The Kindest Thing

Chapter Twenty

The journey back to Styal takes for ever. We have to call at courts in Wigan and Stockport and Bury. It is rush hour so the traffic is appalling. I hear the security guards talking about an accident on the M60, which has gridlocked half the region. Snow starts to fall, looking dirty against the sky, then rain so the tyres make a slushing sound on the wet roads.

Once back in Reception, I am strip-searched again. I feel the familiar slow burn of humiliation and try to disguise it. When I get back to my pad, I make a cup of tea in the house kitchen. Sitting on my chair, I close my eyes, sip and listen to the sounds in the place. A telly still on, a jangly tune. Someone shouting. There is always someone shouting here.

As I get ready for bed, it is snowing again. The flakes are fat and soft and coat the limbs of the trees and the steeply pitched roofs of the houses. The place looks like a scene from a snow globe – stick in a horse and carriage and it could be a Victorian Christmas scene, as long as you photo-shopped out the fences and wire in the background and the bars at every window.

One Christmas we rented a cottage in the Lake District. Adam was ten and Sophie seven and they were happy to go along with it, as long as we did a ‘proper’ Christmas. That involved taking our tree decorations with us as well as materials to make some new ones on Christmas Eve. And a boot full of presents. I thought we should take a tree too, but Neil laughed. ‘We’re going to the Lakes,’ he said. ‘Half the countryside is forest. We can just pick one up.’

He was right. As we left the motorway nearing our destination, there were signs saying Pick Your Own. And the kids were giddy with excitement at the prospect. The four of us wandered through the plantation with a leaflet and a saw, arguing amicably over choices. Adam wanted the biggest possible tree but Neil explained that it might not fit in the cottage. Sophie, coming out for the underdog, was drawn to the spindliest specimens. I was after symmetry. We agreed at last on a five-footer and took turns to wield the saw. The sharp scent of pine sap was delicious in the air, the trunk sticky with drops of amber resin.

The cottage was low and cramped but the living room was cosy: the owners had left a great fire banked up and we were able to keep it lit for the whole week. In the bedrooms the sheets were cold enough to make us squeal and there was frost inside the bathroom window in the mornings. Out the back there was a view of the hills above Grasmere. Snow fell on the third day and we bought sledges at the petrol station on the main road. The man told us where the popular local runs were.

I recall careening down the slope with Adam, who was yelling like a banshee, and racing against Sophie and Neil, or Neil and I rollicking down together, travelling faster with our combined weight, Neil whooping and me laughing uncontrollably. Later, peeling off sodden gloves to reveal bright pink fingers, Sophie whimpering as her hands stung from the cold, then dunking shortbread in hot chocolate, feeding the fire shovels full of tarry coal and growing dopey in the heat.

Once the children were asleep, Neil and I sat reading by the fire, sipping Famous Grouse and cracking open walnuts and hazelnuts. I was curled in an armchair and he sprawled on the floor, his back against the chair opposite, relaxed and tipsy with whisky.

When I put down my book, I looked across to find him watching me.

‘Fuck me,’ he mouthed, and his eyes danced.

Turning I switched off the table lamp, casting us into firelight. While he watched, I stood and undressed, the air against my back and buttocks cold from the draught at the door. I knelt beside him and took his face in my hands. Kissed him soft then harder. Pulled away as he reached for me. I took off his fleece and then his T-shirt, licked his nipples and the hollow of his throat. I unbuttoned his jeans, moved his underpants aside and let his penis spring free. I straddled him and he ran his hands flat and smooth down my shoulder-blades and my back. He pulled me closer, eased me on to him. I felt the depth of him fill me and my sex quickening. I rode him as he bent his head to reach my breasts, his mouth hot, his breath more ragged with each rocking motion.

I came, shuddering and pulsing, and reared back, releasing him, the tremors travelling to my forearms and fingers, to my scalp. With a few quick strokes Neil came too, arching his back and groaning and spraying pearls onto his belly and my thighs. We lay together afterwards and I listened to the hiss and pop of the coal and the thud of his heart.

The next day our winter-sports antics were cut short when Adam fell off the sledge and started screaming. A high-pitched animal sound that cut to my bones. He had broken his wrist. We spent a couple of hours in A&E and got back to the cottage in the dark, the street in the hamlet empty, the air full of oily coal smoke, the sky a dense black and the stars crisp as ice.

It’s a time I revisit as I lie down in bed and wait for sleep, forcing myself to take it in sequence. I usually reach the part where we make the decorations: the table covered with newspaper; Sophie, her tongue between her teeth for concentration, sticking black beads onto her snowman bauble; Adam, his good hand thick with glue and glitter, daubing at a reindeer that looked more like a rat; Neil telling us all stories about the olden days here, who would have lived in the cottage and how they would have worked, children and all, in the local slate mines.

I never get to Christmas Day.

I was happy. We were all happy then. I’m sure we were. I thought I’d got away with it. That Neil and I had weathered the damage done by my affair and survived. That the worst was over and my family still intact. That everything would be all right from now on.

That night, halfway through my trial, I dream that I am in the snow. We have been building an igloo and I am inside it but I can’t find Neil or Adam or Sophie. I have lost them. There is a shore nearby, a lake frozen, and I run to the edge, knowing they are trapped under the ice. Walking out on to it, I see shadows, pewter-coloured, twisting beneath. On my knees I hammer at the blue-white crust but it is as hard as stone, inches thick, and I can make no headway. Knowing I must get help, I spy a dwelling on the horizon. There may be people there. I get to my feet but when I try to run my legs don’t work. No power. I can barely lift my foot off the ground. No matter how hard I try to force myself forward, my lungs bursting with effort, my legs are as weak as dried grass stalks. The soles of my feet are stuck to the ice, which is growing through my heels and the pads of my toes, forming crystals in my blood. Then I hear banging. They are breaking the ice, something is breaking the ice, and I am sliding in fast, sinking down, the water shocking, cold and heavy as lead.

I wake, my duvet on the floor, the prison officer hammering on my door again, calling at me to get up, the transport leaves at seven.

I am reluctant. Today I will have to tell them things that I would rather not remember.

When I had been on remand awaiting trial in Styal for two weeks, my brother Martin came to visit. We hadn’t seen each other for years, drifting apart in the wake of my mother’s death and with nothing in common other than our childhood. He was patently ill-at-ease. I was still shell-shocked, I think, both with losing Neil and with the horror of being incarcerated. He was sitting in the visitor’s centre when I walked in. He rose as I got close. We exchanged a clumsy hug, talked numbly about him finding the place, and sat. There was a stilted pause punctuated by a child’s laugh. Nearby three youngsters were visiting their mother.

‘Dad and now Neil.’ Martin shook his head.

Halfway through grunting in agreement, I stopped short. Dad and now Neil, he said. Why Dad and not Mum? Her situation was closer to Neil’s: the illness, the diagnosis, the decline.

‘Dad?’

He gave an odd twitch of his head and blinked, a sign of embarrassment.

‘Martin?’

He raised his hands then, palms towards me: leave it, forget it.

My mind scrambled for explanations. Men I’d lost as opposed to women?

‘Was Dad ill?’

He gave a great breath out. ‘Maybe now’s not the time.’

‘No,’ I was cross at his prevaricating, ‘now is the time – now is precisely the time. When better? I’ve nowhere else to be, nothing else to do. Dad – it was an accident.’ The clothes folded on the sand. I waited for him to agree, to explain, my face hot, my breath trapped in my chest.

His eyes, a lighter blue than mine, slid down, a slow blink of denial.

‘What then? Was he ill?’

Martin hesitated. I wanted to reach across the table and throttle him.

‘Not physically. Look, I don’t know all the details.’

‘You know a fuck of a lot more than I do.’ He flinched at the steel in my tone. ‘Martin, please, just tell me.’ I tried to rein in my agitation. There were prison officers up on the dais monitoring the room. Any argy-bargy and they would clear the place, send us all in.

‘He was depressed,’ Martin said.

Time ran slower. Disbelief clutched my throat; the hairs on my arms stood up; my scalp tightened. ‘What?’

Every image I had of my father threatened to dissolve with the onslaught of this new truth.

He was folding his clothes, slipping the watch from his wrist and tucking it into his shorts, laying the towel over the neat bundle. Shivering in the dawn wind, indifferent to the bone-deep ache as he waded out, driven by a greater pain.

The sea is cold around the British coast, even with the Gulf Stream, cold enough to induce hypothermia. Was that what he had done? Float? Memory jolted me rigid. Daddy supporting my back at the lido while I tried not to sink, my arms flung wide. Did he do that? A human star, limbs splayed as he bucked the waves, as the cold settled in his tissues and his teeth chattered and the sky rose and fell. Or did he hurry, diving down and filling his lungs with brine, searching for Charybdis to suck him under, snorting and choking and gulping in more?

‘Mum said it was an accident,’ I persisted.

‘Well, we can’t know for sure.’ Martin, who had always been so good and dull and ordinary. Who had toed the line and smiled politely as he did so. Who never seemed to have adolescence or any rebellious phase. Was this why? Had he carried this all those years? Not a cross to bear but a trim grey suitcase anchoring him to the known and safe?

‘Apart from the depression?’ I wanted evidence, facts and figures. Prove it.

‘He’d never done that before,’ Martin answered, ‘gone for a swim so early. He knew he’d be alone. He’d been drinking a lot, whisky with everything, sleeping it off in the afternoons.’

The taste of whisky, bitter in my throat. I stared at Martin, incredulous. Were we talking about the same holiday? I didn’t remember any of this.

‘They’d been rowing, arguing. Things were very rocky. Not just between them. Dad was in line for redundancy – Pendle’s was being taken over.’

The name brought back an image of a warehouse up a cobblestoned hill, near the edge of town. I don’t recall that we ever went inside but occasionally Dad would have to call in en route to some family outing. Pendle’s was a fancy-goods wholesaler. Now and then Dad would bring home some new item from their range (inflatable plastic photo frames, fibre-optic lights, luminous doorbell push), which we’d admire before they ever got into the shops.

‘But you can’t know for sure,’ I echoed his words. ‘Mum thought it was an accident and the police must have done.’ Even as I spoke a hot wash of anger flooded through me. He had left me on purpose. I’d always known my fierce independence, which I used to thwart my fear of abandonment, was rooted in his early death. But he had chosen to leave. Scylla, the sea-monster, had not robbed me of a father. My father had not loved me enough to stay. Was this how Sophie and Adam felt about Neil? Unfairly abandoned?

Martin cleared his throat. ‘When Mum was ill, I asked her.’

The air between us crackled with tension. I could feel my pulse in my ears and the burn of adrenalin about my neck and wrists.

‘She lied to the police?’ Obviously a family trait.

‘She didn’t tell them about the problems. They didn’t probe too deeply. Suicide back then, there wouldn’t have been any insurance.’ He fell quiet.

I kept my gaze steady. Suicide: illegal, shameful, dirty work at the crossroads. In Dante’s Hell, the suicides are imprisoned in trees, immobilized so they can hurt themselves no more. The Harpies roost in their boughs and rip off twigs making the trees bleed and the souls within moan.

She lied to me. ‘Why didn’t she tell me?’ I demanded.

Martin shrugged awkwardly. ‘You had Adam, you were expecting Sophie, you were travelling fifty miles every few days to visit.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I agreed with her. You’d such a lot on.’

Arguments crowded into my head, batting around like moths to a lamp. ‘Since then?’ I spoke sharply. ‘She’s been dead for fifteen years. Haven’t I a right to know what happened to him? He was my father too.’ There was jealousy clawing in my gut, the loneliness of having been left out. She’d told him but not me. And still the gnawing ache that he had left us, folded his clothes and left us for the dark, cold sea.

A look flew across Martin’s face, guilt, then his features fell. ‘I shouldn’t have said-’

‘Yes, you should – you should have said years ago.’ And I turned my face from him and wept.

Once I had learned from Martin that my father had committed suicide, I found it hard to stay afloat. I’d been punctured, my history, my childhood leaking away. My grief had doubled. I requested a doctor’s appointment; I’d been warned it might take ten days to actually see someone. While I waited to hear, I felt raw: a layer had been peeled back to expose my vulnerability. At night I’d go over and over it, vitriolic with anger at my father, raging at my family’s duplicity. Sleep eluded me – nothing new there – but the acidic fury I felt exacerbated the physical discomforts of sleeplessness. My muscles ached dully, I was dehydrated, my skin and eyes itchy, dizzy, and a headache lapped at the back of my skull.

By day I stuck to the timetable, kept my head down and struggled to cope with the tears that would spring to my eyes at the slightest thing. One afternoon Patsy, a woman I was teaching to read who also lived in my house, came in with a letter from her daughter. Would I read it to her and help her write back? It was mundane stuff, family news and local gossip, nothing overtly sentimental, but as I read on, I broke down. She rushed to comfort me, which made it even worse.

‘Aw, darlin’, what’s wrong? What’s to do?’

‘I lost my husband,’ I spluttered, ‘I miss him so much. And I lost my dad and now I feel as if I’m losing my mind.’

‘We all feel like that sometimes,’ she said. ‘That’s why there’s so many girls cutting up.’

Self-harm is commonplace. Some people cut or burn themselves; others swallow dangerous objects or even find ways of breaking their bones. The prison librarian told me that forty per cent of the women inside have a mental illness, and eighty per cent have a serious drug or drink addiction. Most have been convicted of crimes linked to their addiction. Counselling is practically non-existent – lack of resources. Women speak of waiting nine months, a year or more to see a therapist.

‘You want to see the doctor,’ she told me, ‘get some meds.’

I nodded, wiping my face. ‘I’ve put in for an appointment.’

And then I helped her write the letter.

If I had known that my father had killed himself, if I had experienced the bewilderment, the anger and hurt of that abandonment, would I have even entertained Neil’s request, knowing what it might feel like for his children?