The Last Act of Love

by Cathy Rentzenbrink

  Now all this seemed to have happened in another universe and I couldn’t summon any enthusiasm for continuing my education. We were hoping Matty would get better quickly, might only need to have a year or so off, so I wanted to drop out of sixth form now and pick it up again later when he could too. Mum, keen to try to keep things as normal as possible for me, brokered a deal with the college that I’d go back into the lower sixth and repeat the year I’d just done, which meant I could attend as and when I wanted to as long as I did the work, and could therefore spend as much time with Matty as I wanted.

  It was weird going back. Scunthorpe wasn’t like Snaith, where everyone knew all about Matty. I felt completely separated from my friends and their stories and started to dodge out of conversations because I didn’t want to be asked how my summer was.

  Everything apart from being with Matty seemed irrelevant. I’d always kept diaries and notebooks, but now I wrote nothing. My words had gone AWOL. I couldn’t bear to read the pointless, silly rubbish the old me had written so I tied all my diaries up in two carrier bags and chucked them into the skip at the back of the pub.

  Reading was still my friend, though. I read constantly and compulsively, drowning out the sounds of my own thoughts with the noise of other people’s stories. I no longer turned out the light before going to sleep – I had to read until the moment my eyes closed. There could be no gap for the demons to jump into.

  Mum and Dad wanted me to carry on trying to do normal things as well as visit Matty, so on the first weekend of term I went to a party at a friend’s house. There was a girl there who had found a newspaper report about Matty and was showing it to everyone, and she kept asking me questions, all wide-eyed and waving her hands around, clearly enjoying the excitement of it. I felt like an odd kind of celebrity and didn’t know what to do with myself or how to be with those people. So I got drunk, and then sat in an armchair in the corner and got really stoned. The walls were tilting, my limbs were heavy . . .In the haze I thought I was Matty. I watched the tears fall onto my shirt, unable to lift a hand to brush them away, and then I was sick all over myself.

  After that, I steered away from drugs. Matty and I had always blithely ignored the fact that our parents, permissive in many other ways, hated drugs because who ever does everything their parents want? Now, though, I didn’t want to add to their problems. It felt very important that I should be a good daughter. And I didn’t want to mess with my own head. I had enough trouble controlling my imagination as it was. I couldn’t bear to be brought face to face with my unruly imaginings.

  I sat in Matty’s bedroom a lot, playing his records and looking out of his window at the beer garden, and one day I noticed that his sovereign ring had been taken out of the brown bag and put on his bedside table with money rolled up in it. I had a closer look. Matty’s GCSE results slip was there too, and I realized this was Mum keeping her side of the bargain and rewarding him for his results as she’d always done with both of us. There would be a pre-agreed amount of money for school reports and exams – perhaps £10 per A – and a family trip to the China Palace in Selby to celebrate. I found it unbearably sad, this reminder of how things used to be and how much everything had changed.

  I didn’t tell Matty about this. There was no room for any complex personal stuff in this new life. He was the prodigy who needed to be saved and I was his devoted sister.

  I always talked to Matty as though he understood everything I said, even though there was no evidence to suggest that he did. But how could I tell him how miserable I was without him? How could I complain about anything that was happening to me in the face of the magnitude of what had happened to him? Instead I stayed upbeat and jolly, carried on telling him funny things that happened in the pub, and reached further into our childhood for safe stories:

  Do you remember when Granddad used to take us early-morning fishing and we’d creep down the stairs in the dark and toast a piece of bread in the Rayburn before going out into the dark? . . . Do you remember going to see Star Wars on the big screen in the village hall and you wanting Mum to put my hair in Princess Leia plaits for ever after? . . . Do you remember when we got Polly? Mum came home from work where one of her colleagues had told her of a whole sack of puppies thrown into the river to drown. One of them yapped and yapped and a passer-by jumped in to save them, and only one little one was still alive. A mongrel, obviously, but looking like a black Lab. We begged and begged for her and Mum said we could have her if we looked after her . . . Do you remember when we got the Granada Scorpio and it was the first car in the village to have electric windows and Dad drove it down to the park so all our friends could have a go at pressing the button to put the window up and down? . . . Do you remember playing with your train set? You’d lay the track, make the trains run and do the building, and I’d make up stories about the people who lived in the little houses and the reasons why they travelled . . . Do you remember going swimming on Friday nights in Kellingley? How we could smell the colliery in the air and would always go to the Chinese takeaway on the way home?

  There were moments of light in the darkness. Dad was much better at reading than he used to be, but he still got confused. On the ward, anyone awaiting surgery would have a sign that said ‘Nil Orally’ put up at the end of the bed. Watching such a sign go up one day, Dad said, ‘That Neil O’Reilly moves around a lot, doesn’t he?’ We had a laugh and it made a good story to take back to the pub.

  The pub helped us stay buoyant. We couldn’t be miserable because we needed to keep our customers entertained, and after a while I realized that I was better off being downstairs behind the bar pretending to be happy than upstairs alone with my own thoughts.

  TUG OF WAR

  December. Four months had passed since the accident and there had been no miracle, but by now Matty was showing a tiny level of response: I could get him to move his head round towards me by dancing and singing out of his eyeline. We went to the hospital every day and took in a mirror and a mobile and posters of the periodic table and the solar system to experiment with, holding them up at different distances from him as we didn’t know yet whether or not he could see anything with his open eyes.

  The feeding was going so well that the nurses had stopped all daytime Ensure feeds, and we were keeping a food chart, although he was still fed Ensure overnight to keep up his calories and hydration. We had even taken him home for the weekend for the first time. The transfer was difficult. We used a small hospital wheelchair and our car – the Granada Scorpio with the electric windows – and neither of them provided adequate support for his toneless body. As we tried to lift him out of the car and into the flimsy wheelchair, we had to put him down and he ended up splayed out in the pub car park like a Saturday-night drunk.

  Once we got Matty upstairs and settled, he was responsive. Propped up on the sofa, surrounded by his friends, he was able to move his head to follow voices and movement. So many people called up to see him, and I gave him tiny tastes of lager by dipping my finger into a glass and then patting the drips onto his lips. Polly sat at his feet, tail thumping, not quite able to understand his lack of activity but enjoying the party atmosphere. It was a joyous weekend, and we felt sure he was about to speak to us. The physios commented how much better he was after his visit home, and on Wednesday 5 December they had their best ever session, with Matty raising his head each time the physio asked him to.

  Mum was warming up for her darts match the following Wednesday evening when the hospital rang. This had never happened before, and as she went to the phone she was excited, recalling another young man on the ward who, like Matty, had been slow to progress, and who, as his parents were leaving after a visit and were almost out of the door, had said ‘Goodnight, Mum.’ Could this be the hospital ringing with good news?

  It was Rachel, one of our favourite nurses.

  ‘I’m afraid Matthew has had a major epileptic attack. Status epilepticus. We’ve given him an injection and stabilized him.’

&nbs
p; We knew Status epilepticus was life threatening, The doctors had explained it all when they decided to take Matty off his anti-epilepsy drugs in November because they were concerned at his lack of progress and thought that the medication could be sedating him too much. It had seemed worth the risk but now, although they’d saved his life, the fit had reversed the small amount of progress that had been made. No more feeding by mouth, just watered-down Ensure through the tube. No standing at physio, just someone coming to his bedside and doing some light work to keep his joints and muscles moving. No response, no following of voices.

  The night after was the presentation evening up at Matty’s school. He had won the overall Award for Academic Achievement and the English Prize. My parents decided they couldn’t face it.

  ‘I’m too tired,’ said Mum, ‘and Dad is too sad. It will be too much of a reminder of what we’ve lost.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ I said. I wanted Matty to have his trophies and I wanted to be able to tell him about them. Mum hugged me and told me how brave I was.

  I wore the same green suede jerkin I’d been wearing on the night of the accident and a pair of blue silk flared trousers, and walked up to school with Matty’s friend Ian’s parents, Mr and Mrs Robinson. They were lovely people and good friends of our family. Mr Rob, as he was known, ran the football team Matty had played in since he was nine. They were called Camblesforth Colts and had become quite good after a few legendary defeats in the early years. I used to go and watch them and tagged along on the trips Mr Rob organized to Hillsborough to see Sheffield Wednesday. Mr Rob wore his distress about Matty very openly, tears brimming in his eyes.

  I managed to hold it together as I walked up to the stage to collect Matty’s certificates, his trophy and a £10 gift voucher for WHSmith, and shook hands with the headmaster as he said that the whole school was rooting for Matty’s recovery. Back in my chair, I remembered all the presentation evenings in the past, all those times we’d both picked up certificates. I’d usually had the lead part in whatever sort of entertainment was being put on for the parents and governors – I’d been Lady Macbeth and Lady Bracknell in the final two years of school – and as I watched the school choir and band, the younger ones nervously playing their recorders, I thought back to the times when I used to get lost playing the recorder and how I’d stop blowing and just move my fingers over the holes, hoping no one would notice. It seemed amazing to me now that I could ever have cared about playing the recorder or learning lines or winning prizes or anything at all.

  Awards were given out for attendance, and each child who had not missed a day of school got a certificate. One girl, a friend of Matty’s, had not missed a day of school in all five years, so she got a trophy, and then the headmaster presented a bouquet of flowers to her parents, whose two elder children had also been through their entire school careers without missing a single day. I knew this family: they were beautiful, with Irish looks – black hair, pale skin, red lips. I couldn’t grasp that they had all not only achieved adulthood but had done so without a single illness. I thought of my parents at home, prevented by everything that had happened from being able to enjoy Matty’s achievements, and felt so glad that they hadn’t come, to be faced with the contrast between us and the healthiest family in the history of the world.

  There was, of course, some drinking afterwards. I went with Ian and the rest of Matty’s friends, who treated me with a brotherly respect that moved me, and by the end of the night the other girls and I were crying over how terribly we all felt Matty’s absence. He had been massive, in personality as well as size. He had always been central to everything, made everything better and funnier just by being there – there was just an unfillable hole anywhere he used to be. On that, as on many other nights, I cried myself to sleep.

  Christmas was coming. Our second Christmas in the pub. The first one had shocked us with the sheer amount of work it brought, but we’d rounded up Matty and all his friends to help with collecting glasses and bottling up.

  The hospital agreed that Matty could come home for Christmas. We’d borrowed a bed and a hoist from the hospital. He slept in Mum and Dad’s room, and they set an alarm for every two hours to turn him in the night. Each day we would bathe and dress him and move him into the living room so that visitors could call to see him. We’d put him back to bed after last orders.

  When carrying him from room to room we used a technique called the Australian lift, where two people make a type of sedan chair by clasping each other’s wrists under the patient’s bottom. Matty had made some progress again and was back to taking small bits of food, but his main nutrition still came from the Ensure feeds which we would hang from a picture hook above the sofa. There was no shortage of friends and customers willing to sit with him while we worked behind the bar – one chap proudly declared ‘he’s drunk all that’ when the feed had dripped through, as if he was a baby who had finished his bottle.

  Following the big fit, Matty was back on epilepsy drugs. They made him very sleepy most of the time, and it was disappointing for his visitors that he was so unresponsive. Everyone secretly hoped that it would be their voice or joke or story that would rouse him back to life.

  On Boxing Day there was the annual inter-pub tug of war which attracted crowds of people, and anyone who pulled for the Bell and Crown got a gallon of ale, whether they won or lost. I made up the little brown envelopes, the same ones we used to pay wages, with eight signed raffle tickets, one per pint. Men would be green and shaky afterwards, sometimes throwing up before feeling recovered enough to start cashing in their tickets.

  After last orders on Boxing Day night, there was a fight outside and the back windows got smashed. Dad went out and restrained the person responsible, and the next morning the police came round to say that the man wanted Dad prosecuted for assault. The same person made threatening phone calls all through Christmas saying he would burn the pub down with all of us in it, and it felt grossly unfair that we had to cope with this as well as looking after Matty and working so hard, but we didn’t really have time to be frightened. We knew that the phone calls would stop when the man lost interest and in the meantime customers were waiting and pints needed to be pulled, so we got some new glass fitted in the broken windows and opened up with smiling faces ready for the next session.

  We took Matty back to the hospital on New Year’s Eve and then got ready for what was the busiest night of all, but also the last big effort as everything would return to normal the next day. There were crowds of customers, many in fancy dress, and at midnight there was a brief reprieve at the bar when all the customers went out into the street to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ or get off with each other, depending on their age and inclination. I went outside to collect glasses, but first leant against the front wall of the pub smoking a cigarette and watched the drunk, happy, dressed-up people in the street. Lots of people came to hug me, and some of them mentioned Matty. ‘Let’s hope this will be a better year for you all, lass.’

  I finished my fag, picked up the glasses from the street and walked down the alleyway to go in through the back door, passing a gorilla in the beer garden who was relieving himself into a plant pot.

  We served up last orders and started on the mammoth task of getting the pub back to rights, which involved mopping up sick in the toilets, unblocking the urinals and sweeping up all the broken glass in the street. As usual, Dad gave himself all the most unpleasant jobs, and when everything was done we sat up with the rest of the staff, giving them drinks to thank them for working so hard. We got drunk really quickly as the adrenaline that had kept us going for the last hectic fortnight flooded out of our bodies, and we talked about New Year’s resolutions. All we wanted was for Matty to get better. It had been a fuck of a year.

  Dad got super drunk, and Mum helped him up to bed, leaving me to lock up. I let everyone out and lingered a moment in the dark. 1991, I thought, what will you bring us? I climbed the back stairs, too sad to look in on Matty’s bedroom, and as I passed t
he door to my parents’ room I saw that Dad was lying on the floor, holding the leg of the empty hospital bed, sobbing. Polly was sitting next to him, her head on one side, looking sad.

  I cried and cried myself to sleep, so drunk that I didn’t even wake up when I burned my knee on the radiator next to my bed. I still have the scar.

  DRIVING WITHOUT DUE CARE AND ATTENTION

  The police prepared a case against the driver who knocked Matty down and on 8 January – my eighteenth birthday – it came to court in Goole and was adjourned.

  None of us were in the mood to celebrate my birthday. My parents gave me a card with irises on it and a cheque, but didn’t put any words in the card, just a row of kisses. I was glad they hadn’t tried to write anything celebratory: the idea that I might have a happy birthday was absurd. One of the ladies in our darts team made me a cake and I got drunk and then sobbed myself to sleep.

  Matty’s birthday was a month later and we fetched him home for the weekend. Mum and Dad gave him a new cassette player and a clock.