by Kate Bradley
Snapped with the power of what? My thoughts sped, each blurred and smudgy with panic: the dog was dead and I grasped through the haze that, as a family, we’d finally reached the impasse. There had been a sequence leading to this and now that wouldn’t stop; now nothing was going to stay the same. I felt it clearly in that moment, through the muddle: now it’s all going to get worse. I didn’t know how, but I was right, because within two days Nick and I were finished, for better or for worse.
Really, the way we’d been functioning, it was about time.
But I couldn’t be relieved about it – there was no relief in the dog being dead or what came next.
I looked at Nick, on his knees with our dead dog, a silent bellow of anger and sadness ripping through me, making me step back. My marriage was over and it hurt.
Sorry.
I know about temper: I grew up around it. How that sudden silent seizing in the amygdala and the release of catecholamines means rational becomes irrational within a heartbeat. Fire like that can just live in blood.
I pick up the broom, just to look at it really. Just to see the smudge of blood on the handle more closely, and seeing it, I thought of Issy pulling up my jumper sleeve and exposing the bruises. Not for the first time, I wonder what could happen to me.
He must’ve known that we couldn’t come back from this. I thought: How is this horror my life?
I felt the snap again. Blood hot; beating heart. I looked at my son, eyes wide with fright, blood-smeared. Then I turned, reaching for something, desperate to spear the anger with something possible. Then: Nobody lays a finger on my child. I held the broom tight. White knuckles. Then brought it down again and again on my husband as he cowered under my rage.
I was never a victim. This is because I always knew what others, like beautiful Issy, did not. I have a hard edge: there’s a point beyond which I will yield no more. It’s that knowledge that kept my chin up, kept me in my home, because really, what is a broken rib? What is that single, slim, white rib or finger or bruise, when any time you want, you can change your world?
nineteen:
– before –
Three days later, Jack and I were alone. We queued for train tickets at Brighton train station. Then we sat on the cold, metal benches and ate the sandwiches I’d bought from a café.
By our feet were several large suitcases and my go-bag. Apart from our clothes and a few of Jack’s toys, we’d left everything in the flat. The furniture, the car, the sofas – I’d laid claim to none of it. It was too dangerous. All the effort of the refurbishment: sanding the woodwork, the careful cutting in, the bookshelves I’d helped build . . . it was all just nothing to me now.
It was cold and I tightened Jack’s coat, buttoning against the chill. But my own I left open. Some things you can’t be shielded from.
Our train drew into the station. I stood up and pulled my bag over my shoulder and then, with careful arrangement, laid claim to the rest of our baggage except Jack’s own, small rucksack. I indicated to Jack that he should take my free hand. He did. I wrapped my fingers tight round his and smiled down at him. Sometimes you don’t have the answer, I knew, but sometimes any answer is better than none. Whatever had happened in the past, I was determined we’d leave it all there. We had a new start ahead of us and we had to look forward.
As we stepped up onto the train, receiving a little help from strangers paid for with ‘Oh, thank you!’ and ‘If you don’t mind, that’d be great,’ we settled our extensive baggage and then ourselves.
Seated, I rubbed the condensation from the window so I could see clearly. Looking out, I saw nothing of Brighton’s vibrancy, only the grey station platform pocked with discarded chewing gum, dropped litter, and in the shadows, a homeless person as wanted as a dropped Subway cup.
Because I needed to see it again, I took out the letter and read it all through for the zillionth time. When I got to the end, I took a deep breath, folded it up and returned it to the zipped-up compartment in my handbag. I was done with my home town and this letter confirmed it – anywhere was better.
When the train finally pulled away, I leaned forward and seized both of Jack’s small hands in my own. His sweet face looked up at me; he was so young and it all seemed so impossible. I wanted to say something important, something memorable, but in the end all I could say was: ‘We’re leaving.’
And that seemed enough for him.
It was enough for me.
twenty:
– now –
One.
Two.
Th—
Then into the flame. Nothing. Then: instant! So instant! Think of Jack, I think, already panicking. It’s worse than I thought it would be. Searing doesn’t cut it. It’s like the ring of fire in childbirth without any pain control. At least then you have no choice, but I have to hold my wrists, my hands, over this flame because I can’t see where to hold it. My fingers too – they’re over the other side of the ring of fire, I thought.
A bright point – this agony is a bright point, larger, and then larger still, a rising and exploding firework. Now it’s a star; a sun; vast and all-consuming.
I can’t do it, I think, panic rising high, so high, that I can’t think of anything else. Can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t do it.
I smell something like food – cooking meat. It’s me! It’s me! I’m cooking myself!
I start to shiver. Then it’s gone. My subconscious is now screaming what my conscious already knows: Too hot, too hot, too hot.
I’m worried I’m screaming. My jaw is clamped shut and my ears hear nothing, but I’m not sure there’s not a thin, high wail emanating from me.
When I know I can’t stand any more my mind clears. I can only describe it as a nirvana. Maybe it’s just adrenaline, maybe it’s a higher power come to help me. But it works.
Through it all I think: Jack. I see his eyelashes – so long, longer than mine! His blue eyes with the dark ring round them that makes them so unique. I see his face, so serious until something makes him laugh and then he erupts in the funniest laugh I ever heard.
Jack. This second thought is the important one. Through the fire I feel my love for him. Just like his terrible, terrible birth, after which I swore, never again. I have handled pain before – that is what I tell myself when the smell makes me so sick and the fire is so bad that the world greys again.
I think of Nick.
twenty-one:
– now –
I wake on my kitchen floor. This time the grey recedes quickly and I immediately know where I am. I am sharper; I feel the difference to before. The burning in my wrists and hands is ragged and rabid, an uncontrollable animal that stalks my mind, not waiting for me to open my eyes, before sinking its jagged jaws into my wrists, but I want to know.
I move my arms to test . . .
Yes. I am free.
Now I can get to Jack.
I shut my eyes when I bring my hands up in front of me. I feel the thrum of my heart in my hands as I lift them up.
I don’t want to open my eyes and see the damage. But there’s no time to waste, so I do.
twenty-two:
– before –
Just five days after Winston’s death, everything was different. Sometimes, one thing triggers another thing and before you know it, your world has irrevocably changed. I suppose it was several things coming together that finally ended our family life forever, but mostly that awful, terrible last straw that I don’t think about even now, that happened two days after Winston’s death – but also the letter, which I carried with me as Jack and I arrived at our new home.
A new town; a new home; a new us. This available-now-and-also-furnished flat was just behind the Bracknell high-street shops. Finally, my diligent savings had been put to good use.
My son stood nervously behind me, unsure. I rattled the key in the lock, muttering under my breath. When it gave and opened, I stood on the threshold and hid my sigh.
I’d only been
here once, just two days ago. Although Jack had been with me, he’d sat, uninterested, playing a game on my phone. I was still so frightened after the terrible event that I’d had to hide my shaking hands from the lettings agent.
Then, it’d been a bright sunny day, a counterpoint to my misery – and the sun streamed through the windows. Inside, the flat had smelt of fresh coffee. Today, it was rainy and we’d had to dodge a huge puddle by the front door where the drainage must’ve been blocked and now I was standing in a flat that smelt of gravy and old socks. Of course, I realised, inexperienced me had been hoodwinked by the homely fresh coffee smell.
Now, I stepped into the thin corridor of a hall and looked at the grubby carpet tiles and couldn’t help but compare it to the carpet of our last oh-so-lovely flat. We’d never been well off, but this . . . this felt like I’d been plunged into a world of poverty. Perhaps I’d rushed things a bit.
No. No choice, I reminded myself.
‘Well, this is it!’ I said to Jack in a too-bright voice. ‘Don’t forget we will put plants around the place –’ I glanced through to the small sitting room and the tired sofa – ‘and brighten the place up with throws and pictures! And I can paint it too, so you can pick any colour for your bedroom walls.’ My thin laugh bounced in the low-ceilinged, characterless space.
Five-year-old Jack peered round me and stared, his bottom lip now protruding, looking like he was going to cry. Boys his age don’t care much for throws and pictures. They want their dads. They also want their old school. They also want their grandma, Irene.
What did I want? I wondered, looking inside the grubby faux-wood kitchen cupboards. I wanted safety. I wanted change. I opened a drawer and saw a dead woodlouse. I wasn’t sure this was it.
After Winston and then . . . what happened next, I’d picked up my phone and pretty much picked Bracknell off a map. It was a panicked decision to leave Brighton.
When I’d seen it, Bracknell had seemed like enough distance to start again. It had several hospitals and lots of care homes, so there was plenty of opportunity for work. A phone call to the local authority had told me I could secure a space for Jack at the nearby school; it was small and only a short walk away, which felt perfect. By living on the high street, we had useful shops on our doorstep and great connections Even better, Bracknell was only thirty minutes’ drive from my mother’s prison. At the time, it’d felt like the perfect decision.
But today, I could see the reality. When I got a car, I wouldn’t be able to park it nearby. The recent rain had overflowed the drains. The overcast April sky made the flat feel shabby and cheap, because it was shabby and cheap. Although I’d saved enough for a deposit and the first few months’ rent, I couldn’t afford to be extravagant. Moving away from Nick also meant moving away from Irene. I felt terrible for her, effectively walking out of her life, but it also meant that I’d be limited to how much I could work and therefore earn.
I planned on taking nothing from Nick – it felt safer that way.
But despite it all, I still missed my husband. I missed his large hands rubbing my back when I was upset; I missed his pragmatic way of looking at things; I missed his logos to my pathos. But I wasn’t going to stand in this empty ’70s box with Jack looking at me with large blue eyes, waiting for me to react to what we had lost.
‘Well, this is good, isn’t it!’ I had to be bright about this because we were only here because I wanted us to be – because I thought it was right.
I took hold of his hand and led him round the flat, but I didn’t linger in the bathroom because it had no window, and its brown dirge colour scheme made me feel like my life was so far off its rails it couldn’t even see where it’d left the tracks.
But this was somewhere safe, where no one knew us, and I had to be strong. It didn’t matter that my nerves were still gossamer thin from yet more tears from Jack. I didn’t blame him – he was five and understood that he’d left his home forever.
It was all so terrible.
Poor Jack, my heart bled for him. I looked at my little boy standing by the back door. I knew there was an alleyway that ran down the side of the flat, and it led to the high street one way, and the flat’s small yard the other way. He looked pale and I thought: I’ll show him the yard. I wished it was a garden, but there was no pretending that it was anything more than a barren, six-metre-square paved concrete area.
‘Jack, there’s a yard out back – do you want to see it? I thought we could grow tomato—’
‘No!’ His hands had balled to fists. He took a step forward. With his eyes narrowed, he looked just like his dad.
‘Jack . . .’ My tone was at best placatory, but I didn’t have any words. He was owed a tantrum. What could I tell him?
‘I want Daddy.’
I forced myself to breathe in. And then out. ‘We’ve talked about—’
Jack started crying. ‘I want Daddy, please, Mummy, please.’
People talk about their hearts breaking, and right there, I felt physical pain. ‘Daddy is fine and safe and well but we just can’t see him at the moment because . . .’
Jack looked around the kitchen area and I saw it through his eyes. The Formica worktop was scratched and chipped. The window above the single full run of cabinets overlooked the dark alley, and only the bobbly privacy glass was softened by a fat-splatted blind.
‘It looks a bit unfriendly here, but we’ll cheer it up. We’ll make it home.’
‘But what about Daddy? Is this because of what Daddy did?’
‘All you have to understand is that Daddy isn’t living with us anymore,’ I said again, using the most calming, patient tone I could manage given that we’d had this conversation five hundred zillion times. ‘We’ve decided it’s for the best.’
‘Best for who?’
That was a good question and one he hadn’t asked before, and for a moment I was stumped. Unable to answer it in a way that he could understand, I said: ‘You come first, Jack.’ And it was true. I had always put him first. I was standing in a shithole and he was looking at me like I was the emerging turd and yet we were both standing here for him.
But sometimes, when I lay in the dark thinking about the different ways my life had gone wrong, I wasn’t so sure. It seemed that everyone else was the turd and I was the paper they used to clean up their shitty mess. The thought angered me. Actually, it’s best for you, Jack.
‘Best for me how?’
I took a step back and hit the radiator behind me. My hands reached down and touched the coldness. The paint was rough and chipped. How could I have said it aloud? I shook my head a little – I didn’t say it, I didn’t.
‘Why is it best for me? I want to go home.’ He bit his lip and I knew he was about to cry.
I wanted to grip him tight in a hug, squeeze him and say yes, all right, we will go home. Tomorrow we will wake up and go to the DIY store and chip the hairs out of the paint and sand the living room and paint it fresh all over and everything will be perfect.
But it wasn’t as simple as that. If it was, I would’ve done it already. I felt sick. This new flat was so disappointing. It was so tiring being a parent. And I so hated – hated – being on my own.
‘I want to go home!’
He said it but I felt it. Jack shouted: ‘Home, home, home,’ in a chant as he backed up against the kitchen counter; it was like we were opposing fighters backed up against the ropes of a boxing ring. He then threw his head back and began to scream.
twenty-three:
– before –
Two weeks after I’d moved Jack and me into the dreadful flat off the high street, I took a train, another train and then another train, before getting on the visitor bus, to visit my mother.
The journey was a huge disappointment. I was now carless; because our car had been a present from Irene, I’d decided to leave it with Nick. Without it though, the trip was as long as it had been driving to Send from Brighton.
The travel got to both Jack and m
e. By the time I got off the bus, I was on the verge of a full mental breakdown. I’d once did a rotation on a psychiatric ward during my nursing training, so I had an idea what I was talking about. Now we’d given up the buggy, I was determined not to go back, but I missed it when Jack dithered. With the gate in sight, I took his hand and tried to tow him faster, but he complained: ‘Ow, Mummy, don’t pull so hard!’ An old man, walking in with us, turned to glance at me. Feeling judged, I felt the tension in my jaw tighten and I loosened my grip on him.
I realised I was brewing for an argument and felt a twinge of shame. I told him: ‘Sorry, Jack, it’s just that we have to get there on time,’ as if he didn’t already know.
As we walked through the outer gate that seemed to define my life, I glanced down at my young son, and finally felt my heart properly soften. His large eyes looked up at me and I realised again that he was so beautiful, sometimes I just forgot what a precious, precious gift he was.
I knew I was angry at him; angry at Nick; angry at myself and what our family had become. It was so far from where we’d wanted to be, it was such a scrunched up mess, it made me hate each one of us. But at the centre of it, I saved the most hate for myself.
Each of us were victims. However, Jack was the biggest victim of us all. I thought of me and then of my mother. And then of my father. Jack was my father’s victim too. Like throwing a stone in a lake, the ripples of his actions many years ago were hitting against Jack now.
As I took my hard, plastic chair, I realised that I wasn’t stressed from our horrendous journey, I was frightened. I was frightened of what my mother would say about my news.
I sat opposite her and it started straightaway.
‘No smile today?’ She didn’t look at me as she said that, instead looking at Jack who was reading a Horrible Histories book. He loved them, but I didn’t trust him not to be listening anyway. ‘Jack,’ I asked to test him out, ‘want a sweet?’ He didn’t raise his head. Mollified a little, I paused, listening to the sounds of the visiting room. Lots of voices; someone weeping; someone else hacking a stubborn cough; maniacal laugher cackling from some other place. Jack turned a page.