Mother and Child by Annie Murray

Author:Annie Murray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Twenty-Five

I go to Lodge Hill Cemetery every few days now, instead of daily. It’s so far and I hardly ever have the car. In the beginning it was the only place I wanted to be. That’s what I did, some weeks, once I’d stopped pretending I was coping at work and left the school. I used to spend half of the day on buses. Having to leave his body at the hospital that night, after it happened, was like being torn apart. All I could do to survive was to be close to him, to his body, which I was so attached to and could not yet take in that he was not. If I didn’t go for some reason, I was weighed down with guilt.

I took him flowers, read him things from the paper, told him everyday bits of news. I remember wandering round and round those paths lined with the dead, in the winter cold, sometimes under an umbrella. Time was a blur, especially when I had taken sleeping tablets. Once or twice I remember screaming. It would have been better if I had been able to cry.

When I can go now, I still offer him flowers like a present. Sometimes I think of taking chocolates and then realize how ridiculous this is. I tidy up as if I am arranging his bed for him to come home to. I talk to him. I tell him over and over again how much I love him and miss him, how I will always love him.

But less and less, these days, does it feel as if he is there. It is a grave, with grass sprouting round the stone, leaves spiralling down and settling, spiders weaving tiny veils of grey, and lichen spots appearing. It is a marker where we can commune with him – as his bedroom was before we left the house. But now we are not living there, and he is not here to answer me. His remains are here, lying, as he does, in a garden full of markers of the long dead. But not him. My boy with his quiet way and sensitive eyes. And now I am feeling that, suddenly, like a chill wakening to reality.

And so I have reached a point where there are chinks in the black wall of my own pain, through which I can see out around Paul, even though hardly a beat of my heart passes without my thinking of him.

Dorrie seems to need to talk now, urgently.

All along, since I have known her, Dorrie has said so little, despite her long life and the loss she has experienced. She has kept it tight inside her. I must ask her about her happy years, the life with Tom before he died. Must hear anything she wants to say, because who has ever been there to listen to her? Not her own mother, by the sounds of it.

‘She must want someone to know,’ Pat says when I talk it over with her.

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