literary fiction

I have been thinking a lot recently about the writing I love. About the characters I become invested in. About the stories that develop as a natural, organic extension to these characters. Maybe that happens because I particularly feel close to those stories I write which involve single moments in the life or ‘ordinary’ people, yet which reflect something identifiable, relatable, and evoke some emotional connection with the reader.

The following short story is one which I have been fortunate enough to have had published some time ago. ‘Instinct’ is my title for the story, although it was reproduced under a different one. If you, or someone you know, has ever felt overwhelmed by being a mother, or by the expectations of being responsible for a young child and the confusing, sometimes heartbreaking emotions which can come with it, then this story may resonate with you.

Trigger warning: reference to the serious illness of a young child.

Instinct

Kieran waves at me through the window. As a matter of instinct I wave back, but my mind is a platter of ironing and unfolded washing, teatime food and the little secret I harbour deep inside my head, about the way Kieran makes me feel.

‘You just can’t face growing up, Kate, can you?’ Dad had said when I last saw him a couple of months ago. ‘You’ve got to realise that everyone has responsibilities and yours are to your family now.’

My family. Gary spends all his time at work, out of the way, probably, so I don’t start another row. I close the dustbin lid and stare with a screwed-up face at my dirty hands. I never have enjoyed getting dirty. The time Kieran had that tummy bug wrenched my stomach. And Gary came in and took over. Wonderful Gary, Superdad, again.

I return to the back door and get ready to kick off my shoes at the doorway, so I can continue with my ironing. And I won’t have to think about caring for Kieran. He’ll be occupying himself. He’s very self-sufficient like that.

I go to open the door – except it doesn’t move. I rattle the handle, but the door just doesn’t budge.

‘Mummy, look.’

I bolt back around to the window where, through it, Kieran points his chubby finger to the door. I’d left the key in the lock, I know, but I was only gone for a moment.

‘Have you touched the key, Kieran?’ I call through the window. It’s open a fraction, enough to let the steam out. I know Kieran can hear me as he’s pushing his car up and down the furrows in the doormat.

‘Kieran, can you let Mummy in, please?’ He must understand, well I know he does, but he just looks at me and smiles.

‘Let me in, Kieran.’ I can hear the tone of my voice beginning to sink to urgent depths. It must have some kind of effect inside his little brain because he reaches with his baby hand and hangs onto the key. He fiddles with it, and I can hear it jingle against the metal hoop on the key-ring.

‘Twist the key, Kieran.’

But he doesn’t. Or can’t. All I know is he leaves me there, my little boy who’s three at the weekend, who I hadn’t realised could reach the key and move it, because I wallowed in self-pity and didn’t want to see. I am left on the outside while Kieran pushes his car away from the door mat, into the centre of the kitchen.

‘Nee-nah, nee-nah.’ The toy races round the ironing board. It’s like a set of sickening still frames from a film, right in front of me each time I blink: Kieran; the car; the ironing board; the lead from the iron coiled in front of him and his imaginary police force. All I can do is play voyeur as my little boy heads straight for the wire.

A flash of an image from the mother and toddler group bites into my brain. Normally, I don’t really mix with the women there. Comparing babies’ weights, eating patterns and the best type of pushchair seems to be the main focus of their lives. I have struggled to fit in. My pushchair was third-hand, and Kieran has always had problems gaining weight since he came out of the special care unit. Nights spent asleep are still scarce, and I sometimes don’t notice that Gary has actually gone to work in the mornings until I talk and he doesn’t answer.

But I remember a couple of months ago, one mother had been absent from the usual twittering conversation. Someone had enquired where she was.

‘Oh, haven’t you heard?’ The group leader seemed genuinely delighted that someone had noticed. ‘She’s been at the Children’s Ward for the last few days. Little Nicky pulled a boiling pan over onto himself. He was burned very badly, but the pan handle imbedded itself into his head as well.’

As she ranted on, triumphant, I just remember feeling queasy at that moment, wondering how I would have felt if it had happened to Kieran. Would I have felt anything at all?

Kieran’s playing around the cord on the iron – round and round it he goes. I see his shoulders knock against it, and his right leg sticking its toes into the hoop of flex.

And, at that second, I know exactly how I would have felt if I’d been that poor, talked-about mother. I feel as if the world’s closing in around me, and all I can see is my boy, my baby, who could pull that burning metal plate on the iron onto his tiny head with one scuff of his foot across the kitchen floor.

‘Kieran.’ He looks over to me, frowning. Has he ever heard me talk gently and encouragingly to him? Maybe he hasn’t, and the thought of it makes me choke on tiny arrows that come up in my throat and force themselves out of my eyes, all wet and blinking now. ‘Sit very still. Mummy’s coming.’

I stretch my hand through the gap in the window, pushing, forcing it through and skinning my forearm on the wood. Right now, I’m grateful for the single pane of glass and the old arm mechanism. I flick it up off its peg, and my fingers tremble.

Kieran giggles. He begins to shuffle away from the cord to investigate my clanks and grunts. My hair is dangling across my face, but through it I glimpse a reflection of myself in the window. Still the same blonde hair, the same grey eyes, and the same look of fear that I had when they told me that Kieran had only a few years to live.

‘There’s a heart defect. There’s a possibility he might not live until he’s six. Not unless there’s a donor.’  I’d not heard what else the consultant had to say. My brain just wouldn’t – didn’t want to – take it in. I just remember screaming, and pulling on Gary’s shirt.

‘Tell them to get one, then. Find one; they’ve got to find one!’

He couldn’t speak to me. He just held me, and rocked me, like a baby. And my brain switched off the part which allowed me to love my new-born, telling me there was no point in feeling anything, just in case. Dad said it to me once, when he’d brought home a puppy and Mum had told him to take it back.

‘Don’t get attached, love. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be here for long.’

Kieran’s leg is completely entangled. I fight my way through the window and onto the draining board. My eyes are fixed on the iron, wavering on its stand. With one thrust forward, Kieran pulls the iron downwards. It’s like watching all those still frames come together in one sickening slow-motion film, seeing that iron fall from its platform as he looks upwards towards the noise. That’s the second, right then, when, no matter how long my boy is here, I know I want to love him and protect him as I should always have done, and so I try to ask for forgiveness. My body falls between the iron and my son, and it rolls off my back and onto the floor.

I cling onto Kieran like a life buoy in an unrelenting sea, and he stares at my streaming wet face and touches the tears with his tiny, soft fingertips.

‘Why are you crying, Mummy? Did it hurt?’ I can’t speak. I just hold him and I stroke his mass of straw-like blonde hair. And then he asks me – that same question he asks Gary, when he cuddles him at bedtime. ‘You love me, don’t you?’ His words gurgle in my ear, as his little face looks with puzzled eyes at my tears.

I whisper back, right into his hot, pink ear. ‘Yes.’ There’s no need for more.

* * *

Gary comes in from work. His eyes scan my face, trying to judge what kind of a day I’ve had, and whether he dare risk asking. Kieran flies out from the living room. But he doesn’t run to Gary – for the first time ever, he doesn’t choose his dad. And I’m elated as I hold him on my knee in the hallway.

I don’t tell Gary about the iron. Not then, although I’ll have to let him take a look eventually. But as he looks down at our boy, already in his pyjamas, he raises his eyebrows and smiles.

‘You’ve already been in the bath, then, kiddo?’

‘Yep, Mummy and me played with all the toys. My toes went all squashy.’

Gary looks at me.

‘So I don’t miss out,’ I say, as I stroke Kieran’s damp hair, and I hold in my heart the hope that, just maybe, someone may be able to donate a heart to my boy, and I won’t lose the one part of myself that I love more than I believed I could love anyone.

I cry, silently at the years of inertia, the fear of getting too close and of being hurt.

‘I want Mummy to put me to bed.’ Those strange words bombard me and stir me into movement. As I carry him up the stairs, and his arms and legs koala all around me, I am enveloped by the realisation that this will be the night that I’m not afraid of saying goodnight to him. I’m sure, finally, that he won’t be gone when I wake tomorrow. And we’ll deal with tomorrow together.

This story is included in my short story collection, The Reason for Everything, and other short stories.