CLEO. Helen Brown E.
They’d lowered the bird into a shoebox and carried it down the zigzag. Lennel Road was a main route into town from the outer suburbs. In a less car-obsessed age, a town planner had decided to wedge in a bus stop for people wanting to travel up the hill out of town. The road narrowed so dramatically at the footbridge that there was only room for a footpath on one side of the road. Any pedestrian wanting to go farther down the hill into town had no choice but to cross the road at the bus stop. It was a perilous crossing with no signs to make traffic slow down.
As the boys arrived at the bus stop at the bottom of the steps, a bus pulled in on its way up the hill. Rob told Sam he thought they should wait until the bus had moved on before they tried to cross. But Sam was impatient to save the bird. Determined to reach the vet’s rooms down the hill as quickly as possible, he told Rob to be quiet, and ran out from behind the stationary bus. He’d been hit by a car coming down the hill.
The words were like pieces from different jigsaws that didn’t fit together. A nightmare voice that wasn’t mine yelled down the phone, demanding to know if Rob was okay. Steve said Rob was fine, though he’d seen the accident and was badly shaken. A shudder of relief jolted through me.
When people receive ghastly news, some say a sensation of disbelief sets in. Perhaps it was the simple harshness of Steve’s language, but his words hammered through me straight-away. My mind collapsed into different compartments. From a position high on Jessie’s hall ceiling I watched myself wailing and screaming below. My head felt about to burst. I wanted to smash it against the glass panels of Jessie’s front door to stop the pain.
At the same time, I registered the incongruity of the situation. The purpose of my visit had been to cheer Jessie up. Now here she was, standing in her white nightgown, trying to soothe me. Having trained as a nurse, Jessie switched into practical mode. She rang the hospital’s accident and emergency ward. When she asked if Sam was D.O.A. the logical part of my brain deciphered the abbreviation. I’d heard it as a cadet reporter late at night on the police round. Dead On Arrival. Leaden with resignation, she put the phone down.
I wept and raged, but couldn’t encompass the grief. No collection of human tissue was resilient enough to endure such pain. My life was over. Time squeezed up like an accordion. We waited for Steve and Rob to arrive. Refusing offers of tea and alcohol I watched light filter through a window and listened to the bellowing from the back of my throat. Part of my mind was curious about the noise my body made, and the way it seemed to go on like a chant, for infinity.
I wanted to compose myself for Rob’s arrival. The poor kid had seen enough. But my mind and body refused to obey instructions. I’d become a roaring animal. We waited maybe twenty minutes for Steve and Rob to appear in Jessie’s hallway. It felt more like twenty years.
They materialized like a pair of ghosts, a sad man, hunched over as if he’d been shot in the stomach, holding the hand of a traumatized child. I’d seen that body language before in photos of refugees and war victims. Steve’s face was blank as a wall, his eyes empty like a marble statue’s. Rob seemed to have shrunk into himself. I looked into the boy’s face, so passive and contained. Falling to my knees, I wrapped my arms around our surviving son, and wondered what nightmares were whirling inside his head. He’d just seen his brother run over and killed. How could he ever recover?
Clutching my son, I sobbed. My body shook. The intensity of my grip must’ve been frightening. He wriggled and withdrew from my embrace. Trying to regain composure, I asked Rob what had happened. He explained how he’d tried to stop Sam crossing the road, to wait on the footpath until the bus had gone, but Sam wouldn’t listen. His last words to Rob were “Be quiet.”
Sam had looked like a cowboy lying on the road, Rob said, with red string coming out of his mouth. It took a while for me to understand what he’d meant by red string. His young mind had interpreted the scene as a Western movie. Sam had become John Wayne, flat on his back after a gunfight, with stage makeup trickling down his chin. It was my first glimpse of how differently a child perceives death.
As we staggered numbly towards the car, Rob asked if he could have Sam’s Superman watch. I was shocked, but he was only six years old.
The road unfurled beneath us like licorice. Houses peeled away at drunken angles. I hated this town with its hills and twisted streets. Everything about it was harsh and ugly, on the brink of destruction. I didn’t want to go back to the house. Couldn’t face the zigzag and the sight of Sam’s possessions. But there was nowhere else for us to drive to.
When Steve asked if I wanted to see the footbridge I hammered my head against the car window and screamed. I never wanted to go anywhere near that thing. He drove the long way home so we wouldn’t have to pass under its shadow. People might still be there, shaking their heads, looking for stains on the tarmac.
Accusations shot like flames from the back of my throat. I yelled at Steve, demanding to know why he hadn’t driven the boys to the vet. He’d been busy with the lemon meringue pie, he replied. Wild as a she-wolf, I accused him of caring more about lemon meringue pie than his sons. A cooler part of my mind knew that my behavior was cruel and irrational.
Absorbing my recriminations without the retaliation they deserved, Steve pointed out that the vet was only a short walk down the hill. He reminded me the boys knew the road rules, and there was no stopping Sam when he got an idea in his head. “We both know what Sam is like—was like—with animals.” Steve’s change of tense was an obscenity.
Like an octopus, my mind scrambled for possibilities. Maybe there’d been a mistake and Sam wasn’t dead. Steve refused to be dragged into my fantasies. He’d spoken to the ambulance driver, who’d told him he was sorry but our son had passed away.
Passed away? The words unleashed a fresh onslaught of fury. Back in journalism school our tutors had drummed into us that dead meant dead, not passed away, passed over or sleeping in God’s arms. How could an ambulance driver who saw death every day use such euphemistic language?
Ignoring my raving, Steve continued to repeat what the ambulance driver had said. If by some miracle Sam had managed to survive such a severe head injury his only triumph would have been to spend the rest of his life a vegetable. My subconscious snared that snippet of information.
Dead. Lifeless. Gone. Such final words. If our son really was dead, then someone had killed him. My mind boiled, desperate for someone to blame. A murderer who deserved punishment. I created a Hollywood villain inside my head, a man full of hate with a history of crime.
“It was a woman,” Steve said, “a woman in a blue Ford Escort. She’d been driving back to work after lunch. There was hardly any damage to her car. Just a cracked headlight.”
A cracked headlight for my child’s life? I’d kill her.
Staggering down the zigzag to the house I couldn’t believe I’d never again feel Sam’s weight on my lap, his arms around my neck. Never was such a finite word. Rata greeted us at the door, her head to one side, gazing up at us, questioning. I flung myself on her neck and wept. Her head drooped, her tail curved under her hind legs and she tumbled to the floor. Sam’s words echoed in my head. Animals understand…
Hands trembling on the receiver, I made the worst phone call of my life. Mum’s voice sounded nonchalant when she answered. There was no way to soften the news. Her cherished grandson was gone. I was the ultimate failure as a parent. I could hear her intake of breath. Her voice deepened. The tiny part of me that remained an observer was surprised by her calm response. She belonged to a more seasoned, tougher generation that through the horrors of World War II had developed strategies to deal with outrageous loss. She brought my yelps and wails to a halt and said she was on her way.
I fastened the Superman watch around Rob’s wrist and flung myself on Sam’s unmade bed, its sheets and blankets still in the shape of his living body. I drank the smell of his clothes, heard his voice in my head. Steve led me to the living room and coaxed a glass of brandy between my lips. Hot alcohol shot through my veins.
An hour or so later, two policemen, young and embarrassed, arrived on the doorstep. They said the pigeon was still alive and asked what we wanted done with it. What