Jack shakes his head.
‘You overreacted, you always overreacted.’
I bite my lip so hard I can taste the metallic tang of blood. That’s what my mother always used to say. I can hear her voice now as clearly as if she is in the room, quiet but still clear as her words hit me.
‘It’s not as bad as you think, Lorna. I know he’s not perfect, your father, but he’s been through a lot. We just have to try harder to be good for him. My father was much worse, you know. It could be worse.’
‘And besides,’ Jack adds, ‘you were difficult. That’s why we didn’t get to go to the secondary school like everyone else – because they wouldn’t take you. And Mum worried I’d find it too hard on my own so that’s why she kept me at home too.’
‘You still believe that?’ I say to Jack now, looking at him closely.
I can see a question dart across his face, but when he doesn’t say anything, I continue.
‘That’s what they told everyone, of course. That I was wild, out of control. But I was just a teenager, Jack. Yes, I dyed my hair and got caught out smoking the only cigarette of my life, but so what? At the time I thought maybe Iwasbad. Dad told me it so many times that I thought maybe it must be true. But ever since having Ella … Yes, she misbehaves sometimes or questions my decisions. But that’s normal! She’s just a kid. Doesn’t Molly do the same? I was just a kid, Jack. I didn’t deserve it, any of it. Neither did you.’
He says nothing but I can see he is thinking, that my words are shaking him. Am I getting through to him? Might I finally be able to break the hold my parents had over him now they are gone?
‘I think really they just hated that I wasn’t like them, that I wanted to leave the island, and had dreams of my own.’
‘I had dreams too, once,’ he replies, louder now, his face flushed red. ‘But when you left I had no choice but to stay. I couldn’t leave them on their own, with no one.’
He fixes me with those grey eyes, his tensed body filling the doorway in front of me. Shame twists in my stomach.
‘I know. I’m sorry. Honestly, Jack, I have never stopped being sorry about that. I would have taken you with me if I thought you’d come. But I knew you wouldn’t. And I had to leave.’
He shakes his head. I can tell he still doesn’t understand. And I need my brother to understand. So, I pause for a moment and then in a quiet voice I say, ‘Do you remember when I showed you that bruise?’
I remember pulling my jumper sleeves down over my hands at school and always refusing to take it off, even on a rare warm day. I remember my teacher asking about a bruise on my leg and telling her I fell off my bike.
‘Silly Lorna walked into the dresser again,’ my father said one evening at the dinner table as my mother served our food. ‘You need to be more careful, Lorna, you broke your mother’s favourite mug.’ He pointed to the dresser, where a willow-patterned mug lay in shards. For a moment I wondered if my father was right. Perhaps Ididwalk into the dresser. The mug was broken, after all. I looked up at my mother for reassurance but she wouldn’t meet my eye. Then, beneath the table, I placed a hand to the spot where the new bruise flowered on my wrist. I pressed down lightly and felt the pain bursting beneath my hand. It was a pain that reminded me of what I knew to be true, that made me feel less like I was losing my mind.
I somehow always knew that my father never treated Jack the same way he treated me. Jack was young and obedient. My father didn’t need to try too hard to control him. And I was the one who had seen him crying in the living room after his accident. That’s the first time it happened.
It was late, and I’d come downstairs for a glass of water. The living room door was ajar and I could see my father inside, slumped over in a chair weeping. My mother was crouched opposite him.
‘It hurts so fucking much,’ he said through gritted teeth, one hand on the small of his back, the place I knew never to bump or touch since his injury. The other hand held a bottle of amber liquid. He took a deep swig from it. Even from where I stood in the hallway I could smell that smell I’d recently come to know so well.
‘What can I do?’ my mother asked quietly. ‘We could take you to see another doctor on the mainland? Use some of the money from my parents?’
He laughed but it was unlike any laugh I’d ever heard before, cold and sharp.
‘That’s right, my wife the saviour. Keeping the family afloat with her death money.’
He lunged forward and my mother flinched backwards, but as though changing his mind he leant back again, taking another swig from the bottle instead.
All the while the tears slid down his red cheeks, his nose streaming too. I couldn’t believe it. My father shouted and cursed, but he didn’t cry. Never.
Perhaps I shifted slightly on the bottom step, but suddenly my father looked up and spotted me. I’ve never forgotten his expression. Fury, but something else I didn’t recognise at the time but have come to understand now. Shame.
‘Come in here,’ he said quietly. Somehow his quiet, calm tone frightened me far more than if he’d shouted.
My mother stepped back to the other side of the room, watching us both, her arms wrapped tightly around herself. She was trembling.
I stood in front of my father, my head dipped, knowing that somehow I’d done something very, very wrong by seeing what I’d seen. When he swung his fist towards me I felt almost like I’d deserved it.
The next morning, I watched as my father prepared breakfast for Jack, talking to him gently. But with me he was silent. I knew then that things were somehow going to be different from now on. But I still had to check that Jack was OK. I remember slipping into his bedroom later that day when our parents were out, our mother at the village shop and our father assisting on a new building project, more, I think, because the islanders involved felt sorry for him and less because he was much use on a building site anymore. I took advantage of the rare moment alone to try to have an honest conversation with Jack.
I found him where our mother had left him, reading his school books in silence.
