‘It should have been a car,’ said Mum, ‘but there’s no point dwelling on what should have been.’
We blew up lots of balloons and all his friends came round. He was responsive, moving his head between his best friend, Ben, on one side and Claire and Sarah on the other and making little moaning noises.
The case came up again on 14 March. The driver was charged with driving without due care and attention and leaving the scene of the accident. He was fined £180.
The magistrate said, ‘This was an unfortunate night for both these young men.’
We couldn’t get our heads around how he could have said that. My parents were angry and upset, and Mum said, ‘We should have wheeled Matty in here. He wouldn’t have made that comment if he could see him.’
I just felt sad. I felt sorry for the driver and imagined how I’d feel if I’d done something like that to someone.
The police explained that, unless someone died, the court didn’t distinguish between driving into a person and driving into a tree. They also pointed out that we should be grateful that the driver had been insured, because this meant we could get some money from the insurance company for Matty. We could see the logic of this, and we knew we had to follow the process as getting Matty better was going to be a longer and more expensive job than we’d hoped, but we hated even a whisper of the word ‘compensation’. The idea that any amount of money could make up for what had happened to Matty was beyond our understanding.
A LONG, TRUE, SAD STORY
We were approaching another summer. Nine months after the accident, Mum and Dad went to a gloomy case conference with the medical staff. Brain scans showed that Matty had had a further bleed and a stroke. There weren’t many damaged areas, but those that were, were critical: speech and directed movement. We concentrated on the positive bits. ‘Not many damaged areas,’ we said. We’d heard that the brain could be taught to forge new pathways. We wanted to keep trying.
The hospital announced that they could not keep Matty any longer as they needed the bed for more hopeful cases, and told us that he wasn’t suitable for referral to the specialist rehabilitation unit as he hadn’t made enough progress for anyone to build on. It was suggested he be moved to Scunthorpe or Goole hospital, but we made a decision to care for him ourselves at home. At least then we would all be together, and we wouldn’t have to worry about what was happening to Matty when we weren’t with him.
The hospital supported this decision and fitted a PEG tube directly into Matty’s stomach so we no longer had to change it or do the litmus paper test before each feed. Matty looked less medicalized without the tube hanging from his nose, but for us it felt like a backward step. We had hoped he would eventually progress enough to take food and drink through his mouth, but the PEG represented an acceptance of the permanency of his condition. He would have physiotherapy three times a week at Goole hospital, and the head physio at Leeds gave Mum a sealed letter to pass on to the physios there. ‘If you open it I don’t want you to be upset by the term vegetative,’ he said. ‘It’s just a word we use to describe the condition.’ Mum didn’t open the letter, but it was the first time we had heard that word used about Matty. It was difficult not to be upset by it.
There was much to do to prepare for Matty’s homecoming. Not bunting and balloons, but specialist equipment – a ripple mattress that prevented bed sores, a hoist, shower trolley and wheelchair. A district nurse would call, a home help would be there for the morning bath, and a rota of professionals and friends would sit with Matty so that we could carry on working behind the bar.
Once he was home, I spent a lot of time sitting on the sofa with him. I’d put on the comedy videos we used to watch together before the accident. He couldn’t be left alone in a seated position in case he coughed and toppled over, so he’d be propped up with a pillow under one of his arms, and I’d cuddle myself around him on the other side, putting my arm across his waist and resting my face against his chest. I’d pull his arm around me and hold onto his long fingers, interlacing them with mine. Sometimes I’d close my eyes and imagine that the accident had never happened. Sometimes I’d cry, very quietly because I didn’t want him to know, and let my tears fall onto his T-shirt.
Only a matter of months ago we’d been sitting on this sofa with one of his friends who’d kept tickling my feet.
‘If you’re going to try to get off with my sister,’ Matty had said, ‘don’t do it in front of me.’
I’d always felt so proud when he’d referred to me as his sister. I wondered if he still knew that I was, if I existed somewhere in his head.
Once we’d watched a film about the French Resistance and I’d sobbed my way through it while Matty had remained unmoved.
‘How could you not cry?’ I asked at the end.
‘I wouldn’t ever cry at something made up.’
‘But it was based on a true story.’
‘Oh. I might have done, then, if I’d known. It was really sad.’
Now he was stuck in his own long, true, sad story with me there watching it.
In August, a year after the accident, Matty went into a major fit as I sat with him in our usual place on the sofa. It started with a horrible noise like a cross between a shout and a scream, and then his face started twitching and his arms and legs jerked rapidly. His eyes rolled up into his head, leaving only the whites showing, and his lips turned blue. I shouted down to the bar for someone to come up and help me. Mum and Dad had gone to Goole Leisure Centre for a swim and we couldn’t get hold of them, but we called the doctor and he called an ambulance.
The ambulance pulled up in front of the pub, sirens wailing and lights flashing, and the men charged up the front stairs, got Matty onto a stretcher and bundled us off to Pontefract Hospital. I was terrified but trying to stay calm – I knew it was possible that Matty could die. There was panic from the medical staff when we got there – I don’t think they had seen anything like it before – and they couldn’t find a vein to get an intravenous line into his arm to administer the drugs to stop the fit. I kept telling them that they wouldn’t, that his veins had hardened, that they needed to try his foot, but they wouldn’t listen and kept stabbing at his arms as he flailed around. I couldn’t bear to keep watching, so I stood at the window and looked down at the car park through my tears. I was letting Matty down, I knew it – the more upset I got, the less inclined they were to listen to me, but I couldn’t control myself. If Mum had been there she would have got the message across. Eventually they gave up on his arms and got a line into his foot, and Matty was stabilized. They discharged him the next day.
Life had changed beyond recognition in the last year, but we felt lucky that he was still there to cuddle and love and hope for. ‘At least we’ve still got our Matty,’ said Mum when the little baby of one of our customers died. ‘At least we’ve still got him and can tell him we love him.’
For a while a Catholic priest visited regularly, an old man who struggled with the stairs and always arrived puffed-out and hot. We joked amongst ourselves that we might have to call in another one to administer him the last rites. We hadn’t asked for him to call, but as Matty and I had both attended the Catholic school in Carlton before Matty moved to Snaith for his last two years, he probably assumed we were of the faith. We were never quite sure what we were supposed to do – offer him tea, whisky? Cash? Dad was full of bitter memories from his childhood of priests visiting the poorest people and getting money out of them. One day the priest arrived when Mum was trimming Matty’s nails. ‘If his hair and his nails are growing,’ he said, ‘there are signs of life.’ Another day, arriving particularly out of breath, he asked, ‘When did Matthew have his First Communion?’ ‘He didn’t,’ Mum said, and we never saw him again.
We also had visits from various lawyers and doctors to assess Matty for the compensation claim and write reports about him. They all diagnosed him as being in a Persistent Vegetative State with no likelihood of recovery, though we didn’t believe
that and were far from giving up hope. What I found troubling was that the people who came from ‘the other side’ – the driver’s insurance company – were entirely focused on paying out as little as they could, and always behaved as though they wanted to catch us out in some way, though of course there wasn’t anything to catch us out on. I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t behave honourably and treat us all with a little more respect and compassion. One day, Mum was explaining to a lady sent by the insurance company how her life had changed – that instead of discussing sixth form colleges and university courses with her children, she’d had to give up her career and become an expert in disability equipment.
‘Ah well,’ said the lady, ‘life doesn’t always work out how you planned it, does it?’
Eventually the insurance company made an offer. Our solicitor said it was an opening salvo and they were expecting to have to pay much more. My parents had had enough of the whole thing and wanted to settle. Our solicitor told us the insurance company was so surprised by this that they speculated that Matty had died.
‘Well,’ said Dad, ‘at least it’s over and we don’t have to spend any more time with that shower of shits.’
A more welcome visitor was Mrs Shaw, Matty’s form teacher, who had also taught him English. Matty had always been more interested in science, and he’d changed schools because the one we went to in Carlton decided to offer only a general science GCSE rather than physics, chemistry and biology. Once he’d settled in at Snaith, though, and possibly because he was no longer being compared with me, he’d started to love English with Mrs Shaw. ‘I could never get cross with him,’ she said, smiling through her tears, ‘even when he was cheeky. He was so full of charm.’
Not long after Matty came home, Polly died. The joy had gone out of her after Matty’s accident, and she pined away. One of our customers took her to the vet for us so she could have a hysterectomy, but she had a heart attack during the operation. When our customer came to tell us about it, Mum and Dad were out – they had taken Matty to physio – so it was just me. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, crying, ‘I know how awful it is to lose a dog – just like losing a child.’
I was worried I might get the giggles. It seemed a ridiculous thing to say, given what had happened to Matty.
At least Polly had had a quick death, I thought. It was the first time I’d allowed myself to consider even for a second that it might have been better if Matty had not lived. I thought about how the old me would have cried buckets for Polly, but that now I had nothing left to give her. All my sadness was for Matty, and I couldn’t scare up a tear for his poor dog.
I could feel myself becoming a less pleasant person and was often angry and resentful, though I tried not to show it. I’d stand either behind the bar or out in the pub and fix on a smile as I listened to people who had not had their hearts ripped out by Matty’s accident but who somehow felt they had some ownership over it. They’d tell me how dreadful they felt, where they’d been when they heard the news, what their last conversation with him had been about.
‘I love that lad like one of my own,’ people said. At first I thought that was lovely. He was loved; it was nice that people said it. But I came to hate hearing it. I’d nod and smile, knowing that their own children were safe and that they had no idea what our life had become. ‘Really?’ I wanted to say. ‘Do you think this is your tragedy? Do you think you feel the same way we do? Because if you do, that’s insane.’
I hated people who made any sort of reference to God, as though this could possibly be part of some grand design. A religious person said to me, ‘This is the sort of thing that tests my faith.’ I’m sure it was meant kindly, but I was furious that he had appropriated my brother’s pitiful situation to play out his relationship with his God.
There was no pleasing me. I was angry with people who wanted to talk to me about Matty, but also angry when they stopped asking and didn’t want to see him. A tragic accident and a coma are exciting, but the prospect of permanent severe brain damage much less so. People didn’t want to see him. They had loved him – not quite like one of their own, but they had loved him – and it was distressing for them to see him so transformed. They gradually drifted away.
One morning, I poured a boiling hot kettle over my arm on purpose. I hadn’t planned it, but as I stood waiting for the switch to click, I found myself thinking about the idea that physical pain distracts from emotional pain, and just decided to try it.
It was agony. Far worse than I’d thought it would be. My arm was immediately covered in blisters and I could see I’d need to go to hospital, which hadn’t really occurred to me. I was wearing the six camel bangles that my dad had brought back from a work trip to Dubai for Mum, and they had heated up and burnt horizontal lines onto my wrist. I phoned a taxi and cried all the way to the hospital because I felt like such an idiot. I didn’t dare tell anyone I’d done it on purpose.
The doctor said they might have to cut the bangles off, and I couldn’t bear that my stupidity would lead to the beautiful bangles being ruined so I took a deep breath and pulled them off over the burnt flesh. Then they bandaged me up and I went home. It was a huge inconvenience because I couldn’t work my shifts for a few days, and I felt both irresponsible and fraudulent because everyone was so nice to me and I didn’t deserve it. Worse, despite the considerable pain in my arm and the shame at having done it, I never felt one iota distracted from the pain in my heart.
I tried, as time ticked on, to learn to live with our new reality. I drank huge amounts, but so did lots of people we knew, and no one really noticed, least of all me. It didn’t occur to me that our most regular customers weren’t exactly the yardstick for a normal drinking habit.
WAS IT FOR THIS THE CLAY GREW TALL?
The most difficult practical thing for us was getting Matty up and down the stairs, either to go to physio or for fresh air. The back stairs were too narrow, so we had to carry him down the front stairs and out through the pub. On sunny days, we’d take him out into the beer garden and set up him under a sunshade. We left his feet sticking out unprotected once, and his shins got slightly burnt. We rubbed aftersun on, and it reminded me of the time we were on holiday in St Lucia when we were seven and eight and his arms and the very tops of his ears were badly burnt whilst the rest of him that had been underwater in the pool was OK. Matty had been up all night in agony back then. Now he made no reaction.
‘You can’t carry on like this,’ said our customer and friend, Frank. Frank was the first person Dad had met when we’d moved to Yorkshire, and we were very close to him and his wife, Liz. He was a draughtsman. ‘Why don’t you knock down the garage and build an extension? I’ll draw you up some plans.’
Frank said he was worried about both our safety and our backs, not to mention what would happen if some disgruntled customer did come and try to burn the place down, as they always seemed to be threatening to do. He also pointed out that it was bad for trade to be carrying Matty through the pub. We needed our own space and our own garden for him because people didn’t want to see him.
This was dreadfully hard to hear, but we knew it was true, and we respected Frank for saying it. I realized that there were two parts to it. If it was an emergency admission, like the epileptic fit, if there was a shrieking ambulance in the street and paramedics running up the stairs to bring Matty through on a stretcher, then that was acceptable and even a bit exciting, a break from routine. But if it was part of the routine, if Matty was being lifted down to be wheeled off for a physio session or out for a walk, if there was no rush and people had the opportunity to see his giant, wrecked body, to look into his vacant eyes, to notice the crater in the side of his head . . . no one in their right mind would want to witness it as they sipped away at their hard-earned pint.
So we decided to knock down the garage where Matty had built his motorbikes, where he and I had discussed the existence of love, and build a special bungalow to house him in its place. But then the local council
decided they wanted the land behind the pub for a public car park and put a compulsory purchase order on it. A long battle ensued. Dad rang up BBC Look North, and the same people who’d interviewed Mum about Matty’s GCSE results came to film us lifting him down the stairs in a wheelchair. Our customers were fierce on our behalf, organizing a petition and galvanizing support.
Once again Matty was in the papers.
PARENTS’ PLEA TO COUNCIL
Battling Snaith parents Kevin and Margaret Mintern presented a 1500-signature petition to Boothferry Council on Monday in a bid to persuade the council to allow them to build special accommodation for their brain-damaged son.
The couple brought to the council offices in Goole their 17-year-old son Matthew, paralysed and brain damaged by an accident. The couple hope the petition will persuade councillors to reverse their decision to purchase compulsorily land at the rear of their public house in order to create a public car park.
Instead the Minterns wish to use a small part of the land, which they own – four parking spaces – to build a single-storey extension where they may care properly for their shattered son.
There was only a receptionist available at the council’s offices when the family arrived, accompanied by the friends who had helped to collect the support of more than half of the total population of Snaith and Cowick.
After 10 minutes the mayor’s secretary appeared, and was in the process of accepting the petition from a reluctant Mrs Mintern when it was made known that chief executive John Barber was on his way. He was accompanied by the mayor and the borough solicitor when he arrived, and the Minterns were finally able to present their point of view.
This is simply that assertions made on TV and elsewhere that the people of Snaith were adamant in their demand for a car park were unfounded; 1520 of them supported the Minterns’ plea for permission to build, on their own land, accommodation for their son.
The Last Act of Love Page 6
