Laroche said, out of the blue, that when he was six he saw his stepdad hang his mother over the banisters by her ankles till her teeth rattled, and without thinking Michael said that he once saw his dad hit his mum around the face.
That shut them both up for a bit – the sum total of an afternoon’s conversation.
Looking back, Michael could remember his mother from when he was young – her brisk hands swooping down from on high and wiping his mouth, the wrap of a hot towel around him after bath time, her standing in the kitchen doorway and bursting into tears at the end of a wet afternoon, the birthday cakes she whisked up: the football pitch, the circus, the guitar, the skateboard: elaborate creations that reflected his every passing interest. She made him a star chart for his reading – he might try that on Laroche who was making heavy weather of The Monstrumologist. She lay on the floor and they played with his garage by the hour: wheeling the blue car up three stories and down again, up three stories and down, filling it with petrol, taking it to the car wash. He always had the red car, but the routine was the same.
He could remember her dried up and dying, but he didn’t remember much in between. It was his dad he was trying to get to, elbowing her out of the way. When people talk about what hurts them most, they smile; they don’t look sad. He’d noticed that. He remembered his mum smiling, the contraction of her gaze as he hurried to go fishing, or off to football. He could remember the breathless radiance in her face when he first saw her with Étienne, and the complete understanding he had of what was coming.
She gave him a choice when she went to France: you can come with me or stay with Dad, it’s up to you, and he was so overwhelmed with guilt at the wringing relief he felt because she’d said he could stay with his dad, that he stammered in a rush he wanted to go and live with her.
He remembered one dirty morning lying late in bed with Charlotte in her flat, when they had only just got together and were thirsting for every kind of knowledge of each other. He was trying to explain the situation to her: how he’d ended up in France, the awkward wreckage which his parents had created.
She lit a cigarette and for a while the two of them watched the slow dissipation of smoke into the room, the pale convolutions catching the sliver of light through the curtains, drawn against the midday sun.
“I’m not sure that I’ll ever be able to forgive them,” he was tentative, wanting her to know about him, nervous about telling her.
She leaned on one arm, sweeping her last exhalation up and away. “Mon petit Chéri.” He felt her beautiful French words rather than heard them, on his skin, in his hair; her voice like smoke tangible in the air. She trailed her fingers over his chest as if she might write something there, things which could not otherwise be said.
“Charlotte–” her name twisted out of him. He was convulsed with wanting her, wanting everything about her, all five senses of her: touch, smell, taste, sight, sound.
“If you don’t forgive you can’t forget,” she said, “and you’ll have to carry the past with you always and the weight of it will become très lourd.”
Uncertainly, he moved to kiss her and she caught his face in her hand and he could feel the grip of her fingers, the urgent grip, “and you will never be free.”
He ducked his head. He was way out of his depth, deliciously, terrifyingly. She leaned across to stub out her cigarette and he felt the graze of her against him as if she had burnt his skin. He was consumed by her. The last thing he wanted was to be free.
Michael looked up at the barred window, at the drain pipe on the hospital wing with its slick of green algae. He should have listened to her. He felt the glint of a migraine in the corner of his vision, like the half-seen slap to his Mum’s face, the sight of Charlotte crashing down the stairs.
There was silence in the cell, brief and rare.
“About this kid,” said Laroche. “If I agree it’s mine – wot then?”