Bright Burning Things(56)

‘What did you draw, Tommy? Did you bring the picture?’

He shakes his head. ‘I told them my dada is in the sky. I drawed you, me and Herbie.’

That’s my boy, good lad, be yourself.

‘Herbie? That your doggie?’ Maureen asks.

The floodgate bursts: he jumps off the chair, pushes the table away from him, the book tumbling to the floor, its spine broken in two.

‘When can I see Hewbie? When, Yaya? Now?’ The old terms of endearment fall out of his mouth and I want to fall to my knees and kiss the perfect feet of him. Instead I stand tall, plant my feet firmly on the ground and say, ‘Soon, darling, I’m sure Maureen will organise that you come home very, very soon.’ I look at Maureen as I say this.

‘When, Maween, when?’ Tommy goes to her and tugs at her sleeve.

Maureen looks down at her notes, composes herself a moment, then speaks in a low, reasonable voice: ‘Soon, Tommy, soon, just like your mummy says.’

‘Now,’ he says quietly at first, shaking his head over and over. ‘Not soon, not soon, not soon. Now, I want to go see Hewbie now now now now.’ He’s getting all worked up, red in the face, hot and blotchy like me. Having found his voice, it won’t stop spilling: ‘Home now Yaya now Yaya now…’

Maureen seems quite calm in the face of the outburst. I want to join in his dance of outrage, but I need to maintain at least a semblance of equanimity, so I go to him, put my arms around his hot, shaking little body and feel him go limp. He nuzzles into me, sniffing and shuddering.

After some moments, Maureen speaks in a calm manner: ‘Ok, now, Tommy. We have to go. Say goodbye to Mummy now. You’ll see her next week.’

I disentangle from him, place him gently on the ground. He clings to my knees, pushing his head against my skirt, trying to disappear up under it.

‘I think it would be best if Tommy came home with me now. He’s been through enough.’ I know that this is impossible, and Maureen doesn’t have the authority, there are boxes to be ticked, protocol to be followed. From now on, Tommy won’t see me as the woman who rejected him; he’ll know he is wanted by his mother. Let him turn his anger on this other woman, on his foster carers, on the world out there.

‘You know that can’t happen today, Sonya,’ Maureen says in a tight voice.

‘But why why why why?’ On and on he continues, an eruption of incomprehension.

Once this ‘Why’ has planted its seed in him, its roots will grow tough and deep, and no amount of digging will unearth them. I should know.

I bend down to him and whisper in his ear: ‘Darling, it won’t be long now. We can count the days together.’ I turn to Maureen, follow the internal direction to minimise the drama. ‘Can you tell us roughly how long?’

‘I’ll let you know next time, ok, Tommy? Only seven more sleeps till you’ll see your mummy again, ok?’

He sniffs, rubs his nose with his sleeve, looks into my eyes with such a lack of guile it might break me in two.

‘There, Tommy, seven more sleeps. We can do that, can’t we?’

He nods, tries to be a big boy, a strong boy, all those labels I bet have been placed on him. He reaches his hands towards me and pulls my head down to his level. He flutters his eyelashes on my cheek. A kiss like butterfly wings.





35


The restaurant is loud and bright, busy and bustling with a forced joviality that makes me want to back out the door the moment I’ve arrived. Tang of microwaved metallic tomato sauce on the air, matching napkins with walls, striped lime green and deep purples, try-hardy. Low pop on the airwaves – some she-wolf young one, one of those sexually liberated ‘feminists’ that writhe in their underwear in a cage. Something about broken dreams, about bastard men that ‘steal’ their hearts away, about yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m so sexy, sexy, sexy…

‘A treat,’ he said. ‘Let me take you out somewhere nice.’ It’s been so long since I’ve been dressed up, on some man’s arm, out in the public arena, that I allowed a frisson of excitement to live in me for as long as it took to get ready, even as I knew this was the greatest fantasy of them all: the greatest addiction containing the greatest high, and everything that follows. Coming home to the clean house, the feel of my son’s eyelashes on my cheeks, the dog and kitten lying sleepily on the rug in the living room, I could almost imagine a world where good things happened and continued to happen. Then he rang. I agreed, in my moment of rose-tinted weakness. And because the fridge was beginning to whisper to me.

I decided to go for a walk in the park beforehand, noting with intense concentration the beauty of the fallen leaves, crisp underfoot with frost, and the silhouettes of the almost-bare trees against the high, domed, almost-blue sky. Present-moment awareness: an antidote to craving. Marmie looked so sweet with one of Herbie’s heavy corded leads attached to her tiny collar with its loud ringing bell. She has taken quite well to the lead, considering her feisty nature. There were, of course, lots of stares, but this time they were accompanied by smiles and oohs from various children: ‘I want to do that with Snowy, Mummy.’ Mummy smiled indulgently as they passed, then spoke in a whisper that carried on the clear, crisp air: ‘That’s just plain odd.’ Who cares what other people think, Yaya? I smiled and shook my tail feathers.