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Why didn’t she help her child? How could a mother turn her back on her child and leave him alone in the sea? A child who couldn’t swim. No armbands, no rubber ring. How could any mother in their right mind do that? Was she out of her mind?

She would have watched her child drown – she said that she’d wished Jonathan hadn’t done it. Those were her actual words. Was her passion for Jonathan greater than her love for her child? Little Nick. Is he such a devil of a child that even his own mother didn’t think him worth saving?

Up it all goes, the extract from Nancy’s notebook, my last post. I feel as if I have stuffed a kitten into a sack and dropped it in the canal. I can hear it mewing, but there’s nothing I can do to save it now. Sink or swim: it is up to him.

44

Summer 2013

Somebody grabs his arm and pulls him to the door. Finish up now, finish up. Somebody pushes him out on to the street, bolts the door, locks him out. He starts to walk but trips. Is pushed? No, trips. Better sit down. Sit it out. And he sits on the ground, leaning against the wall. He’s still holding the book. Flicks to the end. Wants to read his mother’s death. He laughs. Pure fucking fantasy. Good luck to them, trying to get her under a train. Go back, go back, go back further. Find the sex. Mum sucking the nineteen-year-old’s cock. How fucking weird is that? Shit. It’s working on him too, can’t have that. He stands up, drops the book on the ground and pisses on it. Greasy, cold beads of sweat ooze from his pores as he urinates; his piss spits back at him. He presses his hands against the wall, steadying himself, and kicks the book as hard as he can; watches it scuttle along the pavement. He slides down the wall, sits. Shuts his eyes. No good: it’s in there. It’s in his head and he can’t get it out. He digs his fingers into his scalp, wanting to prise the images out of his brain, but he can see them so clearly.

Mummy’s love. Lost at sea. She watched him die. Poor old Mummy. A flip of a coin, and Nick won the toss. Saved when he should’ve been lost. Someone should help her; give her a hand throwing herself under a train. He closes his eyes and a red-and-yellow dinghy bobs by: a little speck in the distance; a little speck bouncing off the edge of the world.

Numbers swim in front of him. A two or a seven … no, two. Two twos: twenty-two. Then nothing. A blank house. Boards instead of windows. There is a bell and his fingers scrabble for it, his ear presses the door. He’s hot, cold, nauseous. He can’t remember getting here, yet here he is. This is where he wants to be. Hasn’t been for a while, has resisted the urge. It’s where he needs to be. A buzz, a distant buzz. The door opens and he falls through. Aah, the familiar smell of dog shit. He’s sick into his hands – tries to catch it. He’s tried that trick before – it never works, bits escape. His cupped hands overfloweth, and no one cares. Clean yourself up, mate. He is inside, makes it up the stairs. Just needs to close his eyes for a minute, he’ll be all right. He curls up on the floor, a giant foetus, and listens to their low murmur. He doesn’t need to know what they’re saying, all he wants is to hear the sound. It’s enough to know he is in their midst – a fellow traveller.

He imagines a different story for his mother: a tragic heroine who lost her only child in an accident at sea. She would have made a full recovery from that loss; she would have played that part well – it would have suited her better than being the mother of a low-key, low-energy, under-achieving worthless shit.

He rolls on to his back and opens his eyes, staring at the ceiling. A face peers down at him and smiles. ‘You all right?’ He smiles up at them. He feels better. A bit better. Makes it to the bathroom. Washes the sick off his hands, washes his face, swills his mouth with water, spits. His phone vibrates in his pocket. Dad. Fuck off. But he calls his mum. Is that his voice? Is he leaving a message? Something comes out.

‘You OK?’ A voice from outside the door.

‘Yeah,’ he croaks, staring at his lips moving in the mirror. He tears himself away and opens the door. A girl is standing there. A pretty girl.

‘You all right?’ She looks over his shoulder into the bathroom. ‘Who’s in there with you?’

He stands to one side and she looks in.

‘Who were you talking to?’

‘No one.’

‘You were crying.’

‘I was being sick.’ He grabs her hand, wanting her to come with him, but she pulls away. He stumbles on into the main room and sits down on the sofa. It stinks, someone’s pissed on it and springs dig into his spine. But he doesn’t want to move. He never wants to leave this place. This is where he can be his best self.

45

Summer 1993

She remembers the questions from the Spanish police: did she know him? Had she ever met him before? She’d never seen him before that day, she’d said, and they’d accepted that and allowed her and Nicholas to catch their flight home the following day. The police had his bag; they knew where he’d been staying; they would inform the British authorities; they would contact the young man’s family. A tragic accident. She was free to go home. There were no more questions.

That evening she packed their suitcase. The next morning she and Nicholas took a taxi to the airport and caught their flight home. An easy flight, she had told Robert when he’d come home that evening. She’d brought back a bottle of duty-free whisky and they drank a couple of glasses before going up to bed. She remembers closing the bathroom door and looking at the bite on her neck in the mirror: patting more make-up on to cover it up and then turning off the light when she got into bed. And he had reached for her, kissing her mouth, moving down and kissing her stomach. He was so gentle. They had made love, even though she hadn’t really wanted to. But she felt she needed to, that it was a necessary act to help erase what had happened. He had stroked her body; he had missed her, he said. He had been thoughtful, gentle. And she concealed for weeks, until it faded, the tell-tale mark on her neck. And the bruise on her thigh was already a yellowy green, easily missed. She could keep her secret, burying it in her head; gradually, over the years, she succeeded in chewing on it like a piece of gristle until she could finally swallow it down without choking.

There had been moments when she’d nearly told Robert, but she thought it would have been selfish. If Jonathan hadn’t died, things would have been different. If he had swum to shore with Nicholas in tow, everything would have been different. It was her secret. It belonged to her. She had chosen not to share it.

Catherine’s phone buzzes on the bedside table. She grabs it, not wanting to wake her mother who has just gone back to sleep after another trip to the loo. It is four a.m. Her heart thumps. It is Nicholas. She gets out of bed and rushes from her mother’s room, gently closing the door behind her, trying not to wake her.

‘Hello? Nick?’ She isn’t quick enough. His call has gone to voicemail. She hopes he’ll leave a message. He does. She listens to it and it is as if she has been swept back twenty years. The same rush of adrenalin which begins in the groin, so fierce it actually hurts. A mother’s basic instinct, when her child is running too close to the edge. She feels it now as she listens to Nick’s message: no words, just choking sobs, heaving down the phone to her.

She is freezing as she dials his number, over and over. All she hears is another Nick, telling her to leave a message. A bird is singing outside, but it’s not dawn and it sounds wrong. Like her, it’s been squeezed out of its nest too soon. She grabs her coat and bag and leaves the flat. She has no car, so runs to the local mini-cab company and waits. Five minutes, that’s all, for a sleepy man to pull up and drive her to her home. A twenty-minute journey at this time of day, with no traffic. She pays him and runs to the front door and lets herself in.

46

Summer 2013

How could Nancy possibly have known what went on between Jonathan and the whore? How could she describe their intimacy in such detail? She had the photographs with their gruesome detail and she used her imagination: it’s what writers do. She played around with some of the facts – I doubt very much whether Jonathan would have been interested in pursuing Orwell, Bowles or Kerouac. Wishful thinking? Artistic licence. Of course she changed names. To protect the innocent? Perhaps I should have changed them back again. It was a work of fiction, but still, I like to believe that it released the truth from its ballast: it allowed it to float up to the surface. It’s the substance of a story that is important, after all.

Jonathan had travelled out to Europe with his girlfriend, a fact Nancy left intact, though she changed the reason for Sasha’s early return. Her father hadn’t been taken ill, that’s not why she came home. She and Jonathan had had a row and Sasha had stormed home. That’s a fact. But it’s not an important one. What is important is that Jonathan continued his travels alone. He was a nineteen-year-old boy, alone in a foreign country. He was vulnerable. I remember how Nancy worried about him being on his own. I didn’t. I suspected he’d have a much better time without his girlfriend. I thought he might meet someone more fun.

When we’d returned from Spain after identifying Jonathan’s body, Sasha was the first person Nancy called. She didn’t want her to hear about his death from anyone else. It was Sasha’s mother who answered the phone. She said that Sasha was out, but that she would tell her what had happened. We never knew whether she did or not, because we never heard from Sasha again. Nancy always sent her cards on her birthday and at Christmas, but we never heard back from her. I was furious and upset about it, but Nancy was more generous. She said she understood. Sasha was young, it was too much to expect of her, and certainly her mother would not have encouraged her to stay in touch. Relations with Sasha’s mother had never been easy.

When Sasha had returned home from Europe, I remember Nancy taking a call from her mother. Though I only heard Nancy’s end of the conversation, I was struck by her patience as she listened to the woman’s rant. She stayed calm, repeating over and over that it was up to the two young people to sort out their differences, it was not right for parents to interfere. She managed to end the call with civility, but when she put down the receiver I could see she was white with anger. Yet she had not lost her temper, and I admired her for that. She maintains that same even tone in her notebooks. They whisper, they don’t rant. She wishes for things, she doesn’t demand them.

I wish her child knew that he owed his life to my son. I wish he knew that, if it wasn’t for Jonathan, he wouldn’t be here.

47

Summer 2013

Catherine puts her key in the door and turns it, almost expecting it to no longer fit, but it does. She lets herself in and runs straight up to the spare room. She takes in the empty bed, the mess on the floor, the state of abandonment. Then she opens the door to her bedroom and stands over Robert. He is fast asleep. On the bedside table is a packet of sleeping pills, and next to them, a much-handled copy of
The Perfect Stranger.
Once this would have shocked her, but now it sickens her that he is keeping it next to the bed. That he has brought it back into their bedroom. She wonders where the photographs are. Does he keep those in his bedside drawer or has he destroyed them?

‘Robert, wake up.’ His sleep is so deep he hasn’t heard her run up the stairs, doesn’t sense her presence looming over him, doesn’t hear her voice in his ear. She reaches down and shakes him. ‘Wake up.’

He groans and turns away. His eyes stay shut.

‘Robert!’ she shouts, angry now. ‘Wake up!’ She picks up his phone and checks for calls from Nick, but there are none, only missed calls from her. How dare he sleep? She grabs the glass of water next to the bed and pours it over his head. Justified, needed, excusable. He splutters and shrivels. He looks pathetic. Her anger and dislike take her by surprise.

‘Robert, for fuck’s sake – wake up. Where is Nick?’

When at last he opens his eyes he is confused, useless.

‘What are you—?’

‘Where is Nick?’

Still he looks blank, trying to drag himself back from sleep. She waves the book in his face.

‘Have you told him?’

He slides to the other side of the bed, then gets out and looks at her. He is naked and she turns away.

‘Have you told him?’ she yells.

He walks to the bathroom, returning in ankle-length towelling. He is calm, not at all worried.

‘I haven’t told him anything,’ he says. ‘But I’m going to—’

‘Well it’s a bit late for that. The father has beaten you to it. Nick called me at four this morning and now I can’t get hold of him. He won’t pick up, hasn’t answered any of my calls. He left me a message’ – she shakes her phone at him – ‘he was in a terrible state.’ And she starts to cry. ‘He knows. Where is he? We need to find him.’

‘I don’t know where he is. Probably with a friend.’ He refuses to join in her panic. ‘He went off to work this morning – he didn’t come home for supper, so what? He’s twenty-five.’ He is defensive. ‘I’m sure he’s fine … What do you mean, he was in a state?’

‘He was crying – he didn’t say anything. All I could hear were his sobs.’

Pain washes across Robert’s face: ‘Oh Jesus, I wish to God I’d told him. He should never have had to hear it from someone else.’ He pushes past her to get downstairs.

‘I’ve never heard him like this, Robert … I’m scared.’

He turns on her. ‘Well, what did you expect?’ He looks her up and down until it seems he can no longer bear to look at her. ‘I should have been the one to tell him … and now he’s had to hear it from a stranger. Can you imagine how shocked he must be?’ he says.

‘That crazy fucking bastard has got to him—’

‘What?’ he interrupts. ‘You mean the father of the boy who drowned saving Nick’s life? The father of the young man you fucked and then denied you’d ever met? After he had died saving our child? You mean
that
crazy fucking bastard? You are unbelievable.’ God how he hates her. He is consumed by it.
The young man she fucked.
He should be worrying about Nick, not attacking her. She despises him for not being able to focus on their son, not working with her to find him.