Page 56 of Days You Were Mine

I read the tag:For you, Alice, with all my love.

Inside there’s a framed photograph, an instant bullet to the heart. It is a school portrait of Jake aged nine or ten, a beautiful boy with short hair and solemn eyes. He is wearing a grey V-necked jumper, a white shirt and red and grey striped tie, and the thing that strikes me most about this picture, this textbook, cheesy school picture, is his refusal to smile.

‘I found this photo and thought you might like it. I know you’re curious about when I was a kid.’ He leans forward to kiss my face.

‘I love it. You’re so handsome,’ I say, looking at the photo. ‘But you don’t look very happy.’

‘Well I wasn’t.’

He gets up from the sofa and starts pacing around our tiny sitting room. I can hear the breaths he is taking, deep and longer than usual. My heart clenches in empathetic distress.

‘My grandfather was into punishment. I think we can safely say he was a sadist. There were the regular beatings – he broke my ribs once – and there was the locking me out of the house in the middle of winter. I slept – or rather didn’t sleep – in the car. But the thing that made me miserable was the way he talked about me, as if I was disgusting, the lowest form of species, corrupt, sinful, all of that. I was illegitimate, you see, which made me flawed and unlovable, beyond redemption. When I was young, it was difficult not to believe him. Sometimes it still is. Sometimes his is the only voice I can hear.’

I am crying as I stand up and walk over to him.

‘Is that why you …?’ I leave the rest unsaid.

‘Yes. He made me feel worthless. That life wasn’t worth living. And it’s hard to shake that feeling sometimes.’

‘Oh Jake, I can’t bear it for you.’

My arms are wrapped around him, my face pressed against his chest. I hate the factualness of his voice. When he states these feelings, it’s as if he believes they are true. For the past year I’ve longed to understand his demons; I’ve thought, naïvely, that I could help him overcome them. Now I am beginning to understand how deep-rooted his self-loathing is; I’m not sure the baby and I will be enough to fix it.

‘Please don’t cry. I hate you being upset. Can we talk about something else now?’

‘Why didn’t your mother help?’

‘I suppose she was a bit frightened of my grandfather; she must have known how violent he could be. But I think she was so committed to her quest for freedom, she didn’t care about anything else. And then she met someone and she wanted to start over. And that meant leaving me behind. I just wish she’d had me adopted. I used to dream about it sometimes, this wonderful older couple turning up to take me away. I’d imagine their house, an old ramshackle farmhouse with a huge garden and lots of animals, ponies and dogs and cats.’

‘You honestly think it would have been better to be adopted?’

‘Of course it would. It was just me on my own dealing with my grandfather’s rages, and this went on for years, all the way through my childhood. But you know what that’s like. An only child, with no other siblings to take the edge off.’

‘Sometimes I think I hate my mother more than my father, for not standing up to him. Never trying to protect me.’

‘We are exactly the same, you and I. But it’s the thing that brought us together. You and me, that’s the silver lining.’

When Jake goes out to baste the chicken and check on his roast potatoes, I sit back down on the sofa, the framed photograph balanced on my knees. It gives me a feeling of vertigo, this picture, not just the past, his past, the past that up until now he has kept hidden, hermetically sealed inside him. I also feel, as I stare and stare at ten-year-old Jake, that I am looking into the future and in some bizarre sense I am time-travelling forward to meet our unborn child.

Now

Luke

As expected, Alice has a mini nervous breakdown when she sees the bear. I’m standing at the sitting-room window, Samuel in my arms, waiting for her to arrive. Samuel is holding the bear, face outwards, with ugly new eyes on show – Hannah did her best, but essentially it’s cut-price plastic surgery. A bear with caring black and amber eyes made of glass now has the flat, cold glare of cross-stitch.

As soon as I hear Alice’s knock, I bring Samuel to the door with me, our daily ritual. She makes her funny face, he laughs and reaches out for her, and then I’m off in a swirl of anxiety about the day ahead. This time, though, she spots the bear immediately and cries out.

‘What did you do?’

Samuel is rolling his R’s like a gift, but Alice ignores him.

‘This, you mean?’ I point at the bear, acting casual, ignoring the dramatic plunge of my heart. ‘Hannah has a thing about glass eyes. She’s thinks they’re a choking hazard.’

But the words come out like sawdust. Dry to me and to her. I understand the cruelty of the crime.

‘The bear was yours, Luke. It means a lot to me. Perhaps it was wrong of me to give it to … Samuel.’

Her hesitation is enough.

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