‘Yeah,’ Molly replies. ‘They said I could stay here whenever I liked, although I never stayed the night. Mum didn’t want me to, I don’t think. They didn’t get on …’
Molly trails off, her hand hovering over another bear, this time pink with a white skirt. The floorboard on the landing creaks and the girls look up. Ella immediately drops the bear she had been holding.
‘Mum! What are you doing?’
‘I …’
My voice won’t work. I look again at the pile of toys on the floor, the carefully painted walls, the curtains which I only notice now are decorated with a print of tiny shells. This was Molly’s bedroom? And my parents did this? It is a room for a grandchild who is adored. It is a room that was decorated with attention and care, filled with things to make a child smile. It makes no sense to me that the parents I remember could create a room like this, and yet on another level it does. Looking at this room, I feel once again the fear that has sat in the pit of my stomach since I was a child. That my parents were not incapable of love, I was just unlovable.
Ella looks at me, her face stricken, the bear abandoned beside her. I see the confusion on her face and I understand it, because I feel it too. Why did she not get the family that all her friends take so carelessly for granted? The family that she deserved? Why did she never get books or toys from grandparents, a room outside our flat that she could call her own? I wish I could answer the questions I see flitting back and forth in her eyes. But I can’t.
Instead, I wave the boxes and bin bags that I’m still carrying in my hands.
‘I’m just looking around before getting to work.’
‘Well we’ve got it covered in here,’ Ella snaps, arms folded across her chest.
‘I can see that.’ There’s a cardboard box in the corner of the room but it is currently empty, as is the bin bag next to it. ‘I’ll leave you girls to it, I’ll just be along the corridor.’
Ella turns away from me, examining a pile of Molly’s books. I retreat from the room.
‘See you later, Auntie Lorna!’ Molly calls after me. It still feels strange to hear her call me that.
My feet carry me along the corridor to my old room before I know whether I’m really ready to see it again. My body knows these few paces well and it’s my body, not my mind, that brings me to the door at the back of the house. I don’t want to. My hand reaches for the handle. I pause. My fingers turn the handle and push the door.
The entire room is filled with boxes stacked on top of one another and reaching nearly to the ceiling. The floorboards creak as I step inside, shuffling around the door and into the small clear area of floor. Just visible over the top of one stack of boxes is the view outside. My life may have changed beyond recognition and this room might look nothing like the room I grew up in, but the view outside is still the same. We might age, but the forest does not, or not in any way we know how to notice.
I feel as though the room is shrinking around me, squashing me into the corner. I need to sort through these boxes. I promised Jack I would help. But where to start? I trace one hand along the wall. If I look closely, I can still make out the faded marks where my paintings and drawings used to hang from strings, the only place in the house where they were on display. If I close my eyes, I can see my easel standing by the window, facing outside.
But before I can open any of the boxes, footsteps are crashing up the stairs and along the corridor. I spin around. Jack stands in the doorway, his shoulders heaving, his face red. He stares at me, his grey eyes meeting mine.
‘Why?’ he says, his voice loud and trembling, his face flushed with rage. I take a breath. Ever since I stepped foot on the island I have been waiting for this anger. I know I deserve it. And yet I was met instead by silence. But deep down I knew it would come eventually.
I stand opposite him, his anger radiating from his body like a burning heat.
‘I’ve had enough of not talking about it, of pretending like everything’s fine and that we can just carry on as though nothing ever happened. I want you to tell me why. All of it. Why you left. Why you didn’t tell me. Why you never came back, not even …’
His voice breaks off now as he gasps for air. His hands are clenched by his sides.My brother, my little brother.
I find my voice deep inside, pulling it up through the tears that catch in my throat.
‘I had to leave. They were impossible, Jack. This life was impossible. I couldn’t survive it.’
I remember again the night of the fire. How I left the house and walked in the dark to the lighthouse. The wind was howling and yet I stood right on the cliff edge, closer than I’d ever stood before. It’s then that I made up my mind to escape. It was many months until I actually managed to leave, but that night I knew I had to go.
Jack shakes his head now and although his hair is short and thinning I see a mop of curly dark-blond hair, a dusting of freckles on his nose.
‘It wasn’t that bad,’ he says.
My stomach clenches. Because this is the hardest part. This is why when I left I had to leave my brother as well as our parents. My brother, whom I felt so proud of on his first day of school, whom I read Moomintroll to in the night, staying up beside him until he fell asleep. We started life as allies, my brother and I, but as we grew older our differences started to show. I asked my parents questions and stopped believing in God, and sneaked out with my friends as much as I could. I confronted our mother, pushing her to leave my father. I dyed my hair and found painting and threw myself into that, finding this well of creativity I didn’t know I had but that gave me a feeling of strength and hope for a different kind of life off the island. I tried to take Jack with me, inviting him to join me with Sarah and my other friends, and encouraging him to find his own passion too and to contemplate a life beyond our four walls. But the more I encouraged, the more he seemed to withdraw. I know he was younger than me and was scared. But it’s one of my biggestregrets in life that I wasn’t able to reach him, that somewhere along the journey of our childhood, we lost each other.
‘It was bad, Jack. Don’t you remember? The way they were, it wasn’t OK.’
I mustn’t cry. But my eyes are filling now, because these are the things I’ve tried my whole life to escape. These are the things I’ve spent years trying to accept.
‘I don’t know why they were the way they were. I think Dad’s injury didn’t help – it made him so bitter, so angry, I guess because he felt useless. And Mum, she was so clearly scared of him but she still let us down. She let him control us. Maybe he needed to because he couldn’t bear the thought of us having our own lives after his hadn’t gone how he’d wanted. But it wasn’t normal. How come we were the only children who weren’t allowed to go to the school on the mainland? And the guilt – that way they had of making you feel constantly guilty, even if you didn’t know why. The thing is, it was never our fault, Jack. We were just kids.’
It took me years to realise that. Even when I finally did come to that conclusion, I still felt flashes of guilt and doubt every now and then. I still do. Perhaps it was my fault?Each time the doubt comes it rocks me and makes me question my decision. Maybe I did the wrong thing?But then I remind myself of everything my parents did and didn’t do. I cling onto these memories, even though they are painful. Because they are the only things that stop me from going completely mad.
