Come on.
It was funny, because whenever it was the person I’m calling Euan’s turn to play, he couldn’t sit still. He’d move around all over the place, hardly even watching the screen. And he’d make all the noises with his mouth.
‘Kerpow! Kerpow!’
He didn’t even realize he was doing it.
‘Kerpow!’
I thought about when I was younger; a time when I was poorly, genuinely poorly for once, and Mum had helped me to make a den in the living room, and we played Donkey Kong together on my Game Boy Color. ‘Do you remember it, Mum?’
She looked at me blankly. Not blankly. But sort of distant – looking right through me to some faraway place. Her voice sounded distant too. ‘I don’t think I do remember.’
She’s never kept much. Not from that time. She doesn’t know what she was like – the way she was with me. She doesn’t know how her suffering spilled out of her, filling the house. How it controlled her. ‘You were fucking mad back then,’ I said.
‘Kerpow! Kaboom!’
‘Sorry, darling?’
But perhaps it’s me who has it all muddled up. And anyway – what difference does it really make? She did her best. I guess there’s a Use By date when it comes to blaming your parents for how messed up you are.
I guess that’s what turning eighteen means.
Time to own it.
‘Pardon, darling?’ she asked again.
‘Nothing. It’s not important.’
I leaned into her, letting my head rest gently against her shoulder. I listened to her breathing. When it was my turn to play, I let Thomas take another turn instead. I nestled into the nook of Mum’s arm. Then lay on a cushion on her lap. I fell asleep like that. She’s all bones and hard edges. She’s never been comfortable, but she’s always been there.
‘Ka Blamo!’
That evening they both stayed on the ward for supper. Usually supper was just sandwiches, but to celebrate my birthday Dad bought fish and chips for the entire ward – all the staff and patients. The dining room rustled with chip paper. The whole building smelled of salt and vinegar.
Mum disappeared partway through, then the lights went out, and she came back in with a chocolate birthday cake and eighteen flickering candles. Everyone broke out in a loud chorus of Happy Birthday. Simon joined in too.
He was in the flames.
Of course he was in the flames.
A nurse grabbed hold of my wrist, leading me quickly to the clinic where she held my blistering fingers under the cold tap. I had no idea what I’d done, only that I had been trying to hold him.
My medication was changed yet again. More side effects. More sedation. In time, Simon grew more distant. I looked in the rain clouds, fallen leaves, sideways glances. I searched for him in the places I had come to expect him. In running tap water. In spilled salt. I listened in the spaces between words.
At first I wondered if he was angry with me, if he’d given up? It made me feel sad to think like that. I don’t know which one of us was most dependent on the other. Over the next few weeks, I would lie in my bed, listening to fragments of conversation drifting from the nurses’ office, to the scraping of the viewing slats. And I would watch my helium balloon slowly die.
The worst thing about this illness isn’t the things it makes me believe, or what it makes me do. It’s not the control that it has over me, or even the control it’s allowed other people to take.
Worse than all of that is how I have become selfish.
Mental illness turns people inwards. That’s what I reckon. It keeps us forever trapped by the pain of our own minds, in the same way that the pain of a broken leg or a cut thumb will grab your attention, holding it so tightly that your good leg or your good thumb seem to cease to exist.
I’m stuck looking inwards. Nearly every thought I have is about me – this whole story has been all about me; the way I felt, what I thought, how I grieved. Perhaps that’s the kind of thing Dr Clement wanted to hear about?
But what I said was, ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘Sure. Sure. But people have been worried about you. Why is that, do you think?’
‘I don’t—’
The doctor nearest me lifted my file of medical notes, but Dr Clement said, ‘It’s fine, Nicola. We don’t need to write anything. Let’s just listen to Matthew.’
She put her pen down, her face flushing pink. The doctors have a hierarchy, and Dr Clement is at the very top. He’s my consultant psychiatrist. What he says, goes.
‘I want to go home,’ I said.
‘Where’s home?’ Annabelle asked.
She had asked me to walk down to the cove with her. I didn’t protest. There was something in the way she looked at me – a look somewhere between determined and pleading. And maybe I felt that I owed her something.
The rain had stopped. The air was still. Pebbles crunched beneath our feet as we reached the shoreline, where small dark waves broke into frothy white.
‘I live in Bristol,’ I told her. ‘I’ve got my own flat. I mean— I don’t own it or anything.’
The sea looked like black silk. Or maybe velvet. I always confuse those two. It looked nice is what I’m getting at. It was the same black as the sky, so looking out to the horizon you couldn’t be sure where the sea stopped and the sky started.
And the moon was huge. And everywhere, the stars were scattered in their millions.
‘It must be nice living here,’ I said.
‘I live in a bloody caravan, Matt. With my dad. It’s not nice living here.’
‘You haven’t seen my flat.’
She laughed at that. I wasn’t trying to be funny, but it felt nice seeing her laugh. She laughed a lot. She’s a person who might say, ‘Well if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.’
She didn’t actually say that, but I can easily imagine it. She seemed nice. I reckon anyone who would stay to comfort a stranger whilst they wept their life out must be fairly nice. It was more than that though. She had a way about her too. Like everything was important, but nothing was so important that it couldn’t be interrupted with another offer of tea from her flask, or a question about if you were warm enough because it would be really no trouble at all to go back to the site, to borrow you one of her dad’s jumpers. And she’s sorry that you’re having a hard time, she really is. But it’ll all be okay. She’s certain of it.
She’s known sadness. That’s what it is. I only just thought that as I wrote it. She’s known sadness, and it has made her kind.
‘She didn’t have a name,’ she said.
We had walked along the shore, and then back on ourselves towards the scattering of beach huts. And now we were sitting side by side on a small upturned wooden rowing boat. Our knees were almost touching.
‘She wasn’t my favourite doll. If she did have a name it would have changed every time I played with her. But when you saw us. When you watched her funeral. She was called Mummy.’
She knew that. Because they all were.
If I’d counted to a hundred the day before then I might have watched her bury a Barbie in the dirt, or the day before that a Furby, or a rabbit from the Sylvanian Families. And all of them were called Mummy.
‘Jesus,’ Annabelle said. She put her face in her hands even though it was too dark to properly see her blushing. ‘What was I like?’
The only difference with the funeral I saw, was what she kept.
‘The coat?’
‘It’s meant to be a dress.’
She took the piece of yellow cloth from her pocket, but she didn’t hand it to me. It’s strange. She trusted me enough to be alone with me in the night-time. But there was something about the way she held it, her small fist closed tightly. I knew this wasn’t an invitation to take it again. ‘We made it together,’ she said. ‘It was supposed to be a dress, but Mum let me help a bit too much and it ended up— It is more like a coat, you’re right.’
It became a comforter. Her friends teased her because she was never without it. That’s what she told me. It’s worn right through in places from where she rubs it between her thumb and fingers whenever she’s watching TV or reading. And it’s grubby too. More brown than yellow really. It even smells a bit. She laughed loudly as she said that, as she told me she’s never once put it in the washing machine in case it falls apart.
And all of this somehow made it more real. Like it couldn’t possibly be Simon’s comfort blanket because it had its own story. Because it was Annabelle’s.
‘I would never have kept it all this time,’ she said. Suddenly serious, suddenly looking straight at me. ‘I don’t suppose I would have done. Except it took on more meaning after what happened. And in a way, I suppose that’s because of you.’
Dr Clement glanced to my dad with an apologetic wince. Dad nodded slowly. ‘Let’s do this another way,’ Dr Clement continued. ‘I’d like to ask you the difficult question.’
Instinctively I found myself reaching for Mum’s hand. Not because I needed comfort, but perhaps to offer her some. This is my care plan: As a small boy I killed my own brother, and now I must kill him again. I’m given medicine to poison him, then questioned to make sure he’s dead.
Dr Clement lowered his voice. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Is Simon in the room with us? Is your brother still talking to you?’
The door swung open, the student nurse bounced in, spilling tea on his hand, ‘Ouch! Here you go, Matt. Sorry it took so long.’
‘Thanks.’
‘We were out of sugar. I had to get some from the store cupboard—’
‘It’s fine, Tim,’ Claire-or-maybe-Anna said softly, gesturing him to sit.
Then the whole room was looking at me again. I must have answered too quietly because Dr Clement said he was terribly sorry, but could I speak up a little.
Someone pressed the button on the electric fan, bringing the whirring blades to a halt.
She didn’t mean what had happened between us.
The way I’d pushed her over in the dirt as she had her toy funeral. As she tried to make this goodbye, the goodbye; the one she thought she needed.
No. She wasn’t talking about that, because she didn’t remember it. She has no recollection of a small boy spying on her, or how she had shouted at me, and told me that I’d ruined everything.
And if that’s hard to believe then maybe think back through your own life, to when you were eight or nine years old. See if the memories you have are the ones you might expect. Or if they are fragments, dislocated moments, a smell here, a feeling there. The unlikeliest conversations and places. We don’t choose what we keep – not at that age. Not ever, really.
So she hasn’t kept that. But she has kept some memories around it. This is how we piece together our past. We do it like a jigsaw puzzle, where there are missing pieces. But so long as we have enough of the pieces, we can know what belongs in the gaps.
A piece that Annabelle has, is of her doll coming back from the grave.
‘It was a few weeks after—’
Annabelle stopped to interrupt herself. She said it was cold. She said I was soaked to the skin, would I not rather go and get some dry clothes?
‘I’m okay here,’ I said. ‘I’m not cold. Are you?’
‘No. I’m fine,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to talk about. I don’t want to upset you. We could talk about something else? Perhaps you’d rather be getting home?’
I hadn’t told her that home was currently a mental hospital. But I would. Before this evening was over. Before finding myself on a twilight bus with an extra jumper, with an apple and a Snickers bar and a cheese sandwich. Before that, I’d tell her everything.
‘It was a few weeks after the accident, the horrible accident. With your—’
Simon wasn’t saying anything. He was listening though. He was on the shoreline. He was in the shallowest ripples. He was making pebbles shiny.
‘Is that what it was?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Is that what people called it? An accident?’
‘Of course. Of course that’s what it was. You blame yourself, don’t you?’
‘Sometimes. A lot, recently.’
She shook her head, ‘My dad blamed himself too. For not putting a rail up even though he’d been meaning to. For not putting a sign up. For being too sad to do much at all. But it wasn’t his fault either.’
And that’s what the policeman had come to say when he brought Annabelle’s doll back in a brown paper bag. The policeman – the policeman with a bushy ginger-brown moustache and glasses. The same policeman who had taken a statement from me. He was an old family friend. More a friend of Annabelle’s mummy, really. They’d gone to college together. He’d gone to the wedding. He’d gone to her funeral. He knew how much Annabelle’s dad was struggling – drinking too much, taking too much on. He was looking for excuses to check up on him from time to time. He needed excuses, because Annabelle’s dad is the kind of man who would never ask for help.
He’s like me.
So when a brief investigation into the death of Simon Homes reached the verdict of a tragic accident – this family friend looked for an excuse, and he found one in the small cloth doll that was discovered at the scene. That I had carefully placed under my brother’s head, to make him comfortable.
It was a poor judgement, perhaps. No. Definitely.
The policeman didn’t stop to think that Annabelle may run in to say hello. He didn’t stop to think that she had no bedtime any more. No bath time. No story time. He didn’t really think at all. But sometimes all the stars in the entire universe conspire to make something good happen.
‘I just froze,’ Annabelle said.
And she was sort of reliving it as she told me. She was staring ahead at the big black sea, but in the place in her head where pictures form she was standing in the small reception area. Her dad and Uncle Mike the Policeman were talking. A stilted, awkward conversation. And there on the counter, an arm flopped awkwardly, face tilted, staring back at her, was her dead dolly.
‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘What did he think my dad was going to do? Give her a wash, bring her through to me. Here you go Bella-Boo, here’s your dolly back. Uncle Mike thought you might want it. By the way. It was found under the dead little boy! Fuck! Shit. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Matt.’
‘It’s okay,’ I said.
And I meant it too.
Dr Clement offered a small glance to the other doctor, then they turned back to me.