by John Marrs
Hemel Hempstead
1.10 p.m.
After being dropped off a few miles south of Luton, I attached myself to a metal chair in a motorway service station and waited patiently for the rain to stop.
I was sitting near an oil heater to help dry my damp clothes. I wedged a bunch of napkins under the table leg to stop it from rocking on the uneven floor tiles. A stocky man in a red cap and apron behind the counter frequently took pity on me, refilling my mug with hot tea for no charge.
I mulled over what I might say to my mother when I found her. I’d followed her once before. I’d been thirteen years old when she suddenly began writing me letters from her new home in London. She’d reassure me I was never far from her thoughts – words I’d longed to hear in the five months since she’d last left. And I read each sentence again and again until I knew them off by heart.
I’d missed her too, and even though it wasn’t something I felt I could share with my father, I suspected he felt the same. So I kept our correspondence covert. I’d intercept the postman and squirrel away her letters between books about building designs on my bedroom shelf. I’d reply hastily, recounting my day-to-day activities, life at my senior school and the things I’d do with my friends. I even told her about a wonderful girl I’d met.
Then, out of the blue, Doreen asked me to visit her. She told me she was sharing a house with a friend and had a spare room. It was mine to use if I wanted it. Doreen was working in a nearby restaurant and had saved some money, so offered to send me the train fare.
I wrestled with my conscience before I broached the subject with my father. He was surprised, and probably a little disgruntled to learn it wasn’t just his wife who kept secrets from him. He tried to make increasingly flimsy excuses as to why I shouldn’t go, warning me she would only hurt me again.
‘I had a full head of hair when I met her – look at me now,’ he said, clutching at straws and pointing to his shiny dome. ‘She’ll do the same to you, Simon.’
But we both knew his reluctance was because he was scared I’d prefer to stay with my mysterious, occasional mother over my pedestrian, full-time, bald father. I reassured him it wasn’t the case, but I admit, I briefly considered it. Although Arthur had yet to fail me, Doreen Nicholson’s secret life held an overpowering allure.
I imagined her living in a beautifully furnished home where she spent her nights dressed up to the nines, holding glamorous parties for London’s elite. And I needed to experience first-hand just how that world took preference over mine. Eventually my father had relented and let me go, but he insisted on paying for the ticket himself – making sure it was a return.
As a grown man, I now recognised Doreen’s and my reasons for craving new lives were at odds, but our actions mimicked each other’s. I was beginning to understand her like I’d never understood anyone else before.
London
5.30 p.m.
I was sandwiched between four snoozing Yorkshire terriers in the back seat of a Morris Minor when I reached the outskirts of London. I’d approached an elderly couple by the service station’s petrol pumps and they’d agreed to deliver me to the capital. An eight-track played John Denver’s Greatest Hits on a loop while they trundled along the motorway at no more than forty-five miles an hour. I only realised the irony of my singing along to ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ by the second chorus.
I absent-mindedly fumbled with the rotating bezel on my watch – the only gift Doreen had given me that I’d kept – and stared through the window at a train bursting out from a tunnel in the distance.
I remembered my mother standing, waiting for my train twenty years earlier, taking nervous drags from an unfiltered cigarette as it pulled into the platform. Nicotine and lavender perfume clung to my coat as she pulled me to her chest, her falling tears glistening on her cheeks and bouncing off my lapels.
‘It’s so good to see my baby,’ she cried. ‘You have no idea.’
I did, because I felt exactly the same.
We perched on the top deck of a red double-decker bus as we made our way to her home in East London’s Bromley-by-Bow. Doreen draped an arm around my shoulders and intermittently kissed the top of my head as the wind raced through my hair. I’d always had a fascination with buildings, and was as hypnotised by the architecture we passed as by the woman who held me. I sketched notable landmarks like the Houses of Parliament and St Paul’s Cathedral in my jotter to show Steven when I returned home. He shared my obsession with creatively designed, historic buildings. They had dominated the city for generations, ever-present fixtures that wouldn’t uproot themselves if a better location made itself known.
‘We’re here,’ my mother finally announced with a nervous smile, as if to encourage mine in return. But I struggled to find any enthusiasm for the cramped little terraced house on the square before me. It was squeezed in between dozens more, like a concertina, in an austere backstreet square. I knew my disappointment secretly mirrored hers. It doesn’t matter, I tried to convince myself, I’m with my mum.
She unlocked the front door, and as the sun struck her face, I saw the tears she’d wept had made her make-up drip like ink. Behind her heavily disguised eyes lay the ghost of a purple bruise.
And as she lifted up my suitcase and walked into the corridor, the sleeves of her floral dress rose a little to reveal yellow and blue circular blotches scattered randomly about her wrists. I didn’t mention them.
Inside, Doreen’s house was neat but sparsely furnished, and hadn’t seen a lick of paint since the last war. Strips of wallpaper had once made futile attempts to escape by peeling themselves from the walls, but sticky tape secured them back into place. Cigarette smoke had stained the ceiling above a blanched armchair from which stuffing leaked. A large pair of scuffed men’s boots lay tossed to the side in front of her white stilettos.
‘Whose are those?’ I asked.
‘Oh, they belong to a friend,’ she replied.
And before I could delve any further, a monster appeared.
Northampton, today
8.27 a.m.
‘Simon . . .’
She whispered his name, as though the word was trapped in her last breath and she could barely find the strength to shape her lips around it.
‘Yes, Kitty,’ came his measured reply.
She gripped the door handle like a life belt. She was terrified that if she let go, her legs would buckle beneath her and she’d drown in emotions she’d cast adrift decades ago.
In the few moments she took to regain her composure, her mind raced nineteen to the dozen. At first, she considered she might be having a stroke, and that her brain was playing tricks on her. Then she wondered if the disease they’d told her she’d beaten had returned to play one final, callous joke. She focused on the olive-green eyes before her, eyes that had once given her everything she’d ever wanted, then cruelly snatched it away.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked. He’d anticipated his reappearance would be likely to shock her, but he was concerned he might have to catch her if she fainted.
Meanwhile she was snapping out of her thoughts. No, he definitely wasn’t a figment of her imagination. He was very real. The man who’d fallen from the branches of their family tree twenty-five years ago; the man she had loved then lost; the man who had been no more than a ghost for so long was standing on her doorstep.
She cleared her throat and her voice reappeared, albeit as little more than a croak. The word she produced was one that had preceded so many of her unuttered questions, past and present.
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘May I come in?’ he replied, having faith that her answer would be yes. Instead, she said nothing and stood firm. He tried to read the expression on a face he no longer knew, until eventually she turned aside and allowed him through the porch and into the living room.
As he moved inside, her eyes looked beyond the front garden to see if anyone else had witnessed his resurrection. But, like the day he had vanished, he
was invisible. She inhaled all the fresh air her lungs would allow before she breathed in that belonging to the dead.
Then she quietly closed the door.
CHAPTER THREE
SIMON
London, twenty-five years earlier
6 June, 5.20 a.m.
Street-sweepers brushed discarded soft drink cans and polystyrene fast-food boxes from London’s pavements into black plastic bin bags. The previous day’s rainstorm had washed away the stale, humid air and brought with it an early-morning chill. I pulled my shirt cuffs down over my cold hands, perched on the wall outside the British Library and leaned back on the railings, hoping it would be warmer inside when it opened later. I’d spent the night in a homeless shelter at a church, but awoke early to get a head start on my day.
Now I passed the time by staring at the blank faces of the daybreak workers who sleepwalked past me. Any one of them over a certain age could have been Kenneth Jagger.
My first recollection of the monster that lived with my mother was of his iron-girder legs pounding down Doreen’s stairs. The solid brick walls had seemed to quake under each footstep. Then, when he reached us, Kenneth briefly eyed me up and down, and without saying a word, lumbered into another room. I looked at my mother quizzically. She answered with a forced smile.
My loathing of Kenneth was immediate, intense and plainly reciprocated. I had never been in close proximity to such an intimidating presence. He wore a thick, black moustache and his receding hairline was poorly disguised with a limp Brylcreem quiff. Dark hairs crawled across his broad shoulders like spider’s legs and poked out of the holes in his dirty white T-shirt.
A chequered history was etched across his gnarly face – a portrait of his environment. A collection of clumsily self-inked gun and knife tattoos on his forearms and the backs of his hands warned he preferred to be feared, not befriended. A crimson heart with a black dagger penetrating the name ‘Doreen’ sat off-centre on his left bicep. Its faded colouring indicated he had been a part of her life a lot longer than I.
As Doreen began to pull him aside into their tiny concrete backyard, I noted a scrapbook lying on the sideboard. He saw me looking and nodded his head as if to say ‘open it up’. It was more an order than a request.
Inside was a potted history of the man in the form of newspaper cuttings.
Kenneth Jagger – or ‘Jagger the Dagger’, as the press had branded him – was a gangster of sorts – enough of a wrong’un to earn vibrant stories every time the police questioned him in connection with armed robberies. Knives were his weapon of choice. His was a wasted life, blighted by sporadic stays at Her Majesty’s pleasure, but never a punishment so harsh as to encourage him to see the error of his ways.
By the mid-1960s, Kenneth had remained a small fish in a crowded pond. As a career criminal, he had seen meagre returns. All he had under his control were his aspirations, and Doreen. According to one report about his conviction for beating and robbing a postmaster, he’d been released from prison shortly after my mother had last walked away from us. I realised he must have been the one my parents argued about behind closed doors.
Kenneth and Doreen returned to find me engrossed in his criminal CV. If he thought something like that might impress me, he’d already misjudged me. And Doreen’s apprehensive expression told me she, too, sensed the atmosphere that hung thick in the air like her cigarette smoke.
‘Right, let’s get the tea on,’ she offered in an overly chirpy voice, like Barbara Windsor in a Carry On film. She nervously tapped her bottom lip with her finger. ‘Do you want to give me a hand, Simon?’
‘How do you know him?’ I whispered as she bustled me into the kitchenette.
‘Kenny’s an old friend,’ she continued without making eye contact, and focused on peeling potatoes and dropping them into a deep-fat fryer.
‘But why is he here? With us?’
‘He lives here, Simon.’
I glared at her, waiting for a better explanation, but there was none. I scowled at Doreen, unable to reconcile the carefree life she’d led in my imagination with the squalid reality before me. The silence loomed heavy between us as we made our first, and last, meal together.
1.50 p.m.
I’d sifted through mountains of electoral registers in the library dating back two decades, but drew a blank in trying to find any trace of Doreen. It was possible – and given her history, quite likely – she had moved on from East London. But the pain etched into her face the night my father and I turned her away from our door for the first time had told me she’d resigned herself to her fate. And that lay with Kenneth.
So I relied on my hazy memory, a London street map I’d smuggled out under my shirt, and several buses to get me to Bromley-by-Bow.
I recalled Doreen’s futile attempts to gloss over the sour mood between Kenneth and me that day by talking incessantly. He’d had little to say, and stared menacingly at me to relay his feelings instead. I all but ignored him, frightened to even make eye contact. She’d had everything she could possibly have needed with my father and me, but had discarded it for a pitiful existence with a worthless man. It made no sense.
‘How long’s he here for?’ Kenneth suddenly spat, then stuffed his face with another chip sandwich. Tomato ketchup trickled down his chin like lava.
‘Don’t be like that, Kenny,’ Doreen replied gently. Around my father she was the life and soul of the house, but around Kenneth, she was subservient. I didn’t like this version of her.
Doreen asked me about school and I explained how I planned to go to university and study architecture. She smiled warmly. Kenneth just laughed.
‘Poncey load of crap,’ he roared. ‘University. Load of bollocks.’
‘Why?’ I asked – the first time I’d dared to speak to him.
‘You should get a proper job. Get out there and work instead of learning rubbish.’
‘I’m thirteen, and I can’t train to be an architect if I don’t pass my exams.’
‘Listen, kid, I was in the boxing ring and earning money working on the markets when I was your age, not wasting my time.’
‘Well, my dad doesn’t think it’s a waste of time.’ I directed this at Doreen. Her eyes remained fixed on the table.
‘What does that pussy know? Someone needs to make a man of you.’
I was aware cockiness probably wasn’t the best way forward with a man like Kenneth, but my brain wasn’t listening. ‘Like you?’
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing.’ I looked down at my plate.
‘You think you’re better than me, don’t you?’ he continued, a volcano preparing to erupt. ‘Coming down here with your big bloody ideas. Well, you’ll never be better than me – you’re fuck all.’
I looked to Doreen for support, but she said nothing. Then my ability to self-censor completely evaporated.
‘So I should stab someone and waste my life in prison, then – would that be better, Kenny?’
He banged both fists on the table. ‘You know what I’ve got? Respect. And you can’t buy that.’
And before I could process what was happening, he’d thrown his chair to one side, and I was six inches off the ground, pinned to a wall by an arm the size of an anchor. His cheeks had exploded in a rainbow of reds.
‘You ever look down your nose at me again and I swear to God, I’ll fucking kill you,’ he shouted, as bread and potato bullets flew from his mouth and sprayed my face.
‘Kenny, no!’ shouted Doreen finally. She came towards us and tried to grab his arm. He swivelled around and her cheek took the brunt of the back of his hand. It sent her sprawling to the bare floorboards.
‘Leave her alone, you bastard!’ I yelled before he punched me in the stomach, winding me, and then clamped me tighter so I struggled to breathe.
‘Stop it, you’re hurting him,’ pleaded Doreen, smearing a trickle of blood from her lip across a ghostly pale face.
‘Maybe this’ll teach him a lesson,’ he repl
ied, pulling his arm back to punch me again.
‘You can’t do that to your own son!’ she screamed.
He hesitated for a moment before letting me drop to a heap on the floor.
‘I told you then to get rid of him,’ he fired back before storming out of the dining room. The front door slammed as I fought for breath, and time temporarily stood still.
‘Why did you say that?’ I gasped at last, utterly confused.
‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed.
‘He isn’t my father – Arthur’s my dad.’
‘You have two, Simon. I just wanted you to get to know each other.’
Doreen attempted an explanation but I refused to listen. The truth was out, and so was I. I hadn’t even unpacked my suitcase when I picked it up and left. She ran up the street behind me, begging me to stay, naively believing Kenneth and I could work through our differences. But, as always, she was fooling herself.
Arthur knew something had gone terribly wrong when I called from a telephone box at Northampton station, begging him to pick me up the same day he’d dropped me off. But he never enquired as to what had happened and I never volunteered a reason why. I think he knew but, secretly, he was just grateful I’d returned to him.
I didn’t reveal to anyone the truth of my heritage. I locked Kenneth in a box inside my head and I only thought about him again when Doreen reappeared a few months later on the eve of my fourteenth birthday. As three disconnected souls gathered in our hallway, Arthur and I knew we were too exhausted to go through the charade again.
I ran to hide in my bedroom without speaking to her and sat on the floor, my back pressed against the door, listening. Downstairs, Arthur turned down her request for forgiveness. She begged with all her heart, but for the first time, he refused to relent. Eventually the front door closed and he retired to the kitchen, quietly weeping.
Later that night, I left the house and found Doreen waiting for me at the end of the garden. She thrust a green box into my hand.
‘This is for you,’ she said calmly, and tried to force a smile. ‘Always remember your mum loves you, no matter how stupid she is.’ Inside the box lay a handsome gold Rolex watch. By the time I looked up, Doreen was already walking away. I didn’t try to stop her.