It’s just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you are one, is that it is not the grown man – the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated offspring – you see before you, with his parking tickets and unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever been all rolled up into one.
I looked at Will and I saw the baby I held in my arms, dewily besotted, unable to believe that I had created another human being. I saw the toddler, reaching for my hand, the schoolboy weeping tears of fury after being bullied by some other child. I saw the vulnerabilities, the love, the history. That’s what he was asking me to extinguish – the small child as well as the man – all that love, all that history.
And then on 22 January, a day when I was stuck in court with a relentless roll call of shoplifters and uninsured drivers, of weeping angry ex-partners, Steven walked into the annexe and found our son almost unconscious, his head lolling by his armrest, a sea of dark, sticky blood pooling around his wheels. He had located a rusty nail, barely half an inch emerging from some hurriedly finished woodwork in the back lobby, and, pressing his wrist against it, had reversed backwards and forwards until his flesh was sliced to ribbons. I cannot to this day imagine the determination that kept him going, even though he must have been half delirious from the pain. The doctors said he was less than twenty minutes from death.
It was not, they observed with exquisite understatement, a cry for help.
When they told me at the hospital that Will would live, I walked outside into my garden and I raged. I raged at God, at nature, at whatever fate had brought our family to such depths. Now I look back and I must have seemed quite mad. I stood in my garden that cold evening and I hurled my large brandy twenty feet into the Euonymus compactus and I screamed, so that my voice broke the air, bouncing off the castle walls and echoing into the distance. I was so furious, you see, that all around me were things that could move and bend and grow and reproduce, and my son – my vital, charismatic, beautiful boy – was just this thing. Immobile, wilted, bloodied, suffering. Their beauty seemed like an obscenity. I screamed and I screamed and I swore – words I didn’t know I knew – until Steven came out and stood, his hand resting on my shoulder, waiting until he could be sure that I would be silent again.
He didn’t understand, you see. He hadn’t worked it out yet. That Will would try again. That our lives would have to be spent in a state of constant vigilance, waiting for the next time, waiting to see what horror he would inflict upon himself. We would have to see the world through his eyes – the potential poisons, the sharp objects, the inventiveness with which he could finish the job that damned motorcyclist had started. Our lives had to shrink to fit around the potential for that one act. And he had the advantage – he had nothing else to think about, you see?
Two weeks later, I told Will, ‘Yes.’
Of course I did.
What else could I have done?
9
I didn’t sleep that night. I lay awake in the little box room, gazing up at the ceiling and carefully reconstructing the last two months based on what I now knew. It was as if everything had shifted, fragmented and settled in some other place, into a pattern I barely recognized.
I felt duped, the dim-witted accessory who hadn’t known what was going on. I felt they must have laughed privately at my attempts to feed Will vegetables, or cut his hair – little things to make him feel better. What had been the point, after all?
I ran over and over the conversation I had heard, trying to interpret it in some alternative way, trying to convince myself that I had misunderstood what they had said. But Dignitas wasn’t exactly somewhere you went for a mini-break. I couldn’t believe Camilla Traynor could contemplate doing that to her son. Yes, I had thought her cold, and yes, awkward around him. It was hard to imagine her cuddling him, as my mother had cuddled us – fiercely, joyously – until we wriggled away, begging to be let go. If I’m honest, I just thought it was how the upper classes were with their children. I had just read Will’s copy of Love in a Cold Climate, after all. But to actively, to voluntarily play a part in her own son’s death?
With hindsight her behaviour seemed even colder, her actions imbued with some sinister intent. I was angry with her and angry with Will. Angry with them for letting me engage in a facade. I was angry for all the times I had sat and thought about how to make things better for him, how to make him comfortable, or happy. When I was not angry, I was sad. I would recall the slight break in her voice as she tried to comfort Georgina, and feel a great sadness for her. She was, I knew, in an impossible position.
But mostly I felt filled with horror. I was haunted by what I now knew. How could you live each day knowing that you were simply whiling away the days until your own death? How could this man whose skin I had felt that morning under my fingers – warm, and alive – choose to just extinguish himself? How could it be that, with everyone’s consent, in six months’ time that same skin would be decaying under the ground?
I couldn’t tell anyone. That was almost the worst bit. I was now complicit in the Traynors’ secret. Sick and listless, I rang Patrick to say I wasn’t feeling well and was going to stay home. No problem, he was doing a 10k, he said. He probably wouldn’t be through at the athletics club until after nine anyway. I’d see him on Saturday. He sounded distracted, as if his mind were already elsewhere, further along some mythical track.
I refused supper. I lay in bed until my thoughts darkened and solidified to the point where I couldn’t bear the weight of them, and at eight thirty I came back downstairs and sat silently watching television, perched on the other side of Granddad, who was the only person in our family guaranteed not to ask me a question. He sat in his favourite armchair and stared at the screen with glassy-eyed intensity. I was never sure whether he was watching, or whether his mind was somewhere else entirely.
I looked at Will and I saw the baby I held in my arms, dewily besotted, unable to believe that I had created another human being. I saw the toddler, reaching for my hand, the schoolboy weeping tears of fury after being bullied by some other child. I saw the vulnerabilities, the love, the history. That’s what he was asking me to extinguish – the small child as well as the man – all that love, all that history.
And then on 22 January, a day when I was stuck in court with a relentless roll call of shoplifters and uninsured drivers, of weeping angry ex-partners, Steven walked into the annexe and found our son almost unconscious, his head lolling by his armrest, a sea of dark, sticky blood pooling around his wheels. He had located a rusty nail, barely half an inch emerging from some hurriedly finished woodwork in the back lobby, and, pressing his wrist against it, had reversed backwards and forwards until his flesh was sliced to ribbons. I cannot to this day imagine the determination that kept him going, even though he must have been half delirious from the pain. The doctors said he was less than twenty minutes from death.
It was not, they observed with exquisite understatement, a cry for help.
When they told me at the hospital that Will would live, I walked outside into my garden and I raged. I raged at God, at nature, at whatever fate had brought our family to such depths. Now I look back and I must have seemed quite mad. I stood in my garden that cold evening and I hurled my large brandy twenty feet into the Euonymus compactus and I screamed, so that my voice broke the air, bouncing off the castle walls and echoing into the distance. I was so furious, you see, that all around me were things that could move and bend and grow and reproduce, and my son – my vital, charismatic, beautiful boy – was just this thing. Immobile, wilted, bloodied, suffering. Their beauty seemed like an obscenity. I screamed and I screamed and I swore – words I didn’t know I knew – until Steven came out and stood, his hand resting on my shoulder, waiting until he could be sure that I would be silent again.
He didn’t understand, you see. He hadn’t worked it out yet. That Will would try again. That our lives would have to be spent in a state of constant vigilance, waiting for the next time, waiting to see what horror he would inflict upon himself. We would have to see the world through his eyes – the potential poisons, the sharp objects, the inventiveness with which he could finish the job that damned motorcyclist had started. Our lives had to shrink to fit around the potential for that one act. And he had the advantage – he had nothing else to think about, you see?
Two weeks later, I told Will, ‘Yes.’
Of course I did.
What else could I have done?
9
I didn’t sleep that night. I lay awake in the little box room, gazing up at the ceiling and carefully reconstructing the last two months based on what I now knew. It was as if everything had shifted, fragmented and settled in some other place, into a pattern I barely recognized.
I felt duped, the dim-witted accessory who hadn’t known what was going on. I felt they must have laughed privately at my attempts to feed Will vegetables, or cut his hair – little things to make him feel better. What had been the point, after all?
I ran over and over the conversation I had heard, trying to interpret it in some alternative way, trying to convince myself that I had misunderstood what they had said. But Dignitas wasn’t exactly somewhere you went for a mini-break. I couldn’t believe Camilla Traynor could contemplate doing that to her son. Yes, I had thought her cold, and yes, awkward around him. It was hard to imagine her cuddling him, as my mother had cuddled us – fiercely, joyously – until we wriggled away, begging to be let go. If I’m honest, I just thought it was how the upper classes were with their children. I had just read Will’s copy of Love in a Cold Climate, after all. But to actively, to voluntarily play a part in her own son’s death?
With hindsight her behaviour seemed even colder, her actions imbued with some sinister intent. I was angry with her and angry with Will. Angry with them for letting me engage in a facade. I was angry for all the times I had sat and thought about how to make things better for him, how to make him comfortable, or happy. When I was not angry, I was sad. I would recall the slight break in her voice as she tried to comfort Georgina, and feel a great sadness for her. She was, I knew, in an impossible position.
But mostly I felt filled with horror. I was haunted by what I now knew. How could you live each day knowing that you were simply whiling away the days until your own death? How could this man whose skin I had felt that morning under my fingers – warm, and alive – choose to just extinguish himself? How could it be that, with everyone’s consent, in six months’ time that same skin would be decaying under the ground?
I couldn’t tell anyone. That was almost the worst bit. I was now complicit in the Traynors’ secret. Sick and listless, I rang Patrick to say I wasn’t feeling well and was going to stay home. No problem, he was doing a 10k, he said. He probably wouldn’t be through at the athletics club until after nine anyway. I’d see him on Saturday. He sounded distracted, as if his mind were already elsewhere, further along some mythical track.
I refused supper. I lay in bed until my thoughts darkened and solidified to the point where I couldn’t bear the weight of them, and at eight thirty I came back downstairs and sat silently watching television, perched on the other side of Granddad, who was the only person in our family guaranteed not to ask me a question. He sat in his favourite armchair and stared at the screen with glassy-eyed intensity. I was never sure whether he was watching, or whether his mind was somewhere else entirely.
