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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      Whatever he did to us Isobel and I were always a team. We had been together since the day I was born and we understood each other perfectly. No one could ever come between us, no matter how devious and cunning they might be. Although we had our own separate friends, we were often together socially as well. Isobel was always a bit of a tomboy and quite happy to hang out with groups of boys, playing football or climbing trees. She wasn’t interested in whatever it was most of the girls wanted to do, which usually meant staying indoors as far as she could see. As we got older Mum didn’t mind letting us go out to play with other kids in the area so long as we had finished our homework and so long as we were together. Not that we had very much spare time to just play around, because she filled virtually every waking hour with activities. If we did have a few spare hours, however, playing outside was always preferable to being indoors and worrying about disturbing Dad if we made any sort of noise at all. We didn’t often take friends back home either because we could never be sure if he would be there or not, and if he did emerge from his room and find other people in the house he would always make a scene to ensure they felt as uncomfortable as possible.

      ‘Our Dad might be there,’ we would warn them on the odd occasions when we did bring friends back to the house. ‘If he’s there, just ignore him. Don’t say anything to him if he talks to you.’

      It was like warning children not to pet an unreliable dog in case it suddenly turned nasty and bit them. It was obvious that our friends couldn’t understand why we were issuing warnings like this and I dare say they went back home to their own parents with some colourful descriptions of what the atmosphere was like inside our house, with the invisible bogeyman of a father hiding away upstairs, a bit like the wicked giant in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. Most of the people we met during our after-school activities didn’t even realise we had a dad since they only ever saw us out and about with Mum. He would never come to see us playing in a concert or competing in a sports match. Just like Mum, neither Isobel nor I would ever talk about him to other people if we didn’t have to.

      If Dad did make an appearance when there were other people in the house he would usually appear quite alarming. He seemed to take pride in making himself look as much of a thug as he could, and he wouldn’t say much, just looming there, silent and threatening. On the rare occasions when he came to one or other of our activities he would be deliberately aggressive and abusive to everyone else there, as if he wanted to embarrass us and Mum, to teach us a lesson for taking an interest in something that was nothing to do with him and to show us who was in control. He liked to demonstrate his contempt for anything any of us did, to make it look as though Mum was wasting her time rushing around doing things that he thought were pointless and laughable. If you can’t see the point in anything then there really isn’t any reason to come out of your bedroom, especially if someone else is willing to pay the bills and provide you with food.

      Mum would cook big meals when she had the time. Most Sundays she would do a family roast, although Dad still wouldn’t want to come down to eat with us. He didn’t even eat with us on Christmas Day. It didn’t bother Isobel or me because we couldn’t remember anything different, and it was always nicer when he wasn’t around to create a bad atmosphere anyway, but it must have been hard for Mum. She must have wished she had a normal husband who was part of the family. She pretended not to notice that anything was wrong, keeping herself and us so busy that we didn’t have too much time for introspection, but it must have been wearing her away inside.

      On weeknights Isobel and I made sure we’d done our homework by the time Mum got home, and sorted out something to eat. We got through a lot of pasta in those years because there was never any time to cook anything more elaborate. There was certainly no space in our lives for just sitting down and relaxing over a meal. Mum drank endless cups of strong coffee throughout the day – sometimes as many as twenty a day – just to keep herself awake. Dad never ate the meals we prepared, of course. From what I could make out, he seemed to survive on takeaway kebabs or chips.

      Mum was a great believer in the importance of exams and achieving things academically. During the daily car rides back and forth between after-school activities she would constantly bombard us with questions about school, getting us to go through every lesson and tell her what we had been learning and then she would fire questions at us, testing us on our times tables or our French vocabulary. She was always enthusiastic in the early days before tiredness started to overpower her, wanting to exercise our brains to the full at every opportunity. During half terms and holidays she would give us her own work projects and tests on top of anything our teachers might have set us. We never complained because we were so used to it and we knew she would always let us go out to play as soon as we had finished our work. We enjoyed most of the tasks anyway.

      We certainly never had any time to chill out in front of the television as many of our friends did after school. None of this bothered us because we had never had a chance to get into the habit of watching television and whenever we did tune in the programmes seemed boring compared to the pace and variety of our own lives. The only time we might watch anything would be on a Sunday morning, but even then Mum wasn’t that keen if there was something else she thought we should be doing, and we weren’t interested enough to go against her wishes. About once a week we would catch an episode of The Simpsons, which was the only show we really liked.

      From as early as I can remember, Mum would enrol us for every after-school activity imaginable. It didn’t matter how much it cost (and they were virtually all private lessons), or how many hours of her evening she had to give up to ferry us from one place to another. She was determined that we should be given every possible opportunity to try everything, even if we decided not to follow it up later, and that we would never be unable to do something just because we couldn’t afford it. Almost the moment she arrived home each afternoon, having driven for at least an hour back from work, she would be piling us into the little Metro she’d had for years and driving me to one place and Isobel to another.

      The activities she enrolled us for covered virtually every skill she could think of. It wasn’t just the musical instruments – piano, violin – and singing in the choir; there were also the physical activities like swimming and gymnastics, ballet and karate. If we tried something and didn’t like it she would be happy to let us stop, but would immediately suggest something else instead. We must have belonged to every single club within a ten-mile radius of the house. At one stage I tried learning the trumpet but the teacher said I would do better changing to the French horn, which was a big instrument for a small boy to have to lug around with him all day. I joined the scouts but somehow Isobel escaped brownies and girl guides; I think maybe she didn’t have enough hours left in her day to fit them in, although she did do woodcraft.

      Isobel’s favourite activity was running and she was brilliant at long distance and cross-country. She actually enjoyed going through the thickest mud and deepest puddles. She was so good she went all the way up to compete at county level. She was always a real tomboy, preferring football to ballet. Mum was willing to indulge her in anything that she showed an interest in, even though she was the only girl on the football team, until things got too rough and Isobel broke her finger at one match. After that, Mum decided enough was enough.

      When we got a little older and started to have minds of our own, one or other of us might announce that we wanted to give up one of our activities. Sometimes Mum would react badly to this. Maybe she didn’t like the idea that we were growing up and not totally within her control any more. When Isobel said one evening that she wanted to give up swimming in order to have more time for her running Mum went completely ballistic.

      ‘All the money I’ve spent on swimming lessons,’ she shouted, ‘and you want to give it up just like that?’

      She seemed to hate the idea of us limiting our options in any way, even though there obviously weren’t enough hours in the week for us to do everything properly. I think Isobel’s swimming costume got hurled out of the СКАЧАТЬ