The first of her many swift exits began with a stay at a cousin’s house in the Midlands. There, Doreen met Arthur and he fell hopelessly in love with her. And aware she was pregnant with another man’s child, he offered to take care of us both. It was all the security an unwed mother-to-be with a bastard inside her needed. Doreen had love for her new husband, but he was unable to capture the heart of a conflicted creature. And after I was born, she knew a sedentary family life would never equal a passionate one.
So she returned to Kenneth, alone. The abuse continued, and when it became intolerable, she rotated between the two men in her life.
‘Please don’t blame her, luv, she couldn’t stop herself,’ added Maisy, despairingly. ‘She was a smashing girl, but she had a self-destructive streak. I got a feeling her old dad messed with her when she was a little ’un, if you know what I mean. I don’t reckon she thought she deserved to be loved. She tried so hard to make Kenny a better fella, but he was born evil. You can’t change nature.’
No, Maisy, you can’t, I thought, catching my reflection in the café window.
Doreen reappeared in London for her final swansong, soon after we’d rejected her. ‘She had nowhere left to go,’ said Maisy. ‘She knew Kenneth was gonna be the death of her, so she just held on as long as she could.’
And after the inevitable happened, her friends were unaware of where Arthur and I lived. With no savings to pay for a funeral, they clubbed together to offer her a respectable send-off instead of a pauper’s grave.
‘I still think about your old mum,’ added Maisy, her eyes moistening. ‘Always wished I could have done more to help her.’
‘So do I, Maisy; so do I.’
7.50 p.m.
The grounds of Bow Cemetery were laid out in square blocks, making my mother’s plot easy to locate. Her name, the years of her birth and death, and ‘God Bless’ were all her substitute family could afford to have engraved on the concrete headstone. ‘Laing,’ I repeated out loud. I hadn’t even known her surname.
I tore out buttercups and long grasses and smoothed down stray pebbles with my hands. Then I lay on a bench close to her and soaked up the troubled tranquillity around me. I made up my mind to keep her company that night – my mother had spent too many evenings on her own.
My two fathers lived in contradictory worlds, but shared common ground when it came to her. They’d loved her too much but had handled her rejection in very different ways.
Doreen and Kenneth. I’d fought to be so different from the people who’d created me, but I’d ended up exactly the same.
8 June, 3.10 p.m.
‘What the fuck do you want?’ he began with a derisive snort.
I didn’t reply. I sat calm and motionless, my palms face down on the table, staring at him, unafraid.
‘Well? You expecting an apology or something? ’Cos you ain’t gonna get one.’
Kenneth Jagger had planted himself behind a metal table in the visitors’ room in Wormwood Scrubs prison, his arms folded defiantly. Only there was little for him to be defiant about, because he was a different man to the one I’d last encountered.
A merciless cancer had ravaged his bones and cut his body weight in half. His cheeks were sunken and hollow and chemotherapy had reduced his teeth to brown crumbs. The tattoos that once shone proudly on his tough, leathery skin had blurred and sagged as the muscles beneath them deflated. Doreen’s name and the heart were barely distinguishable under a layer of raised welts, like he’d tried to cut her out of him with a blade. Eyes that once craved esteem were now drained of hope.
‘Don’t waste my time,’ he spat.
‘You don’t have much left,’ I replied.
He shot me a look that would have petrified the thirteen-year-old me. ‘Last chance. Why are you here?’
I was there because I wanted to know if my rotten apple hadn’t fallen far from his decaying tree. I’d dedicated much energy to trying to erase our biological link, but in the end, I was a chip off the old block.
‘What did it feel like, killing my mother?’ I asked.
He paused. Of all the things I could have asked, that wasn’t the question he’d expected. ‘Why did you do it?’ or ‘What’s wrong with you?’ possibly. But not an enquiry into the emotions involved in severing a human life.
‘It was self-defence,’ he finally replied. ‘The bitch tried to knife me.’
‘That wasn’t what I asked.’
He frowned, puzzled as to what to make of his flesh and blood. So I repeated myself.
‘I asked you what it felt like to kill my mother.’
‘Why do you wanna know?’
‘I just do.’
His faded, squinting eyes burrowed deep into mine. ‘What happened to you?’ he asked.
‘I’m not scared of you anymore.’
‘Well, you fucking should be.’
I shook my head. ‘Kenneth, look at you – you’re no threat to anyone. Your time has been and gone. You’re a pathetic, dying old man who’ll only ever be remembered for bringing misery to people’s lives. Now answer my question please. What did it feel like, killing my mother?’
At first, he tried to pretend my words hadn’t rung true, but his fallen expression betrayed him. From the corner of my eye, I watched the second hand of a wall clock rotate twice before he spoke again. And when he did, his bravado crumpled like a house of cards. His shoulders slumped and his arms unfolded. It was as if suddenly he was too tired to fight against the world any longer, like he’d realised I was the only person left who cared what he had to say. And he was almost grateful for my ear.
‘It was the worst feeling in the world,’ he said at last, his voice ravaged. ‘And I’ve done a lot of bad shit in my time.’ He cleared his throat and raised his eyes to mine. ‘It was like someone else was killing her and I was watching but I couldn’t stop them. I loved her so much, but I never really had her. She was gonna leave me again and find you.’
‘Why?’
‘It tore her up not being part of your life. I told her she weren’t going, but she wouldn’t listen. My Dor never bloody listened. She started packing her bags instead.’ His eyes became watery but no tears fell. ‘I grabbed her and pulled her away, but she reckoned she’d “wasted too much of her life” on me. She was always saying it, but this time she meant it. So I smacked her one, and once I started, I just kept going. I couldn’t let you have her.’
I sat in silence and digested Kenneth’s words. I felt no anger towards him – I’d invested too much time in hating the woman I’d built a life with to have any spare. Instead, I understood him.
‘Thank you,’ I said, finally. ‘I have something for you.’
I glanced around the room to ensure I wouldn’t be seen by a guard, then rolled up my shirtsleeve, unclasped the watch Doreen had once given me and pushed it across the table towards him. He covered it with his hand.
‘Take it.’
‘I don’t want it.’
‘She bought it for you, correct?’
‘No, I got it myself.’ I assumed that meant he’d stolen it.
‘And she took it, without you knowing, to give to me.’
His head fell and he looked away. I realised I’d been wrong to presume.
‘You wanted her to give it to me?’ I asked. He remained inert. ‘But you disliked me . . . You wanted her to terminate me.’
‘I didn’t wanna kid because I didn’t wanna turn them into someone like me. I ain’t got anything to show for my life but you. You’re the only thing I’ve ever done that was any good.’
I allowed him to embrace that illusion briefly before I spoke again.