Renée Knight - Disclaimer

“Hello, I’m trying to track down my son — I’m worried something may have happened to him… he called me very upset… he’s twenty-five… yes, but he has a history of drug problems… and he was in a terrible state on the phone… he may have done something to himself… Nicholas Ravenscroft…” She can hear they’re not interested. A twenty-five-year-old man with a mum phoning to check where he is. It sounds absurd.

She runs back up to the spare room. He could be anywhere — any hospital in London — on any train out of London — on any railway line…. She calls the police but they brush her off. Her son is twenty-five. She heard from him two hours ago. Did he say he was going to harm himself? No, she has to admit. She starts searching through his things. His laptop reveals nothing. She finds his washbag with telltale signs of his drug taking. Please no. She runs to the top of the stairs and screams down:

“Did you know he was taking drugs again? Did you?”

Robert comes to the bottom of the stairs and screams back:

“Don’t start trying to tell me how to parent our son.” But she can see she has got to him. She goes back into the spare room, gets down on her hands and knees and crawls through Nick’s mess, sifting through it for God knows what. She finds a letter from John Lewis. A letter of dismissal dated two weeks ago. She snatches it up in triumph and rushes down the stairs with it.

“He’s lost his job. So where’s he been every day when you thought he was at work?”

Robert can’t answer that. Now, he is as shocked and frightened as Catherine and she feels ashamed. How could she have felt triumphant? She looks down at him and says in quiet desperation:

“Don’t you have any idea who he might be with? Hasn’t he mentioned anyone?” Robert doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know. Neither of them does. What a state of parenthood, she thinks. Neither of them knowing who to call — neither of them knowing who their son might be with. Does he have friends? There are none left from teenage years, she is pretty sure of that.

“He mentioned a girlfriend but I’ve never met her, I don’t know her name. I’m not sure whether she even exists….” He tries Nick’s number but it goes straight to voice mail: “Hi, mate. Give us a call when you wake up. Just let me know you’re okay… Love you…”

Then Catherine’s phone rings; she doesn’t recognise the number. Her fingers shake as she presses Answer.

“Hello?”

It’s time now to begin tidying up, to wipe our fingerprints away. I have closed down Jonathan’s Facebook page. Nancy had wanted me to leave it up, but I felt it best to take it down. She is feeling frustrated, I can tell. She doubts that my softly, softly approach, as she calls it, will achieve the outcome she desires, but I ask her to be patient. Look, I say. Look at little Nick’s Facebook page. He hasn’t touched it. That means something. There has been nothing new on his page for twenty-four hours. That is unusual for him. He can’t keep his little mitts off his page. “Status.” What a very grand word. His status hasn’t changed. How good that must make these young people feel. To have status. A status. Jonathan never had any doubt about his status — he didn’t need Facebook to endorse him. He never had to doubt his importance in his mother’s life.

I can say it now. I was sometimes jealous of Nancy’s devotion to Jonathan. Our relationship changed after he was born, of course it did. Not at first. At first it was us and our new baby, but as he grew, as he became more defined, I felt at times that it became me and them. They had a special bond and there were occasions when I found myself competing with him for her attention. I must have seemed needy to her, weak. Of course Jonathan needed her more, and it was unfair of me to ever try and pull her back from him. The only times we ever rowed were over Jonathan, over how best to manage him. We didn’t row often, less and less in fact the older he became. I started to back away from decisions about him. Nancy was unwavering in her belief that what he needed was unconditional love and support. That’s what every child needs, she said, and it was hard to disagree with that.

Oh, Nancy, how brave our son was. When I heard how he had died, saving a child, I was surprised. How shameful is that? I didn’t know he had it in him to save another life. And you suspected me of that, didn’t you? Although you never accused me of doubting his courage, you knew that I would have had a problem matching his death with his life. I am sorry it has been left until after your death for me to try and make amends. When I discovered the little boy he saved was his lover’s son, it made more sense to me. He wanted to please her; he wanted to show her how brave he was. He was in love.

I leave the computer open on Nicholas Ravenscroft’s Facebook page and go into the garden. I have already started building the bonfire. It was something Jonathan and I used to do together when he was little. He loved Fireworks Night, staying up in the dark, throwing things onto the fire, writing his name with a sparkler. It is dark now and I flick through a notebook, not reading it, just watching Nancy’s handwriting dance before me, and then I place it on the pile of wood along with the others. I light a taper and hold it against the fire lighter, watch it catch with a satisfying flicker and lick. The leather smells and curls as it burns, darkens and smoulders, the paper hungry to swallow the flames.

When I go back inside, I see Nancy. She is sitting in front of the laptop and she turns to me and smiles and I think it’s because the smell of the bonfire has conjured up happy memories of Jonathan and me together on Bonfire Night, but I am wrong. There is a message from the father on Nicholas’s Facebook page.

Nicholas was left outside St. George’s Hospital in South London. A body dumped in the entranceway. The doctor told Catherine and Robert their son had had a stroke. Cocaine, probably injected. Too early to say how much damage had been done. They’d know more over the next twenty-four hours. Catherine and Robert stood side by side at their son’s bed. Opposite them, on the other side, were the machines which were keeping him alive: helping him breathe; checking his heart; vital liquids dripping into him; balance trying to be restored. The ICU was quiet, almost silent. Rows of bodies on beds wired up, eyes closed, frozen, waiting to be reborn. Or not.

Catherine stares at her boy, whom she failed to protect. The doctor was wrong. It has been more than twenty-four hours, two days in fact, and they still don’t know how much damage Nicholas has done to himself. She and Robert are no longer able to stand next to each other so they take it in turns to sit with their son. Robert won’t allow Catherine to be there at the same time as him and so she has to wait for him to leave before taking up her position. She resents the time Robert is there, denying her those hours she could be with her son, but she doesn’t fight him. In a way she is relieved not to see him. She has no room to think about him, all she wants is to be with Nicholas. She is with him now and every moment is precious.

She finds herself wondering if her son has always been vulnerable to an early death. He has been saved once already but she is frightened that this time they will not be so lucky. When she looks at him, helpless, like a premature baby whose system is not able to function independently, it is as if she is newly born too. Her mind and body are raw and, strangely, it feels good, good to feel the outside world touch her at last. She is able to look at her son and really see him as she had seen him when he was first theirs: those first few years before his presence became tangled up with the mess and filth that she deposited on him. Yes, she must accept her part in how they came to be where they are now. She cannot push it away, it must be thought about. And when, if, Nicholas is strong enough to bear it, she will tell him what she should have told him years before. She touches his cheek, gets down on her knees and kisses his forehead, then rests her head on the side of his bed.