We’d probably have rubbed along not too bad together, just the three of us, but then my sister came along. I don’t blame her, not really, not any more, but it was hard not to at the time. I didn’t know any better. It wasn’t her fault, even though she caused it.
We lived in the country in a line of prison-officer homes, within sight of the prison. I’d grown up listening to mum and dad arguing over the years because the walls were thin in the house. Though you couldn’t hear mum, just dad. She always kept her voice right down, whispering even, while he either shouted or just talked in his loud voice. I don’t think he ever whispered in his whole life. When you listened to them it was like he was arguing with himself, or with somebody who wasn’t there. I used to wrap my pillow round my head, covering both ears, or if it got really loud I’d stick my fingers in my ears and hum to myself to shut out the sound.
One time I must have been humming really loudly because the light went on and I opened my eyes and dad was there over me wearing just his underpants standing at the side of the bed and demanding what I thought I was doing making all this noise? He scowled at me as I lay there blinking in the bright overhead light, wiping my eyes and cheeks. I was sure he was going to hit me but he just made a grumbling sort of noise and left, slamming the door. He left the light on so I had to put it out myself.
I had already, over the course of the preceding few years, heard things I would not have chosen to hear, things about sex and so on, but the night mum came back from the hospital a week or thereabouts after giving birth to my sister was the thing that really made the difference, for me. Mum had had a bad time giving birth to me and she wasn’t really meant to have any more children, but then she got pregnant and that was that. Dad would just have soon have got rid of what turned into my sister but mum wasn’t having that because of her religion so she went through with it. But it was an unpleasant procedure and she needed a lot of stitches down there. I suppose dad must have been drunk – especially drunk, as he always liked a drink.
I tried humming but I knew they were talking about sex that evening when she came back from the hospital and because of the age I was a part of me was getting interested in sexual matters and so I partly wanted to listen, so I did. Thus I got to hear my mother begging my father to let her take him in her mouth, or even sodomise her, rather than have normal sex, due to the stitches and the fact that she was still very sore. I had heard dad in the past demanding these favours, or thought I had, but from the little I knew neither had actually occurred. That night, though, he wasn’t to be fobbed off with such distractions, especially not after months of being denied.
So, not to put too fine a point on it, he had his way with her, and I had to listen to the gasps and gulps and then the screams. A lot of screams, even though despite it all you could somehow tell that she was trying to be quiet about it. I shoved my fingers into my ears so hard that I thought I was going to puncture my eardrums, and I hummed as hard as I could, but I could still hear her.
It took much longer than you might imagine. Perhaps it was the drink, or the screams. But eventually the screams stopped, to be replaced by sobs and, shortly, snores.
I had, of course, imagined myself bursting in on them and hauling him off her and beating him up and so on, but I was only eleven, and slight, like her, not big and burly like him. Therefore there was nothing I could have done.
Meanwhile my sister had been set off by all the screaming and she was crying the way that very small babies do, and had probably been crying like that all the time but I hadn’t heard her over the screams from my mother and my own humming. I heard mum getting up from her and dad’s bed and going over to the cot and trying to comfort her, though you could hear her own voice breaking and her sobbing as she did this. Dad snored very loudly, and mum was sobbing and breaking down and my sister was screaming in a high, unpleasant whine. It was only at this point that our next-door neighbours started hammering on the wall, shouting, their voices like a sort of tired, distant commentary on events.
I am not ashamed to say that I cried quite a lot throughout the rest of that night, though I still dropped off to sleep eventually and got up for school the next day, because it is amazing what you can put up with and get over. Almost anything, in fact.
Nevertheless, I think it was then that I decided I would never get married or have children.
3
There is a certain purity to my existence. A simplicity. In a sense nothing much happens; I lie here, gazing into space or at the view presented by the window, blinking, swallowing, turning over now and again, getting up occasionally – always while they make the bed each morning – and staring open-mouthed at the nurses and orderlies. Now and again they’ll try to engage me in conversation. I make a point of smiling at them when they do this. It helps that we do not speak the same language. I can understand most of the one that they speak – sufficient to have an idea what my perceived medical status is and what treatments the doctors might have in store for me – but I have to make an effort to do so and I would not be able to speak much sense in it at all.
Sometimes I nod, or laugh, or make a sound that is halfway between a sort of throat-clearing noise and the moans that deaf people make sometimes, and often I frown as though I’m trying to understand what they’re saying, or as though I feel frustrated at not being able to make myself intelligible to them.
Doctors come and give me tests sometimes. There were quite a lot of doctors and quite a lot of tests, early on. There are fewer now. They give me books to look at with photographs or drawings in them of everyday objects, or large letters, one to a page. One doctor brought me a tray holding letters on wooden cubes, from some child’s game. I smiled at them and her and mixed them up, sliding them around on the tray, making pretty patterns out of them and building little towers with them, trying to make it look as though I was attempting to understand these letters and do whatever it was she wanted me to do, whatever might make her happy. She was a pleasant-looking young woman with short brown hair and large brown eyes and she had a habit of tapping the end of a pencil on her teeth. She was very patient with me and not brusque the way doctors can be sometimes. I liked her a lot and would have liked to have done something to have made her happy. But I could – would – not.
Instead I made that motion babies and toddlers make sometimes, clapping with fingers fanned, knocking down the little towers of letters I’d made. She smiled regretfully, tapped the pencil on her teeth, sighed and then made some notes on her clipboard.
I was relieved. I thought I might have overdone the kiddy-clappy thing.
I am allowed to go to the bathroom by myself, though I pretend to fall asleep in there sometimes. I always make mumbly apologetic noises and come out when they knock on the door and call my name. They call me “Kel,” not knowing my real name. There was a reason, something between a conceit and a joke, why I was christened so, but the doctor who named me thus left earlier this year and the thinking behind this name is not mentioned in my notes and nobody can remember the reason. I am not allowed to bathe alone, but being bathed is not so terrible; once you get over any residual shame it is very relaxing. One even feels luxurious. I take care to masturbate in the toilet on the morning of a bath day, so as not to embarrass myself in front of the nurses or orderlies.