stroke, she put her key in the lock as usual and pushed the door, but it immediately hit an obstacle, refusing to open wide enough to let us in. Peering through the gap we could see Dad lying across the hallway where he had fallen down the stairs, motionless. Alex was sitting on top of him, waiting patiently, as he always did for everything.
‘Dad’s asleep,’ he told us, solemnly.
‘We’ll come in the back,’ Mum told him and we hurried round the house to let ourselves in through the kitchen.
Mum knew immediately that Dad wasn’t asleep and an ambulance must have been called, although I don’t remember it arriving. I do remember going to visit him in hospital later, as he recovered. It wasn’t until many years afterwards that we discovered that Mum had told our godmother, Helen, that she had hoped he would die that day. She called Helen to come over before she dialled 999 and apparently said she was considering not calling an ambulance for a while, in the hope that he would just slip peacefully away. It would have been a merciful release for all of us if that had happened, but Mum would never actually have been able to do such a thing, however miserable he was making her life by then. If he had died that day maybe we would still have Mum with us today. Things must already have been very bad between them for her to be thinking such terrible thoughts about him. Not all strokes are fatal, though, so we’ll never know if it would have done much harm to have left him on the hall floor a bit longer.
He recovered almost completely over the coming months, although his movement never came back completely because he refused to have the physiotherapy that the doctors recommended. He wouldn’t have wanted to put himself in someone else’s power like that. He needed to be separate from the world and having someone manipulating him physically would probably have felt too personal. He hardly ever spoke to us so it was hard to tell if his speech had been affected, as it can be after a stroke; as far as I’m aware it didn’t seem any different.
Once he was back home Dad’s stroke made no difference to any of our lives. Mum went back to work, we went back to school and he went back into his bedroom as if nothing had changed. But who knows what pressure the condition was putting on his brain, both before and after it happened? Did he act the way he later did because of the stroke, or did he have a stroke partly because of the stress he put himself under by hating the whole world?
All Mum’s efforts were channelled into giving Alex and me the best possible start in life, and she refused to accept that anything was ever important enough to disrupt the relentless and steady routine of our educational and after-school activities. Feeling a bit ill, for instance, was never an excuse for missing anything. We actually had to be at death’s door before she would let us use illness as an excuse to stay home or go to bed. Maybe she was fearful that we might have enough of Dad’s genetic make-up to make us give up on life if she didn’t keep us continually encouraged and stimulated. If that’s the case I don’t think she needed to worry, because neither of us wanted to be in the least like him.
Dad took no interest in any of Mum’s plans for us. In fact he took no interest in us at all, apart from hating me and trying to recruit Alex to his cause of annoying Mum as much as possible. He would seize any chance he could to upset me. Knowing that I was terrified of dogs, for instance, he brought home a mongrel puppy, which we christened Alfie. He was a lovely dog, black with gold-coloured paws and eyebrows. Dad told Alex in advance what he was planning to do, which delighted Alex because he’d always wanted a dog of his own. The plan backfired on Dad because Alfie was so endearing I immediately overcame my fear and loved him as fiercely as Alex did, while having a dog in the house nearly drove Dad mad, particularly when Alfie barked and forced him to come out of his room unnecessarily. He grew to hate Alfie just as much as he hated us and he would lash out and kick or beat him so often the dog became a quivering mass of nerves whenever Dad was around – which annoyed him even more.
I had other pets over the years, which gave Dad more opportunities to get at me. There was the pet rabbit that he let out of the cage and chased away, taking pleasure in telling me that it would never survive in the wild. And there was the hamster he poisoned and cut open, leaving the corpse for Alex and me to find when we got back from school. It lay in the cage, looking as if it had been turned inside out with all its internal organs on display, and I retched at the sight, knowing straight away who must be responsible. If there was anything that I really liked, Dad would destroy it just for the pleasure of making me unhappy. I began to grow a protective layer over my emotions, always expecting the worst and never letting his cruelty get to me in the way he hoped. Even though he couldn’t stand it when either of us cried, he still liked to try to make us, just to prove he could. The deaths of the pets was probably more upsetting for Alex, because he was that bit younger than me, but Dad was willing to pay that price.
Bit by bit he taught me that I could never trust him, never hope that he would change or do something nice for me, and I learned to hide my emotions from him at all costs so that he wouldn’t be able to see when he got to me. But the less I reacted to his campaigns of hate, the more violently he hated me. I gave up all hope that he would ever change and grow to like me because the disappointments were too frequent to be bearable. It was better to have no hope at all than to be let down every single time.
In some ways at the beginning I liked the idea of being special to Dad, of being the only one in the family he was nice to. When he encouraged me to misbehave at school or not bother to go in at all, he made it sound much more interesting and exciting than it ever turned out to be, particularly as he was always generous with his bribes, giving me sweets or money if I did what he wanted. The more he could encourage me to misbehave, the more he knew he would annoy Mum and undermine all her efforts to keep me working hard and in the top classes for every subject. Annoying Mum and Isobel was the primary aim of almost everything he ever did in the house. I never stopped to question why; that’s just the way it was.
At the same time I also discovered that however much he might pretend to me that we were allies when we were alone, he couldn’t be trusted not to betray me as soon as he had an opportunity. He would encourage me to do something bad when it was just the two of us together, but as soon as Mum came home he would sneak on me and tell her what I had been doing, without confessing that he had suggested it in the first place. He would gloat over how badly behaved her precious little son really was, and how he had managed to sabotage all her good work in bringing me up. I never protested in my defence because I didn’t want to provoke his anger and make him hate me as much as he hated the others, and because I was never one for protesting about things generally. I was always pretty philosophical about life, even as a small boy.
I soon learned that everything Dad did was part of some spiteful mind game he had dreamed up in the long hours he spent on his own in his room. If ever he gave us a present there was always a reason, a hidden agenda behind it. He heard Isobel asking Mum for money for something one day and so he put forty pounds in her room for her to find. Not knowing what to say, Isobel spent it and then a week or two later he demanded it back. Since Isobel only received a pound or two a week as pocket money, that took a long time and was something else for him to hold against her, another way to keep control and prove to her what a bad daughter she was.
He gave us both CD players one time, but only so he could smash Isobel’s up in front of her and enjoy the look of disappointment on her face. He must have planned it from the start because the one he bought me was far more expensive than the one he intended to destroy. When he first gave it to her Isobel sensed there was something wrong and was hesitant to even touch it for fear that it would prove to be a trap. When he smashed it he didn’t even bother to say why, but I knew he wouldn’t
