No One Listened: Two children caught in a tragedy with no one else to trust except for each other. Alex Kerr

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СКАЧАТЬ put a stop to it. To be honest we were always pretty keen to get out of the house after a night of rowing anyway. We certainly didn’t want to be trapped there on our own with Dad if we could help it. Once we were with our friends at school, or concentrating in lessons, we could forget for a few hours the unpleasant things we had been forced to listen to in the small hours.

      Even when Mum was left with bruises or marks on her face and arms from his beatings she would still go to work, telling colleagues that she had walked into a door or some such excuse, and we later discovered from Jillian that no one ever doubted her for a moment. No one at her school had the slightest idea that she was in an abusive relationship. Jillian and a couple of others knew she was married to a man who was odd, but most of them thought she was a single mother and never enquired any further. I suppose she just wasn’t the sort of person you would ever expect to be in that position, because she always seemed so vibrant and in control of every detail of her life.

      The only people who I believe knew there was violence going on, and suspected that it was much worse than Mum was saying, were my godmother Helen and the lady vicar at our local church. They were the only two people Mum talked to about it and we discovered that both of them tried to persuade her to leave Dad before things got any worse. Near neighbours later testified that they could hear arguments going on all the time, but none of them wanted to interfere because Dad was such a frightening figure and because Mum seemed to be so capable and seemed to want to keep everything private. When our next-door neighbour on the other side from the old lady was asked why she had never called the police during any of the rows she said that it was because she and her husband were having their own marital problems at the time. Mum never wanted to make a fuss about anything. Perhaps if she had been a little less strong-willed and a little more willing to accept help she would still be alive today.

      Mum was a keen churchgoer and would attend every Sunday. When Alex and I were both in the choir we spent even more time there, which could be boring at times although we had a lot of friends there. The biggest bonus to being in the choir was that occasionally we would get paid a few pounds for singing at a wedding. Mum was very proud of us because we got to visit all sorts of cathedrals around the country and once even went on a choir holiday to Wales. We both sang solos so I suppose we must have had pretty good voices.

      I think Mum had strong Christian beliefs, although she didn’t talk about them much, and maybe that was another reason why she believed she had to soldier on with the marriage ‘for better or worse’. In her eyes she had made a commitment to my Dad and she was never one to weaken once she had done that. When I started to learn more about religion at school I would sometimes challenge her on her beliefs, like a typical teenager, but she never rose to the bait. Maybe she just went to church because she always had done and she liked the discipline and routine of it.

      Although she and Dad hadn’t done anything about having us baptised when we were born, she wanted us to be able to get confirmed at the same time as our friends at the church, so we wouldn’t feel like odd ones out. She arranged for us to be baptised when I was about twelve and Alex was about ten and that was when she asked Helen and Steve to be our godparents. Dad wasn’t remotely interested in any of it and didn’t even turn up for the service.

      Mum was the strongest person imaginable considering all she had to put up with, but eventually even she found the pressure too much. One night, after one of Dad’s all-night attacks on her, she decided to commit suicide. I was fourteen at the time. We had no idea how bad things had got inside her head and we would certainly never have thought she would consider the option of suicide for even a second. I will never know exactly what was going through her mind on the night she made the decision, although I found out a lot more later that she hadn’t told us at the time, but it was a decision she took with all her usual pragmatism and lack of emotion.

      It must have been a really hard decision for her on a number of levels. Firstly there were her religious beliefs to overcome, and I also don’t believe she would ever have taken the idea of leaving Alex and me with Dad lightly. She must have wrestled with her conscience for a long time before deciding to do it.

      Perhaps her mind was clouded by the exhaustion she was obviously suffering from at the time. It must have been a relatively quiet fight she had with Dad that night because Alex and I both slept right through it. She must have stayed awake even after he had finally run out of steam and gone back to his room. Everything must have seemed so impossibly bleak as she sat on her own downstairs in the small hours of the morning, in the dark silent house. I found out later, long after the event, that she had serious health problems, although she hadn’t told us at that stage, and she maybe thought that by ending things quickly she was sparing us from having to see her suffer and die slowly.

      She had some tablets, but I don’t know if that was a co-incidence or if she had been saving them up deliberately. We were told later she took eighty-six pills, a mixture of paracetamol and whatever else she could find in the house, which seems an awful lot unless you have been deliberately hording them. Even in her moment of deepest despair she wanted to cause us the minimum amount of trauma possible. She didn’t want us to be the ones to find her, so as soon as she had swallowed the tablets she quietly let herself out of the house and went for a walk across the Downs.

      It was a bitterly cold morning so maybe it was the fresh air, perhaps combined with the beauty of the rising sun, that shook her out of her black mood and made her realise that she had made a mistake and that she couldn’t abandon Alex and me. Whatever it was that changed her mind she turned round and hurried home, determined to get help before the tablets started to take effect. When she got back she rang Helen and asked her to come to the house to help. The sounds of their raised voices woke me. I could sense an air of panic and I came downstairs to find out what was going on. Helen was trying to ring an ambulance on the house phone. She told me the truth about what had happened but we decided just to tell Alex that Mum was feeling ill without going into any details.

      ‘Your phone’s not working,’ Helen said, unable to keep the tone of panic from her voice.

      ‘Dad ripped it out of the wall the other day,’ I told her.

      ‘I’ll have to drive your mother to the hospital,’ she said.

      There was no option but to keep to our usual routine because Mum wouldn’t hear of anything else. As usual Alex didn’t ask too many questions when he came down, just watching what was going on around him with patient, solemn eyes, so I didn’t have to lie to him as we got ready and walked to school as if it was any other day. He was good like that, always willing to wait until things came clear, never in a rush. When we got home that afternoon Mum still wasn’t back from hospital. We kept as quiet as we could while we made ourselves something to eat and did our homework, so as not to aggravate Dad and bring him storming out of his room. We knew all the routines to follow until Mum returned. She came home from the hospital later the same day but she was still throwing up constantly and I’m afraid I wasn’t very sympathetic.

      ‘How could you do that to yourself?’ I yelled, furious with her at the thought of how she had been willing to leave us at Dad’s mercy without even preparing us for the shock, and hurt as well. I was so angry I couldn’t bring myself to offer to help her even though she was obviously feeling really ill.

      ‘You must be nice to her,’ Helen said when she came round, bustling about, trying to keep the mood cheerful.

      ‘Why?’ I wanted to know. ‘She’s brought this whole thing on herself.’

      Helen didn’t answer. Mum couldn’t give me any explanation as to what she had been thinking, still not willing to talk about all the worries that must have been weighing her down by then. Maybe she didn’t want to burden me, or perhaps she knew she wouldn’t be able to put them into words without making herself cry, which she wouldn’t have wanted to do.

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