Cath Staincliffe - The Kindest Thing

I came, shuddering and pulsing, and reared back, releasing him, the tremors travelling to my forearms and fingers, to my scalp. With a few quick strokes Neil came too, arching his back and groaning and spraying pearls onto his belly and my thighs. We lay together afterwards and I listened to the hiss and pop of the coal and the thud of his heart.

The next day our winter-sports antics were cut short when Adam fell off the sledge and started screaming. A high-pitched animal sound that cut to my bones. He had broken his wrist. We spent a couple of hours in A&E and got back to the cottage in the dark, the street in the hamlet empty, the air full of oily coal smoke, the sky a dense black and the stars crisp as ice.

It’s a time I revisit as I lie down in bed and wait for sleep, forcing myself to take it in sequence. I usually reach the part where we make the decorations: the table covered with newspaper; Sophie, her tongue between her teeth for concentration, sticking black beads onto her snowman bauble; Adam, his good hand thick with glue and glitter, daubing at a reindeer that looked more like a rat; Neil telling us all stories about the olden days here, who would have lived in the cottage and how they would have worked, children and all, in the local slate mines.

I never get to Christmas Day.

I was happy. We were all happy then. I’m sure we were. I thought I’d got away with it. That Neil and I had weathered the damage done by my affair and survived. That the worst was over and my family still intact. That everything would be all right from now on.

That night, halfway through my trial, I dream that I am in the snow. We have been building an igloo and I am inside it but I can’t find Neil or Adam or Sophie. I have lost them. There is a shore nearby, a lake frozen, and I run to the edge, knowing they are trapped under the ice. Walking out on to it, I see shadows, pewter-coloured, twisting beneath. On my knees I hammer at the blue-white crust but it is as hard as stone, inches thick, and I can make no headway. Knowing I must get help, I spy a dwelling on the horizon. There may be people there. I get to my feet but when I try to run my legs don’t work. No power. I can barely lift my foot off the ground. No matter how hard I try to force myself forward, my lungs bursting with effort, my legs are as weak as dried grass stalks. The soles of my feet are stuck to the ice, which is growing through my heels and the pads of my toes, forming crystals in my blood. Then I hear banging. They are breaking the ice, something is breaking the ice, and I am sliding in fast, sinking down, the water shocking, cold and heavy as lead.

I wake, my duvet on the floor, the prison officer hammering on my door again, calling at me to get up, the transport leaves at seven.

I am reluctant. Today I will have to tell them things that I would rather not remember.

When I had been on remand awaiting trial in Styal for two weeks, my brother Martin came to visit. We hadn’t seen each other for years, drifting apart in the wake of my mother’s death and with nothing in common other than our childhood. He was patently ill-at-ease. I was still shell-shocked, I think, both with losing Neil and with the horror of being incarcerated. He was sitting in the visitor’s centre when I walked in. He rose as I got close. We exchanged a clumsy hug, talked numbly about him finding the place, and sat. There was a stilted pause punctuated by a child’s laugh. Nearby three youngsters were visiting their mother.

‘Dad and now Neil.’ Martin shook his head.

Halfway through grunting in agreement, I stopped short. Dad and now Neil, he said. Why Dad and not Mum? Her situation was closer to Neil’s: the illness, the diagnosis, the decline.

‘Dad?’

He gave an odd twitch of his head and blinked, a sign of embarrassment.

‘Martin?’

He raised his hands then, palms towards me: leave it, forget it.

My mind scrambled for explanations. Men I’d lost as opposed to women?

‘Was Dad ill?’

He gave a great breath out. ‘Maybe now’s not the time.’

‘No,’ I was cross at his prevaricating, ‘now is the time – now is precisely the time. When better? I’ve nowhere else to be, nothing else to do. Dad – it was an accident.’ The clothes folded on the sand. I waited for him to agree, to explain, my face hot, my breath trapped in my chest.

His eyes, a lighter blue than mine, slid down, a slow blink of denial.

‘What then? Was he ill?’

Martin hesitated. I wanted to reach across the table and throttle him.

‘Not physically. Look, I don’t know all the details.’

‘You know a fuck of a lot more than I do.’ He flinched at the steel in my tone. ‘Martin, please, just tell me.’ I tried to rein in my agitation. There were prison officers up on the dais monitoring the room. Any argy-bargy and they would clear the place, send us all in.

‘He was depressed,’ Martin said.

Time ran slower. Disbelief clutched my throat; the hairs on my arms stood up; my scalp tightened. ‘What?’

Every image I had of my father threatened to dissolve with the onslaught of this new truth.

He was folding his clothes, slipping the watch from his wrist and tucking it into his shorts, laying the towel over the neat bundle. Shivering in the dawn wind, indifferent to the bone-deep ache as he waded out, driven by a greater pain.

The sea is cold around the British coast, even with the Gulf Stream, cold enough to induce hypothermia. Was that what he had done? Float? Memory jolted me rigid. Daddy supporting my back at the lido while I tried not to sink, my arms flung wide. Did he do that? A human star, limbs splayed as he bucked the waves, as the cold settled in his tissues and his teeth chattered and the sky rose and fell. Or did he hurry, diving down and filling his lungs with brine, searching for Charybdis to suck him under, snorting and choking and gulping in more?

‘Mum said it was an accident,’ I persisted.

‘Well, we can’t know for sure.’ Martin, who had always been so good and dull and ordinary. Who had toed the line and smiled politely as he did so. Who never seemed to have adolescence or any rebellious phase. Was this why? Had he carried this all those years? Not a cross to bear but a trim grey suitcase anchoring him to the known and safe?

‘Apart from the depression?’ I wanted evidence, facts and figures. Prove it.

‘He’d never done that before,’ Martin answered, ‘gone for a swim so early. He knew he’d be alone. He’d been drinking a lot, whisky with everything, sleeping it off in the afternoons.’

The taste of whisky, bitter in my throat. I stared at Martin, incredulous. Were we talking about the same holiday? I didn’t remember any of this.

‘They’d been rowing, arguing. Things were very rocky. Not just between them. Dad was in line for redundancy – Pendle’s was being taken over.’

The name brought back an image of a warehouse up a cobblestoned hill, near the edge of town. I don’t recall that we ever went inside but occasionally Dad would have to call in en route to some family outing. Pendle’s was a fancy-goods wholesaler. Now and then Dad would bring home some new item from their range (inflatable plastic photo frames, fibre-optic lights, luminous doorbell push), which we’d admire before they ever got into the shops.

‘But you can’t know for sure,’ I echoed his words. ‘Mum thought it was an accident and the police must have done.’ Even as I spoke a hot wash of anger flooded through me. He had left me on purpose. I’d always known my fierce independence, which I used to thwart my fear of abandonment, was rooted in his early death. But he had chosen to leave. Scylla, the sea-monster, had not robbed me of a father. My father had not loved me enough to stay. Was this how Sophie and Adam felt about Neil? Unfairly abandoned?