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I look up. There’s a middle-aged woman with two carrier bags full of groceries. She looks tired, a bit frazzled. She digs in her handbag and pulls out a packet of tissues. She’s trying to wrestle one out of the packet, but after a moment she gives up and hands me the whole lot.
‘Here,’ she says. ‘You going to be OK?’ I wonder whether they see her at home, whether they hear her when she says something, laugh when she tells a joke. I want to tell her that I see her. But I don’t, obviously; that would be nuts.
‘Yes, thanks,’ is all I say. ‘I’m going to be OK.’
‘All right, love, mind how you go.’
I watch her go on her way until someone else appears, coming towards me. At the sight of me, he lifts his hand in a wave. He said he might be able to meet me out of today’s session on his way home from college, and here he is, how lovely. Ian didn’t die, did I say that? He pulled through. He was only sixteen, as it turns out – cheeky monkey, telling me he was nineteen – so the attack alerted the local authority to his situation. They found him some temporary sheltered accommodation and he’s seeing his mother once a week. He’s started a plumbing course at Widnes FE College. I vouched for him. He and Katie get on very well, so if he gets his diploma, I’ve told him he can have Kieron’s room for a year while he gets himself sorted.
‘Rachel,’ he says. ‘What’re you doing sitting on the kerb?’ He holds out his hand and pulls me up.
58
Rachel
A week later, on the second anniversary of Kieron’s death, Mark, Katie, Lisa and I walk to the town-hall gardens at dawn. At the pond we stand together and say goodbye and scatter my son’s ashes on the water, listening to ‘Into My Arms’ on Katie’s iPhone. When I ask her if it’s Rick Cave, she rolls her eyes, but before she can say,Mum, it’s Nick, not Rick, I tell her I’m only joking and she laughs and throws an arm around my waist.
Later, before we go out for dinner to celebrate our son’s too-short life, Mark and I are sorting through his remaining things. This last year I have come into his room often to sit and be quiet and remember. I have listened to his favourite vinyl records, and if I close my eyes, I can tell you every poster and scrap of paper and photo he has Blu-Tacked to the wall.
‘Shall I take this stuff to the car then?’ Mark is standing at the door, nodding at the totem pole of cardboard boxes by his feet.
‘I’ll come with you. Just let me sit here another minute.’
On my lap is a box. In it are Kieron’s dancing and football medals and shields, his bolt and hoop earrings in a smaller, velvet-lined box, his soft ripped jeans and his Antony and the Johnsons T-shirt, which still smells of him, and which has the wordsI Am a Bird Nowon the front. Yes, I think. You are a bird now, my love.
I’m keeping his art folders and English books from every year of his school life – some of his ink drawings and paintings I have put into frames and hung in the hall and the kitchen, where I can see them every day. His childish compositions I will read and reread, and no matter how much it hurts. I will try not to look away from the memory of him at eight years old reaching for the right way to say something. There is no right way. That much I know. Sometimes there is no way at all, because saying it will make it true. If you’re lucky, someone will help you find maybe not the right words but the words you need in that moment. Amanda was that person for me. She was able to help me swim down to a truth I had no heart, no stomach, no lungs for. The last compassionate act of my grief-addled mind was to trick me into saying the words I needed to say to my beloved boy in his dying moments to another boy in a memory entirely of my own making. What would any of us say?I love you. You’ll be all right. Sleep now, my angel.
Anger gets trapped inside us, becomes hate. If we’re not careful, hate becomes a force often too hard to control and which solves nothing. A father punishes a son for damage done by his own father. A child beats up a weaker child to avenge violence done to him at home. A grown man stabs another for fear of what lurks in his own chaotic nature, perhaps – who knows? We punish the wrong people, too hard, for the sins of others, for our own frustrations, our own failures. Ingrid found me in her sights and, humiliated and rejected, decided I would be the one she punished for all that had gone wrong in her life. In the end, the only person she hurt was herself. That’s the thing about revenge. It’s an act of hate and not the satisfying finale everyone believes it is, the action-movie climax where the villain dies a horrible death in a plume of flames and everyone cheers. Revenge is not a dish best served cold. It is a dish best served not at all.
When I turned myself in, they saw a woman made mad by grief and believed me until the evidence and testimonies didn’t add up. All I wanted was connection. I wanted Mark and Katie to be able to look at me and me at them and for us all to see the memory of Kieron and be able to keep looking. I wanted to live in a world where love wins out over hate.
Mark is still standing at the door.
‘Are you hovering?’ I ask, folding up Kieron’s T-shirt to put in the ‘keep’ box.
‘I thought…’ He seems to lose his train of thought a moment before starting again. ‘I thought after this we could walk down to the canal and maybe call at the Wilsons for a half, just the two of us, before we meet Katie at the restaurant.’
‘OK.’
He pushes his bottom lip up against the top one and shakes his head. He’s looking at me. His eyes are greeny-brown and they change according to the weather. I’d forgotten.
‘What?’ I say. ‘What are you looking at me like that for?’
‘I’m not looking at you like anything. I’m just looking at you.’
My eyes prick but I don’t take them from his. ‘And what do you see?’
‘I see the girl at Tanya Hodgkins’ eighteenth at the Mersey View wearing the tightest black minidress I’d ever seen and big black DMs, dancing like she was on something. I see the girl I asked out for a walk that first time when I had no money to take her out for a drink.’
‘You nicked flowers from that garden.’
He smirks. ‘You were worth stealing for. And you bought us a packet of Hula Hoops and a can of Bass shandy and we shared them on the bench by the pavilion. I thought,I’d better get a job if I’m going to have any chance of getting her to be my girlfriend.’
‘An apprenticeship, no less. There’s flash, I thought. I thought, he’s going places. And—’
He holds up his hand, biting his lip now against the stuff on his mind, and I realise he’s been waiting to say his piece, that he’s probably rehearsed it, knowing that words are not his strong suit, that he’s been waiting for the right moment, which has never come, and so now, surrounded by our beloved son’s things packed into all these cardboard boxes, he’s saying it anyway.
‘Go on,’ I almost whisper.
