harder and harder to picture her in the world at all, let alone in mine.
My so-called father, well …
I think about the issue of ‘bad blood’ a lot. You would too, in my shoes.
A few nights before we got married, I’d had a huge attack of nerves, entirely based on the idea that Anya wouldn’t want me if she knew everything about me. I’d got royally pissed and, because I am unable to stop myself from making sarcastic quips to big, angry men, ended up with a black eye and a wobbly tooth.
Anya was furious, and I blurted it out. I decided she needed to know that part at least. I told her about the man who was my father by pure biology alone: Mark Little. He got life for beating a man to death who’d been working in a post office Little was trying to rob at the time. I don’t remember any of this. Part of my mum’s disabilities came from him having thrown her down some stone stairs when I was a newborn baby.
He had hepatitis and died in Brixton Prison. And that was the end of him. At least, in the corporeal sense. I try not to think about it, but I find it very hard to forget that fifty per cent of my DNA comes from him.
Anya had held me tightly that night and told me she loved me and that it was going to take a lot more than a ‘gangster dad’ to change that.
She didn’t know everything about me.
I could only test her love so far.
Irene placed her chunky Nokia next to the sink and stared out at the small rectangle of back garden.
Why wasn’t Michael picking up? It was the third time she had called him this week and it kept going to voicemail. Her son could be very elusive sometimes.
The grass was emerald bright after all the rain and badly in need of a cut. Michael had promised he would be round this week to do it.
When her husband Colin was alive, the garden was kept in an immaculate state. He spent hours out there, in all weathers, digging flowerbeds and tending their small vegetable patch.
Now and then she pulled up a weed or two, but she wasn’t able to do much these days and relied on Michael, for this and other little jobs about the place.
Sighing, she put the kettle on and then, from nowhere, she was sideswiped by a scene.
The two boys, aged maybe ten and five, playing football on that lawn. It wasn’t so tidy then; strewn with plastic toys, footballs, and cricket bats. This wasn’t one specific memory, just an ordinary afternoon that would have played itself out many times. It was so vivid on the canvas of her mind now, she felt as though she could step right back into it.
Liam, her little firecracker, was probably cheating again, running around his red-cheeked brother with a cheeky grin that meant he got away with an awful lot more than he should. Michael, always so concerned with fairness, would have been huffing and puffing with the injustice of it all. Liam wouldn’t have been able to resist stoking the flames, goading his big brother and maybe calling him a mean name. They would be fighting before she had the chance to rush out and prise them apart.
Michael was so much bigger and stronger than his brother, but would never really hurt him, even when he was pushed. But still they fought like cat and dog and at the time it drove her doolally.
She smiled now, remembering it. It felt as though those long days of the boys’ childhood would go on for ever. But no one told you that they would be gone one day.
She was always so tired then. Her supermarket job left her exhausted every day, with an aching back and sore feet. Little time for much beyond making tea and hanging out washing before sitting in front of the television.
Irene wished she could step back into that afternoon, just for one hour. She’d wrap herself in it, bathe in every single second. There would be no, ‘I’m too tired to play’ or, ‘Go and watch telly, boys, I’m busy.’ There would be cake and sweets and as much Coca-Cola as they wanted to drink. She wouldn’t even bother with the diet stuff. She’d play all day if that’s what they wanted.
She swiped at her eyes.
Silly old baggage.
Glancing now, despite herself, at the space next to the cupboard where the cat bowls had lived until recently. Stupid still to be upset about this, when there were so many awful things going on in the world. Michael had brushed it off a bit when she’d told him.
But she couldn’t help the sadness that surged now as she thought about the comfort that old moggy had been.
The kettle seemed to have boiled already. She wasn’t sure she even felt like a cup of tea now, or the sandwich she was planning to make.
Michael was always nagging her to look after herself properly, but it was difficult, when she was on her own.
She hoped he was alright, whatever he was doing.
What was he doing?
He pretended that he was happy, but she knew he wasn’t, not really. How could they be happy, after what had happened, any of them?
Abandoning all thoughts of tea now, Irene went into the sitting room and picked up the photograph that sat on the mantelpiece. Liam, aged eight, all gappy teeth and sparkling eyes. He was always such a beautiful child. When he was a toddler, people used to stop her to comment on his auburn hair and those big, light brown eyes. Once, when she was up in London for the day visiting her mother, a man in the street gave her a card and said he was from a modelling agency that represented children. Modelling!
Irene had been dying to tell Colin about it when she got home, but he hadn’t been excited at all. He said that Liam already ruled the roost and it wouldn’t do him any favours to make him a bighead. She never called the modelling man.
It was a shameful thing she kept locked away inside; the fact that Liam had always been that tiny bit easier to love than his older brother.
Michael was always sick; always complaining about something or another.
And as an adult, he had all his weird theories about things; that there was a secret group of powerful people who controlled everything we did, that the state was constantly monitoring us. Irene couldn’t really keep up and just humoured him when he went into one of his rants.
Liam, though, seemed to have sprung from her womb raring to go at life. He sparkled with some sort of vitality that pulled you in.
He could have been anything, really. She gazed at the picture in her hands. He was still so open then, at primary school. Later, his smile became uncertain and wary. That was when things started to go wrong for him, at secondary school. He was always drawn to the bad lads, the cheeky ones at first, then worse. Something about extreme behaviour in others seemed to draw him like an insect to a lit window, and just like that insect, he would destroy himself, bashing against the glass.
For a minute she allowed herself a fantasy.
Liam was working in some sort of well-paid job in an office. He had a nice car and liked to go on holidays to hot places, where he bought her daft souvenirs. He hadn’t settled down yet, but
