“Dad keeps saying it’s for the best. They used to argue a lot. I think he feels guilty.”
“I imagine he does. His wife’s left him. He can’t have been all that much of a husband if she’s done that.”
“Don’t you dare say that. It’s not Dad’s fault. If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s hers. She’s so selfish –”
“Stop that right now. You’re tired and upset and you’re talking nonsense. People who don’t love each other don’t have to stay married. She’s entitled to leave him if she wants to.”
“But what about me?” The lamb-bleat wail of the aban-doned child, unattractive coming from a boy so close to manhood. “What if I never see them again? Dad says I won’t ever see them again –”
“He doesn’t know anything. He’s talking nonsense too. What makes you think he’s got all the answers? Don’t listen to him. Go home and go to bed and let him sleep it off. Things will be better in the morning. They always are. And don’t feel sorry for yourself. There’s nothing worse than people who feel sorry for themselves.”
Her utter lack of sympathy seemed to be what Jacob needed. The terror in his face was ebbing away. When he stood up he seemed stronger, more ready to brave the world outside. Or perhaps that was just the soup and the sandwich. She opened the door so he would know it was time to leave. On the doorstep, he hovered awkwardly.
“Thanks,” he muttered, without looking at her.
She closed the door as soon as he turned away, but then went upstairs to watch his progress from the tiny slit of a window in the end of her bedroom. The glass was warped and wavery, but she could see the dim shape of him slowly retreating along the diminished cliff towards his house.
Ella’s gone too, she thought, and felt again that hollow ringing in her chest. But it was too late, too late, too late, and she should have known better than to let herself get close. This was the best way. Things would work themselves out, in time. Human beings were strong. They could survive far more pain than they wanted to believe.
Chapter Sixteen
Now
“You drug him,” she said.
The shame was a physical thing, a shrinking burning crawling sensation that invaded every cell in his body. He could hardly bear to look at her. Was it possible to die from the way he felt? No, of course it wasn’t; he would have to feel this way for ever, every second of his life, as punishment.
“I don’t,” he said, not knowing why he was bothering. She’d seen him with the milk, with the spoon, with the tablets. She’d seen the furtive guilty shuffle as he tried to hide the packet. She was holding the tablets. What was the point in lying? She was looking at the label.
“Take one tablet as required before bedtime,” she said.
There were three tablets in the spoon. His hand gave a strange twitching leap as if he might hide them. There was nothing he could do, nothing he could say. He forced his hand back to his side.
“But you’ve got three,” she said.
“He’s built up a tolerance,” he said, as if that was any defence.
“Is that how you knew? That he couldn’t have been the one who Mum –” she swallowed hard, shut her eyes for a moment, then forced herself to hold her face in a neutral position – “who Mum ran away from?”
“I don’t drug him,” he said. “I just – it’s just –”
“Tell me about it. I want to understand. Please.”
Was she truly the first one to guess? The doctor, who wearily authorised the endless repeat prescriptions, perhaps guessing that this was the cheapest and easiest solution to a near-impossible problem? The pharmacist, who made up the prescriptions? The assistant who handed over the bag? Did they have time to stop and look at what they were doing? Were they complicit? Or were they simply too busy to notice?
“There’s nothing to understand. Forget it. What do you want for dinner?”
“Don’t shut me out. I want to help.”
“Well, you can’t help, okay? There’s nothing you can do to help, there’s nothing anybody can do, this is how it is and it’s how it’s going to be until he –” His voice was rising; if he wasn’t careful his father would hear him and want to know what was going on. He forced himself to lower the volume. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
In the silence between them, he became aware of a faint rattling sound. It was the packet of pills in Ella’s hand, trembling slightly. She put it hastily down on the counter.
“I shouldn’t have shouted,” he said. What would happen if she reported him? Perhaps they’d get him some help. But then what? Would they look at his father’s life, his pathetic stitched-together care arrangements, this wildly unsuitable house, and say, this man needs 24-hour care in a residential home? Perhaps, but what kind of a care-home? He couldn’t afford to pay; it would have to be whatever there was, and what there was could be horrifying. And how would his father cope in a place where nothing and nobody was familiar? What would happen to him then? “Please don’t tell anyone.”
“Does Mrs Armitage know?”
“I – ” he had been about to say no, but he wasn’t sure if that was the truth. Perhaps she knew. Perhaps she’d seen the faint residue in the bottom of the glasses, counted the empty packets in the bin. But even if she did, she would never, ever say. Her judgement on him would be cold and clear, untouched by compassion for either his father or himself. She would know he was simply doing what he had to, in order to survive. “I don’t know. Maybe. She’s never said.”
The look on Ella’s face reminded him of when she was very small, and wanted to tell him something she thought he might not approve of. He remembered, for what felt like the thousandth weary time, that the girl standing in his kitchen was his little sister.
“What?” Now it was his turn to try and coax her into reluctant speech. “What is it? You can tell me.” She was worrying her lower lip with her teeth. “Come on, it’s not as if I’m in any position to judge you, is it? Please, Ella, don’t shut me out.”
“Do you remember when you found out how to do it?”
“Do what?” For a dreadful moment, he thought this was going to be a conversation about sex. He remembered again the expression on Donna’s face, as if she had just understood some fundamental deficiency in him that, once seen, could never again be overlooked. The expression of someone who feels they’ve been tricked, but who also pities the trickster.
Ella reached for the teaspoons, balanced them one on top of the other, then pushed down with a quick decisive movement, grinding the tablets into powder. “Do that.”
“I – I don’t really know. Maybe a drugs awareness thing, we have them all the time at school. It’s not exactly rocket science, is it?”
“It was Dad,” said Ella, very softly but very clearly.
“What are you talking about?”
“Dad. He used to do it to Mum.”
The accusation was as absurd as if she’d said Dad used to lock us up in cupboards at night. “No he didn’t.” His denial was immediate and instinctive. “What on earth makes you think that?”
“Because I remember. And you ought to as well. You do remember, you just don’t know you do. We used to see him sometimes. When they’d had a bad night. You know the kind of night I mean.”
The times they cowered in the bathroom, sometimes for one night, sometimes for three or four in a row. The water filling his ears, almost drowning out the voices below. The sound of things breaking. Ella’s steady, careful counting. Watching his little sister sink in her turn beneath the surface of the water, eyes closed, hair fanning out like Ophelia. They simply had to wait for the storm to pass. If they kept still enough and quiet enough, eventually the sun would shine again. And each time, the storm would pass. They would wake to their parents happy in each other’s company, exhausted but ready to begin again. Except that each time a little more of the landscape of their marriage had been eroded, until at last there was no land left and their relationship had crumbled into the sea and everything had
changed. It hadn’t been an ideal childhood but it had been the way it was, and he could remember every part of it.
“I know,” he said. “It was Dad’s fault. He’d get drunk, she’d get upset, they’d have a massive argument. Then they’d be back in the honeymoon period and it would all go quiet for a while.”
“But don’t you remember how she used to sleep all day after they had a row?”
“Oh,” he said, blushing. “Oh. I know what you –” In his memory, the sun was always shining, even though this couldn’t possibly be the case. He remembered his mother’s slow sleepy movements, floating and blissful. Their father, solicitous and loving, pouring their mother her glass of orange juice, her mug of peppermint tea, kissing her fingers when she reached dreamily up to caress his face. Both of them wrapped in that unmistakeable rosy haze that Ella had been far too young to recognise. “You’re remembering…” Was she really going to make him say it? “It was the sex,” he said, as impersonally as he could. “You know about the concept of make-up sex, right? When you’ve had a huge row and you’re making up to each other afterwards and both parties’ emotions are really heightened so the, um, the sexual experience is extremely intense?” Both parties’ emotions. The sexual experience is extremely intense. No wonder Donna had pitied him. “That’s why they were always so spacey and happy afterwards, okay?”
“She used to go to sleep straight after breakfast. He used to take her upstairs.”
“And now you know why.” Even as an adult, the memory still made him squirmy and uncomfortable. His father holding out his hand to their mother, his gaze and his attention so entirely on her that it felt as if he and Ella were hardly in the room at all. Her dreamy compliance. The creak of the stairs; the firm closing of the bedroom door. The breathless silence in the house as he strained every muscle not to hear anything or know anything; the way his father looked when he came back downstairs, both weary and satisfied, as if he’d accomplished something important. Come on Jacob, you’re going to miss your bus. Ella, you stay in the house, do you hear me? Don’t disturb your mother, she’s sleeping. “Look, do we really have to talk about this?”
“Yes, we do.” It was so strange to see Ella so insistent. “Sometimes we’d come down early and see him in the kitchen. You must remember, Jacob, you have to remember. We used to stand behind the door. We used to check before we went in, to see if we’d get shouted at for being up too early. We used to look through the crack.”
He remembered this, too; it wasn’t a new memory, there was no sense of revelation. No monster lurched up from the depths of his unconscious. Just the well-remembered feel of Ella’s sleep-warm paw in his, the smell of her sweat, the unbrushed tangle of hair that caught the light over the crown of her skull. The cautious peek through the crack in the door, watching their father shamble about in his dressing gown, muttering as he filled the kettle. Ella beside him, trying hard not to breathe too loudly, because he’d once told her off for that and now she was paranoid about giving them away with her inconvenient need for oxygen.
“Of course I remember.”
Knowing when it was dangerous was easier than knowing when it might be safe. If they saw him slam a cupboard door or swear wearily into the fridge, they would go back upstairs immediately. Sometimes they’d stand transfixed for several minutes, savouring this unauthorised glimpse of their father when he thought he was alone. Jacob remembered it all, the good and the bad, the mundane and the shameful. The secretive trips to the pantry; the scrape and twist of the bottle-top, and the faint clink of glass against glass. The way his father wiped at his mouth when he came out again, his look of furtive relief. He could remember it all, even the moment when his father would go to the cupboard, take down the mug, and –
“Oh my God,” he said, his voice sounding not like his voice at all. “He did. He did. We saw him. We did. That’s what we saw.”
“You told me it was sweetener. For her tea. Because she didn’t like to have too much sugar. And I asked you –”
“– why he had to crumble it up, and I said it was so it would dissolve properly. And then you wanted to know why he was putting sugar in as well, and I said that was because the sweetener didn’t taste very nice so she had half and half. I think I even believed it. I must have believed it. But how could I have?”
“And when she came downstairs, he used to give her that mug of tea and she’d drink it,” said Ella. “And then afterwards she’d be all spacey and sleepy, and they’d go upstairs and he’d put her to bed. She’d sleep all day sometimes. And when she woke up, she wasn’t like herself at all.”
“Ella. This is awful. Please don’t say any more.”
“It was like she was walking underwater. She was really slow when she moved, and sometimes she’d talk slowly as well. She’d go into rooms and forget what she’d gone in there for, but it didn’t bother her. She’d stand there staring at the wall or watching the trees move.”
“But why would he do that? Why would he do that to her?”
“And she’d forget the words for things, or make things up. One time she forgot the word for feet. She wanted me to get my shoes on, but she couldn’t quite get it, so she said, you need to get your walk-things dressed. Do you remember?”
(Ella’s face when she greeted him by the door, her little legs like sticks above the trainers she must have taken from his room. “Look, Jacob,” she’d whispered. “My walk-things are too small for your shoes. We have to call them walk-things now, that’s their new name.”
“You mean your feet. They’re called your feet. And those are my trainers, and you got them out of my room.”
“No, Jacob, they’re my walk-things.” The frailty of her little foot emerging from the cavern of his trainer. “We’re going to call them walk-things now. Mummy says so.”
He’d thought she was being manipulative, trying out the effects of an artificial cuteness so he’d forget she’d been in his room again. He’d thought he was being quite restrained by not yelling at her, but instead simply saying that walk-things was a bit of a babyish word, and he didn’t want to talk to her if she was going to be babyish. He’d held onto this memory so he wouldn’t fall into the trap of idolising her. Sometimes she was annoying. Sometimes she was naughty. Your life before wasn’t perfect. How many other times had she made these oblique pleas for help, only for him to ignore her?)
“I thought you’d invented walk-things to be cute,” he confessed. “I didn’t know.”
“It wasn’t your fault. How were you supposed to know what to do?”
“But I watched him. We watched him. We saw him drug our mother. How could I forget that? How could I? And then I –” the shame had left him for a few minutes, but now here it was again, the searing realisation of seeing what he had done through his sister’s eyes. “I started doing exactly the same thing to him.”
“Jacob.”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe me when I say I’m not judging you because you’re my brother and I’ll always love you no matter what?”
“Not really. But carry on.”
“Why do you do it?” she asked. “I mean, I know he keeps repeating himself and he gets upset, but is that really so hard to deal with? He seems so gentle –”
“Gentle!” He laughed. “Is that what you think he is?” He could make eye contact with her now, suddenly back in a place where he could be the blameless hero. “Ella, trust me, he’s a lot of things but he’s not gentle.” He tore off his jacket, threw it on the floor, fumbled angrily with the buttons of his shirt.
The bruise where his father had struck him with the fence-post was beginning to fade, but it was still impressively large, spreading out across his ribs like the paper chromatography experiments that decorated the walls outside the science labs (“separating black ink into its component parts”). He let her look for a moment in angry silence.
“He did that,” Jacob explained. “He thought there was someone in the house. I was trying to calm him down an
d he went for me.”
She took three steps towards him. Her fingers reached out towards the bruise.
“And look.” He turned around to show her the more recent injury, less impressive but still worth sharing. “That’s where he shoved me into a doorframe. Same reason. Some days it’s all he thinks about. If I don’t drug him up, he prowls around the house, looking for imaginary people who are coming to get us. He can go all night sometimes. And if I try to stop him, he gets so angry.” He’d thought he was being dramatic, making more of a show of this than it really deserved in a pathetic effort to win his sister over to his side, but he found his voice was trembling.
“But during the day?” She looked guilty even as she spoke the words. “I just want to understand –”
“He pisses me off.” The air was cold against his naked chest. “That’s all it is. Some days I can’t deal with him another minute, the same conversations, the same questions, always wondering what’s going to trigger him off, if he’s going to start crying and not stop for an hour, if he’s going to hit me. It’s easier to drug him up. I don’t do it very often.” Except he did, he knew he did. “It’s only every now and then.” Except it was every weekend, every Bank Holiday, every day he was forced to spend at home and not at work. He’d even laid in extra supplies to get them through the long six weeks of summer. “I even make myself sick. I’m disgusting.”
“You’re doing your best.”
“My best is pathetic. I’m just like him, aren’t I? He drugged our mother and drove her away and drank until he broke his brain. I drug our father on a regular basis and I can’t even get a second date, not that I’ve got time for dating anyway, and I’d probably end up drugging them up to stop them leaving me –”
“Don’t say that. You’re lovely.”
Underwater Breathing Page 23