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Karen Lawson

Karen Lawson — wife of Phillip Lawson

Character Profile
Stories Book of Thoth Saga (Vol. I)
Species Human
Status Active
Occupation Supermarket worker (at the time of the bike shed)
Family
First Appearance Cambion, Chapter Two: Inarticulate

Karen Lawson

“Dragging me from work for this. When your father hears…”

Overview

Karen Lawson is the wife of Phillip Lawson and the mother of Michael Lawson. She appears in Cambion in Chapter Two: Inarticulate, called from her supermarket shift after the bike shed incident knocks her son’s tooth out.

She arrives at Stepping Stones Primary still in her shift uniform: thin and pale, a pink coat slouched over her supermarket tabard, a packet of Benson & Hedges bulging from the pocket, slip-ons with the backs trodden flat. Her hair is scraped back so tightly the skin at her temples shines. Her hands tremble — whether from exhaustion or fury held in check is not, in the moment, clear. She carries the smell of smoke and aisle dust into the corridor with her. Michael flinches at the sound of her footsteps before she does anything. The room registers this. The headteacher does not comment on it.

Her response to the scene is unambiguous on the surface and complicated underneath. She finds Robert and Daniel in the waiting area, jabs her finger at Robert, and tells him: You. You did this to my son. Look what you’ve done. She pulls Michael to her side and makes him face them. When Michael makes a wet, ragged noise, she clips his ear and starts tugging him toward the double doors. Dragging me from work for this. When your father hears… She glances at Mrs Davison framed in the office doorway and delivers, on the way out, the sentence she came in to say: That lad should be suspended. He’s dangerous. Then she leaves. Her slip-ons and Michael’s heavy shoes scuff away down the hall.

✦

Beyond the Scene

Karen worked the till at a supermarket for the eighteen months the family lived in Hope’s End. The job was a way of being out of the house, and a way of having a wage that was hers, and a way of not asking Phillip what he was doing on the days she came home and the front bedroom door had been locked for hours. She did not, on the whole, ask him about his work. She had not asked him about his work for a long time before the move to Hope’s End. The not-asking was the agreement. The agreement was the marriage.

She had once been — a long time ago, two children ago — the kind of woman who laughed in pubs. The pink coat and the trodden-flat slip-ons are not the whole of who she is, but they are a great deal more of it than they used to be. The Benson & Hedges in her pocket is the only fixed point in a working week she runs at the pace of a person trying not to feel the running. She smokes outside the back door of the house when Phillip is in the locked bedroom and the boys are in front of the television. She has been doing it for years. She thinks, sometimes, that this is the part of her day she counts as hers, and what that says about the rest of her day is something she has chosen not to examine.

She was afraid of Phillip in a way that did not appear on the surface of the marriage and was the entire engineering of it underneath. She had been afraid of him longer than she had been married to him. She did not name the fear; the fear did not require naming. The line she said to Michael in the corridor at Stepping Stones — when your father hears — was not a parental warning. It was an instinct she had relied on for years to keep two boys in line, because the thing she could not bring herself to do, what Phillip would do, was always available as a threat. The threat worked. The threat had been working for years.

What she did not understand, on the afternoon of the bike shed, was the operational shape of what was unfolding. She thought her son had been in a fight and lost. She thought the school had not protected him. She thought her husband would be furious about being interrupted at home with bad news. She did not know that the bad news was, for Phillip, the data he had been waiting two years for. When the family relocated eight weeks later, she experienced it as the first thing in her marriage that had ever gone the way she had quietly wanted. She was wrong about whose decision it had been. She has not, in the years since, allowed herself to wonder whether the move was hers at all.

Trivia

  • Karen is never named in Cambion. The manuscript refers to her only as his mother or Michael’s mum. The first name is editorial. She is the wife of an Orion operative, the mother of a deployed son, and the household’s third inhabitant by the architecture if not by name. The choice not to give her a name on the page is one of the manuscript’s small operational decisions.
  • Michael flinched at the sound of her footsteps before she had said or done anything. The detail is delivered in a single line and easy to miss. It is the manuscript’s small clear note that the household had a violence to it Karen herself was part of the architecture of, not just an observer of. Whether the violence was hers or whether it was Phillip’s landing on Karen and bouncing off through Karen onto her son is not addressed by the text. The flinch covers both readings.
  • Her line in the corridor — When your father hears… — is the only direct mention of Phillip in the bike shed sequence. He is not at the school. He is not on the phone. He is not in the room. He is, nevertheless, the loudest figure in the conversation. Karen invokes him without realising she is the one putting him there.
  • Her demand — That lad should be suspended. He’s dangerous — was directed at the wrong child for the wrong reason and was, in its own backwards way, accurate. Robert was dangerous. He was just not dangerous in the direction Karen was pointing.

Appearances

Title Role Notes
Cambion
Book One · Book of Thoth Saga		 Minor; Michael’s Mother Single appearance in Chapter Two: Inarticulate. Arrives at Stepping Stones Primary from her supermarket shift, confronts Robert and Daniel in the reception waiting area, demands Robert’s suspension, leaves with Michael in tow.