The Kindest Thing

by Cath Staincliffe

  As with any new project, I flung myself into research hoping understanding might make me better able to deal with the situation. I read and read, surfing link after link, waiting for obscure medical abstracts to load as pdf files, sussing out books on the disease, startlingly few. But all it did was reinforce my anger, my alarm, each new web page breaking over me, a cascade of rapids, cold and treacherous. Without hope.

  Neil’s next appointment was with a hospital neurologist. Apparently it isn’t easy to diagnose MND in the early stages: the symptoms may be due to other problems, which have to be ruled out. After an examination, a muscle biopsy and an electromyography test to measure muscle strength they might be left with MND. A matter of elimination.

  We agreed not to say anything to Adam and Sophie until we knew one way or the other. We were worried about Adam’s reaction. Sophie would be devastated but Adam’s state of mind was fragile and a shock like that could see him in meltdown again.

  As it was he beat us to it.

  That Friday night, a few days before Neil had to go for tests, Adam didn’t come home. He was sixteen then and had just started back at school. Part of the deal he’d made with us and the counsellor was that he’d be home by midnight or get in touch if not.

  That night we lay in bed longing to sleep, taking turns checking the clock. I tried Adam’s mobile at twelve fifteen, one thirty and two forty-five. I got up at five. The house was chilly. There’s a convector heater in my workshop. I went to get it, half hoping that Adam would be there, spreadeagled on the rug or even huddled on the bench in the garden. A lost key, reluctance to disturb us, the explanation.

  There was no Adam. Back in the kitchen, I made coffee with hot milk, then dragged out my bread-maker, dusted it down and sprinkled in dried yeast, filled it with wholemeal flour, adding sunflower seeds, chopped dried apricots and walnut pieces, salt, sugar, olive oil and water.

  Neil came down at seven. ‘Adam back?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Should we try Jonty?’ He was one of the friends who still hung out with Adam.

  ‘It’s very early, I’ll try at nine.’

  Neil stood behind me, wrapped his arms around me and stooped to kiss my cheek. ‘He probably got pissed and stayed at someone’s house.’ He straightened up.

  ‘And lost his phone?’ I was more sceptical. And also, if I thought the worst, as I had done all night – the body broken beneath car wheels; the figure, beautiful and bare-chested, falling as he tried to fly; the knife fight after some silly comment; the beating dished out by a gang of hard lads who had sniffed out Adam’s middle-class softness – it would not come to pass.

  The phone rang. It was Manchester Royal Infirmary. Adam had been admitted to A&E. Unconscious. He’d ingested a cocktail of drugs washed down with vodka. They were pumping his stomach.

  When we got there he was awake but very drowsy, looking sheepish and then plain sad when I asked him if he was okay.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to us both. There was defeat in his tone, a note that sent a chill through me, as though he’d accepted that it would always be like this. Him messing up, him hurting us, scaring us.

  He claimed not to remember anything about the hours before he collapsed.

  ‘Nothing?’ Neil said incredulously. ‘Not where you were, who you were with?’

  Adam shook his head and looked away, his lips parted slightly, his tongue up behind his front teeth: a trick he uses to fight tears. Had he taken the drugs to get off his head or had he wanted to harm himself? The question bored into my brain. It didn’t seem fair to ask him yet and I guessed he’d be more likely to lie now, in the immediate aftermath, eager to reassure us and be forgiven. I knew all that but I was so upset I wanted to shake him.

  ‘You promised,’ I heard myself saying, ‘that if you ever felt at risk . . .’

  ‘Mum, I got trolleyed,’ he said. ‘That’s all, honest. I’m sorry.’

  The rest of the weekend I found myself watching Adam, looking for signs of deterioration: was he hanging around the kitchen so he wasn’t alone? Was he feeling anxious again? When he stayed at home all day Sunday, was that because he wanted to chill out after Friday’s scare or because he was too fearful to leave the house? I asked him if he wanted to see the GP but he shrugged a no. He gave the same response when I offered to contact the counsellor.

  Once Sophie knew he was okay, she dealt with the situation by ignoring it: he wasn’t going to get any of her attention with his dumb behaviour. She had spent her life being frustrated by Adam, playing together and invariably falling out. Adam always pushed things too far, rebelled; he’d grow bored with whatever game they were playing and want to change the rules; he’d get distracted and start playing something else. Sophie would end up incandescent, in angry tears, vowing never to play with him again. Till next time.

  His chaotic behaviour sucked up our attention while her diligence, hard work and successes won way too little recognition. Neil and I often talked of it, as things grew difficult in recent years: how to care for Adam without neglecting Sophie. He saw the same thing with some of the kids at school: that gap between achievement and recognition when another sibling is acting up.

  We tried to talk to Sophie about it when Adam first saw the psychiatrist, to explain the situation and apologize for the upheaval, for our distraction, maybe our neglect.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she reassured us. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘We love you, Sophie,’ Neil said.

  ‘I know, Dad. And I’m not a little kid any more. I can see that Adam needs your time.’ She was relentlessly self-reliant. But the truth was somewhat different.

  One day I found her weeping in her room, face blurred with misery. ‘Sophie, what’s the matter? What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’m sick of it, sick of everything, and Adam and living here. It’s all so shitty,’ she cried, the words a snarl of hurt.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Your precious Adam happened. I know you love him more than me.’

  My heart tore. ‘Sophie, that’s not true! I swear to you, I love you both. More than anything.’

  She gave a shuddery sigh, sniffed and wiped her face. ‘I hate it, Mum. Why can’t he just be normal and stop messing everything up?’

  ‘Adam—’ I took a breath, meaning to try to answer but her question was rhetorical.

  She went on, ‘They’re all talking about it at school. I’m not me any more, I’m just Adam Shelley’s saddo sister.’

  ‘Sophie, you are not a saddo. You’re a wonderful—’

  ‘Mum, don’t.’

  Tears burned in my eyes. ‘Hug?’ I offered, my voice too squeaky by half.

  She gave a little shrug, noncommittal. I moved in and wrapped my arms around her. Kept quiet. In a few moments she spoke: ‘When’s Dad back?’

  ‘Soon.’ Could he make it better? ‘I’ll tell him to come up and see you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Okay. It won’t always be like this, you know. It’ll change. Everything changes.’

  She nodded. ‘Yeah.’ A small voice.

  ‘You want anything? Hot chocolate?’

  ‘No, just tell Dad.’

  ‘I will.’

  She always wanted her father. He was her rock. And now he’s gone. I have taken him from her.

  Neil persuaded me not to hang around while he was in having the tests done. He wouldn’t get the results then, and most of the day he’d be sitting about waiting. He promised to call when he was done.

  It was late afternoon when I picked him up. He didn’t say much about the day, just some quip about hospitals being no place for sick people. He had a little plaster on his arm where they’d taken the biopsy. They wanted him back in a week’s time for the results. ‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.

  Did the days go fast or slow? They rippled, concertina-like, altering speed. The sooner the days passed, the sooner we would know.

  That winter I was working on a refurbishment project for a health
spa. They were building an extension and it was a good time to revamp their interior, which was looking jaded: Roman mosaics and friezes, pillars and arched doorways. I’d been playing around with something minimalist, using Japanese influences. Any materials would have to be high spec, to cope with the heavy traffic and, of course, the effects of steam and chlorine in the pools area, without looking industrial. Calm, comfortable and clean: these were the words I used with the client during my first presentation.

  The day of Neil’s follow-up appointment I drove out to the spa, near Knutsford, for a meeting and spent the morning with the manager and the architect. It was frustrating: the manager was eager to shave off costs but not happy to compromise on quality, and the architect was dying to get away.

  I tried not to get too sharp even though I felt the manager was wasting our time. At one point I suggested he redraw his budgets and give me a new figure to work to, if he was having second thoughts, which prompted the architect to complain about delays. The manager backtracked and blethered on. My husband might be dying, matey, I thought. I don’t give a flying fuck for your yardage problems. But I smiled thinly and did my job. After all, if Neil was dying, I’d need all the work I could get.

  Of course, the proper jargon, as I learned on the Internet, is living with MND, not dying from it. Like AIDS. Adam had a T-shirt around that time, black and voluminous with a slogan in scratchy white lettering: ‘Life – a death sentence’. That soon got lost in the wash.

  At the hospital, I saw Neil before he saw me in the waiting room (ghastly orange chairs designed to deaden the bum and weaken the spirit). He was reading, his head tilted to the side, legs stretched out, ankles crossed. Beautiful. If I hadn’t known him, I’d have thought the same: the shape of his face, his frame, dark hair, inherently attractive. I didn’t need to get close enough to smell his pheromones.

  He sensed me watching, looked up and smiled, closed his book. Unhooked his ankles and sat up straighter. I reached him, sat beside him, unbuttoning my coat, unwrapping my scarf: I was hot after the frosty air outside.

  ‘They’re running late,’ he said.

  ‘Great – gives you a bit more time, then.’ I thought I’d gone too far but his eyes crinkled at the joke.

  ‘Good meeting?’ he asked.

  ‘Crap. He wants to cut corners without it showing. I told him we need to move forward by next week or he’ll lose the slot, another client waiting, bigger.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Neil Draper,’ the nurse called.

  The consultant, Mr Saddah, was a really nice man. He took his time, answered all our questions, even if most of the answers started off with it’s hard to say or it varies a great deal. He said eminently sensible things about support and resources and dealing with it as a family and how MND progressed.

  His words streamed past me, lapping around me like channels of water carving the sand. I gripped Neil’s hand and tried to stop time.

  The judge comes in and everybody stands. A wave of panic washes through me, blurring my vision. I blink hard. Jane is saying something to Adam. It’s lonely here, lonely and exposed. Did Martin think of coming and decide against it? If my dad had lived would he have come to show support? I’m glad my mum’s not still around, not here today, anyway. Because her reaction to all this, her eloquent unhappiness would give me more of a burden to carry. Happy birthday, Deborah. Happy bloody birthday.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Call Deborah Shelley.’

  I stand in the dock, beside me a guard from the court. The clerk asks, ‘Are you Deborah Shelley?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Do they ever get it wrong? No, not me, mate. Whoops, sorry, you should be next door with the traffic offences . . .

  ‘Deborah Shelley,’ she reads from a notepad, ‘you are charged that on the fifteenth of June 2009 you murdered Neil Draper at 14, Elmfield Drive, contrary to common law. Are you guilty or not guilty?’

  ‘Not guilty.’ My voice sounds thin, swallowed by the space.

  The judge is exactly how you would imagine a judge to be: old, white, male. The only deviation from the stereotype, a northern accent. He has wild white eyebrows and a pleated face. He leans forward slightly and asks the clerk to fetch the jury. They file into the court and make their way to the jury box. Here they are sworn in, each person putting their hands on the Bible (no one chooses the Qur’an even though two are Asian and one is black) and promising to try the case faithfully and reach a true verdict on the evidence presented. Three of them choose to affirm rather than use a holy book. I find it depressing that nine are believers. But perhaps their faith is the church-once-a-year variety, the sort of people who tick ‘Christian’ on the hospital admission form because they can’t bear to tick none. If any of them are fundamentalists, rabid right-to-lifers, it bodes ill for me.

  The clerk repeats the charge against me to the jury.

  The judge explains to the jury and the court that we will hear first from the prosecution who will make an opening statement. He consults with the barristers about a probable time to break for lunch. The exchanges are eminently civil and the reality that I am in the dock for murder seems preposterous set against this mannered chat. I detect warmth in the judge’s voice, perhaps down to those Lancashire vowels, and a benign paternalism in his manner. It shouldn’t make a difference: he is meant to be impartial, his role simply to apply the processes of the law, but had he seemed waspish or frosty I would have been more fearful. After all, the jurors will look to him for guidance, they will drink in all his non-verbal communication. And if I am not acquitted he will set my sentence.

  The prosecuting barrister stands up and introduces herself. ‘Your Honour, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my learned friends, I, Briony Webber, appear for the prosecution, and my learned friend, Mr John Latimer, appears for the defence.’

  I guess she is in her early forties. She’s extremely tall, like a seedling gone rampant, but she carries it well. No stoop. Her wig looks fresh and tidy, whereas Mr Latimer’s has the appearance of a scrap of sheep’s wool caught on barbed wire.

  Miss Webber has a clear voice, a fluency with words as she lays out my crime for the court.

  ‘In the dock today stands Deborah Shelley. She is here accused of the gravest crime, that of murder. The murder of her husband Neil, a loving son, a caring father, a valued colleague. The case for the prosecution is that Deborah Shelley set out to kill Neil Draper, in the full and clear knowledge that what she was doing was wrong. We shall show how she attempted to cover up her crime, lying to her family and lying to the police. We shall show how, faced with incontrovertible evidence that she had poisoned and then suffocated her husband, she continued to lie. Neil Draper was unwell. He suffered from motor neurone disease. He had a limited life expectancy. It is our contention that Neil Draper asked his wife to help him end his life prematurely and that she complied. We shall call witnesses who will testify that Deborah Shelley was functioning well in the days before this tragic death, witnesses who will report her being in good spirits, able to socialize, to work. We will call a psychiatric expert who has examined Ms Shelley and who will tell you that the defence of diminished responsibility is a sham. Ms Shelley knew exactly what she was doing that day last June.’

  She gives the word ‘Ms’ a little buzz, a hornet’s touch.

  ‘She set out to end Neil Draper’s life and she succeeded. She then covered her tracks, employed deceit and a web of lies to try to convince the world that this was a natural death. There was nothing natural about this death, there was nothing natural in her behaviour. This woman lied to her own children, to the parents of the man she killed, to the authorities, and she persists in her lies even as she stands before you today.’

  Holding my head high, fighting the urge to bow, aware of the tension in my throat and my jaw, I watch the jury, their eyes flicking from the prosecutor to me. Examining my hair, my clothes, making assessments already. Forming first impressions. Snott
y cow, not even a Mrs, unnatural, how could she do that?

  The day the magistrates refused me bail and remanded me to Styal, I rang home again. The desire to hear their voices, to make sure they were coping, was all-consuming. Sophie answered the phone.

  ‘Sophie, it’s Mum. Are you all right, darling?’

  There was a pause and then she said in a low, trembly voice, ‘You shouldn’t have done it, Mum.’

  My heart racketed in my chest. I felt the blood drain from my cheeks and the cold steal into my bowels. ‘Sophie, I never meant to hurt—’

  There was a clatter as she let go of the phone. She believed what they were saying. She trusted them, not me. I longed to call her back to the phone, to try and explain. Her censure was understandable: she’d adored her father and now she thought I had taken him away from her. I felt unsteady, the love and concern I’d anticipated from Sophie snatched away. The chance we might console each other shattered.

  A few seconds later, Adam came on. ‘Mum?’ He was subdued.

  ‘Adam, I’m sorry for all this. I need you to be strong now, look after yourself.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You can go to Grandma and Grandpa’s.’

  ‘I’ll stay. Sophie’s going.’

  I’d a mad image of Adam opening up the place for a house party. It’d be great weather for it, tents in the garden and a barbecue, giant spliffs and too much booze.

  ‘Talk to Jane, if you need anything.’

  ‘Cool. Can I come and see you?’

  I couldn’t speak for a moment. Tears burned the back of my eyes. I didn’t want to break down on the phone, didn’t want him to have to cope with that on top of everything else. ‘Yes, please. I’ll find out what we have to do. You’ll need to go shopping – make sure you eat something.’

  ‘Course.’ There was a pause. Then he went on, ‘ Jonty’s going to this festival in Spain – there’s a load of them going. I . . .’ He offered it as something to talk about, then realized it might seem tactless.