Cath Staincliffe - The Kindest Thing

His chaotic behaviour sucked up our attention while her diligence, hard work and successes won way too little recognition. Neil and I often talked of it, as things grew difficult in recent years: how to care for Adam without neglecting Sophie. He saw the same thing with some of the kids at school: that gap between achievement and recognition when another sibling is acting up.

We tried to talk to Sophie about it when Adam first saw the psychiatrist, to explain the situation and apologize for the upheaval, for our distraction, maybe our neglect.

‘It’s okay,’ she reassured us. ‘I’m fine.’

‘We love you, Sophie,’ Neil said.

‘I know, Dad. And I’m not a little kid any more. I can see that Adam needs your time.’ She was relentlessly self-reliant. But the truth was somewhat different.

One day I found her weeping in her room, face blurred with misery. ‘Sophie, what’s the matter? What’s wrong?’

‘I’m sick of it, sick of everything, and Adam and living here. It’s all so shitty,’ she cried, the words a snarl of hurt.

‘What’s happened?’

‘Your precious Adam happened. I know you love him more than me.’

My heart tore. ‘Sophie, that’s not true! I swear to you, I love you both. More than anything.’

She gave a shuddery sigh, sniffed and wiped her face. ‘I hate it, Mum. Why can’t he just be normal and stop messing everything up?’

‘Adam-’ I took a breath, meaning to try to answer but her question was rhetorical.

She went on, ‘They’re all talking about it at school. I’m not me any more, I’m just Adam Shelley’s saddo sister.’

‘Sophie, you are not a saddo. You’re a wonderful-’

‘Mum, don’t.’

Tears burned in my eyes. ‘Hug?’ I offered, my voice too squeaky by half.

She gave a little shrug, noncommittal. I moved in and wrapped my arms around her. Kept quiet. In a few moments she spoke: ‘When’s Dad back?’

‘Soon.’ Could he make it better? ‘I’ll tell him to come up and see you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Okay. It won’t always be like this, you know. It’ll change. Everything changes.’

She nodded. ‘Yeah.’ A small voice.

‘You want anything? Hot chocolate?’

‘No, just tell Dad.’

‘I will.’

She always wanted her father. He was her rock. And now he’s gone. I have taken him from her.

Neil persuaded me not to hang around while he was in having the tests done. He wouldn’t get the results then, and most of the day he’d be sitting about waiting. He promised to call when he was done.

It was late afternoon when I picked him up. He didn’t say much about the day, just some quip about hospitals being no place for sick people. He had a little plaster on his arm where they’d taken the biopsy. They wanted him back in a week’s time for the results. ‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.

Did the days go fast or slow? They rippled, concertina-like, altering speed. The sooner the days passed, the sooner we would know.

That winter I was working on a refurbishment project for a health spa. They were building an extension and it was a good time to revamp their interior, which was looking jaded: Roman mosaics and friezes, pillars and arched doorways. I’d been playing around with something minimalist, using Japanese influences. Any materials would have to be high spec, to cope with the heavy traffic and, of course, the effects of steam and chlorine in the pools area, without looking industrial. Calm, comfortable and clean: these were the words I used with the client during my first presentation.

The day of Neil’s follow-up appointment I drove out to the spa, near Knutsford, for a meeting and spent the morning with the manager and the architect. It was frustrating: the manager was eager to shave off costs but not happy to compromise on quality, and the architect was dying to get away.

I tried not to get too sharp even though I felt the manager was wasting our time. At one point I suggested he redraw his budgets and give me a new figure to work to, if he was having second thoughts, which prompted the architect to complain about delays. The manager backtracked and blethered on. My husband might be dying, matey, I thought. I don’t give a flying fuck for your yardage problems. But I smiled thinly and did my job. After all, if Neil was dying, I’d need all the work I could get.

Of course, the proper jargon, as I learned on the Internet, is living with MND, not dying from it. Like AIDS. Adam had a T-shirt around that time, black and voluminous with a slogan in scratchy white lettering: ‘ Life – a death sentence ’. That soon got lost in the wash.

At the hospital, I saw Neil before he saw me in the waiting room (ghastly orange chairs designed to deaden the bum and weaken the spirit). He was reading, his head tilted to the side, legs stretched out, ankles crossed. Beautiful. If I hadn’t known him, I’d have thought the same: the shape of his face, his frame, dark hair, inherently attractive. I didn’t need to get close enough to smell his pheromones.

He sensed me watching, looked up and smiled, closed his book. Unhooked his ankles and sat up straighter. I reached him, sat beside him, unbuttoning my coat, unwrapping my scarf: I was hot after the frosty air outside.

‘They’re running late,’ he said.

‘Great – gives you a bit more time, then.’ I thought I’d gone too far but his eyes crinkled at the joke.

‘Good meeting?’ he asked.

‘Crap. He wants to cut corners without it showing. I told him we need to move forward by next week or he’ll lose the slot, another client waiting, bigger.’

‘Have you?’

‘Nope.’

‘Neil Draper,’ the nurse called.

The consultant, Mr Saddah, was a really nice man. He took his time, answered all our questions, even if most of the answers started off with it’s hard to say or it varies a great deal. He said eminently sensible things about support and resources and dealing with it as a family and how MND progressed.

His words streamed past me, lapping around me like channels of water carving the sand. I gripped Neil’s hand and tried to stop time.

The judge comes in and everybody stands. A wave of panic washes through me, blurring my vision. I blink hard. Jane is saying something to Adam. It’s lonely here, lonely and exposed. Did Martin think of coming and decide against it? If my dad had lived would he have come to show support? I’m glad my mum’s not still around, not here today, anyway. Because her reaction to all this, her eloquent unhappiness would give me more of a burden to carry. Happy birthday, Deborah. Happy bloody birthday.

‘Call Deborah Shelley.’

I stand in the dock, beside me a guard from the court. The clerk asks, ‘Are you Deborah Shelley?’

‘Yes.’

Do they ever get it wrong? No, not me, mate. Whoops, sorry, you should be next door with the traffic offences…

‘Deborah Shelley,’ she reads from a notepad, ‘you are charged that on the fifteenth of June 2009 you murdered Neil Draper at 14, Elmfield Drive, contrary to common law. Are you guilty or not guilty?’

‘Not guilty.’ My voice sounds thin, swallowed by the space.

The judge is exactly how you would imagine a judge to be: old, white, male. The only deviation from the stereotype, a northern accent. He has wild white eyebrows and a pleated face. He leans forward slightly and asks the clerk to fetch the jury. They file into the court and make their way to the jury box. Here they are sworn in, each person putting their hands on the Bible (no one chooses the Qur’an even though two are Asian and one is black) and promising to try the case faithfully and reach a true verdict on the evidence presented. Three of them choose to affirm rather than use a holy book. I find it depressing that nine are believers. But perhaps their faith is the church-once-a-year variety, the sort of people who tick ‘Christian’ on the hospital admission form because they can’t bear to tick none. If any of them are fundamentalists, rabid right-to-lifers, it bodes ill for me.