Mal, Cordelia and I turned the corner to our road and saw the ambulance outside my and Cordelia’s house, and in unison we all stopped.
The ambulance was usually outside Mal’s house. But this time, it was outside ours. I started running first, Mal caught me up, then outran me because his legs were that bit longer and he was that bit stronger. Cordelia, who was six, was strides behind us. We ran and ran but it still took forever to reach our house.
As we arrived, we saw my mum being helped into the back of the ambulance. She looked fine, fit and healthy. It must be my dad. I could run a hundred meters in very quick time and my heart was always racing afterwards, but not like this. It had never raced as much as this.
I was scared of lots of things: the dark, the monster Mal had convinced me lived in the outdoor toilet, the fluffy toys I told Cordelia came to life every full moon (I did such a good job convincing her that I became terrified of them, too), of something happening to Aunt Mer. But I’d never been this scared before. I’d never been so scared that something would happen to my dad like it had happened to Uncle Victor and I wouldn’t see him again.
We stopped in front of the ambulance and tried to see in. My whole body began to tremble. “Children,” Dad said. Behind us. He was behind us, in front of our house. We all turned toward him. He was wearing the pinstripe gray suit he wore for work with a light blue shirt, his blue tie slightly undone. I wanted to run to him and hug him and kiss his face and tell him I was glad he was all right, and that I’d never been happier to see him in all my life, but I didn’t. He wouldn’t like it. My dad wasn’t like that. In his arms, he held three-year-old Victoria, Mal’s sister. She was staring at the ambulance, her face dry, her eyes wide. Her hair was in perfect bunches with a perfectly straight center parting, the kind of style Aunt Mer used to spend hours brushing and brushing until everything was even. Everything was neat. We all knew that was a sign. That she was unwell. That we should be scared.
“Come inside and eat your dinner.” We were all looking at Dad, so we were all startled when the back of the ambulance slammed shut.
It was Aunt Mer.
Like always, it was Aunt Mer.
The siren started up on the ambulance and it began to move down the narrow street, lined on both sides by parked cars. We all watched it bump down the uneven road and turn the corner.
“Come inside,” Dad said more sternly. I knew why: all the neighbors on that part of our street were standing outside their houses or peeking out of their windows, watching. They were always watching. I sometimes used to think that if they could, they’d pull up chairs and sit and watch us because we were better than Coronation Street. Better than anything they could ever see in the cinema. Mum and Dad hated it. “Like being a goldfish,” Mum had said to Dad once. It wasn’t that my parents begrudged people looking, it was the comforting pleasure these people seemed to get from the knowledge that if they were standing on a cold, damp pavement watching it happen to someone else, it was very unlikely to happen to them.
Mum often told us that when she and Dad moved into this street about eleven years ago, those very same neighbors wouldn’t talk to them. The women would often stand in groups in the street, gossiping, but would stop talking when Mum walked past; they stared at her if she smiled at them in the shops; they refused to take parcels in for her from the postman. This was alien behavior to two African people who always tried to welcome newcomers to their community. The neighbors had shunned Aunt Mer and Uncle Victor when they moved in six months later, so Mum had gone over and taken them a casserole. That was how their friendship began, that was how our families became intertwined, and that was why Mum always went to the hospital with Aunt Mer.
Dad struggled trying to get dinner together because Victoria wouldn’t let him put her down, so he had to work single-handed. Every time I tried to help, as I did when Mum made dinner, he waved me away. He was scared, but pretending not to be. We could all tell, even Cordelia.
“Your mother has had to go to hospital,” he said, whilst trying to transfer fish fingers onto a plate with boiled potatoes and bright green peas. “It’s only for a little while,” he said to Mal. “You two will stay here until she comes home. We will go and get your pajamas and some toys for Victoria later.”
Mal, Cordelia and I sat at the dining table in silence. It was the deathly silence that we often sat in. It was the silence of afterwards. Afterwards always felt like this: stiff, sore, quiet. Every breath a painful reminder of what could have happened.
We ate in silence, each of us imagining what had happened. My mum and dad wouldn’t tell us anything, of course; we were only nine, Mal and I, too young to hear from them directly. We, instead, heard it from what the people at school taunted us with, and what we found out from creeping out of bed late at night and listening to my parents talking. That was how we found out that Uncle Victor hadn’t been working away for the five years after we were born, he had been in prison. We still didn’t know what for; everyone at school would chant at us that he had been anything from a murderer to a burglar. But no one knew. And Mum and Dad never seemed to talk about it.
A few days later they did talk about Aunt Mer and I found out.
She had dressed up in her best dress, put on her fur coat that Uncle Victor had bought her years and years ago, and brushed her hair just so. She had brushed Victoria’s hair, and dressed her up in her party dress. And then she had put Victoria downstairs in front of the television, while upstairs she took almost a whole bottle of painkillers and cut her wrists, then lay down on the bed to sleep.
Uncle Victor had died six months ago, so Mum had started going to the Wackens’ several times a day: first thing in the morning to check Mal was ready for school and had his packed lunch, and that Victoria got her breakfast; once at lunchtime to check Aunt Mer and Victoria had eaten and if they wanted to go to the shops or the park; then again in the evening to check Mal and Victoria had eaten dinner, Mal had done his homework and they were in bed. That day, Dad had come home early from work, so Mum thought she’d drop in early to see Aunt Mer. She had knocked for a while, then she got scared and used her spare key to let herself in. The ambulance had parked outside our house because there was nowhere else for it to park.
The hospital was keeping her in for a while because, I heard, this time was the worst yet. She’d tried it before, we all knew that. But this time she was serious. This time, with what she had done, how she had timed it, it meant that she didn’t want to be here anymore.
I wake up to find the kitchen light on, the grain of the wood from the kitchen table imprinted on my cheek and five text messages on my mobile from Keith:
All fine here. Love you. K x
Go to bed. Love you. K x
I mean it, go to bed. Love you. K x
And don’t even think about going on the computer. K x
I said bed, not the kitchen table. K x
Keith thinks I go on the computer because I can’t sleep or because I am looking for alternative therapies that will wake up Leo. He’d prefer that to me reading medical journals; he doesn’t want me trying to learn technical jargon and about the doctors’ procedures because he thinks that will make me feel worse. He believes that in this instance, ignorance is bliss, and I should leave it all in the hands of the doctors; that if I must, I should look at my nice little alternative therapies that he can dismiss as nonsense, and leave the rest to the professionals. He doesn’t want me talking in terms he cannot understand, making him feel more powerless than he already does.
I can understand why he feels like that. Keith has always been in control in his life. He has always been strong and self-assured; his sense of right and wrong has always seen him through. This has stranded him in an unknown place where he has nothing tangible to fight, nothing wrong that can be brought to justice. He hates it. Me knowing more than him would make him feel even more insubstantial, insecure, weak.
If I can do anything for him, it’s to not add to his pain.
&n
bsp; We, all six of us, were squeezed around our dining table because Mum and Dad wanted to talk to us.
It was serious because Mum and Dad rarely sat us all down together to talk to us. Ever since they had called Mal and me downstairs from where we were doing our homework in my bedroom, I had been running through the list of things I could possibly have done wrong. I couldn’t think of anything that would mean all of us sitting down like this. Mal and I weren’t like other fourteen-year-olds: we didn’t smoke; we didn’t hang around in the park; we didn’t try to get our hands on alcohol; we weren’t “in” enough to be invited to parties—even if we were, Mum and Dad wouldn’t have let Mal or me go. The only thing I could think of was that I hadn’t got an A on my last history project.
“We want to talk to you children,” Mum said.
I realized suddenly how old my mum looked. Weary, actually, rather than old. She was beautiful, my mum. She had her hair in nice, big, bouncy curls that came from wearing rollers every night; she had wonderful cheekbones and huge, nearly black eyes, and really, really long eyelashes. She used to have virtually no wrinkles on her deep, dark brown, smooth skin, but now some were appearing around her mouth, around her eyes. They weren’t laughter lines, as I’d seen them called in magazines, either. Dad’s hair was turning white. I hadn’t noticed until now, but the sides were gray and would probably soon be white, and the jet-black areas would soon be gray. I knew he used to dye his hair but he hadn’t done so for a while. His once smooth dark brown skin was now wrinkling across the forehead, too.
They weren’t old, they were weary: the most recent incident with Aunt Mer had taken it out of them. It had taken it out of all of us, but especially them. On top of everything, they must have been feeling guilty as well. They hadn’t noticed the signs, none of us had really. Or maybe it was because she had become better at hiding it over the years. But she wasn’t here at the moment and none of us children knew if and when she was coming back.
Which meant that Mum and Dad were raising four children when they had only intended to have two. One of them had to stay over with Mal and Victoria every night or the two of them would have to sleep over with us—Cordy in bed with me, Mal on a mattress on the floor in Cordy’s room with Victoria in Cordy’s bed. Mum had gone back to nursing and Dad did as many extra shifts at the college lab as he could so they could afford to feed and clothe and house us all. I hadn’t noticed how much of a toll it had taken on them until I saw it carved into their faces as wrinkles, and etched into their eyes as sadness.
“We’ve decided that Malvolio and Victoria will go away to school,” Mum said, a waver in her voice.
Dad placed his hand on her shoulder to steady her, silently telling her he would do this. He focused on Mal and Victoria. “Your mother’s brother, who lives in Birmingham, said he will look after you both if you go and live with him. He will pay for you to go to boarding school. The two schools are very near each other, so you will be able to see each other often. And for the holidays you can spend time with your uncle. You can get to know his family.”
“You’re splitting us up?” I asked. There was a tone of anger in my voice that I never used with my parents, but I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“Malvolio will be starting his O-levels soon, he needs to concentrate, and Victoria will be able to catch up with her schoolwork.”
“You can’t split us up.” I was outraged they’d even consider this. It was unthinkable. Waking up every morning knowing I wouldn’t see Mal or Victoria would be like knowing I wouldn’t see Mum, Dad or Cordy. It would be like waking up to find the sun had forgotten to rise. We didn’t have much that was stable or predictable in our lives except the six of us always being together. This was not going to happen. “You can’t send them away. What about me and Cordelia? How can you split us up?”
Mum’s shoulders fell as she lowered her head. She was going to start crying for real.
“Nova, this isn’t what we want to do, but we have to,” Dad said reasonably. I may have looked like my mum, but I usually took after my dad. I was of the same temperament, Mum was always saying. Always trying to be reasonable. Until now, of course, when I was faced with losing my family. “With Malvolio and Victoria being looked after, we can look after your Aunt Meredith.”
She was coming out of the hospital, then. I wondered for a moment if they knew when. If they were going to move Mal and Victoria before she came back or after. It was May now; they would have to start school in September. Would Aunt Mer be back by then?
She had promised, promised, promised Mal when he last saw her that she hadn’t been trying to kill herself. Not this time. She just needed some sleep. She had taken the sleeping pills because she had been awake for so long that she needed sleep. Nothing she did would make her tired. Her body would sometimes feel tired and she’d be too exhausted to get out of bed, but she couldn’t stop her mind from racing. She’d tried writing down her thoughts to get them out of her head, she said, but her hand wouldn’t keep up with them. She had tried speaking her thoughts into a tape recorder but the sound of the tape whirring had driven her to distraction. She had tried reading but she couldn’t take in the words. She had tried cleaning the house from top to bottom but she still had energy. She had tried running around and around the garden to make herself tired but it didn’t work. Nothing worked. She knew that if she didn’t get some sleep soon, she would go crazy. That’s why she went to the doctor and got some sleeping tablets. Just in case it carried on for too long. The doctor was new to the surgery and didn’t know her, and had been very sympathetic and had given her the tablets. (He was an idiot, I had raged inside as Mal told me. Simply glancing at her notes would have told him that you didn’t give someone with Aunt Mer’s history sleeping tablets; you didn’t make it easy for her to end it all.)
Aunt Mer had promised, promised, promised Mal that she had only meant to take a couple, like it said on the side of the bottle. She thought taking them with a little vodka instead of water would make them work faster. She’d been so long without sleep, she decided to take a couple more to make sure they worked. And then she’d forgotten how many she’d taken, so she took another one to make sure she’d taken enough. And then another.
She’d been able to sleep then. The first she knew that she’d taken too many and used too much vodka to help them down was when she woke up in the hospital to find she was back on suicide watch. And even then it’d taken a while to understand what was going on because she was so fuzzy from not having slept.
I understood perfectly why my parents thought this was the best way to handle this. I’d heard them talking about it one night: Mal and Victoria shouldn’t have to suffer because their mother was ill, they’d said. I hadn’t realized separating us was their solution.
“It’s not fair,” I said. “We all have to stay together. It’s not fair if they have to go away. We won’t see them anymore and that’s not fair. We haven’t done anything wrong.”
“No one has done anything wrong,” Dad said. “This is just the best way.”
I opened my mouth to disagree, when Mal moved in his seat beside me and then pressed his hand onto my forearm, telling me to stop. I glanced at him to ask him why, and saw he was watching Victoria. She had her head bowed, her long wavy blond hair hiding her face, but not the tears that had puddled on top of the mahogany table. She was eight but her height, her mannerisms, her deeply ingrained sadness, made her seem so much older.
Mal pushed out his chair, went around the table and took his little sister’s hand. “Come on, let’s go for a walk,” he said to her. He used to say that to Cordy when she was being “difficult,” which was pretty much all the time. He used to say that to Victoria when she would slink into silence at the dinner table. He used to say that to me whenever he had done something to annoy me and wanted me to still be his friend. This was the first time he’d said it and looked so heartbroken and scared as he spoke.
They were gone for about half an hour and in that ti
me Mum had made herself a cup of tea, Dad a cup of coffee, and Cordy and me a cup of Ovaltine each. Cordy had been singing the tune to the Ovaltine advert ever since, and even though it was extremely annoying, especially because she filled in the bits she didn’t know with “da-de-da-da,” no one told her to stop.
“Victoria has gone for a lie-down in Nova’s bedroom,” Mal said as he sat down in the seat he had occupied earlier. He sounded so grown up that I blinked a few times at him. “She wants to go to Birmingham. She wants to go away to school. Thank you, Uncle Frank and Aunt Hope, it’s what she needs. She doesn’t want to be here anymore, but she doesn’t want us to be cross with her because of it.”
“No one would ever be cross with her,” I said at exactly the same time as Dad. Mum smiled to herself.
“But I’m going to stay,” Mal continued. “I can’t leave Mum. I can’t ever leave Mum.”
The words he said, his tone of voice, the slight shake of his head, told everyone he was serious, that no one could put asunder him and his mother.
“We understand,” Mum said.
“Yes, we do,” Dad agreed.
Silence came to us as we all digested what this would mean for us. Once Victoria left, she would no longer be a part of our family. Once we didn’t see her every day, create memories and jokes and feuds with her every day, it’d be difficult to connect with her. We’d be a different type of close. No matter how many times she visited physically, she would always have grown up somewhere else. Somewhere other. With some others.
“So,” Cordy said after a while, “if Malvolio’s not going away to school, can I go instead?”
Later, much later, Mal said to me, “I wish my dad was here.” We had sneaked out of bed and were sitting side by side in the dark on the back step, staring into the garden and the railings that backed onto the railway line that ran past our house. (Mum and Dad probably knew that we were out here: apart from the fact we both had the grace of stampeding elephants, Mum and Dad seemed to know pretty much everything about everything. Which was why, I suppose, they’d been so upset about the sleeping tablets and vodka Aunt Mer had been able to get her hands on.)
Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel Page 6
