Speechless

Tonight I will be paid an unforgettable sum, the most I have ever received, for committing my own beautiful little boy to life; for murder. It’s also my last pay check, the signal for me to let go of everything—but how can I let go of those precious 12 years we wasted, while you were so innocent?

I’d like to say I loved you all this time, but evidently not enough, or you wouldn’t have done something like this.

We had our…Struggles.

“What’re you doing with Train?”

Tracing the abstract artwork of plastic tracks with your finger, you remain speechless; it’s done to annoy me. The matching train is stranded inches from your groping hands.

Why does that frustrate me so much? Dr.Chophra advised I should be more involved with your play. I rescue the abandoned train, placing it on your design.

Your hands twitch like a dying moth. “No, mummy!” But in your eyes, my damage is done.

I cautiously push the train along a curve, demonstrating how to play right, goddamn you, and your twitches increase to frantic flapping. “You—you ruuuinned itt!”

Why do I even try?

“No more screaming! Enough!”

I remember your body collapsing into a whimpering mess on the floor as I turned on my heel and slammed the door on my way out. Back then, I wished you were mute.

Not on the court stand nine years later, when you needed to defend yourself.

It is incontestable, Jury, that Mr.Alfie Drury intended to commit murder on the 1st of February.

Speechless.

It’s surreal in your empty room, once the source of daily high-pitched fits and screams, now silenced. I don’t know who you are anymore. That’s what led me here, to find the sweet son I lost in an unused black notebook, left behind after his funeral.

It’s here I, too late, found the unspoken answers to those questions you were confronted with on trial.

WHY DOES MY CHILD HATE ME, I type desperately into Google. I fed you well, I bought toys, yet I couldn’t do enough since the diagnosis.

The doctor said you’d struggle to make friends. She was right: 4 years into Primary, teachers pushed you both together because you ate lunch alone.

“Nothing in common?”

“No, she’s a girl.”

“That’s sexist.” Dr.Chophra told me not to hide things; you are too smart for an eight-year old. “What’s Prinan like?”

“Her dad makes her lunches…Because she has blue things on her teeth.”

“Braces, sweetheart. How interesting! Ask why she chose blue.”

“She chose that? Why not green?”

She did choose green when her elastics changed: your favourite colour. I wept in relief as Prinan became your first, only, friend.

“Apparently, he’s very smart,” Mari observes her daughter self-absorbed in a Barbie romance, eyes flitting over your irrelevant green legos.

You present them to Prinan, who feigns delight. “Too smart. He’s a handful.”

“I bet! Kids pick up on everything at this age.”

But I was the one too stupid to pick up that you were hiding things from me, the scars of our tumultuous relationship documented within your tiny notebook.

The CCTV footage shows irrefutably that Mr.Drury brutally mutilated his teacher’s stab wounds after robbing him at knifepoint.

I didn’t know

I made too many comments about how difficult autism made you to handle in the office; the dirty looks explained the £20000 I’m being paid to leave quietly. They think I misrepresented you on purpose, to get rid of you.

I blamed your father, of course. If I had been allowed to have my own child instead of three miscarriages and a bloody C-section, I knew that child would have been loved. Instead, when my brother never came home and my husband died with him, I was stuck with you.

“Where Daddy go?”

He would have raised you right. Especially after the relaxing holiday it was meant to be after his volatile breakup: “Egypt.”

The word stings my eyes as it leaves my lips, leaving only a ghost of Michael’s touch on the day we said goodbye—not knowing it was forever. I said the same to my brother, adding that yes, Alfie and I’ll love spending time together.

We never connected. “But he not coming back?”

“He found peace.” I tell you what I think you’d like to hear.

That’s what your dad thought he was doing, when he offered his childless sister the opportunity to care for a baby she never had. “Where?”

“In the Justice of Heaven.” It’s automatic; the only dream I have left, for your dead dad and my Michael. “It’s a magical place…”

You always knew too much.

“Can I go there too?”

Throughout, the defendant toyed with the lethal weapon he had conscientiously concealed inside his sleeve.

It wasn’t my toy

The first day of high school, you burst in—halfway through my assessment!—choking out through tears that Prinan betrayed you.

“She took off them, the green! She—she doesn’t liiike meee!”

I needed Prinan and her mum. I needed those playdates for mental breaks. You liked each other; you had no other choice.

The only friendship you had was broken instantly, over braces.

“They’re removed, her teeth are fixed! Can’t you, I don’t know, ask her to wear a green…Scrunchie?”

Prinan liked purple scrunchies, and no amount of desperate persuasion over the phone could force her mum to change that preference. Girls will be girls, she said, and your boy needs to grow up.

“Alfie won’t play with me anymore.” Indeed, Prinan is growing into a beautiful young lady, the sort any mother would adore. “Does he hate me?”

I thought I deserved a child more like her, but your teachers called me a bad parent to my face. “He’s just immature, darling. Find new friends.”

I think I made it my mission to fuck you up, or I wouldn’t have said anything like that.

Mr.Drury hid underneath his teacher’s desk for five hours after school that Tuesday, anticipating the opportunity to attack.

I only wanted to hurt him

I thought I knew better than anyone you could never understand death.

Only just now did I open the final remainder of you left in this unfeeling notebook, tearing through inkstains and snagging papercuts, where my parenting mistakes came out later, in your creative writing:

Swan dropped her long neck down into the water to drown. She wants peace and escape in the Justice of Heaven.

He grew great wings and flew away to find peace in the Justice of Heaven, so he wouldn’t be a part of life anymore.

Dad escaped and found peace in Heaven so he won’t be in my life anymore.

Now you’re not in my life anymore for me to mess you up.

No, I never loved you. But I miss you.

I hope you’ll find peace, even though it’s somewhere else on Earth.

The defendant left the house at 7:45am on the 1st February, armed with a large kitchen knife.

It wasn’t planned

31st March: Robbed of his innocence and pride, the wolf retreats into the darkness.

It’s clear why you wrote that in this book: I taught you innocence=money, when it comes to the law.

As your infant shadow darkened my doorway, I braced myself for another fit.

“Why’s Mummy crying?”

I press my palm to my forehead.

Two hours earlier, I looked into old eyes wracked with regret, offender perched restlessly on the edge of a steel recliner. I had never seen such a cleanly painted picture of guilt in my years as a lawyer.

His excuses are thinly-veiled as tissue paper, yet he has money enough to prove otherwise, as long as I do my job. “I’m writing scripts for a bad liar.”

“Did he do it?” Fraud.

“Yes. He’s paying me to say he didn’t.”

You always were my confidant.

“Isn’t lying bad?”

I’m so alone now.

“Only if you don’t have enough money to defend it.”

The defendant had just learned that his teacher, Mr.Tarrant, was a sexual predator.

She needed me

After two years in high school, you hadn’t gotten over losing Prinan, the same way I never got over losing them.

“I wear purple, but she still doesn’t see me.” You hungered for her attention like a stray dog.

“She has girl friends now. Find yourself boy friends.” I don’t mention the bruises you come home with; they beat you up because you cry lots.

Every trend she followed, you copied—I braided your hair for a week, to keep you quiet—it gave us both hope.

Prinan’s loss ate at both of our sanity. That’s why I didn’t question another, albiet strange, request.

Ms.Drury, you claim that you did not copy Miss.Suri’s scars on the arms of your son.

No. Alfie did it.

We met each other’s eyes for the first time in court, mine puffy and tearstained, yours bone-dry and bloodshot. My child, a murderer. Both equally shocked by the news: those senseless drawings I helped scribble up your forearms, were Prinan’s cut and burn marks.

I understand now, from the last story in this notebook…You weren’t the only one craving her attention.

20th March : A stalking wolf lurked in daylight, salivating to leave his claw scratches on the pretty young girl’s flesh.

Prinan hadn’t found new friends either. Somebody else found her.

What happened, sweetie?

I didn’t know, I didn’t—

Honey, please tell me.

He kept taking her after class, hurting her. She liked it, but it wasn’t right. I knew ‘cause you’re a lawyer, you’d help us.

But he’s too rich and he’d money his way out of it. I just needed to get the money off him.

I hid under the desk, but he wouldn’t sit for me to grab his wallet.

I was trembling—

You had a knife.

Mummy, you gave it to me.

I thought…You were cutting…Sandwiches.

Truth is, I didn’t think.

He saw.

So I did it like burglars do in movies.

With the knife?

Yes, holding it.

He wouldn’t stop coming. I screamed, I just—hit him.

Loads of blood started pouring out.

I got the money!

But blood was going everywhere…

We’ll get through this together.

I put my hands in and tried to block it closed; it was so slippery and warm. It felt nasty and he was shaking lots.

It smelled horrid.

I ran but they caught me. They won’t let me shower.

Sweetheart.

Mummy, I want to go home.

Trust me.

Is he in the Justice of Heaven now?

Mr.Drury became aware his teacher was abusing and molesting a classmate.

He’s too strong

I wonder if you still believe he found peace, or if your perceptions of death were shattered the same way as mine.

I’m sorry for your loss.

Thank you.

They are at peace.

I could blame the priest who said that, I could blame your teachers, I could blame anyone but myself until it became clear: you trusted my swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

I lied about the knife, the marks, everything. I thought your sentence would have less repercussions than mine.

“Bad parent.”

You’re happier there. You’re happier there.

Mr.Alfie Drury, you are charged with murder: minimum sentence, 25 years to life. How do you plead?

You trusted me.

“Not guilty.”

I betrayed you.

Speechless.

From then, you didn’t speak. We lost.

£20000 drops into my bank account with a Ka-shink. Midnight.

I lost my job, I lost you. I’ve lost everything. The least I can do with this money is put it towards a new life, though you’re not here to share it.

I’ve chosen a therapist’s degree, in hope that one day I’ll look back and see what I did wrong.

We’ll get through this together.

Maybe I’ll save someone else.

When you open this letter, you’ll be eighteen. Treasure your black book back, and this picture of her. But throw this away now.

Don’t remember me.

Goodbye.

—Mummy