Daddy moved round in front of her and took her by the shoulders and pulled her forward.
I grabbed his arm and cried, ‘Please don’t hurt her any more. She’s only asleep.’
‘I’m not hurting her,’ he said. ‘I have to lift her up so I can get her downstairs and into the car. She needs to go to hospital.’
Then he reached down and picked up one of Mammy’s pill bottles, which had been lying on the floor. He shook it but there was no rattling sound. It must have been empty.
‘I’d better take this with me to show them,’ he muttered, and put the bottle in his pocket. Then he lifted Mammy up, knelt in front of her, and let her fold forward, face downwards over his shoulder, with her head lolling against his back.
He told me not to go out but to stay where I was until he got back. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be,’ he said as he carried her downstairs. ‘But I’ll be back.’
I heard the back door slam and ran to the front window. A couple of minutes later I saw his car turn out of the side street into the Ashton Old Road.
I sat on the sofa and tried to stay awake, hoping they would come home together as though nothing had happened. But I must have dropped off to sleep, because when Daddy woke me it was morning.
‘Where’s Mammy?’ I asked him, rubbing my eyes.
‘They’re keeping her in hospital for a day or two. She’s not very well, but she’s going to be all right. You’ll just have to get yourself to school and I’ll be back this evening after I’ve visited your mother. The key will be with her next door. Get yourself something to eat and don’t bring anyone home with you. Understand?’
‘Yes,’ I told him, and that was it. I would have to fend for myself. But what was new in that?
It wasn’t until two days later, at school, that I learned my Mammy had tried to kill herself. One of the neighbour’s boys had heard his mother telling the details to another neighbour. Mammy had taken a huge overdose of her depression pills because she wanted to die, he told me. He obviously thought it was a fabulous piece of gossip to spread around the school.
To me, it was devastating. Mammy dead. I just couldn’t imagine it. She would never leave me alone with Daddy. It couldn’t be true.
‘You’re lying,’ I screamed. ‘My mammy wouldn’t want to die and leave me.’
‘It’s true,’ he cried, a satisfied smirk on his face. ‘I know it’s true ’cos it was your dad who told my mam about it in the first place. I heard her say so.’
It was like the bottom had fallen out of my world.
Chapter Seven
The thought of Mammy being dead was to haunt me for the next three years – until finally reality over took imagination.
Nothing else and nobody else seemed to matter any more. Certainly not my school lessons. In that first year at primary school, a learning pattern began that I was to follow for most of my school life.
I didn’t see the point of studying if Mammy could die and leave me so easily and abandon me, on my own, to cope with Daddy’s brutality. It all seemed a complete waste of time. So I shut down.
When other children struggled to master their ABC, I simply sat there looking at the pictures, and when it came to writing things down I covered the paper with scribble.
What my teachers thought about me didn’t concern me. Not that they seemed to be worried by my lack of effort. As long as I was quiet and didn’t disrupt the class, as some children did, they were apparently happy to let me scribble away.
The first year was not important anyway, I heard some of them say. Plenty of time later on for me to learn to read and write. Not one person, at school or at home, appeared in the slightest bit concerned that I was well on my way to becoming the class dunce. Least of all me. I had far more important things to worry about.
The second time I returned home from school and found the shop closed and Mammy upstairs asleep in an armchair, it was much more frightening. From the moment I discovered that the shop door was locked and saw the closed sign in the window, things that had never worried me in the past, I immediately started to picture the scene upstairs. Would I find her like she was before, and would she be alive or dead this time?
By the time I had run round to the back door and was inside, by the bottom of the stairs, I was almost too frightened to go up, in case my worst suspicions turned out to be correct.
Eventually, I managed to overcome my fears and crept up the stairs, until my eyes were level with the landing and I could look along into the living room.
When I first saw her sitting in the armchair everything looked perfectly normal, the way I had found her asleep dozens of times before at this stage of the day.
But, as I walked along the landing and got closer to her, I could see that there was something very odd, unnatural, about the way she was sitting. Her legs were awkwardly splayed outwards and one of her arms, as before, was over the edge of the chair and just dangling.
My heart began hammering away inside my chest and my breath seemed to catch as I sucked in air. Suddenly, I was terrified that she might be already dead.
It was a big effort to make my legs carry me on towards her and, even when I was very close, and could see and hear her breathing, it wasn’t much better. My teeth were rattling with fear. I had already dropped my school bag, and now I grabbed her by the shoulder with both hands and began to shake her as hard as I could.
I shouted, ‘Wake up, Mammy. Wake up. Please wake up.’
But she just sat there, her head lolling backwards and forwards and sideways as I shook her, and her eyes remained tightly closed.
I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t take her to hospital myself and I knew that, if I went to fetch a neighbour to help, Daddy would be angry. He wouldn’t like it at all. Even though it was he who had told a neighbour about the last time Mammy had taken too many pills, I also remembered that he had shouted at her and slapped her for talking to them about our private family affairs.
On the other hand, I couldn’t just do nothing and let Mammy die, and I realised that she did need to go to hospital – and quickly. It was a terrible dilemma to be in, and at five I had never been faced with that kind of big decision before.
Just to be doing something, I went to the kitchen and soaked a tea towel under the cold tap and took it back to the living room and bathed her face. But she didn’t budge. And now her breathing sounded worse. It was slower, but louder, a kind of hoarse sound as though she was fighting for breath.
I kept on shaking her and shouting in her ear for her to wake up, and finally I was on the point of going to seek help from a neighbour when I heard Daddy come in downstairs.
I didn’t wait for him to come up, but ran over to the top of the stairs and shouted down to him. ‘She’s done it again. Mammy won’t wake up. She’s dying. Please come and stop her dying, Daddy. Will you, please?’
He ran up the stairs and dashed straight over to where Mammy was sitting – as she had been for what seemed to me like an age. This time he didn’t waste any time but bent down and hauled her up on to his shoulder and carried her, not to the stairs as I had expected, but to the kitchen.
He told me to drag an ordinary chair close to the sink and dumped Mammy down on it, on her bottom, and turned her slightly sideways so that her head was towards the sink.
After making sure she was balanced properly and wasn’t going to topple over on to the floor, he went to one of the low cupboards and pulled out a large jug. He filled this with cold water and then poured in half a packet of table salt, which he stirred in with a wooden spoon.
‘They used a stomach pump at the hospital, but this should have the same effect if we can get it down her,’ he said.
He tilted back her head and held her nose until her mouth opened and poured in some of the mixture. Mammy looked so helpless and pathetic, more like a broken toy than a person. Until then, she hadn’t reacted at all to anything we had done.
Some of the liquid ran down her chin and on to her dress
, but some of it must have gone down her throat because she started to choke. Daddy put her head over the sink and began slapping her on the back. She made coughing noises but nothing much else happened. So he repeated the whole thing, pouring more of the salt solution down her throat until she sort of convulsed and a whole torrent of stuff burst out of her mouth and all over the sink and on to the window sill behind.
It made me feel sick just to watch it, but, as soon as she stopped heaving, Daddy lifted her head back and gave her another huge dose of salt water.
She was violently sick again, and so it went on, with Daddy repeating the process until Mammy was only bringing up water. Only then did he give her a drink of clear water. And this she managed to keep down.
‘That should have got all the shit out of her stomach,’ said Daddy. ‘Now, if we can get her moving for a while, we’ll be able to let her sleep it off. Apart from that, there’s not much more that we, or anyone else, can do for her now. But, if we got it out of her in time, she should be all right.’
‘Does that mean she’s not going to die?’ I asked him through my sobs, because I had been crying ever since he came home.
‘I don’t think she will,’ said Daddy. ‘But God knows what she’s done to her brain, taking all those pills. Until she wakes up, we’re not going to know for certain.’
It didn’t sound all that hopeful to me but I had to trust Daddy to know what he was doing. And, even with everything else going on, I was thinking that this was about the longest talk I had ever had with Daddy without him hitting me.
‘Let’s try and get her walking,’ he said.
He placed her right arm around his neck and put his left arm around her waist and hauled her to her feet, supporting her weight against his hip. The first time he tried to set her on her feet, her legs buckled under her, but he hung on and kept her upright and then half-carried her, half-dragged her around the living room until she eventually began to move her legs herself and tried to support her own weight.
It must have been hard for Daddy, strong as he was, but he kept on circling the room with her until she was walking almost normally. Then he guided her into the bedroom and lowered her gently on to the bed. He lifted up her feet and straightened her and she immediately rolled over on to her side, tucked her knees up and her elbows close to her chest and fell asleep.
‘Now it’s up to nature to take its course,’ Daddy told me. ‘Go and see what you can find to eat downstairs and then you’d better get to bed.’
I could scarcely believe it: Daddy thinking about me eating and getting me to go to bed. I ran downstairs and found part of a loaf of bread, a piece of cheese and some tomatoes and took them upstairs, where Daddy made us sandwiches.
We sat and ate them in front of the television watching a quiz show, though I was far too excited to pay much attention. Sitting and eating with Daddy was a completely new experience. I almost forgot that Mammy might still be dying in the bedroom. It had been a day of big surprises all round.
Next morning, Mammy was up before I went to school, looking very white and sickly and not saying very much.
‘I’m sorry, Michael,’ she told me. ‘Sorry you had to go through all that again.’
But she didn’t appear to be very happy to be alive. Certainly not happy enough to stop her trying to kill herself again. And again.
For over the next few months the upstairs drama was to become an almost regular feature of our family life. Usually, Daddy was able to cope, and when I found her unconscious I waited for him to come home.
On one other occasion, though, he wasn’t able to make her vomit up the pills and had to take her to hospital to have her stomach pumped out. At other times, he managed to cope alone by giving her the salt-water treatment.
Before my seventh birthday, Mammy was to try an amazing total of nine times to kill herself by overdosing with pills.
I don’t know why the doctors kept giving them to her, or perhaps Daddy wasn’t telling them or she was buying other pills from the chemist, but she didn’t succeed in killing herself. What she did do was become more and more unhappy and depressed.
Chapter Eight
Mammy’s repeated attempts at suicide provided irresistible ammunition for the kids at St Brigid’s, who, with typical childish malevolence, nicknamed her ‘Suicide Lil’. Sometimes a group of these tormentors would surround me in the playground chanting things like, ‘Old Suicide Lil, she keeps taking the pill.’
At that age, I’m not sure if they understood what it was they were saying, but that didn’t make my distress any easier to endure. It was so easy for teachers and other adults to say, ‘Words can’t hurt you’, but I can only assume that, as five-year-olds, they had never experienced the misery of their mother’s repeated attempts to kill herself and then been forced to suffer their classmates’ persecution over it.
It didn’t take much of this torture for me to start hating the other kids at school, and what few friendships I had formed by that age quickly fizzled out under the daily verbal onslaught in the playground and classroom. I wasn’t a coward by any means, but I knew I couldn’t fight them all. So I took the only way out open to me. I became a loner.
I stopped talking to my classmates or trying to join in their games. I became an outcast by choice, although, in truth, few of them wanted my company anyway. It was a role I was to perfect during the remainder of my wretched childhood.
I think I could have coped better had some of the boys chosen to physically attack me. I didn’t look for pain, but I had learned to handle far worse beatings than any of my classmates could have handed out. It was the verbal bullying that was so wounding. Yet I was determined I would never give my tormentors the satisfaction of seeing me cry. I did most of my crying when I was alone.
One evening, after a particularly hurtful day at school, I was so upset I stupidly mentioned it to Daddy. I should have had more sense and known from past experience that he would be far from sympathetic.
He immediately turned on me, his eyes starting from his head. ‘You’re such a spineless wimp,’ he snarled. ‘You should stand up to them. Not come snivelling home like a bloody girl. You’re useless. Not worth a bloody damn. No real son of mine would act like that. But then it’s probably your fault your mother is trying to kill herself in the first place. It certainly isn’t mine.’
I gasped out loud. Daddy had said a lot of awful things to me in the past, but this was the nastiest thing ever.
‘If it wasn’t for you coming into our lives. things would never have got this bad,’ he said harshly.
I began to cry. I couldn’t help it. Could Daddy be right? Was I really the reason Mammy was trying to kill herself? I turned to where she was sitting, on the sofa as usual, hoping she would deny what Daddy had said. But it was one of her switched-off times. Her eyes were open and I knew she was awake but she appeared to be taking no notice of anything going on around her.
‘What a bloody useless pair,’ Daddy snarled. ‘A clapped-out tart and a stupid little bastard.’
Then Mammy spoke. That in itself was amazing, because in that state she rarely said a word. But more amazing to me was what she said.
‘Don’t upset your father any more, Michael. You’ll only make him angry and then you know what will happen.’
Daddy laughed out loud, a nasty mocking sound, and he slapped me hard across the face. ‘See what I mean,’ he crowed. ‘Your mother knows it’s your fault as well.’And he hit me again across the other side of my face, knocking me off my chair.
I was in total shock. Not from the slaps, which I was used to, but from what Mammy had said. Surely she didn’t really blame me for all our troubles. It wasn’t me who was making her try to kill herself. I desperately needed her to tell me I was wrong, but she just sat there, silent, back in her zombie state.
‘It’s not my fault,’ I screamed at Daddy. ‘It’s not.’
His answer was to kick me in the side, the casual way he might have kicked aside a piece of old ru
bbish. It knocked the wind out of me and I felt quite dizzy for a few moments, though instinct and experience made me curl into a ball in case there was more to come.
‘You’re useless,’ he shouted. ‘A complete waste of space,’ and he kicked me again, this time on my thigh.
I screamed and my sobs became even louder. I could feel the tears washing down the side of my face and on to the floor. The pain in my side was getting worse all the time and I thought that, if Daddy kicked me there again, I would probably die.
But he had apparently tired of the sport of treating me like a football and, after a last half-hearted kick to my bottom, he stomped downstairs and took off.
I lay on the floor for ages and, when I eventually tried to sit up, there was a deep stab of pain from my side, which made me gasp out loud. I lifted my shirt and saw that the area around where he had kicked me was already turning bluey-purple and I knew it would turn into a massive bruise. As so often, it was not in a place where anyone would see it.
Eventually, I managed to get back on my chair at the little table and I rested my head on my arms. On the sofa, Mammy kept staring at nothing.
I had never felt so utterly lonely in my life. I couldn’t think of anyone in the whole world who was likely to offer me so much as a kind word – except perhaps my Nanny Ramsden, and we hadn’t been to see her for more than a year.
If anyone had to die, I thought, it ought to be Daddy, and I sat there wishing with all my being that he would die that night. Right then. Wherever he was. That he would never come home again.
But at that moment I heard his steps on the stairs and was suddenly terrified. What if he had somehow felt what I was wishing and had come back to punish me. It was very unusual for him to come back after he had handed out a beating and left the house.
I would have dived to hide behind the sofa but my side was still hurting too badly for me to move that quickly. So I kept my head on my arms and closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep.
Nobody's Child Page 5
