Cathy stood at the kitchen sink. Through the window she watched Kevin walking away from her across the estate playground. She noticed that the hem of his coat was unravelling. His shoulders sloped. She watched him until he rounded the corner and disappeared.

It used to console her that just beyond that corner, beyond the estate, was the Thames, a thread of nature so close by. She used to allow herself a moment to notice the robins, pigeons, gulls, their indifferent chatter and eager wings, as they perched on the seesaw or the railings around the playground. She had grown up in the countryside and never realised until moving to this ground floor flat on an estate in south east London what it meant to not see trees, fields and long stretches of sky, every single morning.

Twenty minutes earlier, Cathy had been trying to get down a mouthful of cereal when the phone rang. Before Kevin even stood and lifted the receiver, she had known it would be about Michael.

“And when was he last seen?” Kevin said. “And the police have been told?”

Cathy watched every microscopic throb and twitch beneath the surface of Kevin’s skin. It had roughened and reddened in recent months. After replacing the receiver, he went out of the room and reappeared a moment later in the doorway, pulling his jeans and coat over his pyjamas.

“What do they mean he just walked out of the ward?” Cathy heard her own voice as if projected from somewhere else. Her hands were gripping the table.

“I’ll find him,” Kevin said, struggling into his boots.

“How? But he might come here. He will, he’ll come. I’ll wait for him.” She stood up.

Kevin nodded, said he would call from a phone box. He did not remember to kiss her as he left. And now she was alone, standing at the sink, waiting. She began to wash the breakfast bowls in the cold water.

Yesterday, when the boiler went down, it had just felt like another in a long string of things. Things that felt to Cathy heavy with meaning or, depending on the day, heavy in their lack of meaning. Their complete lack of meaning. Kevin had spoken to a sympathetic lady at the council who said someone would come as soon as they could. No one had come yet. It was February and the temperature had dropped in the night. The man on the radio said 1992 would be the coldest in years. That morning they woke to the kind of cold that could be seen. Heads close in bed, Cathy smelled the musk like stale apples on Kevin’s breath and for once did not mind. Beneath that was a furred, animal smell which was his, which she clung to.

They met in college. Cathy had noticed Kevin because he was impossible not to notice. He had a slender nose and a broad forehead and jaw, the kind of skin the sun burns quickly. He seemed always to be laughing, shaking hands with someone, patting someone on the back. He was in the year above her and went around with a gang of uncertain boys who copied his walk, who all wore the same style of leather jacket. She watched him in the college play as Hamlet, his force, his sparkle. Kevin had seen her running up the stairs between classes, he said, her tennis skirt bouncing softly on the back of her legs, and had to know her. It all happened quickly, more quickly than Cathy’s parents would have liked. It was the late sixties and some of Cathy’s friends were thinking about secretary work or even journalism, not marriage. But Kevin walked three hours from his village to hers, across fields and mud, to propose. She had never met anyone like him, so specific in his ideas. They were married in his Catholic church and Cathy felt sure in her white dress, her father finally accepting it all with one of his small nods as he met her at the bottom of the aisle. Kevin moved them to London where he could get an agent.

Looking back on that time now, it would be easy to say she hadn’t questioned enough, hadn’t thought harder, set things up better, but to her memory she had been questioning and thinking all the time. ‘Soft Cathy,’ her father used to say, not as an admonishment but simply, like naming the day.

The phone rang. Cathy moved quickly, lifted the receiver.

“Hello?” Her voice came in a whisper.

“Hello, is that Stanton House, number 45?” It was a matter-of-fact, woman’s voice.

“Yes.” In her stomach, one twist and then another.

“We are trying to get someone out for your boiler today, alright love?”

The council.

“Yes, thank you,”

“We know the temperature’s dropped a bit, so we’re just following up on all of our emergency calls, alright?” Michael was out there, no doubt coatless. And now Kevin, walking the streets, searching. Cathy closed her eyes.

“When… when will someone come?” she said. What did it matter?

“We’ve got someone coming as soon as they can.” The woman’s voice was warm and practical and untouched by the things that Cathy knew. She thought about asking the woman how her day was going. If she had a son. But there was a click, the woman was gone. Cathy held the phone to her ear for a moment longer before replacing it. She stood in the kitchen, facing the clock. The boiler was broken, she remembered again, and felt the cold slipping into her skin, right through to the bone, with the ease of a knife.

She was wearing the pink flannel dressing gown Kevin had bought her, along with matching flannel slippers, last Christmas. They were things for a middle-aged woman which she supposed she was now. She had thanked him, managing to smile, before going to the bathroom to bury her face in the crook of her arm and cry. It was the first Christmas Michael had spent away from them, in hospital. She drew the dressing gown around herself tightly.

When they first moved to London, all those years ago, Kevin found them a place in Kensington in West London. It had high ceilings, fresh white walls and large bay windows that the sun poured through in the mornings.

“This’ll be us from now on!” Kevin said.

He knew people in theatre, though it was films he wanted, it wouldn’t be long before something came along and in the meantime he could pick up any old work. They drank gin and tonics in tall crystal glasses. Cathy never doubted that Kevin was someone who made things happen. In the big bright kitchen he would cook without a shirt on, his posture upright and shoulders square. He was always buoyant then. She would watch him, her hand resting on her stomach, the baby a simple truth inside her. What else could she have known?

Michael was born with his father’s intelligent eyes and snub nose which would grow serious and slender. Cathy would describe him, when asked, as a sensitive, shy child who used to like resting his head on her shoulder until he was twelve and Kevin said he was too old to hang on to his mother like that.

Cathy felt her legs weaken and leaned on the table. She had to call someone. She had to speak – to act – because the shock was turning into something else, into something that could think, that could imagine all the lonely parts of London, those shadowed alleys, corners, arches, ditches, holes that might swallow a boy. He was still a boy.

She reached for the phone, thought of friends she might call, their faces arranged in concern. She always saw the glimmer of incomprehension, the knitting together of imagination and facts, the faint shadow of disgust and something a little hungry behind their eyes, as they offered comforting words. No, she would call their parish priest, Father John, who had a steady voice, softly creased hands. She had gone to him when it first began. Sitting side by side in a pew, it had spilled out in a garble of words, unplanned: she could not eat, she could not sleep. Every day she searched Michael’s childhood, like frantically turning the pages of a photo album. Every day was a cliff that her toes dangled off.

“It’s hard not to think that it’s somehow my, our, fault, Father. Mine and Kevin’s.”

The priest said nothing for a moment while Cathy’s words settled into the dust of the church.

“We can’t always understand God’s ways, Cathy,” he said, “but no matter what, Michael was made in the likeness of God, as we all are. We open our arms to the sick.” He talked for a while about love. She needed only to love her son, he seemed to say. As if she could ever do anything else! But sitting there, the sheer shredded mess of it felt held, for a breath, by something larger. Perhaps he could give her that now. At the very least, he could pray.

It was around that time that Kevin started buying the biggest, cheapest bottles of cider he could get. Never even tried to hide it from her. She could see a squashed empty plastic bottle now, expanding back out of the bin. She held the phone to her ear, imagining the ringing echoing through the safe, solemn rooms of the priest’s house, unheard. She replaced the phone and sat back down at the kitchen table, shivering.

She had seen Michael just yesterday. She drove the traffic-laden route to the hospital in Woolwich every day when she could, took supplies of Dairy Milk chocolate, Lucky Strikes, coca-cola. What was odd about yesterday was that it had almost seemed normal between them.

“Michael, sweetheart,” She had reached her arms around him, hanging from his thin frame. He smelled of cigarettes and someone else’s cooking. She couldn’t believe that here they were in modern times, practically entering a new millennium, and psychiatric wards still felt so punitive. Orderlies stood around like prison guards. Everything stained, no colour anywhere, sad murmurings or cries echoing through the rooms.

“Let’s sit away from the dribblers and shufflers,” Michael said, as they walked into the visitors’ room. A joke! Cathy laughed. He told her he had these names for the other patients. Shriekers, weepers, starers. It felt a little mean but it was humour at least. It was awareness. And every now and again there was a flicker of a smile across his lips as Cathy told him stories about the silly parents she had to deal with on the reception desk at the school. It had been the nicest visit she could remember, in fact. It was not like the times when he stared straight past her. It was not like the times when he begged her to take him home. She could not, she would not, think of those times.

It was getting on for eight. She should have called the school by now, to tell them she wouldn’t be in. She looked through the kitchen window but could see no one coming.

Before Michael left for university a year ago, Kevin had said he was almost a man and Cathy shouldn’t fuss so much, she would make him soft. What had eventually been returned to her was a tall, thin creature, hollow and pale. Definitely not soft. He looked to her like he had been teleported on to earth and into that body, with no life behind him; no knowledge, no childhood.

If Kevin came to the hospital, he usually waited for her outside. Cathy didn’t begrudge him that. He had driven up to Leeds alone when the phone rang, when it all first happened, a month into Michael’s first term. 

“I’m going to get my son back,” Kevin had said, dogged and sure. He was intent on going alone, that this was some youthful silliness that could be solved with a good kip and good grub; she shouldn’t worry. But when Kevin arrived at Leeds Central Police Station he was led to his son, silent in a cell, and did not recognise him. He was given the full details. Afterwards, he went to the car and cried open-mouthed and silent, more of a scream, into the steering wheel. He told Cathy all this some days after like a confession, his head bowed, their hands knotted over the kitchen table. She had never seen Kevin cry but she could imagine him gripping the steering wheel as if she was there, as if she was screaming herself.

That was just the first time. Sectioned. A word so violent in its neatness and precision, when in fact it meant chaos and splinters, no neat parts at all. She did not let herself imagine the glass sprayed across the floor of the HSBC Bank, Michael holding the leaflet stand he had used to smash the door, eyes bold and barren. The people staring at him with pity, fear. The police so casual, so routine. Their hands on her son. It would be two sleepless nights before she got to see him herself. Kevin brought Michael down from Leeds to the psychiatric ward of Queen Elizabeth Hospital, and Cathy spent every second she could there, even if it meant not seeing him. Just to be near. 

After stabilising, as the doctors called it, Michael had been released home to them. The flat seemed to shrink, smaller than it already was, not big enough to hold him. Kevin couldn’t take more time off work unpaid but Cathy ignored certain tones in conversations with her manager. She sat with Michael for hours, amazed and terrified at the volume of his silence. How angry it felt. Then there were those awful moments when Kevin didn’t know better, couldn’t tell what was an illness and what was just youth and pressed Michael with questions until Michael, like a possessed thing, released a deep, long roar that shook the walls. That went right through Cathy like a train.

The doctors had questions. Was he a nervous child? When did she first notice his paranoia? Had there been any traumatic events? Well, she asked, what counts as traumatic? She was on trial.

She wrote down words: schizoaffective, antipsychotic, lithium. They were still landing at an official diagnosis, finding the right combination of medications. They said she had to get used to the idea that things would never be ‘normal’. Books on mental illness from the library seemed to suggest it had been living somewhere in the child all along, as irrefutable as bone marrow.

But yesterday, the psychiatrist had praised Michael’s ‘insight’. He said that Michael was aware that he was sick, that his delusions were delusions. Cathy had left the hospital with something close to a smile. She had slipped her hand into Kevin’s as they walked back to the car park and felt his fingers squeeze hers gently. She had let herself think that the things she loved most had not slipped away.

The phone rang. Cathy jumped, lifted the receiver.

“Hello?” There was a quiet, mechanical whirring.

“Hello?” Her voice echoed stupidly.

“Hello? Kevin?”

Or was that breathing she could hear?

“Michael?”

Nothing. She slammed the phone back in its place, hard. It was not the first time. Every few weeks it rang like that, as if someone were toying with them. A syrupy lump rose in her throat. She was cold.

What did it matter if she was cold? But she moved, propelled herself towards Michael somehow, to the living room, to find a jumper. She almost missed herself in the hallway mirror. She stopped. It was like one animal passing another in the woods, the snap of a twig, the startled eyes. She both did and did not recognise herself. It wasn’t just the lips, which were thin and almost blue with cold. It was age, it was fear, looking back at her. It was, she supposed, knowledge of some kind. She seemed to always be acquiring it and felt no better prepared for anything.

In the living room the curtains were still drawn. In recent months, she had not been so good at housework. There were always piles of laundry, abandoned mugs of grey tea. It had never been a beautiful space, it was small and perfunctory and low-ceilinged like most council flats, but now it felt like a storage unit in which they hurled their things and walked away. Not so long ago it had been, she had made it a home. In her own quiet way – painting walls, stirring scrambled eggs, making lists – she was not one to give in. You made the best of things. You saw nature – the gulls, the robins, the daisies pushing through the grass in the playground – where you could. Michael loved those things, too.

They had moved here, to this flat in Deptford, after Kevin lost yet another job. It was never clear to her in these situations if the job got rid of Kevin or the other way round. His answers were short, like the frayed end of a tangled knot she didn’t want to pull on. She knew that for all the ways people warmed to him, he was not good at compromise. Neither of them had savings or came into inheritance after their parents died. Neither had gone to university. He had finally let her take a job as a receptionist at a local school, using the typing skills she learned briefly at college. He had been miserable at the idea of her working. She had kept the job for fifteen years now. In that time Kevin had worked as a cab driver, security guard, packed shelves in a warehouse, and now, moved furniture. Whatever the job was, he came home from it in a mood, heavy and mean like a storm, consuming the flat.
“Don’t give up on the acting, Kev,” she whispered to him once in bed. He had not responded, though she knew he was awake. Michael must have been around five then. You had to try and hide heartbreak like that from a child, the same way you had to hide money struggles and ominous doctor appointments. But perhaps they had not been so good at hiding their sadness from Michael, or from each other.

And perhaps that was why Michael as a child had all these fears, complicated worries about dogs and neighbours and certain teachers. He had been scared of the estate. It wasn’t always easy to be patient with those things, when you had been raised yourself to get on with it. You could, quite accidentally, brush past the trembling heart of a child.

Her eyes now fell on Michael’s Law textbooks, stacked next to his Megadrive and the TV. He would probably never finish the Law degree. He had told Kevin what he planned to do, tilting up his chin, proud at the masculine slickness of it – ‘Law at Leeds University’. But Cathy had seen his sketchbooks filled with these incredible drawings of pensive figures on benches, the bridges of the Thames. His art teacher said he was talented. Cathy did try to point this out, she did. But Kevin couldn’t seem to see that. Kevin had a way of going right through what you thought you knew about yourself. He would talk at Michael, at length; he didn’t want him to make the same mistakes he had. Cathy could see Michael now, with his camel-long eyelashes, head bowed, listening to his father. She wanted to reach out and touch him. There was nothing that prodded her heart so much as the back of her child’s neck, still slender. Not a man’s.

What had she missed? Michael had been like many teenagers, like she herself had been; vague with answers, inward-looking, prone to bouts of silence, momentarily cheered by a can of coca-cola. She remembered a shopping trip a couple of years ago. She had put aside a little money so she could treat him, without Kevin’s knowing. They had trawled around the shopping centre. Michael seemed distracted, listless, though she remembered him breaking into one of his giant, heart-stopping smiles over hot chocolate at a greasy spoon cafe. In one shop she took a hoodie from the rail, it seemed trendy, like something the boys he hung out with would wear. She held it up.

“What about this?”

Michael smiled a little, shook his head. He looked down and away in the way she had come to know that young people did when they didn’t want to hurt your feelings. When they couldn’t begin to explain to you just how much you had misunderstood.

She pulled a cardigan from a pile of clothes on the sofa and went back to the kitchen. She sat at the table, fingers clasped tightly as if in prayer. Each second crawled across her skin like something that itched, to be slapped away. A helpless voice called out. And again.

“Mum!”

Cathy stood up. It took a moment for her to realise it was the neighbour’s daughter. She could see her through the window, staggering after her mother on bendy little legs into the playground. Cathy often caught herself thinking the mother was too harsh, too blunt with the child. It was easy to think such things about other people, she knew.

It had been over an hour since Kevin left. Cathy could picture him searching the streets. He would try Michael’s old hang-outs, places he used to go when he still had gaps in his teeth and too-long limbs. The park. The shopping centre. It was senseless. But then Kevin still had a knack for making things happen sometimes. He would find Michael, bring him home. Michael wouldn’t be better, no, but she could pull him to her tightly for a moment. And Kevin, all clear-eyed action, bristling with his own shy hope, would rustle up Michael’s favourite meal – burger and chips. The man from the council would come to fix the boiler and find them all huddled together at the kitchen table, shivering but glad, like survivors of a shipwreck.

The phone rang. Through the window Cathy could see the woman from next door pull her daughter back, gently by the hood, away from the icy seesaw. When she thought of today that was what she would remember: the phone ringing like drilling in another, nearby building. Her own breath in the cold air in front of her. The little girl and her mother. Small things. The sag of Michael’s nappy when she came upon him in the kitchen before sunrise on his second birthday, trying to put an empty cake tin through the oven door. He had turned to look at her, triumphant and gummy, the sun beginning to poke through the curtains, his eyes shining to be found.

Cathy lifted the receiver.
“Hello?”

“Cathy.” Kevin’s voice, when he said her name so quietly like that, was a tender husk that somehow contained everything she knew. It was her past and, no matter what, her future. It held the tears she had shed and the tears he hadn’t. He couldn’t.

“Where are you, Kevin? Where is my son?”

She listened to Kevin’s soft, ragged breath. Through the window she could see a man in work wear carrying a tool box, striding across the playground towards the flat.