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‘A love that’s destroying you.’
‘I know,’ she repeated. And again I knew she didn’t mean it.
He made reverse-charge calls two or three times a week. My mother always accepted them, but never the toll the calls were taking on her. She went in to work late, stopped eating, rowed with Linda. When our car was stolen, she couldn’t even be bothered to report it to the police.
‘You have no idea what it’s like to hate yourself,’ she told me.
I said yes, actually I did, but she didn’t hear. She didn’t hear much of what anyone said any more, anyone apart from Matty.
He phoned one night when she was ‘having a lie down’, code for drinking to blackout. I’d long given up trying to stop her, but maybe I could stop this.
A prisoner from HMP Huntersville is trying to make a reverse-charge call. Do you accept the charges?
I hesitated a moment, then said yes, I would.
‘Well, hey there, pumpkin,’ Matty said. ‘What a nice surprise.’
His voice, his manner. He sounded just like he always had, as if the intervening months hadn’t happened. I felt my insides melt. It was an effort to keep my resolve.
‘Mum’s packing,’ I said. ‘It’s why she can’t come to the phone.’
‘Packing?’ He sounded put out. ‘You’re going on holiday?’
‘Didn’t she tell you? We’re moving. A fresh start. Tonight’s our last night here.’
He gathered himself quickly. I suppose he’d had a lot of practice with that.
‘Can you give me your new number? I’ll need to get it approved with the screws, see? You wouldn’t believe the bureaucracy in here.’
I glanced at my mother’s closed bedroom door, heart strumming against my ribs.
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea. She doesn’t want you calling any more.’ Then for good measure, ‘If you must know, that’s the real reason she didn’t come to the phone now.’
The silence that followed went on so long I thought he must have gone. I was about to hang up– hands trembling, underarms pricking with sweat– when he spoke again.
‘Is that why she didn’t answer my letter?’
‘I expect so,’ I said, though I had no idea.
I didn’t come across the letter until years later when I was sorting through my mother’s things. A declaration of undying love that I’d have urged her to burn had I found out about it sooner:
Life has no meaning without you in it. My dreams are nothing if I can’t share them with you. Believe in me, in what we had and what we will have again. I’m going to fight this verdict until it is overthrown– which it will be. Our journey together hasn’t ended, my love. It’s only just begun.
He was right about their journey just beginning, I thought when I read it. The moment he was convicted, my mother was on a one-way train to the grave.
Matty took a long, deep breath. I could picture perfectly the way he’d look as he did so. How he’d press his lips together, eyes cast down as though travelling deep inside himself. I knew him so well I could draw his face from memory, and yet in other ways I didn’t know him at all.
‘Does she think I’m guilty?’ he said.
‘Are you?’ I asked.
Another pause, and then the line went dead.
