by Alan Goodwin
‘There’s something I want you to do for me, Bebe. Think of it as a last favour.’
‘What, Jack?’
‘I need to go back to New Zealand, no I have to go back to New Zealand, and I want you to arrange it for me.’
‘Once you’ve gone back to England and sorted these things out, I’m sure you can make a trip.’
‘No Bebe, I think you’ve missed the point. I want to go back now. I want you to arrange for me to go to New Zealand instead of to England.’
‘I can’t do that, Jack. Please don’t ask me to do something that I just can’t do. The company have made it quite clear what has to happen. If you go off against their wishes you’ll be finished.’
‘Not if you can get them to agree. All I need is a week. Tell them you know me better than I do myself. If I have a week to sort out things there, I’ll return to the UK and do anything that’s required. I’ll go to any clinic and attend any course. Please Bebe, please try. I have to go back there. All the rehab in the world will be useless if I don’t go back and sort out what I’ve left.’
‘You’re asking so much, Jack.’
‘I know, Bebe, but once I’ve done this and been back home, things will change.’
‘Will they?’
‘Yes, I promise.’
‘I’ll try, Jack. I’ll try and get to see George now. The man likes you and he wants to do right by you. I know you think he only cares about the company, but that’s not true.’
‘I’ll be in your debt, Bebe.’
‘You already are.’
I touched his shoulder and he smiled thinly.
FOURTEEN
I was sure that the act of returning alone would convince Mary to talk to me. I was wrong. I should have realised this the first time I called, on the number kindly supplied by Mike, who’d the decency to refrain from asking why I needed it. Far from welcoming me, Mary grunted responses as though woken from the deepest sleep even though I rang mid-afternoon. She listened impatiently to my increasingly desperate pleas to meet me and left me staring at the receiver long after she’d hung up with the firmest of rejections. I tried again, a few times actually, but her response was the same and her voice harsher each time until by the end of the fourth call she screamed at me to leave her alone. Briefly I toyed with the idea of visiting her at school, that information also provided by Mike in the mistaken hope that he was helping to repair our damaged relationship. I even got as far as the car, key in ignition, before I realised just how pointless such an attempt was. Mary did not want to see me and did not want to speak to me. She thought Caroline’s death was my fault, but she refused to explain, so all I could do was try to strike the thought from my mind. I knew, though, that it was going to haunt me on lonely cold nights and ferociously empty mornings when only the bottle accompanied me.
As I sought Mary, Detective Sergeant Ryan sought me. Bebe could have withheld the information that I’d returned, but he owed me nothing more. Somehow he persuaded the powers that be, namely George Mason, that my request should be allowed. I asked him how he’d achieved the impossible, but he refused to say. It struck me then at what cost to him my fleeting freedom must have been purchased. Bebe simply placed a finger over his moist lips and promised that one day I’d know. I knew that to be true, although I suspected it might not come from those wet lips. However, we both knew I owed him everything and I would have to pay. I don’t think I realised the payback would start immediately, but it did: Bebe told Ryan where I was. Ryan wanted me back at the station. I said I’d call to arrange a time. He rang twice more. Once Mary made her position clear, I turned off the phone, sure in the knowledge I wouldn’t miss her call and would miss Ryan’s.
While there had been hope of meeting Mary, I hadn’t given England a second thought, but now there was only a paper-thin wall separating me from my fate there. I knew if I was to keep my rocket on planet fame I had to pass through the house of the head fuckers. When Mason first told me about the company’s requirement that I attend a clinic I wasn’t particularly shocked but now my pathological hate of going to such a place was in full flight. I would be a prized specimen for the men in the white coats, slicked-back hair and pebble glasses. They would rub their hands in glee. Think of the battery of questions, tests and psychobabble they could amuse themselves with. Think of the endless evenings of earnest discussion they could dine out on. It would all be very comfortable of course—first-class accommodation, expensive suits and spa pools to make the whole thing feel like a resort—yet behind the façade lurks a veritable host of syndromes and psychoses, people diagnosed with emotional fuck-ups that have names like Welsh villages. And they’d invent a whole lexicon of new descriptions to describe my phobias and needs.
My letter-writing stalker became the focus of my attention: I got into the car and headed for Avondale, where I sat for nearly twenty minutes, then took a stroll down the street, located number 26 and returned to the car to wait again. A light rain started and spattered the windscreen. There had been little rain over the past week and the shower brought the smell of the ground to my nose. I took this as a sign that the waiting was over. In the time it took to cross the road the rain grew harder. I glanced at the sky, which was surprisingly light, apart from a smudge of dark grey above me. As quickly as the rain came it vanished, as though God had turned off his hose. The steps to the front door were uneven and badly cracked with weeds growing to well above my ankles. The house, painted a pale salmon, was thankfully mostly hidden from view by an enormous banana tree, its huge leaves drooping under their weight and their ends brown and curled.
A young woman in her mid-thirties, holding a baby in her arms, answered the door. She was pretty, but sallow; her hair hung lankly to her shoulders and looked as though it needed a good wash. In fact, everything about her looked as though it could do with a good wash. Her shirt showed signs of more stains than just baby dribble. The child lolled on its mother’s shoulder, hardly able to keep its head up. ‘Can I help?’ Her voice was deep and husky. A smoker I surmised. She yawned inadvertently, the way new parents do, and the baby kicked as it pushed excitedly against her, driven by some buried instinct.
For a moment I had no idea what to say. In the hundred or so times I’d played this moment in my mind, I’d assumed the person answering would immediately recognise me and know the purpose of my visit. ‘Hello,’ I stammered, ‘my name’s Jack Mitchell.’ I hoped this simple introduction would clear the confusion but the name meant nothing and the woman stood with a blank stare that turned suspicious as she took two steps back into the house and looked around nervously. ‘I received a letter from someone at this address and I’d like to talk to them, please.’
The woman shouted for her mother. The edge of panic to her voice brought an instant response from somewhere deep in the house and the sudden sound of heavy footsteps. ‘Trudy, who is it?’
‘Some guy.’ The young woman spoke without taking her eyes from me and I dismissed her comment with what I hoped was an ironic smile, to prove I was no threat.
‘Can I help?’ Mother was almost twice the size of her daughter but with the same limp hair and once pretty face. She wore a pink tracksuit with similar stains to those on her daughter’s shirt. Obviously there was some genetic explanation for their inability to find their mouths when eating.
‘He says someone here has been writing to him.’ The baby wriggled and the daughter hitched her higher onto her shoulder.
I held out my hand. ‘Jack Mitchell, Mrs…?’
‘Ross, Heather Ross.’ She turned to her daughter. ‘You take Angus inside, love, he’ll catch a cold out here in this weather.’
Trudy walked off, her slippers slapping on the hallway tiles.
‘Did you write me those letters?’
Heather Ross shook her head. ‘Not me, Mr Mitchell. You’d better come through.’ I followed her through the hallway to a chaotic kitchen where the daughter and baby sat at a table. The back door stuck in the wet and Heather heaved her sh
oulder on the wooden frame to loosen it. ‘We could go around the side, but it’s overgrown and muddy. It’s better this way.’ There was a flight of wooden steps down to the jungle of a garden. Just visible through the trees at the very rear of the garden was a prefab building painted a dark brown. The steps were greasy from the rain and we tottered down them. ‘Sorry,’ she panted from the effort at keeping her balance, ‘we’ve not had the time to get around to tidying things up out here.’ Somehow I think twenty years wouldn’t be enough time for the three generations of the Ross family to tidy the place. We waded through knee-high grass and ducked down under the lowest branch of an apple tree to get to the front door of the sleepout. Heather smiled, opened the pale green door and waved me inside. Reluctantly I followed.
The room was empty apart from a faded beige carpet, a single mattress at the far end and a sheet over the only window. I went to the middle of the room, stood, stared and shrugged my shoulder. Clearly something obvious was escaping me, but I had no idea what it was. ‘I’m sorry, Heather, you’re going to have to explain this one to me.’
‘I’m afraid she left a week ago, your mother.’
As I stood, I still saw the room, but in the split second it took me to process Heather’s comment, it was suddenly transformed. A heavy rug excluded all natural light over the window. Lamps in the corners lit the place with a yellow glow. Along the wall opposite the window were books stacked in piles and a heap of papers and magazines. On the floor a beautiful Moroccan rug covered most of the tatty old carpet. A series of desert prints hung on the wall by the door, their colours ranging from the brightest yellow of midday to the sumptuous orange of sunset. A curtain divided the mattress from the remainder of the room. In my imagination I pulled back the curtain, revealing a space just big enough for the mattress and an upturned box for a bedside table.
An elderly woman lay on the bed. I recognised her from the distant past, from pictures and the ghost of a memory, but still I couldn’t quite make out her features: they appeared smudged, the lines ill defined. Although I could conjure an image of the room, I couldn’t make out the exact form of my mother’s face. I saw myself standing there; open-mouthed, flat-footed, feeling as though a stone the size of a football was lodged in my gut. A hundred questions bombarded my mind, knocking me one way, then the other. How do you cram nearly two decades of wondering and questions, twenty years of yearning, into a solitary moment? There were no words. At last we were united and as that thought dawned on me, my body sang. I thought my legs would give way, but I steadied myself. All through this encounter, Mum held me in her stare, watching my every reaction. And then she smiled. Her translucent lips curled at their edges and in that second I forgave her for everything.
That was how I wanted it to be. Perhaps in some parallel universe, from where I sensed the faintest of signals, I lived on to sit on Mum’s bed, hold her hand, stroke her hair and discover everything that had happened to her since she’d left. But in this universe, in this shitty, grey, fucked universe, where I’d missed the chance to meet her, her image and that of the room faded like powder dissolving in water. It could have happened—if I’d been brave enough to take the chance of going to her.
‘Mr Mitchell? Mr Mitchell?’
Finally I acknowledged the woman standing with me. Just one question demanded to be asked. ‘Do you know where she’s gone? Did she leave an address?’
‘Sorry, no.’
‘How long was she here for?’
Heather noticed my unsteady sway and guided me to the mattress where we sat next to each other.
‘She came about two months ago when she answered an advert in the newspaper. At first she kept to herself, but slowly we started to talk. You know, she’d pop in for a cup of tea, or I’d come down here in the afternoon for a chat. Quickly we found we had things in common. Lost husbands, for one—in her case by choice, for me enforced. It’s ten years since Eddie left. He went to Thailand, you know. Went on some…tour and never came back. To this day I don’t know what happened to him. I expect he shacked up with some nubile Thai girl and probably stayed there.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘We’d sit together for hours on end. She was a lovely woman. Lovely. I really miss her now she’s gone. I hoped she would leave some way of contacting her, she said she would, but it wasn’t her style. I think she hated ties, hated any roots. No, I don’t think there was a chance she’d leave behind a piece of her future like that.
‘She told me about you. She had this big book of articles and magazine pieces. You see she kept an eye on you, like an angel. Always watching from a distance. She knew all about you, about Mary and Caroline.’ She talked as though the story was her own and even took the liberty of nudging me in the ribs.
‘How did she know?’
‘Didn’t say, but she had all these notes.’
‘Did she ever tell you…tell you why she left? Did she ever tell you which one of us forced her away?’
Heather tugged at the place where her bra cut her considerable girth. How strange that answers I’d sought for so long were held by this woman I’d met just minutes before. I hung on her every word as though she was a shaman, and, of course, in a way she was. She knew what I craved; she was privy to secrets I’d asked myself on endless sleepless nights and cold bitter mornings when only tequila kept me company. Her movements ceased with a final shake, much like a chicken finally settling on an uncomfortable egg. ‘It wasn’t you or your dad who forced her away, love—neither of you did anything wrong. Is that what you thought?’
‘It had to be one of us and I never forgave Dad because I thought it might be him and I never forgave myself because I thought it might have been me. What else were we supposed to think? Who else could we blame?’
‘She just wanted more, Jack, that’s all. I think you get that from her.’
‘Get what?’
‘That striving for something more, that need to push the boundaries. For your mum it meant a rejection of being a wife and a mother. She thought your father was much better cut out to bring you up.’ Heather shook her head. ‘What a shame you held him responsible.’
‘It was inevitable.’
‘With hindsight perhaps that’s right, but she meant it for the best, Jack. She said once that she didn’t feel she had room for you and her, and to let you grow she had to leave. I think she saw it as a kind of sacrifice, a kind of gift in a way. For you to bloom she had to give way.’
‘Whatever she meant, that wasn’t the outcome. We were left abandoned and what she said just sounds like self-justifying bullshit. She left us with nothing to fill the hole she left except unhappiness and shit. I tried to force it back, but it got to me in the end. Nothing she could have done as a mother could possibly have been as bad as what she left behind. And if she knew what was going on, if she was watching like an angel, she must have seen what was happening. Why didn’t she save us?’
‘I think that’s why she reached out to you in the past month. I think it was her way of trying to put things right. It was her chance to make amends.’
‘So she felt guilty?’
Heather merely nodded. ‘Terribly, but I think she thought returning would serve no purpose, that it could never put things together again.’
‘So why now?’
‘I’m not sure she really knew. I think she saw your life as being fragile, almost at breaking point, and felt she could have made a difference.’
‘Why didn’t she just say it was her? What was with all this cloak and dagger stuff? Why didn’t she just sign the fucking notes? I would have come, Heather, I would have come straight away.’ I felt the first tears come. They slipped down my cheek. ‘I would have come. I would have come.’ I wiped the wet away. ‘Why didn’t she just say it was her?’
‘Because she was afraid you wouldn’t come and see her. She couldn’t have lived with the rejection if you’d known it was her and hadn’t come. This way she knew there could have been other reasons for you to stay away.’
�
��If I’d known I would have come, I would have come anyway, but it’s all too late now.’
‘Would you like some time by yourself, Jack?’ She noticed the slightest tip of my head and with considerable effort levered herself from the mattress and left the room.
All I could hear was the occasional hiss of tyres on a wet road. I tried to recapture what it might have been like with Mum and me in the room, but nothing came. There was just emptiness and now the additional sound of the baby crying as Heather opened the back door. Then that, too, was gone. The room was empty and I was empty. There was nothing in this place for me, but still I felt compelled to stay, as though some last trace of my mother was there that would disappear when I left. I needed to take in every last detail of the room, so I walked to every corner, along every wall. When I returned to the mattress and it sank under my weight I saw the smallest of white triangles against the wall. I reached over and pulled out a photograph. I thought it would be of me as a child, a treasured link with the past she had abandoned. To my surprise, no, to my disbelief, it was a picture of Dad. Taken recently, no doubt, on a prowl past our house. How old he looked, how bent and destroyed. I passed my hand over the glossy surface. Why had the photo been taken, and why had Mum held on to it? Did she pity Dad? Before this meeting I might have thought that she had kept the photo because she blamed him, but that was all wrong. I had conjured the darkest of thoughts about what he might have done behind closed doors to force her to leave, but now I knew it had been just my mother’s whim, just a fucking whim.
I thought of taking the picture with me, but it belonged in this empty space, in this vacuum where once there might have been the hope of atonement for past mistakes, so carefully I slipped it back from where it came. You never know, perhaps she might return for it. With a final look and a trickle of tears wiped away with the back of my hand, I turned and left.