seems like some sort of premonition.
Also in the box is the tiger sleepsuit that my brother gave to him and that we brought him home in, and Foxy, his first ever toy. I hold it close and sniff it. It still smells of baby, of my baby – or that could be my imagination – but either way, I find it so hard to believe that that baby is going to be eleven in three weeks, that he starts secondary school in September, that very soon, my little big man will be an actual man and it’s all going so fast.
Far. Too. Fast.
Looking for his dad, finding out what he’s found out in the past few weeks, has, I fear, forced him to grow up faster than he’s ready to, forced the ‘little’ out of ‘little big man’ – a name I’ve always called him, in my mind at least. I don’t know what I thought I was protecting him from by telling him that his dad left before he was even born. I wonder – no, I know – that it wasn’t just him I was protecting; it was myself too.
There’s something else in the box: a small brown envelope with a set of Polaroids inside. They’re pictures that Liam took of me every four weeks or so in my bra and knickers as my bump grew. I look so happy in them, so comfortable with my body, pointing down at my belly, grinning in the one where I’m just beginning to show. And there’s another photo taken in Mum and Dad’s back garden. It’s of Liam bending down and kissing my bump, a starburst of sunlight bouncing off his black, glossy hair, like a crown of light, like something religious, and he’s looking at the camera with a surprised, delighted look on his face and I’m looking down, giggling at him. I thought I’d be relieved when Zac said the search for his dad was off: Thank God, I’ve got away with it for a little while longer. But here’s the thing: I don’t feel relieved, I feel disappointed, because I realize it’s not just Zac who wants answers – it’s me. I need to know why he never came back. I need to know why he never fought for us, or wanted to see his son at least. Most of all, I need to know what really happened that night, because I realize I never actually asked him the details. I just took what Mum said as fact.
The doorbell rings, making me jump. That’s weird, I think, who would be ringing the doorbell at this time? Zac has a key to get in. I quickly put the top back on the shoebox and hurry down the stairs towards the front door. The sun is blaring through the glass, as if there hadn’t been even a drop of rain just ten minutes ago. The air feels still, and I can see a shape – there are two people – but it’s what I hear that turns my stomach to ice: this animal cry. My baby.
I fling open the door.
‘I just found him like this, on the corner of Guildford Street, so I walked him home …’ There’s a woman – I’d say she’s in her sixties – standing on my doorstep with her arm around Zac.
‘Oh God.’ My baby, what have they done to my baby? ‘Thank you, thank you so much …’
‘Let your mum look after you now, pet,’ she says, rubbing Zac’s arm and smiling; a sad, regretful smile.
The woman leaves and I take Zac inside. He’s sobbing so much he can’t speak, not even to tell me what happened. His face is grazed down one side, and there are spots of blood and particles of grit almost pushed into the soft plumpness of his cheek. He’s wearing his jumper – which is covered in dirt and ripped – but holding his shirt for some reason, and he’s doing that hiccupping crying again, just like he did in Manchester, and I hate it. I can’t bear the sound. I sit him down on the bottom step of the stairs, pull him into me and hold him like that, rocking him and stroking his hair, until finally the hiccups subside and he’s calm.
I don’t realize about the bra until much later, when I have to help him get it off and I see the deep welts it’s left on his skin. I clean the grazes on his stomach and face with cotton wool, ever-so-gently picking out the bits of grit, and put Sudocrem on them, then I put him in his pyjamas and settle him on the settee with some toast. He doesn’t want to talk about it, he says. He just wants to eat his toast and for me not to ask any questions – not now.
We watch telly for a while, him lost in a programme about the feeding habits of sharks and me in my thoughts about how on earth anyone could be so evil to my son who has never knowingly done anything to hurt anyone else in his whole life. Then I ask him what he wants for tea – I say he can have anything he likes. He says chicken Kiev and oven chips, so I go to Costcutter. It’s four forty-five, and just beginning to rain again. I didn’t think to put on a coat when I left – my head’s all over the place – so I run across the estate to the shop, covering my head with a plastic bag – and it’s there, already, like it always is, the little voice, the craving; anything to ease the horrible, empty churning in my stomach, to have some feeling other than this one.
Mr Singh is busy serving a man with his child, making small talk about the ‘schizophrenic’ weather, and I ma
ke a beeline for the freezer. I’m hoping he hasn’t even seen me come into the shop, so I open the freezer, take out the chips and the chicken Kiev, which, I tell myself, I can’t really afford anyway, as I don’t get paid until next week, and it’s for Zac, to help him, to cheer him up after the world has been so cruel to him – surely the world can forgive me this? I wait until I can hear the shop bell indicating the man and his child have left, and I quickly stuff the food into the plastic bag and then under my fleece, freezing cold against my T-shirt, and walk briskly to the door.
‘Hang on a minute!’
I stop dead. Everything seems to stop: the rain, the world, my heart.
‘I wasn’t born yesterday!’
I am frozen, glued to the spot, out of ideas as to what to do, and so, like a slow surrender, I simply let the bag with the food inside fall from underneath my fleece onto the floor and I burst into tears. ‘I’m sorry!’ I cover my face with my hands with the shame, like a child who’s hiding: I can’t see you, so you can’t see me. ‘I’m so sorry! I was going to pay for it,’ I say, which is both patently untrue and completely pathetic in the circumstances.
Mr Singh picks up the food from the floor, quickly and flustered, as if he is as shocked as me with this turn of events.
‘I’ll have to call the police, Juliet,’ he says, his voice steady and calm. ‘You give me no choice. I shall have to call the police and bar you from this shop.’
The horror and seriousness of the situation piles on top of me in an awful avalanche of fear and self-loathing – what have I done? What have I done to my life? Mine and Zac’s life? I’m his mother – he already feels let down by his father, by me for lying to him. He only has me; what will this do to him if he finds out?
‘No, please!’ I’ve still got my hands clamped over my face like a child. ‘Please, please don’t call the police, Mr Singh. I will pay for it, and give you more. I will do anything, anything at all. I will never do it again. Just please don’t call the police. I’ve had a terrible day, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’ And then I sob, because there’s nothing else for it. It feels like my life has just come crashing down around my feet, along with the oven chips and the chicken Kiev, and there is nothing, nothing to be done.
Mr Singh stands in silence, the food in his hands, looking at me as I sob like a baby, like Zac did just half an hour earlier. Finally, I dare to uncover my face for a second, and wipe my eyes and then my nose with my fleece sleeve. ‘Zac came home today,’ I say between sobs, ‘and he’d been bullied so badly. Some boys had put a bra on him, Mr Singh. They’d pinned him down, scraping his face into the concrete, and made him put on a bra, can you believe it? Who would do that to my beautiful child? And he was so devastated, so humiliated. I just wanted to cheer him up. And so I asked him what he wanted for his tea – I told him he could have anything he wanted – and he said oven chips and chicken Kiev but I couldn’t really afford it and I wasn’t thinking straight, I don’t know why I did it … I wish, God, I wish I hadn’t …’
Mr Singh puts the food on the counter. I think he’s going to say, I’m sorry, Juliet, I really am but you leave me no choice, then go to call the police. But he doesn’t. Instead, he puts an arm around me, then, when I don’t stop crying, puts both arms around me and holds me while I sob onto his shoulder. ‘If you promise,’ he says, very slowly, whispering into my hair, ‘if you swear on your life never, ever, to do this again, then I won’t call the police – and you can have the food. But if I ever catch you doing it again, I shall call them with no hesitation, OK?’
I nod, quickly, stepping back and uncovering my eyes. ‘Definitely. Definitely. I swear on my life.’
‘This shall just be our secret, OK? We’ll put it down to a very bad day.’
I tell Mr Singh I’ll give him the money anyway, when I get paid, and then I walk – slowly, still shaking, trying to give my face time to look normal again – across the estate to home and to Zac. The rain is falling heavily now, the sunshine gone again, and the sky is the kind of purple-grey that tells you it’s not going to stop any time soon. And I think of him sitting there, at home; how sad, how let down he must feel; how out of control his life must seem. And I know I can’t go on like this anymore; we can’t go on like this – this family. I can’t let another day go by where my son believes his dad left simply because he didn’t want him. I have to tell him the whole truth.
I let myself in with my key. ‘I’m back,’ I call out. ‘I got your chicken and chips, I’ll just put them in the oven.’
‘OK.’ Zac’s voice is still small, still buried in trauma. ‘Thanks, Mum.’
I pass the lounge – the door is ajar – and I can just see the soles of Zac’s feet and his red, Man U pyjama-clad legs, sprawled across the settee, hear the soothing, familiar burble of kids’ TV. He’s only just recovering, I think, and now I’m about to blow his world apart good and proper, but I don’t have a choice. He has to know and I, as his mum, have to be the person to tell him. I want to be that person – I realize that now.
I turn on the oven, then spend far too long arranging Zac’s tea on a baking tray, trying to get each chip equidistant apart, putting off the inevitable. I close the oven door, eventually, and lean with my fists on the kitchen worktop, my knuckles white through my skin. I look out at the drab estate – the shrunken and only world that Zac has ever known. Then after a deep breath, I walk into the front room in three, decisive strides. Zac, still with white Sudocrem smears on his face, looks up at me with his father’s eyes. ‘Zac? Can you switch off the TV?’ I say. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’
Chapter Thirty-One
Zac
Fact: The first English cookery book was written in 1390 and it was called The Forme of Cury.
I knelt down in front of Uncle Jamie’s grave. I know they say you’re not meant to sit on people’s graves but I knew Uncle Jamie wouldn’t mind this one time. I can’t explain why, I just did. What I had to say to him was too important.
I got out the recipe I’d written down – I’d put it in a plastic cover specially, because my Marmite pasta one hadn’t lasted two minutes; it got rained on and all the ink splodged everywhere – and I slipped it under the stone angel, so it wouldn’t blow away.
It’s spiced cod and scallop linguine, I said (not out loud, just in my head, even though I was actually talking to Uncle Jamie in heaven). It was one of my dad’s favourite recipes and would definitely have been on the menu if you’d ever got your ambition of opening a seafood restaurant together.
You might think my uncle Jamie wouldn’t want anything from my dad, that he’d hate his guts because it was his fault he’s dead, but it’s not like that, I know. It’s why I’ve come here – to explain. I closed my eyes like I was doing a prayer, but I said it all in my head so that the other people wandering around the graveyard wouldn’t think I was a crazy beast.
Uncle Jamie, I know how you died now. I know you didn’t fall off a bridge, breaking your spinal chord. Everyone just told me that because they thought I’d be too upset by the truth, which is that you died because of a fight – a fight that my dad started and that meant your brain got too injured to survive.
Uncle Jamie, you have to listen to me. I know my dad might have started the fight (because he was really drunk) and that he did a stupid thing, especially because you were younger than him and he’d promised my mum and nan that he’d look after you, but it was just a terrible accident, you have to believe me, and I know my dad will be so, so, so sorry that you ended up dead, that he will have missed you, that he even probably loved you, because you were his top friend.
I started to tell him stories to remind him of stuff; stories my mum told me about him and my dad. I told him about the time he and my dad drove to Sheffield in my dad’s Skoda and how it broke down, but how they ended up getting on so well with the AA man who picked them up that they went to his party that night and kept in touch after that. I reminded him of when they went on a three-day fishing trip t
o Scotland together on the trawler my dad worked on, just them two and the seagulls, for three whole days! I told him about the dream they had of opening a seafood restaurant; how my dad was dead jealous but proud of him going to catering college, but how my uncle Jamie would tell him some of the recipes he’d learnt and how they’d play MasterChef. My dad and uncle Jamie would cook the same dinner and Mum, Nan and Grandad would give them both marks out of ten (they weren’t allowed to know who cooked what) but my uncle Jamie was always best at puddings and baking and my dad was best at seafood. (It’s because he worked at sea. He had the sea in his veins, like me.)
I told my uncle Jamie all this, because I wanted him to remember what good friends they were and how there was no way my dad would have meant to get drunk and into the fight where my uncle ended up dead; how he would have missed him, I knew it, probably still did – like I would miss Teagan till the end of my life if she died. I told him how I knew Nan blames Liam, but she only hates him so much because she loved Jamie so much. (Mum explained it to me – the hating makes the loving when he’s not here a bit easier, because it’s something else to think about. It’s like when I’m scared of getting bullied at school, I play the dad film in my head and it helps, it really does. It’s just a shame my nan does hating instead of playing a nice film in her head, but maybe that could change.)
I stopped talking to my uncle Jamie then, and I stood up to go. I thought I wouldn’t be surprised if my uncle Jamie knew all this anyway. ’Cause God knows all the truths in the world. He can see right into your head and your heart, so I bet the people up in heaven with him can do the same.
A few days after the bra thing (just saying the word ‘bra’ makes my face go hot now), and Mum telling me the truth about my dad, all of Year 6 went on a school trip to Bolingbroke Castle. Except Aidan Turner and Luke Shallcross; they got suspended for what happened. My mum made me tell on them. Actually, she didn’t make me, I decided I had to. Teagan said the only thing bullies are scared of is being told on, because they think you never will. So I did and they got a massive bollocking, and I realized then that that was what I was most scared about – but it’s happened and so far it’s all right, they haven’t murdered me! And life doesn’t feel as scary as it did before it happened, so maybe telling was a good idea.