42

Rob often visits Louisa on Saturdays. They read the papers together, drink coffee, dunk biscuits and whinge about the conservative government, but really, all governments are entitled to their scorn. Lately, he’s missed a few Saturdays because Lou doesn’t seem entirely with it at the moment and he hasn’t wanted to delve into why. Then, there’s the kids and he’s been helping a lot lately and if she starts to rely on him, he decides, it will end in tears because I am not to be relied upon.

This bright Saturday morning is different. Bizarrely, John Keele decided in advance that he wanted the kids for the weekend. His parents were interested in them or something. So today when Rob walks round the back, he finds things very quiet and he’s surprised. Not that he’s looking forward to seeing Tom and Beck, he’s just forgotten they were at their father’s.

Rob doesn’t love them, actually he barely knows them, with their limbs like stalks and their eyes like a deer’s. Kids! Who needs bloody kids, he wonders, getting the spare key out of the hide-a-rock that looks so pathetically plastic. Inside, he drops a swag of newspapers on the table, fills up the kettle, flicks it on with a glance at Beck’s latest drawing on the fridge and sees with a strange rush of pleasure that she has drawn her Uncle Robert up a tree. He has a closer look. The girl has talent, he muses, then pushes on through the house looking for Louisa.

By now he’s thinking that Lou must have nipped down the shops but he looks around anyway and pops his head into her room. When he opens the door, he sees she’s on the bed and apologises, assuming she’s asleep. But then something makes him look again, and he sees the empty bottle beside her and that she’s unconscious on the sagging smelly bed with her mouth spilling white froth. He feels a wave burst within him and he drops beside his sister.

He cannot understand that she had wanted to be dead. His heart is pounding. He needs to wake her up now. ‘Lou, LOUISA, WAKE UP,’ he shouts way too loud, shaking her and he turns her on her side and then she’s sick everywhere and there’s so much white foam. He wipes her mouth with his hand. No, he thinks, this is not over Louisa.

‘No, no,’ he says to her softly and urgently, ‘No, Louie it’s all right, it’s quiet now. It’s really all right. The kids are with their father and they’re all right. He will look after them. You’ll be right, we’ll get you better.’ He just keeps talking because it seems the right thing. There’s no telling how long she’s been unconscious.

With shuddering fingers he grabs his mobile and rings an ambulance and runs to open the front door, ready for them. Louisa moans and Rob sits beside her. He puts a towel over the vomit and cleans up around her mouth with a wet face washer from the bathroom and while he’s doing that, it crosses his mind that he’s never cleaned anyone’s face before and then, persistently, that Louisa looks like Emmett.

In an ambulance with the siren cutting through the bright morning like a sword the paramedics take her to the hospital and Rob goes with her. He sits up the front looking out on the shiny day with the kind of fear he hasn’t felt since Daniel died. He finds he’s crying and his breathing comes in swells.

At the hospital, they take her away from Rob and push a tube down her throat and pump charcoal into her and the nurses say things like, ‘You’ll be right love.’ Between themselves they wonder lightly about the story of this one.

She can’t speak because of the tube and she can’t really hear because everything is clouded, but there’s something she recalls and it’s a sort of questioning from within that goes something like how could you even mess this up? Useless. Useless. Rob sits outside the swinging doors holding his arms to make himself be still.

He’s in the ward when she’s wheeled in on the narrow bed but she turns her head away from him to the window. Still, he sits there and without turning to him she says in her hoarse voice, her throat raw from the tube, ‘Don’t tell anyone.’

He puts his hand on her sweaty head, ‘No one,’ he says. ‘Ever.’

She’s transferred to a psychiatric hospital and ends up being there for six months. Clinical depression has her in its grip. She doesn’t eat unless people stand over her. She doesn’t talk unless she absolutely must. She stares. She’s gone away. Rob moves into Louisa’s house and the kids live with him because it suits everyone.

Louisa’s children tell no one about their mother. They visit her with Rob on Saturdays and always come out wildly brushing away tears. Rob takes them for a medicinal burger afterwards. Kindness has caught him up in itself and the weeks pass by slowly as if they are all on a boat on a frozen glacier.

At first they look at Rob as though he’s an alien, this gawky, skinny, jokey uncle who eats apples, core and all, and who puts tomato sauce on everything and who loves dim sims with a passion.

Peter and Jess bring dinner on Tuesday nights, but it’s soon clear that Jess is hopeless at food so Pete does it all. He settles on lamb roasts and cooks them like Anne’s, the flavours clean and separate and the gravy light and shiny. Jess and Rob help the kids with their homework while he cooks. And a kind of pattern emerges.

One night they start upon word definitions and Jess asks them to define ‘cadaver’. Rob groans about ‘my macabre little sister’, but the kids love it and a dictionary is produced to clear up misunderstandings. Rob takes over as quiz master and their haul of words includes ‘immense’ and ‘dogged’ and ‘going Dutch’ and ‘drop kick’, as in ‘What exactly is a drop kick, Peter?’

When the kids are in bed, they drink wine or tea and settle back into being together. One night Jess says, ‘We’ve got to show the kids that they will survive this, that it’s possible. We did. We knew we would. And they will too and so will Louisa.’

‘Yeah,’ say her brothers, each thinking how clever she is and not saying it and then Pete says, ‘I didn’t always know I’d survive. I have to say there were times when I thought I was gone but somehow you don’t give up even when it seems obvious that you should. Even when you know the chances are that you are totally fucked. These kids have each other and that helped me, knowing you were all there going through it too.’

Rob laughs from the couch, ‘You’re glad we suffered too, are you? Little shit.’ Later he says, ‘You know, doing the homework with them tonight, it kind of reminded me of Emmett, and he was always a bastard but there is a real truth about him and it was that he wanted us to get an education, remember that? And I want these kids to get one too. It is crucial, but how do you get kids to know that?’

‘I reckon they know,’ Jess comments, ‘they’ll be right as long as Louisa is. Can you imagine what our lives would have been like without Mum?’ she asks, tucking her feet under herself in the armchair. ‘She was all that stood between us and the shit heap. Having her there and knowing she loved us, that was everything.’

There are murmurs from the brothers and then Peter stands up and says firmly, ‘Let’s not turn this into another Emmett session. Let’s just not, I’m far too tired to enter into it,’ and he makes a start on the dishes.