Made Especially for Me

He’d refused to see me.

This might come as a shock to you; I assume you are also making assumptions, trying to fill in the holes of a story you have just stumbled across. I think you’ve decided that rejecting someone’s request to visit is unwarranted. I wouldn’t blame you for that conclusion- it’s understandable, given the laws of human interaction.

Someone requests to see you, you accept. Simple.

But then, there was nothing simple about this request. Maybe you scoffed at his rudeness, but you don’t know him, and you don’t know me. You don’t have the necessary context to make an accurate judgment. No matter, I will explain. It’s not like I have anywhere to go right now. And to whom would I go anyway? He refers to my son. My boy.

Jacob Cullen Macaualy Gulliver - a raging ball of red screaming energy. No, his name isn’t an heirloom. In the fuzzy hours after his birth, I was highly emotional (and on morphine) and felt inspired by the doctors’ badges that surrounded me in my hospital room. Jacob was a mistake, though perhaps I shouldn’t say such things. What I meant to say was, he burst into my world unexpectedly, one hot and humid day at the start of July, delivered in the car park of my local budget supermarket.

Despite the sudden pain, all I could think at the time was how thankful I was that I had not decided to do my weekly shop at my usual hour.

There I was- legs spread, my cargo pants pooled around my ankles, panting doggy style on the hot asphalt. It wasn’t a picture I wanted any of my “frengers”(that’s friendly strangers) to remember every time we half-smiled at one another across the grocery aisles.

They were a strange mix, the 08:30 am Friday bunch, a bit like a Caesar salad - some crispy and fresh, some limp and stale. In the early days, our interactions were brief but meaningful.

There was the student wearing three layers of t-shirts, a chunky iPod tucked into the back of her apple bottoms, who debated milk fat content with me by the fridges.

Ang and Rob yelled each other’s names as they chased their runaway toddlers, casually advising me to “neva have kids” as they jogged by.

The curly-haired twins in pinstripe uniforms liked to pile 30p bars of chocolate onto the checkout belt whilst slipping the extra packets of Juicy Fruit into their pockets. They’d see me looking and wink as if I were a co-conspirator.

And then there was the Brummie Boomer I had nicknamed Nanna Beet, because she always had a rosy, bright pink stain brushed across her cheeks - obviously blusher, but it was more akin to beetroot juice. Once she remarked that “I seemed like a good young bab, not like those…” and proceeded to use distasteful choice words to describe the other girls who lived on my sprawling estate.

What am I saying? And what does this have to do with Jacob?

It sounds ridiculous, but that small group of “hi-bye” people, as random as they seemed, were like a family to me. If you think that is dramatic, then I am sorry to reveal at this point in my story that I had no one else. As in no parents, no family, and you guessed it, no friends. Without going into too much detail, my parents are MIA, dead, abroad - I have no idea, I’d been in and out of the system for as long as I can remember. As for friends, being an orphan of sorts was ostracising enough, but add on the poverty that comes from relying on the state, and being too old for a foster family equals a displaced reject, drifting through the world, trying to find her way through doors that already felt closed.

Nanna was surely someone’s grandmother, but she wasn’t mine.

The twins were a pair, a complete set. Rob and Ang had more than enough with their 3 children.

Looking back, I am certain that, in my own way, I was trying to feel, or just belong to something, or someone. Anything. Anyone.

That led me to the real mistake.

19-year-old Daryl had no real substance or drive, and biked around the nearby council flats with a group of boys identically clad in Lonsdale hooded jumpers. A leech, who attached (and quickly detached, then reattached) himself to the impressionable and gullible. When he wasn’t busy oozing charisma over ‘the young, dumb and living off mum’, he disappeared for days, on the run from the police for a variety of misdemeanours.

I will not pretend that I was wise to his charm, because I wasn’t. They call it sweet nothings, but I gorged myself to sickness on every single lie he spun me. I couldn’t get enough, yet I knew I was just that month’s slim picking and his attraction to me was only surface-level.

The promise of forever, of the ‘I’ll pick you first no matter what’ and ‘you’re my only choice’ spoke to my hollow heart and eight and a bit months later, I found myself trying to breathe through my nose, out through my mouth, wondering how on earth I’d ended up in labour at the back of Nettos.

That day was worthy of my favourite soap opera’s duff-duff moment. I had gone from having some sort of dysfunctional relationship with a bunch of strangers to having real flesh and blood that wanted me, needed me. I hadn’t had any symptoms, and no idea of the life forming within me, a human being, a half copy of me, made especially for me to…

Train him up the good and proper way, Nanna Beet sniffed the next time she saw me. I could tell she didn’t know what to say to me; after all, she didn’t have me down as that type.

Give him some bloody manners, Ang added, a hand hovering in mid air, attempting to swipe the back of a squirmy triplet’s legs. Rob and iPod guffawed. The twins poked Jacob’s face but didn’t offer any advice.

Suddenly, I’d gone from being a loner to a clueless, helpless 22-year-old with a newborn baby, and everyone had something more to say. In the early days, I found myself pacing my flat, day and night, bottle and baby in arms, talking at him, not to him, babbling nonsense I thought sounded appropriate. But we were not connected. I used to look into his big blue eyes and feel unsure.

I was given a bunch of leaflets by the nurse midwife, and some numbers to call for group sessions with other women in my position, but I was always yearning for another Friday morning to arrive. It was the only thing I felt that could help.

This family of mine had started to lend me their ears (and their time), and we would congregate by the basket collection point. I was a sponge- I absorbed everything they told me, for I was truly lost. I wanted to know what to do, but also how to do it.

I’d learnt from Daryl - words were not enough. I needed to do something.

My green signal was Daryl’s imprisonment and Nanna’s declaration that “this impoverished parish s’no place for an innocent babby, you don’t want him turning out like his father”, which was met with reluctant hums of agreement from the group.

So I did it. I applied for housing and got us as “out” as I could manage - only over to another parish, but it was bigger, cleaner, greener and more diverse.

And there my boy flourished.

His blue eyes deepened, his cowlick curls became a Bieber-like push back, and he towered over me by the time he was 12.

Of course, in the meantime, the twins and iPod grew, graduated and left the town for the big city, but Rob and Ang Palmer and Nanna (eventually Jacob's godmother) stayed in touch - now all empty nesters with no one left to pour into, they would frequently shuttle over in Rob’s dad-van for a catch-up and an ever present word of warning to keep him good.

Jacob was mischievous, a little impulsive, but manageable, and I overcompensated for the parts of his childhood that were just gaping holes in mine. I never refused a hug, I showed interest in his homework, and my face was the first thing he’d see in the morning and the last thing at night.

I diligently watered every seed I planted into his head - I taught him about society, justice and accountability. I didn’t have much financially, but we survived. I’d feel bile in my throat when I’d catch him glancing at other boys as we’d wait for the bus - the whiteness of their no-crease Air Force Ones, and the pricey athleisure wear from influencer design houses. I knew the feeling, so I attempted to reduce the quantity gap with quality time and attention.

Then COVID came with an immediate lockdown, and our community shrank to just me and my boy. But then the world opened up again, and Jacob, maturing and moving from tween to an adolescent, itched to escape our two-person bubble.

I need to pause here because I want you, need you, to understand.

I know I said Jacob was not a part of my initial plan, but I now know that he was a part of a bigger plan - one bigger than even myself.

How could I - a girl from nothing, who had nothing - be afforded such a privileged opportunity to raise a child, to make up for all the brokenness in my past? Don’t laugh, but it’s like the Virgin Mary. She didn’t plan, yet she was chosen. She was lowly, yet she was willing. And her baby made a difference (look, even if you don’t believe, I’m sure you're happy for your kids to sing Away in a Manager year after year about a child you never met).

What I am saying is, I had a responsibility. I didn’t take it lightly. In fact, I would be damned if I ever allowed my son to fall into the same stereotypical trap his father fell into. And if he should even decide to dip his toe in all that filth, then I would have to see to it that he never got that urge again.

The day it happened, it was, funnily enough, a Friday.

It has been over 18 months now since the catalyst that set everything into motion, but I recall the events as clear as day.

They call it mother’s intuition, don’t they? I’d secretly known that the pandemic on physical health that caused a pandemic on mental health, which they discussed on the news, noticeably impacting the younger members of society, had made its way into my household.

Jacob had been retreating into his shell, quiet in his room, his hormonal changes stinking the entire top floor. In the daytime, he surfaced to be fed or to check the router’s connection. In the evening, he’d mutter something about seeing a friend and be gone until the early hours.

Then he’d be gone for days, and I comforted myself believing that this was just a phase that all boys went through - Ang and Rob’s words, not mine.

I was willing to temporarily turn a blind eye because I had done what was required - I had raised him to be good, polite, proper, law-abiding, sweet to the elderly and respectful to authority. I had smothered him with the contents of my heart, so he never went without or knew loneliness.

Wasn’t that enough?

It wasn’t enough, apparently.

I’d asked Jacob directly- I looked him in the eyes that day, though my chest burned and my legs felt weak. I thought I might collapse under the weight of the dawning realisation that I knew the answer anyway before it left his lips.

He’d cried and run his hands through his floppy hair, acne irritated on his flushed cheeks, and blubbered about the lads he’d gotten to know online, the things they were into, the dares and pranks they played that had become risky. At first, it was little things, like loose change, snacks from the corner shop, and wallets from coat pockets. And then the bravado and the ego sucked out all the pettiness and replaced it with the reckless and the criminal.

I’d been angry then as I remembered the twins in the store, stealing weekly right under my nose. So bold-faced and smug, yet I had never reacted to their theft because it felt juvenile. I was more interested in the fist bumps and the awkward hugs.

After all, they were a part of my support group, my unit, my family.

But they were wrong.

And so was my son…

*

I’m sorry - a sudden noise has brought me back to the present.

I am trying not to reveal to the cloaked figure before me that I had slipped into a reverie, an internal monologue of the events that have brought me to this point today.

My face feels frozen in a small line, and I attempt to broaden it, but I can’t manage the effort.

I ease myself to my heeled feet and turn to look behind me, down the aisle of the church I am sitting in. It is full (when did it get this full?), and I can feel a horde of eyes swivel in my direction. I guess some are curious, trying to catch my attention or expressionless, but I can’t bear to meet the gazes.

Pastor Graham compels the congregation to stand.

The sound that is playing is an organ, and it swells as the doors open, and oh, here he comes! Here comes my son, down the aisle, surrounded by Rob and his triplet sons, Mickey, Calvin and Dylan, and a few nice lads from the local college.

I know you are trying to imagine it, so let me describe it to you. My son wears a black suit, a navy blue bowtie at his throat, and a spray of tiny white flowers in his buttonhole. His hair is gelled into a quiff, and he looks…handsome.

The men walk as an army towards the front altar, towards me and finally stop. The organ plays its final note, and now I can hear another sound. It's shrill, choked and desperate, and it is coming from me - from my mouth. Rob clutches my black-gloved hand as my legs really do collapse this time. I fall forward, my other hand stretching out, trying to reach for Jacob, but it only grasps the cold, frigid January air and slides down the side of the wooden casket that contains my beautiful baby boy.

*

The last time I had seen Jacob alive was the same day I’d called the police. They’d come to the house and ducked his head into the back of the patrol car.

Believe me, this is for your own good, I had shouted as it cruised out of view.

In 8 weeks of senseless burglaries, 4 young men, including my son, had smashed and broken their way into people’s homes and taken thousands of pounds of valuables.

The crown court sentencing was brief - 16 months in a YOI.

I was pleased initially - a short spell inside would set him straight- besides, he was safer there than on the streets. Sure, he would come out with a buzzcut and hate me for a while, but he couldn’t hate me forever.

I was glad Nanna hadn’t lived to see the day. Ang and Rob were my strongest supporters, even when the vile notes appeared underneath my front door. The nameless senders called me a grass and a brownnose. The red top newspapers sensationalised our story and openly questioned how any mother could do what I had done to my only child.

As the time away from Jacob increased, I attempted to run through the paths I could have taken before calling in his crime.

Feigned ignorance?

Hidden the evidence?

Pointed the finger at the yobs he’d connected with online?

No, because no matter how hard I tried, every possible path, as a mother, as a responsible mother, led me back to what I had chosen to do.

I had wanted to teach my son a valuable lesson, one I expected to last him a lifetime. I just didn’t know it would cost him his life.

A week before Christmas, Jacob rejected my request to see him for the final time. And then, whilst the Palmers carved me a slice of honey-glazed gammon from their festive family roast on the 25th, Jacob Cullen Macaualy Gulliver was set upon by a lone assailant - he didn’t stand a chance. He didn’t even make it to the hospital.

I was told that the prison service was deeply saddened by the incident and sent their regards and thoughts to my family and me.

There is no one else. I had howled at the family liaison officer and sobbed into Ang’s lap, whilst Rob fussed with the kettle to make me some sweet tea for my shock.

So now here I am, listener or reader, kneeling beside my murdered son’s body, in a church full of people I have never met or seen before.

*

Knowing what you know now, would you also reject your mother, who only wanted you to make it in a world that wasn’t designed to reprieve the lower and poorer class?

Or would you allow her to hold your hand one final time?

Would you give an imperceptible nod to acknowledge that she had to do what she had to do, despite the costly, eternal burden she now has to bear?

Would you let forgiveness etch a small smile on your face, because despite your crime, you knew deep down, that right or wrong could never truly steal away your mother’s….