Page 5 of The Perfect Son
I check the bathroom. Gold taps, a cream suite, and aubergine tiles that stretch floor to ceiling, but no jumper.
I find it in Jamie’s room. His bedroom is a mix of colors—red and blue Spider-Man bedcovers, green Ninja Turtle figures on the bookshelf, black and yellow Batman curtains, and the car rug he’s had since forever that I can’t bear to part with.
The jumper is hanging in Jamie’s wardrobe. It smells of lavender fabric conditioner. I must have washed it and forgotten; hung it up on autopilot when I was thinking of you, of us.
—
“I found it,” I pant, dashing back into the kitchen.
Jamie pulls the jumper over his head without a word.
“Ready to go?” I ask, looping my hair into a bun as I shuffle around the kitchen table to the nook by the side door where we keepthe coats and shoes. Don’t roll your eyes, but I’m still wearing a pair of your red tartan pajama bottoms.
Oh, Tessie. Really?
With the wellies and the long winter coat, it’s not that obvious. It’s only the school drop-off.
I know if I drove the few minutes down the lane to the village and the school, then I could stay in the car and wave Jamie in, and no one will see the pj bottoms, but I also know that I’m in no fit state to drive this morning. I’m in no fit state to walk either. My feet feel as though they are filled with lead, my legs with jelly.
The sun is a pale yellow but bright—a spotlight—and I squint, dipping my head and focusing my gaze on the road.
As the engine of a car roars by I have that split-second flash again, that heart-stopping what-if moment where I think about diving in front of the engine so we can be together. The feeling is gone so fast I can almost pretend it was never there. Almost.
I tuck my body nearer to Jamie, moving us both closer to the prickly hedgerows bordering both sides of the lane. The days of scooting ahead with his friends on the estate and waiting at every third lamppost are long gone.
I wish there were sidewalks.
“Stop, Tessie. Stop worrying,”you said on Jamie’s first day at his new school, and anytime in fact that I worried about all the things that might happen and all the things I had no control over, like sidewalks and plane crashes.
You took the day off and we all walked together, remember?“It’s the countryside,”you said, nudging Jamie so that both of you were laughing at me. It was a laugh to say: Silly Mummy doesn’t like walking in the road next to the cars. Silly Mummy would like sidewalksinstead of bushes. Silly Mummy wants housing estates instead of rolling farmland thick with dark mud.
“Today, Clarke Tours will be taking you on a tour of the village on your journey to school,”you said, making Jamie and me laugh with your silly tour guide voice.“There is approximately a mile between our house and the church, Hall Farm and the old school building at the other end of the village, where I went to school before they built the new one on the estate. The old building is still there, but it’s an accountancy firm now, I think. The village also boasts a post office, a vet’s, a playground, and a new housing estate.”
“New?”I scoffed.“Our Chelmsford house was new.”
“OK, so it’s not brand-new, but new for the village. It was built in the seventies. The not-so-new estate runs parallel to the old road where the Tudor houses like ours are.”
“And the cottages with hay for roofs,”Jamie piped in.
“It’s called thatch,”I said, giving his hand a gentle squeeze.
“And if you’re very lucky then I’ll take you for a packet of overpriced crisps and a hot chocolate in one of the three pubs after school.”
I rolled my eyes at Jamie’s cheer and your boyish grin.
“Try an overpriced glass of wine,”I said.
“I like your thinking, Mrs. Clarke. And if you’re very good,”you added, leaning so close to my ear that the heat of your breath tickled my skin,“I’ll let you kiss me behind the bus stop in the exact spot where I had my very first kiss. It was with a rather buxom girl by the name of Kerry Longston.”
“Oh, Mark.”I laughed.You always made me laugh.
I catch the distant smell of a bonfire drifting in the wind. It’s just a whiff, a trick of the mind perhaps, but it still tickles my lungs, and before I can stop myself I see the TV footage, I see the plane in theclear blue sky, I see the fireball. I scrunch my eyes shut as tears prick the skin beneath them. My breath comes heavy and fast.
A few more steps and we’re around the bend and the smell is gone, replaced by the dewy, cold morning.
“Mum?” Jamie’s voice floats in my periphery, distant and soft.
“I’m fine, baby,” I whisper, the umpteenth lie of the day.
