‘Your voice… It’s not even yours.’
The kettle boils, the steam rising towards the damp, mildewed ceiling. I watch the vapour dissolve into the cracks. I notice a large one, running the whole width of the room. Maybe the ceiling will fall on our heads and the whole matter will be settled. He pours the scalding water on the tea bag, tops it up with a dash of cold and sips warily, like he’s doing penance by the very act of swallowing anything from this rat’s lair. I open the back door and lean against it, inhaling the night air, which contains traces of barbecue smoke from gardens on either side, and a damp-earth smell mixed with something decaying, rotten. It’s been weeks since I put the bins out.
‘Sonya, you’re simply not coping.’
‘And where have you been? Maybe if I’d had just a little support I’d be coping better than I am.’
‘Sonya, you have a problem with alcohol.’
How dare he waltz, jive, shimmy, slink – no, shove – his way in here after all this time, with his disdain and his arrogance, telling me what I am, who I am, what kind of a mother I am. My love for Tommy is bigger than anything I’ve ever felt before, bigger than any love he ever showed me.
‘It’s in the family, Sonya.’ He looks like he’s struggling to say something.
‘What? Who in the family?’
He weighs up his words before saying, ‘You know it almost destroyed your uncle? I’m scared the same thing is happening to you.’ He sits from the effort of having this confrontation. This is not his habitual way; he’d usually manage a situation by pretending it wasn’t happening, until something thunderous did happen, like with his brother, like now, with the guards threatened. There’s something he’s not telling me.
‘You’re a terrible coward,’ I say, my voice smudged at the edges.
I want to go to him and snuggle against him, bury my head against his chest as I used to before Lara came into our lives, his heartbeat reverberating in my ear, but I’m scared I’ll break if I make a move in his direction. Although my vision is soft, blurred by the booze, I’m surprised to see him slumped at the table, a man defeated. Finally, finally, I have him beaten. And what wells up inside me is an unbearable sadness: mine and his. We remain silent as tears build inside me, until my whole body is shaking, racked by the effort of pushing them down. Is this even real?
‘Stop that now, Sonya, think of the boy.’
There he goes again with his directives: wrong, wrong, all wrong. When do I ever not think of my boy? I roughly rub the tears away.
‘Sonya, we have to talk…’ He tells me that Mrs O’Malley is an old family friend, and despite appearances he didn’t completely abandon me; he asked my neighbour to keep an eye and to keep him updated.
‘You asked that old bat to spy on me?’
‘Mrs O’Malley said you were becoming increasingly erratic, leaving doors and windows open; she said you almost set the house on fire.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake. You weren’t exactly a stranger to burning food either.’
‘That was only in the time immediately following your mother’s death,’ he says quietly. ‘Look, Sonya, Mrs O’Malley’s worried, and I’m worried. The boy is obviously not in good hands.’
‘And do you think you were a good set of hands?’
He looks down at his large, cumbersome fingers encircling the fake-china hardware-store cup, ornate and fussy, with blue calligraphy: willows, or catkins, a pagoda, blossoms, boats and gargoyles chasing each other across the enamel surface in never-ending circles.
‘Did you pay her?’
He ignores this last question, suggesting that perhaps he did.
‘You should have come to see us,’ I whisper.
‘Have you forgotten you told me to never, ever contact you again?’
‘And you couldn’t even send your grandson a Christmas card?’
‘Sonya, there’s selective memory at play here. I did send cards, which were returned unopened.’
It’s true that I kind of edited that part out. It almost felt too painful to get those scraps when he wouldn’t show up in any real sense.
‘And I suppose there’s “dramatics” going on too?’ I say.
He’s rubbing his temples in exactly the same circular motion that I do. He closes his eyes and breathes deeply, the exhalation sounding like a long sigh. Now words will pour out of my mouth, words I’ll later regret if I don’t get a handle on myself. I can see the mist, feel the heat rising, and my mouth is burning from holding in all the invectives I need to spew. I too breathe in deeply and exhale slowly on a whistle. For the next few moments the only sound is of us both breathing in an exaggerated fashion. Impulse control. I can hear my father’s voice ringing in my ear. I was four, or maybe five, too old to be having a toddler tantrum – or in his words a ‘hissy fit’ – in the aisle of an overheated, overly lit supermarket. I have a flash of me lying on my stomach pounding the tiles with my fists, grazing my knees and my stomach in the process. He walked away, pretending not to know me. I wonder where my mother was. I don’t recall her ever shopping or cooking or reading me bedtime stories. An absence, even before she passed away.