The Perfect Son Read online

  I imagine Jamie brushing his teeth, skipping over the gap in the middle where his bottom baby teeth used to be. Pushing his tongue against the tooth at the top, testing its wobbliness, and wondering if today is the day it will fall out. I’m sure he’s grown too since you died. Me, I’ve shrunk. I feel so lost, so small, without your arm around me, but nothing can stop our boy from growing up.

  Quieter steps now as Jamie moves back to his bedroom to finish getting dressed.

  A minute or two ticks by before Jamie appears in the kitchen.

  A rush hits me. Our baby boy is here. The relief laps in tiny waves over the pain squeezing my heart. Jamie is here. You are gone and my world has stopped, but Jamie is here. I still have a world.

  “Morning, baby,” I say.

  Jamie slides into the chair across from me, where a bowl and a spoon are waiting for him.

  I glance at the clock on the microwave. It’s 8:35 already. Where did the morning go? “We’re going to be late for school again. Sorry. I lost track of time.”

  A crease forms on his face. Jamie hates being late for school. He never used to mind. He never used to frown like that either. It’s too adult on his seven-year-old features, but he’s been doing it more and more when he looks at me, taking in the sallow color of my face and the dark smudges under my eyes.

  His gaze falls to the box in my hand—the medicine I should take, but don’t. I stand too quickly, dragging the chair legs against the ugly reddish brown floor tiles and dropping the box on top of the post pile beside the microwave. The stack of letters wobbles under the pressure of the new addition.

  When I turn back, the concern is gone and he is a boy again, picking up the box of Rice Krispies and tipping too many grains into an empty bowl.

  He needs a haircut, Tessie.

  You always say that.

  The blond curls, so like mine, are a tad unruly, but he scoops them away from his face so that the strands don’t get in the way of those piercing blue eyes of his. Do you remember the midwife on the day he was born? She tutted at us, cooing over his eyes. “They’ll never stay that blue,” she singsonged. But they have.

  I’m putting off the haircut, but it’s not for the same reason that I haven’t opened the post or checked the messages on the answerphone. It’s because the rest of him—the long legs, the square jaw, and the straight nose that ends in a point—is all you, Mark. And if his hair is shorter, then he’ll look so much more like you. Besides, Jamie likes it longer. It’s something to hide behind when his shyness gets the better of him.

  “Have you got everything?” I ask. “Where’s your jumper?”

  Jamie shrugs, unable to speak with his mouth full of Rice Krispies.

  “I’m not sure where it is either. Where did you leave it on Friday?”

  “Don’t know,” he replies.

  Frustration sweeps through my body. Anger is riding like a cowboy on its back, and the words fire out of me before I can stop them: “Jamie, for Christ’s sake. Where is your bloody school jumper?”

  He shrinks back, cowering at the anger in my tone, and now I feel shitty. Really shitty.

  He hangs his head, slumping over his bowl, and a single tear rolls down his cheek. “Don’t swear. It’s rude,” he whispers.

  “I’m sorry,” I blurt out, crouching beside his chair. “Mummy shouldn’t have snapped, and I definitely shouldn’t have sworn. You haven’t done anything wrong. I’m just not feeling very well this morning, but it’s not your fault.

  “I’m sorry.” I pull myself up, gnawing at my bottom lip. “I did some washing over the weekend. I’m sure I saw your jumper hanging up,” I lie. “Eat your breakfast and I’ll look for it.”

  Jamie nods and I know we’re all right. As all right as we can be without you.

  My slippers slap on the tile floors as I dash out of the kitchen and into the hall with the huge oak front door. I move from room to room, searching for the missing jumper. The dining room is first—the dark shiny wood of your mother’s furniture sitting beside the whopping great fireplace, black with decades of soot. The furniture is the same coloring as the Tudor oak beams that stretch across the ceiling and down the walls.

  No jumper.

  I don’t remember if I washed it. I don’t remember if I hung it out to dry. It’s another memory lost to the fog I’m living in.

  I move across the hall to the living room that overlooks the garden and another fireplace; the Oriental rug with scorch marks dotted at the edges from years of spitting fires. I wanted to bin the rug but you wouldn’t let me.

  It suits the room, Tessie.

  Maybe it does. I can’t say I care much now. The black corner sofa from our old living room doesn’t look right in here though, does it? It’s too small, too modern, like the flatscreen TV on the glass stand. Perfect for the square living room in our Chelmsford semidetached, but not for here.

  I expect to find Jamie’s jumper in a discarded heap by the PlayStation, but it’s not there and I keep on going. Along the hall and around the main staircase, to the rooms beyond: the library crammed with old copies of Reader’s Digest; the other living room, or parlor—whatever it is—stacked with boxes. Half of them are filled with the things we haven’t unpacked, and the other half with your mother’s stuff.

  Up the narrow stairs at the back of the house, I peer into the bedrooms. All but ours and Jamie’s are filled with seventy-two years of your mother’s life, and the dirt and grime of a woman who thought herself above cleaning.

  She did go a bit doolally in the end.

  An understatement if ever I heard one, but who am I to comment on mental health? According to the doctor, I’m depressed.

  I check the bathroom. Gold taps, a cream suite, and aubergine tiles that stretch floor to ceiling, but no jumper.

  I find it in Jamie’s room. His bedroom is a mix of colors—red and blue Spider-Man bedcovers, green Ninja Turtle figures on the bookshelf, black and yellow Batman curtains, and the car rug he’s had since forever that I can’t bear to part with.

  The jumper is hanging in Jamie’s wardrobe. It smells of lavender fabric conditioner. I must have washed it and forgotten; hung it up on autopilot when I was thinking of you, of us.

  * * *

  —

  “I found it,” I pant, dashing back into the kitchen.

  Jamie pulls the jumper over his head without a word.

  “Ready to go?” I ask, looping my hair into a bun as I shuffle around the kitchen table to the nook by the side door where we keep the coats and shoes. Don’t roll your eyes, but I’m still wearing a pair of your red tartan pajama bottoms.

  Oh, Tessie. Really?

  With the wellies and the long winter coat, it’s not that obvious. It’s only the school drop-off.

  I know if I drove the few minutes down the lane to the village and the school, then I could stay in the car and wave Jamie in, and no one will see the pj bottoms, but I also know that I’m in no fit state to drive this morning. I’m in no fit state to walk either. My feet feel as though they are filled with lead, my legs with jelly.

  The sun is a pale yellow but bright—a spotlight—and I squint, dipping my head and focusing my gaze on the road.

  As the engine of a car roars by I have that split-second flash again, that heart-stopping what-if moment where I think about diving in front of the engine so we can be together. The feeling is gone so fast I can almost pretend it was never there. Almost.

  I tuck my body nearer to Jamie, moving us both closer to the prickly hedgerows bordering both sides of the lane. The days of scooting ahead with his friends on the estate and waiting at every third lamppost are long gone.

  I wish there were sidewalks.

  “Stop, Tessie. Stop worrying,” you said on Jamie’s first day at his new school, and anytime in fact that I worried about all the things that might happen and all the thin
gs I had no control over, like sidewalks and plane crashes.

  You took the day off and we all walked together, remember? “It’s the countryside,” you said, nudging Jamie so that both of you were laughing at me. It was a laugh to say: Silly Mummy doesn’t like walking in the road next to the cars. Silly Mummy would like sidewalks instead of bushes. Silly Mummy wants housing estates instead of rolling farmland thick with dark mud.

  “Today, Clarke Tours will be taking you on a tour of the village on your journey to school,” you said, making Jamie and me laugh with your silly tour guide voice. “There is approximately a mile between our house and the church, Hall Farm and the old school building at the other end of the village, where I went to school before they built the new one on the estate. The old building is still there, but it’s an accountancy firm now, I think. The village also boasts a post office, a vet’s, a playground, and a new housing estate.”

  “New?” I scoffed. “Our Chelmsford house was new.”

  “OK, so it’s not brand-new, but new for the village. It was built in the seventies. The not-so-new estate runs parallel to the old road where the Tudor houses like ours are.”

  “And the cottages with hay for roofs,” Jamie piped in.

  “It’s called thatch,” I said, giving his hand a gentle squeeze.

  “And if you’re very lucky then I’ll take you for a packet of overpriced crisps and a hot chocolate in one of the three pubs after school.”

  I rolled my eyes at Jamie’s cheer and your boyish grin.

  “Try an overpriced glass of wine,” I said.

  “I like your thinking, Mrs. Clarke. And if you’re very good,” you added, leaning so close to my ear that the heat of your breath tickled my skin, “I’ll let you kiss me behind the bus stop in the exact spot where I had my very first kiss. It was with a rather buxom girl by the name of Kerry Longston.”

  “Oh, Mark.” I laughed. You always made me laugh.

  I catch the distant smell of a bonfire drifting in the wind. It’s just a whiff, a trick of the mind perhaps, but it still tickles my lungs, and before I can stop myself I see the TV footage, I see the plane in the clear blue sky, I see the fireball. I scrunch my eyes shut as tears prick the skin beneath them. My breath comes heavy and fast.

  A few more steps and we’re around the bend and the smell is gone, replaced by the dewy, cold morning.

  “Mum?” Jamie’s voice floats in my periphery, distant and soft.

  “I’m fine, baby,” I whisper, the umpteenth lie of the day.

  “Where’s my book bag?”

  “Oh.” I stare at my hands as if I don’t already know that they’re empty. Where are Jamie’s book bag and water bottle? I look at the empty hands of our son and just like that the anger is back.

  “We’ve forgotten it,” I hiss through gritted teeth. It’s your sodding book bag, Jamie. Yours. When are you going to grow up and take some sodding responsibility? I shout in my mind, struggling to keep it inside, but it’s still there in my loud sigh, and I sense Jamie’s shoulders sag.

  “Sorry, Mummy,” he says in a voice so quiet I almost don’t hear. The hurt inside threatens to pull me in two.

  “I love you to the moon and back,” I used to tell Jamie every day.

  Jamie’s reply was always the same. “I love you to the sun and back a hundred times.”

  It was never ever angry words and silence that we shared.

  We turn around, back in the direction of the big white house with its black beams that sit a little wonky on the outsides of the house. Back to the L-shaped maze of rooms and cold and gloom. Back to the smell of the bonfire, and the memories it unleashes.

  By the time we make it to school the playground is empty. The children have already filed inside. Jamie turns and disappears into the building, and just like that the anger from this morning is gone and all I feel now is the emptiness of the day dragging out before me.

  * * *

  —

  When I look back at that first month without you, I wonder if I should’ve seen her coming. Like a siren, bright and blue, flashing in the night. If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in you and the grief, would I have seen the path my life was about to take? The old Tess, the person I was before, screams YES, but the new one is not so sure.

  CHAPTER 4

  Monday, February 19

  48 DAYS TO JAMIE’S BIRTHDAY

  Happy birthday to me! Thirty-eight years old. When did that happen? Of course my birthday this year would fall on a Monday. That’s five now, Mark. Five Mondays without you.

  Happy birthday, Tessie.

  At least it’s cloudy today. A thick blanket of gray hangs low, trapping in the cold of the night and the frost shimmering like glitter on the brambles beside the road. I don’t think I could’ve survived another clear-blue-sky kind of day, where airplanes leave those streaks of white cloud and I feel the injustice of it all like a savage beast in my gut.

  So that’s one thing at least.

  Jamie caught me crying at the kitchen table this morning—big heaving sobs—which made him cry because he thought he’d upset me, which made me cry even more because I was being selfish and shitty.

  “Don’t cry, Mummy. Please don’t cry,” he said over and over as I held him tight in my arms.

  By the time we both calmed down we were late for school, and I snapped at him for losing his school shoes, which were exactly where they should’ve been by the side door. And that set us both off again.

  I asked Jamie if he wanted to stay home with me, but he said no. Monday is PE.

  We arrived at school thirty minutes late, quivering, tear-streaked messes, the pair of us. At least the school has been lenient about the lateness. I’ve been waiting for the head teacher to grab me for a quick word, but the staff have kept their distance. I’m not sure if it’s out of respect for my grief or fear over how I’ll react, but either way I don’t care.

  It wasn’t the best start to the day.

  But it made me think—maybe I should take a tablet today. Just as soon as I’m home, just as soon as I’ve warmed up in a hot bath, I will. Maybe.

  You don’t need the tablets, Tessie.

  Easy for you to say.

  Here’s what they don’t tell you about grieving—you feel cold. Really cold. An icy chill froze my body in those first moments of knowing, and it hasn’t left. Nowhere in the half dozen “Coping with Grief” pamphlets that have been thrust unwanted into my hands in the last month has cold been mentioned. It’s all about the stages of grief: the denial, the anger, acceptance; as if I ever will accept it. The emotions are listed in bold and bulleted as if we, the bereaved, can simply tick them off one by one and come out the other side normal again.

  By the time I’m almost home from dropping Jamie off at school, my teeth are chattering and I’m shivering all over. All I can think about is sinking into a scalding-hot bath. So I don’t register the huge black Land Rover parked in the entrance of the driveway. Not at first anyway.

  It happens all at once. I’m turning the corner, sidestepping between the car and the brick wall, cursing under my breath when my elbow catches the wing mirror, and then I see you and a rush like the wintry wind sweeps through me.

  It’s you. It’s really you. You are standing in our driveway. Your half smile. Your head tilt. I love you. I love you. I love you.

  For a split second everything is how it was. The darkness, the fog, the cold, it lifts and I smile. It was all a mistake. A terrible, terrible mistake. You’re alive and I love you.

  And just as quickly, in the very next heartbeat the feeling is gone. Reality hits with the same force as PC Greenwood’s words: “Your husband was on board . . . There were no survivors.”

  It’s not you. It’s your brother. How have I never noticed it before—the similarities between you and Ian? It’s in your eyes—deep brown and a perfect oval sh
ape. I miss your eyes so much. I miss the way you cupped your hands around my face and stared at me with those eyes.

  The hair is the same too. Ian’s is shorter, more corporate, more suitable for his partner role at Clarke & Barlow Solicitors—but it’s the same straight chocolate brown as yours.

  “Hi, Tess,” Ian says. He steps closer, crushing the final whisper of hope lingering in my imagination. Ian is not tall like you, but is my height, five foot ten, so that when he reaches me, his eyes—your eyes—stare straight into mine.

  “Hi.” I don’t know where to look. I can’t look into his eyes, so I pick a place to the right and stare at the white side door with black hinges that leads into the kitchen.

  We hug—an awkward, weird kind of embrace where our feet stay rooted and we lean our bodies in. Ian never used to hug me on the few occasions each year when we saw him. It was always a little wave and an “Oh, hi, Tess,” as if I was an odd cousin at a wedding that nobody wanted to invite.

  We hugged at your funeral too. I can’t remember if I started it or if Ian did, but we seem to be stuck with it now.

  “I’ve been calling you,” Ian says when we pull apart.

  “Sorry. I’ve . . . I’ve had the flu,” I lie.

  “For a fortnight?” His tone is incredulous and I don’t know what to say.

  “Can we go inside and talk?” Ian strides to the open porch and side door without waiting for a response, leaving me trailing behind like I’m the visitor and this is his house.

  My hands are shaking when I push the key in the lock. I’m not sure if it’s the shock of thinking it was you standing on the driveway or the cold making them tremor, but either way I can’t get the old dead bolt to shift.

  “Here,” Ian says, moving closer and waving my hand away from the key. “You have to lift the door a little as you turn it when it’s cold like this. It’s always been that way.” The hinges of the door creak and whine as it swings open. Ian strides into the kitchen and I’m left on the doorstep wishing I didn’t have to follow him in.