Billy and Me

by Giovanna Fletcher

  It was the day after the three of us had painted my bedroom pink. Coming home from school I found Dad banging nails into the walls and hanging up photo frames, full of pictures of him, Mum and me. It looked wonderful. Looking at that wall made me feel so happy, wanted and loved. The three of us always had such fun together – we were a real team.

  It was then that Mum decided to come in and sit me down on the bed with a big smile on her face, telling me she had some news to tell me. I honestly thought they were taking me to Disney World. Giddy excitement rose within me as I sat waiting for those words to come from her lips.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she announced, with a huge grin, glancing at Dad who was also beaming with joy beside her. ‘You’re going to have a little brother or sister to look after, aren’t you a lucky girl?’ she added as she wiggled my nose in her fingers.

  I guess I was in shock, or disappointed that I wasn’t going to meet Cinderella or Minnie Mouse; it wasn’t usual for me to act up with my parents or be spiteful … but I just went berserk. I can remember screaming at them, telling them I hated them for destroying us. Asking them how they could be so mean. It was meant to be just us three. Wasn’t I enough for them? I couldn’t understand why they had done this awful thing. I told Mum she was too old to have a baby, that it would be disgusting when my friends spotted her walking around the village with an ugly bump, that she was an embarrassment.

  I was only eleven years old, of course, but even then I knew better. I knew what I was saying was spiteful and malicious. I knew I was hurting them. The words still haunt me now along with the hurt expression on Mum’s face. How could I have been so selfish to the two people I loved most in the world?

  At first they tried to calm me down, but in the end they left me on my own in my room – letting me scream, shout and sob until I found myself exhausted into an angry silence.

  A little while later I heard my door open and someone creep into my room. The sigh told me it was Dad. I was curled up under my duvet in bed, hugging Mr Blobby, pretending to sleep. He perched next to me on the bed, causing the whole thing to wobble.

  ‘Soph, you will always be so special to us,’ he said, pulling the duvet down slightly to reveal my face and stroking my forehead.

  I stayed silent, still feigning sleep with my eyes shut.

  ‘Do you want to know a secret? You’ll always be my number one,’ he persisted. ‘I cried so much when you were born, I couldn’t get over how much love I felt for this tiny little thing who was squawking her head off. I don’t think I could love anyone as much as I love you.’

  ‘That’s what you say now, but wait until the baby comes along,’ I shot back, opening my eyes and giving him a sulky pout. ‘You won’t love me as much then, I won’t be your favourite any more.’

  ‘Oh yes, you will,’ he said, planting a kiss on my forehead, leaving his face right in front of mine on the pillow.

  I looked into his eyes and I saw the sincerity.

  Dad would never lie to me. Would he?

  I bit my bottom lip, mulling over his worlds.

  I needed to be sure.

  I needed a guarantee.

  ‘Pinkie promise?’ I squeaked sadly, holding out my little finger.

  ‘Pinkie promise,’ he laughed, grabbing my little finger in his and shaking it wildly in the air, sealing the deal and making me chuckle. ‘Now,’ he added, his tone changing to a more serious one, letting me know that what he was about to say was important. ‘Mummy is downstairs and she’s a little bit sad that you’re upset,’ he said, as he brushed my hair away from my face. ‘We have to take extra special care of her from now on. We can’t be shouting at her and making her sad. She needs you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Daddy,’ I mumbled, my lower lip starting to quiver.

  ‘Hey, baby girl …’ he cooed, kissing me again on the forehead. ‘I know you are. Why don’t you go downstairs and see Mummy? Give her a hug and tell her you’re sorry?’

  I pulled a face at him, needing further encouragement to take the walk of shame and apologize for my appalling behaviour.

  ‘I’ll make you one of Daddy’s extra special hot chocolates if you do.’

  ‘With cream and marshmallows?’ I begged – making the most of the offer.

  ‘Yes! And we can drink them in front of the fire if you like. Now, off you trot,’ he said, lifting me off my bed and guiding me to the door.

  I leapt down the stairs and ran into the living room to see Mum, who was lying on the sofa. I could see she had been crying and I felt terrible.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mummy,’ I cried, bursting into big sobs at the thought of upsetting her.

  ‘Oh, love …’ she said, grabbing me and laying me down next to her on the sofa, giving me a big hug. I held her back, so tightly.

  ‘I didn’t mean the things I said.’

  ‘I know, love. I know,’ she whispered, kissing the side of my head.

  ‘Is it going to be a girl or a boy?’

  ‘We don’t know yet.’

  ‘If it’s a little girl, can we call her Ginger?’ I squeaked.

  ‘As in the Spice Girl?’

  I nodded in reply, as I looked at her with pleading eyes.

  ‘We’ll see, love. Although you already have a goldfish called Ginger, you don’t want to upset her by stealing her name …’

  ‘True,’ I said sadly, wishing I hadn’t given such a good name away to a boring fish.

  We were still curled up on the sofa when Dad came in and said that we were out of marshmallows.

  I moaned. It wouldn’t be a real hot chocolate without marshmallows.

  Anger rose within me again – had Dad known we were out of them and tricked me into coming downstairs? Had I been lied to? The tears that had only just left me threatened to spurt out once more.

  Wanting to keep me calm and to stop another outburst, Dad decided to run down to the shops quickly to pick up some more.

  Phew. Crisis averted.

  ‘Do you fancy coming with me, Soph?’ he asked, nudging me gently.

  Lying there next to Mum on the sofa, all snuggled up in front of the fire, the thought of going out in the cold wasn’t appealing at all. I didn’t even answer him; I just closed my eyes and shook my head, holding on to Mum a bit tighter.

  We dozed off.

  It was the sound of sirens blasting by and the blue lights flashing past the front of the house that woke us with a start, causing us both to jump up off the sofa.

  Mum’s eyes were instantly full of fear. Looking back, it was as if she knew that something serious had happened. As if she knew it was Dad.

  ‘Soph …’ she said, coming down to my level calmly. ‘I’m just going to go out and find Daddy. You stay here all wrapped up, OK?’

  I nodded and watched as she walked out of the front door and into the cold, dark night.

  She didn’t even bother putting her coat on.

  She left in her slippers.

  Unsure what to do, I just stood in the same spot. Looking at the front door. Waiting for them both to come back home.

  When I heard a knock on the door quite a while later I knew it wouldn’t be either of them, they wouldn’t have needed to knock – Dad had his keys with him.

  I opened it to find a policewoman standing on the doorstep. She had a very kind face. She was sort of smiling at me, but it was a sad smile. A troubled smile.

  ‘Sophie?’ she asked.

  I said nothing. I just nodded my head slowly.

  ‘Hello, Sophie, I’m PC Wallis. Your mummy has asked me to pick you up so that we can go meet her. Is that OK?’

  I can remember thinking to myself, ‘She didn’t mention my daddy. What about my daddy? Why aren’t you taking me to him?’ But I said nothing. I walked upstairs to get Mr Blobby and then followed PC Wallis to her car.

  It felt so strange to be in the back of that police car behind PC Wallis and her partner – a young man who didn’t even turn around and say hello. I can recall the route perfectly; I know
the traffic lights that let us drive by without pausing and those which stopped us with their menacing red glare, where we were joined by other vehicles on the road and where we drove in solitude through the empty streets.

  I didn’t say anything to the two adults in front of me on that journey, and they didn’t say a word to me. They barely spoke to each other, in fact. The only noise in the car was the constant bark of the police channel, ‘… any cars in the area can you make your way there immediately and report back. Over,’ ‘… suspect on foot, heading west on Brucknell Road,’ and lots more police jargon that I didn’t understand. I listened carefully, though, trying to hear if there was any mention of my dad at all. There wasn’t.

  Once at the hospital, I was taken to Mum who was slumped on a chair in the middle of a busy corridor. Walking towards her I could see her puffy red face and could tell she’d been crying. I knew that wasn’t a good sign.

  I felt more scared than ever.

  ‘Mum?’ I said meekly, when I was finally standing in front of her, the short walk through the corridor seeming to have taken hours.

  She looked up with a pained expression, her face and body crumpling as she slid off the chair on to her knees, grabbing hold of my waist and burying her head into my body.

  Then she started wailing.

  The noise was like nothing I’d ever heard before, loud and animal-like. It sounded as if she was in so much pain.

  I stood there as her sobs vibrated through both of us, causing us to shake.

  I can remember not knowing where to look as people around us began to stare at the broken woman on her knees, gripping hold of me. I wasn’t embarrassed, though. I was numb.

  Nothing made sense.

  Mum never did tell me that Dad had died. Those actual words were never uttered from her mouth. The wailing, which lasted for months, told me everything I needed to know. That and the fact that Dad wasn’t there to make her stop.

  I didn’t join in. I didn’t shed a single tear when my dad died, because there was one thought that kept hammering around my head – it was my fault. If I hadn’t been such a spoilt little cow, Dad wouldn’t have been out in the dark on his way to buy a stupid packet of marshmallows. He wouldn’t have been in the middle of the road as a car, going twice the national speed limit and driven by a drunk, whizzed around the corner and ran straight into him. Killing him instantly.

  I’d done it.

  It was my fault.

  It was wrong for me to cry.

  I’d look at Mum with her tortured faced and I’d be consumed with guilt.

  Going back to school and seeing other people was awful. I couldn’t bear the looks on their faces as I walked into a room – the stares, the whispers. I couldn’t stand their kind, pitiful, empty words. Or how their eyes would well up as they spoke. I could feel their pain adding to my own, increasing my guilt and weighing me down further.

  I was convinced that one day someone would find out the truth and declare me a murderer. That they’d all turn on me in disgust.

  I withdrew into myself. My body language changed. I was so sunken, shoulders rounded, chest concave, head dipped. It was like I was trying to make myself as small as possible, so that nobody would notice me. I hated their attention.

  At first, people did try and help me, to get me talking about what had happened, like my teacher Mrs Yates and the girl who had previously been my bestest friend, Laura Barber, but after a while they gave up and left me to my own devices. No longer sure what to say to try and tempt me to talk, or unable to understand that I hadn’t ‘gotten over it’ already. Their desistance suited me fine. I didn’t feel like I deserved their time. I had done a terrible thing. I had killed my dad. I didn’t want them talking to me, or about me. I wanted to disappear.

  That’s when my panic attacks started – although I never had the courage to ask anyone for help. It was embarrassing. In some way I thought it was a punishment for being such a bad person.

  Things went from bad to so-bad-she-wondered-what-there-was-left-to-live-for for Mum. She suffered a miscarriage just weeks after Dad’s death.

  The doctors weren’t sure whether it was her age, stress-related, or simply one of those things – either way, she’d lost her husband and unborn child in a matter of weeks. She might have had me, but it seemed her unborn child had been her glimmer of hope – another connection to Dad that had disappeared.

  She quickly became a shell of her former self. Nervous and twitchy, constantly cleaning anything and everything, she obsessed over it and became panicky if things weren’t done her way.

  Our relationship at that time was strained to say the least.

  She never blamed me. Never mentioned the fact that if I had only let Dad give me a blooming hot chocolate without marshmallows, then he’d still be with us, but I knew that’s what she thought. I’d robbed her of her husband and her unborn child.

  A light in her eyes had gone out – as though part of her had died too. She didn’t love me as much. She would sometimes still hug me and talk to me like a mother does but it would be rigid and stiff, her mind was elsewhere. She was empty. Cold. Distant.

  She kept working through her grief. She had to. With Dad gone she was the only one able to bring money home. She spent as much time as she could at the library, hating being at home. I wasn’t sure whether that was because Dad’s belongings were still scattered around the house as a constant reminder that he was no longer with us, or so that she could spend as little time with me as possible.

  When I was old enough, I decided to get a job in the local florist’s to help Mum with the bills at home. I wasn’t getting much, £15 for a full day’s work on a Saturday, but it all helped. I was their ‘bucket girl’, the one who had to clean out all the slimy buckets at the end of the working week. I liked the job because I was secluded, able to hide away in the back room not talking to anyone while I got on with the cleaning. I also liked it because the owner would let me take some bunches home with me if they were past their best. There was something about the life of a flower and its brief beauty that had me transfixed – all its energy went into blooming. For that one moment they’d be beautiful and close to perfection – but as soon as that moment had passed, they’d start to shrivel away almost instantly. I saw my life in those rotten petals. My family had bloomed to its peak, but now we were withering away.

  All I wanted was my mum back. I’d lie awake at night listening to the sobs coming from behind her bedroom door. Sometimes, especially if I’d had an attack in the night, I’d want nothing more than to go to her. To be held by her. On those occasions I would take Mr Blobby and tiptoe across the landing. I wouldn’t go into her room. I wouldn’t even knock. I’d just sit outside hugging my toy. Longing for my mum but feeling too ashamed to reach out for her. I didn’t want to add to her worries when she was already so fragile.

  For six years we lived under a cloud of doom, not really communicating or expressing how we felt. Life had stopped. We walked around our house in silence, unsure how to move forward, not wanting to move too far away from what was.

  Mum’s close call with the pills was the start of our recovery. She promised that she hadn’t meant to take them. She just wanted to end her recurring nightmares so that she could sleep. She wasn’t thinking straight. Hadn’t thought about how her actions could’ve left me all alone in the world. It was a horrific time, especially as it took us back to the emergency ward at the hospital – back to that horrific place.

  It was after her stay in hospital that things started to become more bearable. We began to talk, not about Dad or anything important, but about silly things – books we’d read, or something we’d seen on the news. It allowed a relationship to be rebuilt between us.

  I made sure I was there for her, whether she needed me or not. I’d cook when I got home from school, making sure we’d sit down together and eat – something we’d stopped doing when our unit had been blown apart. I started doing more around the house so that Mum had less to worry
about, although her obsession with cleaning and for things to be precise continued, so there was only so much I could do. I was there more, choosing to sit downstairs with her instead of being cooped up in my bedroom alone, blocking out the world. I watched TV or films with her. Sometimes we’d just sit and read together. We even did the odd puzzle.

  I think that’s when she started loving me again. I don’t think she had anything left inside her to give before that.

  With Mum on her way to coming back to me, there was no way I could think of leaving Rosefont Hill to go travelling or to university. How could I swan off and live another life when I had done this to Mum?

  The guilt still clung to me, making me doubt myself and keeping me away from other people. All my energy and time went into keeping Mum safe and well. I still didn’t think I was worthy of anyone else’s love or affection.

  It was Molly who made me see that I was. She never asked questions about that time that had obviously had a massive impact on my life and she never looked at me with pitiful eyes. To others I felt like the walking personification of my dad’s tragic death, but to Molly I was simply Sophie May, a quiet little girl who was willing to learn.

  Molly’s husband Albert had died a few years earlier from a heart attack, so she knew what it was to grieve the loss of someone you loved more than anything else in the world. We had something in common. She never tried to force information out of me, but she did talk about Albert a lot. She was forever telling me stories of the pair of them and their son Peter. I admired her for doing so. I saw that by speaking of the man she loved she was keeping his spirit alive, that he was as much a part of her then as he was when he was living. So, I did talk to her about Dad, about how he used to make me laugh and how much I missed him. She was the only one I’ve ever opened up to. I couldn’t bring him up at all at home – even after years had passed it felt too raw, I wasn’t sure how Mum would react. I couldn’t cope with the thought of seeing more anguish in her eyes when she was on her way to getting better.

  In time, I spoke to Molly about the actual night of Dad’s death, Mum’s miscarriage, and how guilty I felt. How, in my eyes, I was just as guilty as the drunk driver who ran into him. She was aghast that I’d been carrying those feelings around with me for so long. Shocked that it was guilt that had driven me to cut myself off and feel unworthy. Eventually, she made me realize that what had happened was a tragic accident, and one that I’d punished myself for long enough.