Gilly MacMillan - What She Knew

‘But I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t they wait for the results?’

‘Your mother had convinced herself, and your father, that you would not be fine. By then she was, as far as we can gather, extremely depressed and unstable. She told her sister, your aunt Esther, that she would not be able to cope any longer if you were also diagnosed with Batten disease, and your father had never coped well. The report mentions that she spoke of feeling very isolated. There was a stigma to mental and physical disability in those days and your mother was not very emotionally strong. The coroner concluded that the strain of caring for Charlie had affected your parents profoundly. They felt that they had no option.’

‘It makes no sense.’

‘Things don’t always make sense,’ said Clemo, ‘especially when people are under duress. We see things you wouldn’t believe.’

I resented the way he was trying to reassure me, as if he hadn’t just turned my world upside down, and I didn’t want his words to distract me, because there was something else I needed to ask.

‘Why did our names get changed?’

Nicky said, ‘Aunt Esther thought it would be better. She didn’t want it to be hanging over us, or herself either. She thought people would judge us, that they’d say it was a shameful thing. Luckily, for us anyway, the Falklands War started four days later, so that article was all the press attention our little family story got. The papers were full of battleships and submarines after that. Better to be safe than sorry, though, Esther said, and social services approved the idea of having new names. I chose them, you know! I renamed us!’

She forced a sarcastic enthusiasm into her voice but there was nothing in her expression to suggest that this fact actually gave her any pleasure.

I picked up the article and studied the photograph. I’d never seen an image of myself as a baby before. I was chubby-faced with a curl in my hair that I never knew I’d had. I was balanced on my father’s knee, with fat little arms protruding from my dress. My hands were blurry, as though I might have been clapping. My sister stood beside my mother in the photograph. She wore shorts and a T-shirt and her hand rested casually on my mother’s shoulder. Her feet were bare and she had the skinny coltish legs of a prepubescent child. She was smiling widely. When I studied the faces of my parents I felt a new emotion: a stab of betrayal. They’d been willing to leave me. Whether I was healthy or ill, they’d relinquished care of me at just one year old. They weren’t taken from me by chance. They’d abandoned me and they’d abandoned Nicky too, in the most final way possible.

I swallowed and just that small physical reflex felt like an effort. I felt as if the blood had drained from me, just as it had from my sister minutes earlier, and with it any strength that I might have had left, any fight. I was a husk, robbed of all the things that had made me who I am, all the things that had made me vital.

‘Am I Alice or Katy?’ I asked.

‘Katy.’ It was a whisper and Nicky’s face contorted tearfully around it, mirroring mine.

In the photo, my parents’ expressions were impossible to read. They were both smiling for the camera and I tried in vain to imagine what was actually going through their minds. I looked at my brother. He sat in the centre, cocooned by their bodies: a terminally ill little boy who was never going to get to live a proper life. I wondered whether they’d had the diagnosis before this photograph was taken, or were they just worried about his eyesight at this stage, thinking that was bad enough and having no idea what horrors lay just around the corner for their little boy. A boy who looked just like Ben.

I said to Clemo, ‘Why are you telling me this now?’

He addressed Nicky. ‘We spoke to your sister’s ex-husband this morning.’

She looked at him warily and raised her chin slightly, with a touch of defiance. She let go of my hand. The light in the room fluctuated, growing darker and more riddled with shadows as the clouds lowered outside.

‘I know what you’re going to say, and it’s bullshit,’ she said.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘I know what you’re trying to do, but you’re wrong.’

‘What am I trying to do?’

‘I don’t have to listen to this.’

‘I think we both know that you do.’

She crossed her arms, stared down at the table.

I sat in a state of pure, simple shock. I knew well enough by now that you could lose your child in just a few minutes, but I was shocked into silence by the new knowledge that in a similar space of time you could also gain and lose a brother who was the image of that child, and parents who were more imperfect than any version of them that I’d ever imagined.

Clemo spoke to Nicky: ‘John Finch told us that when Ben was born, he was concerned that you might have what could be described as an unhealthy interest in Ben. Would you like to comment on that?’

‘You revolting man,’ said my sister. ‘You haven’t got a clue who’s got Ben so you’ve decided to pick on me. Easier to get to someone close to home, is it? Stops you having to do so much work?’

Clemo’s gaze never left her face. ‘Would you care to comment?’ he asked her. ‘I’d be very interested to hear what your response might be.’

‘I’m sure you would,’ she replied.

‘I expect your sister would as well,’ he said.

Nicky looked at me. ‘I’ve tried so hard, and for so long, to protect you. I just wanted you to have a life where you didn’t feel rejected. I wanted it to be straightforward for you. But you were so…⁠’ She searched for a word, frustrated.

‘What?’

‘Difficult, and ungrateful.’

‘For what? Ungrateful for what?’

‘And irresponsible! You never understood anything. You just took it all for granted. You did what you wanted to do, when you wanted to do it. You had no burden. You had no loss to bear.’

‘I had the loss of my parents to bear.’ I said this quietly, because I understood that she’d had more to cope with, but she was angry now, and so was I.

‘You were clueless! Totally clueless!’

‘How could I have been any other way, if you didn’t tell me anything? That’s not my fault.’

She didn’t respond to that, she had more to get off her chest. ‘You never thanked me.’

‘For what?’

‘For protecting you.’

‘How could I have known?’

‘They never thanked me either.’

Suddenly she lost her momentum, as if that statement summed up the hopelessness of it all.

Clemo leaned in towards her. ‘Who never thanked you?’

‘Mum and Dad.’

‘What did they never thank you for?’ he asked.

‘For loving Charlie, for watching him when they’d had enough, for making him smile when they were too tired, when they couldn’t cope any longer.’

Her eyes were glassy with loss. His were intent.

‘Nicky. Were you jealous when Rachel had Ben?’

She snapped an answer at him as if he were running through a questionnaire.

‘Yes, I was jealous, yes.’

‘But you had the girls,’ I said.

‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand,’ she said.

‘Why were you jealous?’ said Clemo.

‘Because he looked like Charlie, right from the start. All I could see when I looked at him was Charlie.’

‘Did you feel that Rachel might not be able to care for Ben properly?’ said Clemo.

‘I was worried,’ she said simply, and she turned to face me. ‘You were so feckless, you know, so young?’

My sister spoke as if she’d rehearsed these words for years. Her speech gathered pace, as if she were confessing something.

‘You messed about for years, you never bothered with schoolwork although they said you could have done brilliantly if you’d tried. You never cared about anything, and then all of a sudden you got John. God knows how, because you were pissing your life away, partying all the time, and suddenly everything was so perfect and what had you done to deserve it? Nothing.’