THE LAST MONK 12

Mother and child reunion./...

THE LAST MONK

12

August, it was, who told me so many times that my mother had died when I was born and he was named after the month, yet noe t seems he was August before he met my mother.. And the other two, as well, over the years, had mumbled it, but mainly it had been August who seemed to be particularly moved when he told me. I once thought I caught a tear leaking from his eyes when he said something like “it was beautiful and noble, Betty, as you entered the world and I cut your umbilical chord and your mother reached out for you and crooned Betty, my Betty, and then was silent because you know, child, that death is silent…”

I had cried back then, not because it was my mother who had died because mother was an abstract to me in those early years of childhood and as far as I was concerned it was three monks who were my mother. After all, they did what was necessary for me to stay reasonably healthy.

So the possibility that she was still alive was no more than another confusion. If she hadn’t died, if she was still alive, then where had she been when this baby called Betty had needed her? Or had she really required more than she already had? There was even a kind of love from the monks, a gentle kind of care for a young child that was almost as much as that child needed? Especially from August… But even the way he stroked or rubbed my legs was no more than he said it was. It was to comfort innocence because there are so many things in the world that a child needs comforting from.

Then I had been told the August was my father, though in all honesty I didn’t really know what a father was…

This was the range of thoughts that ran through my mind after Inspector Appleby dropped his bombshell bout my mother being somewhere nearby, and aware of our conversation.

“If she’s ready to tell me who I am then tell her to do just that,” I said, “go on, Mr Inspector, in charge of lives, tell her to come right here and tell me, to my face, who I am!”

He shook hs head slowly, as if he hadn’t expected that outburst from me, which is no surprise because I hadn’t been expecting to say those things myself. Sometimes emotions burst out without the company of forethought…

Then he nodded.

“Okay,” he said resignedly, “did you hear that, Isabel… I mean, Mrs Downes. If you think it’s appropriate you can join us.”

There was a few seconds of silence. Inspector Appleby was watching the door, so I watched it as well, and slowly it opened. I almost recognised the woman who slid nervously into the room because she had burst in on me very recently, when I had been in the hospital. It was the same woman who had claimed back then that she had been my mother. She had called me Betty when she’d burst in on me before she’d been escorted out of the ward.

Inspector Appleby smiled at her in much the same way as he occasionally smiled at me. “Ah, Isabel, there you are,” he said, “please take a seat. What have you made of it so far?”

It was my mother. I knew as I saw the look on her face as she slowly walked towards the table and took a seat opposite me. I tried to work things out. She was pretty, I could tell that, and the miracle was that hair of hers. I’d thought the sergeant had long hair, but the hair on the head of this mother of mine was a great deal longer, draped over one shoulder and hanging almost down to her stomach. To me it was a revelation and I wanted hair like that for myself, not the scrubby mess I had, hacked short by Celestial when the mood took him, though it hadn’t been hacked short recently, him being dead, and I suppose was getting to be almost long enough to upset him if he hadn’t walked into his tomb back when he had.

And her eyes were right for my mother. I don’t know what made them right: maybe the suggestion of love that leaked out of both of them when she looked my way.

I could see that the Inspector was going to say something, maybe to me, but I wanted to get in first.

“Why?” I asked, “why did you leave me? You didn’t die, did you? You weren’t dragged down to that tomb, were you?”

“Betty,” she said, slowly drawing my name out, and looked at mr as if that was a full explanation of everything, but to me it wasn’t.

“Well?” I asked.

“It was a nightmare, darling,” she said, “you are my darling, so do you mind?”

“Call me what you like, mother,” I said, acknowledging in that sentence that I believed her when she said who she was.

“A nightmare?” I reminded her.

“I was what you might call a gangster’s moll,” she said with a smile, “I was not yet sixteen and I’d run away from home because home was horrible. My mum had a boyfriend who was not my dad and who hated the sight of me and my real dad worked as hard as he could to make a living, but what he did was never good enough, not even when he worked double shifts. So there was arguing and fighting and in the end I’d had enough, I grabbed as many of my things as would fit into a carrier bag, and was off. It was horrible and after a few days I got hungry and really tired and I was ready to go home with my tail between my legs, and I bumped, in the rain, into a scruffy individual who said he’d rescue me if I wanted to be rescued. He lived, he said, in a disused building that once upon a time had been a small monastery, and he shared the place with two friends. His name was Adam Jones, but the police were after him so he went by the pseudonym of August.”

“August!” I gasped, thinking not called that because I was born in August, then.

“Your father, darling,” continued my mother, “yes, he was your father, for my sins. Nobody else could have been. Anyway, he took me back to the disused monastery, a broken down old place most of which was just about falling down, and to what he called his own cell because, years and years ago when real monks had lived there it had been living quarters for one monk. It was comfortable enough and to my eternal shame I shared a single bed with him.”

I didn’t see the relevance of that, not having any idea about such grown up matters as love and the things men and women do together in order to create a child, and neither, it seemed had my mother until she learned the hard way.

“Anyway,” she continued, “it didn’t take long for me to get pregnant, and so it was that you were born, Betty. And Adam (or August as he preferred to be called) was my midwife as well as beig my better half! And, to be fair to him, he did a good job. You see, he’d found a book about childbirth and actually found out what to do! He even cleaned himself up a bit in order to not pass on anything nasty to the baby!”

“And the other two monks?” I asked, “what did they do?”

“Oh, they came and went. They were pleasant enough, but when you were born, darling, the other two, who only pretended to be monks and even almost dressed like them, making rough hooded cloaks out of black hessian they found somewhere so that they looked the part should they be discovered, or so they thought, made it clear I wasn’t wanted, and leaving you with August they dragged me off, stole a car, and dumped me miles away in a village called Swanspottle, where I knew nobody and where I didn’t last long on my own. I was soon in the hands of the police, who took me to a hospital and then taken to a town I didn’t recognise, and I ended up in a home for waifs and strays, where I decided to make something of myself, sought education, eventually went to college and qualified as a psychiatric nurse. And all that time I was determined to find my Betty… and here you are!”

“Here I am,” I sighed.

There was one question in my mind: did I need a mother? Or was I alright without one?

Then I looked at her.

And saw a woman who needed a daughter very much indeed.

TO BE CONTINUED

© Peter Rogerson 16.08.23

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