Rocks in the Belly (33 page)

His thumb coerces the plunger along the one-inch journey that'll take her an infinite distance away. My shaking stopping like Robert did when he was perched on that edge, the man strapped to him. My eyes wide to every drop of this — the moment I missed.

Her body deflates as if the plunger isn't pushing death in but pulling life out. Her tongue sliding out the side of her mouth, the light in her eyes dimming. Robert with the clouds in his eyes. The room quiet now without the sound of her clogged and difficult breathing. Without her suffering. My body going up and down with its own silent unravelling. Cheekbones working quickly, getting his stethoscope and putting it against her, his eyes looking at a listening
point on the wall. My breathing stopped again, watching his face, waiting.

He takes the scope away and removes it from his ears, nods at me without making eye contact.

‘Are you
sure
?'

He nods again, taking out the cannula, a cotton ball ready and pressed on to stop any intrusive details of the death that has so obviously occurred.

He puts everything in the kidney dish and says an almost inaudible sorry as he closes the door, leaving me on the floor of this little box room with sorrow in my arms.

I'm sat here barefoot on the bench looking across the park to Patricia's front door. Alfie's collar is with me, some of her fur still clinging to the inside of it, my head turning occasionally to see if Reg is going to come along, Rocket's tail in the air.

I've got my sleeve rolled up and the marker pen colouring my arm black, my tongue out in concentration. Progress halted occasionally by having to stand and wander over to a tree beside me and wipe the built-up skin and sweat from the pen nib — several of the leaves with black, chemical lines defacing their green purity.

The picture's gone from Patricia's front doorstep and a part of me wants to go and peek in through her window to see if it's on her wall.

I called her last night, left a message, apologised for a visit from the police, if she had one. Telling her about the funeral, if it happens. Asking her to call, if she wants to.

I had the same nightmare again last night — Mum laid out in the old pirate-chest freezer she put me in. A strip light above the freezer blinking on and off, making that sound they do like the fluttering of glass eyelashes. Mum all hollowed out and blue behind make-up applied the way a twelve-year-old girl would, or a transvestite.

In death she looked like she would if I'd just met her. The way Robert would have first seen her. The way she probably looked to the checkout girl at the supermarket or the surgeon operating on her brain. The way a face looks before you love it. Before all those feelings and history and familiarity are laid over it. So that even after years of loving them you can still sometimes conjure what their face first looked like, when they were a stranger.

That's the uniqueness of your parents though, isn't it, that you're never haunted by that other face from before they were yours. Your parents are supposed to have always been yours.

In the dream I reached out an uncertain hand and unbuttoned her blouse, the mark from an autopsy running thick and raw up the centre of her, ragged and unnecessary. Her body dressed in some standard-issue garment rather than the clothes I chose for her.

I took one of her eyelids between shaky finger and thumb, lifting it up, her eye shocking me — the pupil unmoved. Dilated.

I dragged her into the kitchen to measure the size of her pupils in the light of the TV, a cricket match being played.

Then I was on the stairs with her again, both of us screaming as I tugged her up one step at a time and put her back in the bath, green peas and chicken kievs in there with us.

And I tried to measure her pupils in that light too, so I could know where she was when her eyes stopped reacting to the light. So I could know where she was when she died.

So I could know if I'm still bad.

Sat here now on this park bench, my heart beating away at the memory of the dream, I can't get the back of my arm coloured in so I start on the other, a little nausea building in me and I hope it's the chemicals in the pen. The nib turning my arm black and my head imagining that Reg
does
show up — invites me back to his and it turns out he's lost a son like I've lost a dad. Our particular wounds matching up.

I've read Mum's attempted letter countless times already. It's not so much a letter, more a series of false starts and segments.

You are a wanderer now and I blame myself. You blame me too and I accept that. Having children means accepting responsibility.

Being a mother feels like this permanent act of repentance for unforgivable sins. For those things I did to you in simple human moments. Except those little moments shape lives. If anything is unfair it is that. How we're supposed to endure parenting with such precariousness is hard to believe.

Michael is the little moment that shaped lives. That and my front wheel on a ladder. And Robert's inability to land on his feet. His mother's pain.
Her
mother's pain. And hers before her. It's hurt people that hurt people.

Sometimes the pain in you threatens to stop my heart.

I lift up my top and start colouring in my chest. The light is dimming, the streetlights coming on but Patricia's windows still in darkness.

This loneliness in me isn't just about being alone. It's about what I'm alone with when I'm alone. And I don't know how to be alone with all the things I'm alone with.

I always asked myself if a child is born good and I know you were. I believe in the goodness in you now. I will never stop believing. I am just sorry I wasn't always enough to keep it feeling alive in you.

There's the vibrating of my phone, my eyes darting to Patricia's house — my hair standing up and adrenalin firing like it has every time any phone has rung these last few days.

I answer the call, my body ceasing all movement at the sound of the police detective on the other end of the line. He doesn't make me wait.

‘You're in the clear.'

‘What?'

‘The coroner gave it the red light. No prosecution. You're ok.'

I tilt my head back and look at the tree canopies above me. ‘Does this mean you can't prove it or that she didn't drown? What about the autopsy?'

There's a pause, silence, the phone heating up my ear.

‘If we're satisfied I think you can be,' he says.

Just like that. As if all my ugliness can empty out at the stroke of a coroner's pen. Abracadabra.

‘But I need to know.'

There's a sigh down the phone. ‘I told you these things rarely go all the way. No need to dig into it further. We're saying you're ok.'

I fold forward and lower myself onto the grass and it's still warm from the sunny afternoon, the phone pressed to my ear while the detective apologises in the softest of voices for the inconvenience, and for the other day — tells me he'll fax
and
call the undertakers so we can still hit our original funeral slot. He says he'll do it the moment he hangs up. Then he can't resist mentioning procedure again, that he hopes I understand. But I'm hating him for opening up a new wound. My face gazing up at the sky and the drifting cloud shapes looking back at me.

The Loch Ness monster came by once.

It's not long until the light starts to change. I can't wait for them anymore. I walk out onto the path that Reg and Rocket take each day. I get down and try to write on the tarmac in marker pen but the nib can't cope. I look around, finding a piece of rock which does leave a white scratch on the path.

Over near a lamppost so my message will be lit up, I get down on my knees and scratch and scratch at the path — giant letters.

Then I cross the little park, shoeless, like last time, and get down on my knees with the rock in front of Patricia's place.

The spire pokes up in the distance and I park the car close to a hedge to hide the broken window and damaged door, still a ten-minute walk away from St Margaret's. Buttoning up my dad's oversized suit, I sit here for a second in the safe cocoon of a parked car, the quiet suburban streets around me, my eyes trying to discern shapes out of Robert's biro scribbles on the roof interior.

Perhaps today's the last moment in which I have to hold myself together, my mind calculating how many witnesses I'll have to show my sadness to.

Auntie D's been ringing the whole world, I know that from the condolence cards that have been arriving.

I slam the door harder than intended and wander down the road, focusing on the trees moving over me as I walk, the shapes they cut out of the sky, my shoes sounding on the tarmac, mud at the verge, small birds hopping and twitching in the trees. My senses alive to everything.

The church spire grows larger through the trees. I kick a stone and a bird flees, tweeting warnings.

There's the dried-up old pond sitting at the crossroads, and the common with the tree on it, a small bench underneath. The pathetic
war memorial standing there as a cold, stone thank-you to the dead and buried — a littering of cigarette butts and bottles left around it from where teenagers must congregate, already disenchanted with life and so turning to the blunt tools of inebriation and sex. My tools.

Robert's funeral was in that same church six years after he fell. He didn't just lose his mental configuration in the fall, he lost his immunity. Pneumonia took him in the end, then an ambulance. No lights, no siren, no rush. Dad watching it go, his hand coming out and touching the back of it as it pulled away, Mum inside the house somewhere.

Just like it was with Michael — the way Dad was big enough then and Mum distant. The way Dad hugged Michael's body and Mum didn't.

I suppose you only know who you are in the extreme moments because that's when you can't help but be how you really feel.

I remember Robert's parents at his funeral, sat on one side of the church, my parents on the other. Everyone who'd come to support us sitting on Mum and Dad's side, so that it was just Robert's parents with a whole half of the church to themselves. Me at the back feeling like I should have been with them. The bad parents, and me the bad son.

A lot of people came out to see the burial. People who had vanished from our lives since the accident. They came to gape at us. Mum leaning on Dad, both of them putting on a united front for the day. Mum touching him for the first time in so long. I remember being jealous of that touch. And I'd dared hope she'd touch me again too. Or look at me. Even with the valium blur behind her eyes.

I step over the low, dilapidated fence and meander through the graveyard beside the church, walking to their grave — my father and my adopted brother's names carved into the stone. Only it says
Robert McCloud
. A little cloud carved there too.

At Dad's funeral I had to sit up the front with Mum. Then once
everyone had wandered away from his lowered coffin, those handfuls of soil on its lid — slamming car doors, starting engines — I loitered on the church green drinking beer, avoiding the wake. Hating them all for showing up after Dad's death but failing him in his life. Resenting the mourners for being alive and my dad gone.

When I stumbled in late that night, Mum was waiting up in her dressing-gown and pressed a cheque into my palm. I was on a plane as soon as the cheque had cleared.

I step back over the fence and head across the common, some dewy grass sticking to the shine on my shoes. The suit uncomfortable around me, the trouser waistband pinned at the back where I adjusted it to fit my size relative to Dad. He would have worn this to Robert's funeral.

I take my place on the little bench under the tree, pulling out the rolling tobacco and building myself a cigarette. What's left of the marijuana is in the packet too and I'm wondering if I should.

I sit here, my mind panning up out of my head and hovering high above the church and looking down at me dwarfed by this oak tree in the middle of this bit of green — a man on a bench in a suit under a tree in front of a church. That's the reality but there's so much meaning we heap on top of that.

I pack the cigarette tobacco tighter by tapping it on the bench, teenage names scratched into it. Pronouncements of invincible forever love, now coated in mildew and time.

Maybe all this will be like that one day, carved into me but softened by the elements of time.

The clouds are out, one of them looks like a dragonfly. Or a biplane. I light the ciggie and there's a head between my legs making me jump.

‘Rocket!
Hello boy.
' His tail is flashing a swatch of white as it wags his behind. ‘Rocket,' my hand lost in the hair on his back then twirling his ears.

I reach down and gather him up. He issues a grumpy noise but lets me, settling on my lap, his bony elbows digging in. I lean over him and take in the contact, smothering him, my eyes closed, my face in his fur.

A man on a bench under a tree in front of a church, hugging a dog.

‘Good boy.
Where's
the old man.'

Then I see him smart and upright in his suit, smoke trailing behind like an old steamer.

Rocket leaps from me, a foot in my groin and he's flat out across the common, ears forward.

I can't help but stand and come out from under the tree and Reg notices me. I wave and he lifts an uncertain hand and heads self-consciously over.

I go back to the bench, fidgeting during the time it takes him to get to me. Rocket coming back, barking, shuttle-running between us.

‘What are you doing here, Reg?' I say when he's in hairy earshot. He stops in his tracks.

‘It was you who wrote on the path. Surely.'

I grin at him and he resumes his approach, grinning back.

‘I felt I should like to come. Pay my respects,' he says.