Gilly MacMillan - What She Knew

‘She doesn’t know,’ said my sister. ‘She hasn’t got a clue and that’s the way it should be.’ Hatred had crept into her voice, and it was directed at Clemo.

He persisted. ‘And what about Alice and Katy Bowness? Do you know who they are?’

Nicky began to shake her head violently.

‘Alice and Katy Bowness,’ he repeated. ‘Do you know who they are?’ He spoke slowly, giving each word space and a weight, as if it were a rock being dropped into water.

She looked right at him, and it seemed to cost her an enormous effort to do that. Defiance and defeat waged war in her expression. She spoke her next words quietly. ‘I know who they are.’

‘Have you heard of them?’ he asked me.

‘No!’ I said. ‘Who the hell are they? Have they got Ben?’

‘Are you sure you haven’t heard of them?’

‘No! She hasn’t! She’s telling the truth,’ said my sister.

Clemo remained impassive. He contemplated me, and then my sister, in turn. I felt my chest tighten.

‘Will you tell her, or will I?’ he said to Nicky.

‘You bastard.’

Zhang started to speak but Clemo held a hand up to silence her.

‘Careful,’ he said to Nicky.

‘You’re frightening me,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand.’

Nicky turned towards me. I was sitting at right angles to her, at the head of the table. She wanted to take my hand and I let her.

‘Who are these people?’ I said.

‘Andrew and Naomi Bowness…⁠’ said Nicky. It was hard for her to go on. A sob escaped her. ‘I’m sorry, Rachel,’ she said. Her gaze flicked back to Clemo and he nodded at her, willing her to continue. She placed one trembling hand upon the other, so that my hand was buried beneath both of hers. I saw in her eyes that some kind of battle was lost.

‘Rachel,’ she said, ‘Andrew and Naomi Bowness are our parents. Our mum and dad.’

‘What do you mean? No they’re not. That’s not what our parents are called.’ I tried to pull my hand away but Nicky was gripping it now.

‘It is. Those are the real names of our parents,’ my sister said. Her eyes were begging me to understand but I didn’t, not really, not yet.

‘And Charlie Bowness?’ I said.

‘He…⁠’ She was welling up again, but she got herself under control. ‘He was our brother.’

‘Brother?’ I’d never had a brother. ‘And the others? I suppose they’re our sisters are they?’

‘Tell her everything,’ said Clemo.

He’d broken Nicky, drained the fight out of her. In her expression I saw terrible suffering, terrible vulnerability and, most frightening of all, what looked like a plea for forgiveness.

‘Alice and Katy Bowness are us. Those were our names before they were changed. We were, we are, Alice and Katy Bowness.’

Clemo briskly pulled something from between the pages of his notebook. It was a newspaper cutting.

If he hadn’t showed it to me there and then I’m not sure that I’d have believed any of them. I’d always been told that my parents died in a car accident. You could tell the story in an instant and I’d been doing that for years: our parents died in a head-on collision with a lorry. It had been nobody’s fault, just a tragic accident. The steering on the lorry was proved to be faulty. My parents were cremated and their ashes scattered. There was no headstone. End of story.

Except that apparently it wasn’t.

I wasn’t who I thought I was, and nor was Nicky.

Clemo handed me a photocopy of a newspaper article from 30 March 1982, thirty years ago. There was a photograph of a couple that I recognised as my parents. My Aunt Esther had had one photograph of them on her mantelpiece and this grainy image showed the same two people. The difference was that in this image they were with three children.

I recognised my sister. She stood beside our mother. I could see a baby, a chubby little thing of about one year old in a smocked dress, and I supposed that she could be me. I didn’t recognise the boy who sat in the middle of the picture. Around four years old, he was so like Ben it took my breath away. He had the same messy hair and balanced features, the same posture and the same grin, the one that could light up your day, and the same smattering of freckles across his nose. He was nestled between my parents. It was a lovely image, a perfect family.

The headline beside it told another story:

BATTEN DISEASE FAMILY IN FATAL DEATH LEAP

I scanned the article, snippets of it jumping out at me: ‘Local couple Andrew and Naomi Bowness leaped to their deaths… driven to the act by lack of support for their terminally ill son… no grandparents surviving… friends and neighbours expressed surprise… had coped so well… feel sorry for their two surviving daughters… wanted to end his suffering.’

I looked at Nicky who was watching me, stricken.

‘They killed themselves?’

‘And Charlie.’

The way she said his name, the tenderness in those two words, the loss, told me that it was Charlie who she mourned above all.

‘But what about us?’

Nicky looked away.

‘Why did they leave us?’

‘Don’t you think I’ve been asking myself that all my life?’

‘And why didn’t you tell me?’

She didn’t answer.

I looked at the article again, and stared at the photograph.

Clemo cleared his throat. ‘There was a report from the coroner. Would you like to know what it said?’

‘I’ve read it,’ said Nicky.

‘I want to know,’ I said.

He took another sheet of paper from his notebook, ran his eyes down it.

‘It says that your brother Charlie was diagnosed with Batten disease at the age of five and that his condition began to deteriorate rapidly after that. His diagnosis came about a year after you were born, Rachel, at around the time that this picture was taken, but he was already experiencing some of the symptoms.’

‘He looks OK in the photo,’ I said. He did. He was lovely: sunny-looking, vibrant, snug in his family’s embrace.

‘He’s not,’ said Nicky. ‘He was beginning to lose his sight. Look at the photo. You’ll see that he’s not looking at the camera properly. He’s looking above it. It’s because he only had peripheral vision when that was taken. He had to look out of the bottom of his eye to see anything.’

She was right. The little boy was staring at a point that was above the camera.

‘He was totally blind soon after that,’ Nicky said. ‘And then he stopped being able to walk and stopped being able to talk, and he had to be fed with a tube because he couldn’t swallow and he had epileptic fits. The disease took him away from us piece by piece.’

‘You loved him.’

‘I worshipped him.’

Her words seemed to hang for a moment between us, and when she spoke again it was hushed.

‘He didn’t deserve it. I would’ve helped them. I would’ve helped them to look after him until the end, but they couldn’t stand his suffering. Mum blamed herself.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s an inherited condition.’

‘But we don’t have it.’ I was struggling to understand.

‘Not every child gets it. It’s a matter of luck.’

‘So they jumped off a cliff with him? That’s so extreme.’

Nicky simply nodded. She’d turned her head away now, and I could only see her profile, as she looked fixedly towards the dim winter light that filtered through the kitchen window, washing her features with grey.

‘But why would you do that if you had two other children?’ I asked.

Clemo replied, ‘The coroner’s report does shed a bit of light on that. Apparently, because the condition was inheritable, they had had you tested. They were waiting for the results when they took their lives.’