‘Kenny, no!’ shouted Doreen finally. She came towards us and tried to grab his arm. He swivelled around and her cheek took the brunt of the back of his hand. It sent her sprawling to the bare floorboards.
‘Leave her alone, you bastard!’ I yelled before he punched me in the stomach, winding me, and then clamped me tighter so I struggled to breathe.
‘Stop it, you’re hurting him,’ pleaded Doreen, smearing a trickle of blood from her lip across a ghostly pale face.
‘Maybe this’ll teach him a lesson,’ he replied, pulling his arm back to punch me again.
‘You can’t do that to your own son!’ she screamed.
He hesitated for a moment before letting me drop to a heap on the floor.
‘I told you then to get rid of him,’ he fired back before storming out of the dining room. The front door slammed as I fought for breath, and time temporarily stood still.
‘Why did you say that?’ I gasped at last, utterly confused.
‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed.
‘He isn’t my father – Arthur’s my dad.’
‘You have two, Simon. I just wanted you to get to know each other.’
Doreen attempted an explanation but I refused to listen. The truth was out, and so was I. I hadn’t even unpacked my suitcase when I picked it up and left. She ran up the street behind me, begging me to stay, naively believing Kenneth and I could work through our differences. But, as always, she was fooling herself.
Arthur knew something had gone terribly wrong when I called from a telephone box at Northampton station, begging him to pick me up the same day he’d dropped me off. But he never enquired as to what had happened and I never volunteered a reason why. I think he knew but, secretly, he was just grateful I’d returned to him.
I didn’t reveal to anyone the truth of my heritage. I locked Kenneth in a box inside my head and I only thought about him again when Doreen reappeared a few months later on the eve of my fourteenth birthday. As three disconnected souls gathered in our hallway, Arthur and I knew we were too exhausted to go through the charade again.
I ran to hide in my bedroom without speaking to her and sat on the floor, my back pressed against the door, listening. Downstairs, Arthur turned down her request for forgiveness. She begged with all her heart, but for the first time, he refused to relent. Eventually the front door closed and he retired to the kitchen, quietly weeping.
Later that night, I left the house and found Doreen waiting for me at the end of the garden. She thrust a green box into my hand.
‘This is for you,’ she said calmly, and tried to force a smile. ‘Always remember your mum loves you, no matter how stupid she is.’ Inside the box lay a handsome gold Rolex watch. By the time I looked up, Doreen was already walking away. I didn’t try to stop her.
4.40 p.m.
My feet must have grazed every road and cobbled avenue in the East End before I chanced upon where my mother once lived. But the square’s name wasn’t the only thing to have changed over time.
A looming tower of concrete flats had ousted her row of dilapidated houses, casting a bleak shadow over an already grey landscape. Everything I’d deplored during my fateful last visit had been demolished and replaced by a more contemporary, but equally hideous, version of the same thing.
Disappointed, I gravitated towards a greasy spoon café to contrive a new plan of action. I ordered, and an elderly waitress with a raven-black beehive and a soup-stained apron carried a cup of tea to my table.
‘Excuse me, are you from around here?’ I asked as she shuffled away.
‘All my life, darlin’,’ she muttered over her shoulder.
‘I don’t suppose you remember a woman who used to live in a house where those flats are now? Doreen Nicholson?’
She stopped, turned around. ‘Hmm.’ She thought. ‘I knew a Doreen, but Nicholson weren’t her last name. What does she look like?’
My father had never taken a photograph of my mother – well, if he had, none had ever hung on a wall inside our house. I could remember how she smelled, sounded, laughed and sang. I could picture the hint of grey hiding in the roots of her hair, how her large gold earrings made her lobes droop and the Bardot-like gap between her two front teeth. But for years I had struggled to put the pieces of a mental photofit together to create a whole woman.
‘Ash-blonde hair, around five foot four, olive-green eyes, quite a loud laugh. She lived here about twenty years ago.’
The waitress headed towards a wall of framed photographs behind the counter, and unhooked one from the wall. ‘This her?’ she asked, handing it to me. Instantly I recognised one of the four women standing in their uniforms around a table.
‘Yes, that’s her.’ I smiled and swallowed hard.
‘Yeah, darlin’, I knew old Dor. She lived around the square on and off for a while. Worked here with me, ooh, a good few years back now. Poor cow.’
Goosebumps spread across my arms. ‘Did something happen to her?’
‘Yeah, she passed away, darlin’. About fifteen years back.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘That bloody fella of hers gave her one pasting too many. Bounced her head off the walls, the Old Bill said. He was a vicious bastard . . . Gave her brain damage. She was in a coma and on machines for weeks before she went.’
I closed my eyes and exhaled as I muttered his name. ‘Kenneth.’
‘Yeah, that’s the one. How did you know her then?’
‘She was my mother.’
The waitress put on the glasses hanging from a copper chain around her neck and squinted. Then she sat herself down opposite me with a thump.
‘Well, blow me, of course you are . . . You’re Simon, ain’t you? You have her eyes.’ I was surprised she knew of my existence, let alone my name. ‘Ooh darlin’, Dor said you was a handsome little bugger,’ she cackled as I offered an embarrassed smile.
‘She talked about you a lot, you know. She had a baby photo of you in a little locket round her neck. Well, she did till he made her pawn it. Never forgave herself for letting you go.’
For a fleeting moment, I felt warm inside.
‘What happened to Kenneth?’
‘Locked him up again, didn’t they? Told the coppers she went for him and it were self-defence, but the jury didn’t believe him. Got banged up in the Scrubs for life this time.’
The waitress introduced herself as Maisy, and lit an unfiltered roll-up cigarette as she filled me in on the missing pieces of my mother’s life. She recalled how Doreen and Kenneth began courting in their teens. When she fell pregnant with me, her parents and Kenneth had insisted she have an abortion. But when Doreen stubbornly refused, he pummelled her in the hope nature would force her to miscarry. Even then, I was a resilient soul.