Читать книгу No One Listened: Two children caught in a tragedy with no one else to trust except for each other - Alex Kerr - Страница 12

The row started because Alex had got himself thrown out of choir practice and then announced he wanted to leave the choir altogether, but for some reason I was the one who ended up being thrown out of the house by Mum. Things just went completely mad for a few minutes.

As I stood outside on the drive in my socks, holding onto Alfie by the scruff of his neck, I wasn’t sure what to do next. Mum was in such a hysterical state that there didn’t seem to be any point in trying to get back in the house until she had calmed down. The only person I could think of to turn to for help was my godmother, Helen, who had moved away from our street by then but was still living in the area. I don’t think we had mobile phones at that stage – or at least if we did I didn’t have one on me, not having expected to be leaving the house quite so abruptly – so I had to knock on one of the neighbours’ doors and ask if I could use their house phone.

I don’t think they were surprised by the request because everyone in the nearby houses knew about Dad and assumed that our whole family was a bit dysfunctional. I rang Helen, who very kindly came and took Alfie and me back to her house before going to talk to Mum and attempting to calm her down and make her see sense. Helen was a good friend to Mum and one of the few people she allowed to get close to her. I expect Mum was already regretting her outburst by the time Helen got there. These sorts of temper storms always passed quite quickly and we would then return to our normal family routines as if nothing had happened, the hectic pace of our lives helping us to forget any lingering bad feelings. Dad wouldn’t usually come out of his room when Mum was kicking off. He had his own demons to fight in private. He had no interest in anything to do with any of us unless it affected him directly, and if Mum sounded upset that probably pleased him since he spent most of his time trying to achieve exactly that result.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know how much Dad hated me. It started because I looked so much like Mum, or at least that was what he kept telling me, but it grew worse as I got older and started speaking out against him more often. He needed to be able to dominate everyone in his life completely, and Mum was mostly willing to let him get away with it in order to protect us and try to maintain a fragile peace in the house. As I entered my teens, however, I became less willing to put up with everything he did in silence. If he was attacking Mum I would often take her side, speaking up for her while she remained silent, and that made him loathe me all the more deeply. Arguments were usually based on him saying how dirty the house was, or that the vacuum cleaner hadn’t been put back in the right way, which was infuriating to me. The house was perfectly clean because Mum spent her weekends cleaning it, but nothing she did was ever right it seemed. It drove me crazy that Dad should have the nerve to complain when he sat around at home all day never lifting a finger.

Sometimes his attacks would escalate beyond mere shouting and he became physically violent. He would slap her and throw things at her while she tried frantically to pacify him by agreeing with everything he said, accepting all the criticism without trying to defend herself. Partly out of anger and partly out of fear, I would be screaming at him to leave her alone and threatening to call the police. He found the thought that I would dare to stand up to him almost unbearable and Mum would become desperate that I was winding him up even more by challenging him, but I couldn’t just stand by and watch him hitting her without saying anything. Perhaps her approach was more intelligent than mine. Maybe she already sensed just what he might be capable of if he was pushed too far, but to me at the time, with all the recklessness and ignorance of youth, it looked as though she was giving in to him, being a complete doormat, and my pride wouldn’t let me do the same.

On several occasions as I went to pick up the phone to call the police, Dad pushed me out of the way, threw an ornament at me, or lunged past me and ripped it out of the wall. He didn’t always manage to get there in time, however, and when I was eleven or twelve years old I managed to call them out on two separate occasions. Both times I truly believed that Mum was in real danger and needed grown-up help. Once I heard noises from my bedroom and came downstairs to find him punching her and throwing her around the room. I intervened and he swung a punch at me as well. I managed to get a call through to the police but in the few minutes it took them to turn up he had wrecked the house in his frustration and fury.

Even when the police were standing there in the room and she had a chance to tell them what he was like, Mum would never make a formal complaint or agree to press charges, so there was nothing they could do apart from warn him to calm down. On one occasion when he was particularly wild they took him down to the cells for a few hours to give him time to settle down, only allowing him home once they felt he was calm again. I remember we were all terrified that they would release him in the middle of the night. Alex and I were literally shaking with fear so all three of us slept in my bed till morning. Locking him up served the purpose at the time but did nothing to help our overall situation. His was a vendetta of hate that would outlast any short-term measures the police might be able to impose.

When he got home after his night in the cells we were out at our swimming practice with Mum and by the time we arrived back he had changed all the locks on the house so our keys didn’t work. Mum had to beg him through the letterbox to let us in, trying to avoid provoking a scene on the doorstep that the neighbours would hear. I suppose ultimately he had to let Mum back into the house because she was his only source of income, but he had made his point, showing that he could take control, lock us out and disrupt our lives whenever he chose if we displeased him or challenged him.

On one of the occasions when I called the police Dad ran upstairs and started stabbing himself in the arm with a fork so that when they arrived he could tell them that Mum had attacked him first, and show them the wounds to prove it. When they got there the police left Alex and me sitting on the stairs, just watching and listening and taking it all in. They didn’t ask us for our version of what had gone on, but just ignored us as if we were part of the furniture. Maybe they get called to so many domestic disturbances every day that they have a set method of dealing with them, but they never made us feel that they would be able to offer us or Mum any real protection from Dad should we need it. Later, when we were in court for Dad’s trial, a policeman read out his notes of the incident that night, talking about ‘two young and clearly very disturbed children’ being on the scene. If we were so clearly disturbed, why didn’t anyone do anything to help us, or even talk to us? Why did no one come back the next day after one of these fights to check we were okay? I suppose by not pressing charges Mum forced them to assume that she had the whole situation under control.

Most of the arguments happened late at night, when Dad would emerge from his room and expect to have the house to himself, or perhaps he would decide to go and waken Mum to raise some grudge he had been mulling over all day. Looking back, Dad was getting through a lot of whisky and I suspect the worst arguments probably happened when he was drunk. Alex was usually fast asleep by the time they started to shout and often didn’t wake up, allowing Dad to believe that he could still control him and keep him on his side, even if I was becoming openly rebellious to his tyranny.

If Mum was still up and about when Dad got downstairs it was almost inevitable that he would start picking a fight with her. Most of the time our routines meant that we were able to avoid him, but if something went differently it would make him feel threatened and he would immediately become aggressive. Sometimes, if he had fuelled himself up enough on whisky, he would keep the arguments going all night, forcing Mum to stay awake just so that he could shout at her, and me as well when I came downstairs to investigate. It didn’t bother him how long the fights went on for because he could just sleep through the next day, but we were exhausted and needed our sleep. He knew perfectly well how tired Mum got and exploited it sadistically. I think sometimes he picked fights simply to alleviate the boredom of his existence.

As he got older Alex started to be woken by the shouting as well and we would all end up only getting a couple of hours sleep, but however tired we were in the morning Mum would never consider for a second that we should be allowed a day off school. It was almost like a religious belief to her. She would never take a day off work, however ill or exhausted she felt, and she expected the same level of dedication, determination and discipline from us. We didn’t even bother to ask because we knew what her answer would be. I think my attendance rate was pretty close to a hundred per cent and Alex only managed to bunk off once or twice before Mum found out and put a stop to it. To be honest we were always pretty keen to get out of the house after a night of rowing anyway. We certainly didn’t want to be trapped there on our own with Dad if we could help it. Once we were with our friends at school, or concentrating in lessons, we could forget for a few hours the unpleasant things we had been forced to listen to in the small hours.

Even when Mum was left with bruises or marks on her face and arms from his beatings she would still go to work, telling colleagues that she had walked into a door or some such excuse, and we later discovered from Jillian that no one ever doubted her for a moment. No one at her school had the slightest idea that she was in an abusive relationship. Jillian and a couple of others knew she was married to a man who was odd, but most of them thought she was a single mother and never enquired any further. I suppose she just wasn’t the sort of person you would ever expect to be in that position, because she always seemed so vibrant and in control of every detail of her life.

The only people who I believe knew there was violence going on, and suspected that it was much worse than Mum was saying, were my godmother Helen and the lady vicar at our local church. They were the only two people Mum talked to about it and we discovered that both of them tried to persuade her to leave Dad before things got any worse. Near neighbours later testified that they could hear arguments going on all the time, but none of them wanted to interfere because Dad was such a frightening figure and because Mum seemed to be so capable and seemed to want to keep everything private. When our next-door neighbour on the other side from the old lady was asked why she had never called the police during any of the rows she said that it was because she and her husband were having their own marital problems at the time. Mum never wanted to make a fuss about anything. Perhaps if she had been a little less strong-willed and a little more willing to accept help she would still be alive today.

Mum was a keen churchgoer and would attend every Sunday. When Alex and I were both in the choir we spent even more time there, which could be boring at times although we had a lot of friends there. The biggest bonus to being in the choir was that occasionally we would get paid a few pounds for singing at a wedding. Mum was very proud of us because we got to visit all sorts of cathedrals around the country and once even went on a choir holiday to Wales. We both sang solos so I suppose we must have had pretty good voices.

I think Mum had strong Christian beliefs, although she didn’t talk about them much, and maybe that was another reason why she believed she had to soldier on with the marriage ‘for better or worse’. In her eyes she had made a commitment to my Dad and she was never one to weaken once she had done that. When I started to learn more about religion at school I would sometimes challenge her on her beliefs, like a typical teenager, but she never rose to the bait. Maybe she just went to church because she always had done and she liked the discipline and routine of it.

Although she and Dad hadn’t done anything about having us baptised when we were born, she wanted us to be able to get confirmed at the same time as our friends at the church, so we wouldn’t feel like odd ones out. She arranged for us to be baptised when I was about twelve and Alex was about ten and that was when she asked Helen and Steve to be our godparents. Dad wasn’t remotely interested in any of it and didn’t even turn up for the service.

Mum was the strongest person imaginable considering all she had to put up with, but eventually even she found the pressure too much. One night, after one of Dad’s all-night attacks on her, she decided to commit suicide. I was fourteen at the time. We had no idea how bad things had got inside her head and we would certainly never have thought she would consider the option of suicide for even a second. I will never know exactly what was going through her mind on the night she made the decision, although I found out a lot more later that she hadn’t told us at the time, but it was a decision she took with all her usual pragmatism and lack of emotion.

It must have been a really hard decision for her on a number of levels. Firstly there were her religious beliefs to overcome, and I also don’t believe she would ever have taken the idea of leaving Alex and me with Dad lightly. She must have wrestled with her conscience for a long time before deciding to do it.

Perhaps her mind was clouded by the exhaustion she was obviously suffering from at the time. It must have been a relatively quiet fight she had with Dad that night because Alex and I both slept right through it. She must have stayed awake even after he had finally run out of steam and gone back to his room. Everything must have seemed so impossibly bleak as she sat on her own downstairs in the small hours of the morning, in the dark silent house. I found out later, long after the event, that she had serious health problems, although she hadn’t told us at that stage, and she maybe thought that by ending things quickly she was sparing us from having to see her suffer and die slowly.

She had some tablets, but I don’t know if that was a co-incidence or if she had been saving them up deliberately. We were told later she took eighty-six pills, a mixture of paracetamol and whatever else she could find in the house, which seems an awful lot unless you have been deliberately hording them. Even in her moment of deepest despair she wanted to cause us the minimum amount of trauma possible. She didn’t want us to be the ones to find her, so as soon as she had swallowed the tablets she quietly let herself out of the house and went for a walk across the Downs.

It was a bitterly cold morning so maybe it was the fresh air, perhaps combined with the beauty of the rising sun, that shook her out of her black mood and made her realise that she had made a mistake and that she couldn’t abandon Alex and me. Whatever it was that changed her mind she turned round and hurried home, determined to get help before the tablets started to take effect. When she got back she rang Helen and asked her to come to the house to help. The sounds of their raised voices woke me. I could sense an air of panic and I came downstairs to find out what was going on. Helen was trying to ring an ambulance on the house phone. She told me the truth about what had happened but we decided just to tell Alex that Mum was feeling ill without going into any details.

‘Your phone’s not working,’ Helen said, unable to keep the tone of panic from her voice.

‘Dad ripped it out of the wall the other day,’ I told her.

‘I’ll have to drive your mother to the hospital,’ she said.

There was no option but to keep to our usual routine because Mum wouldn’t hear of anything else. As usual Alex didn’t ask too many questions when he came down, just watching what was going on around him with patient, solemn eyes, so I didn’t have to lie to him as we got ready and walked to school as if it was any other day. He was good like that, always willing to wait until things came clear, never in a rush. When we got home that afternoon Mum still wasn’t back from hospital. We kept as quiet as we could while we made ourselves something to eat and did our homework, so as not to aggravate Dad and bring him storming out of his room. We knew all the routines to follow until Mum returned. She came home from the hospital later the same day but she was still throwing up constantly and I’m afraid I wasn’t very sympathetic.

‘How could you do that to yourself?’ I yelled, furious with her at the thought of how she had been willing to leave us at Dad’s mercy without even preparing us for the shock, and hurt as well. I was so angry I couldn’t bring myself to offer to help her even though she was obviously feeling really ill.

‘You must be nice to her,’ Helen said when she came round, bustling about, trying to keep the mood cheerful.

‘Why?’ I wanted to know. ‘She’s brought this whole thing on herself.’

Helen didn’t answer. Mum couldn’t give me any explanation as to what she had been thinking, still not willing to talk about all the worries that must have been weighing her down by then. Maybe she didn’t want to burden me, or perhaps she knew she wouldn’t be able to put them into words without making herself cry, which she wouldn’t have wanted to do.

‘I knew you would both be okay. You’re old enough to look after Alex now,’ was all the justification she was willing to give when she was finally feeling strong enough to reply to my open hostility.

With the benefit of hindsight I think she was also worried that she would become an invalid and didn’t want to get to the stage where we had to look after her, as well as having to cope with Dad’s increasing aggression, but Alex and I didn’t know anything about the gravity of her illnesses at that stage. She must have believed that if she died social services would become involved and they would make sure we were okay. Again with the benefit of hindsight, I wouldn’t be able to share that confidence.

‘I’m going to leave when you’re sixteen anyway,’ she said in another surprise announcement, but then refused to explain what she meant. I didn’t challenge her because it sounded as though she really meant it and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know any more. At the time I assumed she meant she would make another suicide attempt when I was sixteen, but perhaps she was thinking she would just walk out and leave us. That seems even harder to imagine somehow. The subject was never mentioned again, like so many things in our family. It is hard to grasp just how deeply depressed she must have been, but to try to take her own life was so far out of character that things must have been very bad indeed.

I didn’t know what to think; I just knew I didn’t want her to go. Despite my bravado with Dad when she was around, I was deeply frightened of him and didn’t like being in the house on my own with him – which was one of the reasons why my school attendance record was as good as it was. The only time I can remember being forced to stay at home during a school day was when the arch of my foot collapsed and I literally couldn’t stand on it at all, so I couldn’t even hobble into work with Mum. I had to rest for a couple of days, unable to leave the house, and I was terrified that Dad would get up and come down to the kitchen and I would get in his way and impinge on his territory. Being alone in the house with him was the worst feeling imaginable, because I never knew what would happen if I accidentally annoyed him. While he was still safely asleep I set myself up in the living room with drinks and everything I would need in order to last without having to come out until Mum or Alex got home.