Mother Was

Mother was standing on the back doorstep, calling me in for supper. I was down the garden, putting out some food for the birds, which at least added a modicum of joy to an otherwise depressing scene in a garden that had never had much in the way of tender loving care.

I looked across to The Patch, which had always mystified me. This was an area of bare soil, about the same size as might have been occupied by a garden shed or a small greenhouse, but there had never been either of these during the 15 years of my existence.

Nothing grew on The Patch, not even weeds. I had tried to brighten things up by planting a few bulbs, but nothing ever came up. My efforts at growing radishes and leeks had all been complete failures. We had no pets, but the cats that came into our garden, and the occasional dog that broke through our apology for a fence, all avoided The Patch, either for digging holes or doing their business.

Even the birds, who were happy to take breadcrumbs off what pretended to be a lawn, never hopped on to The Patch to take any that might fall there.

I had mentioned The Patch to some of my friends at school, who had plenty of ideas about what might account for its strange properties. There was an ancient curse on it, one of them said, the result of terrible crimes that happened centuries ago, when Laburnum Avenue was the site of a grim castle owned by an evil baron whose victims had been burned at the stake on this very spot.

I even went to the library to see if there had ever been a castle here at any time, but it appears that this area had always been farmland before being taken for housing back in the 1920s.

One of my friends reckoned that there was a body buried in The Patch, maybe more than one, and it was ghostly apparitions that made it what it was. Only today this friend had even suggested that I should get a spade and start digging for evidence. I wondered how I was going to explain that to Mother if I actually did so.

There were just the two of us living here, and that had always been the case for as long as I could remember. I had no brothers or sisters, and I had never known my father, who had been lost at sea in a yachting accident very soon after I was born. Mother had never remarried, or shown any sign of wanting another partner.

She could in no sense be regarded as a brilliant mother, although she let me get on with just about everything I wanted to do, which was fine by me. She wasn’t around much – always there to cook my meals and that was about it. She was at work during the day and usually went out in the evenings, only coming home after I had gone to bed. It was a lifestyle that suited both of us.

I sat at the dining table and had just started to eat when there was a knock at the door. Mother went to answer it, and was clearly shocked by the sight of the person who stood outside. I heard her say, “What the Hell are you doing here?” but could not hear the reply.

The dining room door opened and Mother ushered a man towards where I sat. He was tall, gaunt and balding, reminding me strongly of the farmer in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” painting. When Mother stood next to him I could easily see her as the farmer’s wife. 

The man ignored me, but said to Mother: “We must talk. Now. Alone.”

I had no choice but to leave the room. I reached for a drawer in a chest against the wall, explaining that I wanted to take a radio with me to my room. The man nodded at this, clearly reckoning that if I was listening to music I wouldn’t be eavesdropping on their conversation.

What I actually took with me was one half of my walkie-talkie set. I turned the other half to “on” and left the drawer slightly open, unseen by either of the others. This business sounded important and I saw no point in missing out on anything.

What I heard was a lot more than just important. It was dynamite.

“The Boy suspects something” said the man.

"What do you mean?” said Mother. “We’ve always been so careful.”

“Someone I know down the pub is the father of one of the Boy’s schoolmates. Of course, this man has no idea who I am, but he started telling me that his son had been told by his friend that he was going to buy a spade and start digging for a body in his garden. From the details he gave it could only have been this garden. The guy seemed to think that this was all some huge joke – he was laughing fit to burst, but he had had a few by then.”

“He could have been right”, said Mother. “I saw the Boy looking long and hard at The Patch this evening. I’ll bet that’s what he had in mind.

“We’ve got to stop him”, she said. “We’ll both be in trouble if the body ever comes up”.

“You mean you’ll be in trouble”, said the man. “I’m at the bottom of the English Channel, if you remember, along with your twin sister if I recall. How naughty of me to go sailing away with my wife’s twin, leaving wife and baby son at home. How unfortunate that the yacht was run down in the night by an oil tanker and no trace of it ever found.

“It was quite a neat trick for you to assume her identity ever since and carry on living as a grieving widow. Not even your parents noticed the switch.”

“So what do we do?” Mother asked – or, from what I had just heard, was this my mother at all?”

What came next was even more shocking.

“We’ll have to arrange another little accident”, said the man. “It sounds as though he intends to buy a spade after school tomorrow and start digging when you’re not around. He’ll head off towards town down a main road that he’ll have to cross. I’ll steal a car, run him down at high speed, then drive off and torch the car. I’m dead already, so I can’t be traced. 

“If the Boy dies straight away, all well and good. If not, you’ll be able to visit him in hospital and finish the job if you’ve still got some of the stuff left that you used on your sister.”

“I probably have”, said the woman I should now refer to as my aunt. “It was pretty powerful, which is why The Patch is the way it is to this day.”

I’m sure they had plenty more to say to each other, but I had heard enough. I was in danger, and had to escape. I packed some necessaries in my backpack, intending to head for my grandparents’ house after slipping out my bedroom window and down a drainpipe. I had every intention of visiting the Police Station as my first destination.

I now knew so much more than I had done only a few minutes before. I knew that I had been sold a lie for all my young life, that I had a father after all, although he was an evil scumbag, and – of course – I knew for certain exactly where Mother was.

© John Welford