‘I need a fucking cigarette,’ he announced, sharply.
‘You don’t smoke any more, remember?’ He’d given up when he moved in with me and baby Lucy; an unwelcome thought popped into my head.
‘Did you move in with us so you could keep an eye on me? To make sure I never found out about all this?’
He didn’t answer. All these years I’d painted my big brother as the hero of my story, stepping in to save me when my life went to shit; when the reality was that he was there to protect himself, to keep me from finding out about the lies I’d been told. ‘Well?’
‘No, Abs, that wasn’t why,’ he said finally. ‘I moved in because you needed me. It was nothing to do with all this other stuff, I swear.’
I wanted to believe him; I wanted to know that I could still put my faith in him, but how could I do that now? ‘You need to tell me everything, Matt, all of it. I want to know.’
‘I need a cigarette,’ he repeated and made a move to leave the room. I had to stop him; quickly I moved between him and the door to try and block his escape but it was no use. He ducked around me and then he was gone, the glass in the front door rattling as he slammed it behind him. Lucy looked up at me from her position on the floor; she was sitting cross-legged surrounded by piles of books, papers and photographs.
‘What’s he doing? He can’t just walk out.’
‘It appears he can,’ I said as I paced across to the window; his car was already gone.
‘How much of all this do you think he knew?’ she asked, picking up a handful of letters.
‘I don’t know.’ That was the truth; I might have had my suspicions but I didn’t know anything for sure. I looked at the piles of letters and photos on the carpet. ‘There must be replies to all those letters here somewhere, in the house.’
‘Where do you think Nan would have put them?’
‘I’m going to have a look upstairs in her room, see if I can find anything that helps to explain all this.’ I gestured towards the piles on the carpet.
‘Want a hand?’
‘No, it’s fine. You stay there. I can manage.’ I left her sitting on the carpet, surrounded by the evidence of a family history that felt as if it belonged to someone else entirely.
*
It was hard to believe that I’d been in this room only a few hours ago, packing the things that I thought Mum might have needed in the hospital. That bag was sitting in the hallway downstairs, its contents no longer necessary. The room felt very different now, as if it was hiding things. Every drawer, every cupboard could be laden with secrets. I felt like a trespasser, as if my mum were going to poke her head round the door at any moment and demand to know what I was doing in here.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and looked around the room, wondering where I should begin my search. What was I looking for? Was I expecting to find a big box marked ‘Family Secrets’? Her wardrobe seemed like as good a place as any to start so I pulled open the heavy dark wood doors. The inside smelt like a unique combination of her, beeswax and mothballs. Her clothes were hanging neatly in groups: trousers, skirts and dresses, followed by blouses, jumpers and cardigans. The untidiest part of the wardrobe was the pile of jumpers that I’d shoved back on the top shelf earlier. At the bottom were her shoes, all sitting tidily together in pairs. I hadn’t followed in her footsteps when it came to neatness. My complete lack of interest in tidiness and order had been just one of the many things we’d fought about. She’d stand at my bedroom door and just shake her head in utter dismay at the state of my room.
‘How ever do you find anything in this disgusting excuse for a room, Abigail?’ she would say to me. I remembered thinking, in the way that moody teenagers did, that what I chose to do with the contents of my wardrobe and my room was my business; especially since she’d only just started taking an interest in me after two years of previously not giving a shit.
‘It’s been like this for ages, Mum. Why do you give a toss suddenly? Have you run out of pills to take? Just woken up?’
I cringed now at the memory of those horrible words and how often I’d used her absences from my life against her. I’d known she was unhappy; I’d known she’d had a nervous breakdown, although I hadn’t really known what that was at the time. I’d known because that had been all anyone had talked about when it came to Mum. Neighbours would question my nan about how she was doing and she’d tap her temple with a nicotine-stained finger and say, ‘She’s still not right in the head. She’s had a nervous breakdown, you know?’ All the old crones would nod their heads sagely and talk about what an awful business it was. Had they known about Dad? Of course they had, you stupid woman. Turns out it was only you who didn’t know the truth. I felt like such a fool. I’d managed to convince myself that the stories they told weren’t about my dad. Not him, not the man who’d taught me how to ride a bike and watched Grandstand every Saturday, sitting in his pants, chain-smoking Benson & Hedges and swearing at West Ham’s football scores. That man surely wasn’t capable of doing the kind of things that would send him to prison for twenty years.
I was just sitting on the end of the bed, staring into the wardrobe, when Lucy appeared at the door. ‘Didn’t find anything, then?’
‘What? Oh, no, not really, well, I haven’t had a chance to look.’
She came and sat next to me on the bed. ‘I don’t think the answers are just going to leap out of the wardrobe, do you?’
I shook my head. ‘Maybe there isn’t anything to find. Maybe she burned all the replies to make sure I didn’t catch sight of them.’
‘I can’t see Nan setting light to letters in her kitchen, can you? She wasn’t some sort of secret agent and, besides, it would have made far too much mess.’
I smiled; she was right, of course, it was a ridiculous image.
‘I think you should read this one, though.’ Lucy held out a letter to me. ‘I haven’t gone through all the others, but this is the last one she sent, the one he never saw.’
I could see that it had already been torn open. She gave me a sheepish smile.
‘Sorry, Mum, I couldn’t resist. It’s the last one she wrote; it’s like the last piece of her.’ She wiped away tears and I took her hand.
‘It’s all right, I understand. I just don’t know if I have the strength to read it now, that’s all.’ I turned the envelope over in my hands and traced the outline of her writing with my finger.
‘I think you need to read it,’ she insisted.
Taking a deep breath, I slid out the single sheet of pale blue paper covered in my mum’s shaky scrawl.
Dear John,
I hope this letter finds you well. It’s been almost a month since I wrote last. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long. I’ve been keeping busy though, there’s always plenty to do. I hope you are keeping busy too. Everyone here is all right. Matt is still working hard, managing the gym and his complicated love life. He thinks I don’t know about all the girls he’s got on the go but I hear things. I’m not that fond of the new one, I think her name’s Karen or Sharon or something. She’s a bit of a trollop I think. Far too much make-up and she has the most annoying bloody voice.
That brought a smile to my face. We did have something in common after all; I didn’t think Karen was good enough for my brother either. Lucy looked at me quizzically, but I didn’t stop to explain.
Lucy is getting ready to leave for university. She’s going to Bristol. I think I’ve probably already told you that, haven’t I? I wish you could meet her, John, her photos don’t do her justice, she’s beautiful and so clever. She reminds me so much of Abigail at that age.
That remark stunned me; it was the nearest thing to a compliment I’d ever had from my mother.
Abigail is still doing well with her café business but I do worry about the rest of her life. I’m very worried that she’s going to be so lonely after Lucy leaves. Not that she would ever tell me anything like that. We don’t really talk anymore. She seems to get angrier with me as time
goes on. I’d hoped that eventually she might come to forgive me for not being there for her but, if anything, it’s got worse. I see her struggling with the guilt of how she feels about me and I want to tell her that it’s all right, that I understand. But I can’t seem to say it right, anything I say just seems to make her even angrier with me and pushes her further away. I wish I could make her understand but I think it’s too late for that now.
There was more but I couldn’t carry on reading; I couldn’t see the page through my tears. I let the letter drop from my hands. Lucy didn’t speak, she just sat beside me, resting her hand over mine. I looked down at our two hands together; my stubby fingers interlaced with Lucy’s longer, slender ones, and I marvelled at how I could be holding the hand of a grown woman, when only yesterday she’d been a little girl. Why did everything feel as if it was moving so fast? Why was there never enough time?
‘Why didn’t she just tell me the truth?’ I sobbed. ‘If she’d told me… I wouldn’t have… everything could have been so different.’
‘I know, Mum, it’s all right.’ She stroked my hair gently. After a few minutes I sat up, roughly swiping tears away from my cheeks, and I took a deep breath.
‘Well, that’s enough of that,’ I said sternly. ‘I’m meant to be taking care of you, not the other way around.’
‘Don’t be daft, Mum, it’s all right to let me look after you for once.’
‘I’m fine, sweetheart, honestly. This has all been a bit of a shock, that’s all. Hard to take it all in.’ I plastered on my brightest smile and stood up. ‘I think we need to start sorting some of Nan’s things out, don’t you?’ Wrenching open one of her drawers, I grabbed a handful of jumpers and dropped them onto the bed, trying to ignore the overpowering scent of her. In that moment, all I wanted to do was lie on her bed and bury my face in them. I wanted to close the curtains and lock the door and just hide there, surrounded by her things; just the way she did after my dad left. That thought shocked me into stillness; maybe I wasn’t so different from her after all? Deep down I think I’d always suspected that I had more in common with my mother than I wanted to admit.
There was a time, Lucy was almost three, and I was working as many shifts as I could in the café whilst trying to get through my course at catering college. I was chasing round, never a free moment to stop, just trying to do everything at once. I’d thought I was managing all right, but the brain can be tricky. I woke up one morning and I couldn’t get out of bed. It wasn’t a physical thing – I still had four functioning limbs – I just couldn’t muster the mental energy I needed to make them work. It was my ‘Stop the world, I want to get off’ moment and it frightened the shit out of me. No amount of tea or cajoling from Matt could persuade me otherwise. The guilt I felt about not being able to take care of my daughter was like an immense weight that sat on my chest and made it hard to breathe, but still I couldn’t drag myself up and out of the depths; there didn’t seem any point.
That must make me sound like a terrible mother and I still sometimes cringed at the memory, but gradually I’d come to realise that I didn’t have to be ashamed about those lost weeks because I couldn’t have done anything about it, even if I’d wanted to. My brain had just decided it had had enough; enough of the broken sleep, the worries about money, the worries about being a good enough parent to Lucy. My brain had needed a rest just as much as my body. For two weeks all I did was sleep or lie there staring at the ceiling. I didn’t wash – not my hair, not my body, not my teeth – I didn’t eat and I hardly spoke. Matt and Liz, who at that point had known me for barely a year at college, took over Lucy’s care. They gave me the time I needed to get back to a point where I could at least get up and get dressed in the morning.
In all that time, throughout those two weeks where I’d basically given up, my mother never came to see me. Not once. I’d never forgiven her; it had just been another nail in the coffin of our relationship as far as I was concerned. But now, after everything that had happened, I thought I understood why. It would have been too much of a reminder to her of the way she’d been after Dad left. She’d pulled herself out of that dark place and hadn’t been keen to go back. She hadn’t abandoned me after Dad went away; she hadn’t been able to help her breakdown any more than I had mine. It was so obvious to me in that moment, but it was all too little, too late for us.
‘Mum, you don’t have to do that now.’ Lucy gently took the pale blue cardigan I was holding, out of my hands. She put it down on the bed and then pulled me into a hug. We stood together like that for a few minutes, until we were interrupted by my brother’s voice.
‘Room for one more in there?’ He was standing by the bedroom door; he looked awful. I opened out one arm and he came across to us, burying his face in my shoulder. I heard him sniffing back tears and trying to mask the fact that he was crying with an awkward little cough every now and then. That was enough to start Lucy off again and then we were all crying.
‘I don’t mind the tears, Abs, but you can keep the snot to yourself, thanks,’ he said, reaching into his pocket for a tissue. I took it and blew my nose loudly.
‘Bloody hell, you sound like Nelly the Elephant!’
I slapped him across the shoulder, which probably hurt me more than him since he was all muscle. He laughed and rubbed his arm. I offered the tissue back to him; he refused it with a disgusted look.
‘No, thanks, you can keep it.’
I stuffed it in my pocket and started to pick up some clothes from the bed to fold; I needed something to do. ‘I’m going to fold while you talk.’
‘And I think I’m going to make myself scarce,’ said Lucy, sidling out of the room before either of us could stop her.
‘Keeping your hands busy so you don’t punch me, is that it?’ said Matt.
‘Something like that. I want to know everything, Matt. I mean it. You don’t get to stop talking until you’ve told me all of it.’
‘I can only tell you what I know, which is by no means all of it.’
I raised an eyebrow at this, unsure of whether to believe him or not.
‘It’s true, Abs, I swear. Mum only told me the bits she thought I needed to know in order to make sure you were protected.’
‘But you knew that Dad was in prison?’
‘Yes. She told me that Dad had been a “very silly man” and that he’d got himself mixed up with the wrong sort of people. In Mum’s version of the story, the one she fed me at least, Dad was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and didn’t deserve to be where he ended up.’
‘And you believed her?’
‘At first, yeah. But then you hear things and I did a bit of digging of my own.’ Matt was pacing back and forth across the bedroom floor. ‘No one was really that keen to share what they knew, it’s like the whole subject made them nervous, but I eventually found out which prison Dad was in and what for.’ He stopped pacing and turned to look at me but didn’t speak.
‘And?’ I prompted him.
‘It was an armed robbery. Him and six other blokes. They robbed a security van.’
‘Armed robbery? What the fuck did Dad know about guns?’
Matt shrugged. ‘Mum didn’t want you to know about any of this, Abby.’
‘And what about Dad? What did he want?’
Matt gave a wry laugh. ‘No one knew what he wanted.’
‘But all those letters downstairs? Mum wrote to him all the time.’
‘She wrote to him but he never wrote back. She kept sending him letters and photos, even though she never heard from him again after he got sent down.’
‘Then why did she keep writing to him? I don’t understand.’
‘I told you, as far as she was concerned he was just unlucky. He got lumbered with the blame, that was all. She still loved him, Abby. She never stopped loving him. And it was important to her that you still loved him too. That’s why she didn’t want you to know; she didn’t want it to change how you felt about him.’
‘How I
felt about him? What about the effect it had on the way I felt about her? Didn’t she care about that?’
‘Yes, of course she did, but I think she thought that you’d eventually get over that and maybe forgive her, in time.’
‘This is such a fucking mess, Matt.’ I plonked myself heavily down on the bed and he came to sit by me.
‘I know. I wanted to tell you, Abby. There were so many times I almost did, but Mum would get so upset if I mentioned it. She’d disappear to her room, refuse to eat, refuse to come out. It frightened me, Abs – she’d revert back to how she was… when… y’know…’
‘How she was when he left, you mean?’
Matt nodded. ‘It freaked me out, Abs. I couldn’t cope with it so I just left it. I’m so sorry. I should have been stronger. I should have stood up to her and told you everything. Now it’s too late, isn’t it?’
I shrugged. ‘I guess it is.’
‘What about me and you, though? Are we all right? Please say we are. I don’t know what I’d do without you and Lucy.’ A panicked look flickered across his face at the thought of the damage this might have done to our relationship. The thought of losing what little family I had left was enough to push me towards my answer.
‘It’s going to be fine, Matt. I’ve lost a mum and dad in the same day; I’m not about to lose a brother too.’
Matt let out the breath he’d been holding and pulled me into his arms. I wanted to return the gesture with the same gusto but I didn’t feel able to – not yet. He sensed my reluctance and let me go.
‘Not quite ready to forgive me yet, are you?’
I shook my head and he nodded. ‘I understand. Just promise me that you’ll try, tell me that you’ll let me have a good go at making it up to you. Please?’
‘I promise, but you have to promise me something too.’
‘Anything. What?’
‘Promise me that you won’t lie to me any more about any of this. If there’s anything else I need to know, you have to tell me now; because if I find out later that you’re still keeping things from me I won’t be able to forgive you.’
Secrets and Tea at Rosie Lee's Page 14