by Lulu Allison
‘I’m… I’m so sorry, I—’
‘Stop. Shh, please, let’s just sit.’ Audrey waves her hand, pointing at the kitchen table. Ryan pulls out a chair for her with his foot, and they help her to sit down.
‘I should go, I didn’t mean to—’
‘Shh, stay. Ryan, kettle please.’
‘I got you some water.’ Anna looks with something like longing at the front door and the garden and the whole wide rest of the world.
‘Tea, please. Better have some sugar. Sit. Please.’
Unable to do anything other than comply with the woman she has just caused bodily harm, Anna sits.
‘Make us all a tea, Ryan.’ Audrey’s voice is quiet and a little breathy, but steady. Anna feels sweat prickling her palms. She cuts Ryan out of the picture, looks either at her hands fidgeting together on the table or quickly sideways at Audrey.
‘Shall I stay until the ambulance arrives?’ Anna is confused as to the purpose of her remaining.
She is grateful that Ryan puts sugar and milk on the table next to the tea; there is no awkward manoeuvre through the protocol, the ‘how do you have it?’ routine. It gives her a little time. No need to unravel what this strange situation requires. No need to work either with or against her instinct. No need to establish yet what her instinct is.
‘I don’t need an ambulance. I’m just a bit shaken.’
‘Mum, you’ve fallen. You have a cut on your head; you might have banged it.’
‘I’m fine, Ryan. I fell, and yes, I have a cut, but please don’t fuss. There’s no point in wasting their time. I don’t want to go anywhere. I want a cup of tea and an aspirin later. There’ll just be the odd bruise.’ Audrey looks at the graze on her forearm. She rotates her hand and arm, as if to show that there is no impaired movement.
‘I really didn’t plan to, well, I didn’t plan anything. I don’t really know why I came here in the first place. I mean, I don’t know what it is that I thought I was going to do.’ Anna’s words are quietly spoken. She looks at her hands on the table.
‘I understand why you came. I think I kind of expected it.’
Anna turns to Audrey in surprise. She catches sight of Ryan, who is observing them both with a frown. She immediately looks back down at the table, her mouth compressing, her eyes shuttering off.
‘Ryan, you were on your way into town, weren’t you?’ asks Audrey. Her voice is still quiet but she speaks firmly.
‘Mum, I’m not going into town now. I’m staying to wait with you until the ambulance arrives.’
‘No, I’ve said I don’t want an ambulance. Please call them and tell them that, then perhaps go into town. I’m fine.’
‘I should really go,’ says Anna.
‘Please, no.’ Audrey puts a hand briefly on Anna’s arm. ‘Ryan, call, please, or pass me the phone.’ Ryan sighs in exasperation, almost teenage in his resentful compliance with what his mother asks. He picks the house phone up from its base and makes the call. He hands the phone over to Audrey, who talks calmly and quietly, says she is fine, she doesn’t need help. The conversation ends and she passes the phone back to Ryan.
‘Ryan, please do go to town. I am fine.’
‘No, Mum, I’m not leaving you here.’ He briefly glowers at Anna over Audrey’s head.
‘Well in that case, go upstairs, please.’
He stands for a moment, hands on his hips, then turns abruptly and walks out of the room. Anna presumes he feels as much relief as she does. She sips her tea, wondering what she is doing there. But injury has conferred authority on Audrey and she feels obliged to respond to her commands just as Ryan does.
Audrey puts her hand up to her own shoulder, rubs it gently.
‘Do you want me to find you some painkillers?’
‘There’s ibuprofen in that drawer, but I’ll take some later.’ Audrey pauses. She is cradling her shoulder but puts her hand down slowly. She sits neatly, her hands in her lap, looking straight ahead at the back door in front of her. There is a small trickle of blood still, on the side of her head, from under the soft white hairline. Anna longs to clean it, or apologise again, to be of service somehow. But Audrey is so calm and complete. She sits straight, still, aligned, in quiet command of the unusual circumstances. Anna simply waits. She feels herself calming too, borrowing from Audrey’s Easter-Island composure. The drip of blood acts as a marker of her authority, as if part of an authenticating regalia. After a moment Audrey lifts her hands from her lap and interlaces her fingers before her on the tabletop. Though her actions are entirely natural, a ritual solemnity, a prescribed deliberation, imbues her movements. Anna is captivated, drawn along by Audrey, willing to concede all to this unexpected, gentle authority.
‘I have hoped for years, even without knowing what I would say, that I’d have a chance to talk to you.’
There is another pause.
‘It’s not so much that I didn’t know what I’d say, I know there’s nothing worth saying, but still, I wanted to talk to you. Of course I couldn’t contact you. But we are here now, and—’ She stops, looks down at her hands for a moment, then, looking at Anna, says, ‘I wanted you to know the terrible, terrible shame I have felt. I don’t expect that to be any comfort or value to you. And I am sorry to be opportunistic, but here we both are. I hope you won’t think that I expect my words to be important to you, I don’t. But I think about you every day.’
Anna is stunned. Unable to speak, or to imagine what she might say, she looks back and forth, with furtive, sideways glances, between Audrey’s profile and her blue earthenware mug, her eyes tracing up and down the bell-curve shape, interrupting it with her fingers, finding out its smoothness by touch as well as sight. Both women sit in silence for a few breaths.
‘I don’t for a minute expect I’ve been able to understand everything, the terrible way my son has changed your life. But I have tried to understand it. I have tried to understand the part I might have had in it. I love Ryan, of course, even when I hated him for how he changed everything, everything. Even when I hated him for that, I still loved him. His father couldn’t get over it. He wanted to believe Ryan was innocent. When he stopped thinking of it as a terrible mistake, he sort of gave up. He died nine years ago.’ She speaks plainly, simply. ‘He couldn’t bring himself to visit Ryan in prison. But I did. I had to. It became easy enough after a while. But this is not what I wanted to say to you. Why should you be interested in that? I think what I wanted to say was that when I saw you in court, I couldn’t then believe what was happening to my son. I had never known anything of him that made me ready for it. I didn’t believe he could have done those things, and as it became obvious that he had done, I believed it was a mix-up, an accident. Everything was so confusing then, and I didn’t have the chance to think about it. Afterwards, I did understand. I could see what he had done. I do blame him for what he did, and I feel such shame that my son could be such a man. I think I just wanted to tell you that. When I saw you in court I wanted to shout at you: no, no, no, no! You are all mistaken, it can’t be him, don’t take your loss out on us. I know I didn’t actually say those words to you, but I felt it. I didn’t get even close to understanding your grief because I was dealing with my own, which, though it was much less, still overwhelmed me. But I wanted you to know that has changed. It seemed such an insult on top of everything you have suffered that anyone should try to take the responsibility away from him. I wanted to tell you that I did blame him for what happened to… for what happened.’
Audrey pauses for a moment, looking sideways at Anna as if to check on her desire to react, to allow space for her to speak, but Anna can say nothing. She waits, and soon Audrey resumes, her quiet voice steady.
‘When I did understand what he had done, well, for a while I didn’t really think much at all. It was around then that Charlie died. Things had become difficult between us because he would not admit what had happened, and he wouldn’t visit either. He got very ill. His heart. Liam, our eldest, was living
in Australia. He’d just got married, just before… just before Christmas. So I was looking after Charlie. He died two months after Ryan went to prison. Liam came back then, managed to stay for a few months, which was… well never mind all that, but after Charlie died and Liam had gone back, well, it was just me, and I had time for a lot of thinking. It took a long time to get past the horror of what had happened, of what my son had done to your daughter. I had a need, I think it was a mania really, to unpick every detail, everything I could remember from the moment he was born, trying to understand how I had brought up a boy, such a lovely boy, to be a man who did that. I was very lonely at that time.’ She turns hurriedly to Anna and says, ‘Please don’t think I expect you to care about that, or that I expect anything from you at all. But, well, this may sound very wrong to you, but I thought of you a lot and of how we were connected by what he had done. I knew that however much I felt I had lost everything, it couldn’t match what you were going through, though I knew it would make no difference to you at all, what I felt.’
Audrey stops again. She rubs her shoulder; she seems tired. She takes a few sips of her tea and carries on speaking.
‘I see now how Ryan was the person who could do those things. I have learned a lot. There was something in him that made it possible. Though I do believe he has changed.’
‘You aren’t asking me to forgive him, are you?’ Anna says abruptly, suddenly alert to the possibility of having been tricked into staying.
‘No! No, not at all. Of course, I don’t expect you to think anything about him, that is up to you. I’ve thought about it myself, whether I can forgive him. But it didn’t ever make sense to me, forgiveness. I learned to accept what he had done and to accept the harm that could never be undone. Not because it was an acceptable thing, but because it was the only way for me to keep going. Please don’t think I’m trying to persuade you about anything. You must hate him. And that is part of what I accept. Before it happened, I would have been very upset thinking that someone hated my son. So much can be changed.’
‘How did things change for you, so that you could accept things?’
‘I don’t want to burden you with talk about me. I suppose I just wanted to say, perhaps for selfish reasons, but also because I felt so terribly sad for you, that I think of you, and that I wish there was a way I could have known Ryan in the way I came to know him. I would have done anything to protect her if my eyes had been as open then as they are now.’
‘But I’d like to know. How did you get to a point where you can talk to me in this way? It seems from what you say that you’ve made peace with it all. How did you do that?’
‘I’m not sure. I had a lot of time.’
‘But I’ve had time too. So bloody much time. Time isn’t enough.’
‘I think I just kept picking over things. It wasn’t very helpful at the time. In fact, I felt a little crazy for a while. I was too ashamed to go out much. I had dug out everything, all the things I’d kept, so proud of my son. Photos, school reports, school photos, little shoes, toys and Babygros. There weren’t many letters but I had kept all of them, and every birthday or Christmas card. The first thing I thought was how disgusting my pride in him now seemed. I had kept everything. I wanted to burn it all, and to tell him next time I visited him that’s what I’d done. But I felt so guilty that I couldn’t allow that. For a few weeks, I even pushed back the furniture in the living room and laid all those things out on the floor. Like one of those films when someone is solving a crime, and they have a wall with strings connecting everything. I think that’s what I thought I was doing. I kept making new arrangements of it all. It was a bit mad, but I was sane enough to know that I’d have no visitors so I could get away with it.’
Audrey stops briefly to sip her tea. She leans forwards with her elbows on the table, resting her forehead on her hands.
‘Shall I pass you the ibuprofen now?’
‘Please. Please make more tea if you would like. I feel a little wobbly otherwise I’d do it myself.’
‘Do you think you should lie down?’
‘No, I don’t want that. I hope you can stay a bit? There’s biscuits in that tin.’
Anna has a momentary bubble of laughter at the idea that she is being bribed with biscuits to continue with such an epochal encounter. If biscuits were the reason she would stay, they’d have to be pretty miraculous biscuits. But she does not want to leave, she wants to hear more of this strange, unexpected confession. She gets up, glad to have activity; perhaps such activity is in the end the chief therapeutic ingredient of a cup of tea.
‘While I was going through that sorting and rearranging, looking at Ryan’s past, thinking about him, I started to understand things about him. I started to understand things I had always found harmless in a new way. He is, always was, very vain. I was so proud of his good looks that I thought, used to think, it was natural. I mean, I thought if I looked like him I’d probably be the same. But I wouldn’t. I wasn’t like that, I’ve never been like that, even if I had been beautiful. There is a horrible side to it – he thinks he is better than other people at the same time as he’s afraid of being nothing. Look, I don’t want to keep on about him. It can’t be nice for you to hear all this, but realising things about him was a start for me. I had to decide, almost, that I was still his mother. I had to be the mother of a man that I loved but didn’t know how to be proud of. He didn’t give me all the things I used to get, all that silly maternal pride in having a handsome young son who held doors open for people and impressed all my friends. He had done the worst thing possible. He had a mean, nasty side of his character that I’d known before but thought insignificant. I had to decide that because I still loved this selfish, terrible man, I was still his mother. And I had to look for another way to fill my life now the easy part of that was gone.’
Anna places two fresh cups of tea on the table and sits down once more. She feels strangely comforted to hear Audrey’s words, told so simply and clearly. It was as though she were discovering a subtle but secret ally had been alongside her all this time. Her unexpected compassion for Audrey, the image of her alone in the living room a few yards away, the familiar yet transformed stage of a newly senseless world, turned her thoughts away from their well-worn paths. She was no longer the only centre of the devastated circle made by Caitlin’s death.
‘I started working, as soon as I was more in control again, at a domestic violence refuge. I was a volunteer first, and then I became a fundraiser. I don’t work so much now, I’m retired really, but I still do lots of things to make money for them. Mostly buying cheap stuff and selling it on eBay for a bit more, as I can do that from home and a few little shopping trips to charity shops. It doesn’t make that much, but it’s important to me to keep it going. They struggle so much for money, there’s never enough. It’s not so much that I feel I’m making amends for what he did, because that will never happen, but it may be that someone else is helped, and that is worth doing.’
Audrey’s hand shakes a little as she puts three sugars in her tea. She stirs the cup, then fidgets with the sleeve of her jumper, pulling gently at a fold at her elbow. Anna holds her mug with both hands, letting the warmth seep like comfort into her palms.
‘It is such a sorrow to me that my son did what he did. I have tried and tried to see how I could have prevented it, how I could have made him into a different kind of man.’ Audrey pauses again, and resumes uncertainly. ‘I don’t feel as if I have the right to talk to you about Caitlin.’ Audrey looks at Anna with such a profound look of sadness that both women turn away from each other. ‘But I think of her every day too. Every day. She was a beautiful, lovely girl. And I am so deeply sorry.’
Audrey stops speaking. In the small silence that follows, Anna is overwhelmed with the amount of what has passed, the volume of events. She is overwhelmed by Audrey’s gentle act of trying to amend, overwhelmed by her presence in what for Anna is darkness. Audrey seems to be walking with slow purpose, holding
a small, steady flashlight, walking through that darkness, showing Anna that maybe, after all, there are other paths.
For some minutes, they sit in silence. Anna leans her head forwards, her elbows on the table, her hands cradling and shielding her face. She weeps, quietly at first. There is a purity of sadness in the tears. No anger to rescue her from feeling it, no frustration to distract. Her shoulders shake, a small tremor; she sobs almost silently. Audrey reaches over, places her hand gently on Anna’s arm. Two women sit for all of time in a tidy kitchen.
Chapter 24
Anna walks along the path at the field’s edge. The day is brisk; wind scuds, flicking the sunlight on and off as small clouds buffet across the sky. She pulls her scarf up, squinting in the bright light. She walks a familiar path, on a longer loop than usual. Past the village and into fields beyond. She walks by the church tucked into the far end of the village, and on, passing the small graveyard. She thinks of her dead, wonders where they found their resting place, what customs and rituals accompanied them. Symbols of love and sadness, spoken in ritual, intentions embodied in solemn formalised acts of caring.
Though the dead in her notebooks are still companions in quiet moments, she has not written any new portraits since she got back from Tenerife. Since, she realises now, the moment when she looked from the sea to the beach and thought she saw Caitlin. She knew it was not her daughter, it was a summoning, a mirage, but in that moment, it was a sight she allowed herself. A shimmer of her child in the distance.
She recognises now that something changed in those seconds. The crowd she had gathered, the many to disguise the one, parted. The one face she had pushed aside, refused to see, was there before her, and she did not turn away.
She still feels a duty of care, a kind of love for the relentless, numberless strangers tucked inside the news stories and those familiar strangers written in her books. It is a love that flickers in her chest when she reads the papers or listens to the radio, for the souls she didn’t know, for the loss to the world in their death. But she no longer needs their intervention in her own life, no longer needs the subtle barrier of the ghost chorus. Instead, she has chosen to offer herself to the living. She has applied to work as a volunteer in a refugee centre, teaching English and helping people complete their paperwork. Her training is due to start in a few days.