I Won't Forgive What You Did (6 page)

By the time he’d been in hospital for a couple of days, these thoughts were going round and round in my head. I was standing outside school one afternoon, waiting for the coach home, and all I could wonder was what had he
done
to make her be with him and not me all the time? I wandered over to the edge of the playground, preoccupied, and suddenly saw movement within the hedge. I instantly felt afraid and jumped backwards. Was it a snake? I was always thinking someone or something was going to get me and in my mind it was often a snake. Then I remembered the terrifying stories my mother used to tell me about snakes, and how, if you walked on the common without looking, you might be bitten and die. There was an element of truth in this. Adders were common in our part of the world, particularly
on
the common, which was sandy, and only five minutes from school.

I started picking up stones and throwing them into the hedge, and before I knew it I was shouting, ‘I’ve just seen a snake! I’ve just seen a snake!’ hoping someone would hear me. In my mind the snake was huge, and slithering towards me, and was going to jump out and bite me or curl around my leg, so tightly I wouldn’t be able to get it off. I edged back further and stepped on a big unsteady stone, which unbalanced me and sent me tripping into the hedge, and made me fall onto another stone – one sharp enough to cut the skin on my shin. On inspection, it was red, with two distinct grazes. It had just started bleeding, and for a moment I thought a snake really had bitten me, and then a story took root in my head. I decided to pretend I’d been bitten by a snake so my mother would worry, come home from hospital, and bring Adam with her.

The coach arrived then and, my story now up and running, I limped towards it slowly, also making sure when I sat down I rested my injured leg, which was really hurting now, across the seat.

It was pouring with rain that day and, once we’d arrived in the village, the local farmer’s wife, who’d driven to the coach stop to pick her sons up, offered to take me and my siblings as well – we could then walk on home from her farm. It was to her that I first ventured to announce what had ‘happened’, but she just said ‘Oh, yes’, unimpressed, and drove on. She’d later call round to apologize to my mother for not believing me, but for now it seemed my plan hadn’t worked.

Nevertheless, I persisted, and when I got home and told my mother she reacted as if it was her worst nightmare. Which it probably was. She’d only just returned from seeing one sick child in hospital and now she’d another potentially fatally ill. She looked tired and sad but all I could think of was how angry I was at her for spending time with Adam, and not with me, and so I reasoned that it served her right.

She immediately called for an ambulance, which was dispatched from the local cottage hospital. I was amazed and frightened at how quickly things had started happening – I had no idea my mother would call for an ambulance, but now she had how could I tell the truth? I knew I’d be in real trouble. It seemed like only minutes before there was an ambulance lady standing over me, taking my pulse.

I was then rushed, with my mother, to the General Hospital, and put into a bed close to where Adam was sleeping under an oxygen tent in a little cubicle.

A snake bite in Britain, then as now, was a rare event, and the hospital had no supplies of serum. It was necessary therefore for them to have some sent down from the city, and this, being an emergency, was done by helicopter.

I wasn’t feeling very guilty for fibbing about the bite now, because not only was my mother with me, but I thought I could see Adam as well. I was, however, frustrated at the time they were taking – how stupid were these adults to believe me? I just wanted them to go so I could go and see Adam. If I could just see him I was sure I could take both my mother and him home.

The doctors who examined me were convinced by my wound though, and pointed out where they thought the snake’s fangs had gone in. As a consequence they were confused by my complete lack of symptoms. In the end they concluded this must have been because most of the venom had already come out. They decided, therefore, not to use the serum after all, but to keep me in for observation.

As a consequence I was in hospital for a couple of days, next to my little brother. I crept out of bed before I went to sleep, and as soon as I woke up in the morning, to check he was okay. I was very frightened the first time, as I walked slowly towards the cubicle; frightened of getting told off for being out of bed, frightened of being told off for looking at Adam and frightened of what I might see. One night I checked on him as usual, at bedtime, and was therefore shocked on arriving at his bedside the next morning to find the cubicle was empty.

Adam had in fact been moved to another hospital and this was the same hospital where he then died. All I knew for sure, however, was that he’d vanished from his bed, and I was completely distraught. I was convinced he had simply disappeared and nobody would know where he’d gone.

I was discharged the same day and his name wasn’t mentioned, and I was too terrified to ask. By the time my mother told me he’d died, two days later, I was so hysterical and out of control I burst out laughing and couldn’t seem to stop. When he was alive I’d watched my mother with him and wished him dead, and now he
was
dead, I believed I’d killed him. To feel I had such power was a very frightening thing, as was the guilt I felt for having slept through that night; had I stayed awake, I felt sure I could have saved him. I had a lot of anger for him too. How dare he escape from the family and leave me in it.
I
was the bad one. It should have been me.

My mother only made one comment: as Adam was crippled he ‘would have spent all his life in a wheelchair anyway’, and that was that. I was not asked if I wanted to attend the funeral.

After that, it was almost as if he’d never been alive. My mother and father never referred to him again in my hearing, and there were no tears, no discussions, no family conversations or recollections involving him. His toys and clothes just disappeared as if he’d never even lived with us, and no explanations were given to me about anything. There was nothing at all, either physical or emotional, to indicate he’d ever existed. I was not taken to see or put flowers on his grave, and I’d no idea the business of dying meant someone was no longer alive.

In the midst of this emotional abyss, I felt terrified. Was it me next? By now I was seven. When would
I
die? I also didn’t understand the process of death and felt a powerful anxiety for my little brother. What would Adam eat and drink and who’d give it to him? He couldn’t go and get it, because he had a bad leg, and couldn’t walk. And, anyway, how would someone who was dead even know what it was he liked to eat and drink?

At school they’d said dead children went to heaven, to live with God, and that heaven was up in the sky. I looked up to see if I could see him in the sky, with God, but I couldn’t. Was he going past, looking for us? In any case, how would he get into the sky when he was now lying in the ground? I decided my mother must have really hated him to have left him all alone and put dirt on top of him, so he couldn’t breathe. He must be scared of the noise of the wind when it blew, and cold too, because he was buried outdoors. And what about his coat? Did he have his coat? And what if it rained? Would he get wet? Would he be afraid of the dark?

I couldn’t stop wondering how he must have felt, being buried. Did he watch as the spadefuls of earth fell on top of him? Did he hold his breath, terrified, as everything disappeared from sight? I was desperate to run away; to go and see if I could find him, but at the same time I was too scared to actually do it, because I worried it might be that if I got too near to him, the same thing would happen to me.

I made a promise to him instead.
I will think of you every single day for the rest of my life and never forgive myself. Every time I eat or drink some will be for you, and I will not fall asleep again, ever.
I ended it by saying how sorry I was, how I never meant for this to happen, and how much I hoped he could forgive me.

Years later, when I was ten, I learned that every Christmas after Adam’s death, my mother would go to the churchyard, where he’s buried, in a grave next to her own mother’s. Here she’d lay a wreath, but this act of remembrance wasn’t shared with me. It was only at the Christmas before my eleventh birthday I plucked up the courage to go and see his grave, but I still couldn’t accept he was never coming back. That he was truly gone, in the absence of anyone speaking to me about it, had become something I simply refused to face.

Did my mother wish to spare me? Exclude me from her grief? Have me just forget and move on? Whatever the reason, my brother’s death was the endpoint, and – for me, anyway – a start. The start of the feeling that it should have been me and not him – a feeling that has persisted all my life.

Just the same as any other young child, I never questioned why my family behaved as they did, or tried to work out what might drive them to do so. Though school had taught me we were different, and in a thousand depressing ways, it would be way into adulthood before the wretched truth dawned. As a child I just accepted that difference, and spent much more time dissecting the way it made
me feel
, as a consequence of having been born ‘full of woe’.

That my life
was
full of woe was without doubt – even though I still didn’t really understand why. Yes, it was clear that my father’s violent temper was frightening, and also that my mother’s indifference to me really hurt, but I had no understanding that Grandpops’ horrible manhandling – endlessly, week after week, throughout my childhood – was wrong. And I didn’t feel anything but gratitude towards Daniel, despite his ‘love’ for me involving me having to do such revolting things for him every single time he came to visit.

No wonder I had turned into such a sad, unhappy child.

But some things are universal among children, however grim their lives, and the excitement of Christmas was one of them. Just like any other child, I grew excited in December, swept up by the air of festivity in school, the making of decorations, the singing of carols, the expectation of presents if we were good. Despite my continuing isolation and my awkward, unhappy state, even I couldn’t help hoping for happiness at Christmas, despite experience so often telling me otherwise, particularly where my nan was concerned.

Nan was a powerful influence in my life, and her malevolence towards me was as unexplained as it was relentless. My father’s mother was the polar opposite of my own; where my mother was neglectful, erratic and unstable, Nan was fiercely controlling, judgemental and strict. The only trait they seemed to share – apart from their mutual dislike – was that both, though complete opposites temperamentally, could be cruel.

With extremely short straight hair cut above her ears, Nan was small and stocky. She lived quite close to us throughout my childhood. And frightened me in the same way my father did, in some ways more, because she frightened
him
too, and my mother said he never made a decision about anything without first obtaining her say-so. The only decision, it seemed, he
had
made without her, was to marry my mother.

Nan was married to a man we all knew as Grandad, though my father, in fact, wasn’t his son. He’d come into Nan’s life when my father was two years old, the child of a man who, even on her deathbed, Nan never identified. All we eventually knew was that, when she was a teenager, she’d had a crush on an older, married, factory owner, who disowned her as soon as she fell pregnant with my father and was never seen again. The only reason my father knew Grandad wasn’t his dad was because my nan’s sister insisted, at the time of my father’s fourteenth birthday, he needed to know, if not who his real father was, at least that he wasn’t Grandad’s biological son, in case he wanted to get a passport or get married, and needed his birth certificate.

There’s little doubt Nan’s difficult upbringing contributed to the woman she went on to become. Her mother died when she was about seven and her father, an alcoholic and a womanizer, quickly remarried and had more children. Her maternal grandmother, fearing for her granddaughter’s welfare – she was apparently both disturbed and ‘sickly’ – took her to live with her in order to bring her up away from her siblings. This meant there was an even greater distance between them, and when she visited her father they teased her mercilessly. When the second wife died, her father married a third time, and Nan ended up in a large family of siblings and half-siblings. It’s unsurprising she fell pregnant and wished to escape, or that in later life she became so controlling and fierce – the antithesis of the sickly little motherless girl, as well as the wayward teenager with an illegitimate child.

But whatever the reasons for her nature, all I knew was she frightened me and had done for as long as I could remember. Which wasn’t surprising. Some of my earliest memories of her, sketchy though they are, are of her treating me with aggressive indifference. She looked after us for my mother on a regular basis, both coming to the house to help out – or take over – and at her own house, when my own mother couldn’t look after us because she was ill or working, or having another baby.

Nan had her own ideas about how best to deal with toddlers and babies, and would put me in a drawer to sleep. But not just in an open drawer, taken from a dresser – one that was still
in
there, which she would also close. It was a big old heavy chest and a big old heavy drawer, and the force required to close it meant it shut with a jolt, and sawdust would fall into my eyes and mouth, compounding my sense of panic and the terrifying realization I was trapped and might be shut in there for ages.