There’s a small boy. He’s waving. All those people on the train and I know the wave is meant for me. The train passes and there he is again, and again, ahead of us, standing behind a fence, waving.
I lift a hand, but hold back on any movement as I become acutely aware of the people around me. Can they see him? I cross my arms, tucking my hands under them, reluctant to appear the fool.
The train moves on.
He’s in the seat beside me. His small, warm hand in mine. He climbs onto my lap and leans his head against my chest as if he’s sharing my heart beat.
We breathe the same air. The silk of his hair a balm against the rasp of my unshaven cheek. Like a benediction.
I send him a silent thank you: beginning to understand that because he endured so can I. With a short, tight, squeeze of his hand, and a smile, he’s gone. Small gestures that leave their message, and as I wake into a new day I feel the realisation lodge in my mind, and become aware of the challenge it represents.
It’s kindness that brings us back to ourselves.
There are two sounds that I have always loved. The first is footsteps in crisp snow and the second is the crunch of gravel as I walk or drive over it. The former is easily understood – what child doesn’t love to be the first person to walk on a virgin piece of snow. The latter is not so easily explained. Perhaps the reason is buried in my past. Perhaps the enjoyment I find in this sound is the whisper of a memory of better times. Whatever the reason, whenever I hear this noise my face lifts into a smile.
My passenger looked over at me quizzically. I declined to answer the obvious question in Angela’s eyes, simply enjoying the noise of small stones being crunched together by the passage of my car.
The week before, the day after Thomas and I visited Coulson, I had phoned Angela. Strangely, something about that act of violence helped to clear my mind.
‘Hey,’ she had said, her voice tentative. And that one syllable was enough to make me realise I couldn’t not be with her.
‘I’ve missed you so much,’ I said, my voice cracking.
‘Me too,’ she replied.
‘I want to make this work. I want to get to know Cathy. I want both of you in my life,’ I babbled. ‘Can we try?’ I’d never felt so nervous as in that moment, as I tried to read her silence.
‘You cheated on me, John,’ she said in a small voice. ‘That kind of trust is difficult to earn back.’
‘I’ll do anything,’ I said, not caring that I sounded desperate. ‘Anything.’
‘The drinking needs to stop.’
‘Already working on that.’
We met.
We talked.
We fell in love all over again.
As soon as she heard that I was planning on confronting my mother again, Angela offered to come with me. She made the suggestion carefully, with eyebrows uplifted, her whole body leaning towards me as if to protect me. Admitting that her company would be a comfort, I accepted.
Inside Lennox House, Angela took a seat in reception. ‘I’ll wait for you here,’ she said, allowing her hand to linger in mine before letting go.
Up the stairs, feeling that my heart was about to burst out of my ribcage, I knocked at my mother’s door and entered.
‘Hello, John.’ A weak, tremulous voice came from the bed. A bony hand fidgeted with a gold chain. My mother’s gaze held mine for a fleeting second. She was the first to look away. ‘How are you, son?’ she asked, her voice edged with false cheer.
We were in full denial mode again, then. Only that brief fidget suggested my previous visit was on her mind.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Fine,’ I tried again after clearing my throat. ‘Are you being looked after?’ I asked, with a politeness normally reserved for strangers.
‘Speech therapist says I’m doing well.’ She held up her damaged hand. ‘The physio is less confident.’
For several minutes the conversation continued in this vein as we carried on our charade of loving mother and dutiful son. A lapse in the conversation then followed as we both fought for something to say. The quiet was even less comfortable than the dialogue.
‘Have you had many visitors?’ The word ‘Mum’ stuck in my throat like a solid lump of bile.
‘Yes.’ She tried to sound bright. ‘Mrs Johnstone has been really kind; she’s been in and out of here a couple of times a day since I arrived.’
‘Good.’ I smoothed down an imaginary bump in the bedclothes, and then withdrew my hand as if I might be burned. I had gotten too close to touching her. ‘It’s a shame it’s not a nicer day.’ I said looking out of the window. ‘That’s quite a view you’ve got.’
‘Beautiful,’ she agreed. ‘The change in the weather gives it that little something extra. No two minutes looking out of this window are the same.’
This was a safe conversation, and a light like a remembered happiness smoothed out some of the lines on her face as she took in the view.
As I watched her speak I remembered past joys. Moments when she had been a good mother, when her affections weren’t tainted. I was that small boy again, needing her love, craving her attention and touch. I was that boy again whose anger was a black surge in his mind. It was wrong, all wrong, but she told me it was special. I was special.
And then it stopped.
The relief and the disappointment warred within me. The shame that I wanted more. The gut-scouring guilt as memory provided a view of her going into Chris’s bedroom, knowing what was about to happen, being powerless to stop it, and feeling that tiny nub of envy prodding at my heart.
Why hadn’t I gone to Dad? He would have stopped it.
The memory of her voice in my mind was a whisper and a song. ‘This is love. The purest form, between a mother and a son. I’m taking you back into myself … and it is beautiful.’ Her eyes shining with tears, her expression beatific.
If it made her so happy how could it be wrong?
‘Dad won’t understand how unique we are. He’ll break us up. You’ll be sent to a home. Do you want that?’
Panic, bright and harsh burst in my mind. ‘No.’
‘Then this has to be our secret. No one can know.’
But there, before the shame crashed in, a second of affection, a touch that was driven by love, not power and lust. I closed my eyes against this yearning, disappointed in myself, feeling that shame all over again. And in that moment, sorrow, rage and longing tumbled over and under each other. Aware that my hands were shaking I placed them under my thighs.
My mother looked back towards me, and my attention shot back to the view She continued to speak – inconsequential stuff, gossip she’d learned from Mrs Johnstone, the quality of the food here. As she spoke her eyes were fixed on the glass. My eyes darted back and forth from her to the window. The muscles of my jaws ached as I forced myself to stay calm. Willing my shoulders to relax I walked over to the window and filled my lungs with the clean air that seeped through the small opening at the bottom of the sill.
‘The doctors say I’m making good progress,’ she said.
‘Right,’ I said and fell silent.
The shrill quiet then sounded in our ears. It was broken briefly by the squeak of a wheelchair passing by the door. I could sense that my mother was building up to something. It took all of my courage not to fill the silence with another inane comment about the weather. I cursed myself for being a coward.
‘Would you fill up my glass with some water please, John? All of this talking is giving me a thirst.’
‘Sure,’ I replied. As I handed her the glass, the warm paper of her hand brushed against mine. She caught my involuntary shudder and her eyes clouded in pain.
‘How’s Thomas? I really do have grandchildren?’ she asked, her voice a tremble of absence. I could see she was bracing herself for my answer. She knew I would withhold the information, but still she couldn’t help but ask.
‘You have some nerve,’ I replied, each word clipped with anger.
‘Sit here, beside me, please,’ she pleaded. A bubble of rust formed on my mental shield and I sat. Her hand gripped mine with a force that surprised me.
‘What have I done to you, John?’ she whispered.
My hand remained limp in her grip. Now that the moment had come, I found myself unable to speak. I wanted to rail at her, to scream and expel the last of the poison that lingered within me. I wanted her to feel my hurt, my confusion, my loss. Instead I said nothing. Freeing my hand from hers, I scanned her from head to toe and once again wondered at how one person – someone now so frail and tiny – could have had such a pervasive effect on my life.
There was one difference now, though: I was the one in the position of power. But I was unsure of how I should use it. Retribution or forgiveness? How could I possibly forgive something so terrible? How could I act as if nothing had happened? Questions crowded my mind like a babble of desperate children.
A tiredness so profound that it leached from me even the power to speak stole over me. All I could manage was ‘Why?’ My voice seemed to come from the end of a long tunnel.
My mother’s chest rose painfully as she prepared herself for my judgement. Her eyes moved back from the window to me and bore nothing but truth.
‘Why?’ she repeated. ‘It was the only way I knew how to love. You were my sons. Part of me. You came from me. You were mine. I’d never had anything that wonderful and beautiful before. Can’t you understand that?’
‘Jesus. You get something new and beautiful and wonderful, and you want to fuck it, is that how it works?’
‘John, don’t be so coarse.’
‘Yeah, cos the f-word is infinitely worse than sexually abusing your children.’
She shrunk from that and in a small voice, asked. ‘Was that how you saw it? At the time, wasn’t it loving, comforting? What we had was special, John. Can’t you see that?’ As she spoke she was stroking my thumb and with a charge I remembered that little movement, and I couldn’t remember an age when she didn’t do it. It was her habit to sit at the side of my bed and as a prelude she’d hold my hand, stroke my thumb, the touch warm and soothing.
I jumped to my feet. ‘It wasn’t loving and comforting, Mother. It was dirty and shameful. And twisted.’ I could feel a sensation, like a heavy metal cap being tightened around my head. ‘And…’
Tiredness had me slump against the window. And I had a sense of wishing the glass wasn’t there and I could slip from her vision, let her watch and worry that the fall might kill me.
I exhaled. Forced myself to feel my feet on the carpet, my back on the solid glass. I recognised the destructive force of my thoughts and how ultimately it would be aimed inwards if I didn’t change the focus.
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘It was “the way you knew how to love”? What does that mean?’
She opened her mouth as if to speak, and stopped herself as if unsure quite what to say. Her gaze turned to the window and the seascape beyond, but she looked like she was seeing nothing of the beauty contained there; instead her eyes shifted from side to side as if she was having a debate with herself.
Slowly, carefully, she brought her eyes back to meet mine, a movement that felt like an act of supplication. In response I could feel the muscles of my face stiffen. Forgiveness was the furthest thing from my mind. She looked away first.
‘On my fourteenth birthday, Grandad took me down to the seaside. Just me and him. He was a lovely man. Then we stayed at a bed and breakfast. Dad was gone. Mum was cold and distant. She was jealous, I could see that. She wanted to keep me and Grandad apart. And I knew I was special, cos Grandad never, ever slept with either of my sisters.’ Her eyes were wistful, as if she was remembering a golden era in her life. ‘That was why I made sure all of my boys learned from me. I didn’t want any of you to feel left out.’
I shook my head, trying to understand what she meant by all of this, but I gave up. How can anyone comprehend how people like her justified their actions to themselves?
‘What happened to your sisters?’
She nodded. ‘We lost touch when Mum kicked me out after I got pregnant.’
‘You were? … What happened to that child?’
‘I called him Thomas, after Grandad.’
‘But … Dad?’ Thomas wasn’t my dad’s child?
‘He was a decent man. He knew Thomas wasn’t his, but loved me enough to take us both.’
‘Whoa,’ I said as I shook my head. The level of deceit and manipulation inherent in that last sentence was impossible to compute. What did that make Thomas – my brother and my uncle? I recoiled from this new piece of information. I imagined what Thomas’s reaction would be if I told him. I shook my head; that was a truth that would have to stay hidden. What other lies did this woman harbour?
‘Don’t you see how wrong all of this is?’
She shook her head sadly, continuing to speak as if she hadn’t heard me. ‘I knew I was wrong, dirty, because my dad left us. But Grandad was nice to me. Bought me lots of lovely dresses, and jewellery and stuff. And that helped turn me around.’
‘Mum, none of that makes sense.’
Silence again reigned. I had suspected that something terrible may have happened to my mother, but suspicion and certainty sit at either end of an emotional chasm.
‘Surely, being a victim of abuse, you would never want to inflict that kind of torment on your own children … surely.’ I was desperately trying to understand.
‘I can’t begin to understand it myself, so I can’t make you, John. While I was in that situation it felt loving. It was only later that I felt shameful and dirty. And later, when I was with you there was this…’ she paused as if fighting to find the right word ‘…compulsion, I rationalised it, talked myself into accepting my behaviour as normal. I saw you beautiful boys and each of you took my breath away. Your purity and innocence was my last chance to make myself whole … by taking my sons back into my body, I was trying to make myself complete.’
‘My God,’ I exploded. ‘Can you hear yourself? Can you hear just how sick that sounds? We were your sons, surely if we were so beautiful and pure’ – I doubted that the two adjectives could have been uttered with such venom – ‘then you could have given yourself a pat on the back for having a hand in its making instead of destroying exactly what you thought was so amazing.’ Demanding an answer but expecting none, my eyes bored into hers.
‘I’m sorry, son. Can you ever forgive me?’ Her shoulders moved as she sobbed.
She leaned her head forwards to hide the passage of her tears, and then resolutely lifted it up. She offered me her tears as an act of contrition. Holding my stare, she was bare of artifice and empty of pride. Every score that life had left on her face, every line of her weakened form begged for my forgiveness. But it was clear she was sorry about my reaction, not the act.
And still, to this day, I’m hostage to her actions as I have a niggling sense that until I can forgive my mother I will never know complete, untrammelled happiness.
But that afternoon, I sat at a distance of both miles and inches from her as she attempted to explain and atone for her actions. Out of the window lay one of a plethora of breath-taking views that the inhabitants of this hauntingly beautiful country have been blessed with. Inside the ivy-covered building hewn from local rock, two disparate people attempted to make sense out of their lives. To find peace.
I knew I had help in that regard. Thomas and Liz were coming over later for Sunday dinner, a dinner that Chris had suggested he cook. Angela would also be there with Cathy, who had already met and had been completely enchanted by Andrew and Jack. And I was looking forward to having them all squeeze into my little flat.
Despite the worst efforts of the woman lying in a bed facing me it looked like we had a future, as a family.
I stood over her one last time, aware of the switch in power, cognisant of how powerfully her body had been wrecked by her illness, and despite my better self, I felt a sense of satisfaction that she’d been punished in this life for her actions.
In an echo of how she used to begin her seduction of me, I slowly traced the feeble purple vein on the back of her hand, down her thumb to the brightly polished nail.
And with a backward glance, I left the room to begin the rest of my life.