When I was 19 me mam was the only person in the world I loved. She’d been in slightly dodgy health for some months, maybe a year or two, previous. It never occurred to me for one moment she could just have a heart attack and die. But she did.
I was woken at about 4am by a noise from the back bedroom.
I remember my eldest brother Derek was a bugger. He carried out a couple of fiendish tricks on me while I was asleep. One was revealed to me as I was walking past Polworth Square on my way to school one morning and My mate Cambo said, “what’s that written on your face…B…O…B…. O…” He got that far, before I realised what it was. Someone had written “BO BOY” on me. B.O. was a kind of family in-joke that I’m slightly too young to know about. In the sixties there was an advert for a deodorant that mentioned B.O. – body odour. It must have been a funny tag to give the youngest in the family at that time; BO Boy.
Another of Derek’s fiendish tricks was to put chewing gum in my hair. That’s right; bloody stupid. But there we have it; he was only a bairn himself at the time.
The third trick I will mention was the best: The one you will wish you had thought of yourself and will want to try out on someone else as soon as possible. He would stand over you while you were asleep (6:30 am maybe) and click his fingers right up against your ear. Click...... click...... click. It didn’t matter how deep a sleep you were in. Click...... click...... click. Its thirty-five years on now but I can still hear it. Click...... click...... click. Whatever dream you were in would suddenly have something clicking in it. Click...... click...... click. It was the most horrible way to wake up.
That morning in February 1981 I couldn’t hear any clicking but there was another repetitive noise. It was the sound of my mother gasping for breath; she’d had, or was having, a heart attack. It was the most horrible way to wake up.
My other brother Brian had woken up first but there could have only been seconds in it. We didn’t have a clue what to do. If we’d been from a well-to-do family with certain expectations we would have picked up a phone, called an ambulance and sat round the bedside the next day discussing our mother’s new diet to ensure a long and healthy life.
But we were poor. We had no idea what a heart attack looked like. We didn’t understand that basic emergency services were a human right. Fuck it; we did not have a phone in the house.
I have no idea how long Brian and I watched my mother trying to hold on. It was probably only a few seconds though. Enough time for me mam to say ‘I’m going now; look after Chris’. I was the youngest of the 4 children and, for reasons I might explore another time, in someway special.
Looking back, it was an awful thing to say: Why should Brian look after me? I was 19, he was 25 didn’t he have enough problems of his own? Wasn’t I big enough to take care of myself? To this day I’ve never discussed those final words with him so I don’t know if he has felt bound by those words or whether he even heard them.
It was at this point we decided we needed an ambulance; there were two choices: One was to run to the nearest telephone box, which was about 1 mile away. The second was to knock up the family friends round the corner and use their phone. The latter seemed most sensible and I was dispatched. I got to the neighbours’ house, which was, unsurprisingly, in darkness. I hesitated. God knows what went through my mind but I made a decision not to try to knock them up but to keep running towards the phone box. When I got there I rang 999. When I told the operator of the situation she told me that an ambulance was already on the way. My brother had in fact followed me out of the house and had knocked up the neighbours that I had left sleeping.
I got back home as the ambulance was arriving. I remember, and will remember forever, offering a pact with God in my head as the ambulance reversed up Paton Square. Except I didn’t make the pact. I withdrew the pact because I baulked at giving up what I was offering in exchange for my mother’s life. I was a 19-year-old boy with all kinds of needs, one of which was my mam. I couldn’t make the deal with God. I wanted my mam to live more than anything; but in reality, not more than anything.
Maybe I should mention that at that time I was flirting with the God thing. In the days before, I had been attending church services with a workmate who was a born-again Christian. If the miracle had happened and my mam had lived it would have been proof to me of God’s mercy, God’s wonder, God’s glory and I might have today been writing this from a wholly different viewpoint.
But she died. The paramedic said there was nothing he could do. I sat on the top stair, head in hands listening to her taking her last, laboured, painful, probably brain-dead breaths.
God: I have long since stopped believing in you. In fact I stopped believing in you on that night as I sat on those stairs. But just in case, by some one in a zillion chance that I’ve got it all wrong and you do exist and you’re reading this, then I suppose you’ve got me down for a trip to Hell for all eternity. Well so be it, but at least I’ll have the opportunity to say to your face: God, you’re a git.
The story now cuts to about 18 years later when I’m trying to sort myself out.
My mam asked Brian to look after me and I kind of think that if he did hear those words then he either dismissed them as unnecessary or quietly decided to do his best; Brian, (there’s slightly more chance he will be reading this that the other beardy bastard) you’ve done ok so far. Perhaps it has been a subconscious thing and you don’t even realise your doing it but I wouldn’t have made it so far without you.
I don’t think Brian has realised how much he has influenced me in getting through this quagmire of life.
One night, whilst on night shift at the paper mill, I was reading a book on self-hypnosis that Brian had supplied to me. Apart from introducing me to the eminently sensible approach of being nice to yourself and being positive, there came a eureka moment. I suddenly realised the big thing that I had been blaming myself for.
On that night in 1981 I made a decision to head to the phone box I realised minutes afterwards that it was the wrong decision but I spent 18years blaming myself for it. If I’d made the right decision, would my mam have survived? Maybe, maybe not. The point is, that I understand now that whatever decision I made on that night was the best I could do under the circumstances. You might be reading this and thinking ‘what a twat’ but you weren’t there. You weren’t in my head at the time so you know fuck all. The point is that I blamed myself. It took me 18 years to realise I was doing it and how I’d been punishing myself ever since.
Because blame is a terrible thing. It’s something I have managed to eradicate from my life and as a result I no longer feel the need to hate. In my twenties I had a whole list of people I hated. Now I accept that everyone is just doing the best they can in a difficult world.
I’m officially screwed up. Well not officially but someone I respect and who has read my blog once said I was screwed up and some of my best friends seemed to agree with her so what the heck. At least I know I’m screwed up. At least I know I’m on the road to becoming unscrewed. It’s going to take another decade or two or three but I’ll get there.
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This post is dedicated to Oriel and Brian. It’s a long one so if you’ve got this far then it must have been worth reading. It’s taken me 27 years to write and I would love to get a few comments on it, even if it’s just one word. I don’t think you even need to be logged in.
