“Please, let my mother leave the flat. Please, let my mother leave the flat.” Driving up Hammers Lane, Shelley prayed aloud to God. Exactly what she had said to her mother on Wednesday night, she wasn’t sure, but Rita had agreed that, on this Friday’s visit, she would accompany Shelley to William’s grave. She could hardly believe it. If she’d been doing more crack recently, she’d have been sure it was an auditory hallucination. Her mother hadn’t been outside in months.
Having set the central locking with the key fob, she looked around, ensuring no one was watching her. Then she circled the car and counted aloud as she pulled on both door handles five times, ran her fingers over the top of both windows five times, and depressed the catch on the boot five times.
She walked between the hedges that concealed the path to the red door. The midday sun was bright. Though it wasn’t warm, it looked like a beautiful day; the trees were brimming with blossom.
There was no answer at her mother’s door. Rather than using her own key, she tilted her head skywards and shouted, “Mum, open the door.”
An upstairs window opened and Rita popped her head out. “Come up. I’m getting ready,” she called.
A warm feeling, like the mildest of heroin hits, streamed through Shelley’s body. She opened the door with her key. At the top of the stairs, her mother stood in daytime attire. She hadn’t seen her like that in months. Like Aunt Elsie, Rita was also trapped in the time warp. But in her blue and green geometric-print dress, she was a vision of beauty to Shelley.
“I’m sorry I’m using up all your holiday allowance again,” Rita said.
“You’re not. I’ve got a day off in lieu.” Why that came out of her mouth and where it had come from, Shelley didn’t know. “You look lovely. Shall I brush your hair before we leave?” she asked.
Shelley hopped up the stairs and followed Rita into the bedroom. The curtains were open and the sun was beaming into the room. Rita sat down on a stool at the dressing table and applied an orange lipstick.
After Shelley had made the bed, she stood behind her mother and gently brushed her hair, all the while, smiling at her in the triple mirror.
“Have you had any breakfast?” Shelley laid the paddle brush on the dressing table.
“Not yet, dear.”
“I’ll make us some before we go.”
Shelley strolled to the kitchen and prepared breakfast. With a tray of toast and tea, she walked through to the lounge and placed it on her mother’s lap. Then she went back for her own breakfast tray and joined Rita on the grey settee.
“Have you had a tidy up, Mum?” Reluctantly, Shelley took a bite of her toast. She wasn’t hungry but she wanted her mother to see her eat.
“Not really, I just moved things around. That stuff’s more in the way up here.”
“But you can hardly get in and out with it stored in the hall.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full, dear.”
Shelley swallowed down her toast a little too quickly and choked. “It’s not safe. You need to be able to get in and out.”
“I don’t need to do that.”
“What if there’s an emergency?” Shelley guzzled her tea to clear the toast stuck in her throat. “Do you mind if I move it all into the spare room?”
“If you must,” Rita replied, shaking her head.
Shelley made umpteen trips up and down the stairs, carrying the files and loose papers into the spare room. She didn’t understand why her mother hadn’t moved them there in the first place. That room was never used and she’d been asking her mother for years if she could move them in there and out of the lounge. She’d also wanted to sort through it all and throw out the rubbish, which she suspected most of it probably was, but today was not a day for that.
***
“Are you ready, Mum?” Shelley asked, as Rita stood static at the front door.
“I don’t know, dear. It’s been such a long time since— I shouldn’t have left it so long.”
Shelley took her mother’s hand and guided her over the threshold. After she’d locked the front door, she linked her arm with her mother’s and together they walked slowly along the pathway, then down the steep steps that led to the pavement.
As they got closer to her car, Shelley felt as though she was being drawn back to the front door, pulled by an invisible chain anchored in her gut. Because she never allowed her mother – or anyone else – to see her checking, she fought the compulsion with a cigarette.
“You shouldn’t smoke, Shelley-Margaret. It’s not good for you,” Rita said, opening the passenger door of Shelley’s car.
“Please don’t call me that, Mum.” Shelley switched on the engine then drove off, heading to the cemetery in East Finchley.
When they stopped at the red traffic lights at the junction of East Finchley High Road and East End Road, Shelley turned her head to see the familiar pub on the corner. The Bald Faced Stag was the last place she’d seen William and his band play before he died. She’d beaten him at pool that night and she’d felt guilty, and still did, for not letting him win in front of his friends.
Once Shelley had parked in the cemetery, she stretched her arm round to the back of the car and picked up one of the two bunches of pink carnations she’d brought with her. She handed the flowers to her mother, then reached back over for her own.
From the corner of her eye, she caught sight of a man watching them. Locked safely inside the car, she turned her head fully to see him. It was the same man again. It had to be. She rarely saw anyone in the graveyard, and he was the only person she’d ever seen in the cemetery wearing a shell suit. As it always did, his staring made her feel uncomfortable. Though since she’d started referring to him mentally as the Resident Cemetery Lurker, she found it difficult to take him as seriously as she thought she should.
The next time she turned her head, he’d vanished. She stepped out the car and walked round to the passenger side. She held out her hand to her mother. Rita was weeping. Shelley pulled her close.
“They say tears nourish your soul. Like the rain makes flowers grow. You’re watering your garden.” Though she was unsure it was a fact, Shelley couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“It’s my fault this happened. It’s my fault he’s not here. I should have known.”
Shelley felt her mother’s body shuddering against her. “It’s not. He never blamed you. I’ve never blamed you. It’s not your fault.”
After a short while, they set off through the expanse of headstones. Shelley felt, as she often did, that the buried souls were there with her in the graveyard. She felt their presence, not individually, but as a collective whole as if she was sensing their parallel world.
She knew there was a heaven and she knew her brother was up there. He wasn’t under the earth. His bones were, but not his soul. That all he was was flesh and bone, Shelley refused to believe. He had to continue to exist. She could think of no other way to explain how she heard him and felt him around her so often.
Rita stumbled over the corner of a grave and as Shelley helped rebalance her, she noticed her mother’s hands were trembling. Although she couldn’t see her mother’s legs for her long coat, she imagined they too were unsteady. They had reached William’s grave.
In Loving Memory
Of
William Roderick Hansard
Born September 12th 1972
Died July 19th 1994
A Beloved Son, Brother and Nephew
You Will Forever Live On In Our Hearts
In her head, Shelley could hear Will singing Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb. A song he used to sing with his band and the one that had inspired their name – Numblivion. ‘But I have not become comfortably numb,’ she told him.
Rita knelt at the headstone and placed the pink carnations on the ground. “My boy, my beautiful boy...” She cried as she laid herself face-down on the grave with her arms outstretched over his body below. “Please come back, son... Please come back...”
Shelley struggled to inhale as she suppressed the sobs firing in her throat.
Holding on to William’s headstone, Rita pulled herself up and on to her knees. She looked up to the sky. “God, I’ll do anything, just bring back my son. Please God, bring him back. Why didn’t you take me? Bring him back and take me...”
Shelley couldn’t speak. She wanted to. She wanted to say something to comfort her mother, but she couldn’t think of any words. What words could console a mother who had buried her child? It wasn’t the order life was supposed to take. So wrong, that a word had never been created to describe a mother who’d lost a child. There should be a word for it. Like there is a word for a child who’s lost their parents; they are an orphan. And there’s a word for a spouse whose spouse has died – a widow or widower. What of a mother who has lost her child? There should be a word. And there should be a word for a sibling who’s lost her sibling. Shelley needed a word. There should be a word. Why was there no word for those left alive when a child died?
Shelley knelt on the grass, beside her mother on William’s grave. She rested her head on her mother’s arm. Then she placed her arms on top of her mother’s, intertwined and wrapped around the headstone. Shelley and her mother stayed like that for what may have been ten minutes, or perhaps it was twenty or more. It was hard to judge time passing in such a timeless place.