There is a silence and he takes my hand. I think I am forgiven.
‘Talk to Mum, then,’ he says simply, and the anger is no longer in his voice.
I swallow hard.
I haven’t spoken to my mum for five years. Nearly six. Which I know sounds terrible, but it was necessary. It wasself-preservation. It was the only thing I could do.
My stepdad, Steven, came into our lives when I was about four. Mark was six, Hannah would’ve been about eight or ninethen, I guess. I never knew my real dad, he left us when I was a baby, and at first it was thrilling having a bigman-dad type around. We were finally like the other kids in the playground who had two parents. And he was better than everyone else’s dads! He was always laughing and cracking jokes. He was always fun, always throwing us around and playing with us out in the garden. He was the lifeand soul of parties – and we were suddenly having parties all the time. We went from aone-adult household, togrown-ups everywhere constantly, chatting, laughing, dancing, having barbeques andall-night living room giggling. Mum seemed happier than we’d ever seen her.
It took about a year for everyone to realise why he was always the life and soul. Why we were always having spontaneous partiesthat lasted all night and all weekend. Why he was always laughing and dancing.
Steven was an alcoholic.
It took Mum a long time to fully comprehend the extent of it because he was so very good at manipulating her, so good at making her feel crazy. She would find bottles hidden down the back of cupboards in the bathroom, or smell something on his breath in the morning and he would laughand convince her it was nothing or that it was from one of their parties. Sometimes he would just plain make her feel like she was losing her mind.
At some point though, there was no way anyone could deny it any longer. Mum tried for a very long time to get him to cut down, she begged him to stop. And he would, sometimes, but it was never for very long. But, honestly, even then, it wasn’tsobad – not for me, Mark and Hannah anyway. Steven was what they call ahigh-functioning alcoholic. He held down his day job on a building site, and was still fun to be around for us kids. He still played with us sometimes and made us laugh. It wasn’t like before, but it was fine, y’know? So what if he was drinking from seven in the morning? So what if he smelt bad and his eyes were always redand swollen? We had a dad.
But things changed around about when I started secondary school. The beer became vodka. The loud laughing became loud shouting. He would disappear for days on end, and Mum would be frantic. I would watch silently from the hallway door as she cried down the phone to everyone she knew, asking if they’d seen him. I would watch as she rang round the local bars askingif he was there, begging them not to serve him any more. The police would often be in the living room when we got home from school, taking yet another missing persons report and looking bored. Sometimes they’d bring him home and I would hate them for that. Then Steven started being cruel. First to Mum, then to us. He was never physically violent, but he was nasty. A nasty drunk. We weren’t wanted.We were in the way. He put up with us so he could fuck our mum. He took money from our piggy banks, he emptied out our drawers looking for more. He laughed at us when we cried.
And there was Mum, always in the middle. Always, always defending him. Always calling it an illness. Always excusing his behaviour. Always using our summer holiday money to book him into another rehab centre that herefused to attend, or would leave after a couple of days. She evenre-mortgaged our family home to help him.
My mum, always choosing him over us.
When I turned eighteen, I moved away to London and tried to find my own life. But I called every day and visited my mum back in Hertfordshire religiously, once a week. I really, really wanted to save her, I thought I could. I would listento Steven crashing around the house, looking for bottles, searching for money, breaking things. I pleaded with her to leave. I wanted her to move in with me – I even bought asofa-bed for my room, so I could be ready for her. I gave her the details of women’s refuges if she didn’t want to stay with me. I only took temp jobs in case I ever needed to run away with her. But she never wanted to hearit, always waved away my speeches, told me he was poorly and she needed to look after him. She always let him off the hook.
The final straw came when I wastwenty-four. I’d fallen in love with a boy called Kit – my first big, overwhelming,all-consuming love. It felt like the first time in my life that Mum and Steven weren’t my priority. I liked it. He moved in with me after only six months.It was quick, but I liked that. I wanted it to be quick, I wanted him to save me from my family. I thought we were soulmates, I thought we were going to get married. I was sure of it, so certain, right up until the moment I came home early from work with the flu, and found him in bed with a woman from his office.
He didn’t even try to say sorry, just laughed awkwardly while she scrambledaround for her clothes. She said sorry. She said she didn’t know about me. She was probably quite nice.
And, oh God, how I cried. I cried so much. I screamed at him to go and I lay on the floor of my living room, crying like I never had before. I wanted to die, and I wanted my mum. So much. I rang and rang, over and over. I left voicemails weeping down the line. I wanted her so much, Ineededher. I’d never asked her to put me first before, I’d never asked her to drop everything and come to me, but I asked her to then. I was close to some kind of an edge and felt dizzy and sick and afraid. I needed my mother to save me.
She never called back. The next day, when I woke up passed out on the floor where I’d cried myself to sleep, there was a text from her. ‘Sorry to hear about yourbreak up. Just in the middle of something with Steven. Maybe chat next week?’
I didn’t cry again after that – and I didn’t speak to my mum again.
I know it sounds selfish, and I know it might sound harsh, but something in me snapped. I just couldn’t do it any more. I couldn’t be second place, watching idly on as my mum hurt herself choosing a man like that over her children. She did loveus, I knew that, but I also knew she would just keep choosing him over and over again.
She tried to ring me a few days later, and I blocked her number. She emailed and texted me, several messages, and I deleted them all unread. Hannah and Mark both tried to talk to me, begged me to speak to Mum, but I said no. I was always the closest to Mum, the nearest to the pain epicentre, and they bothknow I had reached the end of my tether. They kept saying Mum didn’t even understand what she’d done – which only made it worse. I couldn’t explain how she let me down when I needed her most. It seemed silly and trivial after everything we’d been through already, but it was my breaking point. I couldn’t articulate how it felt when she chose him, it was betrayal. I’d had my heart broken, first byKit, then by my mum, all in the space of a day. It was too much. Every time I picked up the phone to call her, I thought again about what it must’ve taken for her to hear all my voicemails, crying like that, sobbing and talking about death – and still not come to me. I just couldn’t.
And horrible as it is to say, in those days, weeks and months afterwards, I only felt better being away. Clearer,freer. Like it was the right decision and I was putting myself first. Of course I felt terrible ignoring my mum and I missed her badly. It was painful in many ways, but I also couldn’t keep her in my life. Not while Steven was also in her life, wreaking his destruction everywhere he went. I had to save myself. Mum couldn’t walk away from him, so I had to walk away from them both.
A coupleof years ago, she and Steven moved to Australia, where his family are from. It was yet another attempt at a ‘fresh start’, and I’d guess Mum couldn’t afford to keep our house any more. It wasre-mortgaged a bunch of times to pay for his pointless rehab stints. But I knew the booze would follow them wherever they were. And at least them being so far away made things easier for me. Out of sight,out of mind, I told myself. I could at least pretend that was true. And I had an excuse when people asked me why I never saw my mum – she was on the other side of the world.
Mark is looking at me now, carefully, waiting. I feel my eyes watering.
‘I can’t,’ I say at last, looking away. ‘I’m not ready.’
He sighs and turns his body to the window to stare out. We don’t talk againfor a while.
***
from: Mark Edwards
to: Alice Edwards
Here you go. You should just ask her if you can be allowed back on the mailing list!
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