No Way to Say Goodbye - Anna McPartlin [2]
Ben had a wall to himself. It wasn’t a shrine but a gallery of her son’s laughter, his tears, tantrums, joy and sadness, all captured in twelve eight-by-ten photos that represented the five years of his life.
There were only two bedrooms, but Mary didn’t need any more. She lived alone and had done so for five years. She gazed now at her son grasping a wriggling Mr Monkels, and smiled at him, now dead as long as he had lived. He beamed back at her, for ever a five-year-old, and for ever smiling.
She checked the time, realized that the hair dye had been on for well over half an hour – it smelt like shit in sunshine, and she wasn’t sure if it was that or the onset of glaucoma that was bringing tears to Mr Monkels’s right eye – and went upstairs to wash it out. Later she combed her hair in front of the bathroom mirror, slapped moisturizer on her face and tried fruitlessly to rub out the black rings around her eyes. Great – I look like a red-haired panda. She had been dyeing it red since she was fifteen, and few remembered her natural mousy-brown: fire-engine fake set off her pale skin and emerald eyes, even when they were tired and betrayed her twenty-nine years.
Mary emptied the fridge of the food that had gone off during the four days she had been sequestered in her room with a migraine. The rain continued to pour, rattling the windows. Rain always reminded her of Ben – not because he had liked it or any great memories featured it. Perhaps it was just that a lazy indoor day allowed her the time to remember him. Or maybe it was the sound – as though the world was weeping – or the way it crept down the window like tears.
She went into the sitting room, intending to play some music, but instead found herself staring at a framed black-and-white photo of Robert, then a sixteen-year-old boy, standing by a lake holding up a large fish and grinning, his eyes so like his son’s. Now as she looked at him she felt more like his mother than his teenage girlfriend. She often wondered what he would have been like if he had lived past seventeen.
“Cheer up, Panda Face,” she said, when she glimpsed herself in the mirror.
Mr Monkels groaned. She laughed a little and put on the Scissor Sisters. “After all, Mr M, no one does happy like homos!” She chuckled at her joke but her dog didn’t share either her sense of humour or her taste in music, because he buried his head under his big paws, reminding her that she needed to get his claws clipped.
Mary went back into the kitchen and boiled the kettle to make a pot of tea, then pulled out the biscuit tin. It was definitely a day for tea and biscuits. Ivan had dropped in a DVD earlier and she was looking forward to a pleasant evening in front of the TV. But first she’d empty the washing-machine, despite encroaching exhaustion. Mary hadn’t slept well the previous night – she’d been woken by a strange dream in which a teenage boy, with a hood pulled tight and covering his face, had been running. She had heard his feet pounding the street and watched his pursuers coming around a corner. His feet moved faster and faster but his steps became shorter and shorter until he was running to stand still. She had woken with a start, her heart racing. Morphine hangover, she’d thought, which made sense: the severe migraine had necessitated two morphine injections each day for four days.
After a shower, a glass of water and a gargle with mouth-wash, she had returned to bed with an uneasy feeling that had guaranteed she would lie awake. She often had “feelings” and sometimes they had forecast something terrible but mostly they came to nothing. Around three thirty, weary yet alert, she wondered if the cryptic dream had foretold something bad, as when she had dreamed of Tina “The Hill” Murphy, trapped inside a large, angry-looking egg. At the time she had dismissed it as nothing more than her own propensity for weirdness, but the following week Tina had collapsed at WeightWatchers with a ruptured ovary. Or, indeed, when she had dreamed of Jimmy Jaw frantically searching for something in what appeared to be a