We are living in Surrey, in the house you inherited from your parents and which I will eventually buy from you. It’s large and untidy in a pleasantly middle-class way, but isn’t quite big enough for our ever-growing family and the piano and the various rabbits and hamsters we collect. We are a dysfunctional clutter of children who play within its walls when school is done. Paul, Penny, and gradually I, begin to suspect that although we speak as politely as the other children in our suburban grammar school, our home lives may not be quite as ordered as theirs. We don’t invite friends round and we decline invitations to tea. We do these things without consultation, each sibling owning their individual moment of revelation. My moment comes when you collect me from school one day. I am six, it is the seventies and things are ‘looser’, but even then all the other fathers either have their shirts tucked all the way in or hanging all the way out, their clothing delineating their political sway. Your shirt, though, is somewhere in-between, ignoring your politics. A bit of it is crumpled into the waistband of your trousers, but most of the back remains untucked like the boys at the big school wear them. I know that it’s wrong in a not-quite-right way and then I realise that is the same for everything in our family. Not-quite-right, not-quite-wrong. Too many cracks mar the surface.
I don’t look at the children and parents casting sly glances in our direction.
Is he drunk?
I can feel the hum of their whispers with every footfall. At least you are there to collect me while Mum sways to jazz in the garden and doesn’t work on her university thesis. You don’t leave us. You will never leave us.
Our mother loves babies and even as children we know this. She loves the touch and the smell of them. She loves their wriggling need and the way the crying stops when she wraps them to her thin chest. Of course we stop crying. Two parts breast-milk, one part raw spirit is what flows out of her and into us. She delights in babies, our mother, but not in motherhood. She has no interest in that. Children with
minds of their own
and a will separate to hers exhaust her. When we get to the foot-stamping age her love affair tires and it becomes time for another, fresher, smaller child to satisfy the aching place inside her only an infant can reach. Paul is the first to be discarded and then Penny, and then me.
By the time the boys come along things are falling apart for our parents and not even the joy of two temporary slaves to her breast can keep our mother with us. They disappoint her by quickly growing chubby limbs that support themselves. I think maybe they disappoint her more than we did. The boys rely on each other for play and comfort in that special way twins have that excludes all others. By the time they are coming up to five she starts to dislocate. She is still there, but she stares
emptily at us as if wondering how on earth we all came to be. And it is you that makes the tea as best as you can and puts us all to bed.
Too often, too late at night, jazz is played too loudly to drown out slurring arguments that spark from nothing on the dry, dead twigs of our parents’ marriage. It becomes habit. Our middle-class bedtime lullaby.
Jazz is playing the night she finally leaves, when I am just two weeks into ten years old.
I am tucked up in my small bed, the covers almost all the way over my head. My bedside lamp is still switched on even though it must be gone ten. I think that Penny will turn it off, if she comes back to our room. We know that our parents will not be checking on us so Penny crept over to Paul’s room as soon as the volume was turned up; Miles Davis cheerfully trying to distract from the sounds of our parents’ war of selfloathing and mutual frustration. Two alcoholics staring at each other and not liking what they see, only a reflection of themselves, nothing better. Nothing worth loving.
Penny has started going into Paul’s room a lot and I know that they think I am too childish to share their talk and their games. Not as much of a baby as the boys but still not old enough to join in. There is just over a year between them and they are becoming their own branch on our family tree. They share knowing glances and giggling fits across the tea table. I feel lonely in my
middle perspective, looking down at two who don’t need me and up at two who are too adult for me.
Tonight the music can’t drown out the rage and our mother shrieks her tantrum, all the words becoming one animal howl through the plaster of the ceiling. My heart is beating fast in my chest, discordant with the record and with the row. There are hot, wet tears on my cheeks, but I don’t sob. I pull the covers further up over my head and wish I could remember a song to sing myself. Something that isn’t jazz, that isn’t wild, but my head is empty. After a while of listening to the pounding thump of blood pushing round my body, feeling my own hot breath beneath the blanket that threatens to choke me, I realise that the sounds from below have stopped. Only the jazz is playing cheerfully on, uncaring about its silenced accompaniment.
I push my clammy face out into the light and listen. There is nothing below the music. The carpet is rough beneath my feet as I go carefully out into the hallway. Paul and Penny are sitting silently on the top stair. They look at me with their matching wide brown eyes.
‘I think Mum’s gone,’ Paul says. He is nearly sixteen and his unruly hair goes this way and that, like his voice that hasn’t quite broken. Paul isn’t broken yet either. Not yet damaged goods. Or maybe just a little.
Penny is holding his hand so tight that even in the gloom I can see where the blood is being squeezed aside. Her eyes are filling up, but to me she still looks beautiful.
‘I don’t think she’s coming back. She didn’t even say goodbye. She didn’t look up once.’
Paul hugs her and I say nothing, but my hands grip the sides of my polyester nightie and I pretend I am holding someone else and then, as my heart picks up the pace and sobs convulse my chest, you come up the stairs and sweep me off my feet, your warm tobacco smell enveloping me.
You take us into the boys’ room and talk. You talk a lot and none of it really means anything to me. You talk about guilt and blame and love and other things in the grey area we only understand in a black-or-white way, but we all know in our hearts that it’s our fault for not staying little for long enough.
Listening to you and seeing you try to be sober and try to give enough love for two and try to understand where it all went wrong, I wonder if you are too stuck in the grey to see the truth of our mother. Babies are wonderful, children tie you down. They make you old. And she has far too many of them. You blame yourself of course. And you will do for years to come. I think for all the years before you stop drinking.
Penny asks questions and cries and for a while Paul shouts at you and then the twins start to cry and we all sit silently. I yawn, suddenly wanting to be back in my bed and then everyone’s mouths stretch wide including yours, me the leader for once, and although there is emptiness inside all of us, the calm is good. The calm is
very good. We go to bed, shuffling to our own corners of the house. The light goes off.
I can hear the clock ticking on the top of our shared chest of drawers. I listen to it until it fills my head and makes my ears hurt. I don’t sleep. My eyes are so heavy, but my heart is pounding and my head feels too hot. From Penny’s bed a few feet away, the sound of tears, of
tears
in her heart, has stopped and her hitching breath is now steady and slow. She doesn’t even twitch, so lost is she in sleep. Her body has shut down to close out the hard and let her start to recover. Gazing upwards in the dark I envy her. My body is storing the storm and I wish I could just let it out. My feet itch and, quietly pushing back the covers, I get out of bed, go to the window and kneel on the carpet. I slip my head under the curtains, goosebumps instantly appearing on my skin as the temperature drops a couple of degrees, night air sneaking in through the tiny gaps around the sash window. Until Penny grew up and found Paul, we often snuck out of bed and came and rested our heads on this window ledge, giggling and making up stories of princesses and witches and happy endings.
Now, sitting on numbing ankles, the curtain feels like a shroud around my dying childhood and even in the chill my face gets hotter and hotter, burning me from the inside out. I wish I could cry; I wish Penny would come back from being a teenager and I wish Mum would come home and put everything back to not-quite-
right. Something is building, bubbling in my stomach, flaring into white heat and I don’t know if it will explode out of me or whether it will meet with the dark spots at the edge of my vision and make me pass out. I want it to come out in words that I don’t have. I want it to make sense. To be not-just-mine. And then, as I am about to combust, it appears in the night. Out of nowhere.
There is a road between the end of our garden and the fields beyond. People drive too fast down it, eager to get to the next town – to other people and away from the quiet. At one a.m. though, it is silent and empty under the white light of the streetlamps, safe for hedgehogs and country mice to cross.
*
The creature in the middle of the road staring up at me isn’t one of these scurrying through the night. It stops my breath racing from my lungs as I stare in wonder. It wasn’t there a second before. There was nothing there but tarmac. And now here it is. Inside, the white fire I can’t control cools slightly. Below, on the cold road, its red eyes glow angrily and through the glass I can see hot steam charge from its flared nostrils as it paws the ground. I think perhaps it is blacker than the night, its mane shining as it is tossed this way and that. I am not sure whether it is beautiful or ugly, but I know that it’s wonderful. And I know that it’s waiting for me. One of my hands rises to the cold glass, as if by touching that I can
reach the beast below. The lonely emptiness inside me fills up with something warm and thick. This creature and I belong together. I know it and so does he.
Its body is large, like a horse but more solid – without the elegance but with twice the power. I can see thick sinews bunch along its long neck as it raises its head again, glaring at me. A black horn grows twisted from between its eyes, a thick, deformed, calloused thing, a tree root erupting from the earthy ground of its forehead, the matt texture oppositional to the sweaty shine on its dark hide. I stare at it and our souls meet. It is power and anger and beauty and nature rolled into something other-worldly, waging a war with the night on its four thick hooves.
I can’t breathe for a second and then the black beast rises up on its rear legs, frustrated at my inaction. It is perfection to me, not like the white, insipid animal of legends with which it shares it horn – that creature does not exist. This one exists more plainly than I do. It is gnarled and dark and full of passion and I know that if I could bury my head in that mane it would smell of the earth and sweat and blood.
It glares at me and I know that below it is whinnying, a deep throaty growl of a sound. A terrifying sound. I smile. I can’t help it. This instant I am full of joy, pure and bright.
I bite my cheek and stare in disbelief as the furious creature turns, its eagerness to travel through the night
too great. Without looking back it jumps heavily over the fence, becoming invisible against the night. It is gone, its patience worn thin. It has no more time for me.
The light inside me goes out leaving only the white heat of pain.
The heat burns my face and burns my brain as I push away from the floor, my legs bursting with energy as I run in panic into the night. I think a whine escapes me, high pitched. I will not be left behind. I will not.
I feel nothing after that. I can barely think; the world is a mess as I drift in the worst way. I know that the tarmac hurts my feet and I know the mud of the field is thick and cold and sucks me down. I see the last glint of bright eyes in the night before there is only the dark and my hot tears. I know I fall. I think I call out. I think I am still screaming, ‘Come back! Come back! Don’t leave me behind!’ when you, Penny and Paul find me on my filthy knees, sobbing in the darkness.
*
I remember everything from the night our mother left us. So many years ago, and yet still with me. Bubbles within bubbles. I quietly raise myself up on one elbow and look at Penny. She is sleeping, her hands tucked under her cheek and her knees pulled up into her chest. I smile and stroke her hair before quietly pushing back the covers, happy to be out of the heat. My eyes are wide open and they burn when I blink. My heart beats too fast to sleep and I want to shake off the feeling of
alltime
.
Leaving the light off I pad down the long, dark corridor and sit with you for a while, even though you are sleeping too. I don’t speak; I just watch you. I resist the temptation to go down on my knees and slip my head under the curtain. I only allow myself one quick glance out. The road is empty. There is nothing in the field. And I wonder again if there ever really was.
By nine a.m. the breakfast bar is covered with the remains of our huge fried breakfasts and the scent of hot grease clings to our hair. I have pulled on some jeans and a T-shirt, but Penny has managed to apply full makeup in the same amount of time. I wonder how she does it. While we wait for the doctor I ring the library and tell them I won’t be in for a few days. My father is dying. The words feel odd in that order and they make the woman on the other end – I think it’s Shirley, but I’m not sure – close down.
Hearing the language does that to people. There are no questions. They don’t want to hear about it. They don’t like the little bit of the language they already know; they don’t want to add to it. And I can hear all of this in the closed tone of Shirley’s voice. I hang up and wonder if I ever told them that you were sick or just that you were coming to live with me. I don’t remember. I don’t care. The world outside the house no longer exists. Not for a little while anyway.
We drink tea and are just finishing the rest of the chocolate biscuits when the doctor arrives. He is a large, middle-aged man. A fat man who speaks very little and appears preoccupied when he does utter a few words. I offer to show him where you are, but he waves me away and takes his black bag upstairs, leaving us clinging to our cups of tea. We go back to the warm comfort of the kitchen, matching his heavy footfalls as he heads towards your room. We eat more biscuits until he comes back downstairs. The chocolate makes me feel sick as it hits the eggs and bacon and toast already in my stomach, but eating is better than talking. We think we know the answers anyway. I can see them in Penny’s scared, kohllined eyes. We think we know exactly what the doctor is going to say. We think your time is nearly up. In our hearts we know that you will be dead by tomorrow. After all, you look so ill and haven’t drunk anything for twenty-four hours. Open and shut case.