Authors: Michael Seed
D
addy’s savage attack with his baton did not go unnoticed at school. Suspicious about the cause of my bruises, my class teacher took me to the headmaster’s study so that he could examine me.
There was one big bruise on the side of my head, extending almost to the tip of my left eyebrow, and a string of others along my left arm.
Having seen the one on my head, the teacher had rolled up my sleeve before I could stop her, and seen the others. But when she had asked me to take off my shirt I refused, and that must have been what made her so concerned.
‘Michael claims he fell downstairs,’ she told the headmaster. ‘It’s the third time this month he’s supposed
to have fallen downstairs. But I’d say someone has given him a good hiding.’
‘Is that right, Michael?’ the headmaster asked. ‘Did somebody beat you?’
I shook my head violently and was ready with my lie. ‘No. Nobody beat me. I just fell downstairs. I’m always doing it. Mammy says I’m clumsy.’
‘You’re sure your mother or father didn’t hit you for being naughty?’
I shook my head again. ‘No, sir. It was all my fault. I fell downstairs.’
The headmaster looked at my teacher and nodded. ‘All right, you can take him back to the classroom. But I’ll have a word with the childcare people just in case. I think they should visit and talk to the parents.’
I could hardly wait to get home that night to give Mammy my news. I didn’t stop to play with the other kids but went straight back to the shop, where Mammy was still behind the counter.
‘I promise I didn’t tell them anything but he said someone might come round,’ I blurted.
Mammy looked puzzled. ‘What are you talking about, Michael? Who’s coming here and what didn’t you tell them? Calm down and tell me what happened.’
So I told her all about my visit to the headmaster’s study and how they had looked at my bruises and asked if I had been hit by someone.
‘But I didn’t say it was Daddy,’ I told her. ‘I told them I had fallen downstairs again. That’s what I always say, or
that I was hurt in a game or something. I’d never tell them Daddy had done it.’
‘Thank God for that,’ she gasped. ‘And don’t say anything to Daddy about what happened at school. It’ll only make him more angry than usual. Let’s keep this to ourselves for now and wait to see if anyone comes round.
‘Perhaps no one will.’
But I think we both knew that was a forlorn hope.
It was more than a week later, but eventually someone did come, a young woman, and she turned up just after I got in from school.
Mammy closed the shop and we all went upstairs. I was told to wait in her bedroom while Mammy and the other woman talked in the living room.
When Mammy came to get me, she was very serious but she wasn’t crying, which meant, I thought, that everything was going to be all right.
The woman asked me to take off my shirt and vest and Mammy nodded to show it was OK for me to go ahead. When I had stripped off, the woman told me to turn around so she could see my back.
By this time, most of my bruises were either a bit yellow or had nearly disappeared, though I think there were still quite a lot of them; enough anyway to make the social worker ask a lot of questions.
‘I fell downstairs,’ I kept telling her, but I don’t think she believed me any more than the teachers had.
‘These look like they came from much harder knocks
than you would get just falling downstairs,’ she told us. ‘What really happened?’
‘I fell downstairs,’ I repeated.
‘He’s always falling downstairs,’ said Mammy. ‘He’s in such a hurry to get out and play with his friends he doesn’t take care. I keep telling him to slow down but at five they don’t take much notice, do they?’
The social worker obviously didn’t believe us, but there was clearly not a lot that she could do about it.
If we just keep on telling lies, eventually she will go, I thought.
In the end, that’s what happened. The woman stood up and told Mammy, ‘I’m not entirely happy with the explanations you’ve both given me. I don’t think I’m hearing the whole story. I may decide to have Michael examined by a doctor, and I’m also going to want to see you both again in the future. I’ll probably make it an evening so that I can talk to your husband as well, Mrs Seed.’
I don’t think Mammy or I was happy with that. Except that perhaps Daddy would become angry and hit the social worker and they would take him away. That would be good.
After Mammy had seen the woman out, she came back upstairs and said, ‘Oh, Michael, I feel so ashamed. What are we going to do? They only send social workers to check up on the worst possible kind of families. If my mother or father ever found out, they’d be horrified.’
Secretly, I was quite happy with the situation.
Especially after Mammy told Daddy about the visit. Whatever she said had a big effect on him. He didn’t stop shouting at us, but for at least a couple of weeks I didn’t receive his regular thrashings. It seemed he was just as terrified about people finding out the truth of the situation as she was.
The effect on Mammy was much more worrying. She became even more switched off, if that was possible. Sometimes she would be crying when I left for school in the morning and still crying when I came home. I don’t know if she opened the shop in the afternoons at all, because she always seemed to be upstairs, crying or sitting in a chair just staring into space.
But one day she did something which was very different indeed and it left me terrified.
I had returned home from school at the normal time and found the shop already closed. That in itself was no longer unusual as Mammy had been acting more strangely since the social worker’s visit and seemed to have totally lost interest in the shop.
When I went upstairs, she was sprawled out in the armchair in a funny way. Her legs seemed to be bent at an odd angle and her arm was flopped over the side of the chair, just dangling down. She seemed to be asleep but I could tell that something wasn’t quite right. For some reason, it frightened me and I did something I had never done before. I shook her and tried to wake her up. But she didn’t move.
I shook her really hard by the shoulders and even
pulled at her hair, but she stayed fast asleep. Her mouth was slightly open and she was breathing with a rasping sound.
‘Mammy, wake up!’ I shouted in her ear, but she didn’t even twitch. Nothing I did had the slightest effect on her. I began to feel really scared. I had seen her in a zombie-like state before but never flopped out like this, unable to wake up. She just didn’t look right.
I don’t know how long I had been trying to wake her, but it was a long time after I had come home when I heard Daddy on the stairs.
For once, I was overjoyed to see him, though he was about as pleased to see me as ever. He had always allowed his contempt for me to show, but, since the last beating and the social worker’s visit, it seemed as though he was now giving free rein to his bullying and hatred, but without the physical violence.
After all, who was going to stop him? Certainly not poor Mammy, who was lying, broken and battered on the settee.
‘What are you snivelling about, you little bastard?’ he spat.
Until then, I hadn’t realised that I was crying.
‘It’s Mammy,’ I said. ‘She won’t wake up. I’ve been shaking and calling her for ages but she stays asleep.’
Daddy stopped glaring at me and pushed me to one side, though not roughly for once. He knelt down next to where Mammy was sitting and gently shook her arm. Even I could detect the anxiety in his voice as he
whispered, ‘Lillian, come on, Lillian, wake up, for Christ’s sake, woman. It’s Joe here. Your Joe.’
Never before had I heard him use such a tender tone to her. He laid the side of his face gently on her breast.
‘Wake up, Lillian, love. Wake up, will you.’
But Mammy just lay there dead to the world, as she had been since I’d got home from school.
Daddy moved round in front of her and took her by the shoulders and pulled her forward.
I grabbed his arm and cried, ‘Please don’t hurt her any more. She’s only asleep.’
‘I’m not hurting her,’ he said. ‘I have to lift her up so I can get her downstairs and into the car. She needs to go to hospital.’
Then he reached down and picked up one of Mammy’s pill bottles, which had been lying on the floor. He shook it but there was no rattling sound. It must have been empty.
‘I’d better take this with me to show them,’ he muttered, and put the bottle in his pocket. Then he lifted Mammy up, knelt in front of her, and let her fold forward, face downwards over his shoulder, with her head lolling against his back.
He told me not to go out but to stay where I was until he got back. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be,’ he said as he carried her downstairs. ‘But I’ll be back.’
I heard the back door slam and ran to the front window. A couple of minutes later I saw his car turn out of the side street into the Ashton Old Road.
I sat on the sofa and tried to stay awake, hoping they would come home together as though nothing had happened. But I must have dropped off to sleep, because when Daddy woke me it was morning.
‘Where’s Mammy?’ I asked him, rubbing my eyes.
‘They’re keeping her in hospital for a day or two. She’s not very well, but she’s going to be all right. You’ll just have to get yourself to school and I’ll be back this evening after I’ve visited your mother. The key will be with her next door. Get yourself something to eat and don’t bring anyone home with you. Understand?’
‘Yes,’ I told him, and that was it. I would have to fend for myself. But what was new in that?
It wasn’t until two days later, at school, that I learned my Mammy had tried to kill herself. One of the neighbour’s boys had heard his mother telling the details to another neighbour. Mammy had taken a huge overdose of her depression pills because she wanted to die, he told me. He obviously thought it was a fabulous piece of gossip to spread around the school.
To me, it was devastating. Mammy dead. I just couldn’t imagine it. She would never leave me alone with Daddy. It couldn’t be true.
‘You’re lying,’ I screamed. ‘My mammy wouldn’t want to die and leave me.’
‘It’s true,’ he cried, a satisfied smirk on his face. ‘I know it’s true ’cos it was your dad who told my mam about it in the first place. I heard her say so.’
It was like the bottom had fallen out of my world.
T
he thought of Mammy being dead was to haunt me for the next three years – until finally reality over took imagination.
Nothing else and nobody else seemed to matter any more. Certainly not my school lessons. In that first year at primary school, a learning pattern began that I was to follow for most of my school life.
I didn’t see the point of studying if Mammy could die and leave me so easily and abandon me, on my own, to cope with Daddy’s brutality. It all seemed a complete waste of time. So I shut down.
When other children struggled to master their ABC, I simply sat there looking at the pictures, and when it came to writing things down I covered the paper with scribble.
What my teachers thought about me didn’t concern me. Not that they seemed to be worried by my lack of effort. As long as I was quiet and didn’t disrupt the class, as some children did, they were apparently happy to let me scribble away.
The first year was not important anyway, I heard some of them say. Plenty of time later on for me to learn to read and write. Not one person, at school or at home, appeared in the slightest bit concerned that I was well on my way to becoming the class dunce. Least of all me. I had far more important things to worry about.
The second time I returned home from school and found the shop closed and Mammy upstairs asleep in an armchair, it was much more frightening. From the moment I discovered that the shop door was locked and saw the closed sign in the window, things that had never worried me in the past, I immediately started to picture the scene upstairs. Would I find her like she was before, and would she be alive or dead this time?
By the time I had run round to the back door and was inside, by the bottom of the stairs, I was almost too frightened to go up, in case my worst suspicions turned out to be correct.
Eventually, I managed to overcome my fears and crept up the stairs, until my eyes were level with the landing and I could look along into the living room.
When I first saw her sitting in the armchair everything looked perfectly normal, the way I had found her asleep dozens of times before at this stage of the day.
But, as I walked along the landing and got closer to her, I could see that there was something very odd, unnatural, about the way she was sitting. Her legs were awkwardly splayed outwards and one of her arms, as before, was over the edge of the chair and just dangling.
My heart began hammering away inside my chest and my breath seemed to catch as I sucked in air. Suddenly, I was terrified that she might be already dead.
It was a big effort to make my legs carry me on towards her and, even when I was very close, and could see and hear her breathing, it wasn’t much better. My teeth were rattling with fear. I had already dropped my school bag, and now I grabbed her by the shoulder with both hands and began to shake her as hard as I could.
I shouted, ‘Wake up, Mammy. Wake up. Please wake up.’
But she just sat there, her head lolling backwards and forwards and sideways as I shook her, and her eyes remained tightly closed.
I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t take her to hospital myself and I knew that, if I went to fetch a neighbour to help, Daddy would be angry. He wouldn’t like it at all. Even though it was he who had told a neighbour about the last time Mammy had taken too many pills, I also remembered that he had shouted at her and slapped her for talking to them about our private family affairs.
On the other hand, I couldn’t just do nothing and let Mammy die, and I realised that she did need to go to hospital – and quickly. It was a terrible dilemma to be
in, and at five I had never been faced with that kind of big decision before.
Just to be doing something, I went to the kitchen and soaked a tea towel under the cold tap and took it back to the living room and bathed her face. But she didn’t budge. And now her breathing sounded worse. It was slower, but louder, a kind of hoarse sound as though she was fighting for breath.
I kept on shaking her and shouting in her ear for her to wake up, and finally I was on the point of going to seek help from a neighbour when I heard Daddy come in downstairs.
I didn’t wait for him to come up, but ran over to the top of the stairs and shouted down to him. ‘She’s done it again. Mammy won’t wake up. She’s dying. Please come and stop her dying, Daddy. Will you, please?’
He ran up the stairs and dashed straight over to where Mammy was sitting – as she had been for what seemed to me like an age. This time he didn’t waste any time but bent down and hauled her up on to his shoulder and carried her, not to the stairs as I had expected, but to the kitchen.
He told me to drag an ordinary chair close to the sink and dumped Mammy down on it, on her bottom, and turned her slightly sideways so that her head was towards the sink.
After making sure she was balanced properly and wasn’t going to topple over on to the floor, he went to one of the low cupboards and pulled out a large jug.
He filled this with cold water and then poured in half a packet of table salt, which he stirred in with a wooden spoon.
‘They used a stomach pump at the hospital, but this should have the same effect if we can get it down her,’ he said.
He tilted back her head and held her nose until her mouth opened and poured in some of the mixture. Mammy looked so helpless and pathetic, more like a broken toy than a person. Until then, she hadn’t reacted at all to anything we had done.
Some of the liquid ran down her chin and on to her dress, but some of it must have gone down her throat because she started to choke. Daddy put her head over the sink and began slapping her on the back. She made coughing noises but nothing much else happened. So he repeated the whole thing, pouring more of the salt solution down her throat until she sort of convulsed and a whole torrent of stuff burst out of her mouth and all over the sink and on to the window sill behind.
It made me feel sick just to watch it, but, as soon as she stopped heaving, Daddy lifted her head back and gave her another huge dose of salt water.
She was violently sick again, and so it went on, with Daddy repeating the process until Mammy was only bringing up water. Only then did he give her a drink of clear water. And this she managed to keep down.
‘That should have got all the shit out of her stomach,’ said Daddy. ‘Now, if we can get her moving for a while,
we’ll be able to let her sleep it off. Apart from that, there’s not much more that we, or anyone else, can do for her now. But, if we got it out of her in time, she should be all right.’
‘Does that mean she’s not going to die?’ I asked him through my sobs, because I had been crying ever since he came home.
‘I don’t think she will,’ said Daddy. ‘But God knows what she’s done to her brain, taking all those pills. Until she wakes up, we’re not going to know for certain.’
It didn’t sound all that hopeful to me but I had to trust Daddy to know what he was doing. And, even with everything else going on, I was thinking that this was about the longest talk I had ever had with Daddy without him hitting me.
‘Let’s try and get her walking,’ he said.
He placed her right arm around his neck and put his left arm around her waist and hauled her to her feet, supporting her weight against his hip. The first time he tried to set her on her feet, her legs buckled under her, but he hung on and kept her upright and then
half-carried
her, half-dragged her around the living room until she eventually began to move her legs herself and tried to support her own weight.
It must have been hard for Daddy, strong as he was, but he kept on circling the room with her until she was walking almost normally. Then he guided her into the bedroom and lowered her gently on to the bed. He lifted up her feet and straightened her and she
immediately rolled over on to her side, tucked her knees up and her elbows close to her chest and fell asleep.
‘Now it’s up to nature to take its course,’ Daddy told me. ‘Go and see what you can find to eat downstairs and then you’d better get to bed.’
I could scarcely believe it: Daddy thinking about me eating and getting me to go to bed. I ran downstairs and found part of a loaf of bread, a piece of cheese and some tomatoes and took them upstairs, where Daddy made us sandwiches.
We sat and ate them in front of the television watching a quiz show, though I was far too excited to pay much attention. Sitting and eating with Daddy was a completely new experience. I almost forgot that Mammy might still be dying in the bedroom. It had been a day of big surprises all round.
Next morning, Mammy was up before I went to school, looking very white and sickly and not saying very much.
‘I’m sorry, Michael,’ she told me. ‘Sorry you had to go through all that again.’
But she didn’t appear to be very happy to be alive. Certainly not happy enough to stop her trying to kill herself again. And again.
For over the next few months the upstairs drama was to become an almost regular feature of our family life. Usually, Daddy was able to cope, and when I found her unconscious I waited for him to come home.
On one other occasion, though, he wasn’t able to
make her vomit up the pills and had to take her to hospital to have her stomach pumped out. At other times, he managed to cope alone by giving her the
salt-water
treatment.
Before my seventh birthday, Mammy was to try an amazing total of nine times to kill herself by overdosing with pills.
I don’t know why the doctors kept giving them to her, or perhaps Daddy wasn’t telling them or she was buying other pills from the chemist, but she didn’t succeed in killing herself. What she did do was become more and more unhappy and depressed.