Blast from the Past

37

Polly was smiling.

Polly was frowning.

She was yawning at the bus stop. Peter’s mother knew those photographs almost as well as Peter did himself. Often when he was out she would find herself drawn to his room, where she would stand, surrounded by images of the woman whose existence had so infected her own. She knew what a terrible thing it was to be the mother of a child gone wrong, to be always looking back on life, searching for the moment when the change had come, when the damage had been done.

It seemed to Peter’s mother that her whole life had been a preparation for this current despair. Every moment of her past had been rewritten by the present. Peter’s boyhood, which had brought her such happiness, was now forever tainted by what he had become. Every smiling memory of a little boy in shorts and National Health Service glasses was the memory of a boy who had turned into a deceitful, sneaking pervert. Every innocent hour they had spent together was now revealed as an hour spent in the making of a monster. Could she have known? Could she have prevented it? Surely she could and yet Peter’s mother could not see how. It was true that he had never had many friends but she had thought him happy enough. After all she was lonely too and so they had always had each other. Perhaps if his father had stayed… but that swine had gone before Peter had even been born. She could scarcely even remember him herself.

Seeing Peter that night, her own son, the flesh of her womb, squatting in a filthy gutter like a rat, had torn at her heart. He was sinking back into madness, she could see that, and this time it would be deeper and more terrible than the last. Peter needed help, that was obvious, help that clearly she could not give him. She was the problem, she had made him in every sense. The help he needed lay outside their home, but to reach it Peter’s mother knew that she would have to betray her son.