It was the perfect opportunity to come out to my mother.
“I’ve been hiding it from you for years, Mum. Perhaps I was ashamed. I thought you would judge me, but I can’t lie any longer. The truth is, I’m a writer.”
She looked across the rickety table outside The English Bistro, where we met to fulfil our weekly coffee and catch-up obligations, and rolled her eyes.
It wasn’t much, granted. A short story I was moderately proud of had been picked up by a respectably mid-range literary magazine. Not exactly The Paris Review, but money for words. Actual words that I had written. I explained all this, tried to put it in terms that would express to my mother how important it was to me, how it felt on an emotional level to have my art validated. She ignored all this and got straight down to brass tacks.
“And how much do you make? As a writer?”
“Well… this piece sold for £75.”
“So, you’ll be handing your notice in at the Hospice next week, then?”
“Ha ha.”
“And what about Marla, dear?”
A typical conversational hand-brake turn. A pet gripe, another stick to poke me with.
“That was two years ago.”
“Aye, was it now? You could have fooled me,” she said. I wondered if she’d somehow gained access to our indiscreet Whatsapp messages or heard about how we’d hooked up again the last time Marla was back in the city.
“Marla… isn’t. We’re not going to… and don’t you dare mention grandchildren again. I’m thirty.”
“When I was your age-”
“Yes, yes. Back in the good old days they practically dragged you down the aisle at eighteen and nine months later you were in the maternity ward.”
“Actually, it was seven.” She gave me one of her looks and I made a visible show of shuddering in horror.
“I didn’t need to know that. Look, the story. Just… read it for me. Believe it or not, and for some inexplicable reason, I’ve grown to respect your opinion.”
I’d wanted to do it casually, mention it in passing and then reluctantly slide the magazine over when she pestered me about it, keen to see the literary accomplishments of her firstborn. I wanted her to see that I didn’t have any pretensions about it, I didn’t think this was the start of anything. It was a hobby, that was all. I should have known she’d be almost perversely apathetic about the whole thing: like the aged punk she was, she’d become deeply cynical about art and ideals. All that rebellion and at the end of it, she’d had to go out and get a job just like everyone else.
As usual, her indifference had undone me and I was coming off as desperate.
She read while I sipped at my flat white. Like a fool, I braced myself for uncomfortable congratulations. Instead, there was a long silence. A silence that grew as she fussed at her blazer and scowled.
Finally, she spoke.
“Why would you do this?”
“Do what?”
“Why would you trawl over our history like this for everyone to see?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“This is Benjamin.”
“Who the hell is Benjamin?”
She looked at me over the rims of her bifocals and studied me. “You know very well who I’m talking about.”
“Who is Benjamin?” I repeated.
“Was. Who was Benjamin. Bennie. Gray, are you messing with me right now?” She asked, tilting her head to the left and furrowing her brow.
I hated it when she called me Gray. I imagined myself drained of colour, a background character from a fifties black and white English kitchen sink drama excised and crowbarred into a technicolour world. She must have seen the look on my face and she corrected.
“Graham, sweetheart,” she began and her face softened, her brows raised a little and her eyes widened. For a moment, I thought she might reach out and pat my hand, and somehow that felt like it would be the worst thing in the world. “Graham, I know we’ve not talked about it… since. You buried it all away and nowadays they’d say that was unhealthy. Judging by how your teens went, they might have a point…” she tailed off, defeated by something she couldn’t quite bring herself to face. “Benjamin? I’ll… I must have a picture of him somewhere at home. But you should… you honestly don’t? You really should remember. I don’t understand. That’s not-”
She shook her head and her face took on a look of strained sympathy that for once looked genuine. I didn’t know what she was reaching for but I could see it hurt. I stammered and, though I didn’t feel a thing, didn’t know why, my eyes started to water.
And then she ruined it.
“The poor retard.”
“What? Mum, you can’t say that any more.”
“Well? It’s what his mother called him. And this story of yours… it’s. It’s Benjamin. Or at least it’s as close as damn it. I can’t tell if you’re being coy, or you’re a little ashamed. But you’ve written a story about Benjamin, the… R-word, the kid you looked out for, the kid who thought you were the greatest thing in the world. But you changed it. You left out the worst part, didn’t you? Maybe you really don’t remember.”
“The worst part?”
She gave me her wan smile again, wrinkles concertinaed on her forehead. She had recently opted for purple tips in her cropped, greying hair and the effect only dated her and left me wondering about my own hair, my face, my skin. Thirty now, a little wear around the edge, but still scrubbing up alright. I remembered one of my mother’s many pearls of wisdom: The old aren’t the ones who’ve lived the most years, but those who’ve let the most years go by unlived.
“The worst part?” I repeated, but she shook her purple tips and creased brow.
“Maybe you should talk to someone about this. If you’re repressing.”
I heard the air quotes in her voice. Mother, despite a largely progressive outlook, was of a generation that still viewed talk of mental health with suspicion. Depression and anxiety were a part of life and well, we all just got on with it in our day, didn’t we?
“I’m proud of the story, anyway. You write very nicely.”
Nicely. Urgh. That was very mother. A go-to when she didn’t really know what else to say. At sixteen, my wavy blonde hair had been buzzcut and that was nice. The floral pattern I’d had inked on my shoulder blade at twenty-two (and which I now regretted) was nice. Katie had been nice until she broke my nose and totalled my Citreon Saxa while off her head on amphetamines. I should pay more attention to the words my mother isn’t saying when she tells me something is nice.
* * *
Back at the flat, I re-read the story and saw a thousand ways to change it, a thousand edits I had missed. Nothing was ever truly finished. Nothing was ever quite how I had hoped it would be. But of Benjamin, I could feel no trace. I was beginning to wonder what mother had been talking about when Marla sent over a photo of her sprawled on her sofa, her dark skin bare, with nothing to hide an inch of her lithe figure.
Marla had been the one after the one after Katie. Mother didn’t call Marla nice. Marla was a firecracker, she was just so wonderful. Mother made her sound too good for me. She might have had a point.
Marla sent nudes without preliminary. That was how she’d been since she left the city and left me. She thought it was the quickest way to get what she wanted and it was hard to argue. Stretched out, her brown hair artfully disarrayed fuzz, a knowing look in her brown eyes, lips twisted in a half-smile as she angled the phone down her body.
How many other guys have you sent that photo to tonight? I replied.
Just you, hun. Always just you. I miss you.
I felt like calling her up and calling her out. She was teasing me. It gave her a kick to keep me dangling. It wasn’t that she would be ashamed or embarrassed about it: she’d find it amusing that I’d care at all and wouldn’t be able to keep the laugh out of her voice.
Marla had left the city for a job two years before and we’d parted as amicably as two twenty-somethings deep in lust could. We wanted each other so badly, but not enough for her to ask me to pack it all in and leave with her. So she sent photos every now and then. To make me jealous, to remind me what I was missing… I don’t know. If she came into the city, we’d hook up and it’d all be roses for a weekend and then she’d go back to her job and forget about me.
Your turn, she sent. But no one wants to see that. Not really. So I paid my way by sending her long, descriptive messages about the time we walked back from the De Montfort through Victoria Park on a hot July night and lost our underwear somewhere out on the playing fields. Before long, I was sending rapturous odes to her beauty. I ransacked the Classics, all the sonnets, but couldn’t find the words that did her justice. I’d collapsed so thoroughly, so quickly. I had no defences when it came to Marla.
God, I miss you. Miss it, she sent and then she spilled about her new man and why she found herself sending nudes to her ex at eight in the evening. She spilled and I wanted to bust his jaw for him, but she wouldn’t tell me anything useful, like where I could find him at short notice.
Then why tell me? I asked. Why tell me if you don’t want me to do anything about it?
Just come get me
It was a two-hour drive and when I pulled up outside her address she was already sitting on the kerb under a streetlamp with a stuffed overnight bag. She jumped in without a word and soon fell asleep – or at least, pretended to. Picked out by red tail-lights her brown skin showed the beginnings of a darkening purple where her collarbone met her neck. From under long lashes, she caught me looking. I snapped my eyes back to the road and she went back to pretending to sleep.
“Thank you,” she whispered as we parked up an hour later. Inside, she opened a bottle of red and put on one of my Bill Callahan LPs and I remembered someone saying how nostalgia is conceived in music and the right melody removes the pain and disappointment with tweezers, paints it a rosy colour and reinserts it, so that it no longer hurts.
When we woke up in a tangle—drunk, warm, cosy, damp with sweat—it was around four in the morning and we had just enough in us to go again and after I didn’t say just stay.
Did I want to? I had said it to Katie when I told her I didn’t care about the drugs or the car, and look how that turned out, and I was sure as hell I didn’t mean it then, either. But for two years, I’d been dying a little out in the world.
“Will he come for you?” I asked.
She hugged in closer, wrapping her leg over my thighs and nestling into my neck so that her breathing made me twitch with an almost unbearable ticklishness. But I’d bear it. How could I not?
“Do you want him to? You do, don’t you? You’d love it. Gray The Protector.”
“Don’t call me Gray.”
“Ha. I forgot. A big show of strength. Admit it, that would make your year, wouldn’t it? Nah, he isn’t coming for me. It was done as soon as he put hands on me. I’m not a damsel in distress.”
“You aren’t?” I pulled away a little.
“It’s sweet, you always wanting to rescue me, but this is enough. Rescuing doesn’t always have to be something violent. Just being here will do. You’ve saved me already if that’s what you need to hear. But you can’t save everyone.” The line made her sound a little like a character in a bad daytime movie, but I smiled and kissed her all the same.
We slept, then. We slept and the whole weekend we pretended like nothing much had changed. Monday morning I went to work and when I came back, Marla was still there and it didn’t seem like she had much of a plan to leave. I wasn’t going to argue.
* * *
When Mother heard about Marla coming back, she was overburdened with joy.
“I’m so glad you worked it out. I do like that girl. She keeps you on your toes. In a good way, I mean. And so pretty.”
She managed a full thirty minutes before mentioning grandchildren, and I suppose I should have been glad I got that long.
“We’re not back back yet,” I said. “It’s… something. I don’t know. I don’t even know if she’s quit her job, or if she even wants to move back to the city. I just helped her out of a jam. She needed me. For now.”
“But you like people needing you, Gray… Graham.” There was a stiff tone to her now. The pink tips of her hair hung low today, not spiked by the hairspray my mother hoped would fix her somewhen around her early thirties but only emphasised that her style hadn’t moved for three decades. Today, the pink tips were soft and dulled, dangling like stalactites in a row above her brow. I asked her what had brought on the change.
“Ach, nothing. I just didnae have time to do it this morning.”
Her accent was slipping, so I knew there was probably more to it, but I didn’t push it. I wouldn’t get anywhere. She scowled a little and blew the foam on her cappuccino.
“You do… want Marla back, Graham?”
“Of course I do.” I shifted in my seat and poked at our shared slice of cake with a dessert fork, moving crumbs around aimlessly, but not eating. I hadn’t actually stopped to consider whether I really did want Marla back.
“You always were the kindest boy. Too kind. Weak, your father said. But then what the hell would he know?”
“Maybe you’re overestimating me. I’m pretty sure I was just the kind of kid who would do something nice if he thought an adult was watching.”
“Ach, no. You’re too hard on yourself, lad. You were a good kid.”
“Was I?”
“You were a good kid,” she repeated, though I wondered who she was trying to convince. All I remembered were the fights, the times I stayed out, long after all my friends had run home, the times I came back and she was still waiting up for me into the early hours. Never scolding, never shouting. Just quietly acknowledging that I had worried her and hoping that I would have the decency to feel bad about it. I never did. The drink first, the drugs later. The failing grades. I hadn’t been a good kid. Or, I guess, I hadn’t been a good near-adult. Does anyone know if they were a good kid or not, really? Kids are supposed to make a mess. I had nosedived through my teenage years, pulling up in time to claw my way into college. Somewhere in my early twenties, I think I over-corrected.
“You were always big.”
“Err, thanks?”
“Ten pounds! Thirty hours I were in labour.”
“Yes, yes, you may have mentioned that before.”
“And you hit puberty early, too. Always the biggest in class, by some distance. You could have turned out the other way, but like I said, you were always the kindest boy. I like to think I had something to do with that. Your teacher told me once how you always picked the worst kids first at football. Now, he said it was pride. Arrogance. You were a hell of a player, they just bounced off you. He thought you were sticking two fingers up at all the other kids and saying I can beat you even with these guys on my side. I thought maybe it was pity. But now I see it was the pleasure of being burdened. Like with Benjamin.”
The fork clanked on the plate. I eyed her warily and she eyed me right back but then averted her gaze.
“I shouldn’t have brought it up. We should just forget about it. But this story of yours… it’s been knocking around my head all week.” Despite myself, I smiled inwardly at that. “I’m sorry, but I do wish you hadn’t written it. It was hard for me too. The Carters were my friends long before you were born. I had to watch it all happen knowing what I knew about him. Couldn’t bear to tell you, but it would have prepared you I suppose. You’ve not thought any more about it? Not remembered?”
I started to shake my head but then checked. Because in truth, there had been something there, growing since Marla had temporarily moved in, following me from room to room, her grateful smile greeting me every evening.
For days, I’d had a vision of mucus trickling from a nose into the corner of a wide, fat-lipped mouth and curving around a chin as square and hard as a brick. It thickened like wax until a line of saliva met it and washed it away down a thick, squat neck… He didn’t wipe it. He never did. Instead, he would come in for a big, wide-armed hug The feel of dribbled saliva pressing against my cheek, angling myself to try and deflect it onto my jumper. But the huge, outsized head would nestle into my neck instead.
“Benjamin,” I muttered. Mother chewed her bottom lip.
“Roll up your left sleeve, past the elbow,” she said sternly and I blinked and then frowned.
“Beg pardon?”
“Go on, do it.”
I did, and when the cuff caught, she reached over and grabbed my wrist, yanking the sleeve violently upwards with her free hand so that the cuff button pinged off and disappeared somewhere under a table two seats down.
“Alright, alright, bloody hell woman,” I snapped, trying to pull my arm back, but she held onto my wrist firmly and pinned it to the table, jangling cups in saucers. A waitress hovered nervously.
“There,” she said, pointing at a spot on my left elbow. There was a small, barely discernible mark as if someone had scratched a tiny triangle into the flesh with a needle. “Don’t you remember the youth club?”
“The… club?”
“Yeah. When you were eleven, twelve maybe. There was this youth club they held down at the village hall on a Friday evening. Next door to the pub. Your father used to drop you there for a couple of hours while he drank. Benjamin’s mum used to go to help out at the youth club and you would watch out for him. That scar… some kid decided to throw rocks at Benjamin. Only you were there, and you stuck an arm out and it wasn’t much, just a little nick. They put a couple of butterfly stitches over it after they calmed you down. You fractured that kid’s eye socket, Gray. You beat the hell out of him. Normally, kids, they know to stop when they think they might actually hurt someone, but they had to pull you away. No one much bothered Benjamin after that.”
Like a gun, a gun going off in my head, ripping through the cerebellum, or wherever the hell it is that memory lives. My knuckles hurt and I looked down at my hands, expecting to see them covered in blood. I had stumbled into some unknown noise-filled room and sat down across from a strange woman with a strained face that I eventually recognised as my mother. I shook my head and pinched the bridge of my nose and all was well again.
Mother sighed and her eyes grew damp. “He was always going to die. Well, I mean, we’re all going to die, but everyone knew he wouldn’t make it to fifteen. We should have told you. I took you to see him. God knows I wish I hadn’t. His parents shouldn’t have asked that. They said he would have wanted to see you, that they thought he might well love you more than he loved them. I didn’t like it, but you insisted. We got there and the poor boy was coddled in muslin. Cosy, almost. Antiseptic smell. Wires sprouting from him like vines. Nothing much moved. He was already pretty much gone. Suffocating. His own body crushing the life out of him. He didn’t know you were there, so who was it for? Put you through that for what? But you wanted to suffer. For him.”
Wires. Saliva again, and a runny nose. Here, at least, someone would wipe it away for him, wouldn’t they? I sat bedside and watched spit trickle slowly toward his ear, cloudy and, when I looked closer, with a slight hint of pinking that could only be blood. At that moment, I realised that I was just matter and like all matter, I was one stray microbe, one misjudged step from the kerb, one errant line of code in my DNA from turning putrid, back to the soil, worm food.
It shouldn’t have been news to me at that age. But it’s always news. Will continue to be a revelation at thirty, forty, fifty. Every time it dawns on me anew that death is real and close and unflinching I gape at the great, wide maw of oblivion and then, after an hour or so, turn my back on it and pretend it isn’t there. A collective blank spot in our species memory: we’re all going to die, we know it, but we choose – or are evolved – to ignore it, erase it. I’m not sure we could function as a society if every person fully understood the shallowness of their own mortality, that they are mere moments from the grave. Cut to black. Lights out. Don’t stop believin’.
“He died a couple of hours after we left and the next day you woke up a little broken and you went under for a while and then you surfaced and you’ve been trying to save everyone ever since. Like your story. You get to save him in that, I suppose. Although I didn’t get all of it. I think some of the symbolism may have gone over my head. But that’s what happened, isn’t it? He lived? I do so hate ambiguous endings, Gray.”
I stammered, unable to respond, still sitting at a hospital bedside, still twelve years old and not quite sure how to reconcile my new-found understanding about the inevitability of decay with the youthful certainty that I was indestructible.
* * *
I came home and Marla was gone. It barely registered. I had been thinking about Benjamin, thinking about how, all along, I think I knew, think I remembered without remembering. Like a black-out drunk, waking and knowing that something bad yet undecipherable has happened the previous night. It was the shadow of a memory, the silhouette of the thing. I sat down hard in the single blue armchair across from the TV and it took me an age to notice that Marla’s things were no longer scattered about the place.
But I couldn’t move, couldn’t. All brain power had been tasked with code-breaking and none could be spared to dwell on frivolous things like movement, eating, fussing over absent lovers.
I couldn’t crack it, though. Benjamin remained nothing more than an idea and a series of still images, a base, gut feeling of unease and growing panic at the crushing weight of my own body. I caught on to that moment of realisation, sitting at his bedside, watching someone I had set out to protect die and understanding I was powerless. Helpless. Hopeless. Memory was a stuck record and it was a bastard thing for my brain to do to me, to only knock loose this one abiding sensation, this one static frame of frozen guilt and fear, weakness and panic.
After an hour my mind unhitched itself from the tormenting idea of Benjamin and I began to take in my surroundings. There was no note, no voicemail, but I already knew why Marla had gone: I was a White Knight, and she worried that should she pierce the plate armour she might discover the suit was empty. It’s what Katie had called me, right before she sped out the door at three in the morning, climbed into my Citreon and crumpled it into a low wall two hundred yards down the road, jumping out and running into the night, afraid the Police would turn up and test her blood.
“My White Knight,” she had sneered. “You’re just very… nothing. All that service, Gray. Constantly fussing around asking what you can do. If you can’t be of use to someone, then who are you? Do you ever do anything for yourself? I can’t take it! Be selfish for once, be a bastard, pick a fight. Do something!”
“I’m sorry if I bore you.”
“It’s not even that,” she grunted in frustration. “You know what you are, Gray? You’re Superman.”
“Thanks?”
“It’s not a compliment. You’re always the hero, but when you’re not saving people, you’re just a blank. You don’t even have the imagination to be Clark Kent. You’re just Superman on his downtime, flying around, with nothing much to do and no real opinions or desires or passions.”
Half an hour later, I had a bloody nose and my car and our relationship was a write-off.
I wanted to reach out to Marla and tell her that this time it would be different, that here, finally, was my moment of frailty, the moment of something yielding, collapsing in on itself. The moment that revealed a regular mess of a human underneath, just like her. But it was her choice, she had chosen space and I had to respect that and wait for her, didn’t I?
I called her and she answered on the second ring.
“I don’t know if I love you or not,” she said and in the breathy, catching note of her voice I could hear a little alcohol, but also something like relief.
“That’s OK, I don’t know either. I know that I’m not not in love with you if that helps. If that even makes any God-damn sense.”
“I think it does. I think I know what you mean,” she said and I imagined her twirling an old, coiled telephone cord between her fingers, even though I’d called her mobile, even though she wasn’t the type to go twirling telephone cords, even though who the hell has a landline these days, anyway?
And then I told her about Benjamin. Told her what I had been doing for the past few hours – near-catatonic, brain whirring but body frozen.
“Fucking hell, Gray. Fucking hell. That’s awful. And… it makes a lot of sense.”
“No, don’t do that, please,” I begged. “Don’t think that this is some sort of ‘key’, that it makes things forgivable that you might not have been minded to forgive.”
“You know I looked it up, there is no Saint Graham.”
“Haha. I’m just trying to be decent-”
“Well, be indecent for once.” There was a snap to her voice, soft, but there nonetheless. She exhaled and I wondered whether she was smoking again. After a pause, she came back lighter, a little flippant. “So… when the hell did you start writing, anyway? I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you.”
“About a week after you left,” I said. It sounded like a rebuke, though I didn’t mean it that way.
“Oh… I’m sorry if I… or am I glad? You have an artistic side. Who would have thought? You do have some hidden depths after all,” Marla said. She definitely meant that as a rebuke and I tried to protest, but she cut me off. “Do you feel bad? For writing about Benjamin, even if you didn’t know?”
For a moment I simply sat in my chair and stared blankly ahead.
“Yes,” I said after a while. “Yes.” And I told her how I didn’t think I would have written it if I had remembered. But also… that maybe I did remember all along. That while I was writing, anything was possible, all avenues were still open. I could save the unsavable. I could write about a man, say, who passionately swept a woman off her feet and then managed to settle into a long, fulfilling relationship of mutual trust and respect.
“Ha,” she laughed.
“Come back.”
“Do you need me?”
“No,” I answered, not sure if it was the truth.
“Good. I don’t need you either.”
“But you want me?”
“You know… those photos. I wasn’t lying. You really are the only boy I ever send anything like that to. Mainly, because I know you’ll keep them to yourself.” There was a small laugh, but then she was serious again. “Mainly, because you’re the only boy I want to see them. God, yes, I want you. I always did. And you should have said all this two years ago and, I don’t know, maybe accept that I’m a strong, independent woman capable of making my own decisions and mistakes? A woman who doesn’t need you to wrap her up in your big arms and keep her safe from the world, but also isn’t totally against the idea of having a strong, handsome man around the house to open jars and occasionally deal with spiders?”
“I can deal with spiders,” I said, feeling on safer ground with arachnids.
“Stop treating me like some delicate flower. Stop trying to rescue me from everything, from violent ex-boyfriends to difficult job application forms. I can’t go on being so…grateful the whole time. It’s exhausting. I think you live for it a little, don’t you? The gratitude?”
We were silent for a beat. Marla was breathing a little heavier. I could picture her slightly too bushy eyebrows furrowing, a hint of annoyance. But she spoke of us very much in the present tense.
“Where are you?”
“Gabi’s.”
“You’re still in the city?”
“Well yeah, I quit my job. I’m not going back. And, no, I don’t need your help, I don’t need a place to sleep while I get back up on my feet, I don’t need help looking for a job or moving all my stuff back down.”
“So… I should never offer to help you again?” I said, but I was already looking for my shoes, shoulder clamping the phone to my ear as I fumbled in my pocket for my car keys and tried to remember where the hell Gabi lived. Somewhere down on the river? “I really don’t mind helping.”
“There you go again. Do you want me or my problems?”
“I promise to only remove the occasional spider. Everything else, you’re on your own. No help, no rescuing. For all meals, we go Dutch. If you ever get into a fistfight, I’m just gonna stand by and watch and maybe offer the occasional shout of support.”
She made an exasperated noise in the back of her throat. “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you for one second.”
“No?”
“No… but just shut up and come get me.”