‘She is so wonderful, your mother,’ whispered the midwife, ‘she should have been a doctor.’
When I went back to work after maternity leave, I was determined not to waste my days. I got a new job running a literacy charity called Quick Reads, commissioning short books for less confident adult readers. I was overwhelmed by all the things I didn’t know about charities, fundraising and government, but immediately enjoyed spending time with people who couldn’t read or write very well and was inspired and humbled by the way they navigated life.
Some time into the job, I went on a visit to Pentonville prison with Andy McNab, the SAS hero and thriller writer. Andy was recruited into the army from borstal and credited army education with changing his life. ‘Everyone fucks up,’ he said, to a room full of prisoners. ‘It’s what you do next that matters.’ I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. I knew in that moment that every single one of us wanted to change our lives for the better. I looked around the room. If all these people, most of whom hadn’t had my educational advantages or good parenting, could face their demons and get on with life, then maybe I could too.
I started talking to people about my own dad and all his struggles with reading, realizing it made everyone more comfortable with me when I shared his story – more inclined to trust me and know that I wasn’t judging them.
‘Thanks for telling us about your dad,’ said a man at a prison reading group. ‘It’s amazing that someone who sounds a bit like me could have a daughter who grows up to be someone like you.’ I was very moved by this and it made me think how I must appear very different to people from how I felt inside.
Quick Reads was part time, so I got another job writing about books for the Bookseller magazine. I used to read it in my breaks in the smoking room at Harrods, and knew that my lonely, younger self would feel pleased at how I’d turned out. I started talking about books on radio and TV and no longer felt directionless or like a fuck-up. People kept telling me how good I was, and after a while I stopped feeling like a fraud or looking over my shoulder to see if they were talking about someone else and learned to accept their compliments. I knew I didn’t present a whole picture: I felt like a burlesque dancer using fans and sleight of hand to hide the bits of myself I felt ashamed of. I didn’t think anyone would like me if they knew how I really was.
I was still sad, and troubled by the fact that I could be sad when I had so much to make me happy. How could I be sad when my son was so beautiful, when my parents were alive and in good health, when I had fulfilling work to do?
We went to visit Erwyn’s beautiful home town of Edam, where it rained non-stop and I felt the black tentacles of depression trying to get a hold on me. I idly clicked a Twitter link and read an article in Time magazine called ‘Top Ten Comas’ and it made me cry for the rest of the holiday. I was distressed by the flippant tone – they placed fictional characters side by side with real tragedies – and by the accompanying images of the blank stares that reminded me of Matty. The thing that most worried me, though, was the entry about someone who magically woke up many years later. That was the stuff of my nightmares.
Back home, I felt empty. I ached all over and was plagued with frequent aggressive headaches. Every day it was a struggle to get out of bed. I felt like I had lead weights strapped to my legs.
I went to the doctor’s and was tested for a few things and then remembered how everything that had ever been wrong with me turned out to have a psychological root. So I went to see a therapist. I wanted to know why I was like this. She said she didn’t know but I had lots of unprocessed grief, and I spent the best part of a year crying at her for fifty minutes a week. It worked a bit, in that my aches and pains lessened, but I wasn’t sure we were getting anywhere.
One day, when I’d exhausted the box of tissues by the chair, the therapist opened the cupboard next to me to get some more and lots of boxes came tumbling out. I laughed and an idea jumped into my head for a story about a therapist at a cash and carry bulk-buying tissues for all her clients to sob into, clients that for some reason she didn’t really care about. Then I felt guilty that I had been so easily distracted and realized that I continually played out this thought process. I felt sad about Matty, I distracted myself from it and then felt guilty about being able to take pleasure in something. I remembered the first time I’d laughed after the accident. I was at a friend’s house and her boyfriend said something funny.
How can I laugh? I thought. How can I laugh?
Sometimes, to relieve the awful tedium of my misery, I tried to make the therapist laugh. I told her little stories from my week that I thought showed I was making progress in not being relentlessly gloomy.
‘I can see you’re very amusing,’ she said, without cracking a smile. ‘I can see you are very personable and have learned to use humour as a defence mechanism. You don’t need to entertain me.’
‘Will I always be this miserable?’ I asked her one day when I didn’t feel I would ever stop crying.
‘Some people have to do a lot of work on themselves,’ she told me.
Not long after that I stopped going.
Months passed and I wasn’t sure what to do next. Accept that I would always be a bit unhappy? Try not to think about it? Find another therapist? I wasn’t relentlessly miserable by any means. I was able to take pleasure in my family, my friends, my work, but there was always an undercurrent, a low-level background noise. I started to think of it as emotional tinnitus.
I’d become better at managing myself. I read books about how to be happy that sometimes helped. I learned to be moderate in my consumption of both news and alcohol. I made gratitude lists that, if I wasn’t at too low a point, would work a bit but would occasionally make me feel worse. On the bad days I’d stare at the lists and think how could I have so much to be grateful for and not be able to summon gratitude? My fear was that some day these feelings would rear up without warning and derail me. The tinnitus would become deafening, my ear drums would burst. I’d find myself down at the riverbank with a couple of bottles of sherry and pockets full of stones. I’d end up in a gutter or dead in a ditch.
One day in the supermarket when I was getting out my wallet to pay, Matt said, ‘Who’s that, Mummy?’
He was sitting in the trolley pointing to the photo I carried of Matty and me when we were children. I didn’t know what to say. It had never occurred to me that my own child might at some point ask me the brothers and sisters question and I would have to find the words to explain. I distracted Matt by giving him my bank card to hand over to the cashier, but I knew that I would have to think about how to answer. ‘I had a brother. He died,’ wasn’t going to be enough for my curious boy. And I didn’t want Matt to grow up surrounded by secrets.
REASONS TO FEEL GUILTY
‘You need to write it down,’ said my new friend Tom in a hotel bar in Korea.
We were on a trip with the British Council. It was exciting to be in the land of sweet-potato lattes and green-tea ice cream, and we’d spent all day talking to arts workers, teachers and librarians about the importance of reading for pleasure. On our second bottle of wine, Tom had asked if I was writing anything myself. People often asked me this and I usually brushed it off, but somehow, possibly because we were half a world away from home or just because Tom is the sort of person who invites confidences, I told him about Matty – that I couldn’t bring myself to write about him, but nor could I get very far with anything else before he strode into the pages demanding to be heard.
‘Just write it down. Start with the funeral. Start with trying not to laugh at the funeral,’ he suggested.
The next day Tom gave me a blue notebook he’d bought in a museum shop, and I wrote about the funeral in it on the flight on the way home.
I’d made several attempts over the years when the words were trying to burst out of me, and I’d managed to write about the night of the accident but could never get past the first few days afterwards, because I couldn’t bear to
think about how our refusal to accept defeat on Matty’s behalf had turned into a grim acceptance that he had to die. Every time, I’d simply downed tools when it became too hard. However, now that, through my job, I’d seen how difficult it was for people to move on when they couldn’t articulate their experience, had watched people in prison struggle to make sense of their toxic narratives and try to get to grips with their guilt, I decided to try it for myself.
I made a list of all the reasons I felt guilty.
I feel guilty that I wanted my brother to die
I feel guilty that I didn’t like looking after him
I feel guilty that I couldn’t bear to visit him in the nursing home
I feel guilty that I couldn’t hack the last 13 days of his life, that I had to run away and go back to London
I feel guilty about enjoying things
I feel guilty that I can’t just enjoy things
I feel guilty for being happy
I feel guilty that I’m not happier
I feel guilty about being depressed
I feel guilty that I have so much when other people have less
I feel guilty when I laugh
I feel guilty when I cry
I feel guilty when I make other people feel bad
I feel guilty that I can’t just get over this
I feel guilty that I could ever get over this
That’s it, I thought. That’s the problem. All this guilt festers in me like a gigantic boil, full of poison and painful to touch. Every time I’d tried to lance it, my courage had failed. Now I was determined to see it through.
ASHES TO ASHES
A month later I was sitting in the car park of Yeovil crematorium with my mother. We had a few minutes before it would be time to go in for the funeral service of her cousin, Sue.
I took a deep breath.
‘Did we ever do anything with Matty’s ashes?’ I asked.
‘No. We never picked them up,’ Mum said. ‘Could never face it. They must still be there, at Mr Punton’s.’
Mr Punton, the undertaker, owned a DIY shop in Snaith on the corner of the main street, opposite the Bell and Crown, which had a sign with green letters on a cream background. I went over with my dad sometimes when he needed something to help him fix stuff in the pub. I liked the smell of paint, glue and sawdust, the plastic buckets full of different length screws and nails.
As I sat in the car, I pictured a back room with a row of uncollected urns on a special shelf, full of ash, gathering a fine layer of dust. For a fanciful moment I imagined them whispering to each other, like something out of Harry Potter, and hoped Matty had someone interesting to talk to.
‘I could write to him if you like,’ Mum said slowly. ‘Ask if they’re still there.’
‘We could find out, I suppose,’ I said sensibly. ‘Maybe they don’t keep them forever.’
The air became filled with unspoken questions: Will they have them? What if the undertakers have a ten-year policy before all the ashes go into a common pit? What if we have waited too long? What would we do with them anyway? Throw them into the sea?
We sat in silence. We usually talked about everything, my mother and I – we were always chatting; but this was an area that we feared stepping into.
‘I’m trying to write about it all,’ I said.
‘Is that a good idea? Won’t it make you unhappy?’
‘It’s OK so far,’ I said. I didn’t want her to worry. ‘Have you still got your diaries and the newspaper cuttings?’
‘Yes. I kept them just in case you did want to write about it. I always thought you would. Do what you want with them, but be careful of yourself, Ca.’ She sighed. ‘Please stop if it’s too painful.’
We went into the crematorium and cuddled into each other in a pew towards the back of the room. It was a progression for us that we were even at a funeral. For years our only response to death was to run away. We’d offended relatives and friends by not attending funerals, and then being unable to find the words to explain why.
When it was over, we filed out past a lily pond and went on to a chapel service in Montacute, where the minister said, ‘This is a sad day, but Sue would not want us to be sad,’ and smiled fondly at the little ones who didn’t want to sit still. Then to Lower Odcombe village hall, where I watched my son fall in love with one of his cousins, and my mother told me that it was here, at Sue and Len’s wedding nearly forty years ago, that I’d taken my first steps. I did some sums and thought, but didn’t say, that Matty would have been in her tummy then, bouncing around getting ready to be born the following February. I felt sad, and wished I didn’t. Or rather, I wished I could devote all my sadness to Sue and her children. It seemed to be their due. I should have been feeling only sympathy for them, and gratitude that my own mother was here to have conversations with me and that my father was taking pride in his grandson. As ever, I was stuck, marinating in my own sadness.
‘Who would have thought the old man would have had so much blood in him,’ said Lady Macbeth, driven mad by guilt, in the play I studied at school before any of this happened.
Who would have thought, I often reflected about myself, that the young girl would have had so many tears in her.
Back in London, I told a friend who was a bereavement counsellor about the non-collection of the ashes, and she said it was quite common for people not to pick them up, especially after difficult deaths, especially in the case of a child. This was a revelation: I had thought it was our dark and dirty secret. It made me feel better, less alone, to think that other people had difficulty bringing things to a close too.
LEARNING TO FLY
Summer in Cornwall and the sun was shining. My parents were delighted to be spending time with Matt, taking him rock pooling and swimming, making him a swing in the garden. Watching them together, I was struck by the realization that I was re-experiencing the bits of my childhood that I couldn’t remember by seeing my parents with my son. Every game, every caress, every joke was a reflection of how it was with me and Matty when we were little.
One afternoon, right up high, Matt let go of the swing and flew off into the bushes. He wasn’t hurt.
‘What did you do that for?’ asked my dad.
‘I wanted to see what would happen.’
I held back from telling him off or urging him to be more careful. I never wanted him to feel how scared I was on his behalf.
Matt was less intrepid at Snakes and Ladders and cried when he was dispatched down a very long snake.
‘It is disappointing,’ Mum said, ‘but you just have to carry on and hope to land on another ladder soon.’
The year after Matty’s accident had been like a big, cruel game of Snakes and Ladders, except that there were no ladders, only snakes. We plodded along, only ever throwing ones, making tiny bits of progress in physio; and then, every few squares, a snake in the shape of a massive epileptic fit would send him plummeting back to the beginning. Maybe all of life is a bit like Snakes and Ladders, but most of the time you don’t have to blindly throw the dice. You can search out the ladders, create coping strategies for the snakes.
After all the years of silence, of finding it too painful to even mention Matty’s name, my parents and I had begun to talk about everything. At first we stumbled over the words, fearful, still, of hurting each other, but as we persevered we became less tongue-tied. I admitted how much Matty dominated my thoughts, and that I didn’t want them to worry about me but had realized I had to stop hiding it.
I explained how I felt like I was always about to be ambushed by memories. It might be the sight of someone in a wheelchair with the twisted arms and scars that indicate brain surgery. Matt’s baby formula reminded me of Ensure, and when John rang me up to boast that his ridiculously enormous new telly was exactly as long as Erwyn, all I could think was that it would be two inches shorter than Matty.
‘I wish I could erase those eight years of my life,’ I said. I told them that from the ages of seventeen t
o twenty-five I would rather have not been alive. I didn’t think I should have had to bear it. I didn’t think anyone should have to bear it. ‘I would like to be able to press delete on those years,’ I said. Select and delete.
It was such a relief to tell them the truth, and of course they took it all in their stride and jumped into the task of helping me remember everything. We sat in the garden or walked along the seafront in Falmouth, and talked and talked as we’d done on all those walks along the riverbank in Snaith.
I sat in their little sitting room and looked through our photo albums. I found a yellowed newspaper clipping about my dad – ‘a young Cork seaman’ – saving a life when he was seventeen. He’d been given a certificate from the Royal Humane Society, and I could remember Matty and me taking it into school for show and tell. I looked at my parents’ wedding photos. A carefree joy shone out of my dad’s twinkling eyes; my mother looked nervous. She was less comfortable being the centre of attention than he was. They both looked so young – but then they were: eighteen and twenty-two. I was there in the photos, too, an unseen tadpole wriggling around in my mother’s still flat tummy.
Everyone said it wouldn’t last, this marriage between the head girl of the grammar school and the illiterate, tattooed Irishman who had knocked her up. But Mum had fallen for Dad as soon as she’d heard him speak. She had never heard an accent like his before, a lovely, lilting, foreign sound. She was studying The Tempest at school and felt like Miranda seeing Ferdinand for the first time: ‘Oh brave new world, That has such people in’t’. When he had told her of his early life, of the Christmas morning he’d woken up to find his stocking empty, she was determined that his future would be full of love.
The Last Act of Love Page 15