Alan Goodwin - Gravity's Chain

A young woman in her mid-thirties, holding a baby in her arms, answered the door. She was pretty, but sallow; her hair hung lankly to her shoulders and looked as though it needed a good wash. In fact, everything about her looked as though it could do with a good wash. Her shirt showed signs of more stains than just baby dribble. The child lolled on its mother’s shoulder, hardly able to keep its head up. ‘Can I help?’ Her voice was deep and husky. A smoker I surmised. She yawned inadvertently, the way new parents do, and the baby kicked as it pushed excitedly against her, driven by some buried instinct.

For a moment I had no idea what to say. In the hundred or so times I’d played this moment in my mind, I’d assumed the person answering would immediately recognise me and know the purpose of my visit. ‘Hello,’ I stammered, ‘my name’s Jack Mitchell.’ I hoped this simple introduction would clear the confusion but the name meant nothing and the woman stood with a blank stare that turned suspicious as she took two steps back into the house and looked around nervously. ‘I received a letter from someone at this address and I’d like to talk to them, please.’

The woman shouted for her mother. The edge of panic to her voice brought an instant response from somewhere deep in the house and the sudden sound of heavy footsteps. ‘Trudy, who is it?’

‘Some guy.’ The young woman spoke without taking her eyes from me and I dismissed her comment with what I hoped was an ironic smile, to prove I was no threat.

‘Can I help?’ Mother was almost twice the size of her daughter but with the same limp hair and once pretty face. She wore a pink tracksuit with similar stains to those on her daughter’s shirt. Obviously there was some genetic explanation for their inability to find their mouths when eating.

‘He says someone here has been writing to him.’ The baby wriggled and the daughter hitched her higher onto her shoulder.

I held out my hand. ‘Jack Mitchell, Mrs…?’

‘Ross, Heather Ross.’ She turned to her daughter. ‘You take Angus inside, love, he’ll catch a cold out here in this weather.’

Trudy walked off, her slippers slapping on the hallway tiles.

‘Did you write me those letters?’

Heather Ross shook her head. ‘Not me, Mr Mitchell. You’d better come through.’ I followed her through the hallway to a chaotic kitchen where the daughter and baby sat at a table. The back door stuck in the wet and Heather heaved her shoulder on the wooden frame to loosen it. ‘We could go around the side, but it’s overgrown and muddy. It’s better this way.’ There was a flight of wooden steps down to the jungle of a garden. Just visible through the trees at the very rear of the garden was a prefab building painted a dark brown. The steps were greasy from the rain and we tottered down them. ‘Sorry,’ she panted from the effort at keeping her balance, ‘we’ve not had the time to get around to tidying things up out here.’ Somehow I think twenty years wouldn’t be enough time for the three generations of the Ross family to tidy the place. We waded through knee-high grass and ducked down under the lowest branch of an apple tree to get to the front door of the sleepout. Heather smiled, opened the pale green door and waved me inside. Reluctantly I followed.

The room was empty apart from a faded beige carpet, a single mattress at the far end and a sheet over the only window. I went to the middle of the room, stood, stared and shrugged my shoulder. Clearly something obvious was escaping me, but I had no idea what it was. ‘I’m sorry, Heather, you’re going to have to explain this one to me.’

‘I’m afraid she left a week ago, your mother.’

As I stood, I still saw the room, but in the split second it took me to process Heather’s comment, it was suddenly transformed. A heavy rug excluded all natural light over the window. Lamps in the corners lit the place with a yellow glow. Along the wall opposite the window were books stacked in piles and a heap of papers and magazines. On the floor a beautiful Moroccan rug covered most of the tatty old carpet. A series of desert prints hung on the wall by the door, their colours ranging from the brightest yellow of midday to the sumptuous orange of sunset. A curtain divided the mattress from the remainder of the room. In my imagination I pulled back the curtain, revealing a space just big enough for the mattress and an upturned box for a bedside table.

An elderly woman lay on the bed. I recognised her from the distant past, from pictures and the ghost of a memory, but still I couldn’t quite make out her features: they appeared smudged, the lines ill defined. Although I could conjure an image of the room, I couldn’t make out the exact form of my mother’s face. I saw myself standing there; open-mouthed, flat-footed, feeling as though a stone the size of a football was lodged in my gut. A hundred questions bombarded my mind, knocking me one way, then the other. How do you cram nearly two decades of wondering and questions, twenty years of yearning, into a solitary moment? There were no words. At last we were united and as that thought dawned on me, my body sang. I thought my legs would give way, but I steadied myself. All through this encounter, Mum held me in her stare, watching my every reaction. And then she smiled. Her translucent lips curled at their edges and in that second I forgave her for everything.

That was how I wanted it to be. Perhaps in some parallel universe, from where I sensed the faintest of signals, I lived on to sit on Mum’s bed, hold her hand, stroke her hair and discover everything that had happened to her since she’d left. But in this universe, in this shitty, grey, fucked universe, where I’d missed the chance to meet her, her image and that of the room faded like powder dissolving in water. It could have happened—if I’d been brave enough to take the chance of going to her.

‘Mr Mitchell? Mr Mitchell?’

Finally I acknowledged the woman standing with me. Just one question demanded to be asked. ‘Do you know where she’s gone? Did she leave an address?’

‘Sorry, no.’

‘How long was she here for?’

Heather noticed my unsteady sway and guided me to the mattress where we sat next to each other.

‘She came about two months ago when she answered an advert in the newspaper. At first she kept to herself, but slowly we started to talk. You know, she’d pop in for a cup of tea, or I’d come down here in the afternoon for a chat. Quickly we found we had things in common. Lost husbands, for one—in her case by choice, for me enforced. It’s ten years since Eddie left. He went to Thailand, you know. Went on some…tour and never came back. To this day I don’t know what happened to him. I expect he shacked up with some nubile Thai girl and probably stayed there.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘We’d sit together for hours on end. She was a lovely woman. Lovely. I really miss her now she’s gone. I hoped she would leave some way of contacting her, she said she would, but it wasn’t her style. I think she hated ties, hated any roots. No, I don’t think there was a chance she’d leave behind a piece of her future like that.

‘She told me about you. She had this big book of articles and magazine pieces. You see she kept an eye on you, like an angel. Always watching from a distance. She knew all about you, about Mary and Caroline.’ She talked as though the story was her own and even took the liberty of nudging me in the ribs.

‘How did she know?’

‘Didn’t say, but she had all these notes.’

‘Did she ever tell you…tell you why she left? Did she ever tell you which one of us forced her away?’

Heather tugged at the place where her bra cut her considerable girth. How strange that answers I’d sought for so long were held by this woman I’d met just minutes before. I hung on her every word as though she was a shaman, and, of course, in a way she was. She knew what I craved; she was privy to secrets I’d asked myself on endless sleepless nights and cold bitter mornings when only tequila kept me company. Her movements ceased with a final shake, much like a chicken finally settling on an uncomfortable egg. ‘It wasn’t you or your dad who forced her away, love—neither of you did anything wrong. Is that what you thought?’