“Stop,” I say.
“I think it was cold,” Melody says. “So cold. Right to the bones of me. I think she held me under. I was scared. I looked up and I could see her face through the water. Her hands were hard on my shoulders. I think I could hear her screaming. I tried to cry but I was too cold inside and it hurt.”
“Shut your fucking mouth,” I say.
I turn to look at her, to slap and bite her, but she isn’t there. Instead, along the path, Mum stands staring back at me. Slippers on her feet. Her coat buttoned tight. Her eyes wide. Her mouth turned down, her lip shaking.
I try to think of something to say. Some reason I can give her.
Mum marches towards me, her open hands cutting through the air. I open my mouth. She raises her fist. It hits me below my eye, a hard slam against my cheekbone. I fall down, my head light.
“What are you doing?” Her voice is high and shaky.
I scramble back. The gravel is wet and stinging on my palms. The heat beneath my eye grows hotter and heavier.
She follows me. “What are you doing here?”
I try to speak, but I can’t find the breath.
“You’re not allowed to come here on your own.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. It comes out as a whisper.
“You’re sorry?” She shakes her head. “You’re fucking sorry? You little . . . you . . .”
She falls on me.
I bring my forearms up, try to keep her hands away, but it’s no good. The nails and the knuckles, the ring she wears on her left hand.
I wish someone would come, pull her away, make her stop. But no one does.
Hot, hot pain above my eyes, and they fill with blood. I am blind. I cover my face with my hands. Her weight shifts on me as she leans back.
“Oh my God, sweetheart, I didn’t . . . I didn’t . . .”
I hear her voice. Know her position. I take my hands away from my face, blink, see light and shade. Push myself upright.
Her voice wavers as she touches my cheek.
“Sweetheart, I—”
I put my shoulders and my neck into it. My head snaps forward. I feel her nose crushed against my brow. She rocks backwards and I feel the heat of her blood on my chest. I roll sideways, and she topples over.
She cries out. I wipe at my eyes, regain something of my vision. She falls back against the fencing, nothing more than sticks and wire. It cannot hold her weight. The sticks and wire give way, and she tumbles back.
I wipe at my eyes again, watch her fall, taking the fence with her. As she slides down the bank, her foot catches in the wire, whips her body back and down.
The sound of her head meeting rock echoes through the trees like a gunshot.
I stand, wiping more blood from my eyes, blinking it away. At the edge, at the torn-away fence, I look down. Her eyes are open wide. Her mouth is working, like she’s trying to tell me something. The shallow water around her head swirls with red.
Melody stands beside her, looking.
Mum’s eyes turn to where Melody stands. Wide and wild. Melody says nothing, only watches as Mum becomes very still. Then she climbs the bank, up to where I wait. I follow her home.
I go to the bathroom, undress, and clean myself up. The cut on my forehead isn’t as bad as I thought. I hold a wet facecloth against it, and the bleeding slows.
When I go downstairs, still in my underwear, Melody sits beside me on the couch. We watch cartoons on the television. Old ones and new ones. Most of them I’m not allowed to watch, but I don’t care, I watch them anyway. Melody holds my hand, the one that isn’t holding the facecloth against the cut.
We know this time is precious. We know it will end soon and we will have to talk to the police and think of lies to tell.
But for now, there are cartoons.
London Safe
Jason McCoubry’s mother stared at the postcard in his hand, her mouth a thin straight line. Her window didn’t allow much light into the room, and sometimes he thought that a blessing. The drab painted walls, the bed with its rails to prevent her from falling in the night, the vase of plastic flowers. They had to sell her house to pay for this place, and she had wept when he first helped her through the door. The carers did their jobs well, but still, leaving his mother here had been about the hardest thing he’d ever done. Until now.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
“There was nothing to tell,” she said, her voice as dry as the card in his hand.
“Nothing to tell? You said he’d left us.”
“And that was the truth.”
“Not the whole truth, though, was it?”
He was getting angry. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t. She was a frail woman, mostly intact upstairs, but her body had failed her long ago. It wasn’t fair to harangue her. But it wasn’t fair that she’d lied to him. He swallowed the anger, pushed it down as far as he could.
“He left us,” Margaret McCoubry said. “That’s all you needed to know.”
“But we never knew why,” Jason said.
She lay back in the bed and looked up at the ceiling tiles. “What difference would that have made?”
“At least I could have understood. Maybe I wouldn’t have wound up hating him the way I did. Thirty years, carrying that around with me. Thinking he didn’t want us.”
“He didn’t,” she said. “If he cared about you or me, he would never have done what he did.”
What he did.
Informant was one word for it. Snitch was another. Or around here, in the towns and villages, in the cities like Belfast or Derry, the word was tout.
Touts out. Snitches get stitches.
He remembered the graffiti on the gable walls of the estate. Keep your mouth shut. Say nothing.
When Jason was eleven years old, one week after he started at the local grammar—the first in his family ever to pass the exams and get into a good school—his father wasn’t at the breakfast table. Jason and his little sister, Claire, had sat in silence as their mother filled the bowls with cereal and milk, radiating fury and pain. She didn’t have to say anything. He and Claire both knew something was terribly wrong.
Margaret told them that evening. Their father, Dan McCoubry, had abandoned them. Just gone. No explanation, no warning. Jason knew his father hadn’t been himself this last while. He had become sullen and withdrawn when he’d always been jovial and outgoing. Everyone knew Long Dan, so-called because of his six-foot-four height married to a painfully slender frame. Long Dan the Handy Man. Those words were hand-painted on the side of the little Renault van he drove about the town, doing odd jobs, clearing gutters, papering walls, painting doors. He worked hard to feed his family, some years even made enough to pay for a stay in a guesthouse in Portrush in the dying days of August.