I know there is violence in this country. I’ve seen it on the news and Crime Watch. I’ve read the papers, the stories about people being stabbed, gunned down, women killed by spouses, children at the hands of the parents who were supposed to protect them, but it has always been a story in isolation, neatly wrapped up before moving on to the next news item. Here, I am surrounded by all these people, sixty, maybe seventy of them, and each one, including the people who run the charity, the guy who’s doing the barbeque, the masseur, the woman making the teas, every one of us shares this bloody reality so easily dismissed by outsiders as an aberration, called “isolated incidents” by the media and the police, all these people, of different colors and origins and religions and none, middle and lower and upper class, as diverse a group of people as you’re likely to meet anywhere, all together, all bereaved, all coping with hideous grief in our own way. It is the most engaged I’ve felt at any event since Ryan passed.
I introduce myself to Patrice’s mother, learn her name is Fimi, introduce her to Lorna when she returns with the teas, discover her son, like mine, was also a fatal teenage stabbing victim. Apparently he gave the wrong boy a look that was interpreted as disrespect—a look, her son died because of a look—his murderer another young boy, fifteen years at the time, still incarcerated today, eight years on; two more young lives wasted. I feel myself studying Fimi as she speaks and I know what I am seeking. It is there behind her eyes, the grief, but she has pulled through. I want to know how she did it, where she found the strength and how she harnessed it, how anyone harnesses enough strength in this circumstance to keep going, not just to remain alive, but to live.
A little girl runs over to us, pretty and pigtailed, about six, Fimi’s daughter, followed almost immediately by her father, panicking because she was out of his sight for a few moments; their consequent child. As soon as her interest is caught, the daughter skips off with her father in close and watchful pursuit. Fimi joins Lorna and me as we drink our teas, then introduces us to some of the other attendees, whom she has met at similar events in the past.
I talk about Ryan to the woman who lost her husband in a robbery gone too far, to the mother of a daughter killed by the man she didn’t want to go out with, a man whose son was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught in the crossfire between two gangs in a shoot-out that sounds more like a scene from a western than urban Britain. I talk about my son and I listen to them talk about those people they have lost, and the things they have gone on to do after; marathons to raise funds to do good, charities to save potential victims or give comfort to survivors like me, and I am filled with too many emotions to keep track of. I could cry for every person here, all those photographs, the people they represent, for the avoidable, unnecessary pain, the waste. Yet I am elated to be here amongst others who understand the need to remember, to talk about their loved ones, who understand how vital it is to listen—people like me. More than anything I wish Lloydie had come along with me, that he had been part of this.
The day ends at seven, after dusk, with the release of Chinese lanterns into the sky, one for every person here, in memory of those who have brought us all together, and for a short while the night sky is illuminated by a constellation of flickering lights. I wait and watch till the glow from the final lantern is extinguished, can feel an emotional exhaustion descend upon me as I do the rounds with Lorna before leaving, taking numbers, saying goodbye.
“Thanks for coming with me,” I say to Lorna, when she pulls up outside my home. The house is in darkness. Lloydie is not inside.
“It was good for me as well. I’m really glad I came. Out now. Get some sleep. We’ve got a big day ahead.”
“I’ll see you in the morning,” I say as I step onto the pavement.
She says, “Bye. Sweet dreams,” before I close the car door and she drives away.
4
THE ALARM AWAKENS ME ABRUPTLY, severs me from my dream of Ryan dying, the first one from which I have woken wishing it had continued. I turn the alarm off and quickly lie back down and close my eyes in the hope of returning to it, but it doesn’t happen. After enough time has passed for me to accept that, I carry out my regular morning assessment; this is a manageable day, on the scale, maybe even good. I will be able to get up without struggle, get ready and over to the courtroom, where I can sit and watch that boy for the entire day. I drink the tea on the side, stroke Sheba, and relive the dream. When I finally look at the clock, I am flabbergasted to discover so much time has passed so quickly, and I go from being as relaxed as I can remember in a long while into a panic, begin a mad dash to get showered and dressed and ready before Nipa arrives. I hear her ring the doorbell, and as I go down the stairs to let her in, the phone rings. I pick up the receiver in the hallway. As soon as she says “Hello,” I know who it is.
She says, “I need to talk to you.”
“Why are you calling me?”
“I just wanna talk . . .”
“Sweetie, I’m at court today, I’m sure you know that.”
“I know you must hate me. If I have to beg, I will, but you’ve gotta meet me.”
“Look, I haven’t got time for this right now. You know where my house is . . .”
“I can’t come to your house. You don’t know, man, there’s people clocking everything I do. It’s gotta be outta the area.”
“You’ll have to give me your number. I’ll phone you back later . . .”
“You can’t call me. Look, my money’s gonna run out. There’s a café, at the top of the market, Hulya’s. Meet me there tonight at six thirty. You have to. . . .”
Then nothing. I say, “Hello? Hello?” The line goes dead.
This is bloody ridiculous. I put the phone down, go and answer the door, tell Nipa I’ll be just a minute, lock up, and leave. I don’t mention the call to Nipa, am not sure I should even be speaking to Sweetie, don’t know whether just that phone call has already meant I’ve broken rules, wonder about the wisdom of meeting with her at all, why I didn’t do what I should’ve done, said no then put the phone down, but that only lasts a moment. There is no great mystery underlying my desire to meet with her. It is the same force that drives me to get up and attend this trial; I want to understand why my son is dead. She is the single link between Ryan and Tyson Manley. She knows why this has happened. She hasn’t told the police, but if I meet with her, maybe she’ll tell me.
There is so much I wish were different, so many things I wish I could turn the clock back and change, and high up on my list is the wish that Sweetie and my son had never met. When I get into the car, I tell Nipa about my day yesterday, and when I finish, we drive in silence, and my mind is filled with thoughts of that girl.
He’d been acting strangely for weeks, humming more, happier than usual. Getting ready already took him ages anyway, but it was taking even longer; brushing and smoothing his hair and eyebrows, trying out Lloydie’s aftershaves, sneaking splashes of the most expensive brands. I watched him like I had been watching him since he was a baby, with the interest I always had when he was learning or embarked on something new, from swimming to speaking French. I never knew where it came from, his innate capacity to master new things, his fearless ability to venture into the unknown and emerge triumphant, thought it was one of the miraculous blessings of nature, his love of life and everything in it, and when he finally brought it up before he left the house for school, it was as casually as if he were asking for money for lunch, or reminding me he was going to the cinema in the evening with his mates.
“I was gonna bring a friend home later . . .”
“A friend?”
“To do some revision, for English.”
“Okay.”
“She’s a girl.”
“A girl?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Er . . . I think we’re gonna need some rules.”
“That’s just what I was thinking,” Ryan said, laughing.
“I’m not joking,” I said, smiling nonet
heless. “You both stay downstairs at all times . . .”
“But I wanted to show her the view from my window.”
“And she needs to go home at a respectable time . . .”
“Aww, I was hoping she could sleep over.”
“And no funny business.”
“Are we talking about sexual intercourse?”
“Ryan!”
“Mum, we’re revising English, not biology.”
“I’m serious,” I said.
“I know. Deal,” he said, still laughing, and kissed me as he slung his schoolbag up onto his back and walked out of the kitchen toward the front door. He had just opened it when I shouted, “What’s her name?” Then I heard it close. If he was bringing a girl home, I assumed this must be serious. If it was a milestone for him, it was an even bigger one for me as a parent. I had already had conversations with him sporadically, naturally arising from the circumstances we found ourselves in, about not treating women like the objects they are portrayed as in music videos, celebrity magazines, and porn; about mutual respect, consensual sex, contraception, and sexually transmitted diseases; but they had always been abstract, laying the groundwork for his future relationships. I had been determined to never be one of those parents who buried their head in the sand, who had important conversations in the form of a cussing after things had gone wrong and it was already too late. This development meant some more specific conversations needed to be had, and quickly.
They were in the kitchen when I came in from work. I had left slightly earlier than usual. I’m not suggesting I had a genuine concern that if I arrived back at my normal time, by then I’d be well on the road to becoming a grandma, but Ryan bringing home his first girlfriend had been on my mind for pretty much the entire day.
When I opened the front door, I heard them both laughing in the kitchen. That was my first impression of her, her laugh. You can tell a lot, I think, from a person’s laugh, and hers was too loud, what my mother would have described as “brawling,” and it went on for too long. I paused inside the passage a moment, getting beyond the stereotype that laughter presented in my mind, then closed the front door loudly so they had an opportunity to compose themselves while I took off my coat before heading into the kitchen to meet her.
She was sitting on Ryan’s lap when I entered the kitchen, jumped up when she saw me standing in the doorway, and quickly sat in the vacant seat beside his, laughing only slightly less loudly, with her hand covering her mouth in what seemed to me to be a display of false modesty, because obviously if she were genuinely modest, she would have gotten off his lap before I made my entrance so that it wouldn’t be my first impression of her (discounting the one at the front door, which she might not have been aware had already been taken into account). Ryan looked slightly embarrassed, but also happy, and I got that. She was probably the first girl he liked who’d squirmed on his adolescent lap; of course he was ecstatic, but I was not.
When I’d pictured her in my mind throughout the day, I had imagined a girl who was really a female version of my son, demure and sensible, respectful and modest, bright and polite, convinced for some reason she would be a perfect balance of prettiness, braces, and glasses. This girl was the antithesis of my vision. She was street, that was the word that came to my mind, pure street, one of those kids who are always outside their yard from the time they learn to unlock the front door and let themselves out. She was a blurred amalgamation of huge hooped earrings, permed, gelled hair, and short skirt with three-quarter-length socks that ended above her knees and below her skirt, like stockings lacking only the garter. She had managed to make her school uniform look like party attire with her cuffs and sleeves rolled up till they ended above her elbows, and a bold collection of clackety bangles adorned her wrists. Too many undone top buttons at the front of her shirt had resulted in an ample display of cleavage. She was pretty, that part I had been right about, but it was a kind of vulgar beauty. She was small, a lot shorter than my gangling son, but fit, like a fully developed woman who’d squeezed herself into a girl’s school uniform to make herself look sexy. Ryan looked at me and his face fell and I knew it was because of my expression, which I tried to soften, make it reflect something other than the thoughts going through my mind.
“Hello,” I said.
In his attempt to greet me cheerfully I saw the effort he was making to mask the atmosphere I had created. He said, “Hi, Mum.” Then he introduced the girl, but I misheard him. I thought he said, “This is my sweetie,” and my response was angry. I said, “Your what?”
“Sweetie,” she said, blowing a purple neon bubble in her gum till it popped, licking it back in, smiling. “Sweetie by name and sweetie by nature.”
“That’s a very unusual name,” I said.
She told me the story of how she got her name like it was some huge jolly jape, and finished with “This is a lush house, man. I’d love to live here.”
Yes, I thought, I bet you would.
While I was at work imagining the studious shy girl with glasses and braces, I had thought I would give them space, respect their privacy in the communal parts of our home, but she scared me, the girl without a proper name, with the brawling laugh and jiggling D cups. Instead, I tidied up the kitchen around them and started preparing dinner, hardly wanted her to have a second alone with my virgin boy, because she wasn’t the sort of girl my son would give a shy first kiss and fumble with for ten months, building up to his first experience of sex. She was the sort who might turn up to revision wearing no knickers! Grandmotherhood was sitting at my kitchen table blatantly taunting me and I’d be damned if my first grandchild was going to emerge from Sweetie’s loins.
She stayed about an hour after I arrived back home, and after she left, Ryan went upstairs to his room without speaking to me. He was disappointed in me. He didn’t say it out loud, but I saw in his face that my attitude toward Sweetie had disappointed him. To be fair, it had disappointed me, but she had disappointed me, his choice had disappointed me. We were all put out, and frankly, I felt it was a small price to pay to have her gone from his life and a space left for the nice girl I knew was out there somewhere waiting. It wasn’t the right time to have the fifty discussions with him I’d been planning all day, so I only said one thing, had to, sitting on the bottom of his bed speaking to the back he’d turned on me when I entered.
“Any girl you sleep with could end up being the mother of your child. Anything could happen; she forgot to take her pill, the condom broke, it was a risky time of the month, anything. If you have the urge to sleep with someone, remember that. And ask yourself if she’s the kind of person you’d want to raise your kids.”
Of everything I ever did as a parent, I regret that conversation the most. To be specific, I deeply regret the fact that it wasn’t a conversation at all. I made a statement and simply expected him to follow through. We bought Sheba when Ryan was four and I spent hours discussing with him what we would name her, and the ways I thought his suggestion, Big Bird, could be improved on. I discussed such inconsequential things in such minuscule detail, and this one thing, so vast and new and so important to my son, this single issue I failed to discuss at all, just made my point then acted as if the matter had been concluded.
I know he spoke to her a couple of times after that on the phone, though I never heard the words he was saying, but I could tell from the tone of his voice and the defensiveness of his body language that it was her. The only other time I saw her was the day before Ryan died. She came in the evening and they talked briefly before I called him in. I wasn’t exactly proud of myself, but I was glad it was a chapter we could close. Then after he died, was taken, I had expected to see her at the funeral amongst his friends, but she didn’t show. It is probably a complete double standard, because I never mourned the fact of not seeing her till then, but since that day, my heart has held that particular absence against her.
Our legal team is already assembled in the court foyer when we arrive, with Kwame.
I ask and Quigg tells me there is no word yet on whether Tyson Manley will give evidence. She outlines what to expect for the day, starting with St. Clare’s cross-examination of Kwame and, depending how long it goes on for, the next witness, Nadine Forrester, the woman who actually saw Ryan’s murder. Quigg apologizes to me in advance, says it will be hard to hear the details of her evidence, says I need to steel myself to sit through it, or to choose not to listen at all, to leave court till Nadine’s evidence is done. I say I’ll give it some thought, though I already know I will be in the gallery listening. Nipa has gone to get coffee for us both, and while I wait for her to return, I take a seat beside Kwame on the bench and Quigg reminds us not to discuss his evidence. I remember my dream. There are things I want to say to this man that make me feel deeply emotional. I have to avoid them, otherwise I will probably cry.
The Mother Page 7