Who Needs Flowers When They're Dead

by George Lincoln

  The boy continued to excel in most subjects, especially English and French. He didn’t really have to try very hard to do well, he thought; it was all quite easy. He wasn’t really part of any one particular social group. He preferred to straddle the divide and got along fairly well with the nerds, the metal-heads, the boys on the football team, the popular girls, the less-popular girls. He didn’t really feel part of any one group but he preferred it that way. The highlight of the school year was always the annual day trip to Alton Towers, where the boy remembers some frantic fingering taking place on the coach. Her name was Kate, but after taking four of the boy’s fingers inside her, she was forever known as KitKat thereafter.

  Children can be cruel.

  Nine GCSEs achieved without too much effort, slightly less impressive than he had hoped, but the boy went on to college to study his A-levels, having breezed through school without ever really applying himself. During one particular lesson when asked a question by the teacher, the boy thought if he stayed very still, the teacher might not notice that his left hand was currently stroking the labia majora of the lucky girl sitting next to him.

  ‘You won’t find the answer down there, boy.’ His plan was foiled by a rather observant business studies teacher.

  His grandmother died when he was sixteen. Unbeknown to the boy, she had been living on borrowed time for ten years after a previous heart attack, but nobody ever told the boy this. She died suddenly aged sixty-three which the boy would come to realise was no age to go.

  She was a formidable woman in every sense of the word. Always in control of everybody and everything. Always looked out for the boy, always keen for him to do well at school and make something of himself. Always gave his dad a hard time for leaving the boy alone so often, not that he ever listened.

  When she died, the boy lost the only person he thought really understood him. His grandfather always wanted the best for him but was prone to seeing only what he wanted to see and ignoring what he didn’t. She wasn’t like everybody else. She didn’t always tell him that he should be nice to his brother or speak to his mother again. She let him be, let him grow into his own person with his own reasons for not wanting to do certain things.

  When Karin got pregnant, his grandmother was furious, telling his dad that he should be focussing on the children he already had and not starting a new family with somebody else. He didn’t listen.

  Everything changed. As the dominant matriarch of the family, his grandmother had held the family together in a way only women of that Blitz generation could. His grandfather was forever broken after she passed. His dad looked for something new to replace the mother he lost and found it with a new baby and a new family elsewhere.

  Then his brother came back. Not content with having kicked one son out of her home a few years earlier, his mother now sent his younger brother back down the A1 in similar circumstances. Unable to settle at school. Turning increasingly violent at home towards her. Excluded from every school he ever set foot in, the younger sibling was out of control.

  And now he was his dad’s problem, his mother said.

  To be fair, she had a point. His dad had spent the last two years sending letter after letter to his younger son saying he ‘belonged in Yorkshire’ and he would make sure he came back one day. Hardly words likely to help to settle an angry, confused teenager seething with rage at the entire world.

  His dad had to be at home a lot more often now. This was unbearable for both him and the boy. They had grown apart and weren’t used to being around each other so often. Like in a marriage of convenience where each party spends the minimal amount of time in each other’s company as possible. Add into the mix a younger sibling who was either at home stealing anything not nailed down or out selling said items for drugs, the environment was completely toxic.

  The boy’s Sega Mega Drive, gone.

  The boy’s Sunburst Stratocaster-copy guitar, gone.

  The boy’s Honda scooter, gone.

  The boy wondered why it was so important for his dad to be around now for his brother, but it hadn’t seemed important when he was that age. Nobody ever answered that question for him.

  His dad did not possess the parenting skills required to handle his brother. Nobody did. The boy witnessed some savage beatings. The horrible aura of violence and anger hung in the air constantly. The boy needed a way out, desperately.

  There is something about witnessing a child being beaten that stays with you, forever.

  The college provided a free counselling service. The boy wasn’t afraid to seek help from strangers; it was family he shunned. Thus began a three-year relationship with anti-depressants that eventually took the boy away to another continent, as far away from home as he could possibly go. It would scupper any future hopes he had of joining the military and later leave him seeking the next best thing.

  When you start taking anti-depressants, you hope it will just be a temporary fix. You search deep within yourself for the wherewithal to deal with things without chemical help. But for the boy, the search had yielded no results and time was running out. He needed to get through the next two years to get his A-levels, to go to university. Thanks to the sage advice of some good teachers, that was his way out. He didn’t care about his brother. He just wanted to get out.

  Two years passed. The longest two years of the boy’s life. New siblings had arrived, one for each parent. One each to prove to the other how they’d moved on. A new perfect family for them both to start again. The boy never lived with either, never asked for either to exist. One sibling had already brought him enough hassle; he didn’t need any more. In a rare conversation with his dad that didn’t involve his brother in some way, the boy one day said:

  ‘If I don’t get the results I need for university, I’ll probably kill myself.’

  Not an easy thing for a parent to hear. He meant every word. The medication had helped balance things out, but that was always with the hope of light at the end of the tunnel, an escape route. If that was taken away, the walls would come crashing in around him, the boy thought. He’d visited all the universities he’d applied to by himself. His parents had no interest in such things. They were too interested in their new families.

  The day arrived. The boy held the envelope nervously in his hand. So much pressure on this moment. He got the results he needed. He was finally leaving it all behind, on his terms. He sold what belongings his brother hadn’t already taken and packed his clothes. No black bin-bags this time. The boy had no intention of coming home during the holidays; he had made sure he had accommodation for the full year. There was nothing to come back for.

  One last visit to see his mother. Perhaps they could reconcile before he left. They’d had a few tentative visits the past year but nothing had been resolved. The resentment still burned inside the boy like a fire, and his mother remained unrepentant. One last chance.

  ‘I don’t think you should go to university. You should stay here with me if you don’t like being at your dad’s any more,’ his mother said, much to the boy’s surprise.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, Mike said he doesn’t want to be with me anymore so I’m by myself now. I need someone to help me look after the baby.’

  The baby she chose to have aged forty-three. The baby she chose to have with a fucking waste of space like Mike, his unwillingness for any meaningful commitment never hidden from anybody with half a brain in their head. More responsibility that the boy never asked for. No fucking way.

  ‘Good bye, Mum.’

  CHAPTER 17

  There is something about seeing a dead baby that stays with you, forever.

  Lying prostrate on the cold, grey hospital slab. All hope lost. No tubes or machines connected to the baby’s organs any more. Life pronounced extinct. Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) – commonly known as ‘cot death’ – is the sudden, unexpected and unexplained death of an apparently healthy baby. In the UK, more than two hundred babies die suddenly and unexpectedly
every year. Most deaths happen during the first six months of a baby's life. Infants born prematurely or with a low birthweight are at greater risk. SIDS also tends to be slightly more common in baby boys. SIDS usually occurs when a baby is asleep, although it can occasionally happen while they’re awake. The exact cause of SIDS is unknown, but it’s thought to be down to a combination of factors. Any unexplained death requires police investigation, the death of a defenceless infant especially. The occurrence of SIDS is thankfully rare, the sort of case a police officer might deal with once or maybe twice in their entire career.

  The Ferreira family had travelled to London from Brazil. Not from any of the well-known cities, the family hailed from an obscure, remote part of the Amazon rainforest. They were essentially tribespeople on holiday. The mother still a child herself, aged sixteen. The young father and both his parents, they had all made the arduous ten-hour journey from the rainforest by bus and then onto the twelve-hour flight to London with three-week-old baby Felipe. They came to visit another relative living in London. They were barely off the plane and through immigration control before the baby started having breathing problems. They made it to the place they were staying in south London for the night but, tragically, Felipe did not make it through to the morning. Felipe died before the ambulance arrived; there was nothing the medical team could do.

  When a baby dies in such unexplained circumstances, there are protocols and procedures to follow. Everything that has passed through the baby for the past twenty-four hours needs to be analysed, which means all baby formula and used nappies have to be gathered. The bedding the child last slept on is seized as a police exhibit, along with the clothing they wore and any toys or dummies that might have been ingested. Readings are taken of the baby’s room temperature, all to establish that a safe environment had been provided prior to the baby’s death.

  In short, everything that the family have of their deceased infant is taken away from them at the most agonising time of their life.

  David had never been so close to this level of pain and suffering before. The parents, absolutely inconsolable as you might expect. To add to the distress, none of the family spoke English, so an interpreter was thrust into the middle of that horrific situation to establish facts, a timeline, any signs the baby was unwell prior to being put to bed. David felt as sorry for the interpreter as he did for the family involved. At last, some humanity stirred within him. Some feeling awakened. When he got home later that evening, sometime in the middle of the night, he drowned himself in brandy. Anything to numb his sadness, to block out the image of the baby on the slab.

  David had never been one to open up about his feelings. Allowing somebody in had always ended with him being very badly let down in the past, so David’s defences were permanently up. Some mistook this for hostility, and this misperception then became a permanent barrier to good relationships. David figured he didn’t owe anybody any explanation. That’s just the way he was, and they had to accept it. Dealing with SIDS was an opportunity for David to show a softer side to his colleagues, to show that he did care and that he did not completely lack compassion. But these are not emotions and behaviours that can just be switched on. After years of having his defences up, David didn’t even know how to lower the drawbridge any more.

  ‘How are you feeling after yesterday, David,’ one of his colleagues, Rachel, politely enquired.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘We’ve all been through it. If you need to talk about it to anybody, we’re all here,’ she continued.

  Rachel was being genuinely supportive and able to rise above the machismo of most of the fascisti. However, this was certainly not a line of questioning David was comfortable with and he prayed she would soon stop. He kept his responses short.

  ‘I’m okay, thanks.’

  It’s not that he didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t know how. Every year officers in the department were required to attend a psychological health screening. It was completely confidential but everybody understood the game. It was a classic Catch 22. Go in there and tell them you’re feeling manically depressed about a SIDS case and you’d be back in uniform walking the beat before the door closed behind you. The Met had crafted yet another system whereby the consequences of complaining were less desirable than the status quo. So, you go in there and say everything is fine. Then you go home and hit the self-destruct button. Alcoholism and divorce featured very highly across the department. There were a lot of fathers who only saw their kids at weekends due to the toll the job had taken on their marriage.

  David didn’t have children. He figured there was already enough sadness in the world.

  It was eventually established that there were no suspicious circumstances to baby Felipe’s death. The incredibly long journey probably hadn’t done him much good. Maybe he picked up some sort of infection along the way through the change in climate and atmospheric pressure. It was difficult to say for sure.

  But David felt uncomfortable with what he had seen. Would you expect a parent to put their three-week-old baby through that journey? Perhaps it was a stretch to say they were deliberately negligent but, in David’s mind, they were fucking stupid.

  It was a terrible, unspeakable tragedy for the Ferreira family and a rare heartening experience for David that he could still feel something. But nothing made sense any more. For years David had survived on his wits with his defences firmly in place, feeling very little and therefore being affected by very little in return. He began to question if exposure to such immense sadness was beginning to affect him. Or was it his drinking habit, which was threatening to spiral out of control at any time. Amazing how the mind clouds judgement with the fog of alcohol.

  He looked around for answers and found some comfort in the Bible. He had always found the notion of religion fascinating. The power of a set of ideas to compel thousands of people to behave in a certain way, to feel something with every fibre of their being and to hate something with equal zeal. Religion hadn’t been talked about much at home, but the same applied to most topics beyond the football results and Coronation Street.

  He couldn’t blame his parents for this path along which he was about to embark. This was his alone. David took solace in the words he found, words written centuries ago yet seemingly so apt for the way he felt about the world.

  ‘Do give heed to me, O LORD, And listen to what my opponents are saying! Should good be repaid with evil? For they have dug a pit for me. Remember how I stood before You To speak good on their behalf, So as to turn away Your wrath from them. Therefore, give their children over to famine And deliver them up to the power of the sword; And let their wives become childless and widowed. Let their men also be smitten to death, Their young men struck down by the sword in battle. May an outcry be heard from their houses, When You suddenly bring raiders upon them; For they have dug a pit to capture me And hidden snares for my feet. Yet You, O LORD, know All their deadly designs against me; Do not forgive their iniquity Or blot out their sin from Your sight. But may they be overthrown before You; Deal with them in the time of Your anger!’ (Jeremiah 18:19-23)

  CHAPTER 18

  The boy wasn’t the first in his family to go to university; his older cousin had just pipped him to that honour by a couple of years. But there was no long history of academic success in the family to put any kind of pressure on the boy. His parents certainly had no real expectations for him, so he was at last able to just enjoy something for himself, away from everything he had fought so hard to distance himself from. For the first time he encountered middle-class children who had not been given any choice about whether they were going to university or not, the matter was simply not up for discussion in their household. The boy felt sorry for these young people, trapped by their parents’ expectations and desire to keep up appearances at the golf club. In the first term he saw so many of these kids drop out, unable to cope away from home.

  How weak, the boy thought to himself.

  What the boy hadn�
��t counted on was the hold anti-depressants had on his body by that stage. When he felt better away from all the problems of the past, he promptly stopped taking them. Which was a huge mistake, of course. As any doctor will advise, the dosage needs to be reduced gradually over time to ensure no relapse or sudden ‘crash’, which is exactly what happened to the boy. He was devastated to be so dependent on something, crushed that his new-found emotional freedom was being curtailed. It was as though the past remained very much there with him in the present, like an old friend he couldn’t quite shake off. This life lesson was not lost on the boy.

  The boy enjoyed his first year, made friends easily as most students thrust together in squalor and alcohol tend to do. But he still needed the medication to keep him on an even keel. An opportunity came along for him to spend his second year away in Canada on exchange, an opportunity he wasn’t going to miss. Amazingly, by this age he hadn’t even been to London yet and now here he was about to go and live on a different continent. A family holiday to Spain aside, he’d barely even been abroad. This was all due to his family holding him back, the boy told himself. Now that he was in control of his own destiny, he wouldn’t be held back by anybody or anything.

  As he packed his bag, he decided not to take the last of the anti-depressants away with him. His dosage had been gradually reduced over the past year, and the boy decided it was time to sink or swim on his own.

  In Canada he settled in quickly and made friends easily. He shared an apartment with a Chinese-Canadian guy named Jon, who would become one of his closest friends. Jon was about five years older and so a little wiser. He seemed to feel sorry for the nervy, skinny English boy and took him under his wing.