She was cold. Shivering. Though the room was chilled, her tremors were because of the reason why she was here. What she had to do.
She found her mind shooting back to when he was little, her Billy, though in truth she hated it when everyone called him Billy. His name was William, she said, getting progressively more annoyed each time. How could they corrupt it so? It was William. In the end she gave up the fight. But to her he was always William, nothing else. Her little William.
How she’d longed — ached — for a baby. How she’d clutched him to her sweated breasts, a tiny, bloodied lump of a baby boy. But he was hers. She promised she would love him come what may. She was a mother, and he was her little boy. A bond that lasts forever.
‘This way, Mrs Krodde,’ said the man.
He had a comb-over. Youngish but with a comb-over. She thought such things were dead and gone these days. Men preferred to shave their heads entirely. It was the fashion.
There was a horrible smell in the room. A sharp, chemical smell that prickled the nostrils and made her feel nauseous.
He was lovely till he was twelve years old, she thought. His mother could do no wrong. He worshipped her. He loved that. My William, she’d tell him, and he’d respond by kissing her on the cheek. Then all that fizzled away when he became a teenager and it never came back. One moment a sweet puppy; the next a snarling hound you couldn’t put your hand near. She could just about put up with the cold shoulder from her husband — there’d been no fire in that particular oven for years — but not from her William. It cut her up.
So she ate away the misery but that just made her fat and feel even more miserable. Eventually she turned off from the hateful William he’d become, drowned her long tiresome hours in long bouts of mindless TV and chocolates. One life swapped for another. You are what you eat, people say. What did that make her?
The man with the terrible comb-over took her to a table. A long form laid upon it, covered with a sheet. There was another similar mound on another similar table. She wanted to turn and run away, but folded her arms against the cool atmosphere and sucked in a breath.
His fingers gripped the edge of the sheet. He observed her closely, a tiny smudge of empathy in his eyes. She glanced at him, nodded quickly.
He peeled back the sheet. It crackled as if it were new and straight out of the polythene wrapper.
The face was so white, she thought, like that of a statue she’d seen in a park.
‘Is this your son, Mrs Krodde?’
She wanted to say no, because her son, her little William, had died a long time ago. But she nodded again, putting a hand to her mouth. ‘Yes, that’s my son William,’ she said. ‘You say he was found in the canal?’
He said yes, and explained that he was found by two young people out jogging. ‘Drowned, by all accounts,’ he said. ‘No sign of any other injuries. He had his wallet on him, and his watch, so not a mugging gone wrong, one presumes. You say he’d been out drinking?’
‘Yes, he was depressed because he’d lost his job at the supermarket. I told him drinking wasn’t the answer.’
‘Probably had one too many, took a walk, went too close to the canal and fell in.’
‘He couldn’t swim. I couldn’t afford for him to have swimming lessons when he was little. Maybe if I had he’d be alive today.’
‘Perhaps,’ he said clinically. ‘Perhaps not. Depressed, you say?’
She said yes. ‘You think that’s a reason? You think he drowned himself?’ The thought cut her up. She knew all about depression. She was drowning in chocolate.
‘Hard to say, but it could be a contributory factor.’
‘Oh,’ she said. She allowed herself to be led meekly to the door. ‘Do you think if I could have afforded swimming lessons for him, like other mothers did, he would be alive today?’
‘Difficult to say, Mrs Krodde. Difficult to say.’