No One Listened: Two children caught in a tragedy with no one else to trust except for each other. Alex Kerr
to put up with, but eventually even she found the pressure too much. One night, after one of Dad’s all-night attacks on her, she decided to commit suicide. I was fourteen at the time. We had no idea how bad things had got inside her head and we would certainly never have thought she would consider the option of suicide for even a second. I will never know exactly what was going through her mind on the night she made the decision, although I found out a lot more later that she hadn’t told us at the time, but it was a decision she took with all her usual pragmatism and lack of emotion.
It must have been a really hard decision for her on a number of levels. Firstly there were her religious beliefs to overcome, and I also don’t believe she would ever have taken the idea of leaving Alex and me with Dad lightly. She must have wrestled with her conscience for a long time before deciding to do it.
Perhaps her mind was clouded by the exhaustion she was obviously suffering from at the time. It must have been a relatively quiet fight she had with Dad that night because Alex and I both slept right through it. She must have stayed awake even after he had finally run out of steam and gone back to his room. Everything must have seemed so impossibly bleak as she sat on her own downstairs in the small hours of the morning, in the dark silent house. I found out later, long after the event, that she had serious health problems, although she hadn’t told us at that stage, and she maybe thought that by ending things quickly she was sparing us from having to see her suffer and die slowly.
She had some tablets, but I don’t know if that was a co-incidence or if she had been saving them up deliberately. We were told later she took eighty-six pills, a mixture of paracetamol and whatever else she could find in the house, which seems an awful lot unless you have been deliberately hording them. Even in her moment of deepest despair she wanted to cause us the minimum amount of trauma possible. She didn’t want us to be the ones to find her, so as soon as she had swallowed the tablets she quietly let herself out of the house and went for a walk across the Downs.
It was a bitterly cold morning so maybe it was the fresh air, perhaps combined with the beauty of the rising sun, that shook her out of her black mood and made her realise that she had made a mistake and that she couldn’t abandon Alex and me. Whatever it was that changed her mind she turned round and hurried home, determined to get help before the tablets started to take effect. When she got back she rang Helen and asked her to come to the house to help. The sounds of their raised voices woke me. I could sense an air of panic and I came downstairs to find out what was going on. Helen was trying to ring an ambulance on the house phone. She told me the truth about what had happened but we decided just to tell Alex that Mum was feeling ill without going into any details.
‘Your phone’s not working,’ Helen said, unable to keep the tone of panic from her voice.
‘Dad ripped it out of the wall the other day,’ I told her.
‘I’ll have to drive your mother to the hospital,’ she said.
There was no option but to keep to our usual routine because Mum wouldn’t hear of anything else. As usual Alex didn’t ask too many questions when he came down, just watching what was going on around him with patient, solemn eyes, so I didn’t have to lie to him as we got ready and walked to school as if it was any other day. He was good like that, always willing to wait until things came clear, never in a rush. When we got home that afternoon Mum still wasn’t back from hospital. We kept as quiet as we could while we made ourselves something to eat and did our homework, so as not to aggravate Dad and bring him storming out of his room. We knew all the routines to follow until Mum returned. She came home from the hospital later the same day but she was still throwing up constantly and I’m afraid I wasn’t very sympathetic.
‘How could you do that to yourself?’ I yelled, furious with her at the thought of how she had been willing to leave us at Dad’s mercy without even preparing us for the shock, and hurt as well. I was so angry I couldn’t bring myself to offer to help her even though she was obviously feeling really ill.
‘You must be nice to her,’ Helen said when she came round, bustling about, trying to keep the mood cheerful.
‘Why?’ I wanted to know. ‘She’s brought this whole thing on herself.’
Helen didn’t answer. Mum couldn’t give me any explanation as to what she had been thinking, still not willing to talk about all the worries that must have been weighing her down by then. Maybe she didn’t want to burden me, or perhaps she knew she wouldn’t be able to put them into words without making herself cry, which she wouldn’t have wanted to do.
‘I knew you would both be okay. You’re old enough to look after Alex now,’ was all the justification she was willing to give when she was finally feeling strong enough to reply to my open hostility.
With the benefit of hindsight I think she was also worried that she would become an invalid and didn’t want to get to the stage where we had to look after her, as well as having to cope with Dad’s increasing aggression, but Alex and I didn’t know anything about the gravity of her illnesses at that stage. She must have believed that if she died social services would become involved and they would make sure we were okay. Again with the benefit of hindsight, I wouldn’t be able to share that confidence.
‘I’m going to leave when you’re sixteen anyway,’ she said in another surprise announcement, but then refused to explain what she meant. I didn’t challenge her because it sounded as though she really meant it and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know any more. At the time I assumed she meant she would make another suicide attempt when I was sixteen, but perhaps she was thinking she would just walk out and leave us. That seems even harder to imagine somehow. The subject was never mentioned again, like so many things in our family. It is hard to grasp just how deeply depressed she must have been, but to try to take her own life was so far out of character that things must have been very bad indeed.
I didn’t know what to think; I just knew I didn’t want her to go. Despite my bravado with Dad when she was around, I was deeply frightened of him and didn’t like being in the house on my own with him – which was one of the reasons why my school attendance record was as good as it was. The only time I can remember being forced to stay at home during a school day was when the arch of my foot collapsed and I literally couldn’t stand on it at all, so I couldn’t even hobble into work with Mum. I had to rest for a couple of days, unable to leave the house, and I was terrified that Dad would get up and come down to the kitchen and I would get in his way and impinge on his territory. Being alone in the house with him was the worst feeling imaginable, because I never knew what would happen if I accidentally annoyed him. While he was still safely asleep I set myself up in the living room with drinks and everything I would need in order to last without having to come out until Mum or Alex got home.
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