Читать книгу Cry Silent Tears: The heartbreaking survival story of a small mute boy who overcame unbearable suffering and found his voice again - Joe Peters - Страница 10

The ambulance carried Dad off at full speed, all sirens blaring. I watched it go and then Aunt Melissa led me up the road to her house and phoned Marie to let her know what had happened. When Marie arrived, I remember lots of hushed whispers and glances that I wasn’t meant to see. Melissa’s husband Amani, a big Nigerian guy, kept staring at me and I remember I felt uncomfortable and didn’t want him there.

‘When can I go to the hospital to see my dad?’ I kept asking. I knew his burns must be hurting a lot. I could remember clearly how much it had hurt when Mum had pressed my hand against the flat of the iron, so I thought I could imagine what agonies my dad must be going through after being completely engulfed in flames and I wanted to go and try to comfort him. I couldn’t get the image of him running around the garage on fire out of my head. I didn’t like being parted from him when I was so worried about what was going on. I felt exposed and vulnerable. All the bad things that had ever happened to me had always happened when he wasn’t there to protect me and I didn’t know how long it would be before he was able to come out of hospital and be there for me again. I kept asking the adults questions but none of them had any answers for me. Everyone was crying.

Marie took me home a few hours later. Being with her always felt more like being at home than when I was in the house where my mother lived. I was in a state of complete shock, unable to take in what I had witnessed and the pictures that kept going round and round in my head, having no idea what it was all going to mean to me. It didn’t occur to me for a moment that my dad might actually die; I didn’t know what death was at that age. I was worried for him and horrified to have heard him screaming so terribly, but I assumed the doctors would make him better and he would be back to look after me soon with nothing more than a few scars to remind us of that terrible day – just as they had made Thomas and me better when we had been burned.

Marie tried to talk to me and prepare me for what might happen. ‘Sometimes, when people are very badly hurt,’ she said, ‘they die and they go to Heaven to be with God. It’s a beautiful place, and they can look down on everyone they love and watch out for them from up there.’

I listened, but as if she was telling me a fairy story. I didn’t for one moment think that she was saying this might happen to my dad. I was just waiting until I could see him again, convinced that he would make everything all right once the doctors had fixed his burns.

I wasn’t allowed to go in to visit him until three days later. I don’t know if the hospital had been permitting visitors before that, but Marie must have known Mum would be there and perhaps she didn’t want to take me in and risk her snatching me away. Or maybe she had thought it would be too traumatic for me to see Dad in that state but I just nagged until she gave in. She must have been as shocked by the accident as I was, even though she was a grown-up. All her instincts must have been to run to be by the bedside of the man she loved, but I suppose she was nervous about Mum starting a fight on the ward. By the time she did take me in to see him they knew that he was going to die and she must have decided I should be given a chance to say goodbye. He was already brain dead but I had no idea about that as I walked in holding tightly to her hand.

I clung to Marie as we passed through the seemingly endless corridors of the hospital, constantly on the watch for Mum, expecting her to jump out round every corner we turned. When we finally reached the intensive care ward it was all quiet, each bed surrounded by equipment that buzzed and blinked as it supported the lives of the patients it was attached to. We stopped beside a bed and I tried to work out what I was looking at. The bandaged figure lying unconscious on the mattress with tubes coming in and out of him didn’t look like my dad. At first I didn’t believe it was him. I thought they’d made a mistake and brought me to the wrong bed.

‘Where’s Dad?’ I asked Marie. ‘What have they done with him?’

‘This is your dad, Joe,’ Marie said gently and I could see there were tears glinting in her eyes.

It must have been just as upsetting for her to see him like that as it was for me but she had to stay brave and not break down in front of me. A nurse was standing by the head of the bed checking something on a monitor, and she gave me a sympathetic look.

I turned again to the bandaged figure on the bed. Parts of him were covered in clear bags of fluid, which seemed to me at the time to be dripping and seeping with blood and raw flesh but it was probably just that I could see through them to the terrible burns underneath. The machines made a heavy sighing sound, and Dad’s chest was moving up and down but his face was so heavily bandaged that I couldn’t see his eyes or his mouth.

‘Dad?’ I said tentatively, but the word came out funny, as if it was catching in my throat.

‘He can’t talk,’ Marie explained, stroking my hair.

I started to back away from the bed, overcome with horror at the sight before my eyes. Marie must have realized that she had made a mistake in giving in to my nagging and bringing me to the hospital, but it was too late by then. Suddenly Mum appeared on the other side of the bed, making me jump and shiver with fright, certain she was going to launch herself at us as she always did on her visits to the garage. But she was behaving differently this time, playing the traumatized young wife for the benefit of the watching nurse. It didn’t last long. Her grief changed to anger as soon as we were left alone round the bed. I could see from her furious face that she certainly wasn’t pleased to see Marie.

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ she snarled as soon as the nurse was out of earshot. ‘He’s my fucking husband, not yours.’

There was nothing Marie could say in her defence. Because they were still officially married Mum was Dad’s next of kin and the nurses and doctors had to deal with her when it came to talking about Dad’s condition and asking for decisions. It didn’t make any difference to them that he had been about to divorce her. Marie was cut out completely from all the medical information and from all the arrangements, which obviously pleased Mum. As long as Dad was unconscious she had complete power over all of us.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, Dad was only alive because of the life support machine.

‘Anyway, the doctors have told me there’s no way he’s going to pull through,’ Mum said. ‘They think it’s time to turn the machine off, but the final decision is up to me.’

Marie gave a gasp and put her hand to her mouth. ‘No, Lesley. Please don’t. Don’t give up hope. There might still be a chance.’

I clung to Marie’s arm, trying to make sense of what they were saying, but I knew from the look on Mum’s face that she had made up her mind about something. Something important.

‘He was no good as a husband before and he’s certainly no good to me now.’ Mum was revelling in her ability to make such a life and death decision about the man who she believed had betrayed her so badly, enjoying the ultimate revenge, no longer bothering to keep up any pretence at being the grieving widow.

‘He was divorcing you,’ Marie protested. ‘He was living with me. I’m his next of kin, not you. I should make the decision.’

‘I’m his legal wife,’ Mum screamed, making heads turn and bringing the nurses running to calm things down. ‘You’re just his whore!’

Marie tried to explain the situation to the nurses and one of them ran off to find a doctor, but it was no good. If Dad had been able to speak he would have said that he wanted Marie to handle everything and Mum to be nowhere near the place, but there was no way he was ever going to speak again. Marie realized there was nothing she could do, that Mum had the law on her side, but still she tried to plead with the staff.

‘It’s my decision,’ Mum insisted to the doctor, ‘and I say turn him off!’

Overcome with grief Marie kept fighting back even though she probably knew she didn’t have a chance of changing Mum’s mind, begging her to think again, but Mum was becoming angrier and angrier that Marie was daring to challenge her decision. The argument escalated into more and more noise until hospital security had to be called to stop them resorting to blows and Marie was told she would have to leave the premises.

‘You can leave him here with me,’ Mum said, gesturing towards me. I shrank as far behind Marie as I could.

‘No way. He’s staying with me,’ Marie insisted, gripping my hand tightly. ‘It’s what William would have wanted.’

She knew that Dad would never have wanted me to go back there and she was already frightened of what Mum would do once she got me alone. Knowing she had the law on her side, Mum asked the hospital staff to call the police. There was no way she was going to allow Marie to keep something that was hers, even though she didn’t really want me herself. Marie stood firm and we all waited as the staff circled nervously around us.

When the police arrived they separated the two women off into different rooms and interviewed Marie first. I clung to her as she tried to explain how Dad had been allowed to have custody of me because of the way Mum had treated me in the past, and how his one wish was always that Mum shouldn’t be allowed to get her hands on me. But there was nothing she could say that could make any difference to the facts of the situation; I legally belonged to Mum and if she said I was to go back to her then I was going to have to go. The police probably couldn’t see what the problem was, knowing that Mum was already bringing up five other children. I listened without fully understanding what was being said, until a policewoman knelt down beside me.

‘You have to go with your mummy now,’ she said, and I started screaming ‘No! Don’t make me!’

There was nothing Marie could do any more. We went out into the corridor where Mum was still gloating.

‘They’ve turned him off now. There’s nothing more to hang around for. Come on, Joe.’

Marie burst into tears as Mum dragged me, sobbing, towards the exit. Just a few days earlier Marie had imagined she was going to spend the rest of her life with Dad, bringing me up as if I was her own son. Now she was a single mother and my baby half-brother, born just a couple of months before the accident, was all she had left to remember my father by.

As we walked home, Mum made sure I knew what had happened. ‘Your dad’s dead now. He ain’t coming back. He’s fucking dead,’ she told me.

‘Has he gone to Heaven?’ I asked through my tears.

‘No, he’s gone to hell where all the nasty people go! God said he was no good and so now his body is going to be burned to ashes. It was God who threw that cigarette into the petrol but he didn’t do a good enough job, did he? So now his body is going to be taken to an oven and burned until it has crumbled to pieces.’

As she talked I remembered watching the burning cigarette end bouncing back into the garage, carried by that fateful wind. Was that the hand of God I had witnessed at work there? Who else would have been able to control the wind like that? Her sneering words had a horrible kind of logic to them and I was left with a picture of my dad burning in hell for all eternity, just as I’d seen him do when he ran around the garage.

I was crying so hard I could hardly breathe.

‘Don’t think you’re anything special,’ she told me, squeezing my hand viciously, ‘just because you were your dad’s favourite, and just because you saw him going up in fucking flames. You’re not special at all. You’re nothing, and I’m going to prove it to you. Just you fucking wait.’