Can you see now why I think my son might have done it? Can you understand my anguish? Perhaps, to understand better, we need to take a look at the prime suspect.
Bob.
He’s tall for his age, a little lanky, with puddle-brown eyes, a splatter of freckles on his nose, and a sharp hairdo. He has a thing for Barcelona, a Spanish football team I assume, and fronts up to our local hairdresser, a lovely lady called Cheyzene, with a scrapbook full of magazine clippings and the words, “Please make it look just like that.”
Cheyzene just smiles knowingly and sets to work. She knows what she’s doing; it’s the same for all the boys in the ’hood: they all seem devoted to the same team, all wear the same ugly maroon jersey every chance they get. I mean, really? Is there only one team in the entire league?
He’s a popular kid, my Bob, judging by the constant greetings he gets as we wander the supermarket and the hordes of kids who hang out on our road, half on their bikes, half on skateboards, trying to steal him away. Has a pretty sweet temperament, all things considered. Rarely raises his voice to me. Doesn’t act like a psychopath, if that’s what you’re wondering.
As for motive? Well, what can I say? Bob grew up with a mother who adored him and a father who lives across the road and makes love staring back at his old house. Is that so odd? Maybe it is, but you wouldn’t kill because of it, right?
How about this then: Bob turned thirteen yesterday. Yep, big, big day—he’s officially a teenager! Woo-hoo! Except I refused to let him have a birthday party on account of the fact that I’d busted him kissing some hussy in the local park the week before. Or rather, I hadn’t busted him, I’d entrusted him to his best mate’s mum, a woman called Junnifer. Well, Jennifer Cloak is her actual name, but she has airs and graces that one and a very odd way of pronouncing her rather common name. I like to call her Jenny, and it really gets her goat.
“Oh Lulu, darling, it’s Junnifer if you don’t mind. Jenny’s not really my style.”
“No worries, Jenny,” I’d reply, then slap my palm to my forehead and say, “Oops, sorry, did it again!” Then I’d call her Jenny for the rest of the conversation. Eventually she would give up, although every now and then she’d give it another whirl. She failed each and every time, and I would go back to calling her Jenny all over again.
So anyway, Junnifer (I like to use her full name when she’s not listening) had custody of my son last Friday night, primarily because it kept her maniacal son Sebastian entertained. I know the way these things work. No one ever invites a twelve-year-old boy over for the pure pleasure of his company. He had a job to do and that was to entertain her spoiled progeny. Except, that night, she boasted as she watched Bob slip into the back seat of her stinky, new black BMW beside “Seb”, she was taking them to a film night at the local hall. I live in a small, regional town, did I tell you that much?
And by all accounts, she did take them to the hall. She just didn’t bother hanging around. Probably had silverware to polish.
So what did they do? They did what all the other ratbags in the village do, they scooted out the back door and congregated down behind the hall in the local “park,” a term I use advisedly because it’s really just a muddy, overgrown patch of earth with a rusty swing and a rotting wooden hutch they call a tree house. Why, I don’t know. It’s not actually in a tree, and it’s the size of a large dog kennel, but there you have it.
Anyway, that’s where the aforementioned crime occurred. Not my murder, we’re not there yet. I’m talking about the hussy wench who snogged my son. My as-yet-to-turn-thirteen son, I might add. Still a tween, not even a teen. Waaaay too young to lock lips with anyone, let alone tongues inside a rotting hutch. But that’s exactly what happened, and I know this because I heard about it in great, florid detail the following morning from two tweenie girls who were beyond excited by the whole affair.
Tweenie girls. Shudder.
No offence if you have one, but I have very little patience for that lot let me tell you that. I mean, sure, they can hold a conversation, make their beds in the morning, and they don’t stink out the house the second they remove their sneakers. I get it. They’re perfect. But they’re also so virtuous and bossy and smug. You wouldn’t want to live with one, let’s put it that way.
“Bob hooked up with Henrietta!” Yana told me the second I stepped into the corner shop, which is a sun-scorched twelve-minute stroll from my house and rarely worth the effort. Yana’s dad ran the place, and Yana could usually be found behind the counter stuffing her face with free gummy bears or loitering just outside the front door, bored to her pudgy eyeballs.
“Sorry? What?” I replied.
“They were having sex!” came the shrill tones of another tweenie girl, a friend of Yana’s I suspect. Half her size and twice as thick.
“Oh don’t be silly!” Yana had turned on her friend. “They were just making out. That’s not sex.”
“Yuh it is.”
“Nuh-uh! Sex is when a guy puts his—”
“When did this happen?” I demanded, not interested in a reproduction lesson from eleven-year-olds at ten in the morning while standing in a local store clutching a two-litre bottle of pasteurized milk.
“Last night, in the park,” she replied, smirking so much her beady little eyes got lost in rolls of cheek fat.
“They were sexing,” persisted the other one. The one I now wanted to smack across the head with my milk bottle.
“That’s not sexing, Eloise.” Pause for eye roll. “That’s just making out. You’re sooooooo juvenile!” Like she was the model of maturity.
The whole time Yana’s dad was watching, also smirking behind the counter. At no point did he think to pull his daughter up, ask her to pull her head in. Instead, he gave me a “Don’t you just love kids?” look, and now it was his head I wanted to smack in.
I paid for the milk and got the hell out of there, not sure whether I was angrier with him for looking so delighted by the whole exchange or Yana for spreading malicious gossip about my son and that hussy.
A few hours later, when Bob got home from his “sleepover”—again, we need to use quotation marks there, you can bet very little sleep was had what with all the brutal, blood-drenched PlayStation games young Sebastian is spoiled rotten with—I bailed him up. Well, kind of.
“So how was the film at the hall last night?”
He shrugged, opened the fridge door, and stared vacantly inside. “All right.”
“What was it about?”
“Dunno. Something.”
“Who was starring in it?”
“Dunno. Someone.”
“Any snogging going on?”
He turned from the fridge door and looked at me. “Huh?”
“Just wondering, anybody do any kissing? You know, in the movie or maybe later on?”
He looked like I’d flipped, didn’t have the good grace to blush, just turned back to the fridge and reached for a tub of yoghurt. “Dunno. Nah, don’t think so.”
“Right,” I said. “Anything you want to tell me then?”
He ripped the lid off his yoghurt and shrugged again. “Nope.” He began to lick the top clean. It’s a pet hate of mine. I mean, is there not enough in the tub to keep you happy? If not, just open another tub.
“Fine,” I said, then added, “The party’s off.”
“What?”
“You heard me, your thirteenth birthday party is cancelled. Kaput.”
All hell broke loose then, of course. You see, boys are men of few words until it pleases them, then you can’t shut the buggers up.
“What? Nooo! It can’t be cancelled! You said I could have a sleepover party. You said it ages ago. You promised! You promised on your grandma’s life! You said I could have twelve mates and we’d toast marshmallows and… and you promised. I’ve been planning it all year, I’ve got it all sorted, everyone’s really excited! So it’s happening, okay? It’s happening!”
I let him get through the first stage of grieving—denial. Then waited while the second stage kicked in. Anger.
“Well, you can bloody well drop dead because there’s no way I’m telling everyone they can’t come. You can’t do that, Mum. It’s the kinda shit you do to me all the time! You make my life miserable. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”
When that didn’t cut the mustard, he tried bargaining. “Come on, Mum, please? Pleeeeease?”
I shook my head. “Sorry, no, I’ve changed my mind.”
“But… but you can’t do that!”
“Why not?”
“Because you just can’t. You gave your word. You can’t break your word!”
“Oh but you can?”
He looked perplexed, so I helped him out. “Last night you gave me your word you were going to quietly sit in the local hall and watch a movie with Sebastian. That’s what you said you were going to do, but you broke your word.”
“Ah, no, Mum. I never actually said that.”
I held up a finger. “Ah yes, but you inferred it. By agreeing to accompany Sebastian to a film at the hall, the inference—the contract between us (my finger was now pointing from him to me and back again)—was that you would stay inside the hall watching said film. But you did not. (Finger was now pointing straight at his head.) You slipped out the back and had your merry way with that girl.”
As my finger now did a dirty dance in the air, he looked stunned.
“But… but…”
Bam! I got you there! I dropped my hand, smiled smugly, and walked out of the kitchen and up to my bedroom where I shut the door. Okay, that was an unfair move—not cancelling the party, that was justified, he shouldn’t be snogging girls in rotting hutches, especially girls that were due to show up to his sleepover party in just a week’s time. No, I was hitting below the belt by storming into my bedroom. It’s kind of like my “out of bounds.”
Bob never enters my bedroom and vice versa. Not since he decided at the age of nine that sleeping anywhere near me was a repulsive thought. These days we’re less “peas in a pod” and more “two ships passing in the night.” So my bedroom has become sacred territory now, the perfect bunker when we’re getting on each other’s nerves. He never crosses the threshold, and I never ask him to. And I certainly never go into his room, at least not while he’s around. So I escaped to my bedroom and forced the issue to drop.
But he didn’t let it drop. He sulked for the full week and then all day yesterday, on his birthday. He ignored the cake I’d baked him, too, until the thick chocolate icing got the better of him and I caught him sneaking a slice.
But this is not the reason I think he killed me even though he did say the actual words, “Well you can drop dead.” You did catch that, right? Well, you need to know I really don’t think my son would slay me over a disappointing birthday.
I think he killed me because the very next day (i.e. this morning, are you keeping up?), I told him to pack up and piss off.