Short Story: Love Hurts

Short Story: Love Hurts

Helen dips the spoon into the jar, twists it to collect the honey and lets a long, golden teardrop fall onto the bread. She slides the knife across the glistening surface. The small Sabatier has a wide blade, perfect for the fat smooth flow of the spread. Honey has always been Ben’s favourite. It was one of the first things she’d tried him on when she began to wean him off the breast.

Eighteen and a bit years ago.

She smiles as her eyes lift to look through into the dining room with its big bay window. A November afternoon. The walls glowing with the warmth of the terra-cotta colour she’d chosen for them, the greens and golds of her paintings like splashes of summer. Outside, the sky hanging between pale blue and the peach wash of the sunset’s beginning. And, in his usual place on the window seat, Ben in silhouette. Six feet two of him, folded into a corner of the sky. She shakes her head, marvelling yet again that she had carried that tall, handsome man inside her.

After it happened, she was interviewed by a man and two women.

‘He was never any problem,’ she told them. ‘Oh, I was sick in the third and fourth months. Backache, too. But it was nothing. Just normal.’

‘What about later?’ asked the man. His name was Fraser. He was young but already beginning to go bald. Not like Ben, with his thick, black thatch. The girls loved …

‘It was so sweet when I started feeling him moving and prodding inside. He was so gentle. Never hurt me. Just tickled really.’

She laughed, reached across and tapped Fraser on the arm.

‘You know, I’m sorry for you,’ she said.

‘Really?’

‘Yes. You’ll never have a baby inside you.’

‘No fear of that,’ said Fraser.

He smiled, but Helen didn’t notice. She was lost in thoughts of Ben, of how, in the darkness inside her, she’d made the bones and tissues of a man. Fraser studied her, saw an image of his mother or one of his aunts, only more refined. They didn’t have her quiet careful tones, each word sculpted by her mouth, correct.

Helen was proud of her taste, proud of the room to which she’d invited them, with its elegant prints and Monart glass. She’d settled Fraser in a velvet-covered armchair and gestured for the two women to sit on the chaise longue. She, of course, was on the window seat. She rarely sat anywhere else.

‘He was only four when Iain left us, you know. Four,’ she repeated, as if to herself. ‘I was sitting here with Ben, reading a story.’

She looked down at the rich, tasselled cushion on the box seat and reached out a hand to stroke it.

‘He loved it here; it was our favourite place.’

The others waited, but she’d drifted away into memories.

‘Tell us about Iain,’ said Fraser.

The name brought a quick, sudden frown and a shake of the head.

‘He just came in and said that he was going. That was it. Mind you, it was no surprise. Made no difference to me. But for poor wee Ben … What a cruel thing to do, take away a wee boy’s father to spend more time with a receptionist.’

There was a curl in her lip as she spoke the word. She leaned forward again, wanting them to understand.

‘I was so angry. I said some … awful things.’

‘You did some … awful things, too, didn’t you?’ said Fraser.

She picked at the material of the cushion and was silent for a moment. Fraser’s voice was gentle as he went on.

‘He had to spend some time in the hospital, didn’t he?’

She looked at him with sad, puzzled eyes.

‘I couldn’t help myself. He just held Ben out in front of him and said, “This is what it’s all about. This.” Fancy that. Calling his own son “This”. I had to stop him saying things like that. Especially in front of Ben.’

‘What did you do?’ asked Fraser.

Helen gave a little shake of her head and made some punching and striking gestures against the seat she was sitting on. They were sharp, hard. For a moment, she was lost again, this time in a memory which had no sweetness. She suddenly became very still then looked up at Fraser again.

‘He didn’t need to leave, you see. He’d already been spending more time with her than with us.’

Her face suddenly clouded, a little spark of anger flicked in her eyes.

‘He even said it was my fault. Said I thought more of Ben than I did of him. “Transferred my affections”, that’s the way he put it. Ridiculous. Jealous of his own son.’

Fraser noticed that her fingers were now picking at the hem of her jumper as she spoke. Fast, angry movements. She took a tissue from the small box beside her and dabbed at her eyes.

‘Men don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Carrying a child, giving it your own flesh, putting up with the pain of delivery. Men can’t have that sort of … bond with their children.’ Her anger melted into a smile. ‘Poor things. It’s your loss.’

Her face turned to the two women, smiling a sort of complicity with them.

‘Can we talk about Ben?’ asked Fraser very gently, aware that his words were an intrusion.

She puts the slice of bread on the plate and reaches for another. Again the spoon dips, the golden blob falls. Beyond Ben’s dark shape, outside the window, the peach wash has thickened to a buttermilk gold.

She feels the joy of her overwhelming love for Ben. Remembers teaching him to read, soothing him through aches, pains and illnesses, leaving him at the school gate that first, agonising day, watching him throw himself into tackles on the football field. She aches with the pride of seeing her son grow from funny, stumbling toddler to archetypal schoolboy with eyes full of mischief, and then on into a youth who moved with grace, rhythm and a beauty that would have been insolent had it not always been qualified by that lopsided grin and his affection for her.

‘About Ben,’ Fraser insisted, the gentleness still in his voice.

‘I never deceived myself,’ she said, with a shake of the head. ‘I knew I’d have to share him. He was such a handsome boy. I knew they’d start chasing him and coveting him and wooing him.’

She made ‘coveting’ and ‘wooing’ sound pornographic.

‘I knew there’d be girlfriends and … a wife. But, you know, he told me all about them. We’d sit at the window here and he’d tell me about kissing them and ask all sorts of questions. I was his friend as well as his mother, you see.’ She gave a little giggle. ‘Like the first time he touched a girl’s breast. It was an accident. He stretched across to take a book from the desk beside her and she moved and he suddenly felt … “this lump” he called it.’

Fraser smiled his understanding although he found it all rather genteel. His own first contact with a breast had been very deliberate and given both himself and Lorna, whose breast it was, the biggest thrill of their twelve-year-old lives. If he closed his eyes, he could still feel the shape in the palm of his left hand.

‘There was none of the birds and bees nonsense,’ Helen went on. ‘It was much more sophisticated than that. He used to tell me the sort of things girls said and did and I’d explain to him what they really meant. All the little secrets that women have. Even when we’re very young.’

Once again, she sought the agreement of the two women. They contented themselves with sympathetic little smiles. The older of the two, Anne Baxter, was about the same age as Helen. The younger, Gillian McKay, had only just turned thirty.

‘Tricky business, sex education,’ said Fraser, dragging himself back from memories of Lorna on the grass in Hazlehead Park.

‘Oh, he’d never make love to any of them,’ said Helen, suddenly very anxious to correct Fraser’s mistake. ‘That was out of the question. I mean, the time I’m talking about, he was only fifteen or sixteen. He knew it could ruin his life.’

Fraser’s virginity had been lost one evening with Lorna when they were both fourteen. Penetration and climax had been more or less simultaneous. For him, at least. But Ben, it seemed, had had to carry the curiosity and the stigma with him well into his teens. Helen had paraded before him the skulking monsters of unwanted pregnancy and disease. He was never in any doubt as to the limits of his freedom.

The changes began in the middle of April. He met Alice at a party, told Helen about her and the two of them laughed and made obvious jokes about Wonderland and looking-glasses. But by the end of May, the words had stopped flowing and Helen found that she was having to prompt Ben to confide in her. She became used to seeing the dark figure hunched day after day on the window seat, clutched around silences that had never been part of his make-up before.

Her eyes lift to Ben and the sky beyond him, where the gold is being burnished to the darker, copper tones of early evening.

‘It was wonderful this summer,’ she said. ‘He’d been grumpy, hardly speaking to me. Then, suddenly, one night, he came home and gave me a huge kiss. Put his arms round me and said, “Sorry, Mum. I’ve been a pain, haven’t I?” It made me so happy. After that, it was just like old times. Sitting in the window together, chatting, laughing.’

She paused. Her voice dropped.

‘Then he brought Alice home. I met her.’

She was almost whispering, feeling again the twisting inside her at Alice’s loveliness. Skin like an angel, wide hazel eyes and a smile that promised secret things. She’d been sweet, but Helen had heard her laughter when she was out of the room and felt that there was a sort of triumph in it. Ben was besotted with her. It annoyed Helen to see him jump up to get her cups of coffee and glasses of wine. He seemed not to realise how it should have been he, not Alice, who sat back to be waited on and adored.

They’d had several picnics on hot, yellow days drumming with bees, and then came home in the evenings to sit and watch the heavy dusk creep over the garden. And Helen knew that she was in the way. Their looks and touches were reined in by her presence, deliberately deflected because their intimacy would leave her stranded and foolish. It was a gentle rejection, one she accepted without distress because it was balanced by the weight of Ben’s happiness.

‘It was frightening how quickly he fell in love,’ said Helen, taking them by surprise. ‘He burned with it, right from the start. Poor Ben. She didn’t deserve it. Oh, she was pretty and nice enough but …’

Her fingers had stopped their clutching and were now stroking the material of her jumper with little caresses.

‘It changed him so much. Somehow, he … wasn’t my Ben any more. Out of reach. And the tantrums … I’d say just the slightest thing, the most innocent remark and he’d jump up and shout and fling himself about. Taut as a drum, he was. Only interested in one thing. Alice.’

The caresses became little tappings. Fraser noticed how she was pronouncing the name with a different intonation, hissing hard on the final sibilant.

‘I tried to get him onto other things when she wasn’t there but he told me I didn’t understand. Have you got any children?’

The question took them all by surprise.

‘Three,’ said Baxter. ‘Two boys and a girl.’

McKay just shook her head.

‘Two wee girls. Little madams, the pair of them,’ said Fraser.

Helen smiled and they saw how sad it was.

‘You love your children so much, don’t you? You can’t help it,’ she said. ‘And you do everything you can for them.’

She stopped tapping her fingers and seemed to settle into a complete stillness.

‘That’s why I asked her to come and see me. Alice, I mean. September, it was. The twelfth. We sat in the window here. Ben was away. We had a long talk.’

She stopped. They waited and Fraser was eventually forced to ask, ‘What about?’ She looked at him, the smile long gone, her eyes narrower.

‘Ben,’ she replied. ‘I told her she was hurting him, making him suffer. I asked her if she loved him and she just shrugged. Yes, shrugged. You see, she didn’t really care about Ben. I wanted to talk to her about what was happening, get her to see how obsessed Ben was, get her to love him like … well, like I did. But she couldn’t. I could see that.’

She stopped, the stillness still gripping her.

‘So what did you do?’

Helen gave a deep, angry sigh.

‘Oh, there were all sorts of things I wanted to do. If she couldn’t love my Ben the way he deserved, well …’

Fraser saw a tear in her left eye. It didn’t form fully enough to brim over onto her cheek but stayed there, shining.

So what did you do?’ he asked.

‘I told her lies.’

‘Lies?’

She gave a little nod.

‘About Ben.’

They waited but she was silent again.

‘What sort of lies?’ asked Fraser, his voice almost a whisper.

She looked at each of them in turn, then down at her hands again.

‘Epileptic,’ she said.

Fraser looked at his two colleagues. Both shrugged.

‘Epileptic?’ he said.

‘Yes. I told her that’s what Ben was.’

Fraser just nodded.

‘He wasn’t, was he?’

‘No. He’s perfect.’

The image of her beautiful Ben brought a little smile to her mouth. The tear still trembled.

‘I just wanted to frighten her off. I told her that he shouldn’t get excited.’

Fraser heard the catch in her throat. McKay reached across, took a tissue from the box and handed it to her.

‘I described what happened when he had fits,’ Helen went on. ‘It was horrible. Not like my Ben. Mouth foaming, limbs twitching, eyes staring up into his own head.’

She pushed the tissue hard against each eye in turn, then shuddered.

‘And she believed me, the stupid girl. How could she? How could she believe such nonsense? You see, she didn’t know him at all. If she did, she’d have realised it was lies.’

She dabbed fiercely at her nose, controlling the little sobs that had come into her voice.

‘But you must have wanted her to believe you,’ said Fraser.

‘Of course,’ she said immediately. ‘It was all for her. I told her that. I said Ben would always need looking after and that she wouldn’t want to …’

She gave a huge, fierce sigh, forcing her erratic breathing back to normal. They waited, watching her hands clutching open and shut.

‘I made her promise not to tell him I’d said anything,’ she said at last. ‘But she must have said something.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Fraser.

Helen waved her hand, a feeble, lost little gesture.

‘He started crying. Ben. I could hear him. Almost every night, sobbing away in his room. He tried to muffle the noise but I heard it. Through the wall.’

Once again she stopped, the echoes of Ben’s crying still deep inside her.

‘I tried to ask him what was wrong. But he just … said nothing. Wanted to be left alone.’

She shook herself, trying to shrug off the memories.

‘There was no need to ask him. I knew. I’d seen Alice with another boy in Union Street. Folded around him. Disgusting. Poor Ben. He was always phoning her, pleading with her. It broke my heart to hear him. All for a stupid, feckless girl.’

Suddenly, the tears came back, welling, unstoppable. She spoke through them, her words pulled apart by sobs.

‘One night, I was driving home from work. And there he was. My poor Ben. Just… just standing there under the trees. The ones opposite her house. All alone. Looking up at her windows.’

This memory was too much. As she gave in to her crying, McKay got up, sat on the window seat beside her and put her arm around her shoulders. Helen accepted the comfort but, very quickly, straightened herself and made an obvious effort to regain her composure. McKay stayed on the seat beside her and Helen shifted slightly, re-establishing a space between them.

‘I had to stop that,’ she said. ‘That misery.’

‘So what happened?’ asked Fraser.

Another deep, controlling breath.

‘It was Halloween. Those stupid orange pumpkins with their eyes and grins and candles. I phoned her. At home. I was going to tell her parents if they answered. But they didn’t. It was her.’

‘And what did you want to do?’

‘I wanted to stop it. Wanted to stop Ben’s pain. Wanted her to know how much she was hurting him.’

‘Is that what you told her?’

Helen gave a bitter little laugh.

‘Oh yes. And she said she was sorry. Said she’d tried to make a clean break but that Ben became greedy, possessive. Yes, she said that. I tried to stay calm, try to make her see, but … I lost patience with her in the end. She wasn’t talking about Ben. The boy she was describing was … well, childish, selfish. … Spoiled. It wasn’t my Ben.’

A heaviness settled in Fraser as he listened. He just had to wait as she worked through it all. There was nothing he could say. He’d seen the photographs; the blood, the young body spread-eagled, the cuts and slashes in the chest and shoulders, the deep wounds in hands and arms that had been raised to stop the assault. She needed to talk.

‘So how did you leave it with Alice?’ he asked.

‘I don’t want to talk about her,’ said Helen, with a dismissive wave of her hand. ‘She was nothing. A terrible mistake, that’s all. She had no right.’

‘But did she …?’

Fraser didn’t get the chance to finish his question.

‘Ben didn’t come home that evening, you know,’ said Helen. ‘He phoned me, very late. He sounded drunk, but he couldn’t have been. Ben didn’t drink. He did say some very … unkind things. I knew he’d be sorry when he thought about them later. They hurt me, of course, but not deeply. He wouldn’t do that.’

Her hands were moving back and forth over her skirt. Fraser couldn’t guess at the sights she saw as she looked down.

‘What happened when he did come home?’ he asked at last.

Helen snorted and shook her head. Once again, they’d reached the point at which the clear thread of her narrative frayed.

‘He just spoke nonsense,’ she said, her voice angry. ‘Wanting to leave home, things like that.’

Her face was turned away from all of them. A stillness came over her and, when she looked at them again, it was obvious that she’d changed. Her eyes had died. The Helen they’d been talking to so far was Ben’s mother; the caring, loving soul of the years they’d had together. But this woman was the Helen that had taken over that evening in early November.

That was when Ben said he hated her, that she’d got rid of Alice and ruined his life. He was out of his mind with grief, shouting and swearing at her, accusing her. It was too much for Helen. He was a stranger. She left the room, crying, and stood sobbing in the kitchen as he continued to scream his hate at her. In the end, he followed her, called her names that sliced into her, saying that he was leaving and that he’d be glad when he never had to see her again. He even grabbed her arms and spun her round to face him.

‘You don’t even understand what you’ve done,’ he screamed, his face red, his eyes wild.

She shook her head.

‘You’re evil. A selfish, evil bitch.’

He pushed her back against the cabinets.

‘You think you did it from love. You’re wrong. Love doesn’t do that. Hate does that. Hate. That’s all you understand. Dad was right.’

He turned and stamped out, leaving the words spinning in her head. She shook herself to get rid of them, to shake away the rude, angry monster that had taken Ben’s place. She had to stop the words and the fury, to get rid of the impostor who’d usurped her boy. She picked up the Sabatier knife, ran through to the window seat and started hitting Ben again and again.

When the police responded to her call, they found her calm once more. Ben’s body lay along the window seat, his face turned towards the garden, his blood pooling deeply in a dark, sticky layer around him.

Helen has stopped spreading the honey. She picks up the plate of bread, carries it through to the dining room and puts it on the window seat. The copper has become black edging on the clouds strung across a sky oozing with the red of the disappearing sun. The plate is piled high with bread off which the honey flows, its amber darkening as it seeps over the edge onto the walnut surround. Helen turns to go back to the kitchen.

Fraser didn’t think she was a danger to anyone. She could easily be in one of the bigger wards. But her quiet, determined actions might eventually unsettle the others and, for the moment, he wasn’t prepared to take the chance. When he, Dr Baxter and Nurse McKay had left her room and locked the door, he’d stopped to watch her through the small observation panel. The walls of the room were a dull cream, unrelieved by any colours. Helen looked round at them, smiled, then started the routine which he’d seen her follow over and over again. Her hand would reach forward and begin to make motions as if she were spreading butter. When she’d finished, she would walk to a corner of the room, the same one every time, and stand looking at the wall. She’d stay there for several minutes, then return to her bed and start all over again. These were the actions that filled all her days.