The Graft by Martina Cole

did.
     

Chapter Five
     
    Tyrell had no interest in what the police had to say about the attack on his mother’s and went off to work with a frown on his face. He was sick to death of it all. He just wanted to grieve in peace.
     
    No one was surprised by the events of the night before. The police seemed sorry for the boy’s mother but not unduly bothered about the broken window. Sonny had been a legend in his own lunchtime around the estate and people had little sympathy for him personally. He had robbed enough of them over the years to cause widespread offence.
     
    Tyrell’s mother, though, was a different kettle of fish altogether. She was respected and liked even though she never left the house now. Everyone came to her and she dispensed advice and sympathy, so to think that anyone would take it out on her like this was making Tyrell feel capable of murder himself.
     
    The paramedics had stitched her eyebrow in the house. Realising she would not leave, they had had to calm her down before they had been able to take care of her wound. Verbena had been more worried about leaving her home than she had been about the attack. But Tyrell understood that. He understood her fear even better than she did.
     
    His mother had not left the house for over twenty years, and he knew that she would never leave it now. Her nerves had got to her long before his brother’s death, but that had been the catalyst that had caused all their lives to change so dramatically.
     
    His mother had taken so much in her lifetime, and she had taken it all on the chin in true Jamaican fashion. She had seen her adopted country as the salvation of her family, as the means to give them all a better life. She had worked every hour that the good Lord had sent, and she had dressed her children in fine clothes, fed them the best foods. She had sent her children to school, and made sure they had arrived there and, more importantly, stayed there.
     
    Unlike their contemporaries, they had been too fearful to play truant, too frightened to let her down, and make her feel ashamed of them.
     
    She had taken them to church and taught them the goodness of Christ and of a life well lived. Her job had been as a care assistant in a hospital, and it had involved shifts, and she had taken every shift she could, never missing one. Like her husband, she had understood that without money they could not further themselves or their children.
     
    When her last baby had arrived, it had been Hettie and Maureen to whom she had entrusted him, and it had been Hettie and Maureen who had taken him to school one day and who had watched in horror as he had run into the road and been mown down by a nice man who had been surprised and terrified by the fact that a young boy had run out in front of his car and had died within seconds.
     
    It had been no one’s fault, but Verbena, already under too much pressure, had taken the death so badly she had gradually lost the urge to do even the most mundane of things. Her children and husband had watched their strongest supporter wither away under the weight of her grief. First the job had gone, then the visits to the shops. Day by day, she had sat indoors reading the Bible, looking for a reason for her son’s death. Going out less and less, until finally even her church had not been enough to make her leave the house, her world had come to her. Until now, her illness was accepted as an intrinsic part of her and not as something strange or alien. It almost seemed normal to her family and friends.
     
    Yet there were no photos of her last-born in the house, and there was never any mention of him. Samuel Hatcher had been obliterated from their lives, because Verbena had never been able to cope with his death, or with her own guilt.
     
    Yet Tyrell knew she thought of him constantly and went over and over in her mind the morning she had sent him off with his sisters to his death, while she had tumbled into bed exhausted from her night’s