by Nicole Trope
The clinic sister recommended a group. Margaret went every week, taking Alice in her beautiful new pram. The women at the group had the same worries and fears she did. She recognised, in their faces, the same despairing defeat she felt at not being able to manage. She never said anything, not even ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to questions asked. Instead, she did what she did best. She listened, she collected stories. She became consumed by inside Margaret once more.
One woman, Lydia, also worried that she would hurt her son, Sam, without meaning to, and another, Sandra, checked the back seat of her car over and over again, convinced that she had forgotten her daughter, Mia, there. No one in the group was sleeping. They were all exhausted and tears were shed at every meeting. Each week Margaret returned home and understood that she was not alone and not a failure of a mother.
One night, Alice slept for four hours and then for five and then, eventually, the whole night through. ‘I’ll get up at night and check on her,’ Adam told Margaret sternly, ‘you just sleep.’
‘But what about work? You have to be able to work.’
‘I’ll be fine, you just get yourself right, my love. That’s all I want.’
The veil between her and the baby finally lifted when her daughter was six months old. Alice slept all the way through the night and Margaret woke up to the morning sun filtering through the curtains, her body rested and her mind calm. At first, she worried that something had happened to her child, and she leapt out of bed and dashed into the living room, where the cot and a change table were set up in the corner. But Alice was fine, lying on her back, playing with her tiny toes, and when she saw her mother, she smiled, her face lighting up with absolute love and devotion. For the first time, Margaret felt a tsunami of love for her child engulf her. ‘Hello, darling,’ she said, lifting the baby up, and Alice curled her chubby arms around her neck. ‘Ma-ma-ma-ma,’ she babbled.
And then life was almost blissful.
Margaret stayed home with the baby, finding the joy in her daughter that she had been missing, crooning at her and finding words she never knew she had in her. Alice didn’t judge, didn’t look at her like she was strange. She thought everything her mother said was gold. She loved outside Margaret.
‘I told you you’d be the best mother,’ Adam said, laughing as he watched his wife and daughter playing with bubbles in the bath.
‘You did,’ she agreed, amazed at how wonderful life could be. A life she never thought she would have the pleasure of experiencing.
‘What kind of a day did my girls have?’ Adam asked every night at the dinner table, and he and his father would look at Margaret and be content with what few words she could offer.
Mr Henkel helped them buy a small house, even though Margaret didn’t want to leave him alone in the flat. ‘I shall come for lunch every Sunday, Maggie dear. Children need a garden and, God willing, Alice will soon have a sister or a brother.’
Margaret felt as though she had been gifted the perfect life. She took Alice to the park every day after she’d cleaned their house, finding joy in making sure everything looked perfect. Whenever there was extra money, Adam said, ‘Why not choose something nice for the place?’ Margaret’s first purchase was beautiful blue curtains for the bedroom.
When Alice was three, Margaret and Adam began trying for another baby, but after two traumatic miscarriages Adam told Margaret that he thought they should stop. ‘I hate how upset you get, Maggie. It can’t be good for you, and little Alice takes it so badly. Maybe we were only meant to have one, eh? I think one is just the right number, just you and me and our girl. I couldn’t ask for more, and now we can give her everything and spoil her rotten.’
Despite all her heartache, Margaret had agreed easily enough. Alice would soon be ready for school, and Margaret was secretly terrified of finding herself locked back into the cycle of sleepless nights and anxious days.
Now Margaret remembers that time as short – sweetly perfect but so very short.
Not long after, Mr Henkel died suddenly and the debts had to be paid. ‘We’ll have to sell off everything. He really shouldn’t have given us that money. Maybe I should have worked in the shop, helped him to keep it up a bit better.’
‘But he was proud of you for going out on your own, he always said so,’ she soothed, grieving as much as he was because he had been her father as well.
‘You always know how to make me feel better, Maggie.’
Margaret mourned for months after Mr Henkel died. She thought she would never feel completely happy again. But her grief slowly faded, growing more manageable bit by bit, and she and Adam began to laugh as they told stories at dinner about Mr Henkel and his unique brand of customer service. ‘I know what you think you need, but let me tell you what you really need,’ he would say to people.
‘We’ll be all right, won’t we, Maggie?’ Adam would sometimes ask when sadness over his father clouded his eyes.
‘We’ll be fine,’ she reassured him. ‘We’ll be fine.’
Thirteen
Now
Alice
* * *
All through the day the memory of what I did keeps hurling itself at me, the smell of vinegar surrounding me, making it impossible to smell anything else. My tongue moves compulsively in and out of the gap in my mouth. At home I grab some fresh rosemary from a pot on the kitchen windowsill and crush it between my fingers, inhaling the lemony-pine scent, but as soon as I move my fingers away from my nose, the vinegar overwhelms me once more, making me gag.
My phone rings with a call from Natalia.
‘I’ve got five minutes and just wanted to invite you to dinner next month – the seventeenth. Does that work for you?’
‘Sure,’ I say, ‘fine.’ My voice is stilted and strange. I shouldn’t have answered.
‘Everything okay?’ she asks.
‘No… but…’ I cannot make the words come out. I let the silence stretch.
Natalia sighs. ‘You’ll call when you’re ready to talk.’ She knows me so well.
‘I’ll call,’ I say.
I go out into the garden, where the air is sharp in my lungs and the next-door neighbour’s dog barks and barks, but nothing seems to work.
Back inside, I try to lose myself in cyberspace, hoping for a comment from someone or a story not my own that I can read. I need the distraction. I don’t think I meant to put my experiences out there for the world to read. I don’t talk about what I went through with anyone except those closest to me. I never wanted to expose myself to the judgement from everyone with a computer or smartphone. I hadn’t meant to but the words seemed to write themselves. I thought my blog would be an online diary for me, read only by me when I needed to confirm for myself what I had been through but also how far I’ve come. It’s strange how comforting it is to see your life written down. There it is in black and white and no one can dispute it. After so many years of my mother doing that very thing, it was a relief. I hadn’t expected that one day there would be other people reading my story.
My first comment came from a young man.
* * *
‘I’m only seventeen,’ he wrote, ‘and I found your blog today. Yesterday I left home forever. I’m never going to let him touch me again. I’m never going to let him hurt me again. I hope that I can make a good life for myself the same way you have.’
* * *
I cried for hours over that message. And then I looked up some places where he could go for help and put the links on the blog. It’s a small thing, and of no importance to anyone but me and a handful of others who stumble across my words, but I like to think that some people are helped by being allowed to leave their stories. ‘It never happened,’ my mother has said to me. ‘You’re making this all up. You’re exaggerating, and that’s not the way I remember it.’ There have been moments over the years when I have reminded her of something and I have seen a light of recognition in her eyes, a spark that tells me she remembers the same thing. But then she’ll say, ‘You have n
o idea how hard it was for me, Alice, no idea at all.’ I have learned that I am not the only person this happens to. Those who leave their stories say the same thing. ‘I just want to be acknowledged. I just want him to admit what he did. I want her to tell me she saw it happen.’ Murderers stand in court and plead ‘not guilty’ despite being found standing over the body with a knife in hand. What chance is there that a parent will admit their failings to an adult child? No one wants to see themselves as a monster.
When my mother had no choice but to give up drinking or die, I thought that she would be able to see the past with new clarity. But instead she sobered up into Alzheimer’s. I will never get what I need from her.
I click on the link for the blog as I sip a strong cup of coffee, hoping to get rid of the incessant vinegar smell. The smell that lets me know it was all my fault. Vampires cannot enter your home unless you invite them in. I invited him in.
I see myself as I was then, my small pinched face and my long brown hair that was filled with knots because no one brushed it. I know I found the world a terrible, strange place then. I had lost my dad, my lovely dad who danced in the kitchen with me, who took me to the beach and built a whole village of sandcastles with me, who threw me high into the air, making me shriek with a fearful joy because I always knew he would catch me. He was gone. Everything had been perfect but then I had lost everything. Not just him but my mum as well. She was there, still alive, but she’d disappeared, getting fainter and fainter, just disappeared. She slept and cried and slept and cried and I had no idea what to do except watch her and mourn.
Every morning I would wake up and lie in my bed with my eyes closed, hoping that if I could pretend to still be asleep, I would hear my beloved father’s voice saying, ‘What’s up, buttercup?’ so I could reply, ‘Breakfast time, Mr Lime.’ I believed if I could just keep my eyes shut for long enough, he would come into my room, scoop me up and take me to the kitchen, where he would make me blueberry pancakes that were never really round but still tasted delicious. But it never worked and every morning I finally braved opening my eyes to my empty bedroom and my silent house, grief lying in every corner. I imagined that I would cry forever. I cried in the morning and at night and secretly in the toilets at school.
I knew when I got out of bed, I would have to make myself breakfast and pack my own lunch and walk myself to school. I had an old pillow that sat on my bed with a picture of a unicorn on it. My father had brought it home for me one day after work, handing it to me and saying, ‘It’s magical, just like you are.’ I’d had it for years and the stitching at the side had come undone, and the image of the unicorn had faded, and no one had fixed it so the inside of the pillow was falling out. That was what I felt had happened to my life. The stitches were undone and everything was coming apart, and the happy memories were fading, and I didn’t know how to fix it. He’d held our lives together and now he was gone.
Sometimes I went and lay down next to her in the big bed, listening to her breathe or stroking her hair. Sometimes she liked that but sometimes she didn’t want to be touched and she would say, ‘Leave me alone, Alice, I’m tired.’
She tried, I think. I think she tried to carry on. She told me that we would be fine, that we would be a little family, that we would be okay, but then she went to bed and didn’t get up again. My father was the one who had made us a family. He was the one who planned family adventures to the beach and special dinners for birthdays. He was the one who made my mother laugh so she was happy, even when she seemed sad. He was the one who kept the stitches closed so nothing came apart. I was so lost without him. We both were.
I walked to school with an empty lunch box. She was never hungry so she didn’t care when the food ran out. ‘Aren’t you an independent little thing?’ one of my teachers said, and I know I felt proud of myself for being able to read the kitchen clock on my own so I would know what time to leave for school.
I should never have spoken to him but I was six years old. I had no idea. How could I?
It was winter, sharply cold and overcast, when he stopped the car to speak to me. My father had been gone for three months by then. I was walking to school, hungry and shivering because I hadn’t been able to find my jumper and the fridge and the pantry were, once again, empty.
I hadn’t noticed the car beside me until he called out to me, ‘Hey, Alice, isn’t it?’ I stopped walking and nodded because he couldn’t have been a stranger; a stranger wouldn’t know my name. The car was a deep blue colour with a single white door. Something he was always going to fix but never did. It rattled as the engine idled while he waited for me to say something.
I want to shout at that naive little girl, ‘Run, Alice, run!’
I should stop thinking about this. I need to get ready to pick the boys up from school. They can’t see me like this, but the memory, insufferable and painful, will not be denied. Outside the kitchen window I can see that the sky has turned the same grey it was that day. I watch the wind rushing through the trees outside and remember his voice, deep and rough, even though he was speaking kindly.
‘I’m Vernon, remember me?’ he asked as I stared at him. ‘I was a mate of your dad’s. We worked together sometimes.’
I didn’t remember him but I didn’t want to be rude.
‘Can I give you a lift to school? It’s really cold.’
I nodded my head as the wind pushed against me and the grey sky offered no warmth, and I climbed into his car.
‘How’s your mum doing?’
‘She’s really sleepy all the time,’ I said.
‘Poor thing, shall I come round this afternoon? Maybe bring some fish and chips?’
I didn’t say anything. I was too hungry to think about food.
‘What’ve you got for lunch?’ he asked kindly.
I stared at my feet because I didn’t want to admit that I had nothing.
I looked up and saw my school and I was so grateful to be there. Something was prickling at me, something was trying to warn me. Instinct had kicked in, and in his car, even with the heater blasting out hot air, goose bumps ran up and down my arm. ‘That’s my school,’ I said and he slowed down and stopped.
‘Tell you what,’ he said as I opened the car door, ‘I’ll come round tonight and bring dinner, and you can tell your mum I helped you this morning. And here,’ he said, pulling out his wallet from a pocket in his trousers, ‘is five dollars for the canteen. I bet that’ll buy you a nice lunch.’
I took the money and smiled at him because I knew that the canteen was serving pizza that day, and with five dollars, I would be able to buy two slices and a bag of crisps and a chocolate milk. It seemed to me an unbelievable bounty of food.
‘You’re pretty when you smile,’ he said, smiling back. His face was a shiny pink with a few strips of red where he had obviously cut himself shaving, and his teeth were yellow. His breath was stale, stinking of tobacco. ‘Your mum is real pretty too as I recall,’ he said. ‘I better get along. Off you go now.’
All I had been thinking about then was the silver shutters of the canteen rolling up, releasing the cheesy smell of pizza. My mouth watered through the first few periods of the day. I found myself almost enjoying my hunger, knowing that today, for once, it would be satisfied.
I forgot about him until that night when the bell rang and I opened the door and saw him there. ‘Ready for dinner?’ he asked. He had a whole parcel of hot chips and another filled with fish.
‘Mum’s tired,’ I told him.
‘Let her know I’m here, love. Maybe she’ll feel up to dinner.’ And she did get up. That was the important thing – she got up. For the first time in as long as I could remember, she got up and got dressed and we all had dinner together and he poured her what I now know was a glass of vodka and she got a bit giggly and I was warm and full and it felt like the answer to all our problems.
I shake my head at my stupidity.
Alice made a mistake. Alice made a mistake. Alice made a mistake.
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‘It’s not my fault,’ I say as Ian taught me to say years ago. ‘It’s not my fault. I was a child.’
He liked a lot of vinegar on his chips and I used to as well. I used to pour it over liberally, savouring the smell. Now it nauseates me because it is the smell of the end of my childhood, the end of my innocence. It’s the smell of the end.
There is a jumper I have hidden at the back of my closet. Sometimes I hold it to my nose, pretending that the smell of my father is still here, but I know that the sweet smell of his aftershave is long gone. I know that his touch was kind and gentle but I cannot remember the feel of it. I feel like I have nothing left of him. All my memories of him are overlaid with my memories of the wrong man, of the worst kind of man. And I hate him for that even more than I hate him for everything else he did to me.
I look at my watch – it’s nearly time to leave. I touch a key on my computer, illuminating the screen again. There’s a new message for me.
Sister, sister, sister. My tongue darts in and out of the space in my mouth.
I feel like my heart may stop. Who is this woman and why is she asking about my little sister? I grow instantly resentful that she thinks she can turn my experiences into a story, into a few minutes of entertainment.
‘Leave me alone,’ I say aloud as the broken red car returns to my mind. ‘It wasn’t my fault. I only meant to help her.’ I keep repeating these words as I type furiously and reply to this woman on the internet. I hate this stranger with a visceral force for making me confront exactly what I did.
* * *
At school I keep my sunglasses on as I wait in the pickup line to hide my puffy eyes. I will not think about it anymore. I won’t think about him and I won’t think about my sister. My lost little sister with her beautiful smile. My sister who I couldn’t save or protect.
