Billy said nothing. After a moment, he crouched and picked up a handful of gravel chippings. He stood up and threw them into the canal. The water wrinkled then flattened.
‘Do you know something?’ he said – and at the catch in his voice, Christopher felt afraid. ‘I’m still not sure I believe you.’ He pushed his hands into his pockets, then appeared to reconsider and brought them out again and crossed them over his chest. ‘It just doesn’t add up. These things are always cross-referenced. What’s to say it wasn’t you who made the mistake?’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Is it? I don’t think so.’ Billy stepped closer, his eyes catching a yellow glint from the street light. ‘See, I’ve always wanted to find my parents too. I had the same dreams you did. And the way I see it, I’m the one with the photograph. I saw the register. I have a birth certificate too, so I can’t see how there can have been a mistake. And if the mother superior was the same woman who handed me over, she would have remembered who she handed me to. And she did remember. She said she gave me to Mr and Mrs Bradbury, from the US. She said that.’ He stepped closer still. ‘She remembered.’
‘It’s not true. I’m Martin. It says so on my birth certificate. The only reason I call myself Christopher is for simplicity’s sake. And because my other family don’t know I’ve found my mother, my Phyllis.’ He grasped Billy’s shoulders. ‘Please. This is my whole life. This is who I am. Without it I have nothing, do you understand?’
‘I understand, of course I understand. But unless you can prove I’m wrong, I won’t stop until I get to the truth. That’s my right – and I have as much right as you do. Now let go of me, Christopher. Or is it Billy?’
‘Don’t call me that. You’re Billy. You’re…’ As Christopher pushed against him, he felt a numb punch that sent him reeling back, down, down onto the gravel.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
When I started to write this, I began by giving my own account of how things had gone. But I couldn’t get to Christopher that way. I couldn’t find him, couldn’t make sense of him. So I had to write him from his perspective, to try and explore moment by moment what he believed. What do any of us believe? How much of what we believe is in fact lies we tell ourselves, and how much is the truth? I’d had four precious years with Christopher and in that time he told me everything – not necessarily in the order I have written, but in the form of conversations, anecdotes, memories that I have pieced together. And to him, I was Phyllis, his Phyllis, but I guess you know that by now.
The scenes I struggled with most were the ones in which I myself featured. But I couldn’t write them from my own perspective because that would not have helped me to understand. It’s only when we remove ourselves and our own feelings that we can fully concentrate on the other person. From my point of view, there was not one hint that he was lying. Not one flicker of doubt in my mind that he was my Martin. And to understand how he convinced me of that, I had to find a way to be him, or at least process his story through him. This has been part of my therapy. If I know he loved me before he knew me, it’s because he told me so. But it wasn’t me he loved, was it? It was the ideal he made for himself of his real mother. And Rebecca did not fit his ideal – she broke it. I was not his ideal either, I don’t think. I am not anyone’s ideal. But I was all that was left.
And this is where I have to stop. If writing is therapy, then in its pages I am my own counsellor. And there are things I struggle to tell even her, my counsellor, myself. I hate myself. I hate her. I hate Phyllis. And now I must tell you the rest, the things I have not yet found the courage to say, even to her, to myself, do you see?
* * *
When Christopher came home that night, I was still awake. I was reading in bed. I’ve never slept well when David’s away – I never used to, at any rate, when we were still together. So I was reading to get myself to sleep. I wish I had been asleep. I wish I’d never heard him come in. Maybe things would have gone differently had we faced them in the morning.
I knew from the sound of him that something was wrong. There was a heaviness to the way the door clattered against the wall, the thud of his footfall in the hall, as if he had fallen. I thought he was drunk. He’d said he was going out with Amanda; I thought maybe they’d had a few too many, ended up a little tipsy or something. Good for him, I thought. It did him good to shake loose from time to time.
‘Christopher,’ I called out to him. ‘Chris, love? Everything all right?’
He didn’t answer, and this struck me as odd. He always called back a hello; in fact he used to say it was one of the best things about living with us: me calling to him, him calling back, like birds. He said it was the little things that made him feel at home.
I set my book aside and listened out. I heard the water run in the downstairs loo. I heard the chain flush, then the water again. More and more. I became convinced he was drunk. His footsteps came on the stairs then, and a moment later he was at the bedroom door.
And it’s funny, because I remember thinking: he’s never been in this room, my bedroom. We decorated years ago, and the walls are apricot and we bought a peach-coloured bedspread to match, me and David, and when you turn on the bedside light, the whole room is bathed in this pink glow. It’s heavenly; not as in the day-to-day meaning – I mean it’s like what I imagine heaven’s light to be: a warm light, a forgiving light. And into that light he came, and I cried out in shock because he looked for all the world like he’d been in an accident. His face was clean but his clothes were covered in mud and whatever blood he’d washed off came fresh then: bright red from his nose and eye.
‘Oh, Christopher, love,’ I said, kneeling up on the bed. ‘Whatever’s happened?’
He sank to his knees and began to cry. The sight of him crying is something I will never be able to shake from my mind. There are so many things that I’ll never shake from my mind.
‘Come on now, love.’ I climbed out of bed and crouched beside him and held him to me. He was sobbing like a child and I thought maybe he’d been in an accident – maybe he’d been attacked.
‘You’re safe now,’ I said. ‘Come on, my love. Come and sit with me.’
Slowly I persuaded him up onto the bed. He moved as if he were in pain and sat down next to me. I pushed at his coat and he helped me pull it from him. Underneath, his shirt was clean but he smelled of sweat, as if he’d been running. I reached over and pulled a few tissues from the box on my bedside table. I dipped them in the glass of water I always take to bed with me and pressed them to his mouth.
‘Here, my darling boy,’ I said. ‘Hold these to your lip. And your eye, love, that’s it.’