Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma

night he doesn’t come home at al. At two in the morning, after caling him repeatedly and getting redirected to voicemail, I phone Mum in sheer desperation. She is in a club somewhere – the background noise is deafening: music, shouting, cheering. As we’re already in the smal hours of the morning, her speech is slurred and the fact that her son has gone missing barely seems to register. Laughing and breaking off every few words to talk to Dave, she informs me I need to learn to relax, that Kit is a young man now and should have some fun. I am about to point out he could be lying face down in a gutter when I suddenly realize I’m wasting my breath. With Dave she can pretend she is young again, free of the restrictions and responsibilities of motherhood. She never wanted to grow up – I remember our father citing this as a reason for leaving. He accused her of being a bad mother – but then the only reason they got married was because she accidentaly fel pregnant with me – a fact she likes to remind me of whenever we have an argument. And now that I am just a few months away from being legaly classed an adult, she feels freer than she has done in years. Dave already has a young family of his own. He has made it very clear that he doesn’t want to take on someone else’s. And so she shrewdly keeps him away, only bringing him back to the house when everyone is asleep or out at school. With Dave she has reinvented herself – a young woman caught up in a passionate romance. She dresses like a teenager, spends al her money on clothes and beauty treatments, lies about her age, and drinks, drinks, drinks – to forget that youth and beauty are behind her, to forget that Dave has no intention of marrying her, to forget that at the end of the day she is just a forty-five-year-old divorcee in a deadend job with five unwanted children. Yet understanding the reasons behind her behaviour does little to stem the hate.
    It is now half past two and I am beginning to panic. Seated on the sofa, strategicaly positioned so that the weak light of the naked bulb fals directly on my books, I have been straining to read through my notes for at least three hours, the scrawled words bleeding into each other, dancing about the page. Maya came to say good-night over an hour ago, purple shadows beneath her eyes, her freckles contrasting starkly with the palor of her skin. I am stil in my uniform, the usual ink-stained cuffs pushed up, shirt half unbuttoned. From deep within my skul, a metalic shaft of pain bores its way through my right temple. Once again I glance up at the clock and my insides knot in fear and rage. I stare at my ghostly reflection in the darkened windowpane. My eyes hurt, my whole body throbs with stress and exhaustion. I have not the slightest idea what to do.
    Part of me simply wants to blot the whole thing out – go to bed and just pray Kit is back by the time I wake up in the morning. But another part of me is forced to remember that he is little more than a child. An unhappy, self-destructive child who has got in with the wrong crowd because they provide him with the company and admiration his family do not. He could have been in a fight, he could be mainlining heroin, he could be breaking the law and screwing up his life before it has even begun. Worse stil, he could be the victim of a mugger or some rival gang – his behaviour has begun to earn him quite a reputation in the area. He could be lying bleeding somewhere, knifed or shot. He may hate me, he may resent me, he may blame me for everything that’s wrong in his life, but if I give up on him, then he has no one left at al. His hatred of me wil have been completely justified. Yet what can I possibly do? He refuses to share any part of his life with me, so I don’t know any of his friends or where he hangs out. I don’t even have a bike to go combing the streets with. The clock now reads a quarter to three: nearly five hours after Kit’s weekend curfew. He