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I stood outside the familiar door of my parents’ house and tried to calm myself, digging deep to find the policewoman within me.
Swallowing, I pressed the doorbell.
As if she had been standing on the other side waiting, Margaret opened the door immediately. She wore a high-necked blouse, lavender in colour, matching the flowers that were used to make her perfume, a calf-length skirt that hid her thick thighs and an apron. She greeted me with no smile. I was reminded of the days I came home from school, when, whatever tale I had to tell, whatever I’d achieved – if I chose to tell her at all – there was never a welcome ready on my mother’s face. My homecoming always felt like an intrusion.
‘I’m not early, am I?’ I asked.
‘Come through, Rachel. No, you’re not.’
We passed the sitting room and I noticed that the walls had changed colour. ‘Been decorating?’ I asked.
‘Life goes on,’ she said in her considered monotone.
My stomach rebelled at the waft of cooking smells coming from the kitchen. She was making bolognese sauce. I took a deep breath and gulped down my burgeoning distress. As a child my dad was always telling me to stop exaggerating, being dramatic.
Why had I come? I had come to try to stop the dreams that were making me wake every night in a sweat-drenched bed. I knew you weren’t supposed to smell in dreams. I’m sure some psych who’d worked in the force had told me that. But I did. Bolognese sauce, Margaret’s lavender perfume. I saw and heard, too. Tomatoes, a kettle, its whistle cutting through my sleep.
Impatiently, she ushered me through to the kitchen and I followed dutifully. As I had done as a child. Obedient. So aware of the quiet rages that were always stewing below my mother’s epidermis, but always wanting to please her. Never wanting to upset her, say the wrong thing, or be there at the wrong time.
Like the day I came home from Sunday school too early.
She moved towards the sink. ‘Your father tells me you’re thinking of going back to work?’
‘Haven’t made up my mind.’
‘You need to do something.’
‘You gave up work to look after your family...’
‘That’s as it should be.’
‘And that’s what I did.’
She shrugged, not saying the obvious: that now I didn’t have a family.
‘You gave up work before having me, didn’t you?’
A hint of anxiety passed over her features. ‘I did, yes.’
‘I want things to be better between us: that’s what I would like. Dad’s told me about you looking after Michael Hemmings when he was young ... to help out Bridget and Sam.’ I watched her. ‘You helped Bridget out.’ I paused for effect. ‘That’s nice.’
Her face relaxed a fraction. ‘That was a long time ago. Your father shouldn’t have mentioned it. It’s irrelevant.’
‘I don’t think it was irrelevant, you helping Bridget.’ She liked that. I took courage, delved deeper. ‘I think you should have mentioned to me at some point that Michael stayed with you and Dad when he was little.’ I said it as gently as I could, attempting to empty my voice of malice.
She watched me. ‘Do you, Rachel?’
‘I do.’ I paused. ‘And you should have said something before the day of Hemmings’ sentencing about him spending the day with you ... and Joe.’ I waited, then carried on quietly. ‘Don’t you think that maybe you should?’
‘I need to carry on making the bolognese sauce,’ she said, ignoring my last question.
Margaret flicked on the kettle. Not speaking, we watched it boil. Simultaneously I felt the heat rising upwards from my toes, reaching my stomach, finding its way towards my neck, and lastly my hand. Unlike the kettle with which I grew up, this one had no whistle. It grumbled with steam and finally, violently, flicked itself off.
She picked up a bowl of fresh tomatoes from the counter top, placing it in the sink. ‘I didn’t skin enough of them,’ she said.
Grasping the kettle she poured the hot water over the red fruits, and I shivered in the oppressive heat of the room, itching with venom the scar on my hand.
Looking up, she moved an imaginary strand of hair away from her eyes and smoothed down the bun she’d been styling her hair into for the last three decades. She glanced fleetingly at my hand, her expression never changing.
‘You make too much of things,’ she said. ‘You always have. Things happen, accidents happen. You always centre everything on yourself.’ She poured the tomatoes into a colander. ‘You are selfish, and can sometimes be cruel.’
I erupted. Not visibly, but inside. I didn’t want her to see my desperate rage. I rubbed the imperfect skin around the palm of my thumb.
‘Me, selfish?’ I said, as controlled as I was able. ‘Me, cruel?’
She looked at my hand, she looked at my forehead and I thought of Michael Hemmings. ‘Accidents happen.’
‘I didn’t come here to argue, I came to try and smooth things over.’
‘It doesn’t seem like that to me.’
‘I’d just like a few answers, if that’s possible.’
‘I’m really not sure that I wish to be interrogated by my unbalanced daughter.’
‘Fuck, Margaret ...’ I wanted to bite my tongue.
‘I’m not having this, I’m really not having it.’
‘Look, I’m sorry,’ apologising, as I’d seemed to have done all my life to Margaret. ‘But I do remember Michael coming to ours...’
And I remembered my dad cutting me short the several times I’d mentioned it as a child, learning by reflex not to touch on the subject again.
‘He came to see me a handful of times, that’s all.’ She watched me. ‘Michael liked me, Rachel, appreciated me, unlike you. He was ... is clever, too. I taught him to read, do you know that? He was reading at three.’ She stopped, felt at her neck. ‘You were slow to read. Had to work hard at everything, you did, Rachel. Didn’t possess the natural ability.’ She took an noisy breath. ‘Boys are so much easier to teach.’
But she’d hit on a raw spot and knew it, as she always knew it, drumming into my insecurities as only Margaret could.
‘Did you regret having me?’ I said tightly, the breath from my lungs trapped. ‘That I was a girl? Were you envious, envious that I had a boy? Is that what this is all about? What it’s been about all my life?’
‘Are you asking me if you were a mistake? I will be truthful: one of us has to be. The answer is yes, you were. From the moment you were born, you were a mistake. Did it have anything to do with you being a girl? No. It did not. It was you. You were all wrong.’ The smile that was absent for most of my childhood played around her thinning lips. ‘Your father has tried his best with you.’ She found my eyes. ‘It was as difficult for him as it was for me.’
‘You really are unbelievable.’
She had confirmed what I’d always known about her. But Dad? She knew what she was doing. I was attempting to not believe her about him, but the seed was sown. The roots would become embedded. Already, I felt them growing and spreading.
I carried on, ‘And Joe, what about Joe?’
‘Joe was a product of you. You made him dislike me.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Oh, it is. I loved Joe, very much. You see? Your selfishness. You think about only how you feel. Not how I feel, your father, even Liam.’
I waited a few seconds. ‘And Hemmings?’
‘What about him?’
‘Don’t you feel at all guilty?’
Because the boy you and Dad nurtured, I wanted to say, grew up to be your grandchild’s killer.
‘Why would I? It was you and Liam who weren’t there for Joe. It wasn’t my fault what Hemmings did. Yes, he came to see me that day, but it was a one off. I’ve had as much to do with him as you have, as a grown man.’ She paused a moment. ‘And Alan tells me that you may well be splitting from Liam.’ She watched me. ‘Which I’m not surprised about.’ She paced the kitchen. ‘Do you still see Jonathan Waters?’
I ignored the mention of Jonathan. ‘I can’t believe this. I really can’t.’ I leant against the wall. ‘I should have moved away from this area years ago.’
‘I was surprised you didn’t, considering your lack of respect for me.’
‘You know why, because of Dad. That’s the only reason.’
She made a sound deep in her throat; a clicking noise that instantly made me question her. That’s what she was doing – again – placing in my mind the question of my dad’s love for me.
I withered. His love was the only thing I had left. And in my parents’ house and inside the hurricane of my mind an understanding fell together. My dad had managed to make me feel that the bad relationship with my mother was my fault. I think I knew he loved me, but understood now that what he’d done, he’d done subconsciously – to keep the peace with Margaret.
‘Look,’ she said, the tight cords in her neck slackening. ‘Our family has gone through a terrible time. This may come as a surprise to you, but I miss Joe. I didn’t see much of him but he was my grandson, and I did love him. Your father is devastated. We have to find some peace between us. Don’t you think that would be a good idea?’
‘Did you love Michael Hemmings?’ I don’t know where my question came from.
She answered without hesitation and with less anger. ‘I felt sorry for him. Bridget had no time for him, and neither did Sam.’ She looked at me. ‘Michael loved me ... when he was young, of course he did. I looked after him, taught him ... But after I had you, I didn’t see much of him, seeing as we had very little to do with Bridget and Sam, apart from at Christmas and such like.’ She stopped. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
‘All I know is that you are not as a mother should be.’ I picked up my bag. ‘I’m going now, I shouldn’t have come.’ I couldn’t stand the smell of the cooking any longer. ‘I am going back to work, and I do intend to tell Tom about you and Hemmings.’
‘Not as a mother should be? Look towards yourself, young lady. And Tom Gillespie? Tell him what you like.’ She stared at me. ‘It was your fault that Joe ran off. Yours and Liam’s.’ She walked towards the front door and opened it for me. ‘If I were you I don’t know how I’d live with myself.’
I walked quickly down the driveway, got in the car and turned on the ignition. Hardly able to control the clutch with my leg shaking so much, I drove around the corner, out of sight, stopped the engine and leant forwards on the steering wheel.
Grieving for Joe; for a childhood that had never existed; for a mother I’d never had; a father who was frayed and flawed and not who I’d wanted him to be, who I’d believed him to be.
For my son who I had let down so profoundly.
The loneliness and hollowness wrapped around like a net. The only thing giving me comfort was the joy of having had Joe, remembering Joe. But this was a blessing that came with a price, because, as I settled into the memories involving my son, the snatched recollections from my past poked at the greasy veneer of my sanity.