A Line of Blood

by McPherson, Ben

  She refilled my glass, then refilled her own. ‘And of course your father’s misfortune was my good fortune. He was a very handsome man, and a very honest man. He loved me, and he adored you, son. He really did. More than anything in the world.’

  ‘Dad loved you most of all, Mum.’

  ‘No, Alexander, no.’ She took my hand in hers, catching me in the lie. ‘I’m seventy-eight, son. I’m not afraid of the truth.’

  ‘OK, Mum.’

  ‘Anyhow, one day your father received a letter from Japan. It was from Noriko, and it troubled him greatly. She asked why he had stopped writing. Your father showed me the letter, because he thought I ought to know; and then he burned it, because he was a good man and he had made his choice.

  ‘And then … and then he went to his mother, and he asked why she had hidden Noriko’s letters from him. And at first she denied it, but eventually she admitted that she had burned them. A cruel thing to have done, do you not think?’ She left the question hanging for a moment. ‘But I have her to thank, I suppose, because without her there would be none of this.’

  My mother went to bed shortly afterwards. I wandered around the flat for a while, trying to understand what I should be feeling. My father was everywhere here: his books, his records, the rack of pipes and the stacked ashtrays; his keen eyes staring out from silver-framed photos, never less than immaculately turned-out. The sharpness of those collars.

  My father’s life had been a series of tickets out: the army; Edinburgh; my mother. He had entered the forces as a welder, and left as an engineer; he had taken a second degree at Edinburgh University, met my mother at a dance. He had come up. A sharp-looking man with quick wits and an easy charm, by the time he had left the army he had erased the Govan shipyard from his voice. He had made good. His parents lived an hour down the road. Tower-block folk, he called them. We never visited my grandmother. The Noriko story, of course. It made sense now.

  My father had taken me to a war film once, at a cinema on the outskirts of town.

  Later, at home, he had sat for hours, silent in his chair, smoking his pipe. And though he would often boast to his friends about having had ‘a good war’, I had seen him crying at the cinema.

  I could hear my mother sobbing from the room that she and my father had shared. I thought of knocking on the door, of entering the room and sitting there, holding my mother’s hand over the blue silk counterpane. But it would mortify my mother to know that I could hear her in her grief. It would bring her no comfort.

  Now was the time I should have cried: for my father, for my mother, for what was lost. All those decisions my mother had taken, alone, in her demure desolation.

  Could you not have waited, Mum?

  I paced through the flat, my teenage self again, skirting the walls, trying not to cross my own path, trying not to hear my mother’s sobs.

  I tried to ring Millicent. Four rings, then voicemail. It was three o’clock, but she must have known that I would need to call her. I called again. Four rings, voicemail.

  My parents’ flat was unchanged from the day I left home twenty-two years ago. Same fridge, same photographs on the walls, same furniture. It wasn’t for lack of money. They’d done well for themselves. But they had known what they liked back then, and they had never stopped liking it. Continuity. Restraint.

  Where is Millicent?

  I rang our home phone. It rang for the longest time.

  There was a worn patch on the carpet by the side of the sofa where my mother liked to sit, and another by my father’s smoking chair.

  Answer the phone.

  Two decades of pipe smoke had gently curled across the flat, coating every white surface in a warm sepia, damping down the pillar-box red of the living-room curtains, the cobalt blue of the silk counterpanes in the bedrooms with which my mother had, rebelliously, accented their home. Answer the phone, Millicent.

  It was Max who answered.

  ‘Max, it’s Dad.’

  ‘You woke me up. Is Grandpa dead?’

  ‘It was peaceful, Max. He died in his sleep.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Max.

  ‘Are you OK, Max?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘I love you very much, Max.’

  ‘I love you too, Dad,’ he said dutifully.

  ‘Can you get Mum?’

  I heard him put the receiver down, could make out the sound of his footsteps as he went back upstairs to wake Millicent. How can you sleep at a time like this?

  I looked out into the night. Large windows, wide streets, sandstone solidity. Safe, I thought. Very safe.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Yes, Max.’

  ‘Dad, she’s not here.’

  ‘Have you checked in the garden? She could be in the garden.’

  ‘It’s raining.’

  ‘Can you check in the garden, please, Max?’

  ‘But why would she be in the garden? It’s raining.’

  ‘Please check the garden, Max. Now.’

  ‘But what if she’s not there, Dad? What if something’s happened to her?’ I was scaring him. This wasn’t good.

  ‘We’ll figure it out, Max. She might have gone to the shops.’

  ‘OK.’ Max put down the receiver again. Of course Millicent hadn’t gone to the shops. I shouldn’t be exposing my son to my fears like this.

  Where was she?

  Max picked up the phone again.

  ‘Dad, Dad, she’s not here. She’s not in the garden. Dad, can you come home?’

  It’s happening again, I thought. Please God, don’t let it happen again. I considered ringing Fab5 and asking him to go round, but Millicent would view it as a betrayal. She would hate me for exposing her like that. Who could I ring, though? Certainly not the police.

  I had to keep the fear out of my voice. ‘Max,’ I said. ‘Max, listen to me. I want you to do something for me.’ Measure your words. ‘I want you to go back to bed, and I want you to make sure your alarm clock is set for half past seven, and at exactly half past seven I want you to wake up and go into our bedroom, and you’ll find that Mum is there and everything is OK.’

  ‘Can’t I go and stay with Tarek?’ said Max.

  ‘No, love, no.’ Tarek’s parents might call the police. ‘I need you to do what I say, Max-Man. OK?’

  ‘I swear on my life I won’t say why.’

  ‘Max, it’s the middle of the night. I need you to go back to bed. I need you to promise me that.’ There is no one to call.

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Because in the morning this will all be OK. Trust me, Max-Man.’

  ‘Can you come home, Dad?’

  ‘I’ll take the first train. That’s a promise. Stay at home till I get there. I’ll walk you to school and explain to Mr Sharpe.’

  ‘But you said Mum would be there.’

  ‘She will.’

  ‘But then you said to wait until you come, so you think she might not come.’

  ‘She will come, Max.’ Please God, let her be there.

  ‘Can’t you take a plane, Dad?’

  ‘The train is quicker. I’ll be there as soon as I can, Max.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I love you very much, Max,’ I said, but he had gone.

  I sat staring at my phone for a time. Then I texted Millicent.

  Max is scared. Where are you?

  This looks bad, I know. This looks like grounds for divorce, with automatic custody awarded to the father. Believe me, it isn’t that straightforward.

  Max was three. Millicent was pregnant again. Six months.

  We had devoted the pregnancy to a propaganda offensive. We talked about how much fun it would be for Max to have a new brother or sister, how much that child would look up to Max, how it would adore him and come to him for help and advice throughout its life. Max, we told him, was going to be a great older brother. He would love the baby, and the baby would love him.

  Max and I used to lie beside Millicent on the living-room fl
oor, each with an ear to her belly, listening, exploring with our hands, feeling for the tiny kicks and punches. We talked about the ultrasound pictures, about where the baby was lying inside Millicent, how its hands and feet were arranged, how it was fully formed now, how it looked like a proper baby now, how all it had to do was get a little bigger now. Just a little bigger.

  Max wanted a sister, he told us, but a brother would probably be OK too. Guess what, we said, you’re in luck: it’s not a brother, it’s a sister.

  Max had marched around the house chanting ‘baby sister, baby sister, baby sister’, until he collapsed exhausted on the living-room floor and had to be carried to bed. He began to make his own preparations: he gave up drinking milk from a bottle, decided he no longer needed a nappy at night.

  We bought him a baby of his own, an anatomically correct girl doll that he used to carry around the house by one arm. He would fall asleep with the doll cradled to his chest.

  We had done our job well; his baby sister had become a reality for him.

  One day the baby’s heart stopped beating. There was no warning, and we never found out the reason; it just died there in Millicent’s womb in the small hours of a Wednesday morning. Millicent woke early, felt an absence, dressed without waking me, and took a minicab to the hospital.

  At seven thirty she rang me. She was talking so quietly I could barely make out what she was saying. There was no detectable heartbeat. Our little girl was gone. The hospital was going to induce a delivery. A birth that wasn’t a birth.

  ‘I’ll come.’

  ‘Don’t, Alex.’

  ‘Millicent …’

  ‘To have you here would be unbearable to me, Alex. It’s a parody of what it should have been.’

  ‘I love you, Millicent …’

  ‘I have to go.’

  I left Max with Fab5. I bought flowers and fruit and chocolates; I bought a cream silk dressing gown; I bought a mountain of books.

  I went to the hospital. I sat at my wife’s side until she woke. I held her hand, wanting the first words she heard to be mine.

  ‘I love you, Millicent … I love you so very much.’

  My words brought her no comfort. She sat silently for over an hour. Babies screamed in nearby wards. She sent me away.

  She came home two days later looking drawn and stricken. I had done what I could to prepare Max, had tried to explain what had happened, but when Millicent came through the door he looked confused. He didn’t greet her, but stood watching her suspiciously.

  ‘Where’s the baby?’

  ‘The baby isn’t coming, Max,’ said Millicent.

  ‘Where’s the baby?’

  ‘Honey, sweetheart, the baby died. I’m so sorry, Max.’

  Max stood for a very long time, the doll in his arms, rocking it gently back and forth. That evening he refused to speak to Millicent and insisted I put him to bed. And the next evening. The evening after that he screamed when Millicent picked him up.

  It got worse. Max would run from the room if Millicent appeared. I would find him in his bedroom, hyperventilating. Once when he seemed to have disappeared completely from our tiny house I found him under the sofa in the living room, his face streaked with snot, shaking and sobbing silently. At night he would cry for hours on end until, despairing, Millicent and I decided that I should sleep on a camp bed in his room.

  Millicent found the doll in the bin under the kitchen sink, the arms and legs torn from their sockets. We sat on the sofa in the living room before Max was awake, holding each other, trying to understand what was happening to our son. What do we do?

  I read all that I could about small children and grief. Cry with them, said the books. Don’t hide your own feelings, said the magazines. They need to know it’s OK to grieve, said the parenting sites. Have a funeral, they said. Bury a doll, they said. Yeah, we said, what a bunch of freaks.

  One night, after Max had cried for six solid hours, I cried experimentally in front of him. The result was immediate, catastrophic.

  Max’s distress intensified. He clung to me as if I too might disappear. I tried to talk to him about why he was crying, about how that was OK, but he became hysterical, pushing me away, kicking and punching the mattress, screaming, ‘No, no, no, no!’ Then he banged his head so hard against the top rail of the bed that his nose bled for two hours. I took him to Casualty, terrified by the bruise radiating out from his left temple.

  The nursery asked us to keep Max at home for a week. I called in sick.

  Millicent avoided the house. She took to working as much as possible, leaving early and returning late. At home she would slink around, keeping out of the way of the boy who seemed to hate her and fear her in equal measure.

  We would meet almost by chance, she and I, if I crept downstairs when Max had cried himself into catatonia: to make tea; to have a smoke; to take a telephone call. Once I stole into our bed and lay down beside Millicent for a few small minutes, only to be summoned back by my son’s screams of rage from the next room.

  This was unliveable. Millicent was losing weight, undone by her own grief, and by guilt at what grief was doing to her little boy.

  And so Millicent’s absences began. ‘Out,’ she would say, when I asked her where she’d been. ‘I’ve been out. Thinking.’ Out to cafés and libraries in the daytime, bars in the evening, parks at the dead of night.

  ‘This is London,’ I would say. ‘Don’t go to parks.’

  ‘It’s super-safe here,’ she would say. ‘No guns.’

  Our son lies in his bedroom in our mean little house, his eyes screwed shut, alone at the dark of night.

  The rain sculpts Millicent’s clothes tight to her body, like cloth on to plaster of Paris. She sits on a bench at the dark of night, huddled against the cold, alone amongst the blue-black shadows of the park. Go home.

  Do people ring Child Protection Services about parents like us? Or do they leave us alone because we look as if we know what we’re doing, because we feed our son, and clothe him, and send him to school?

  Four hundred miles north I pace my parents’ flat. Alone at the dark of night.

  Millicent is more upset about the dead neighbour than she is prepared to admit. Her absence tells me that.

  I paced the flat until five, then made tea and woke my mother. Her eyes wandered around the room, then fixed on me.

  ‘Alexander, you’ve not slept.’

  ‘No, Mum.’

  I sat on the bed. She ruffled my hair.

  ‘What is it, Laddie?’

  I was seven again. We were alone together, the whole day in front of us. Edinburgh Zoo, then Tantallon beach in her racy Triumph Dolomite, front seat, top down. Ice cream in Musselburgh on the way home. Vanilla or strawberry? Both if you’re good, Alexander. Both if you’re good.

  I put my arm across her back.

  ‘How was your night, Mum?’

  ‘As expected. Alexander, son, what is it?’

  ‘Mum, I’m so sorry. I have to go home.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. Everything, I thought. Max, Millicent, Dad. Me. The police. Everything’s wrong, Mum.

  My mother looked at me, sceptical. Tell her the truth, I thought. Tell her something like the truth. ‘It’s Millicent, Mum. She needs me at home. I’m so very sorry.’

  ‘Aye,’ she said softly.

  ‘I’ll come back, Mum. I’m really sorry, but I have to go.’

  ‘Aye,’ she said again. ‘Aye.’

  ‘I can try and make the arrangements.’

  ‘No, son. No, he’d want me to do that. I’ve his instructions in a letter. But you will come, will you not?’

  ‘Yes, all of us.’

  She made me chicken sandwiches, wanted to drive me to the station. While I stood by the front door, anxious to leave, she fetched a large red carrier bag from the spare bedroom. ‘For Max,’ she said. ‘In case you can’t make it back.’

  ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘we’ll be there. Of course we’ll
be there. I have to go.’

  I made the five forty train with three minutes to spare.

  The train came into King’s Cross on time, and I was at home by ten past ten. There was Millicent at the kitchen table, looking for all the world as if nothing was wrong between us. Expensive underwear, an old white cotton shirt of mine. She smiled and got up to greet me, hands on my shoulders, flexing up to me, barefoot and tiny. I kissed the top of her head, then stepped away from her.

  ‘Hey, honey,’ she said. ‘I’m so very sorry for your loss.’ The right words, the right note of concern in her voice.

  ‘Max told you.’

  ‘How’s your mother?’

  ‘Not good,’ I said. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Max went to school. Alex, are you OK?’

  ‘Fine. I’m fine. I told him to wait for me.’

  ‘You were worried about him. There’s nothing wrong with that. You’re a good father, Alex.’ She sat down in her chair.

  Was she leaving a gap, creating a silence that I would feel compelled to fill? You’re a good mother, Millicent. Was that what she was waiting to hear? Part of me wanted to say it so that she could contradict me.

  No, Alex, I left Max alone and I feel bad. I’m a horrible, horrible mother.

  Millicent sat down at the table again. I sat down on the floor, my head level with the counter top.

  ‘So,’ I said. Millicent’s technique. That single word. You fill the gap now, Millicent.

  ‘Oh, Alex,’ she said. ‘There’s so much I can’t tell you about my life right now.’ Then she began to cry.

  I watched her for a while. The anger lifted from me. It was easy to forget how vulnerable she was. I got up, tried to pull her to her feet so I could hug her to me, but she sat, balled defensively into her chair. I crouched down and held her to me. Her shoulders kept me stiffly at bay. Then her body relented and she collapsed into me.