Silent Child(43)

“You should go. Just for a check-up.”

I nodded my head and rubbed my eyes, realising she was right. With everything that was going on I hadn’t concentrated on looking after myself or the baby. I was letting down my unborn child. I hadn’t even thought to concentrate on how often the baby was kicking.

“Now, about Aiden’s art.” Dr Foster stared down at the paintings. “I’m seeing more expression here. He’s forming more shapes and pictures than before. I think this is a door.”

I peered down at the picture she was pointing to. I’d had it the wrong way around before, horizontal instead of vertical. I turned the picture around and examined it properly for the first time. She was right. There was no handle, but it did look like a door. Aiden had used light grey paint to almost completely fill the page, but there was some shading on the sides that indicated hinges. Wherever this door led to, it was almost certainly made from some sort of smooth metal, like a large fridge in a restaurant kitchen.

*

The next morning I managed to get to the doctor’s before 10am to get an impromptu appointment. Aiden sat next to me on the chair, quietly looking at a magazine for women. Next to us was a mother with three children, all of them climbing up over the seats like monkeys and throwing the toys from the play area onto the floor. It began with the mother glancing up at me every now and then, as if trying to figure out where she knew me from. Then there was a longer stare, and her eyes widened in recognition. I squirmed in my seat, adjusting my weight and trying to ignore the way she watched me from the other side of the room.

“’Oribble what happened to you,” she said.

Though I didn’t owe her anything, I found myself offering her a thin-lipped smile in response.

“Is this ’im then?” She indicated with her chin, moving her acne-scarred face in Aiden’s direction. When Aiden didn’t react she waved her arm in the general direction of her kids and ushered them closer to her. “Sick what happened to ’im.”

The blood whooshed in my ears as I tried to remain calm. What right did this woman have to bring up the things that had happened to Aiden? Who did she think she was? I tried to ignore her, but found myself rubbing my hands more frantically than before. I gritted my teeth, clenching my jaw harder and harder.

“Kieran, come ’ere,” she said, gathering her brood, clearly wanting them away from Aiden. Every now and then her eyes flicked over to Aiden and I saw fear in them. Perhaps she thought Aiden had been turned into a monster by what he had been through. Maybe she thought he was going to harm her children, in some sort of by-proxy paedophilia.

While she manoeuvred her children away from us, I found that I couldn’t stop staring at her. She had a greasy ponytail pulled back so tightly it gave her skin a stretched, glossy appearance. She openly swore at her children when they misbehaved.

“What makes you so special?”

The room went very quiet. An elderly man placed his newspaper back down on his lap and turned towards me. I hadn’t meant to say the words out loud, and certainly not with as much venom as I’d uttered them. But looking at that woman I couldn’t believe she’d been given the gift of normal, healthy children, when my child had been to hell and back.

“Excuse me, love?” she said, in her rasping, ugly voice.

“I said, what makes you so special? Why do you get to have everything?”

“What the fuck’s that s’posed to mean, eh?”

I turned my head away, scowling at the health pamphlets and a poster about heart disease. The doctor called my name and I stood. With Aiden following me, I walked straight past the woman and tried my best not to look at her again.

“I only tried to be nice to you, miserable cow,” she muttered, which I figured was typical of the British public. They want gratitude for caring. A little boy was kidnapped and tortured for a decade and they feel sad about it. Good for them. So after feeling all this sadness they see the boy in question out with his mother and they just have to tell them the obvious—they feel sad. Wasn’t it awful? Yes, yes, it’s very sad and it’s very awful, thank you for feeling like that. But if you don’t placate them then fuck you and your son. Fuck right off, you deserve it.

No one is as fickle as the public, and the reason they’re that fickle is that the media tell them how to think and how to feel. Why else are talent shows packed full of sweeping emotional music edited just right to make you feel the pain and heartbreak when a hopeful doesn’t get through? Why else are shots of tearful audience members shown during a sad rendition of a song or a tragic backstory retelling? It’s all manufactured to make you buy things. Whether it’s a car or a lifestyle or a newspaper, you’re buying it because you’re buying the story and that is the truth of it all. When I lost my cool at that woman, I shattered the story she’d bought into. I made her reconsider what she thought was true.

But I didn’t resent people for buying into Aiden’s story. I didn’t begrudge them their sadness over his tragic life. What I hated was the idea that I had to be perfect and if I wasn’t perfect, then they weren’t sad for me anymore. I hated and resented that. I was in pain and I was allowed to snap or make mistakes or do whatever the hell I wanted. I was a human being, not a story, and the world forgot that.

As I passed that woman on the way to my GP’s office, I thought all of that and more. A heavy tiredness seeped into my bones, and I wondered when—or if—this would all be over and I could get into a normal life.