Alan Goodwin - Gravity's Chain

‘It had to be one of us and I never forgave Dad because I thought it might be him and I never forgave myself because I thought it might have been me. What else were we supposed to think? Who else could we blame?’

‘She just wanted more, Jack, that’s all. I think you get that from her.’

‘Get what?’

‘That striving for something more, that need to push the boundaries. For your mum it meant a rejection of being a wife and a mother. She thought your father was much better cut out to bring you up.’ Heather shook her head. ‘What a shame you held him responsible.’

‘It was inevitable.’

‘With hindsight perhaps that’s right, but she meant it for the best, Jack. She said once that she didn’t feel she had room for you and her, and to let you grow she had to leave. I think she saw it as a kind of sacrifice, a kind of gift in a way. For you to bloom she had to give way.’

‘Whatever she meant, that wasn’t the outcome. We were left abandoned and what she said just sounds like self-justifying bullshit. She left us with nothing to fill the hole she left except unhappiness and shit. I tried to force it back, but it got to me in the end. Nothing she could have done as a mother could possibly have been as bad as what she left behind. And if she knew what was going on, if she was watching like an angel, she must have seen what was happening. Why didn’t she save us?’

‘I think that’s why she reached out to you in the past month. I think it was her way of trying to put things right. It was her chance to make amends.’

‘So she felt guilty?’

Heather merely nodded. ‘Terribly, but I think she thought returning would serve no purpose, that it could never put things together again.’

‘So why now?’

‘I’m not sure she really knew. I think she saw your life as being fragile, almost at breaking point, and felt she could have made a difference.’

‘Why didn’t she just say it was her? What was with all this cloak and dagger stuff? Why didn’t she just sign the fucking notes? I would have come, Heather, I would have come straight away.’ I felt the first tears come. They slipped down my cheek. ‘I would have come. I would have come.’ I wiped the wet away. ‘Why didn’t she just say it was her?’

‘Because she was afraid you wouldn’t come and see her. She couldn’t have lived with the rejection if you’d known it was her and hadn’t come. This way she knew there could have been other reasons for you to stay away.’

‘If I’d known I would have come, I would have come anyway, but it’s all too late now.’

‘Would you like some time by yourself, Jack?’ She noticed the slightest tip of my head and with considerable effort levered herself from the mattress and left the room.

All I could hear was the occasional hiss of tyres on a wet road. I tried to recapture what it might have been like with Mum and me in the room, but nothing came. There was just emptiness and now the additional sound of the baby crying as Heather opened the back door. Then that, too, was gone. The room was empty and I was empty. There was nothing in this place for me, but still I felt compelled to stay, as though some last trace of my mother was there that would disappear when I left. I needed to take in every last detail of the room, so I walked to every corner, along every wall. When I returned to the mattress and it sank under my weight I saw the smallest of white triangles against the wall. I reached over and pulled out a photograph. I thought it would be of me as a child, a treasured link with the past she had abandoned. To my surprise, no, to my disbelief, it was a picture of Dad. Taken recently, no doubt, on a prowl past our house. How old he looked, how bent and destroyed. I passed my hand over the glossy surface. Why had the photo been taken, and why had Mum held on to it? Did she pity Dad? Before this meeting I might have thought that she had kept the photo because she blamed him, but that was all wrong. I had conjured the darkest of thoughts about what he might have done behind closed doors to force her to leave, but now I knew it had been just my mother’s whim, just a fucking whim.

I thought of taking the picture with me, but it belonged in this empty space, in this vacuum where once there might have been the hope of atonement for past mistakes, so carefully I slipped it back from where it came. You never know, perhaps she might return for it. With a final look and a trickle of tears wiped away with the back of my hand, I turned and left.

Heather watched as I trudged back through the long grass and negotiated the slippery wooden steps. I was thankful that Trudy and the baby had left the kitchen. The old woman whom I’d met just an hour before held out her arms and I hugged as tightly as I’ve hugged anyone in my life. We didn’t speak; there were no appropriate words. Slowly we released our grip and parted.

The car was a place of comfort and I sat there for some time, trying to regain my composure smashed in the last hour. Finally I started to return to the barren, sterile house that Dad inhabited rather than lived in. There was no point in telling him. The information could never ease his pain and confusion. And so I entered his kitchen, its museum-like quality more poignant after I’d been so close to Mum, and pulled a bottle of whisky from the cupboard. There was a voice from the front room. Dad had a visitor.

This was as unexpected as finding life on the moon: Dad never had visitors. He had no friends and only modern neighbours who kept themselves to themselves and studied the pavement when walking past. During the days of my return he’d spoken to no one and received no phone calls.

Detectives Ryan and Orton sat next to each other on the old blue sofa at the far end of the front room, Dad facing them in the old armchair he’d sat in for as long as I could remember. He’d been there just days before when I’d returned unannounced, greeting me with a nod and a hello as though my appearance was the most natural of occurrences. He had the same look now, as though he regularly received visits from the police looking for his son who hadn’t lived with him for ten years. His face was passive, unresponsive to the strangeness around him.

‘Mr Mitchell, at last.’ Ryan replaced his cup on saucer with an unpleasant scrape of china. ‘I was just telling your father here that we’ve been trying to catch up with you for a couple of days now, but that you don’t seem too keen to talk to us. You should turn your phone on, Jack, you never know who might be trying to contact you.’ His voice was heavy with an irony that both he and Orton seemed to find amusing.

I made no move. Ryan and Orton remained seated and Dad continued to sip his tea with loud slurps.

‘Perhaps we could take a walk outside,’ Ryan invited me with a wave of his arm. For a moment I thought Dad was going to follow, but he turned to the kitchen instead as the three of us stepped outside. ‘There really was no need to avoid us like that, Jack.’

‘Sorry, I’ve had a few things to deal with.’

‘This is all a bit unexpected, isn’t it? This return to New Zealand, I mean. We called Bebe to contact you and got quite a surprise when he told us we could find you back here.’

‘That bad, is it, that you have to find me so urgently?’

‘Guilty conscience, Jack?’

‘I’m tired of games, Detective, so if you don’t mind, perhaps you could just tell me what it is you want.’

‘Is that what happened with Jo—a game gone too far? I went to the funeral, you know—a sad affair. When someone that young dies it really hammers home how fragile we all are. Her parents were distraught.’

‘I’m sorry I missed it.’ And I was.

‘I’ve come to tell you that we’ve completed our enquiries and we won’t be laying any charges.’ He searched my eyes for a reaction. ‘Are you surprised?’