The Mother by Yvvette Edwards Page B

seven months have bleached it near white. If he didn’t care, if he were unaffected, it might have made my response to him less complicated. Instead I know how impossibly hard this is for him. I know he blames himself and how much of that is down to me. But my empathy is matched by my anger, which wants to insist on more from him yet is frustrated by his fragility, the acute sense of attacking a helpless creature, which in turn fuels the rage that I have been made to be wrong in this, wrong to expect anything at this time from my husband; my husband!
    â€œI don’t get it,” I say. “What the plan is. Are you just gonna dodge me and hide till this is all over?”
    â€œOver?” he asks. “It’s already over.”
    â€œSo the boy who killed him, you don’t think he needs to pay?”
    â€œWhat difference does it make?”
    He’s talking about Ryan and he’s right; this trial won’t bring him back, but should we all down tools, find a corner somewhere to sit and hold our heads?
    â€œYou should want to come.”
    He says, “I can’t do it, none of this, I can’t.”
    â€œBut I can? You can’t, but by some magic it’s all a doddle for me? The strength just appears to me miraculously? You can just opt out and leave me to deal with this stinking shitty broken mess on my own?”
    He doesn’t answer. My voice has risen, is too loud, bordering hysterical. There are people downstairs. I sit at the dressing table, take the towel off my head, open the hair grease, rub a small amount between my palms then on my head, and look at myself in the mirror. I hardly recognize my reflection, hardly know who this person is, this balding screaming banshee; hardly recognize the people we’ve become.
    He used to kiss and cuddle Ryan when he was a baby, but he started pulling back from physical affection almost in proportion to the rate at which our son grew, not because he did not love him, but because he did; he loved our son as much as I did, still does. But the image of fatherhood in Lloydie’s mind is without words or caresses. It is a silent movie where hecan be seen repairing Ryan’s bed frame, leaving pocket and dinner money on the edge of the kitchen table daily, tightening the brakes on his bicycle, checking the air in its tires. I know this about him, have always known it. But I gave Ryan enough of the soft things, enough openly demonstrative love to compensate for spaces where there would otherwise have been a lack. I never pressured Lloydie to dig deeper within himself, and it is probably one of the reasons our marriage worked, because Lloydie has no reserves to dig into, they simply don’t exist. Our son’s death has left him completely emotionally crippled. Unlike me, discovering internal resources I never imagined from the depths of my being, he can’t deal with any of this. He’s not lying.
    â€œThose people downstairs, I don’t want to talk to them. I’m getting dressed, then I’m going out.”
    He doesn’t look up. “Okay.”
    â€œWill you be here when I get back?”
    â€œWas gonna go to the allotment . . . I don’t know.”
    â€œThen I’ll see you later . . . maybe.”
    He finally releases his head and stands. “Okay.”
    I wear a scarf on my head when I go out, drift down to the market, wander through the peopled space from stall to stall. It strikes me again just how many beautiful black boys there are in the world, how little I noticed of life with my old eyes. They saunter past me beatboxing aloud, wait outside butchers’ shops beside trolley bags for their mums, are leaning against shopfronts or cavorting on the green, showing off and at the same time pretending not to notice the girls. They distract me, these young boys, cocoa-, demerara-, and vanilla-skinned, small and tall, confident and awkward, withskiffles and afros and cornrows and futures,