was still going strong and he hadn’t lost his job. Maybe he’d had a promotion and they would celebrate with Prosecco. Everyone was always going on about Prosecco and Irene hadn’t ever tried it. For a moment the fantasy was so real and delicious she could almost hear the sounds of them all around her.
Irene leaned forwards and covered her face with her hands.
It killed Colin. That was for sure. Even though they had their differences – God knows they did – Colin still loved his son. For a time after they got that postcard, their last contact with him, Colin had raged about the ‘lack of consideration’ and the ‘utter thoughtlessness for anyone else’. But when it was evident that Liam really wasn’t coming back, even when Colin was sick … well, it did for him.
All the postcard said was, ‘I have to go away. I’m sorry. Don’t look for me. Lx’.
His passport was missing. He’d been talking for ages about how he wanted to ‘get away’. Ever since he was a little boy, really.
And now it was just her and Michael left.
She went back into the kitchen to check her mobile again.
Where are you, Michael?
Gloomy at the prospect of going back to work after the weekend, I’d stayed up too late the night before watching a trashy horror film and drinking a few beers.
In the morning, I was feeling scratchy and tired and not at all like a man who’d just had six weeks off.
I found myself thinking about Mum again, which immediately led me down an unwelcome rabbit hole.
Nowadays I would probably be called a child carer or something, but it didn’t really seem like that at the time. I just had to do a bit more on occasion than most kids my age.
Mum had rheumatoid arthritis that used to flare up quite often, leaving her skin grey and her eyes deadened as she crab-walked gingerly around our small flat. She had strong drugs that were supposed to help but she said they made her sick, so she had periods of not taking them. Her weight had always been a problem and I can’t exactly say we had the best diet, so she was what you’d call clinically obese.
We lived in a ground-floor flat that was a stone’s throw from Holloway Road.
‘Like the prison?’ Anya said once, eyes wide.
Like the prison. Our estate was one of those blocks of flats built in the 1930s.
Morningside House was a big rectangle of brown and white buildings with a scummy grass area in the middle. The ‘No ball games’ signs were ignored but so much of the grass was covered in dog shit that it wasn’t exactly a draw anyway. I mostly played football in the playground after school.
There were benefits to living on the ground floor here, in that you never had to use the pissy-smelling stairs. The lifts never worked. But there was much more chance of being broken into, not that we had anything worth stealing. Mum had her bag taken right off our kitchen table when we were in the other room, eating our favourite meal (Findus Crispy Pancakes and oven chips) and watching EastEnders. We never even heard the door being jemmied open.
But that was lucky, for where we lived. There weren’t quite as many stabbings as you hear about now, but there were still a number, plus the odd shooting. More than anything, though, people opted for the good old-fashioned methods; knuckle, boot, and skull. Maybe the odd car jack or iron bar.
On one side of us was a family with three sons who seemed to spend the better part of the day beating seven shades of shit out of each other. Every now and then you’d hear the mum, Marie, shouting that she would ‘burn down the fucking house one day, with youse-all in it’. It sometimes seemed quite a reasonable idea.
Brendan was the father, a hairy-faced bull of a man whose glower alone could send me scuttling into the house if I happened to come across him outside the flats. The three sons – Frank, Kieran, and Bobby – were all a little older than me but the youngest, Bobby, had enough of a sphere of influence at school for me to avoid ever passing on stuff I saw or heard from their household. Like the time I saw Marie kick him up the backside at the front door because he couldn’t open it fast enough. All it took was one look from him, anger and humiliation glittering hard in his eyes, for me to know to keep my mouth shut.
When Mum’s pain got too bad, she would sometimes go to bed and not get up for a day or two. She took Valium – had been on it for years – from the days when GPs thought nothing of prescribing it for every period of stress or mild sleeplessness. She wasn’t a huge drinker but she knew that if she combined it with alcohol then it would knock her out. That was all she wanted. I don’t think she even liked the taste of alcohol very much.
My neighbour on the other side was an elderly Scottish woman called Mrs McAllister, known as Mrs Mack. She had neat, grey curls and bright eyes behind thick glasses. Her mouth seemed to transmit disapproval without the need for words.
There had always been a polite distance between her and Mum. Mum said she thought Mrs Mack disapproved of us, once speculating it was because of Mum’s brown skin. Or maybe it was because she knew about my father. When she said that it gave me a weird feeling in my stomach. Like there was a thread that tied me to him, still. That I was somehow the same as him.
The whole thing with Mrs Mack started on one of those days when Mum had taken to bed. I came in from school and could tell straight away that she was home, but that something was wrong. There was a stillness, a kind of hesitation in the atmosphere, like the house was waiting for me.
Her bedroom door was closed. I popped my head in and could see the mound of her in the bed, smell the sweetish smell of her bedroom, a mix of smoke, the air freshener on the side, and a uric tang from the damp patch on the ceiling.
Afternoon light was bleeding through the thin orange curtains, highlighting crumpled tissues on the floor next to the bed and an empty can of beer.
This was the sort of detail Anya would never have been able to understand. A gulf of distance so large would open up between her and what she thought my mum was, that I wouldn’t be able to face trying to explain. So, there was only so much I told her about it.
As for the other stuff …
If I could just keep her away from the darkness, you see, and in the light where she belonged, maybe we really had a chance long term. Maybe I would stop feeling that she was an incredible gift I only had on loan.
That day I had been desperate to speak to Mum after school. We’d been given a letter in History about a trip to the Imperial War Museum and it was going to cost parents ten pounds. Museums weren’t free then, so I’d never been, and being a bit obsessed with old war movies, had always wanted to go and see all the tanks and guns. Mum was on benefits and I knew that ten pounds was a lot, but it seemed reasonable to me that we could spare this when it was for school. Especially if Mum could afford a can of Stella when it suited her.
I wandered into the living room and booted a cushion covered in a greasy sort of green taffeta across the room with as much savagery as I could muster. It knocked down a dusty cactus that sat in a knitted pot-cover on the table by Mum’s chair. I glared at it for a moment, then prowled into the kitchen.
Rooting in the fridge, I saw
