Nobody True (16 page)

It was late afternoon as far as I could tell and the traffic flow from the city was already beginning to swell as I made my way to the wide main road. Prepared for a long haul—my mother lived close to the river on the east side of London—something happened that both surprised and pleased me.

My mother’s image and the low-rent flat she lived in were strong in my mind, because I was thinking of her sitting in her old lumpy armchair, the curtains behind her possibly drawn closed so she would be in shadow (that was her usual mode of mourning, and by mourning I don’t necessarily mean grieving for someone just passed away; any slight or upset that involved altercation with other people—might be the milkman delivering late, or a neighbour making too much noise—would send her off into one of her sulky moods). Just my staying out late when I was a teen—which I did a lot, I admit—was enough to send her into a grumpy retreat for a few days. Sunshine was never allowed into the room during that time, but the gap between the curtains would open an inch or so usually about the third day, widening from then little by little as the mood drained from her. It was irritating, but eventually I learned to take no notice. I’d carry on talking to her as normal and sometimes, if there was no response, I’d reply for her. I had many such self-conversations and I’m afraid it never improved the situation. In the end I’d begin to annoy myself, so I’d make an apology and finally—after the third or fourth one that is—it would be accepted. Full daylight returned to our front sitting room.

So that was what I was thinking of, except I saw Mother in a more distraught state, because this time my death would be the culprit. I usually endeavoured to visit my mother at least once a week and the reception was always frosty if I was late, or had missed the previous week. Drawn curtains in summer, single lamplight only in winter. I pictured her there now, shrivelled in her armchair, tear-stains blotching her plumpy face. Maybe she’d be holding a photograph of me in her trembling hands, possibly me as a boy and more manageable. Just you and me, Jimmy, she used to say then, grasping my small hand in hers and squeezing. We don’t need anybody else—and especially not him (she meant my father, the absconded husband). Just the two of us against the whole world. Well that was fine when I was little, but when I grew up I got wiser and realized the whole world and its residents had a lot to offer. Eventually—around twelve, I guess—I rebelled and started to become my own person. Sure, I still loved her, but I wasn’t certain that I liked her that much anymore.

Yet again, I digress. There I was, three (?) days after my body’s death, breezing along—not quite gliding, but not quite walking either—with Mother’s image and environment sharp in my mind, when suddenly, everything became rushed. That is, I was rushing, leaving my own surroundings far behind.

This was how I mostly arrived at places in my previous, living OBEs. I’d think of a location that was known to me, or a familiar person, then with a blurred kind of flight I’d be there. It was a bewildering but exhilarating experience, a “Beam me up, Scotty” affair without the dazzling column of starlights. For an instant, when I appeared before the person I’d had in mind, I was always sure that I could be seen, or that my sudden arrival had at least been sensed. I felt so real myself, you see. It took a beat for me to realize that my body had not come along for the ride.

And that’s how it was again soon after my death. One moment I was moving along a main road, then everything kind of blurred and rushed, and I found myself in an unfamiliar part of the city. However, I was aware that I’d been brought closer to my mother’s address. Concentrating hard this time, rather than just thinking of her, I experienced another blurred rush. Whatever had been accomplished instinctively in my previous dream-states, I realized, now had to be considered.

I found myself even closer to my mother’s address, in a side street where the houses were run-down and the gutters littered. This time I knew exactly where I was and it took only a mental picture of Mother and her surrounds for the rush to start again and the journey to be completed.

Only a few inches of daylight shone through the narrow gap in the curtains, but at least she had the small table lamp on, which cast as many shadows as it defeated. And, yes, sure enough she was in her lumpy old armchair, sitting forward, leaning towards the low coffee table I’d bought her years ago. There were three photographs on its small surface, one of them black-and-white and torn into four pieces, the other two in colour, both of me. The first, a shot when I was no more than ten or eleven years old, the other as a young man, when I’d graduated from art college with an NDD—National Diploma of Design. I looked good—smiling, happy, kind of confident in myself.

The torn monochrome was of an older man, but although the four pieces had been roughly assembled, they had not been tightly joined, the gaps between distorting the subject’s features. It was a small photograph too, which didn’t help; I couldn’t recognize the man. Yet he—I could see that his hair was grey at the temples and that he was smiling—was somehow familiar to me.

I turned my attention to Mother and whispered to her that I was there but, naturally, there was no reaction. Her poor face was puffy, and the redness around her eyes indicated that a multitude of tears had been shed. Unusually for her, she looked untidy: the collarless blouse beneath her thin beige cardigan was wrinkled, unfresh, and her skirt was rumpled too; she wore old carpet slippers and her tights or stockings were crimped around the ankles. Even her grey-brown hair was slightly messy; normally it was tightly set and not a single hair moved when she shook her head. Now it fell over her forehead in untidy locks while the rest was a confused tangle of curled snake-like clumps all over her head. Rarely had I seen her in a state like this. In fact, the last time she had been almost as distraught was on the day I told her I wanted to find my father (I was seventeen, if I recollect correctly, and it was shortly before my motorbike accident). He might—according to her—have been a bad man, an awful husband and father, a person who drank too much and was obsessive about things that decent people did not mention aloud (I took it that she meant sex), but I’d insisted, told her, it was my right to know my own father no matter what kind of scumbag he might be. That was it: curtains closed, sitting in a sulk for the next five days, with a blotchy, tear-stained face, accusations that I was becoming just like him, didn’t care for her anymore, that I was obstinate, bullheaded and disrespectful—all this thrown at me, wearing me down bit by bit until I figured that finding my long-lost dad was more trouble than it was worth. I admit it—as far as women were concerned, whether they be mother, girlfriends, or wife, I took the easy way. Can’t stand moods, never could. Maybe because Mother always seemed to be in one. Anyway, like that time, when I was seventeen, this was just as heavy. Heavy, but at least understandable. She’d lost her only son, hadn’t she? And in the most awful way any mother could imagine.

I noticed her pinkish, transparent-framed spectacles were lying on the coffee table behind the photographs. I also noticed a bundle of letters on the carpet by her feet. Curiosity taking over from the pity I felt for her, I went down on my knees beside the low table so that I could get a closer look at those letters. At first I thought they were letters of condolences for her recent bereavement, but now I saw that some of the envelopes were battered and old-looking. Peering even closer, I saw that the one on the top said: Master James True, with our old address beneath the name.

It was a jolt. Why would someone have written to me at our previous address? Leaning forward so that my head almost touched Mother’s knees, I tried to discern the postmark, but it was smudged. The envelope itself was light blue and the stamp was one I hadn’t seen for many years. The other envelopes were of various sizes and mostly white; frustratingly, I could not riffle through them.

A tearful sigh, not quite a sob, came from Mother. I toppled over as she stretched forward, a reflex because I thought she might touch me and I didn’t want to scare her. Silly, but I still hadn’t become accustomed to my present state; there were all kinds of things yet to learn and, until I did, involuntary actions or reactions would continue.

She reinstated her glasses on her nose, then picked up the most recent photograph of me.

“Traitor,” she hissed with some venom.

I was shocked. I stared at her.

“Just like him!”

The “him” was almost spat out.

She took the colour shot by its top edge, then slowly and deliberately tore it down the centre. Putting one side over the other, she turned the picture and tore it down the centre again. Because of the double-thickness, this was not quite as easy as the first tear, and she breathed an oath as she gripped it, her face as white as her knuckles.

I was shocked again. I’d never heard Mother swear before.

Scooping up the pieces, she mixed them with the other torn photo before leaning over and dropping them into the yellow metal bin on the other side of the armchair. Their sound as they hit the bottom was louder than it should have been because of the stillness of the room itself, the noise of traffic outside muffled by the curtains.

“Bastard!” Mother said again and I couldn’t be sure if she meant me or the man in the black-and-white. “Both bastards!” she said as if to put me right.

I could not believe it. She was acting as if I had deliberately left her. In fact, the same stiff-faced expression that she’d used when I announced that I was leaving home to flat-share with friends, then when I told her I was getting married, now hardened her features. I’d witnessed similar solidifying countenances many times in the past, particularly when I enquired after my father, but they had never been quite as severe, nor as furious, as this one. This was bloody scary! This was Medusa on a bad-hair day.

I shuddered and wondered if it was my hideous death that had sent her over the edge. Then I reconsidered. She’d always been a little crazy, hadn’t she? I mean, not outright, frothing-mouthed kind of crazy, but… disturbed. A hoarder of hurt feelings, a miser as for as warm regard was concerned. Why did she hate me? What had I done? It wasn’t my fault that I got killed. I had problems dealing with it myself. Did she think I’d deliberately deserted her? Did she assume I was just following my father’s example? No, it didn’t make sense. No sane person would blame a son for being killed. Not unless they really were insane…

It came back to that again. I refused to admit it. She couldn’t have been mad. But tearing up my picture…? What was that all about? And I was beginning to guess who the grey-haired man in the black-and-white was.

In the mean time, as I was assessing the state of my mother’s mind, she was reaching down for the letters on the floor. Several of them slipped through her podgy fingers as she picked them up and I was in like a dog whose supper bowl is ready. I quickly scanned the names and checked the addresses.

Every one of the aged envelopes bore my name and our old address except for two which still had my name, although the “Master” had been dropped, and this current address. What the hell was Mother doing with them and why hadn’t she passed them on to me? It didn’t make sense. What reason could she have for keeping them to herself? They hadn’t even been opened.

Call me thick, but it did eventually dawn on me who had written and had kept on writing to me over the years. The old black-and-white photograph, torn but not thrown away—until now, that is, the letters addressed to our previous home, and then to Mother’s current one, the house I had shared with her through the early teenage years. You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to work it out. The picture was of my father; the unopened letters were from him.

Oddly, I didn’t feel rage towards my mother. A huge sadness descended on me, though. How could she do it? All right, even if he had deserted us, run off with some other woman for all I knew—Mother would never speak of it, preferring to let my own imagination do its worst—he was still my dad. Even if he was the vilest man on earth, I still had the right to know him and judge for myself. Really, how could she do it?

I screamed “No!” as she began to tear up the letters, methodically, one by one, dropping the remnants into the bin by her side, and I tried to grab them, but of course, my scrabbling hand touched nothing. I beat on the carpeted floor with the heel of my fist in angry frustration, as if the noise alone would stop her. Naturally, there was no noise. I could have wept, I could have screamed my frustration over and over again. But all I could do in the end was watch.

I remembered the drawings and paintings of mine, the long essays in exercise books, short stories meant for my eyes only, all those personal treasures—treasures to me!—which she had blindly, thoughtlessly, thrown into the dustbin, never letting me know until it was too late and the refuse had been collected, never asking me. I hadn’t hated her then, but I did now.

What had I been to her all those years? A son, or her possession? Had she never felt any real true love? If so, she would have talked to me, she would have confided in me. She would never have sulked every time I made plans of my own. It was the natural thing for offspring to stretch their wings, to learn for themselves, and finally to leave the nest, so why had she never accepted that? Why had she never welcomed Andrea as my wife? Why was she so aloof towards her grandchild, Primrose? Was she so selfishly wrapped up in her own ways and woes that there wasn’t room for others in her chilly heart? But the prime question kept stalking me.

Was she nuts?

Terrible things to think about your own mother, I know, but remember what I’d been through. Murdered most foully, witness to my wife and daughter’s grief, lost and alone without a body to call home. Who could blame me for being in a bitter frame of mind?