Normal.
It was all she wanted for him – to be normal. Of course, she wanted him to have a job and a wife and a family, too – but she’d settle for normal. Normal would be a relief.
Down below, next to the ramshackle wooden shed, on the patch of weed-strewn gravel they called the driveway, Patrick was leaning over the engine of her little Fiesta. What could be more normal than a boy fixing a car on a sunny day? The scene gave Sarah hope. He’d got that from Matt – that obsession with mechanical things, even though Patrick had never learned to drive. The Fiesta was twenty years old now, and still ran like a dream, thanks to him.
She watched him tinker. From this distance she could see the boy and the man; the way he was changed but still changing. Big hands on the end of wiry arms, wide shoulders but narrow hips, and cropped hair that came to a childlike curl at his nape as he bent to read the oil level.
Sarah sighed. Patrick had been such a sweet baby; a boisterous toddler. But then – increasingly – a strange little boy. He’d started to stiffen when they tried to hug him, to look away when they spoke. His teachers said he was the cleverest in the class at sums, but then looked down at their hands while they mumbled about everything else: his fixation on detail and routine, his isolation and his lack of eye contact.
After Matt had… died, Patrick had got worse. He shrieked if Sarah reached out to him, and barely spoke – except to ask obsessively, ‘What happened to Daddy?’
The doctor said it was understandable.
When it went on for a year, the doctor turned his palms up more cautiously, and said it was an understandable obsession.
Sarah hated the word ‘obsession’. She preferred to call it a ‘phase’.
But it had gone on so long…
Patrick had started to bring home dead animals. Birds, squirrels, rabbits. He sat and stared at them for hours, rolling them gently back and forth with a stick, or spreading a dead wing to watch the feathers move into place. After a while he’d begun to slice them open, peering into cavities and unravelling intestines. Making his bed one day, Sarah found a peeled shrew under the pillow. After that, dead things weren’t allowed in the house. She had caught him testing the padlock on the shed door instead, and warmed his backside for him.
No means no, Patrick!
The dead-animal phase had lasted years, and then Patrick had become more focused on mechanical things. When he wasn’t fine-tuning his bicycle gears, he was peering at the engine of her car, or those of neighbours, coaxing dead and dirty metal back to life with a spanner he wielded like a wand. Now his hands often reminded her of Matt’s, with the whorls on his fingers mapped in oily isobars.
Sarah frowned. This sudden desire to go to college – to learn anatomy – seemed like an unwelcome return to that earlier obse—that earlier phase. No good could come of it.
She watched her son tighten the spark plugs, then put each of the old ones back inside little cardboard tubes for disposal and line them up neatly on the ground, making sure each one was parallel with the last. She knew that when the time came to throw them away, he would take them out of the tubes one last time and check each one again before dropping it into the bin.
What went on inside his head?
Sarah had been asking herself the same question for eighteen years and knew she probably would for another fifty, if she lived that long. What was it that made Patrick panic if his T-shirt was too tight? What hitch in his brain made him arrange his books by publication date, and eat his food in alphabetical order?
Sarah never asked him. They talked – but never about the things that mattered. It was all Bring down your laundry and Don’t forget your coat. Part of her yearned for more; another part shied away from anything deeper or more difficult. The truth was, she didn’t want to know why he was the way he was, or whether there was anything she could have done about it.
Or not done…
She caught sight of her reflection in the window: tight-lipped, no make-up, mousey hair scraped into a utilitarian knot. The face of a woman who has no one to wake up with.
Through her own ghostly eyes she watched Patrick wheel Matthew’s old bike across the gravel and disappear down the lane. She knew he’d be gone for hours, and felt the relief.
There were two dusty framed photos on Patrick’s bedside table. The first was a picture of Matt on the Beacons, taken from a child’s angle that only accentuated his stature.
He’d been such a handsome man, thought Sarah, and they’d shared such dreams. Not grand dreams, but humble ones – of a better couch, a holiday in Scotland, and of going together to watch their son on the rugby field or in the school play. They hadn’t wanted much, but they’d been denied even that.
The other photo was of her and Patrick standing awkwardly together – not touching – next to the old blue Volkswagen she’d once loved but which she couldn’t bear to look at after Matt’s death. Patrick was only seven or eight in the photo – a thin child with dark-blue eyes and brown hair that was always clipped too short, to save time and money. She’d framed it because it was one of the few pictures she had of him where he was actually looking into the camera. No doubt because Matt was behind it, she thought with an unexpected flicker of the old resentment. Patrick had always been more Matt’s son than hers. Matt would explain things to Patrick in a low, soothing voice, and never cared if Patrick said nothing in return, or got up and left in the middle of it.
Both of which drove her crazy.
The least you could do is nod your head, Patrick!
If you’re not going to sit at the table like a big boy, you can bloody well go hungry.
It wasn’t often Sarah was able to hold Patrick’s gaze, and now she picked up the photo and thumbed a path through the dust so she could study his eyes. Even though they were ten years out of date, they were still the same – solemn and wary. He didn’t trust her; she knew that. Even as a small boy he would turn and look to Matt for confirmation of anything she’d said – each glance a needle in her heart.
On a whim, Sarah slid the photo under the hoodie, where Patrick wouldn’t notice it until it was too late. It knocked against something wrapped inside the thick material of the sweatshirt.
Sarah took out a black hardcover notebook with a red cloth spine, and opened it – expecting that Patrick had already begun making notes for his anatomy classes. He was the most conscientious of students.
Instead there was page after page of dense pencil lists in his firm block capitals.
…CHARGER, BELLADONNA, HOSTILITY…
She frowned at the long columns of random words.
…EXIT STRATEGY, SLEEPER, COMMON GOOD…
Sometimes there was a date, or an asterisk next to a word, or a symbol that meant nothing to her. None of it meant anything to her. She doubted it meant anything to anybody apart from Patrick. She flicked through dozens of almost identical pages, increasingly uneasy, yet not knowing why. Partly it was because she’d never seen the book before, which meant Patrick must have kept it hidden. That alone was disturbing. But mostly because its contents just seemed so odd – and she discouraged odd wherever possible. Odd had never done Patrick any favours, and never would.
As she was about to close the book, it fell open near the back where the pages were still clear, and suddenly she was looking at a black and white photograph of a little girl in a white dress.