The Mother

by Yvvette Edwards

  Despite the valerian-vodka cocktail, I’m still awake an hour later, but when I hear Lloydie sneaking into our room, putting on his PJs as quietly as he can in the dark, I feign sleep. I do not move when I feel him slipping into the bed, careful not to touch or wake me. It is only when he turns his back to mine that I realize I am already crying.

  3

  THE NOISE OF THE SHOWER wakes me. My head feels groggy, maybe because I had the two valerian capsules or too much vodka, or both. It feels early, but a glance at the clock radio tells me it is nearly nine thirty. I open the drawer beneath it, dig out the packet of paracetamol, and take two with water from the bottle permanently on the side. My routine morning assessment; this is a bad day. I close my eyes again, put my head back down. After the funeral, Lorna insisted I get my doctor to refer me to a bereavement counselor; in fact, she said we should both go, Lloydie and I, but he wouldn’t. Lorna was right, it was exactly what I needed; Jenny, her name was, such a lovely woman, with the eyes you would expect of someone who does such a job and does it well, brimful with empathy. I was furious with everyone at the time. My grief had made me fixated on blame, apportioning it as if it made any difference to what had happened. Tiny details were exaggerated in my mind till I was filled with rage for everyone including Lloydie, because of those boots. She helped me to get things in perspective. Seeing her then probably saved my marriage, such as it is.

  One of the things that came out of it was my strategy for dealing with days like this; don’t expect too much from yourself. Itemize what needs to be done and tackle them one by one. Complete each thing in order before moving on to the next. Keep your list short. If I cannot make myself begin, my day will be spent here in bed. It is a hard desire to fight but I will, not because I have anything specific to do, but because I know from experience that the longer I lie here and do nothing, the longer it will take me to find the strength to get up. If I do not force myself to get moving, I could be lying in my bed for days. Mentally, I make my list.

  I will only lie here till Lloydie comes out of the bathroom and back into this room.

  When he does, I’ll ask if he intends to come to court at all, or if he is just planning on sticking his head in the sand for the whole trial.

  I will accept whatever answer he gives me then get up, brush my teeth, and have my shower.

  I will get dressed and comb my hair—ha-ha.

  I’ll drink my tea.

  This is doable.

  Except Lloydie doesn’t come back into the bedroom. I realize at some point that the paracetamol is kicking in and that it has been some time since the shower stopped running. Eighteen years and I know my husband’s habits as well as I know my own. He has his shower, comes out, sits on the edge of his side of the bed with his towel underneath him, and creams himself before putting on his deodorant and getting dressed. I even know the order in which he gets dressed. His boxers are first, then the socks, followed by his vest, his trousers, and his top last of all. When I hear the sound of a canister hissing I know he has taken the day’s attire and all his toiletries into the bathroom with him. I wonder if he will be forced to return to collect his shoes from under the bed, but when he unlocks the door, I hear him crossing the hallway to the stairs and, from the sound, know his shoes are already on his feet.

  I get up. I push my own feet into the slippers under my side of the bed and tie my dressing gown tightly around my waist. If he will not come to the bedroom, I will speak to him downstairs. I am halfway down when the doorbell rings. I retreat to the landing as Lloydie opens the front door and I hear familiar voices, Pastor Meade from the church at the top of our road and a couple of the sisters from his church who have been fairly regular visitors since the event, have given us much support. It is another of the things that have changed in our lives, the public forum our world has become. Really, truly, it is wonderful to know others are thinking of us, to know of all the people out there who want to help in some way, to be there for us, but sometimes it feels as though I have no privacy anymore, no longer an entitlement to choose who I spend my time with, where and for how long. Some days, like today, it’s not condolences and sympathy I want, I just want to be allowed to do what I feel like, to stay in my jammies all day if I wish, to lie on Ryan’s bed, to speak to my husband about what remains of our marriage and the commitment he made to me.

  As Lloydie invites them in, I tiptoe back across the landing to our bedroom. He doesn’t have a religious bone in his body but he’s happy to fill our home with anything that means he and I will not be alone or in a situation where there is the opportunity to properly talk. He has taken them into the kitchen. I hear the sounds of chairs scraping the floor, them settling in. I pick up the phone and call Lorna’s landline. There is no answer. I ring her mobile, hoping she has maybe only just left and I’m not too late to go with her to Nottingham. Her mobile goes straight to voice mail. She’s probably already zooming down the M1 motorway. I leave a message for her to give Leah a hug and kiss for me. Then I grab my towel and go to have my shower.

  Lloydie is putting my cup of tea on the side when I return to the bedroom. He looks slightly sheepish, is probably annoyed with himself for the mistiming that has meant he has found himself alone with me when we are both awake and alert. He looks at me without speaking.

  “Aren’t you gonna ask how it went?” I ask.

  It’s not the question I intended, too in your face, accusatory. I didn’t want to start the discussion here but it’s out now, I can’t take it back.

  His tone is dutiful. “How did it go?”

  “It was hard. Listening. Seeing that boy, his mother. Very hard.”

  He sits down on the bed, bows his head, and cups his face with his hands. His hair hasn’t fallen out. It is as full as it has ever been, but the last seven months have bleached it near white. If he didn’t care, if he were unaffected, it might have made my response to him less complicated. Instead I know how impossibly hard this is for him. I know he blames himself and how much of that is down to me. But my empathy is matched by my anger, which wants to insist on more from him yet is frustrated by his fragility, the acute sense of attacking a helpless creature, which in turn fuels the rage that I have been made to be wrong in this, wrong to expect anything at this time from my husband; my husband!

  “I don’t get it,” I say. “What the plan is. Are you just gonna dodge me and hide till this is all over?”

  “Over?” he asks. “It’s already over.”

  “So the boy who killed him, you don’t think he needs to pay?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  He’s talking about Ryan and he’s right; this trial won’t bring him back, but should we all down tools, find a corner somewhere to sit and hold our heads?

  “You should want to come.”

  He says, “I can’t do it, none of this, I can’t.”

  “But I can? You can’t, but by some magic it’s all a doddle for me? The strength just appears to me miraculously? You can just opt out and leave me to deal with this stinking shitty broken mess on my own?”

  He doesn’t answer. My voice has risen, is too loud, bordering hysterical. There are people downstairs. I sit at the dressing table, take the towel off my head, open the hair grease, rub a small amount between my palms then on my head, and look at myself in the mirror. I hardly recognize my reflection, hardly know who this person is, this balding screaming banshee; hardly recognize the people we’ve become.

  He used to kiss and cuddle Ryan when he was a baby, but he started pulling back from physical affection almost in proportion to the rate at which our son grew, not because he did not love him, but because he did; he loved our son as much as I did, still does. But the image of fatherhood in Lloydie’s mind is without words or caresses. It is a silent movie where he can be seen repairing Ryan’s bed frame, leaving pocket and dinner money on the edge of the kitchen table daily, tightening the brakes on his bicycle, checking the air in its tires. I know this about him, have always
known it. But I gave Ryan enough of the soft things, enough openly demonstrative love to compensate for spaces where there would otherwise have been a lack. I never pressured Lloydie to dig deeper within himself, and it is probably one of the reasons our marriage worked, because Lloydie has no reserves to dig into, they simply don’t exist. Our son’s death has left him completely emotionally crippled. Unlike me, discovering internal resources I never imagined from the depths of my being, he can’t deal with any of this. He’s not lying.

  “Those people downstairs, I don’t want to talk to them. I’m getting dressed, then I’m going out.”

  He doesn’t look up. “Okay.”

  “Will you be here when I get back?”

  “Was gonna go to the allotment . . . I don’t know.”

  “Then I’ll see you later . . . maybe.”

  He finally releases his head and stands. “Okay.”

  I wear a scarf on my head when I go out, drift down to the market, wander through the peopled space from stall to stall. It strikes me again just how many beautiful black boys there are in the world, how little I noticed of life with my old eyes. They saunter past me beatboxing aloud, wait outside butchers’ shops beside trolley bags for their mums, are leaning against shopfronts or cavorting on the green, showing off and at the same time pretending not to notice the girls. They distract me, these young boys, cocoa-, demerara-, and vanilla-skinned, small and tall, confident and awkward, with skiffles and afros and cornrows and futures, years filled with football and Wii, jerk chicken and study, hours spent peering into mirrors and carrying out the meticulous investigation of new baby hair on cheeks and chin. There are so many of them, so strong and dark and beautiful, alive everywhere, and their presence occupies me like an obsessive-compulsive disorder that breaks the heart.

  When I leave the market it is without having bought anything, more of a resignation than an ending. The weather is holding up and so I walk in the direction of the park. The high street is busy with Saturday shopping traffic, the roads and pavements and bus stops are heaving. I stop at the corner of a block where it is possible to jaywalk rather than walk to the lights that you’re meant to use to cross this busy road safely, notice once again that it is the perfect spot to die.

  I wait there, watching the buses as they leave the stop about two hundred meters up the street. The traffic lights are another hundred meters past where I am standing. There are no zebra crossings or humps or reasons for a busy bus to slow and so they always pick up speed along this stretch. When Ryan was young, I read that a jeep traveling at thirty miles an hour that hits a child will almost certainly kill him. It stands to reason a bus maybe ten times that weight traveling at a similar speed is enough to kill an adult. I watch the bus that is at the stop fill with the queuing passengers and their shopping and bags, close its doors. It departs slowly, pulls from the curbside to the center, begins picking up speed. Precision timing is the key to ensuring the only life you take is your own. A person who stepped out too early would be seen by the driver, who might attempt to steer around them, possibly crash in the process, and others might die. There is a point about five meters away at which, if the driver has his foot down, you could simply step off the curb in front of the bus and be instantly killed. I can see it is traveling fast enough already. As it gets closer, I begin to make out the features on the driver’s face. It is almost at the perfect spot . . . nearly there . . .

  I am stunned to feel the top of my arm being pulled, to hear the blare of the bus horn, to feel the gust of turbulence as the bus passes me, raising a whirlwind of street dust in its wake, and turn around to face a woman who isn’t familiar, staring at me, scared.

  “You okay?” she asks.

  I blink furiously, wipe my left eye, can feel grit in it. My heart is pounding. I collect myself and nod. “Yes.”

  She says, “You’re the mother, aren’t you?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Of that boy who got stabbed. The one who died. I read about it in the papers when it happened. It’s terrible. My sons go to the same school. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to them.”

  She lied; she does know. She didn’t just recognize me, she also saw the trail of my thinking. She knows too well what she might be moved to do, but lucky her, it wasn’t her sons, it was mine. I don’t want to discuss this, so I simply wait in the hope she’ll move on.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asks again. She doesn’t want to leave me here, will not go.

  “Yes,” I say and walk away. I hate unnecessary rudeness, and I’m acutely aware of just how rude I’m being, but I cannot talk to her, cannot talk about it. I walk away quickly in the general direction of the park.

  I buy myself a cookie and a coffee from the café near the park entrance and go inside. I find a bench close to the swings, take a seat, observe the children playing, and listen to them laugh. I watch the mothers more critically than I ever did before, upset when they exhibit the same impatience I exhibited when my Ryan was young enough to be taken to the swings and old enough to be uncooperative.

  That woman on the high street asked me if I was “the mother.” I don’t think I am. The second Sunday after Ryan was taken was Mother’s Day, and I don’t know how I got through it, can hardly bear to think about the next. If it was possible to die of grief it would have happened that day. The worst part was trying to work out whether in addition to losing my son, I had lost my “mother” status, didn’t know whether I still qualified, was unable to satisfy myself or be satisfied by the responses from Lorna and Leah and the masses of people who visited to help me make it through that wretched day. In the end I looked it up in the dictionary, found the definition. It said that “mother” is the relationship of a woman to her child. I have three dictionaries at home and I looked it up in each of them. None of them explained whether that status was rescinded if there was no longer a child for such a woman to have a relationship with. So am I a mother? I don’t think I am, but it is too complicated to explain to every person I meet, too loaded and depressing. When people ask if I’m okay, it is exactly what they do not want me to elaborate on, another issue I cannot discuss, one more thing to swallow and hold down.

  It is ironic there is so much I can no longer talk about when inside I am filled with speeches. I want to get up and talk to those impatient mums, want them to know how fragile is the gift of children that has been given them, how easily and irrevocably they can be taken, how precious every moment is, every second and hour and day, the infinite joy in their possession already, the exact value of which can only be precisely measured in its dearth. I want to teach them to rejoice that they have no difficulty answering when someone asks as simple a question as “You’re the mother, aren’t you?” But of course, I don’t. I just watch them and sip my coffee and eat my cookie. And I listen to the laughter and occasional cries.

  From where I am sitting I can see the blocks of social housing where Tyson Manley’s mother lives, where he lived before he was in prison, really just a half-hour stroll from my home; a group of quick-build low-cost boxes, a Lego town occupying the ground between the entrance to the railway station and an imposing block of luxury apartments with floor-to-ceiling windows and huge balconies from where the view is no doubt spectacular, overlooking the park. There are places in the world I would never travel to, war zones where people live in daily fear for their lives, where families are all too familiar with violent death, the random bloody loss of those they love. They are the parts of the world I have never visited because I didn’t want to face that kind of danger, the risks were too high. Instead I lived here in the UK, bought a cozy house in a quiet street and satisfied myself for years that I was lucky for it, and all the while looked sympathetically at charity adverts or snippets on the news of those victims of warring and genocide, and felt sympathy, as if I with my safe life in this safe land were exempted from it, truly believed we were.

  The sun has gone behind the clouds, my hot coffee is now cold and the a
ir chilly. I get up and begin to walk toward the estate. I don’t know why. Perhaps to see whether I enter something like a scene from a Hollywood action film, gangsters on the corners and armed police with loudspeakers shouting, “Put your weapons down!” It is nothing like that. It must be about one now and the estate is quiet, peaceful even. The homes are a bit worn, slightly dilapidated; the railings and doors and windows could be improved with a fresh lick of paint. There is some graffiti, but it is not excessive, play equipment that looks like it’s been in place for two decades, green areas gone brown. It’s not perfect, but I’ve seen worse. I work out which house the Manleys occupy and I walk past it slowly, just looking. Their address was in a document I saw long before we went to court, had not been redacted on a report from social services, and it always surprised me, the close proximity of their home to mine, like the scene from The Godfather where a man wakes to find a horse’s head in his bed, way too close for comfort.

  The Manleys have an iron gate fitted over the front door, grilles on the windows downstairs. I look around and notice that almost all of the houses on the estate have these, and at once it makes the environment more sinister, more like the kind of place where special provisions need to be made to keep your family safe. The front gardens are tiny fenced areas, more of a container than an outdoor space, just about big enough for a wheelie bin and a recycling box. The recycling box outside the Manleys’ is a black crate on the ground to the right of the door. It is almost full. I can see beer and empty cans inside it, newspapers neatly folded, an empty brandy bottle, carrier bags, the plastic packaging of frozen vegetables and oven chips, and I am stunned.

  I continue to the end of the estate, turn around and walk back, check again, notice an empty toilet roll tube and some used tinfoil I didn’t spot on my first pass. I walk back to and through the park and try to understand it, the notion that Ms. Manley would be concerned about recycling, that she would be actively trying to improve her carbon footprint, reduce energy, that she would wash out and set aside her empty glass bottles to reduce unnecessary waste going to landfill sites, that the mother of at least one son who kills people would go to the trouble of collecting and neatly folding the daily papers, conscientiously disposing of them, doing her part to save trees, protect habitats and endangered species. The logic of it defies me.