How the Trouble Started Page 9
We walked down Waddington Road, heading away from town and towards the river. After the road bends left it bends right and you end up looking down onto the Hoddale as it runs its way past the fringes of the town and further out of the valley. To see it below, nestling between the fields, you wouldn’t believe it was running water. It looked like a country road winding along down there, and even as we got closer it was running so slowly it hardly looked like it was moving at all. After we’d climbed over the stile at the bottom of the hill and walked a few feet alongside the river Fiona said, ‘Come on Donald. What’s up? What’s bothering you?’
Just then a car shot over the narrow bridge behind us, its engine straining hard, the tyres squealing as it rounded the corner. The noise made us jump and we turned to see the car speed off, its back end swinging from side to side. A woman was stood on the bridge with her daughter, the car must have gone right past them. The little girl was howling and pushing her face into her mum’s skirt. You could see the woman was shaken too, but she was trying to encourage the girl off the bridge, to where the road widened and the pavement started. The girl wouldn’t let go of the skirt and the woman had to tear her hands away, so she could pick her up and carry her off the bridge. When I could see they were safely on the pavement I moved to the edge of the river, picked up some stones and started throwing them as hard as I could into the water.
‘Are you OK Donald?’ Fiona had followed me and was stood behind me. I nodded but carried on throwing stones.
‘You seem a little wired,’ she said.
I did feel wired. That was the right word for it. I felt taut. Tight. Too much energy and nothing to do with it. I felt like I could run right back to Clifton. I felt like I couldn’t breathe and couldn’t run a step. I felt like every moment was the moment three seconds before you’re sick when you’re confused and in pain and want to escape your body. I wanted to tell her about the little boy in Clifton. I want to tell her that I killed a little boy and that I wasn’t even that bothered for a while afterwards because I didn’t mean to do it, and I was told he would be in heaven and that seemed all right to me at the time. I wanted her to know that I wasn’t a bad person because I didn’t shake and cry and wail when I’d found out he’d died. I just didn’t know what I’d done. I hadn’t a clue what I’d done. And then we disappeared and Mum would never let it be mentioned so it was never mentioned. But now the silence made me want to scream until my throat tore. I wanted her to know that it would feel good to walk through the middle of town screaming: I KILLED A LITTLE BOY, I KILLED A LITTLE BOY, over and over until everyone knew and there was nobody left to tell. And I wanted to tell her about Jake. I wanted to talk about Jake. A great little lad and nobody cared. Nobody saw what was going on. But what I really wanted her to understand was how it feels to live like you’re living in a diving bell, where you’re trapped and can’t move and things are only going to get tighter and smaller for as long as you’re alive until you’re the smallest Russian doll in a set of a hundred Russian dolls buried deep in a box in the back garden of a house where nobody has ever lived. I wanted to tell her that I didn’t feel well and hadn’t done for a long time. I stopped walking. I told her I wanted to go home. She looked at me but didn’t say anything and we turned and started walking back towards the bridge and Waddington Road. When we reached her house Fiona took my hands and said, ‘Donald, if you need someone to talk to, come and see me. I know things aren’t always easy for you, but whenever you need to, come and talk to me.’ She put her arms around me and hugged me and I hugged her back and the feel and the smell of her was the best thing that had happened to me for years. I blinked back tears and a moment later she was behind a closed door.
I didn’t go home. I went back into town and walked to Gillygate Primary. I walked up to the railings and looked onto the yard. Without any of the children tearing around it looked like a place I’d never seen before. I tried to picture them: Jake and Harry over by the tree, the football lads over the other side and the little girls skipping around it all. But it was impossible to imagine so much life in such a silent space and the emptiness of it made me feel worse so I left. I walked to Jake’s street and had a peer at his house, but I couldn’t see any sign of life there either. I did a circuit of the town and ended up back at the quarry and now my body was tired but my brain still wasn’t slowing. I lay down under a tree and watched the empty quarry and thought about Jake. And then I started thinking about the little boy back in Clifton.
He was two and a half years old. He lived with his mum and dad at the bottom of Hawthorne Road, number five. We lived at the top, number seventy-five. His mum and dad have split up since it happened – that’s common after losing a child, very few relationships survive something like that. But divorce is common anyway these days so who knows what would have happened without the tragedy. They loved him very much – I did know that. I used to see them in the park in Clifton, pushing him on the swings, or they would be sliding him down the small slide, one of them letting him go from the top, the other catching him at the bottom, making him squeal with excitement. We’d never spoken before it happened and we didn’t speak afterwards. I thought they might come and see me, to get my side of the story, but they must have got a version of that from the police. And then, of course, there was the trouble in their garden at midnight. They weren’t going to come after that.
I often think of them. Wonder how they’re doing. I know they must blame themselves for what happened. They must blame themselves. I hope they do. They have to at least share some of the blame with me. Every time I think about it I always come back to the same point. They shouldn’t have let him get outside. They should have been more vigilant. More careful. Maybe that’s why they split up. Maybe one of them thought the other one was more to blame and that ruined the relationship. Maybe the one who was more to blame has trouble breathing sometimes too. Perhaps they’ve never had any real friends since it happened either and aren’t allowed to tell people about it for fear of being judged. It would serve them right. I’m being cruel, I know, but sometimes I want to be. Slowly, gradually, over the years, it’s ruined me. And it’s been clever that way. It let me think for a while that the consequences were manageable. That reason and clear thinking could keep it at bay. But you can’t keep your mind as strong as fortress walls for ever. You will wake up in the middle of the night and the walls to your brain will be as mushy as gravied potato. Some nights you will dream, and you can’t stop dreams. Some mornings when you wake you’ll be attacked before you get a chance to raise your guard. And after each attack it takes longer to rebuild the walls, and you know that there will be another attack on its way and you get tired and it becomes harder to keep your head above water, and you start to wonder if trying to keep your head above water is worth it any more. Fiona was worth it. Jake was worth it. I knew that. What Jake’s mum didn’t seem to understand was that every step he took could be his last. She appeared oblivious to the fact that little boys can go from alive to dead in a second. That risk is everywhere. I’d learnt early that death isn’t only something that you slip into in old age, it isn’t something that sits below the surface of the world and tiptoes in at the end of a long life. Death is now. Death is present. It’s with babies and kittens as much as it’s with the old and ruined. It’s there on the sunniest day of the year and it isn’t ever going to go away for any of us. The little boy I killed was called Oliver Thomas.
Eventually the quarry turned blue, the trees turned black, the birds stopped singing and I grew cold. It was time to go home. I went in through the back door and straight up to my bedroom. I made enough noise so she would know I was back, but she didn’t even come and shout. I couldn’t sleep. I was wired to the moon, as fizzy as a dropped can. I found it hard to catch my breath, to get air properly into my lungs. Thoughts wouldn’t settle and ran into and over each other and I didn’t even attempt to find any sleep. Everything, all of it, such a mess. I didn’t know where to start.
19
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The problems with my breathing began when I was ten years old. We hadn’t been in Raithswaite long the first time it happened and there was no forewarning, nothing to suggest what was coming, so when I woke in the middle of the night feeling like I was suffocating, unable to get air into my lungs, it was terrifying. I tried to think my way through the panic. I couldn’t breathe, you need air to be able to breathe, and all the air is outside. I opened my bedroom window and pushed my head out into the cold night, but it made no difference; even though oxygen was all around me I couldn’t get any of it through my nose and into my chest. I was drowning inside myself. My panic trebled at this realisation. I banged through to Mum’s room, slammed the light on and shouted, ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe!’ Before she had chance to do anything I charged down the stairs, flung open the front door and ran out into the street. I fell to my hands and knees, gasping, still trying to get air into my lungs. Mum followed me out, grabbed my shoulders and pulled me up. She held my head in her hands and looked me in the eye and told me to stop panicking. I didn’t know what she was talking about, I wasn’t panicking; I was dying. ‘I can’t breathe,’ I gasped, ‘I’m going to die.’ She told me she’d rung an ambulance and that we should wait inside where it was warm. She helped me into the house. The operator on the phone had told Mum that I should have a glass of warm milk before the ambulance arrived. ‘A glass of warm milk?’ I was unsure. How could I drink when I couldn’t breathe? Mum made me sit with my head between my knees while she warmed the milk in a pan. We’d been sat at the kitchen table for thirty minutes before I realised that no ambulance had been called, no rescue was coming. But at some point in that half an hour I’d remembered how to breathe again. I was still shaky and scared, but my lungs were working and my nose was allowing air to pass into them. When I finished the milk Mum took me upstairs and put me to bed and told me I needed to calm down. ‘If you let yourself get wound up like this you’ll be in for a very long life.’ I lay in bed frozen stiff, expecting death to return at any moment. But I did make it through the night and by lunchtime the next day I’d started to forget about it, forget how terrified I’d felt.
Two weeks later it happened again, and then again a couple of days after that. It started to happen so regularly that it was a relief to get through a day without feeling I was suffocating. Each time I was sure that I really was dying, that all the other times had been leading up to this one, and that now survival was impossible. But Mum didn’t believe me. She told me it was a reaction to what had happened back in Clifton. She said my mind was playing tricks on me and I just needed to calm myself down. ‘Stress can do funny things to your body,’ she said. I’d never heard anything so stupid. I didn’t think I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get air into my lungs. It was nothing to do with stress; something had gone wrong with my body and unless it was sorted out I would die. After much pestering and pleading I was finally allowed to see a doctor, but she made me promise that I wouldn’t mention Clifton. ‘If you breathe a word about that they’ll want to get inside your head. They’ll want you to tell them all about it and how it feels and that will set you back.’ I didn’t want to mention Clifton, I had no interest whatsoever in mentioning Clifton. I wanted help breathing and staying alive. Clifton was the last thing on my mind right then.
The doctor was an old man with a white beard. He looked like Father Christmas.
‘What’s brought you here today then Donald?’ he asked.
‘He says that he can’t breathe and he’s dying,’ my mum said.
‘Is that true Donald? You think you’re dying?’
I nodded.
‘That sounds serious. Let’s have a look at you.’
He asked me to take my shirt off and pushed a stethoscope to my chest, then my back, and listened. ‘Take a deep breath now Donald please.’ Then he held my tongue down with a little wooden spatula and shone a torch in my throat and my ears. He told me to breathe into a plastic tube as hard as I could and made a note of the result. He took my pulse and blood pressure and asked me to do twenty star jumps and ten press-ups.
‘How’s your breathing now?’ he asked.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes I can’t breathe.’
He made some notes on his computer and looked at me and said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you Donald. You’re as healthy as any ten-year-old child I’ve seen.’
Despair hit me. Tears started to come. If a doctor didn’t believe me, how was I going to get help from anyone? He saw my distress and cocked his head at me. ‘I’m just going to ask your mum a few questions Donald. Is that OK?’
I nodded.
‘Is he an anxious child?’
‘He has his moments,’ my mum said.
‘Has there been anything recently that could have caused him upset?’
‘We have just moved here from another town. He’s started a new school.’
‘Is that it Donald? Do you miss your old friends?’
He was so far away from understanding that it felt impossible to steer him in the right direction. I didn’t say a word.
‘It’s a big change for a young lad. Especially if he is a bit sensitive. It will take time for him to adjust. Give it a few months and he’ll be charging around Raithswaite like he was born and bred here. Physically there’s nothing wrong with him. Nothing at all. Get him playing football, get him playing outside, wear him out. He’ll be so tired that he’ll forget he’s supposed to be dying.’
He smiled at us both and Mum stood up to leave.
It happened again that afternoon at school. Dread filled me from the inside. ‘I can’t breathe,’ I told Mrs Sutton. She sat me down in the school office and made me breathe into a brown paper bag. She rang my mum but my mum refused to come and pick me up. She told Mrs Sutton that we’d been to the doctor and there was nothing wrong with me. I was putting it on for attention, she said, and they should send me back to class. Mrs Sutton didn’t send me back to class straight away. She left me with a glass of water and my brown paper bag and I sat on a chair outside the office for the rest of the lesson. I carried that brown paper bag around everywhere after that day. I never left the house without it. I was convinced that it was the only thing that could save my life.
It took me years to work out that I was suffering from panic attacks. I heard a woman interviewed on the radio and her words froze me to the spot. She was describing exactly what had been happening to me for years, and those two simple words summed up the terror so well. Panic attack. I took myself off to the library and looked for books. There was a whole shelf of them to choose from so I went with the one that had been borrowed the most: Live a Life Free from Panic by Sue Cotterill. The attacks kept coming, but the book did help, I learnt to cope with them better. The threat doesn’t go away though, the threat is always there, and even when there hasn’t been an attack for weeks you know one may be waiting in the wings. They are clever like that. You can’t drop your guard because as soon as you do, as soon as you think you are safe, an attack will charge at you from nowhere and leave you terrified and shattered. What I never understood was why other people had panic attacks. I had good reason but why do housewives and accountants and dinner ladies suffer? Not everyone can have done something as terrible as I had. What reduces normal people to shaking, quivering wrecks?
20
I had made a decision. I was going to help Jake. I primed Mum early; Saturday night I would be round at Tom Clarkson’s, we were going to watch some films and I was going to stay over. She eyed me suspiciously.
‘Who’s Tom Clarkson?’