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Perspectives

By Carly Holmes

 

She comes to the house three days after your son is killed in a climbing accident, floating out from the backdrop of your world, easing herself away from the grey wallpaper of those people you're vaguely aware of but don't ever think about, to stand on your front doorstep and stake a claim in your life. When you see her waiting beyond the thick glass door, her body wavering and separating as she shifts from pane to pane, you assume that she'd been a friend of your son's, yet another stranger compelled to pay ghoulish respects to the bereaved mother. When you open the door and she spills towards you with her hands outstretched and her mouth a crimson crumple you recognise her as the quiet girl from book group, the one who'd watched faces closely whenever anyone spoke and nodded with eager, hungry agreement as though she'd been about to say just that, that very thing, herself. She'd never once offered an opinion on a book and you used to wonder idly whether she even read them, why she bothered to be there. She'd stopped coming a few months back, or had you forgotten to include her when you sent round the latest list of dates and titles for the new season? Had you forgotten to tell her about the change of venue?

 You can't remember her name and are mildly startled to see that her hair is a rich acorn brown, not the muted mouse of memory. Her eyes are pink-rimmed and she pursues the drift of your body as you step aside to let her into the hallway, pressing her arms around you and her face against yours, hard enough for her cheek's bony peak to leave behind a dull smear of pain that you rub away. The hug feels jerky and unpractised, a lunge that you're required to catch and make safe. You pat her with the tips of your fingers before releasing yourself and leading the way to the kitchen. 

The huddle of people crowded around the table, the neighbours and friends and morbidly curious, stop chattering and shuffle aside to create space. They eye the new arrival with interest and she stares back at them with a grimace of horror before scampering to your side. You fill the kettle for the fiftieth time today and wave a hand to indicate the plates and baskets of cake and sandwiches stacked along the counters. 'Please help yourself to something. It'll just go to waste otherwise. People won't stop bringing me food.'

Her skin flushes the same raw pink as her eyes and she slaps her palm to her mouth with a loud fleshy pop. 'I didn't bring you anything. Oh god. I'm so sorry.' She won't sit down, even when you try to point her towards an empty seat, fidgeting instead at your side and fluttering her fingers back and forth over the mugs and kettle so that the task of making a pot of tea is fraught with danger. 'Let me help. Please let me help,' she keeps saying, stumbling over your feet as you move around her to empty and swill the teapot at the sink. 

Your cousin stands up and taps the back of her chair. 'Sit down, will you. You're making me nervous. Here, Kath, I'll have another.' She hands you her mug and takes the girl's arm. 'Sit down and tell me how you know Pete.'

'Pete?' The girl looks around the group with little pecking glances, searching out a familiar face. 'I'm sorry, I don't think I do. I'm here to see Kathy.' 

'Pete, as in my dead son,' you interrupt loudly. 'That's his name. Was his name, before he fell off a mountain.' You fill the teapot and lean with your back against the counter so that you can look at her properly. You want to watch the mortification drench her, you want her to drown in it. Spite rises in you and it's a blessing to feel something other than the bewildered, hollowed panic of the last few days. Maybe this will be my future, you think. I'll turn into one of those cruel, vicious women who make shop assistants cry or report them to their manager for not serving me quickly enough. I'll live to be as joyless as possible. My son, my only child, is dead and so what was the point of the day-and-a-half's labour, the worrying over every sniffle, the slump of relief beneath my bed sheets when he clattered home after a night out and I could finally sleep. Right now, in this moment, you want to take it all back. You want to take him back. You'd rather have had none of it than be left with this.

The girl seems to fold in on herself, her shoulders swooning down over her chest and her face tucking into her throat. She looks boneless and bereft. Jenny, that's what she's called. You're pretty sure it's Jenny.  

You sweep the teapot into your cupped hands and carry it the few steps to the table, enjoying the way its china belly burns the flesh of your palms. 'Thank you for coming, that was good of you,' you say. 'Please have some tea and a piece of cake or a sausage roll or something. Sorry I'm not better company. I'm going for a lie down.'

In Pete's bedroom you roll yourself into his duvet and hunt down his smell, twisting your head back and forth against the cloth cocoon to graze the material with nose and mouth. There, a tiny fading pocket of sweat and sleep-sour skin. And there, another. You shut your eyes and breathe him in, nudging at the scent with your tongue. Beyond the bedroom door and a world away, on the safe side of loss, conversations carry on, doors shut, and chair legs scrape across the floor. You don't care what they talk about, how long they stay, as long as they don't come in here.

The girl appears again three weeks later, on your first solo outing since Pete's death. You hadn't seen her at the funeral but that doesn't mean she wasn't part of the blur of mourners; your grief that day had shattered your eyes to chips of stone, your gaze sightless. 

You're in the local supermarket pushing a trolley up and down aisles, searching for something, anything at all, that will snag your interest enough to make you want to buy it. The shop has that slow, sleepy post-lunch feel about it. People shuffle and creep through the striped fluorescence and piped music coats the air with a greasy, soothing blandness. A young man ahead of you stoops to pick up a tin of something and for just a second, as he frowns down at the label, he looks like your son. They're nothing alike really, there's nothing about his face that reminds you of Pete, but you follow him anyway, gripping the trolley bar with sweaty palms and watching. He pauses to examine a packet of pasta and again, just fleetingly, his concentration is all Pete's and he becomes your son. He straightens and moves on and you trail him, close enough to clip his heels with your trolley wheels.

You make your way along the aisles, past the shelves of cleaning products and into the frozen section, in a jerky stop-start tandem. You can hear your own breathing, gusty and urgent, and beyond that his occasional muttering. His voice is wrong, the sound of it jarringly unknown, and you want to tell him to be silent. 

He stops again and considers a packet of something, leaning over into the freezer just enough for the downward twist of his body to hide his expression. You reach out then to pull him back and raise him up, your hands stabbing out fast and intense, fingers curled to grab at him. Your wrist is tapped, gently, and a figure steps in front of you, blocking the view of your boy. Little mousy Jenny. She smiles and says something, some question you can't hear, and steps to the side when you try to squirm around her to see him. Just one more look, I know it's not him, of course I know that, but just once more and it'll be enough. You don't think you've spoken the words out loud but she tugs you away, placing your hands back on the bar of the trolley and pressing her arm across your shoulders. You go with her without a word, without another glance at the stranger who has straightened up with a bag of chips in each hand, eying you both suspiciously. 

You're embarrassed and ashamed, as if you've been caught slipping a stolen chocolate bar into your handbag or making fun of a child in a wheelchair. And resentful too that Jenny has witnessed your desperation. She must have been following you as you followed him, pitying you with every step she took that brought her closer to saving you from public humiliation. When you get to the tills you shrug out from her embrace and shove your empty trolley away sullenly. 'Thank you,' you say. You think you say that though the words might be wedged in your throat, spiky and unspoken. You walk away from her and out of the supermarket, half-running past the security guard and back to your car. You drive home fast and angry and stay parked on the drive, kissing bumpers with Pete's old van, insulated by the radio jangle, until the day collapses around you and the evening rises up to lay itself filmy and wet across the windscreen. 

The days topple into each other: a sand castle stormed by the tide, a mud pie drowned by rain. You give up pretending to function for a while and spend your life in Pete's bed, drinking tea and eating the crisps that you'd once bought him, all his favourite flavours first. Or you rage naked through the house with your hair flying matted and filthy around your shoulders and your fingers scrabbling at the scar his birth had written on your belly. You shout at his baby-cute black and white image, try to divine from his wise smile some awareness of his broken future. You throw his mug out into the garden and then glue it back together and then throw it out again. You stand in the corridor and clear your throat loudly when anyone comes to the door so that they know you're there but have chosen not to let them in. You call the people who've left messages on Pete's mobile, tell them he's dead, repeat the word until it stumbles against your teeth, and then hang up in the middle of the stammered response. It's liberating to abandon yourself entirely to grief, to not even try, and you wonder whether you'll ever recover the person you once had been. You wonder whether you'll ever want to. 

Jenny is there whenever you pull back the curtains to stare out of the window. She's there when you stand on the step to scatter stale bread for the garden birds. A hunch of coat fading into the shrubbery at the bottom of the drive; a pale slash of averted gaze, there then gone, when you peer into the gathered shadows past the gate posts. You've been waiting for her to come up to the house, you knew she wouldn't leave it long before returning, and you have the front door open, flung wide, before she even knocks. Her hand has formed a limp fist that drops to her side as if stunned, and she blinks at you with a rapid, urgent lash-flutter, her eyes a blur of movement.

 'I assume you're here about the vacancy,' you say, beaming at her. You're dressed today but your clothes are stiff and sharp with the sweat of your rages. She gapes at the sight of you, twisting her fingers into one writhing braid, and she tries to smile. 'Vacancy?' she asks. 

'The mother vacancy,' you explain, leaning out to hold her wrist and pull her close. 'That's why you keep coming by, isn't it?' Her ear, so close to your mouth, pink and pleated against her skull, reminds you of the vulnerable whorl of a baby's, and you suddenly want to nudge your tongue from where it's caught in your snarl and taste her skin. The way you used to taste Pete's when he was small. Rows of kisses dropped the length of his jaw bone, lips flickering around his doughnut-soft  fontanelle. 

You rear back from her before you can act on your urge or, worse, bite her. She stumbles away from your loosened grip on her wrist but she doesn't turn and leave. Her face is wide and blank, her mouth pursed around that second's drawn breath before saying something trite and hushed, something soothingly banal.

'Why did you stop letting me know about the book group meetings?' she asks, and you're so steeled against How are you coping? and I'm really so sorry for your loss that you think you mishear her and ask her to repeat the question. When she does she stands a little straighter, her voice a shrill of indignation. 'I really enjoyed going. I know I'm not that clever but I enjoyed reading books I'd never have heard of if it weren't for you.' Her face is rosy with embarrassment or anger. 'Why didn't you ever reply to my emails? Did nobody want me there anymore? Because you could have just said, I wouldn't have made a fuss.'

You fumble for something to say, some easy lie to excuse your lack of consideration. She waits silently, arms folded around her distress. 'Why do you keep following me around?' you ask instead. 'Why can't you leave me alone? Don't you have a mother of your own?' 

Now her cheeks blotch to smashed liver and her arms swing down to jerk at her sides. 'As a matter of fact I do, thank you very much,' she says. Her oddly formal tone makes her sound like a child aping its parent's speech, and with a child's impulsive surge of spiteful bravery she rocks forward a little on her feet and stares into your face. 'Do you sometimes think maybe your son jumped off that mountain rather than fell, just to get away from you? Do you sometimes think that?'

The cruelty of her words shocks a giggle from you. She looks appalled but the colour of her skin quietens, her malicious energy spent. You're both silent for a while and then you nod at her and turn to go indoors. 'I don't know when I'll be going back to book group,' you say, 'but I'll email you the details. I'm sorry about the mix-up.' 

She doesn't leave straight away. From the window you can see a slice of her shadow faltering on the step for a few minutes as she stands out there and decides what to do. You hope she doesn't knock and try to say something else. You hope she fights the urge to apologise. Right now, for this moment, you admire and envy her and you don't want that undone. Such single-minded self-interest, such a total lack of care for your grief, for your once-son, for the woman you have become. 

You wait, and when she walks away you let your hand drop from its resting place against your heart and you watch her until she's out of sight.