Homecoming

by Kent, Jonathan

  But this time when he fell unconscious, this time Dave ‘went’.

  Chapter 7

  For the next two years David’s beatings continued. Many times he considered running away, but the one thing that kept him from making his escape; was his mother. He feared for her. Whatever overtook his father every month also affected her, but nowhere near as badly and not in the same way. Some months she would be away with the fairies for a few days, but sometimes she seemed hardly affected at all. On these occasions (which became more and more frequent as the years went on) his mother would also get the unwanted attention of his father. Dave never saw his father hitting her, but he would see the black eyes or the bruises the next day. Though she never said so, she knew Dave noticed them and would often change the subject or cover them up when she caught him looking.

  So he couldn’t leave. Without Dave to take on the brunt of the assaults, God knew what his father would do to his mother. They still loved each other he was sure of that. In the good weeks that came before the change he would often hear them laughing downstairs, or making love in their bedroom. Doing normal things that normal parents do together. Then the ‘turn’ would come and an unbearable weight would settle on the house. Dave knew it wasn’t right. He had done a good job at hiding his bruises at school and had become a bit of a recluse. His schoolwork wasn’t suffering, in fact he would go on to achieve some fine grades in his final exams. But any friends he had before Katy’s death had gradually distanced themselves from him. He liked it better that way. It stopped him having to answer any awkward questions and limit the chances of something being discovered that could be reported.

  One hot day in the spring of 1983, when Dave was eleven (nearly nine months after Katy’s death), he tried to talk to his mother. The last ‘turn’ had been a relatively soft one for David. He had received nothing more than a few days of sarcastic put downs from his father, so he had made himself scarce. His mother, on the other hand, had obviously felt the full force. A week after the beating, her left eye was still only opening half way and there was a nasty yellow/green bruise taking up most of her cheekbone. For the sake of his own sanity, he knew he had to say something, but he wasn’t sure what answers he would get. In fact he wasn’t sure what version of his mother he would get.

  As was usual after a ‘turn’, his father had left early for work and his mother was making good use of the early morning sun to do some gardening. She loved her garden, took great pride in it in fact, and as the years went on he would get used to seeing her out here more and more. He approached her across the lawn, not sure how it would go.

  ‘Mum………..erm. Can we talk?’ She was on her knees weeding her rockery. She lifted her head to face him and tried on a cheery smile. The sun glinted off the yellowing bruise and Dave winced.

  Of course Dave, what is it? the smile said in a fake cheery way. But the eyes didn’t. The eyes told him everything. Somehow she had aged almost ten years in the last few months. Huge dark rings circled her reddened eyes and she had a weary pallid look to her. Dave’s heart sank.

  Oh god! He thought. What’s he done to her? What’s he done to my mum!

  ‘I know Dave,’ she said simply. ‘I know.’ She let out a long sigh, put down her tools and made to stand up. There was a loud audible ‘pop’ as one of her knees clicked back into place and as she stretched to stand, she winced. Dave moved to help her.

  ‘I’m not old Dave,’ she said. ‘Just a little stiff from kneeling. That’s all.’ They both knew this was a lie, but that was OK.

  ‘Let’s sit,’ she said, and motioned to an old bench that ran along the rear of the house. In the height of summer this little area became a terrific sun trap, and although it was still early spring, you could already feel the heat. A couple of Sparrows fluttered around the bird table, fighting over some toast scraps his mother had put out that morning, and the air was busy with Bees.

  ‘I like it here,’ she said, closed her eyes and turned her face up towards the sun. ‘If you get to choose what version of heaven you get when you die, something like this would do.’ She chuckled, and turned to face Dave. ‘But I guess you don’t really get to choose though do you?’

  Dave couldn’t remember the last time he had really had any form of conversation with his mother, perhaps not since the night in his bedroom. Her last thought had left him cold, but at least it was her. Not some far away distant version of her. Just her.

  ‘What’s going on mom?’ he said. ‘Is this normal? Because if it is, I’m not sure I can take much more of it.’ The last words were blurted out in a kind of rushed panic.

  For a few minutes, maybe three, she didn’t speak. She just sat there, hands neatly folded in her lap, her face still tilted up basking in the sun. He thought he’d screwed it up, thought that he’d gone in too hard, rather than gently ease the conversation around to the subject.

  That’s it. I’ve blown it, he thought. She’s not gonna talk now.

  But she did talk. Slowly at first and then more rapidly as the memories came to her. She spoke in a kind conversational tone that Dave had never heard before. Not frightened or scared, and definitely not the kind of tone you expect from a woman who had just had six bales of shit knocked out of her the previous week. No, this tone was gentle, calm and almost reserved to the fact that she had seen this all before.

  ‘I’ve never really told you about your grandad, have I?’ She asked

  ‘No, not really,’ he said. His grandad ‘Pop’ had died about a year ago; a few months before Katy had been killed. Visits to his mother’s parents were very few and far between and when they did go, his overriding memory of his grandad was a grumpy old man that kept himself on the very fringes of any conversation.

  ‘Pop had a temper, a real nasty temper,’ she said. ‘Fine one day, and then it felt like a storm cloud had settled over the house and you knew, you just knew what was coming.’ She trailed off, thinking of what to say next.

  ‘There were five of us that lived in the old place. Mom, Pop, me, Sally and Andrea; your Aunts.’ Dave nodded, he had met his mother's two sisters on a few occasions, mainly at Christenings and Weddings and most recently at Katy’s funeral.

  ‘Mom did her best to hide us from him when it got bad, but you know something's she couldn’t hide.’ Dave glanced at her cheek and understood.

  No, something’s you can’t hide from the kids, he thought. Can you.

  ‘Sometimes it would be obvious. Black eyes, bruises on her arms, thumb prints on her neck. Stuff she couldn’t hide. But sometimes – and these were the worst – you couldn’t see anything. It was just there in the way she winced when she got up from a chair or wore long sleeved jumpers in the height of summer. Some days she would just stay in her bedroom and we wouldn’t see her for days. You’d go up and knock to see if she was alright, and she would always say she was fine, don’t worry about me. But Dave, some days you would hear her sobbing for hours in there, really sobbing, and I felt………….useless. Do you understand?’

  He understood perfectly. Her father – his grandfather – was a nasty piece of work with an even nastier temper. Probably not bright enough to talk with his mouth so he did the talking with his fists.

  ‘And the thing is,’ she continued, ‘There was no reason for it. Mom was the kindest, gentlest woman you could ever meet. She doted on him. Dinner always ready on time when he came home from work. Shirts always ironed. You know, she did everything, and most of the time we had a normal life. We went for nice days out. Never wanted for much, but when those days came – and believe me Dave, we knew when they were coming – when they came there was not a single thing we could do about it. It just had to come.’ She trailed off, her face flushing with a bitterness Dave had never seen before. He took her hand, it felt cold like ice.

  ‘And then he turned on us,’ this time there was emotion in the voice, the words sticking in the back of her throat. ‘Not straight away Davey and not all of us at the same time, but there was definitely a time,
I suppose when Andrea was about twelve and I was about your age. He seemed to get bored with Mum and turned on us. Andrea had her own room – being the oldest – and Sally and I shared the smaller room above the stairs. There was one night I can clearly remember. Like it was only yesterday. Pop was working late, which was a clear sign things were going to, you know……..turn ugly. He came home when Sally and I were in bed, we heard Mum and Pop shouting downstairs and then Pop was running up the stairs and slamming Andrea’s bedroom door open.’ She stopped there tears welling at the memory.

  ‘What Mum? What did he do?’ Dave asked.

  She turned to look at him, tears now streaming down her face. ‘He belted her,’ she said. ‘He took off his belt and belted her.’

  Dave’s eyes widened at this. The Stutters' weapon of choice it would seem.

  ‘I got into bed with Sally, and for God knows how long we lay there listening to him whip her. Andrea screaming over and over for him to stop, and asking what have I done? What have I done? But all the time he was beating her, he uttered not one word. Not one word Davey can you imagine it! Dragging your twelve year old daughter out of her bed and beating on her, whilst all the time not uttering a single word……….god I hated him. I was ten years old and I hated everything about him.’

  ‘Did he ever…..’

  ‘What start on me? Oh yes my turn definitely came around. Probably a year or so after he started on Andrea, I think I’d used up too much hot water in the bath or something…………’ She trailed off again, and this time Dave felt sure she wasn’t going to speak any more, but she sighed and went on. ‘Yeah I got my first beating then. Not the belt though that first time – lucky ole me eh? No just your bog standard backhander across the face which left me a lovely shiner for a couple of weeks. Us Strutter women wear them well don’t you think?’ She grinned at this and squeezed his knee affectionately. But he saw great sadness in her eyes.

  ‘God mum,’ he said. ‘Why did you put up with it? Why didn’t Grandma just take you all away? You know, leave him.’

  ‘Would have been easier wouldn’t it?’ She smiled to herself absently. ‘The four of us just pack our bags and slip off in the middle of the night never to be seen again. Yeah I suppose nowadays that would be much more possible. But back then it just wasn’t the done thing. A woman’s place is by her husband’s side for better or for worse etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, yada, yada, yada, and we couldn’t go without mum now could we?’ There was bitterness to this but also something else, something he felt she was holding back.

  ‘No, we all stayed, and we all coped. And your grandma taught us how.’ She stood up with a swiftness Dave didn’t think was possible considering the way her joints had popped earlier. ‘Fancy a drink? I’m as dry as a bone,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah. Ok. Cool,’ he said and followed her into the kitchen. He had about a thousand questions for her. Chiefly what the hell this had to do with his father. Yeah, sure it must have been hell for all of them to live with such a Jekyll and Hyde character that seemed to take pleasure in battering his family once a month. And yeah, Ok the similarities to their current situation were frighteningly close. But where was this going? And how exactly did his grandma teach his mother and her two sisters how to cope with such domestic abuse?

  Chapter 8

  The kitchen felt icy cold compared to the heat trap of the garden, and Dave welcomed the cool air on his skin. His eyes took a moment to adjust from the glare of the outside to the seemingly gloomy kitchen. His mother poured two tall glasses of Schweppes Lemonade and added three or four ice cubes from the top of the freezer to each. The taste was sweet and cool and just right.

  ‘Come upstairs Davey, I want to show you something,’ she turned from the kitchen and headed up the stairs. Her previous calm, almost monotone nature had been replaced with an excitedness that Dave hadn’t seen before. She virtually ran up the stairs like a little school girl. He was barely on the first stair when he heard her pulling something heavy from a cupboard in her bedroom.

  His parents’ bedroom was at the front of the house, and so wasn’t getting any of the late morning sunshine. The curtains were only partly drawn and the room had a shadowy feel to it that felt a little creepy. There was a line of overhead cupboards that ran above his parents’ bed at the headboard end which, Dave supposed, were being held up by the two single thin wardrobes on either side. It was one of these overhead cabinets that his mother had opened and was pulling an old, battered cardboard box from.

  ‘Help me with this would you David?’ she said and slid the box out further. He took hold of one end and together they lowered it onto the bed.

  ‘What you keeping in here mum? Gold!’ He joked. Feeding off her high spirits.

  ‘Not gold Davey. Something much more valuable, something more...powerful.’

  To Dave the box didn’t look like it was full of power. To Dave the box was full of old photos and letters. The odd drawing here – probably a child’s – and the odd ticket stub there. No, to Dave the box looked like the sort of box you would probably find in every household in the country. A keepsake box. Full of memories yes, and the one thing you really couldn’t replace if the house burnt to the ground. But nothing more. No power. No magical answer to their problems. Although he kept that high spirited smile on his face, deep down his heart sank. What the hell could be in here that could be of any use to them?

  What the hell mum, he thought.

  ‘You asked me why we didn’t just up and leave your grandfather, and yeah I suppose in those days it wasn’t the done thing. It would definitely have been frowned upon by our neighbours.’ She highlighted this by making mini speech marks in the air. ‘But the thing is Davey, I can’t ever remember us being that close to our neighbours, we never had many visitors. What relatives we did have we saw very rarely. No, if your grandma really wanted to just take off with the three of us – she could have quite easily and nobody would have batted an eyelid. But she didn’t, she felt it was her duty to stay and take it.’

  ‘Duty?’ Dave said. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It was Andrea who had it the worst,’ she continued, not responding to his question. ‘Yeah, he really took a shine to her. I mean Sally and I had our fair few beatings, but Andrea……………….it was almost like he saved the best for her. One day, a bit like today I suppose, a few days after Pop had given Andrea a real going over, your grandma called us all together. Sally and I were playing in the garden – it must have been a weekend I suppose. Pop wasn’t there, he, you know, made himself scarce for a while after.’

  Dave nodded; he knew exactly what she meant.

  ‘Andrea was sitting in the lounge on one of the big three seaters we had back then. Sally and I sat down either side of her. Her eyes were red from crying and there was a nasty sore at the side of her mouth which she kept dabbing with a hankie. Your grandma followed us in and sat on her knees on the floor in front of us. She looked at each of us in turn.

  ‘’Nothing I can say can take away what has been done to you three,” she said. “But I don’t think you father is an evil man.” I felt Andrea stiffen next to me but she didn’t speak. “The obvious thing to do – and I know this is what Andrea thinks – is to leave. To run away.” Andrea was nodding. “But that is not what we are going to do. Your father is sick. Very sick, and we four are the only ones that can help him.”

  “Why should we help him at all”? Andrea said. “Look what he’s done to me!”

  “I know Andrea, we have all been affected in some way or another, but believe me, running away is not an option.”

  I piped up then “But we can’t just keep putting up with this. He might kill one of us.”

  “I don’t think that will ever happen, but you’re right Lily. This is no life and this is not normal and we are not just going to let this happen.”

  “Are we going to kill him?” Asked Andrea

  “God no!” she said. “Whatever put a thought like that into your head! We are not murderer
s. I am going to teach you something that my mother – your grandma – taught me, and her mother before her and her mother before that. What I am going to teach you goes back generations. Probably as far back as our family tree can go.” She handed each of us a piece of paper and a crayon set I had never seen before. “I want you to think of the most magical place you can and I want you to draw it. Anywhere you want. Real or imaginary. It doesn’t have to be perfect. But it has to be special. Somewhere you feel safe. Somewhere you can imagine yourself hiding away when things get really bad.”

  ‘And so all that afternoon, whilst Pop was away god knows where, the three of us drew.’ She moved away some old photos and pulled out an old child’s drawing from the very bottom of the keepsake box.

  ‘This is mine.’ She handed it to Dave.

  The drawing, although obviously a child’s, was very detailed. It showed a thatched cottage surrounded by a pretty garden with an evergreen forest and mountain range for its background. He figured his mother must have used every colour in the crayon set drawing the garden as the flowers surrounding the cottage virtually leapt from the page. There was also a giant yellow sun in the top corner set within a vivid blue sky. It was good.

  ‘That’s great mum, really good, but what...'

  'Once we had all finished drawing, my mother asked for them back.’ She continued,

  oblivious to Dave’s interruption. 'She studied each of them in turn and then without asking whose picture was who's, she handed them back to us. I think she wanted to take a kind of mental snapshot of our pictures.’

  “Now girls,’ she said. 'I want you to look long and hard at your pictures, really take it in. Burn that picture into your mind, because what I am about to show you, could one day save your life.”

  She took the picture from Dave, folded it neatly and placed it back into the keepsake box.

  'Now comes the tricky bit,’ she said. From the box she brought out some blank paper and a packet of unopened colouring pencils. 'As you can see, I've been expecting this for a while, but it never really felt like the right time to show you.’