“I knew where you were, she told me, probably to rub it in. She demanded that I be in my office or at my flat in Bristol at all times, she’d call me every day at one or the other, to check I was still in Bristol; if I had to come to London, to go to head office, I had to come and stay with her and pretend like we were a happy family, but she’d meet me off the train at Clapham Junction and walk back to the house with me, and she’d watch me like a fucking hawk. She wanted to destroy you though, and now I know why.”
I was intrigued. I’d always wondered why she hated me so much, it would take a lot away to know why.
“Tell me, Mark, please, I have to know!” I begged him.
“Tink, you’re not going to like it,” he warned me, “It’s not a pretty story.”
“Please Mark!”
He began slowly, clearly not happy with what he had to tell me. “I got this in snippets, and I had to piece it all together, because she was basically raving when she spilled all this, with periods of almost normal behaviour, other than the severe memory loss. Like I said, she thought I was dad, and she started going over the whole story, apologising, begging, blaming, the whole thing. Apparently, when I was two, she had an affair with dad’s brother. He broke it off, told dad, and then Mum discovered she was pregnant. She wanted to have a termination,” I flinched, he was talking about aborting me, not a comfortable thing to hear, and he paused, waiting for me to settle, his eyes widening as he realised what he’d just said.
“Like I said, she wanted to… you know, what I just said, but dad went all holy-holy, right to life on her, persuaded her to keep the baby, to keep you. When she was almost eight months gone, he decided he wasn’t going to raise another man’s child, left her, and tried to get custody of me on the grounds that she was an unfit mother. In the meantime, my uncle, your father, managed to get himself killed in a car accident, so no loose ends there, and, as I don’t know his first name, or where he died, or the date, I can’t trace whether he had any family of his own, your half-siblings, if there are any, and to be honest, I didn’t really try that hard; you don’t need that as well. Anyway, she blamed you for destroying her marriage, even though she was the one who had the affair, and she must have started drinking soon after you were born — I remember her being ‘sick’ a lot when you were a toddler. Like I said, not a pretty story; some family, huh?”
He stopped, his face red and his pale hands restlessly twining together.
“So that’s the whole sordid, messed-up, fucked-up story, you and I jerked around like kiddie’s balloons by that fucking woman, and the best part of this, you want to know the best part? In just a little while she won’t remember any of it, none of what she did, not a fucking thing! It’ll all be gone, wiped away, so she won’t have a second’s guilt, or have any reason to apologise for anything, her conscience completely clear. She won’t pay for anything; I know, she’s going to die in an institution, but she doesn’t know that, she thinks she’s at home, with her husband, having a perfect life. Talk about the eternal fucking sunshine of the spotless mind!”
Two big tears rolled down his cheeks as he finished, and my heart went out to him. I understood exactly what he was feeling. Our mother had nearly ruined our lives, neglected, manipulated and controlled us, torn us apart for basically no reason except to make us pay for her guilt, she didn’t want or care about us, and now, there still wasn’t any justice for us. Mark was right to cry, his whole life had been framed by neglect, and now the one person who should be accountable for that was beyond it, that pathetic creature in the institution was nothing to us, and we were less than nothing to her, she didn’t even have enough faculties left to honestly hate us.
I sat next to him, pulling his head onto my shoulder, and at last, he was able to cry, for the childhood he’d been denied, for the care he’d never received, for the love that had been withheld. I cried along with him, once again echoing the sobs of that frightened little boy alone at night.
Eventually he was cried out, and I held him again, my Mark, back at last. I was so happy, Nia’s mother had been right, there had been something keeping him away, but that was over now.
“Mark, you’re staying here tonight, Ok? Baby, can you hear me?” I asked him, and he looked at me, his beautiful sad, sweet smile appearing again, like my own personal sun coming up.
“You mean that, Tink?” he grinned, and I had to grin back.
“Of course, look at you, you look all wrung out, you look like you could do with a good meal, when’s the last time you had a hot meal, baby?”
He looked puzzled. “Dunno, couple of days, I guess, I’ve been trying to sort out her affairs, get the house off my hands, all that kind of stuff, so I’ve been buying sandwiches, soft drinks, that kind of thing.”
I got on the phone and ordered a pizza with all the sides, and put some coffee on. As I was bustling around, he called me over and sat me down next to him.
“Julie, Tink, I need you to know that not a minute went by that I didn’t think about you, want you, need to hold you, hear your voice. Being away from you was torture, and knowing that our mother could lower the boom any time she felt like it was like waiting for the axe to fall. That’s what she wanted, she was an evil, vindictive woman, in my book she’s earned what’s happening to her. She took three years of our lives away from us, are we going to be able to get them back?”
I kissed him gently. “That’s a silly question. What you should be asking is, ‘what do we do now?’ Let me tell you; you come back home, here, this is your home now, we take up where we left off, and life goes on.”
He pulled away from me to look into my eyes for a moment, then pulled me in for a proper kiss, his lips soft and insistent against mine, memories awakening as that kiss burned into me all over again.