Free Nine Lives by Bernice Rubens

company. When they left, they told me they were going to change their surname. Dorricks is not like Jones or Smith. It’s a singular name, and they didn’t want to be associated with it. So I don’t even know what my boys are called. I wish they would get in touch. I want to persuade them to go and see their father. If only I could remember the name of their firm. Perhaps Donald knows. I’ll ask him next time I visit.
    I don’t feel like getting up this morning. I want to sleep my birthday away. Birthdays are times when you think about your future. You daydream and you plan. But the future I have to look forward to is bleak and lonely, and when I’m in a low mood I find it easy to fall asleep. God is good sometimes.
    I was tempted to go and see if there was any post before I went back to bed. I had no reason to expect birthday cards, but I couldn’t help myself going to the letter box. And indeed, there was one letter, and in a pink envelope, so I knew that someone had remembered. I looked at thestamp and saw the franking of H. M. Prison, and I knew who it was from. I had half hoped that my boys would have remembered, but I had to make do with Donald. Which upset me a bit, for it was all because of him that the boys had not written. I get these moments of not liking Donald very much, yet sometimes I love him as deeply as I did in the very beginning. Between the loving and the hating, and the not knowing and not wanting to know, between my total belief in his innocence and my disturbing doubts, between all these things, I was mightily confused. I couldn’t face the reality, because I was not quite sure what the reality was.
    I opened Donald’s card. Inside was a painting, a river with a weeping willow, signed Donald Dorricks. And I loved him once again. There was a river quite near where I used to live, with a willow on its banks. We used to go there often, Donald and I, when we were courting. He must be dwelling on those times, I thought, those happy times before people said he did terrible things. But they lied. Not my Donald. He’s innocent. And I ought to know. I lived with him all those years. I would have noticed something, something not quite right. But everything seemed normal. He got depressed sometimes. But don’t we all? Nothing abnormal about that. It’s a good painting he’s done for me, and I’m glad he has a flair for it, because it will help him pass his time. His life, really, because that’s his sentence. He’ll have to do at least fifteen years before he’s eligible for parole. I’ll be sixty-two then, and he’ll be seventy-three – an old man. I was beginning to feel sad again, and I crawled back into bed and put his card under my pillow.
    Someone was ringing the doorbell, and the sound woke me. I was not expecting anybody so I tried to go back tosleep. But the ringing was insistent. I looked at my watch. It was already twelve o’clock. I’d slept almost half my birthday away, and with luck I could get rid of my caller and sleep away the other half. I dragged on a dressing-gown and went to the door. Through the coloured glass pane, I could see two shadows. I watched them and saw the one merge with the other. Always together. Always one. My boys. I no longer wanted to sleep. That shadow was a reality I could face. I was trembling. It was almost a year since I had set eyes on them, and as I tried to compose myself they rang the bell again. I knew that they were anxious to be indoors, away from the net-curtain stares, those down-the-nose looks they had fled to avoid. So I opened the door quickly and they brushed past me avoiding a doorstep greeting. But once inside, safely housed in their father’s ambivalent innocence, they embraced me, the two of them together, wishing me a happy birthday.
    â€˜We’re taking you for lunch,’ Matthew said. ‘We’ve booked a table. Go and get dressed.’
    I have to