Nicola Barker - Darkmans

He shook his head. He put down his cake. He glanced over towards her, with a shrug ‘…until he didn’t , obviously.’

He clasped his hands together and stared out through the rain-splattered windscreen.

‘What happened?’ she couldn’t resist prompting him.

He sighed. He lifted his glasses and rubbed his eyes. But didn’t seem to object to being prompted.

‘They were living downstairs at that point. I’d divided the flat into two parts. I was upstairs. The pain had been especially bad, I remember, especially gruelling. But there was actually a reason for that — it later transpired — because she’d been stockpiling her painkillers, her sleeping pills. She’d been planning for months to commit suicide.’

‘Did Kane know?’

‘Oh yes. God yes. He was intimately involved. Her motor skills were so diminished by the end. She found it difficult to swallow. And then there was always a danger that she might regurgitate what she’d taken once the process was actually under way. She didn’t want to risk that. Kane was an integral part…’

He fell silent.

‘How old was he?’

‘Fifteen. It was all so cold, so calculated . His sixteenth birthday was just two days away.’

‘Did he want his mother to die?’

Beede turned towards her, scowling. ‘Of course not. He loved her. He doted on her. But he would’ve done absolutely anything she’d asked him to do.’

‘So then what?’

‘I don’t know, exactly. They had a special day together. They celebrated his birthday early. There was a cake , I remember…and presents…’ He bit his lip. ‘And once that was done, once that was over…’

He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Then he opened them again and drew a deep breath.

‘She’d taken the requisite amount,’ he calmly continued, ‘whatever that was…She’d actually passed out. From what I could glean afterwards she’d been “dead”—in Kane’s mind, at least, without any detectable pulse, he said — for twenty minutes or so…’

He smiled. ‘But the human animal is a resilient beast…’

‘She wasn’t dead?’

‘No. She suddenly started to twitch, to gasp, to move about. An awful kind of seizure…’

‘Kane must’ve been terrified.’

‘He panicked. He went to pieces. As luck would have it, though, I’d just come home from work…’

‘So you walked in on the whole thing?’

‘No. No …I was working unsociable hours at the time. I’d just crawl home in the afternoons and slip straight into bed. I rarely saw the two of them. We were all so bound up in our own lives, our own routines…Anyhow, the next thing I knew Kane was shaking me awake. He was hysterical. He said his mother had tried to kill herself. He said he needed help.’

‘He?’

‘Yes…’ he glanced up, ‘not she . Not she needed help. He needed help. I thought about that a lot, after…’

He shrugged. ‘Anyway, I ran downstairs, I saw her. It was…’ he winced ‘…a terrible sight.’

‘And Kane?’

‘Hysterical. You’ve got to help me, he kept saying, so I tried to sit her up, I tried to make her…’

‘Is that what he wanted, though? To revive her?’

‘No. I don’t know. Yes. I mean he loved her. He was traumatised…He certainly didn’t try and stop me at that stage, although I do remember that he became quite distressed when I rang for an ambulance…’

He slowly shook his head. ‘In all honesty I don’t think he knew himself. That was the problem. It wasn’t the kind of decision he should’ve been called upon to make…’

‘But weren’t you tempted to just leave her? To let her die? That was what she’d wanted, after all…’

‘No.’ Beede’s answer was immediate. ‘Absolutely not. It didn’t dawn on me. And apart from anything else I could’ve been considered an accessory, which would’ve been a disaster for Kane. The boy had to be my priority. I couldn’t jeopardise his future care…’

‘But you never actually asked him?’

‘Asked him what?’

‘What he thought you should do.’

‘There wasn’t time…’

‘But you said he was her partner, her rock , surely…’

‘He came and woke me up. He was floundering. He’d lost control. He requested my help…And another thing,’ he continued staunchly, ‘if I’d left her to die, Kane may well have been haunted by his involvement — tormented by it, even — later on…’

‘Are you sure of that?’

‘Of course I am. How could he not be? He was a child …’

‘He was the adult. You said so yourself.’

‘ I was the adult. Heather was the adult.’

‘So you revived her?’

He nodded. ‘I did my best. And the ambulance was mercifully prompt.’

Silence

‘So how long before she…?’

‘Before she died? Months. Almost a year. She was profoundly brain-damaged. But still she knew somehow…There was this powerful, this palpable sense of…of rage, of disappointment.’

‘God.’

‘Yes. It was awful.’

‘And Kane?’

‘Totally devastated. Furious. Mortified. He blamed me, obviously. And at some level I suppose he blamed himself for not having had the strength to sit it out.’

‘Didn’t you ever try and talk to him about it?’

‘I tried. Of course I tried. But the situation was on-going. It was fluid. There was never a perfect opportunity. And it was complicated. It was too difficult — for both of us. There was no…no groundwork …no…no rapport …’

Beede suddenly paused, agonised, as if an awful truth had just dawned on him. ‘I suppose there never really has been…’

Silence

‘…Ever.’

Silence

‘God. I was an abysmal dad,’ he said.

Once the boy had finally been persuaded to head upstairs to bed again, they sat together, stiffly, at either end of the sofa, a small pile of folded bed-linen placed between them like a buffer.

Elen had taken the opportunity to yank on a pair of loose, black sweat-pants and a huge, navy-blue jumper — (five sizes too large for her), which Kane presumed (with a slight sinking feeling) belonged to her absent partner.

‘When someone dies,’ she said, staring straight ahead of her, kneading anxiously with her agile fingers at the jumper’s hem, ‘it’s like they suddenly become a part of you. I mean at first there’s the grief, this huge void , this terrible sense of loss, but then one day you wake up and you find yourself eating the same cereal they ate — salted porridge, in the case of my dad, which I’d always really loathed before…’ she paused, ‘then buying the same kind of clothes — a certain type of vest , for example, which I started getting for Isidore, made out of this special Irish yarn, which really makes him itch , he says,’ she smiled, dreamily, ‘but which my dad had always worn…’

At the mention of Isidore’s name, Kane glanced towards her, with a frown.

‘And he loved Monkey Puzzles,’ she continued. ‘The trees?’

She glanced back at him, very briefly.

Kane nodded.

‘He’d always point and yell, “Monkey Puzzle!” whenever we drove past one — it was like some great, big joke which I never really caught the punch-line of…But I even found myself doing that …’ she shook her head, smiling, ‘and Fleet’s just as bemused by it now as I once was…’

‘My mother used to sing this stupid song about Aspidistras,’ Kane reminisced. ‘She had the most awful voice…’