Gravity's Chain by Alan Goodwin Page B

large by stress. In contrast to the chaos of the Roberts’ house, I returned to the maudlin silence of my home. I had lived in the red brick bungalow all my life. It was square and functional with a back lawn that sloped down to thick hedges. The garden was useless for playing with balls, which always rolled down and lodged in the sharp lower branches of the bushes, but it was ideal for the re-enactment of siege warfare. As a child, under a fierce summer sun I would play the crusader knight attacking a desert fortress. With plastic sword I would slay Ottomans on the deck battlements and gainpossession of the flowerpots by slicing off the head of the last defender.
    I was standing on that slope the day Dad came to tell me Mum had left. He stood there, suddenly brittle in my memory, beckoning me to his side. Awkwardly he put a hand on my shoulder and patted me as though that act alone might soften the impact of what he had to say. I cried until he told me he thought she would be home by the weekend and she was just tired and needed time to rest. I still don’t know if he believed that to be true, or whether he just wanted to protect me. Maybe he just wanted me to stop crying. I can understand that: seeing me so distraught couldn’t have helped him to cope with his own grief. Whatever he thought, though, I’m sure he never contemplated the possibility that neither of us would ever see her again. If he’d known that, I think he would simply have given up then rather than slowly sliding down the following years as it dawned on us both that she was never coming home and we would never know what had driven her away.
    At first I assumed it was my fault. Who else made her tired? What mother could leave her child unless the child deserved to be left? Perhaps she couldn’t cope with my precocious talents. Dad ignored them, but did Mum just up and leave? However, as I grew older and became aware of what adults are capable of inflicting on one another I started to blame Dad as well. For exactly what I was unsure, but I imagined awful scenes of abuse behind closed doors. But I never blamed Mum for going.
    Christmas dinner passed with little celebration. Dad and I shared a simple meal, a bottle of wine and long periods of silence broken by brief conversations like sporadic gunfire on a sleepy night at the Western Front. After the meal he poured himselfa whisky, which he drank in two gulps, then poured another, which he drank nearly as quickly again. I’d rarely seen him have more than a glass of wine at a time before. By evening he’d drunk half a bottle of whisky and his cheeks were flushed red. I shared a couple of drinks with him and smiled the inept smile of the half drunk.
    â€˜Your mum never liked me drinking.’
    â€˜Right,’ I replied, my usual response to one of his brief remarks. Inside, though, I felt as though a bomb detonated. This was information on an unprecedented scale, even if it had been delivered as though reporting the weather.
    â€˜It seemed wrong to change the habit once she’d gone. You had enough on your plate, what with her going like that.’ He spoke with precision, as though he’d brooded on this conversation for years and now that he had finally spoken wanted to be sure what he said was correct.
    â€˜I never remember you drinking more than a glass.’
    â€˜I used to keep the whisky in the shed.’
    â€˜What about at the bach?’
    â€˜In the boat shed.’
    â€˜And Mum never knew?’
    He just shrugged his shoulders at the question. ‘I don’t know for sure. She never said anything, but that’s not the same thing, is it?’
    â€˜No, it’s not.’
    He caught the hard edge to my reply. ‘It’s not why she left, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
    His offhand remark angered me. How dare he make such presumptions? ‘How do you know?’ I asked with some trepidation despite my