Guilty One

26

Minnie had wanted to drive him to university, but Daniel knew that she was anxious about it. In the end he got the train to Sheffield, allowing her to drive him only as far as Carlisle. Blitz had whimpered all the way in the car, and then Minnie’s eyes glassed over with tears when they reached the platform.

‘Mam, I’ll be back in ten weeks. Christmas is in ten weeks.’

‘I know, love,’ she’d said, reaching up to hold his face in both hands. ‘It seems like such a long time, and the time I’ve had with you now seems too short. I can’t quite believe it.’

It was a warm day. Blitz was straining on his lead, turning to the sounds of people and trains. Daniel smelled the diesel and felt a brief frightened thrill at the thought of leaving Brampton and living in a city again. He watched Minnie putting a knuckle to her eye.

‘Are you going to be OK?’ he asked.

She heaved a sigh and beamed at him, her cheeks pink. ‘I’ll be just grand. You make sure and enjoy yourself. Call me once in a while so I know you’re alive and not taken to drink or drugs.’ She laughed, but Daniel could see the sheen come to her eyes again.

‘Will you call me?’ he asked.

‘Try and stop me.’

He smiled, chin down to his chest. He wanted to leave now, but it was a few minutes until his train. Leaving her was harder than he had imagined and now he wished that he had said goodbye at the farm. Part of him worried that she would be lonely, part of him was filled with apprehension for himself. Some childish part of him did not want to go. He didn’t know anyone who had been to university: he didn’t know what to expect.

‘And don’t start thinking you’re not worthy,’ she said, as if she had been reading his mind again. Her eyes split with mirth and wisdom. ‘All you needed was this one chance. Take it and show them all just what you’re made of.’

He held her, bending down to squeeze her, feeling her body yield to him. Blitz yelped and jumped on them, trying to break them up.

‘You’re nothing but a jealous fool,’ she derided Blitz, roughly patting his head.

It was time. Daniel had smiled, kissed her wet cheek, stroked Blitz’s wary ear, and then he was gone.

At Sheffield University, although most of the students he became friends with were a year older than he was, having had gap years abroad, Daniel still felt strangely older than they were. He joined the football team and also a running club and would go out drinking with friends from both. Carol-Ann stayed in Brampton and he saw her occasionally during term and during the holidays when he went back to the farm, but he slept with other girls at university and said nothing to Carol-Ann, who knew him well enough not to ask.

One of the girls he slept with got pregnant and then had an abortion, early in his second year. He was living in a shared flat on the Ecclesall Road at the time, and had gone along with her to Danum Lodge in Doncaster to get the procedure done. They had both been frightened and afterwards she had bled and been in pain. He had taken care of her but after a few weeks it was as if it had never happened.

Daniel was not sure if it was this which caused him to begin thinking about his mother again – his real mother – but shortly before his second-year law exams, he called Newcastle Social Work Department and asked to speak to Tricia. He was told that she had left the department in 1989.

Daniel remembered being told that he would have the right to trace his mother when he was eighteen. Although she was dead, he still wanted to know how she died and if there was a memorial. He decided he would visit Newcastle again, to see what he could find out about his mother’s death. Some part of him wanted to return. He didn’t tell Minnie what he was doing – knowing that it would upset her too much. He didn’t want to hurt Minnie, but away from Brampton he felt more able to make the call. He called social services back three times, before he managed to speak to someone who could help him.

‘Daniel Hunter, did you say?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And your birth mother was Samantha. You were adopted in 1988 to Minnie Florence Flynn?’

‘Mmm-hmm.’

The social worker was called Margaret Bentley. She sounded exhausted, as if the very words she spoke cost her precious energy.

‘All I can find on your mother is notes from the drugs team, but nothing recent … ’

‘It’s all right, I know she’s dead. I just want to know how she died, ’n’ maybe find out if there’s a memorial. I know she was cremated.’

‘I’m sorry, we don’t keep that information, but you could ask at the register office in Newcastle. They’d have her death certificate. The council would tell you where she was cremated and if there’s a memorial … ’

‘Well … the last report from the drugs team, was it bad?’

‘We’re not really supposed to give out that kind of information.’

‘You’re not tellin’ me anything I don’t know, like,’ Daniel said. ‘I knew me mam took drugs. It’s just … ’

‘Well, this last report was very good. She was clean.’

‘Really, when was that?’

‘1988, same year you were adopted.’

‘Thank you,’ said Daniel and hung up.

He thought about his last meeting with his mother; the way she had struggled to face what was happening. He wondered if she had tried to get clean for him; if losing him had scared her away from the drugs. But if she hadn’t overdosed, Daniel wondered why she had died so young. He thought of the men in her life and pressed his teeth together.

He had revision to do, but he got up the next morning and took the train to Newcastle. Returning was a strange joy. As the train pulled in, he looked north towards the Cowgate estates. The city still seemed to be under his fingernails and in between his toes. He walked differently when he was here: he kept his head down and his hands in his pockets, but he knew instinctively where to go. He had not been in Newcastle since the day that Minnie adopted him. He felt a delicious, conflicted thrill, as if he was trespassing, but at home.

He didn’t know where the register office was, but he asked at the central library. It was on Surrey Street and he went straight there. He had written down his mother’s full name and date of birth as he remembered it.

The register office was a Victorian building of pale, unblasted sandstone. It seemed to have shouldered the grime of decades with appropriate resignation. The hallways were institutional, civic, minimally clean. Daniel felt slightly inhibited as he walked to the desk. It reminded him of his first visit to the university library; his first tutorial, before he learned that he did know enough and had a right to be there. He was wearing a long-sleeved football shirt and jeans. He stopped on the steps to smooth back his hair, which was getting long at the front and starting to fall into his eyes. Inside he went to the gents, where he tucked in then untucked his shirt. While he waited in line, he wondered at the source of his anxiety: whether it was because he was about to query the dead, or because he had been abandoned by the dead.

Abandoned.

When it was his turn, Daniel stepped up to the desk. Suddenly he felt abnegated, cast out. He remembered his mother’s long nails, tack, tack, tack on the table.

‘Yes, can I help you?’

The registrar was young. She leaned on the desk with both her elbows and smiled up at Daniel.

‘Yes, I wanted to get a copy of my mother’s death certificate.’

Forms were filled in and Daniel had to wait, but then he was given the certificate, folded into a clean white envelope. He thanked the young registrar and left, not daring to open the envelope until he was outside, and even then he felt inhibited, as people pushed by him on the busy street.

There was an old-fashioned teashop off Pinstone Street and Daniel slipped inside and ordered a coffee and a bacon roll. There was an overweight man with purpled cheeks eating a pie and beans and two women with the same dyed-blonde spiky hairstyle sharing a cigarette.

Daniel carefully opened the folds of the paper. He could taste the smoke from the women’s cigarettes in his mouth. His heart was beating but he didn’t know why. He knew she was dead and he could guess how, but still there was a feeling that he was uncovering something hidden. The typeface swarmed at him. His fingers were trembling and the paper shook.

She had died of a drug overdose, as Minnie had told him. Daniel stared at the paper, imagining the syringe rising valiantly from his mother’s arm and her blue rubber tourniquet releasing, as one hand releases another over a cliff.

His eyes scanned and then re-scanned the dates: born 1956, died 1993, aged thirty-seven years.

He pushed his roll away, left his coffee and ran back to the register office, where he skipped up the steps just as they were closing for lunch.

He pushed his way to the desk. The young woman who had served him called over. ‘I’m sorry, we close for lunch. If you can come back later?’

‘I just wanted to ask … one question, just one, I swear.’

She smiled and came to the desk again. ‘I’ll get in trouble,’ she said, her eyes sparkling at him.

Daniel did his best to play along, although he wanted to shake her. ‘Thanks so much; you’re great.’ The registrar’s lids lowered and lifted. ‘I just wanted to check, like … This certificate says 1993 on it, but me mam died in 1988 at the latest.’

‘Really? That’s strange.’

‘Could you have made a mistake?’ Daniel asked, feeling his eyes wide from the panic, but still trying to relax in front of her.

‘Well no, I mean … that’s your mother’s official death certificate. Are you sure she died in 1988?’

‘Yeah … ’ he said, and then, ‘no … ’

‘Well, I expect it’s right then.’

‘How do I find out if she’s got a memorial?’

‘You need to talk to the council, remember.’

The girl smiled, pursing her lips in apology. Daniel turned and left. When he was outside the certificate was creased in his hand, although he hadn’t meant to crush it.

Daniel waited for the council offices to open. His stomach rumbled and cramped, but he paid no attention to it. He sat on the steps for ten minutes then walked around the block before returning. Three times he read the sign which said it was closed between one and two o’clock.

When it opened, he was directed to Bereavement Services, where he had to wait for twenty minutes despite being the first person in line.

‘I want to find out if my mother has a memorial – I think she was cremated … I have her death certificate.’

‘What’s her name?’

Daniel waited in a plastic chair, his stomach muscles so tight that they began to ache. He had forgotten about university. This was all he cared about.

He expected to have to fill in more forms, to show his identification or to part with money. The woman returned within a few minutes. She told him that his mother’s name was not on any of the cremation lists. She had double-checked and found that his mother had been buried at the Jesmond Road Cemetery.

Daniel thought that he had thanked her, but then she asked him loudly if he was all right. He was standing with his fingers holding on to the desk and the death certificate crushed in his hand.

Off the Jesmond Road, Daniel saw the graveyard. He had bought carnations as an afterthought and carried them in a plastic bag, petals facing the ground.

The entrance reared up in front of him: a red sandstone arch which was at once beautiful and terrifying. He stood outside for a moment, kicking small stones out of his path. He found himself drawn into the red arch and once inside the need to go deeper was powerful. He didn’t know where she lay or if he would find her, but as soon as he entered he felt a hard peace fall on him. His heart was quiet. He moved from grave to grave looking for her name. He searched methodically, carefully, without frustration when another row of graves passed without finding her name inscribed, and without pre-emptive relief when he found graves on which were carved similar names.

Finally, just after four o’clock, he found her: Samantha Geraldine Hunter 1956–1993. May You Rest in Peace.

Already, the black-painted letters were beginning to flake. Daniel tried to imagine her, with her thin shoulders and her long nails. She was a child in his imagination. He thought how young she had been when he saw her last.

He stood for a moment, and then knelt, feeling the grass wet through his jeans. He wiped some new raindrops from the marble, imagining her small bones beneath. He laid the carnations at the foot of the cross.

1993. She had died only months before. He would have been less than an hour from her, when her time came. He could have come to her; he could have helped her, but she had died without knowing that he was near. She had got clean the year that she lost him. He wondered if she had been getting clean so that she could have him back. His eighteenth birthday had come and gone. Maybe she had lost hope. Maybe she had thought he had another family and no longer remembered her.

Someone must have paid for her headstone; someone must have chosen the white marble and decided on the words. He remembered the name on the death certificate: Informant – Michael Parsons. Daniel recalled all the names and faces that had surrounded his mother’s life. He hung his head. The breath was uneven in his throat yet he couldn’t weep. The grief he felt for her was small and fragile. It was grief confused with so much else. Invisible birds sang with a noise that seemed deafening.

Daniel stood up. He was aware of a sharp pain in his head. He turned and walked out of the graveyard, his feet crunching on the red chips with purpose after his slow and patient discovery. The sun was bright and in his eyes. His muscles were tight and he could feel a cold tear of sweat making its way between his shoulder blades.

He remembered the day Minnie told him his mother was dead and pressed his lips together. His jaw ached.

He was going back to Brampton, and he was going to kill her.