Hate

by Alan Gibbons

  Mum shook her head.

  ‘No. I checked.’

  So this was horror. The numbness, the ridiculous descent into the minutest of details, the grim routines of A&E. Mum’s face was red and riven with tears, but it was Dad who upset me most. I couldn’t remember ever seeing him cry before.

  ‘Where’s Paul?’ I asked.

  Mum told me the name of the hospital.

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Manchester.’

  ‘Why aren’t they in the same one?’

  Her arms flopped at her side.

  ‘He’s supposed to be worse than Rosie,’ she said. ‘Touch and go, they say.’

  ‘Oh, my God!’

  I felt somebody’s hand on my arm. It was the nurse, a woman in her thirties. She had a nose stud. Her eyes were dark and kind.

  ‘Don’t worry, your sister’s going to be all right. We’ll take good care of her.’

  Behind her, a second nurse was dabbing at tears, contradicting her colleague’s assurances.

  ‘Mum, what happened?’

  ‘All I know is they went to a party in Brierley, a couple of miles from their flat. They were attacked in Cartmel Park.’

  ‘What were they doing there?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t really know anything.’

  Dad and I were in the hospital café. It was light and airy, with flowers on the table. It was an age before either of us spoke.

  ‘She’ll pull through,’ Dad said. ‘She’s got to.’

  ‘Mum’s been gone a long time.’

  ‘She’ll be back soon.’

  I couldn’t get Rosie’s face out of my mind.

  ‘Why would anyone do something like that? Did you see the footprint?’

  He squeezed his eyes tight shut.

  ‘The attacker stamped on her face. I don’t . . . What kind of person gets a twenty-year-old woman on the floor and jumps on her head?’ He crushed his fists into his eyes. ‘God almighty.’ He puffed his cheeks, struggling with the emotions that were boiling out of him. ‘Did you see her? Did you see Rosie’s lovely face? It was like a football.’

  He grabbed my hand.

  ‘She went to a party. She wasn’t late. She . . .’

  He was trying to make sense of the senseless, to piece together something precious that had shattered into fragments.

  ‘Don’t, Dad,’ I begged. ‘I can’t bear it.’

  He found some kind of composure.

  ‘I’m sorry, sorry.’ His gaze flew round the room. ‘I wonder how many people have sat here like this with their guts kicked out.’

  Then Mum was with us, dropping into the seat next to me. Her hand ran over my shoulder and upper arm.

  ‘Take Eve home, Dave. I’ll stay.’

  ‘No, Mum. I want to be here with you. With Rosie.’

  ‘Seriously Eve, go home and get some rest. Rosie is going to be in recovery for a long time. We will need our strength. I’ll stay a bit longer and let you know if there’s any news.’

  I kissed her. Dad followed suit and squeezed her shoulder as he went past.

  ‘Good job I didn’t take Eve’s helmet out of the box.’

  There it was again, the need to fix on some trivial detail, a way of clinging to a scrap of normality.

  ‘I’ll see you back home.’

  Sunday, 11 August 2013

  ‘Did you sleep?’

  Mum shook her head. A chair scraped on the floor. There was a stumble as Dad escaped into the garden to stare across the hills.

  ‘What about you?’ Mum asked. ‘You look exhausted.’

  ‘I don’t know. I lay awake for hours, but I think I dropped off sometime.’

  Mum must have been up early. Rosie’s bag was packed and sitting by the front door, ready to go. We met her at the hospital a couple of hours later. I will never forget the shattered look on her face.

  ‘They took out the ventilator.’

  ‘You mean she’s on the mend?’

  Her face crumpled. A choking groan followed.

  ‘She’s not right. She sat up mumbling. She was making these awful noises. It was so loud. You could hear it all over the ward. They had to sedate her.’

  ‘But she was conscious,’ I said. ‘That’s got to be an improvement.’

  I was aware of Dad standing next to me. As Mum described Rosie’s condition he let out a breath, but still said nothing.

  ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know, but it doesn’t feel right. She wasn’t . . . awake. It was a kind of reflex. Eve, I don’t know what to make of it, but it scared me. This is worse than I thought.’

  The day followed the same pattern as Saturday. Dad took me home while Mum stayed for a couple of hours. There was a call about seven o’clock.

  ‘I’ve got to pick Mum up,’ he said, reaching for his keys.

  ‘But she’s got the car.’

  ‘She decided to drive over to see how Paul was doing. She lost control and smacked into some concrete bollards. I should have known she wasn’t fit to drive.’

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘She’s not hurt. She wasn’t going fast. I don’t think she’s done any great damage to the car, either. She’s in a terrible state. We’ll be back soon.’

  After twenty minutes I reached for the phone. I was going to call Jess, but I put it down without making the call. What could I say? I was in a dark place.

  Monday, 12 August 2013

  We were living out a fantasy, that Rosie would recover, that one morning those bright, inquisitive eyes would flutter open and she would recognise all of us standing round the bed. I knew the entire sequence. I could see how it would happen. She would be weak at first. There would be the trace of a smile then she would close her eyes and sleep. A day, maybe two, later she would be stronger. Then there would be her first words and the long, difficult journey back.

  I got used to the hospital. It wasn’t a second home. No institution that big, that clinical, could ever have the same warm familiarity as your own four walls, but I grew accustomed to its rhythms, the padding footsteps of the nurses, doctors, ancillary staff, their banter, jokes, smiles and occasional knowing looks. I absorbed its routines, the ambulances sliding into their bays, the visitors huddling round the vending machines, the boredom and frustration of the relatives. I got used to it, but, for all the help the staff gave us, hope crept ever closer to the exit. With every hour that passed it became more obvious that there wasn’t going to be any good news about Rosie.

  There were the questions the doctors asked. Did she take drugs? Where was her partner, the boy who was hurt in the attack? It was as if nobody had explained to them what had happened. There didn’t seem to be any coordination. They were groping towards an understanding of the events that had left Rosie broken and barely alive.

  By then the police had assigned us a Family Liaison Officer. His name was George Howard. I don’t know why, but his very presence shook me. If we had our own policeman, it had to be serious. The police were taking photographs, asking if the nurses could shave Rosie’s hair so they could look for footprints. Mum was horrified by the requests. It was all part of Rosie’s identity. Its loss seemed to demote her from a loved, cherished daughter and sister to some unrecognisable creature fit only for examination and analysis.

  ‘Please don’t,’ she said, ‘don’t cut her hair.’

  Mum sat by Rosie’s side for hours on end, waxing her dreads, keeping them tidy. And that’s how it was, Mum, Dad and I trying to cling on to our Rosie while all these machines and tests and photographs and questions took her away from us, transforming her into a case with a number. They took her off sedation and she made movements with her hands. Her legs twitched. The nurses got her sitting up, but her eyes were tracking, strange flickering, irregular movements that terrified me.

  ‘Mum, why are her eyes doing that?’

  That’s when we knew for sure, when we saw her fitting. She was damaged. Our Rosie wasn’t there. In place of my sister there was somebody h
alf-alive, somebody who had to be fed by tubes, surrounded by stands and machinery. Horrible things were happening. Her stomach filled with water. Her tummy was rippling with it. Our tiny Rosie was bloating. From then on, the nightmare started to accelerate.

  The doctor called us into a room. He was tall and shaven-headed. His scalp gleamed under the artificial light.

  ‘What I have to say to you,’ he began, ‘will come as no surprise. Rosie is gravely ill.’

  Finally there was the worst news of all.

  She had had a heart attack.

  Wednesday, 21 August 2013

  That was the day Paul came to see her. He was on the slow path to recovery. The ordeal had gone on and on, the visits, the tests. Eleven days had passed since the night of the attack. By then we knew that Rosie wasn’t coming back. At first they had talked about a partial recovery, maybe some speech and mobility problems. Then, with each day that passed, the predictions of improvement became lessened.

  But Paul had returned. He was weak, and full fitness was a long way off, but he was the Paul we knew, the man who loved my sister. They brought him in a wheelchair and he stared at her with eyes dulled by suffering.

  The police were putting together a kind of jigsaw. They had Paul’s statement, but other things were happening. George had been telling Mum and Dad not to speak to the press. But there were others who didn’t keep quiet, anonymous voices from the Brierley Hill estate.

  People were messaging on the internet. We were in a bubble of grief and despair, but information about the killers kept washing up against our walls. We knew who was in the frame. It was the same names over and over again. Soon those names would have faces. When Paul had gone Mum took me out into the corridor.

  ‘I’ve come to a decision.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the boys who did this. I know how good George has been, but he can’t tell me what to do. I can’t keep quiet.’

  ‘You’re going to talk to the media?’

  ‘I’ll talk to anybody who is willing to listen. I will not be silent about what they did to my child. People have got to know.’

  ‘What does Dad say?’

  ‘He’s finding it hard to handle what’s happened. I’ve got to make a hard choice. It’s going to affect your life, Eve. Are you OK with that?’

  I could barely breathe. How do you answer a question like that? No, I wasn’t OK with it. Maybe I was like Dad. I wanted it all to go away. I wanted the impossible. I wanted that story of recovery. Why couldn’t there be a miracle? That’s what it was like in the movies. If this had been a film, a nurse would have come racing down the corridor. Light would have flooded through the curtains and my sister would be there, with life in her eyes and a word of recognition on her lips. There would be swelling music. There would be a happy ending.

  ‘Mum, you know best.’ I fiddled with a tissue. ‘What made you change your mind?’

  ‘It was last night. It must have been two or three in the morning. A woman came up to me and put her arms round me. There she was, a complete stranger, but she had heard what those boys did to Rosie and she had something to say. Her husband is dying in another ward. Do you know what she said? She whispered in my ear, “You have to get this out. Tell people what they did to that girl of yours.” The moment she said it, I knew she was right. We will never have justice by keeping quiet and playing by the rules. If Rosie’s life is going to mean something, we will have to fight for her.’

  From that moment Mum began to fight and Dad and I slid into the background.

  Friday, 23 August 2013

  I had never seen anyone die before. I had never seen anyone really ill. Isn’t it strange? The moment we accepted that Rosie was really gone, the moment we agreed that they could take the machines off, that was the first time she became human again. That was why Mum protected her hair the way she did. She wasn’t going to let them strip her of everything she had been in life. In a way, no matter how painful those last few minutes were, that was when we had Rosie back.

  We took it in turns to be with her and cuddle her, to say our goodbyes or let our farewell be a silent one, as it was with Dad. I had expected her to go suddenly, a flicker that was extinguished in a second. It wasn’t like that. She continued breathing for twenty minutes on her own before she slipped away.

  She had died long before, of course. We clung to our impossible dream, but she had been dead for two weeks. She was never going to survive. The doctors said she had two kinds of brain damage. That’s what persuaded my parents to accept the inevitable. Mum was the last to hold her.

  ‘The world is going to see this,’ she said as we left the ward.

  I didn’t know what she had in mind. I couldn’t have imagined all those meetings, the hours on the phone and the computer, the speeches and interviews. The only thing I knew was that Dad understood what it would mean and he couldn’t go with her on her quest for justice. He would know that what Mum was doing was right, he would never stand in her way, but he would forever be in that room, watching those machines and tubes entangling his daughter. He had waded through horror and he refused to return to it. He would shut it out or it would destroy him. That’s how my mum and dad started to drift apart. That’s how they lost each other.

  Monday, 11 November 2013

  Did I say that we got Rosie back? In the days that followed it felt as if they did everything they could to tear her away from us again.

  The battle began the moment she stopped breathing. They started to dictate how we would say goodbye. They wouldn’t let us cremate her in case they had to dig her back up to get evidence. The whole thing became surreal. The police and the coroner said things that you couldn’t dream up even in the most bizarre story. Rosie died on 23 August, but she would not be buried for three long months. There was no forensic expert available who dealt with brain injuries, so we had to wait. There was even talk that the burial might be as late as January. It was like the garbled retelling of a really sick movie. I was buried alive and I could hear the voices of the gravediggers above me.

  One day George Howard visited the house. I was in the kitchen when I heard him say the most incredible thing.

  ‘Dave, Cath, there is another option. You can bury her without her brain. When you get the brain back you can bury it with her body.’

  We didn’t know about autopsies and forensics and procedures, but we knew that this was yet another torture. So Mum went to the media. She did interviews. She wrote articles. She told them the situation. We couldn’t bury our Rosie. In the end the authorities relented. There was a kind of victory. The funeral would be in November.

  We weren’t the only ones who stood up for Rosie. The goth community rallied round. They staged gigs and gatherings. Brierley United held a minute’s silence for Rosie. The bandstand in Cartmel Park was transformed into a carpet of flowers, and the floral tributes were being refreshed on an almost daily basis. In a lonely moment, whenever there was another macabre twist to the long story of her journey from death to burial, I would wander down there and stand reading the tributes. The council voted in favour of setting up a plaque in her memory on the spot where the attack happened.

  So the funeral, when it came, was both a celebration of Rosie and her life and a cry for justice. No one was religious so it was a humanist ceremony. My parents had always said that Heaven and Hell were here on Earth.

  The hearse stopped down the road from Shackleton Crematorium where it was to be held. Hundreds of mourners had turned out to pay their respects, many of them in their gothic black. There were the alternative tribes Rosie had counted as friends: the Emos, the Punks, the Metallers, even Skaters. Mum and Dad had encouraged them to come dressed any way they wanted. Rosie was killed for the way she looked. On the day we let her go, nobody was going to pretend to be something they weren’t.

  Rosie had a white coffin. Family and friends escorted her along the road to the hall. Paul had recovered enough to accompany her. A lone piper played a lament and it d
anced on the snapping wind as we made our way in to the service. Every one of us carried a single rose.

  The hall was decorated with Paul’s portraits of Rosie. Her face was everywhere, studied or beaming, brooding or mischievous. I glimpsed Jess a few rows back and gave her a half-smile. Mum read the address:

  ‘Rosie was a one-off. She was intelligent, enquiring and perceptive. She had her own mind, strong opinions and principles, but that is not why she died. She died because she dared to be different. She died because she expressed her individuality through the way she dressed, the way she made up her face and wore her hair. In a world that is becoming ever more uniform and homogenous, she made her life into a statement that was fiery and personal.

  ‘That was her crime, to be herself. One August night a group of boys were drinking in a local park and they saw her as a threat. They looked at the dark clothes and the pale make-up and they saw somebody to mock and hurt and ultimately destroy. This is an appalling tragedy. It is a tragedy because ignorance can destroy beauty. Brutality can crush aspiration. Hatred can shatter hope.

  ‘It is hard, so very hard, to come to terms with such cruel, mindless, brutish acts, but we must not give in to despair. We must never surrender to violence. Young or old, black or white, male or female, gay or straight, conventional or alternative, we all deserve the same respect. These values informed Rosie’s life. That is why we remember her. Sleep tight, sweet child.’

  There were other readings, mostly by Rosie’s friends. I caught phrases, snatches of words, but no more than that. In my head we were scampering across the grass in our bare feet, Rosie seven or eight, me three or four, the summer sunlight on our faces. I ran behind, wanting to be like her. Now I would always be trailing in her wake, running after her rippling skirts forever as her spirit haunted the hills and cried for justice. I wept that morning, and it was partly for Rosie, but mostly for myself. Even then I was selfish. She had left a hole in the universe and I could never begin to fill it.