TW: Suicide references.
In this story, I do not speak.
It has been seven weeks since my mother retreated to her bedroom and entombed herself in hot layers of bedlinen. The curtains hang low and heavy, dragging the rail down, down. Mould is creeping in the corners. The air hums.
As I brush my hair in the bathroom, her voice slides like black smoke through the steaming air. ‘I want to die,’ it says. ‘Let me die.’
I push the metal spikes of the hairbrush harder into my skull. I wish she would. I am scared she will.
I move the medicine box behind the bleach and the toilet rolls.
I make my mother a cup of tea every morning. In the kitchen, I twist the teaspoon faster, faster; watch as the whirlpool pulls the sugar into nothingness. When I take it up the creaking stairs to her, the hot liquid slops onto my hands. I pull my school jumper over my nose when I enter. She does not move. Does not speak.
She never drinks the tea.
My mother used to drive me to school. She can’t now. It’s a relief. The popular girls in my year had started to make comments about her. They had surrounded me behind the portacabins with their smoky mint breath and their poker-straight yellow hair. Why does she shake and talk to herself? Why are her eyes always red? What is wrong with her?
This morning, the frost has left its sparkles on everything. Even the pavement twinkles. I imagine I am in Narnia, walking with Aslan. My lungs burn with cold and ice catches in my throat. I have run out of tights and my legs are red-raw and prickling by the time I reach my tutor room. I am slightly early for first period. I use the time to forge my mother’s signature in my homework diary.
In English, we read The Crucible, and I think about how to become a witch. In Science, we burn Monster Munch to calculate calorie content. It drips fat, crackles, and crumbles to black dust.
In French, we learn the futur proche.
I am (not) going to eat Monster Munch again - Je (ne) vais plus manger de Monster Munch.
She is (not) going to leave her bed – Elle (ne) va pas quitter son lit.
I walk home with my best friend Ste. We meet at the telephone box with the smashed glass and the cigarette butt carpet. Ste has a new black eye. I touch it but say nothing. He smiles without teeth.
We walk slowly and in snake patterns. We stop at the swings and stare up at the darkening sky until our necks ache. We wrap ourselves in the big scarf I knitted and share his earphones, listening to Fade to Black by Metallica on repeat.
We don’t talk about my mother or his father, who works for air traffic control at the airport, but has none when he gets home.
The sky splits open, and we are running to his house, hand in hand, free arms flailing.
When we reach Ste’s front door, we stand under the porch as the fat rain bounces off the brickwork. He must tell me a secret.
The secret is that he is going to ask Tasha to be his girlfriend. As he is telling me, I stare at the stained-glass pattern in his front door. Red rose. Green stalk. Thorns. My eyes prickle, my throat spikes.
‘Come in until the rain stops?’ he asks me. I shake my head, biting my lip so hard I can feel both sets of my teeth.
Then I turn into the rain, heavier now, dragging my feet along the ground, scuffing the polished edges of my shoes. I scrape my right ankle bone until it bleeds. I let the rain soak me until I feel it has entered my bones. I breathe the watery air, and I am drowning and alive all at the same time.
***
As I stumble down the steep driveway to our house, my coat clinging to me, my skirt gripping my legs, the cold starts vibrating my jaw. Scrabbling between my schoolbooks for my key, I can hear my stepfather and mother’s voices shouting. I swallow as I enter the front door. My legs are suddenly very heavy, my head paper-light.
I put my bag down by the door and start up the stairs. The voices blare louder, louder. It sounds like stones are falling over themselves upstairs. I haul myself up by the bannisters, my heartbeat in my neck.
The door to my bedroom is wide open in a scream. My window has been ripped apart. The hinges contorted sharply to one side. My mother is clamped its jaws, her legs inside, flailing. Her head outside, pounded by the rain. Now hailstones, as big as pebbles. She is crying. Choking. Rocking back and forth.
My stepfather has his back to me. His right hand around my mother’s pyjama neck, pulling her back. The palm of his left hand stuck toward me like a traffic policeman’s.
My feet won’t move. The walls seem to pulse in and out. In. Out.
They are both shouting over each other. It is the mad nonsense of anger. I can’t understand it.
In. Out.
I jerk myself out of my paralysis. Run. Grab my mother around her waist. Pull.
‘You’re hurting me, you’re hurting me!’ she screams. I pull harder. I want to hurt her.
Tony and I have not spoken of a plan, but the force of our joint strength explodes her out of the window’s mouth. I hit my head on the bedside table. Tony almost bounces off the chest of drawers.
My mother is scattered on the floor now, breathing heavily. Her face is a red mess of broken veins. Her eyes bulge out like a frog. She is baring the teeth she always tries to hide in photographs. She seems frightening, wild. Then:
‘I want to die,’ she repeats over and over. ‘Why won’t you just let me die?’
She crunches herself into a ball. She is whimpering, tiny squeaks like when we first got the kitten, and it went looking for its mother for hours. I crouch down by her. I think what I am supposed to do is to put my hand on her shoulder. She pushes it off.
Tony crouches down beside her and moves his face close to hers: ‘You’re fucking mad.’ he spits. He walks heavily out of the room. A few minutes later, the front door bangs. Two sounds: Tony’s broad Leeds accent and my brother’s half-broken voice. Then silence.
My skin is itching from the water in my clothes. I look at my arms. I don’t remember making the bright red scratch marks.
I look up at the window. The water is pooling on the windowsill, dripping onto the carpet, tap-tap-tap. I wonder why my mother chose to break my window.
I ask her what happened. She doesn’t reply.
I leave her on the floor in my bedroom. The sound of the beating hail is fading. As I go down the stairs, her wailing falls softly into the background, like a ghost in an attic.
***
Olly is playing a James Bond video game in the living room. Shooting this, shooting that. On his third life. I tell the back of his head that mum tried to jump out of the window.
‘She wouldn’t have died, you know.’ he says , without turning around. ‘Maybe just mushed her brain up even more.’
I pull my school jumper over my knees and think my brother is probably right. Then I watch him blow up baddies, the pixels dissolving every time that he dies.
***
One of my mother’s voices is calling me. It is the voice I hate the most. It is young, syrupy sounding, like a little girl. The living room door is directly in front of the long staircase to the top floor. I open it and lift my head. She is posing at the top of the stairs.
‘Oh hello, darling. Don’t I look exactly like Princess Diana?’
She is wearing a tight blue chiffon dress that puffs out behind her like wings.
She has twisted her hair into combs, painted on berry-coloured lipstick and electric-blue eyeliner. Round her neck, a crystal necklace she stole from my grandmother half-covers a red burn mark.
She looks like a mad old butterfly.
She opens her arms out wide and the bathroom light behind her twinkles through the mesh. I wonder for a moment if she is going to jump. If her madness has the power to lift her into the air and make her fly.
‘I’m going to go to the opera.’ she sings and lifts one leg high into the air.
I turn and go back into the lounge, shut the door. I slide down in front of it, put my head in my hands.
‘You shouldn’t give her any attention.’ says Olly, waggling his game controller. ‘If no one gave her any attention, this shit would have to stop.’
‘LEVEL TEN!’ shouts the game.
Suddenly, the sound of rapid footsteps and indoor thunder. A scream. Wailing.
My brother turns the volume up.
For a few seconds I imagine my life if I didn’t open the door, if I didn’t go to find my mother. Staying here and ignoring her. Not giving her any attention.
But I am weak.
I jump up and wrench the door open so hard, I smack it into the wall.
My mother is lying at the foot of the stairs, breathing in tiny little rasps. She has arranged herself into an awkward position, one leg on the bottom stair, one arm tucked like a chicken wing under her armpit. The dress surrounds her like a raincloud. She smells of too much Estée Lauder - Beautiful.
I ask her if she is okay. Her response is acid.
‘What do you think?’ she hisses ‘Stupid girl. I fell down the stairs.’
She heaves herself onto her elbows, then pulls herself up by the balustrade. Her face is flushed again. She is tilted slightly backwards, and her head is moving fast left to right, left to right. She almost vibrates with anger.
I count to ten and lean into the wall. I hold my breath. The wave of rage is coming. A tsunami of every one of my selfish acts, torn from different years and separate times so it is everywhere, above me, below me, either side. The volume on my brother’s game goes up, up, up. Shooting. Shouting. Screaming. My ears start to ring like the school fire alarm. My legs to shake.
I crouch on the floor, my hands over my ears. My eyes screwed up tight.
***
In the bathroom, I peel off the layers of my damp clothes and run the hottest bath I can. I like the sound of the pounding water. The burning when I submerge my hand.
On the side of the avocado-coloured sink, I make a neat line of paracetamol.
‘Do not exceed the stated dose.’ commands the leaflet.
The stated dose is two for those twelve and over. I am almost exactly twelve.
Two.
Four.
Ten.
Sixteen. Twenty-four.
I throw them into my mouth, force them down with warm water from the old toothbrush glass.
My mother has taken three overdoses, but not properly. She’s still alive and pretending to be Princess Diana.
I get in the bath and push myself beneath the water. I open my eyes.
The harsh white of the bathroom light wobbles above me. My mouth tastes of chalk.
Je vais disparaître - I am going to disappear.
Like sugar in her tea. Like black ash in a science lesson. Like the pixels in a game.
I close my eyes. Hold my breath.
Don’t say a word.