Little Disasters

by Sarah Vaughan

  He leaves us then. My father keeps his face turned so that I can’t see the grief that is clawing at him; can only see the tear that is rolling down his left cheek.

  I sit upright. My heart is hopscotching now; my mind wired and frantic. ‘Go to sleep,’ Nick, sleep-addled, repeats, pressing against me. We tessellate like spoons, his thighs toasty behind mine, his groin soft, his shins a warm ledge for my feet. His breath is hot on my neck and I try to melt into his warmth, as welcoming as his hug at the end of a long weekend on call. But my mind won’t be stilled. These memories jangle me.

  Why is it that, in the still small hours of the night, our fears are more heightened, and our deepest anxieties swim up from our subconscious? I lean against Nick, but am quite alone while he is lost to sleep. My mind skitters and whirls, flitting from Clare to Betsey and then to the nightmare that wrenched me awake.

  And though I can rationalise it, it doesn’t make it any less potent or vivid.

  I was that screaming baby, writhing and grappling, and someone was holding a pillow to my face.

  *

  ‘You were tossing and turning last night,’ Nick says when the alarm goes off at 6.30.

  I feel drugged with exhaustion: my limbs dead weights that seem impossible to move.

  He rolls towards me and pulls me close. I want to drift back to sleep but I’m aware, despite my closed eyes, that he’s watching me intently.

  ‘What?’ I pull away, peeling open my eyes.

  ‘Were you thinking about your mum?’

  I groan.

  ‘You don’t have to talk about her,’ he says, treading carefully, ‘but perhaps it would help at some point.’

  ‘I haven’t the time.’ I move to the side of the bed and swing my legs over to force myself up.

  ‘We can’t ignore the fact she was so drunk she caused a row in Tesco . . .’ he begins.

  ‘I’m not ignoring it,’ I snap. ‘Of course I’m not. It’s just that I haven’t the headspace to think about it when I’ve got to get to work.’

  He smiles at me and I feel my bad temper ease like a knot prised open. He’s a good man, who cuts me plenty of slack whenever the topic of my mother arises, and I shouldn’t take my irritation out on him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, gesticulating hopelessly. I was drawn to his emotional stability, his calmness, the fact he experienced a relatively easy childhood – the wonderfully solid basis his parents, Pam and David, gave him. But the flipside is that sometimes he’s too bloody reasonable about everything.

  I move towards the bedroom door and the bathroom, but Nick’s still trying to be helpful.

  ‘Is it worth calling Matt about your mother?’

  ‘What good will that do?’

  My brother has made it clear he has no desire to hear about, let alone help, the woman he insists on calling Janet.

  ‘Liz: your mother started to open up about your sister. There’s some serious stuff going on here.’

  ‘There’s no point. He won’t want to know.’

  ‘Try him. It’s not fair that he should absolve himself from all responsibility. If he won’t help on a practical level, he should at least listen and know what’s going on.’

  ‘I guess.’

  Nick will never understand the depth of Mattie’s antipathy or the extent of the pain he experienced: how can he when he didn’t witness what happened, or the painful aftermath? And yet perhaps I’m protecting him too much. As Nick has pointed out before, when I’ve been exasperated by his self-exile, he’s thirty-six – not eight.

  ‘It does feel as if there are gaps,’ I admit. ‘Things I can’t make sense of that he might be able to remember, bits of a broken jigsaw – though he’s so antagonistic towards her, he’ll hardly have a positive view.’

  ‘Well, it’s up to you.’ My husband pulls on his boxer shorts as I make for the shower, hoping the water will blast me awake and wash away these emotions. ‘But I’d try him. He might surprise you.’

  *

  I call Mattie as I near the hospital entrance, knowing that if I put it off until this evening my resolve will crumble. The street is filled with the noise of cars and the sound of hospital staff walking briskly, impatient to get on with the day.

  ‘He-llo?’ His voice is hesitant but clear. I picture him, five hundred and thirty miles away, against a backdrop of tussocky grass and snow-capped mountains. ‘Lizzie, is that you?’ The wind swirls in the background and his voice holds a trace of a Scottish accent as if he’s been only too ready to shrug off his Essex vowels. Then again, he’s lived in Scotland for over twelve years.

  ‘Hello, you.’ It’s such a relief to hear this voice I know as well as my own, despite these relatively new inflections. I pick my way carefully. I want to appeal to the man who teaches underprivileged teenagers on outward-bound courses, not the one who clams up whenever I try to bring up the topic of our mother, but then I realise I haven’t the time.

  I tell him about her drinking and the intervention of the police; about her naming Clare and revealing that her death happened when we were tiny. ‘We didn’t know about this when we were kids, did we?’ I check.

  ‘We didn’t,’ he says.

  ‘I’m worried about what might have triggered her talking about it, beyond the anniversary of Clare’s death. Whether she senses she’s ill; if it’s been a regular cause of this heavy drinking.’ Once I start, the anxieties flow from me. ‘And I’m concerned about the impact on her mental health of keeping this a secret for so many years.’

  He snorts with derision.

  ‘Matt . . .’ I feel protective on her behalf.

  ‘Look, I can understand you being concerned about her drinking. But I can’t fret about whether the auld bitch is going crazy. Let’s be honest, she’s always been a bit on the edge.’

  ‘Matt, please. Her baby died and she shut the fact away and refused to acknowledge it. But suddenly she’s thinking about her and it’s triggered a drinking binge. Any idea why she’s brought this up after all this time?’

  A long pause and I wait, hoping for some eureka moment: an answer that will make sense of this development. Only a sibling can understand the unspoken fears about a parent: the connections I’ve not yet made but which might be hovering within his grip.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘And to be honest, I need to get her out of my head. Perhaps she’s got a guilty conscience? Or perhaps she hasn’t been bothered by it?’

  ‘That’s a bit harsh.’

  ‘She wasn’t bothered about me.’

  And here it is. The sticking point that means Mattie is as stubborn as our mother – and as cruel, perhaps, in his refusal to forgive her for her parental failings.

  His lack of connection isn’t just because of the accident, though the scar tissue is a constant reminder: sullying his left arm and torso, and creeping up his neck like a textured stream. It was every single thing, he once told me, his face twisted with hate. The fact she avoided going to the hospital if possible; that he didn’t get all his operations; that she behaved as if what had happened was an inconvenience. The impression that her life would be preferable if neither of us had been born.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry but I’ve got to go to work,’ I say, now. ‘I shouldn’t have rung but I’m not sleeping, and you’re the only person I can talk to properly about her.’

  He grunts, non-committal.

  ‘I also thought you might know something about Clare, too; something I didn’t recall.’

  ‘Sorry, sis,’ he says, brushing his hands of the conversation – and, it feels, of me. ‘I know nothing – but you know what?’ and his voice manages to combine sadness and bitterness; is hard and cold but tinged with a quiet longing. ‘Nothing about that woman would surprise me.’

  We say goodbye, and I rush to the ward but his tone perturbs me. It’s customary for him to be dismissive when discussing our mother – it’s an obvious protective mechanism – but I sense a strange knowingness there. He must have memories, like me. N
ot of being eighteen months old but later in childhood: inklings that might explain her current behaviour. Or has he managed to suppress it all?

  LIZ

  Friday 25 August, 1989

  Twenty-four

  I was irritated with him. That was what I felt just before it happened. Acute irritation that my annoying little brother wouldn’t leave me alone when all I wanted was to finish my book from the library. An Agatha Christie. Not even a good one, at that.

  I was lying on my stomach on my bed, listening to the rain and finally warm after a trip to the pool where we had been caught by a sudden downpour: a proper, late August torrent that meant my toes squelched in my Freeman, Hardy and Willis sandals as I raced through the puddles, and our T-shirts and shorts turned transparent as they clung to our skinny frames.

  We were shivering when we got back. Proper, teethchattering shivering: Mattie’s lips a curious bluey-purple before I found him some jeans and a worn sweatshirt, then made some sweet mugs of tea. He was happy for a while, dipping a pile of broken custard creams into his mug, then deconstructing them by dislodging the top from its fondant middle and licking off the icing.

  I picked up my mug of tea and left him to it. There were only hard, straight-backed chairs in the kitchen and the only place with room to stretch out was next door, on my bed.

  ‘Where you going?’

  Where did he think I was going?

  ‘Just reading.’

  ‘You’re always reading.’

  ‘You’re always annoying.’

  This comparison was weak. Being annoying was hardly an activity like reading, but he was only eight, compared to my nearly ten, and not as good at arguing as me.

  I sank deep into the bed and counted my remaining pages. Only ten. I had at most five minutes’ peace before he came to find me.

  He lasted about two.

  ‘C’mon, Lizzie. C’mon.’ He tugged at my T-shirt, the thin cotton cutting into my stomach as he tried to manhandle me off the bed.

  ‘Get off ! Leave me alone.’ ‘No.’

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘But I’m bored. I want you to play with me.’ He pounded the bedding with his fists.

  ‘No. Leave. Me. A-lone.’

  I shifted to the other side of the bed, pulling a blanket away from him with a growl.

  ‘You never play with me.’

  ‘I do.’ I turned a page.

  ‘Not properly.’

  ‘Yes I do.’ I rolled off my stomach to face him. ‘And I take you to the pool and I make your packed lunch and I cook for you. I do everything, just as if I was a mum.’

  ‘I could do all that.’

  ‘No you couldn’t. You’re too little.’

  ‘Am not.’ He punched down on the blanket hard, pent-up frustration and testosterone fuelling his fury, though he looked as if he was trying not to cry.

  I turned back to my book, ignoring the ball of anger wedged in my chest and rifling through various responses. I picked one that was suitably dismissive. ‘Yes. You. Are.’

  ‘Well I’ll show you,’ he said, getting up. ‘I’ll show you that I can cook and do our clothes and all the things that you say you do. That I’m not the stupid little one.’

  ‘Yeah, you do that.’ I didn’t as much as glance at him. Made a great show of turning a yellowing page.

  ‘Will, too.’

  ‘Oh-kay!’ My voice was a mocking singsong and it seemed to do the trick. He shoved himself off the bed and stomped back to the kitchen, banging the door and making a great show of his feet thudding on the worn carpet. There was no way he’d do anything. He’d be back in three minutes. I’d play with him then, or cook us something. Pot Noodles, or Cup-a-Soup. My watch – a red Casio I’d been given for Christmas – said ten past twelve. If he could just give me until quarter past, I’d be finished and then I’d go and look after him.

  I was so immersed that when the smell of frying fat seeped into the bedroom, I barely noticed. The salty tang of fried eggs and bacon always filtered up from the caff so nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

  My nostrils twitched. Mattie’s cooking, I half-thought, as I turned the last page. My brain, filled with the coincidences of Christie’s plot, was soupy, and it took a while to register the fact. Mattie was cooking – and frying eggs from the sounds of things, because I could hear the crisp sizzle of fat, the muffled crack of shell against bowl.

  I ran from our bedroom and wrenched open the kitchen door to see the gas on far too high, a slick of oil simmering with fury, and great globules of fat flicking from the pan.

  Mattie was standing on a chair, reaching towards the kettle. ‘I’m cooking.’ He looked wired and defiant. ‘It’s all all right,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not all right,’ I screeched. The flames licked around the frying pan, and the handle was sticking out at a jaunty angle: he could knock it over at any moment. ‘You’ll set us on fire.’

  I shoved the handle away, my head turned aside as a wall of heat flared up and fat spat at me. Hot shivers rippled through me as I reached for the dial at the front of the hob. The flames were sucked back down and I dropped the frying pan into the sink with a clatter, the water fizzing, a puddle of boiling oil slopping out.

  But the relief was short-lived.

  ‘Don’t touch anything. It’s scalding,’ I shouted, not looking at Mattie but turning on the tap and thrusting my arm beneath the cold running water. My scalp prickled; my forearm seared with pain.

  ‘I’m not, I’m not,’ Mattie said, his voice rising, but I wasn’t really listening. All my focus was on the molten water, the hiss and the steam as it hit the pan. ‘I’m just making you some tea.’

  I turned to see a great cloud of steam rising from the plastic jug kettle; could hear the water ferociously bubbling. He’s filled it too full, I thought, as he tried lifting it high with both hands, before listing and pulling one hand away.

  There was a thud: Mattie lost his balance, slipped on the chair, tilted the cheap kettle whose plastic lid clattered off. And the full two and a half pints of boiling water cascaded all over him.

  I’d never heard such a horrific scream. As shrill as a vixen mating or a woman in the last stage of labour. A cry that senses death is near. He was drenched, the water splashing his face and bathing his neck, torso, arms, stomach, groin; even the tops of his thighs, in those heavy jeans I’d insisted on him wearing; his skin turning a vicious red.

  I flung cold water at him as he writhed on the floor, and I screamed for our mother, working in the caff below us. She didn’t come, and it was Leah, the sixteen-year-old who manned the till, who blundered up the stairs a minute later, panic plastered across her face.

  She was the one who called 999; who screeched at our mum, who’d popped along the seafront for an extended fag break and arrived moments before the ambulance. The one who told Mattie, over and over, he wasn’t going to die.

  He was lucky not to. He spent months in hospital. Endured numerous skin grafts. His torso now resembles a patch of sand where the tide has ridged and rippled. His neck is shiny and there’s extensive damage around his armpit where the scar tissue had to be cut after he failed to get sufficient corrective surgery. His hair doesn’t grow properly around one ear.

  And though I blamed myself, Mattie has always blamed our mother for putting him in a situation where his body was permanently scarred and disfigured; has blamed her too for not getting to him sooner and for not visiting him more frequently in hospital – once a week, as his stay lengthened, and no more.

  ‘It was an accident,’ I used to remind him. ‘She was a single, working mum, with me to deal with. She was only trying to do her best.’ I’ve tried to rationalise it for myself too. The specialist burns unit was twenty miles away, she didn’t like to drive, and didn’t have the money for the petrol; she was exhausted after working; perhaps felt intense guilt at what happened to her boy.

  With my compassionate, health professional’s hat on, I continued to make excuses. Her abse
nce – because this is the part that has hurt him the most – didn’t indicate a lack of love. She wasn’t particularly maternal and clearly found the hospital distressing. By her standards, she did her best.

  And yet, now that I’ve seen scores of families visiting their children in hospital, I’ve realised that my mother’s behaviour wasn’t typical – nor is it how I would behave.

  Faced with the pressure of working, and with another child, wouldn’t I still do my utmost to be with my child as much as I could? And wouldn’t I try to ensure that they never felt that visiting was a burden, as Mattie did, our mother clearly uneasy at being in an environment where she was surrounded by so much suffering and pain?

  Those visits to the paediatric burns unit inspired me to be a doctor. As I watched my brother’s rehabilitation and saw the skill with which he was put back together, I knew I wanted to atone for my part in his accident and to try to pay back his care.

  But my mother found it far more disturbing. And I can’t shrug off the feeling that her detachment, her lack of care, was intrinsic to her personality, and is somehow mirrored in her attitude to Clare.

  JESS

  Wednesday 24 January, 2018, 8 a.m.

  Twenty-five

  ‘Is your husband in?’ It is 8 a.m., and DC Rustin is standing on Jess’s doorstep.

  ‘Um, no . . .’ She is caught off balance by her sudden appearance. ‘I’m sorry. He stayed at the hospital last night and he’ll be at work, now.’

  ‘We’ll catch him there.’

  The police officer gives her a smile that says she doesn’t trust her and walks away. A curtain in the window of the house opposite shifts. Her neighbours view her uneasily: Jane fumbling for her front-door key, yesterday; Annie shielding eighteen-month-old Lucas in his buggy, as if Jess was capable of harming not just her own but other babies, too.

  ‘It was the police,’ she tells Martha, coming back into the kitchen. ‘They say they want Ed but I don’t know what for. Why do you think they want him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Martha is brisk. ‘Look: why don’t we keep the boys off school and take them out? They’re worried about Betsey and you could do with some distraction. There’s no point in sitting around here.’