This Heart Within Me Burns - From Bedlam to Benidorm (Revised & Updated). Crissy Rock
want to look after him,’ I explain.
‘Why not?’ Mum asks. ‘He’s your granddad.’
I want to tell her he isn’t like me granddad any more but I’m thinking what he told me would happen to me and our Brian if we told anyone. He said we’d go into the naughty home and Mum and Dad wouldn’t ever come to see us. We’d be pushed on a ferry down the Mersey and never seen again.
‘What’s cat ’n axe?’ Brian asks innocently. He’s a bit thick, me brother, fancy not knowin’ that the cataracts are bad eyes.
‘Nan’s going to hospital for an operation to get new eyes,’ I tell him.
‘She’s getting new eyes?’
‘Yes.’
‘What, two new eyes?’
I look at me mum and she smiles and nods.
‘Two new ones,’ I reply confidently.
‘Will they be glass like me ollies?’ (Ollies was the name we had for marbles.)
‘Stupid div,’ I say. ‘No, they’re real ones. She’ll get two new ’uns.’
‘I bet that hurts,’ says Brian.
Me mum and me are getting Nan ready for the hospital and she is a little strange. Quiet like. Me mum says she is nervous but at least when she comes out she’ll be able to see further than the other side of the living room.
I’m not sleeping with Nan tonight. I’m gonna miss snugglin’ up to her. Perhaps Granddad will keep me warm. He hasn’t played the choking game for a while. Maybe he’s back to our normal granddad.
I’m sleeping when Granddad comes to bed but he wakes me up moaning and groaning.
‘What’s wrong, Granddad?’
He turns over.
‘Me stomach, Christine. It hurts terrible. It needs to be rubbed.’
Granddad reaches under the covers for me hand.
‘Will you rub me belly, Christine? Make Granddad all better.’
Granddad puts me hand on his stomach and makes me start rubbing him. I pull me hand away straight away and he clouts me on the back of me head.
‘Rub me belly.’
He puts me hand down there again.
‘I don’t like it.’
‘Rub me belly. You want Granddad to get better, don’t you?’
Before I can answer, he hits me again.
He closes me hand round his belly and makes me rub it faster. It doesn’t feel right, all lumpy and hard. I tell him he needs to go to the hospital like me nan and they’ll give him a new belly like they’re giving me nan new eyes. Perhaps Granddad will get a bed next to Nan.
He doesn’t answer; he is moaning in pain. His hand is clasped around my hand squeezing me hard and we are both rubbing at his sore belly.
He seems to relax and suddenly his moaning and groaning has stopped. I think I have made it better. He will be pleased and maybe won’t make us play the choking game again.
In the morning, he orders me into a big bath he has filled. Now, after I have made his belly all better, he’s being nasty to me.
‘How’s your belly, Granddad?’
At first, he doesn’t answer me. Then he tells me I am dirty and filthy and disgusting. He grabs me by the neck and says if I tell anyone what happened to his belly they’ll take me away forever and everyone will hate me and I won’t see Brian for 50 years.
I’m crying in the bath telling Granddad that I’m sorry I didn’t fix his belly. He’s throwing cups of water into my face so I can hardly breathe.
‘I’m sorry, Granddad, I won’t tell anyone. I’m sorry.’
‘Shut the fuck up, you snivelling get.’
My other granddad never uses the fuck word, never ever, ever.
And still he throws the water in my face and uses the fuck word again and others I haven’t heard before and grabs me by the hair and forces my head under the water and I can’t breathe. Eventually, he lets me up and I gulp in the air as quick as I can so I don’t die.
And then he shouts, ‘Now get out of that bath and get dried.’
I lie in the bath crying until the water is freezing cold. I am so scared and want to ask Granddad what I have done that is so bad. I thought I was helping him. Perhaps he is right, I am filthy and disgusting.
I sob out loud, ‘Don’t make me go away, Granddad, please. I love Brian, Brian needs me to protect him, please, Granddad, no… I won’t ever, ever, ever tell anyone, honest to God, I won’t ever tell.’
Me mum finds me shivering in the bath but tells me to hurry up as we have to visit Nan in the hospital. She asks me where Granddad is and I tell her I don’t know.
We aren’t allowed in hospital to see Nan. The hospital won’t allow me and Brian in, only me mum. So we are standing by the wall across the road from the hospital and Mum says she will get Nan to wave out of her window at the end of the ward. Dad isn’t with us, he’s working, but Granddad hasn’t come either, which doesn’t seem right to me.
I ask Brian what he thinks but he calls Granddad a bastard and says he doesn’t care. I scold him and tell him not to use words like that about our granddad. Brian and me look up at the big hospital, and to floor number seven. Mum has told us that, if we look there, she will get Nan out of bed and make her wave to us. Five minutes after Mum goes into the hospital, we see people at the place where she pointed.
The tiny figures are hard to see but there are two of them and they are waving, and me and Brian wave back and… yes… it’s me mum and Nan. I’m glad I’ve walked right across Liverpool to see her. I hope she comes back to 11D Windsor Gardens soon.
***
Nan returned from hospital with much-improved eyesight, and I can remember cuddling her tight all night the first night she was home. I hugged her so tightly she said she could hardly breathe. But I knew I would be safe now. Nan, my protector, was back home.
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.
Primary school for us was St Saviour’s on Crown Street. There’s a hospital there now. All of us went to St Saviour’s, even my dad had been there.
I won’t use my class teacher’s real name but will call him Mr Smith. He had the bushiest eyebrows I’d ever seen, and the biggest, loudest voice I’d ever heard. It was in this voice that he told us we were thick – especially me, or so it seemed. You’d answer one thing wrong and that was it.
‘Murray, I can’t believe how thick you are. You are as thick as a brick.’
And, of course, all the other kids would laugh. Day after day, week after week, every single term, I was told I was thick and eventually I started to believe it. I began to wonder what the use was of trying to learn anything. It was the same story back home; when no one else was in, Granddad would be saying how disgusting