Jessie Keane: Stay Dead

She was the one who had to get her younger siblings ready for school in the mornings; she was the one who had to get in from school and cook something for the family. She was the one who did just about everything there was to do, and more besides.

Through it all Mum just sat there, ignoring the housework, barely even touching the food Dolly put in front of her. The doctor had given Mum some pills, but they didn’t seem to be working. Every morning when the kids set off for school, Edie would be slumped at the kitchen table, and when they got home she’d still be there, in the same chair, as if she hadn’t moved an inch all day. And Dolly thought she probably hadn’t.

Dolly finished off the cake, screwed the bag into a ball and threw it down. Then she climbed up the slide, ten steps. It had taken her years to overcome her fear of the slide; it was slippery as polished glass going down, and you shot off the end of it in the most fearsome way. If you weren’t careful, you’d fall awkwardly and break your leg – it had happened last year to one of the younger kids. And Dolly didn’t want to break her leg.

But then, if she did she’d be taken to hospital, and that would be good, better than home. Wouldn’t it?

It was nearly dark now.

Dolly released her grip on the hand-holds at the top of the slide and whizzed, flew, cannoned down it and whirled off the end almost laughing, breathless, exhilarated.

‘Dolly!’

She stiffened. Turned. Dad was pacing toward her, coming quick, and there was something angry about every short, bandy-legged line of his body. Suddenly all the magic of the day dropped away as if it had never been.

He bent over, enveloping her in the smell of Old Holborn and gamey unwashed clothes. She thought he might be reaching for the bag she’d tossed on the ground, but he wasn’t. He grabbed her arm, hurting her, and bent and slapped her hard across the legs, twice. It stung like hell and she let out a cry.

‘What the fuck are you doing, worrying your mum like this?’ he shouted. ‘Come on!’ he said, and started dragging her off the field and back to the road, back to home.

For a while, she’d almost felt free.

But it didn’t last long.

It never did.

Dolly hated secondary school. The primary had been nice, tucked in near the church. It was small. But big school was just that: too damned big. She didn’t know anybody there because Lucy and Vera were put in the top stream and to her embarrassment she was put in the bottom, along with all the other no-hopers who had home troubles or who never paid attention in class.

OK, she admitted it; she’d never worked much at primary school. She’d mucked about and enjoyed it; it was a relief to be at school and not at home. Now, she was paying the price. Lucy and Vera had somehow cracked on, worked harder than her; but then, they had good backgrounds, nice parents. She didn’t.

Well, Mum was nice, to be fair. She just couldn’t cope, that was all. Edie was under the doctor now, taking a lot of pills and sometimes she’d be carted away in an ambulance. Dad had gathered the kids together the first time and told them that Mum was getting some treatment for her nerves, that it would help her, make her better.

For a while, it did. It was usually about three months, Dolly reckoned, before the wheels came off the truck in Mum’s brain once again. Then it was just her sitting in the chair all day, crying, and then it was off in the ambulance for another course of ‘treatment’.

‘What do you think they do?’ asked Sandy, the youngest, eyes wide with terror. ‘Do they strap her to a table or something, inject her with stuff…?’

‘Plug her into the mains, that’s what they do,’ said Dick, looking quite excited.

‘No, they don’t,’ said Dolly, although it was true, more or less. Dad had told her, because she was the eldest and she was his special girl, his favourite, that the treatment Mum got at the hospital was electric shock therapy. But Dolly clouted Dick upside the head because he had a big mouth and couldn’t he see that Sarah was frightened?

‘They do! Straight into the fucking National Grid,’ persisted Dick, rubbing his ear and grinning.

‘It’s a very mild thing,’ said Dolly firmly to Sarah, although she knew different. She had seen her mum brought home after those ‘sessions’, babbling and crying in a state of confusion and vomiting her guts up. Sarah hadn’t seen any of that. ‘It’s hardly a shock at all. And it puts things right in Mum’s brain.’

But they all knew that the treatment had no long-lasting effect. It was just Mum. She couldn’t help it.

Dad still had his job on the railways, but he was off the wheeltapping now. They’d made him a shunter, put him in with a new gang of men. He was doing well, so at least they never went hungry.

Dolly tried to keep the house tidy, but being naturally untidy herself, and hating housework, she found that she just couldn’t manage it.

So their house was dirty. Often, the kids went unwashed and their clothes were threadbare and filthy. Sandy wet the bed; he was nervous, highly strung like Mum. But so what? None of the families in their street were much different. All around them on the council estate there was junk piled up in front gardens, mange-ridden dogs endlessly barking, grubby kids sitting out on the front step watching the world go by when they should have been at school, studying.

Nobody around here gave a flying fuck about education, about making a better life for themselves; it was just the way it was. Vera and Lucy were exceptions to the rule. Around here, you knew your place, you didn’t go giving yourself any stupid airs and graces, trying to be all la-di-dah. Try to make something of yourself and you’d get laughed at or beaten up, or both.

For the boys, the future probably held a job on the railway like Dad. Nigel, the eldest boy, was prudish and formal; he hero-worshipped his little strutting bantam-cock of a father, and was sure to follow in his footsteps. For the girls, there would be marriage and kids.

But whenever Dolly looked at Mum, she wondered about that. Marriage and kids? It hadn’t done Mum any fucking favours. Everyone was talking about how the actress Grace Kelly had found her prince, like in a fairy tale; she’d married Prince Rainier the Third of Monaco.

‘Gawd, innit lovely?’ all the girls were saying.

It was in all the papers, it was even on the telly, they said, the actual honest-to-God ceremony had been filmed.

Dolly was pretty sure that she wouldn’t want to go down that road, not now, not ever. She was troubled by her own feelings about it, though. What else could a girl do? Men earned the money, women had the babies. It was set in stone. But the very idea of it turned her stomach.

Sometimes Dolly thought it started when she was ten, just before she considered running away. But no. Actually, when she really thought, it started a year or so before that, with him giving her little gifts.

Whenever she thought about it in later life – and mostly she tried not to – she always thought of the story about the frog put into cold water that was heated until it boiled to death. Had it been put in boiling water to start with, it would have jumped out. But death was slow, insidious; it crept up on the frog and lulled it; and that was how Dolly’s downfall came about, too.

The first time Mum went away to get her ‘treatment’, Dad brought Dolly a box of chocolates.