Mothers' Boys Read online

  They told her that of course he was traumatised. He’d been in the Land-Rover when it crashed, thrown clear, head-first into soft sand and quite unharmed. But then there had been a time-lapse of perhaps as long as an hour, nobody quite knew how long, before another truck came along. What had Leo done in that hour? Certainly he’d seen the bodies of his mother and father. Maybe he’d touched them. There was blood on his hands and clothes when he was found yet he was not hurt himself. It was too agonising to try to imagine what he had gone through before he was rescued – dreadful, dreadful. So it wasn’t surprising he hadn’t spoken since. Everyone said this, but Sheila thought it was surprising. She thought hysteria would have been more natural, screaming, sobbing, noise in general, nightmares. Leo, she was told, slept deeply. There were no nightmares. There was no psychiatrist at the hospital – it was only a poor cottage sort of hospital – and no paediatrician, but the nurses, all friends of Pat’s and John’s, had talked to him and gone over the accident. They had said his mummy and daddy had gone to Jesus and were happy (it was a religious hospital, a Methodist foundation originally). They’d told him his granny was coming for him to take him home with her, and he would be happy too.

  Sheila took him, before they left, to his parents’ grave. She didn’t know if it was the right thing to do or not, but she did it. There was no stone marking the grave and the graveyard was not the place of trees she thought of as a proper graveyard, but there was a wooden cross, Pat and John’s names written on it rather untidily in black paint. She could find no flowers to put there – it was the hot season and the flowers she was assured bloomed in plenty were all dead. So she stood with Leo, hand in hand, and stared at the cross, and then she picked him up and carried him away, patting his back. His face pressed into her neck and she felt the first stirrings of real love at last. She loved him. She would love him. He was a poor, sad little boy and she would be a mother to him.

  The first word he spoke was not granny but mummy. It seemed pointless, when it was such a triumph, to correct him.

  Chapter Two

  THE MORNINGS WERE always the worst. Harriet couldn’t understand why. She had expected the nights to be the worst, had envisaged Joe unable to sleep or else waking screaming in remembered terror, but no, he slept soundly. It was the mornings which were bad.

  Morning, to her, was a relief. The moment it was light and she could be up doing something she felt better, was able to hope a little. Nights for her, since it happened, were spent staring at the ceiling, becoming intimately acquainted with the fine crack running across it from the centre light to the left-hand corner above the bed. It was never, in their bedroom, or at least to Harriet’s eyes, eyes always good in the dark, entirely black. Almost always there was enough grey to be able to make out the shapes of the chest of drawers, the cupboards, the long mirror. She had grown used to watching the light deepen and the furniture emerge from its shadowy outline. Beside her, Sam slept, sometimes snored, and she envied him, then despised him – to be able to sleep, as he had always done, as she had once done!

  She’d trained herself to keep calm, not to thrash about, turning from side to side in wild attempts to fool her body into rest. Instead, she lay on her back, her hands folded lightly on her stomach, her legs together and straight. Sometimes she closed her eyes, sometimes she opened them, feeling them grow heavier as the night progressed. She knew that of course occasionally she did drift off and that in some way she must be getting a little sleep. Enough. Enough to keep her going, just. She hadn’t taken sleeping pills, not even on the first night afterwards when they had been urged upon her. Joe had. She’d left it to him. Everyone had been most insistent he should take sleeping pills, mild ones, when he came out of hospital, and he had been obedient. Everyone wanted Joe asleep, unconscious. So long as he was staring at them all, dry-eyed, white-faced, mute, they found their own rest disturbed. So he’d taken the pill, that first night home, and the next and the next. He had a bottle of them, beside his bed. It made Sam uneasy. ‘You don’t think . . .’ he’d said. ‘What?’ she’d snapped. ‘Go on, say it, kill himself, take them all?’ Sam had flinched, turned away and muttered, ‘I only wondered. . .’ ‘That was what you wondered,’ she had said scornfully, ‘and the answer is, you’ll be relieved, won’t you, that no, I don’t think he will.’

  What power she had, how Sam, in all this, depended on her. She had only to say she thought Joe would not contemplate suicide for Sam to relax: if she thought not, then she was bound to be right because it was she who understood Joe best and was closest to him. That was what Sam thought, what everyone thought. She was his mother. She must know best. But it was all wrong. Joe was no longer her Joe, what had happened had put him way beyond her knowledge. Being alone with him was torture. The burden of his suffering grew heavier and heavier until she felt she must, she must put it down. But there was nowhere to put it, it could never be got rid of. And it was in the mornings it was heaviest, when she saw Joe so dead-looking, eyes and limbs so weary, skin pasty, with an unhealthy sheen to it as though covered in luminous paint. Yet he tried so hard. He washed, he combed his hair, he put on clean clothes, and she was grateful. She knew he could have stayed in bed and turned his face to the wall and cowered and given up. That was what made it all so very painful, this evidence that he was struggling, trying to get back to normal.

  In the mornings, she had to turn away from him. Her overbright voice made small-talk during breakfast and she could not shut it up. She didn’t fuss over food. She was determined not to comment on the fact that he hardly ate a thing at any time of the day and certainly never in the mornings when, before, he had had two bowls of cereal and toast and fruit and was still, then, looking for more. He was strong enough, it was no tragedy if he stopped eating for a while. She saw to it that all his favourite foods were always available but she did not remark upon his lack of interest. It was all too obviously a punishment of some sort to deny himself a hot croissant, to turn aside from the scrambled eggs, done as he loved them, with thin strips of crispy bacon. Sam ate it all anyway, or Louis, if he was at home. Or the dog, though even Bruno seemed affected by the surfeit of luxuries and ate them less than vigorously if they came his way.

  He went to school as soon as he was able, when his leg was still in plaster. She hadn’t been able to believe he would go until the cast came off, but she didn’t want to stop him. ‘I might as well,’ he said, and she’d taken him and collected him each day. She’d seen how he was stared at. Any boy with his leg in plaster, limping into school on crutches, would have been stared at of course. But these stares were different. She saw how the children stopped talking and gave him a wide berth. Nobody rushed to help him, nobody wanted to sign their name or draw a picture on Joe’s plaster. It made her cry to watch him manoeuvre himself into the school followed by clutches of other pupils whispering about him. And what were they whispering? Everyone knew. If only he’d waited until his plaster was off, then he’d have been less obvious, he wouldn’t have attracted such attention. She’d almost pointed this out and had been stopped just in time by the expression on his face – the least suggestion that he should keep a low profile and he was furious. Rightly. She’d been weak with admiration, aware of how strange it was to admire one’s fifteen-year-old son in this kind of way. And Sam was thrilled. ‘That’s the spirit,’ he’d said, ‘he’ll show them,’ and she’d said, coldly, ‘What spirit?’ and, ‘Show who what?’ and he’d said, ‘Don’t be like that, Harriet, please, it only makes everything harder if we’re not friends.’

  If we’re not friends! Such a silly, babyish phrase. She wanted Sam a million miles away. When, a week later, he had wanted to make love to her – no, have sex with her – she’d hated him. She said to him, that first time, ‘How can you?’ and he had been bewildered, had asked her what she meant, what the connection was between what had happened to Joe and making love. Why on earth should one cancel out the other? There was no point in trying to explain, to explain how pleasure revolted
her. There was no pleasure in anything for her. But the next time he wanted sex she just gave in and he was pleased. He appeared not to realise that the idea of making love made her want to weep. But she’d let him. It gave her some kind of perverse satisfaction not to throw him off her stone-like body. Except she knew it was a warm, soft, pliant stone and so did Sam. Her mind was not in her body, though. Her mind was watching and hating, curling in every corner with contempt and knowing that if she had been the man this behaviour would have been impossible, she would not have been able even to think of this performance. But Sam saw it as more of getting-back-to-normal. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about Joe, never for one moment did she think that, but that he was able, as she was not, to resume day-to-day pleasures. His distress hadn’t affected his desire. He wasn’t held back, he was an expert at closing doors on the past, and proud of it.

  Her doors were always open. The past was the place where she still was even if she went quite competently through the motions of the present. She loved the past, could not get through those doors Sam wanted closed and locked quickly enough. Only work blocked out the past temporarily, and the effort to work was mighty. She battled every day with the need to work. Pushing herself to concentrate exhausted her and yet once she had done it the images stopped, the voices ceased. She was like Sam, then. But the difference was that she, unlike him, did not want to succeed in blotting out that agonising past. She knew it was necessary to her, that she literally fed on it. Several pasts, quite separate. The far past, before anything whatsoever had happened to Joe, before even the feeble melon-and-knife incident, that blissful past. Then there was the more serious but still not really dangerous episode, the theft of Joe’s Walkman, that nearer but still remote past. And then the last year. That past. The past where she did not want to be and which she hoped one day to bury, as Sam had done.

  What she knew she was trying to do was empathise so completely with Joe that she could be with him, know what he was thinking, how he was feeling. She was straining and straining to have been with him, to have been him. And she knew this was dangerous. It would lead her into all kinds of delusions and that would not help Joe. She would goad herself into a kind of frenzy trying to go through every minute of that night. It was not like imagining his Walkman being stolen. Then, it had upset her, thinking herself into Joe walking home from the football match listening to his Walkman and the sudden wrench as it was ripped from his head and the fright of the three louts jeering at him and pushing him and tossing the Walkman from one to another and then running off with it, laughing. She’d been able, then, to empathise successfully and to some purpose. ‘Joe,’ she’d consoled, ‘I know there was nothing you could do, I know it was all so quick and you were in a daze, don’t blame yourself.’ He’d cried, with humiliation, and she could feel how he felt. There’d been a curious thrill in being able to understand so completely. ‘You shouldn’t have been using that stupid thing in a football crowd anyway,’ Sam had said. ‘It was asking for trouble, you were a sitting target.’ Joe had gone mad, demanding to know why he had been a target when scores of boys were walking home from the match on their own listening to Walkmans, why did it happen to him?

  At least Sam had not succumbed to the temptation to tell him. She knew why he thought Joe a target, though. Sam thought Joe looked soft. Even though he was quite tall there was something incurably innocent and tender-looking about him, something sweet. Louis had not had this quality, even before adolescence. He was like Sam, stridently masculine in manner. Joe was not feminine, he was not girlish, but he was unthreatening, hesitant, and it was true you could tell this just by looking at him. Every time Sam bemoaned Joe’s lack of strength, his sensitivity, Harriet rounded on him and asked him what was so wonderful about being and looking tough. She said she didn’t want Joe to ‘toughen up’, she wanted him to stay the same sweet, if difficult, boy he had always been. Sam said that in that case he was always going to have problems, he’d have to learn how to defend himself, how to conceal his lack of aggression. Then they had quarrelled, about aggression, aggressively. Harriet said male aggression had caused all the trouble in the world and she and her generation of women had tried to rear sons who would not think aggression was part of being male . . . Sam had just smiled.

  In the mornings, she fancied she saw that Joe’s sweetness had gone for ever. He had aged. His face was drawn, youth had gone. He had an old, old, tired look to him. Nobody would ever again see him as an easy target, and that was what was saddest of all. He had the same cynical expression as his attacker, the same sour pull to his mouth, the same heavily shadowed planes in his cheeks. And had that, she wondered, happened to that boy overnight? Was his mother looking at him, when she visited him, and seeing that her boy had vanished?

  *

  Sheila had wanted to apologise right at the beginning. She’d asked everyone to please convey, to his parents, her heartfelt apologies. They’d all – the policeman, the probation officer, the solicitor – said that they would. But she’d never believed them, nor blamed them for failing to pass on anything so insulting as apologies. They were out of order. You couldn’t apologise for something like that, it was adding insult to injury. How would she have felt, if it had been the other way round, if apologies had been sent to her? Furious, she’d have been furious, hopping mad. She’d have just looked at whoever conveyed those apologies and said nothing. They would have known what she thought of them all right.

  In the court, the Youth Court, she and the other mother had been very near to each other. Sheila was shocked, shocked by the whole thing. She realised her head had been full of dark, imposing old chambers and judges in wigs and juries sitting in boxes, everything sombre and frightening. But it wasn’t like that at all. The Youth Court was in a new building. They walked up two flights of stairs to it, stairs covered in grey haircord. There were no footsteps echoing down stone corridors. The actual courtroom was quite small, too small. It was a square, plain room with a wooden ceiling lit by artificial light, four globes hanging over the magistrates’ seats. It was light and bright and without atmosphere. The bench at which the magistrates sat was made of a shiny light wood and so was the witness box and the tables at which the solicitors and Clerk of the Court sat. She and Alan sat to the left of these tables, on ordinary grey chairs, chairs such as every office had. The other mother sat with her husband and her son at the back, facing the magistrates. They were no more than ten yards away. Only by looking straight ahead could Sheila avoid seeing them, and even then they were in the corner of her vision.

  It seemed wrong, this ordinariness, this close proximity, this emptiness. She’d imagined a gallery full of curious onlookers and cringed at the prospect, but now she cringed more at the lack of any public, at the exposure of her and Alan because there were no other people. She felt naked, vulnerable, before a word had been said, and looked down at the pink carpet – pink, something else unseemly – with such intensity that she soon knew every fibre of it. She’d hoped she and Alan could just melt into the background, hardly be seen at all, but there they were, targets, a pair of pathetic elderly people, soberly dressed as if for a funeral but this was worse than any funeral. When the other mother crossed her legs or moved her feet Sheila’s heart pounded. She feared any movement from over there, she feared some scene in which the other mother leapt across the pink carpet and hit her . . .

  Ridiculous. Covertly, she studied the other mother and knew such a vulgar thing would never happen. Class hung in the air and she recognised it. They were so infinitely superior, that family. Handsome, well and fashionably dressed, the mother in particular. She was wearing a suit, a black suit with a shortish skirt showing long, slender legs, and a startlingly white, crisp blouse. She looked cool and immaculate. The man, the father, was a big man, broad-shouldered, dark-haired. He wore a suit too, a grey suit with some sort of thin stripe in it. At least the boy had jeans on, very clean jeans, possibly new, and a perfectly ordinary blue shirt. He was blond, like his mother
. Blond, smooth hair and a sweet, gentle face . . .

  A buzzer sounded and the solicitors stood up. Sheila jumped, then nudged Alan to stand up with her. She felt obscurely cheated again – a buzzer, such a cheap thing, like one on a television game show, no pomp and majesty at all. Then a door opened and three people walked in and sat down on the red chairs behind the bench, chairs only slightly better than the grey ones in the body of the court. No grand oak chair with a high back and heavy claw feet and arms to it and no bewigged judge. Three desperately ordinary people, two women and a man, all looking slightly sheepish. Then the prosecutor began, a woman the same as Elaine, their solicitor. Again, Sheila felt disturbed. Neither of these women looked right, she hadn’t expected women, and young women too, neither she was sure out of their thirties. No gowns. They were not barristers and did not wear gowns. They looked so casual. She knew this ought to have made her feel relaxed, helped her not to be frightened, but it didn’t, it made her somehow contemptuous. This was all too upsettingly amateurish, it mocked the serious nature of the business.