My Little Macbeth — Scarlett Murray
On the night it happened, my son asked me to tuck him in. It did not sound cute or small, it did not contain the faint echo of what his voice as a baby had been. Instead, it twisted into what it would become: I heard its rigid hardness, the rigid hardness of a man. It was like the voice of a twenty-year-old calling his mother to tuck him in, and it unsettled me.
My partner looked at me, wondering why I didn’t go to my son. I explained how my son’s voice unsettled me, and he said that my son’s voice was soft and mewing, almost weeping.
“Eventually, he will go to sleep.” I turned my back on him.
“What if he doesn’t? What if this is the start of insomnia or something?”
“What if he is racked by guilt?” I said, dryly. I pictured my son as a little Macbeth, taunted by the ever-growing blood on his hands, walking up and down the hallway that separated his room from mine, and I thought, “he fucking deserves to go mad.”
My partner rolled away from me then, his hot breath no longer on my neck. He faced the wall, it aggravated me. Almost every night since our first date, he had snuggled so close to me that it was as if, even in his sleep, he wanted constant reassurance of my existence. But as soon as there was a murderer in our household, his arms stopped acting as my shield. So, I rolled over to him, locking my arms around him. He let out a heavy sigh. Maybe he wanted my arms to protect him from the mini-murderer. After all, he was my mini-murderer, not his. I moved my hands downwards knowingly.
“Not tonight,” He shook me off. “It’s weird tonight.”
“It’s not weird tonight,” My tone was low. I kissed his ear, his neck, the side of his face. He replaced my hand where it had been. He thought that it would be face-to-face. Romantic and respectful: sensitive to how difficult a day it had been. He thought that we would make love. But I wasn’t interested in that. I stripped my pyjama bottoms off and presented him with my arse, on my hands and knees. As he took me, her face formed in my mind.
I had rushed from work after the phone call. My son was waiting to be taken home. He sat in a classroom, watched by a teacher. The other boys were also in separate classrooms; their parents were on their way too.
The ambulance glared ominously outside. The journey from my office to the school had been one blur, but the ambulance stood as a certified fact. My son’s Dad was meant to meet me there, but he didn’t. Surrounding it, were paramedics and concerned, crestfallen-looking teachers. The total absence of children, even of the sound of them, did not strike me. A stretcher was being lifted into the ambulance, but even that, I barely registered.
Sophia’s face was the second certified fact. Sophia Macduff, mother to Charlie Macduff, a boy with a severe allergy to peanuts. Sophia would probably have thought that there a million other things more significant about Charlie than his well-managed allergy to peanuts.
Only for a split second, her eyes caught mine. Her face was taunt and hungry, as if she’d grieved for months in the space of less than an hour. Her eyes were huge and hollow and shrunk her other features. One of the paramedics had to help her into the ambulance.
Just from thinking about her, my own body became paralyzed, too. I did not realise my partner had finished until he fell back onto the bed, and it creaked loudly.
Our fucking no longer masked the sound of my son crying out. My partner went to comfort him.
I had only spoken to Sophia Macduff once before. At the Sport’s Day the summer before, watching our sons race. My son had won everything. Her son had won nothing.
“I bet your son will win this one, too, he’s super-fast.”
“Maybe,” I said, secretly bursting with pride, “But I wouldn’t want it to inflate his ego too much.”
He won. Afterward, he said to me, “Why were you talking to Charlie’s mum? Charlie’s such a fucking loser.” It was the first time he swore in front of me. I told him not to swear, and I told him to be nice to Charlie.
I later learned that he swore at his Dad’s. It made his Dad burst with laughter. He would ruffle his hair and say, “you’re my mini-me.” We’d divorced a year ago. A year ago, I heard about our son’s new friends. A year ago, he stopped being the budding clever clogs that I’d been and became the budding hopeless drop-out that his father had been. Maybe primary school was too young to foresee a drop-out, but it was what I feared. A year ago, I received a school report that said he non-stop talked over the teacher in class; he’d snapped another boy’s glasses, and he’d made a girl cry by mocking her appearance. The school reports only got worse from there.
After the divorce, our son lived with me full-time, apart from on Sundays. I tried to reassure myself: our son would be six parts me, one part his Dad. He wanted his Dad to walk him into school at least once a week, even if that meant he was late for school. Mondays were the days that his Dad packed his school lunches. It was a Monday that Charlie Macduff died. I knew that we were not allowed to pack any products containing nuts for our children.
But I do not want to deflect responsibility onto his father. Something about me, something about my mothering, made him this way. Something about the way that I parented my child made him think that it was okay to force-feed another child with a severe peanut allergy, peanut butter.
They said that my son was not the one who thought of the idea. He was not the one that lured Charlie to an area in the playground that was out of the supervisors’ sight. He was not the one that held Charlie’s arms down. He was not the one that kept Charlie’s mouth open.
But my son did watch. He heard Charlie as he protested and pleaded with them to do anything to him but this. My son did not tell his friends to stop. He did not tell his friends to stop as Charlie struggled and struggled to free himself from their grips and did all that he could to keep his mouth closed. My son did not tell them to stop, my son probably laughed.
The next morning, I heard my partner and my son laughing in the kitchen. My partner was attempting to comb out a stubborn knot in my son’s hair, and it was making them laugh. I felt my face tighten. My partner beamed at me and poured me a glass of orange juice. My son smeared jam onto slightly burnt toast; he got jam all over the table and his fingers, and I could not help but hate him for it.
“Go to your room.”
“I’m eating,” He nodded to his food. All the jam. The filthy red jam. How could he sit here covered in jam while Sophia Macduff was forced into a life of never sleeping or eating again? She would turn herself into a living corpse out of grief for her son, and I was supposed to watch my murderous little boy lick jam off of his fingers. He disgusted me.
That night, he was back to his calling. He would not stop. My partner moaned at me to go to him until he fell asleep. I lay there, and my son kept calling for me. The haunted face of Sophia Macduff flashed at me. I felt the paralyzed state of her body pass onto mine.
“Mummy,” His fingers traced my clenched fist. His thumb stroked the mark on my wrist. The mark that I made when his father told me that he’d had and would have prettier.
His fingers were little, they were not fully grown. He was not fully formed yet. His body was not fully formed yet, and his mind was not fully formed yet. “Mummy.” His voice was childish, needy. There was no rigid hardness to it, none at all. There was a lostness to it, as if he were standing alone in a dark forest, rather than right next to my bed. My fist yielded to the touch of his little fingers, and uncurled. “Mummy, I can’t sleep because I am an evil person.”
I sat up, I held him to my breast. And through my teeth, I released a hushing sound that I had been keeping behind them for too long a time.
AUTHOR BIO:
Scarlett Murray is a writer. She lives with her two-year-old daughter in West London. Scarlett has a blog on her experiences of having a physical disability. Through this lens, Scarlett discusses subjects that she feels are sorely under-represented: motherhood, desirability, language, and more.
