Random Acts of Unkindness (26 page)

There were three things I could pin my hopes on here: Thomas writing back and his letter being passed to me, Thomas getting the letter and deciding he didn’t want to write back but letting the agency know, and no response. The problem was, they couldn’t tell you where the missing person was, only the result.

Someone from London came to meet me in Manchester and took my details. She took my letter and read it to see if there was anything inappropriate in it, then she said that she would see if he had an address and didn’t really want to be found, and if he did, she would send it and see what happened.

She told me they searched the electoral registers and benefits agencies for missing people, just in case. She told me she’d make enquiries and find out if Thomas had been mentioned in
her
letters. She’d also mentioned that she thought for crimes like this, people should be hanged. The poor girl had a blank look I recognised—the glazed look of someone that no matter how much the sun shone, there was always horror and pain at the back of your mind. I was glad that
she
wasn’t hanged.
She
was the only way I could find out if Thomas was murdered. My only chance. I tried to find out how to contact her, but there didn’t seem to be a way.

Months later, the woman phoned me and told me that
her
letters didn’t contain anything different from
her
statements, as
she
didn’t want to incriminate
herself
more.
She’d
got herself a spiritual counsellor, someone who
she
could confess to, unburden
herself.
By all accounts,
she
was trying to say that
she
was under
his
control,
his
spell, and it was because
she
was in love with
him
that
she
did those things. That
she’d
been a woman who had been led astray. And because of this
she
was appealing for release.

In all the time since Thomas had gone missing and then the babies, I’d never lost my sanity fully. I’d cried, and I’d talked to myself, and to the blackbirds. I’d lain on the grass at Daisy Nook and not spoken to another human being for weeks, but, on the surface, I was reasonably sane.

The thought of
her
out of prison, free to walk around, near kiddies, free, made me ill. Thoughts of my daughter growing up with someone else being her mum, and the dead baby in the wardrobe. I didn’t eat for a while and I became very upset. Not depressed, because I was still doing my routine to a point, but I was very upset and angry.

I looked at a picture of
her
, posed writing. I knew
she’d
been trying to get parole for a long time, and I knew it had been blocked. The developments recently, seeing
her
on the TV, in the papers, with people supporting
her
, telling us that it was
his
fault
she
did it, it didn’t wash with me. It did unsettle me, because it meant people were taking it seriously.
She’d
been able to do a degree,
she’d
become a Christian.
She
looked old.

I looked in the mirror, and I looked a lot older than
her
, but I didn’t look my age. I don’t know if it was the routine or the slow pace of my life, but I’d aged well. I was still walking the moor every day, in the morning at dawn, going to see Thomas, paying my respect to a part of my life where I was imprisoned. After that first day, when I’d been so taken by the heather, I bought a little bit and planted it and looked up its meaning.

Heath heathe
r
: A low evergreen shrub or small tree, native to Europe, Asia, N Africa and especially S Africa. (Genus: Erica, c.500 species. Family: Ericaceae.) Heather: A small, bushy, evergreen shrub (Calluna vulgaris), native to Europe, especially N and W; in Scotland it forms the major food source of endemic red grouse. A rare form with white flowers is considered lucky. (Family: Ericaceae.)

Heathen
: This word for non-Christian or pagan is common in all the Germanic languages. It appears in Old English as hâþen in the year 826. It clearly arose after Christianity, but had to be quite early for it to appear in all the Germanic tongues, sometime in the 4th century or earlier. Most words of this age have unclear etymologies, but this is not the case with heathen. It is believed to have originated in Gothic and spread to the other Germanic tribes. In the 4th century, Ulfilas, bishop of the Goths, translated the Bible into Gothic. In Mark 7:26, which reads "Now the woman was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by birth . . ." Ulfilas used the word haiþnô in place of Greek, or as it appears in the Vulgate gentilis, or gentile. Haiþnô literally means dweller on the heath. The heath is associated with the regeneration of life, and the Triple Goddess symbols of the maiden, the mother and the crone, where birth, life and death are symbolised in the life force. So the original sense is remarkably the same as the modern sense, someone living beyond the bounds of civilization and who has not received the word of God.
’

Sounds about right to me. Heathen.
She
was 58 and I was 74. Both of us had been allowed to age, yet both of us were still focused back in 1964, when children, who would now be middle-aged, suffered and died. They didn’t get any older. They were children forever. I still thought of Thomas as a teenager, because I had no other point of reference. I still looked for him everywhere I went, my eyes searching out young boys about his height, who look familiar. He wouldn’t look like that now, but in my mind he was still waving goodbye to his mam and he cycled to work.
She
was looking back down the years and trying to find a way to escape, to be free. Over my dead body, I thought. I still wanted answers from
her
. I needed to know exactly where
she
was.

Just as I thought it, there was a knock at the door. I tied my hair back and sprayed air freshener round the room. I’d been smoking sixty a day again, and my visits to the moor had made me perspire. I suddenly realised that the room smelled like sweaty cheese, so I opened the back door to let some air in. If this was Thomas now, he’d wonder what the bloody hell had got into me.

It wasn’t Thomas. It was Lizzie.

‘Bessy, love. I’ve just come to tell you that Colin had a heart attack. He’s up at Ashton General and he’s asking for you.’

I got my coat and followed her. Her son was driving her in his car, so we went up there. She didn’t speak to me all the way there. When we got out, she turned round and looked at me, right in the eye.

‘I’m sorry, Bessy.’

I smiled.

‘Never mind that now, love. Let’s just see to Colin, eh?’

I started to walk in, but she grabbed my arm.

‘I just wanted to tell you, he never forgot about Thomas. He spoke about him every day. And you. I should never have . . .’

‘Don’t worry yourself, Lizzie. It’s all water under the bridge now.’

‘But you never remarried. You never met anyone. I thought you might be still holding a flame for Col.’

I snort.

‘Col? No. My life stopped when Thomas went. There was no room in my life for a man.’ I glanced at her son, leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette. ‘Put it this way. Can you imagine if you came out if this hospital and he was gone? You never saw him again and no one ever knew what happened to him?’

She paled.

‘I never thought of it like that. I just thought he’d run away.’

I smiled.

‘Well, he might have. He might have had his reason to go, and all. Or he might have been murdered, by them two, or by someone else. It’s the not knowing, Lizzie.’

‘Did no one help you, Bessy? What about the police? Colin didn’t say much.’

We’re walking along the hospital corridors now, hurrying toward the intensive care unit.

‘They did, but what could they do? They never found any clues, or a body, or him alive, so what could they do?’

We reached the ICU and the curtains were drawn round his bed. Lizzie pulled them open and went to the side of the bed. There was a steady blip, blip, blip of a machine and I flashed back to our wedding day, all those years before. The man lying on the bed now was a faded version of Colin, someone grey and ever so slightly blue.

‘Bessy’s here, love. Look, it’s Bessy.’

He turned his head slowly and our eyes met.

‘Bess. Bess.’ His hand reached weakly across the bed, and Lizzie took his other hand. ‘Have you found him, love?’

I felt dizzy. I thought he’d forgot about us. After all these years, he remembered. Me and Thomas.

‘No, love, not yet, but I will.’

‘He was a good boy. You’ve done well by him.’

Lizzie was sobbing on the other side of the bed.

‘So did you, Col. You were a good dad.’

Lizzie looked panicked and I realised I had said ‘were.’ But we both knew.

The blips got slightly faster and he turned his head toward Lizzie. I turned to leave and there was just a constant beep. The nursing staff ran in and Lizzie cried out, but he was gone. I sat in the waiting room, waiting for her to come out, to make sure she was all right. I wasn’t sure that it was any of my business, but I couldn’t leave her in here alone. At first I was upset, I cried a little, but then I realised that this was what would happen to me.

I felt a little spark of excitement in my stomach, a feeling I hadn’t had since before Thomas had gone. It made me laugh out loud. I put it down to shock, but as I walked out of the hospital and left Lizzie in her son’s arms, I heard a strange, but familiar sound. I could hear birds singing.

I looked around the hospital grounds, and a song thrush was calling out. I’d heard the blackbirds singing, Jack and Jill and all their ancestors, singing in my yard, but outside my little circle of safety, the world had become flat and joyless. Dangerous. Suddenly, it was alive with birdsong. I hadn’t heard that bloody birdsong for donkey’s years.

I walked back through Ashton and over to Daisy Nook. I could smell the grass and hear the trickle of the steam, and of course, the birds. They were everywhere, and a big goose came to see what I had in my bag. I giggled like a schoolgirl and gave it a polo mint.

There was a spring in my step when I walked up Ney Street, a sense of excitement for the future, because now I realised there might not be so much of it for me. Less suffering, less torture, less madness, less worrying. The end was in sight and I was delighted.

I’m getting to the end of it now and funnily enough, this is the bit I can’t remember as well. I can remember forty years ago like it was yesterday, but the past few years, well?

Anyway, Colin was dead and I made friends with Lizzie. She’d come round sometimes and we’d have a cup of tea. She’d always look around the house, like she was imagining Colin there, and at the same time I was imagining I wasn’t there.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t suicidal or anything like that, I was just weary of it all. I did the same thing every single day. I’d got up at dawn for years, first light. This was different in winter and summer, because of the length of the days. I didn’t wear a watch or have a clock in the house. Why would I need one?

Like I said, I did the same thing every day. The rhythmic tick-tock of life kept my feet moving through the daylight, stopping me from stopping, the ever-present moon spurring me on, the knowledge that a person can’t just disappear completely and somewhere, even if it was in his mossy bed, with the heather duvet, Thomas was bathed in the same moonlight as I was.

I’d go up to the moor and do what I had to do there, then I’d go home and in the afternoon I’d walk up to Daisy Nook. I might call on the market or go to a supermarket, but usually I got enough food for the week in one go.

Over a long time I realised that my visit to Wardle Street when all this first happened might have turned out to be wrong, as all the reports released by
them
said that the first kiddies had been murdered somewhere else, in a house
they
had lived in at Bannock Street. I went there quite often and sat outside, wondering if Thomas had been here. There was a kind of yearning in me, a calling out to whatever was left behind of someone.

I was sure that there was a trace of him somewhere, a kind of thread between mother and son that I was holding one end of and Thomas the other. He was lost and if I shouted loud enough, and pulled the thread as hard as I could, he’d find me again.

Occasionally I’d be walking somewhere and I’d remember me and Thomas being there together. A different feeling would flood me, a sort of happiness and love, tinged with desperate sadness. I suppose a lot of the reason I kept going back to those places was because of that feeling. It was like being with him again, his smile and the way he stood, his voice, I could see it all clearly, then it was gone again.

I’d also met up with a group of people, mostly mothers, but some fathers and friends, whose children friends had gone missing. Mothers for the Missing. Some of them had disappeared in the sixties, around the same time as Thomas, but there were lots of people who had missing relatives over the decades. Turned out to be run by John Connelly’s son, Sean. Never met him, but they’re a good family, that. They even carried on giving us a party on Bonfire night, in the same place. John’s factory went to the dogs a long time ago, but Sean kept his memory alive every year with a big bonfire just outside the gates.

A woman called Pat organises them these days. Her boy went missing at the same time as that Harold Shipman business. Poor bugger. Never found him, and it’s made her hard. She always reserves a special place for me at the meetings, because she told me that Thomas was the first case she ever knew about. She told me that load of people had gone missing on the estate over the years, more than we think. Loads. Some of them came back.

But she seemed to think that if it were a young lad who went missing, that would be the last we’d see of him alive. Funny really, she always looked like she was trying to work something out, always troubled, always asking questions. Happen she thought she knew something, but if she did, she never let on.