Woman with a Secret (33 page)

One day, the boy plucked up the courage to ask her. He was beginning to wonder if she secretly enjoyed the fights with her father. She smiled and said, “Of course I don’t enjoy them. Would you enjoy being screamed at for three hours a day about what a terrible person you are?” The boy said he wouldn’t, and that therefore he would resolve never to lie again. “Often you lie when there’s no need,” he told his sister. “Mum and Dad would have let you go to that concert if you’d asked them. You didn’t need to pretend it was a school trip.” His sister laughed. “‘Let’ me?” she said. “Maybe they would have. I lie to them because they deserve to be lied to. They don’t deserve to
have power over me. They’ve persecuted me since the day I was born.”

“No, they haven’t,” said the boy, because, like most people, he didn’t recognize persecution that wore a mask of loving parental concern.

The fights continued. The boy grew more anxious and withdrawn. His sister stopped crying during her father’s tirades, and instead turned herself to stone. She taught the boy how to make earplugs out of tissue paper, so that he wouldn’t have to listen if he didn’t want to when the trouble started.

Sometimes a glimmer of hope was offered by a visiting relative from a different part of the country. Whenever this happened, the boy prayed that there would be a terrible eruption while the relative was in the house and that the relative would leap up and declare, “This is intolerable! Something must be done! No one can be expected to live like this!” Instead what happened was that extended family members turned into versions of the little boy’s mother, perching tensely on the edges of chairs, waiting in silence for the trouble to subside. Sometimes bright, false conversations were had, as the boy’s mother and the visiting relatives conspired to cover up the noise.

What made life even more confusing for the boy was that his mum and dad were always scrupulously kind and fair to him, because he was always honest and obedient. That’s how he knew they were good parents. He wondered why they never acknowledged that it must be difficult for him, growing up in a war zone. Why didn’t it cross his father’s mind, or his mother’s, that all the shouting was as frightening and unpleasant for him, the blameless child, as it was for his sister?

One weekend morning, his mother shook him awake while it was still dark outside. She was fully dressed and crying. “Get up,” she whispered. “We have to go out. You can’t stay here on your own.” The boy asked where they were going, but his mother didn’t answer. “Just get dressed,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what you wear: no one’s going to see you. Go and sit in the car, as quickly as you can.” The little boy understood that he was to have no breakfast, and that to ask would be a mistake. His mother didn’t care about feeding him this morning, or about making sure he brushed his teeth. Something awful was about to happen, if it wasn’t happening already—something worse than what the boy was used to.

He dressed and went downstairs. His mother was waiting for him by the front door. She opened it when she saw him coming, and gestured for him to go outside. He stepped out onto the drive and saw that his father and sister were already in the car: his father at the wheel and his sister behind him, in the back. He climbed in and sat beside his sister. His mother got in too, and his father started the engine. They set off. No one spoke, and the little boy’s sister didn’t look at him, not even when he started to cry. She kept staring straight ahead, at the back of the driver’s seat. This frightened the boy more than anything else. His sister had always been kind to him—always. Most people in her situation would detest a brother like him—the favored good child who never put a foot wrong as far as his parents were concerned—but not his sister; she had never allowed herself to fall into that trap. So why wasn’t she comforting him now, as they drove along in silence, in the only-just-dawning daylight, with him crying? Why was she staring straight ahead as if she were in a coma?

The boy eventually asked where they were going, because the dread that was welling up inside him had grown too large and needed to escape. His father replied, “We’re going to a lunatic asylum, where your sister will be staying for a while.”

The boy’s sister didn’t flinch; the news hadn’t come as a shock to her as it had to him. Evidently she had been told where she was going before setting off.

“Someone who keeps lying in the way that your sister lies must be sick in the head,” said the boy’s father. “Your mum and I have tried as hard as we can to make her see the error of her ways, but we’re not experts when it comes to mental illness. And that’s what a compulsion to deceive is—it’s a mental illness. So we’ve decided to let the doctors at the lunatic asylum deal with it. They have all kinds of techniques and special methods that are meant to be very effective. Like electric shock treatment—where they strap you to a table, tie you down and give you electric shocks that make your whole body light up. It’s very painful, but it works, apparently, when it comes to curing sick minds. That’s if the patient strapped to the table doesn’t catch fire—that happens sometimes, if the electricity current isn’t carefully monitored.
I’m assured it’s never happened at this asylum, though, so we don’t need to worry about that.”

The boy was crying hysterically by this point. “Can you see what you’re doing to your brother?” his father said to his sister.

“I can see what
you’re
doing to him,” she replied.

“Can you see that you’re ruining his life? That’s why we have to put you in the asylum.”

The boy’s sister rolled her eyes and said, “I’ll escape. I’ll fuck whoever’s in charge and persuade them to let me out.” She was seventeen and had been sexually active for a year or so. Her brother knew this because it had been the subject of many of the closed-door rows in his father’s games room recently. His sister had been caught with boyfriends—sometimes in her bedroom, after she’d snuck them in when her parents were asleep; once at a friend’s house.

“Be facetious if you want to,” her father told her, “but you’ll soon see. No one escapes from places like the one we’re taking you to. You’ll be handcuffed for most of the time. Your legs will be chained together so you won’t be able to walk.”

The boy whimpered at the thought of this happening to his sister. She turned to him then and put her hand on his arm. He looked at her and she shook her head. “It’s not true,” she mouthed at him. “It’s a lie. Don’t worry.”

Their mother, watching her daughter in the rearview mirror, said, “She’s telling him it’s not true, it’s a lie.” She sounded terrified. The boy understood why she felt compelled to inform on her daughter so quickly and efficiently; he understood that he would have done the same in her position.

“Oh, I promise you it’s true,” his father said, sounding gleeful about the prospect of incarcerating his only daughter in a lunatic asylum.

After an amount of time that the boy couldn’t measure, the car turned off the main road and onto a lane that was straight and wide at first, but soon started to narrow and bend. There were thick hedges on both sides. From this point onward, the boy saw no cars apart from the one that contained his unhappy family. The lane straightened out again. Daylight had dawned by now, and the boy could see that there was a large house with shuttered
windows coming up on the left, behind a stone wall. The shutters were a sickly shade of green.

“Here we are,” said his father, stopping the car in front of two large stone gateposts. Carved into one of them was the name “Bardolph House.” The boy felt ill. He couldn’t bear the idea of leaving his sister in this place.

His father got out of the car. As he did so, two men appeared from between the gateposts. One was bald and older, the other young and very dark, with a low forehead and wire-rimmed glasses. They were both wearing long white overalls. One was carrying a clipboard. The boy heard a strange noise come from his sister. When he looked at her, he saw that she’d turned pale. She hadn’t believed what her father had told her until she saw these two men, but now she believed it.

The father opened the car’s back door and ordered his daughter to get out. He was carrying a suitcase that he’d retrieved from the trunk. “Come on,” he said. “There’s no point putting it off. It has to be done. Hopefully, if the treatment works, you’ll be able to come home—perhaps in a few weeks if you’re lucky. On average they say it takes about six months for a complete cure.”

“No. Please,” said the boy’s sister. “I’ll never lie again. I swear.”

“You always say that,” said her father, “but you always let me down, don’t you?”

The two men in overalls were standing on either side of the boy’s sister, holding one of her arms each as she struggled and begged to be released. Her father had taken the clipboard from one of them and seemed to be filling in a form that was attached to it. Her mother sat silently in the front passenger seat, saying and doing nothing, though the boy knew, even though he couldn’t see her face, that she was crying.

The two men in white overalls started to drag the boy’s sister toward the house. She continued to howl for a while. Then she went limp and quiet, as if she’d died, and allowed herself to be dragged. Perhaps she fainted. The boy hoped she was still alive. He opened his mouth to say something to his mother—he wasn’t sure what—but found that bile came out, thick and sour, instead of words. Still, his mother did and said nothing. The boy imagined climbing behind
the wheel and driving away. It was too late to rescue his sister, but he could rescue his mother.

Except he couldn’t. He was a twelve-year-old boy who couldn’t really do anything.

After a few miserable empty minutes, he saw something that he didn’t understand. The two men in overalls were heading back toward the car, carrying his sobbing sister between them. His father was walking alongside them, holding the clipboard in one hand and the suitcase in the other. As they got closer, the boy’s father hurried ahead. The boy heard the sound of the trunk opening and something heavy being thrown into it. Then he heard a thud as the trunk was slammed shut, and his father appeared by the open back door of the car, minus the suitcase and the clipboard. This made no sense to the boy; the clipboard belonged to the lunatic asylum—why would his father think he could make off with it as if it were his own? Stealing was as wrong as lying, the boy and his sister had always been taught. Had their father changed his mind about that?

The two men who weren’t his father shoved the boy’s sister back into the car. She was shaking as if an electric current were ripping through her, and wiping her face with her hands. Her father produced two envelopes from his jacket pocket and handed one to each of the men. Then he got into the car and the family set off for home.

“So,” said the father to his daughter, “you begged for another chance and now you’ve got one. Are you going to lie to me again?”

“No,” she said.

“Is that a solemn promise?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” said the father. “Because if you go back on your word, next time there’ll be no joking around. Next time it will be the real thing. Bardolph House is a hospice, not a lunatic asylum, but there are lunatic asylums, real ones, and plenty of them. Don’t think we wouldn’t go through with it just because we didn’t today.”

The boy, the brother, didn’t understand. Somehow, he mustered the courage to ask about the two men: who were they, if they weren’t real lunatic
asylum workers? His father told him that they were friends who had agreed to help him out.

The boy hoped that his sister would stop lying after that, but she didn’t. She lied as much as she ever had. Mercifully, though, there were no more trips to lunatic asylums, and somehow, after that awful day, the closed-door games room tirades didn’t seem quite so frightening. They seemed normal. The boy’s mother stopped crying when they happened. Instead, she listened to the radio in the kitchen and got on with preparing the dinner or the breakfast. The boy started to listen to music, through headphones, and found that he was able to think about other things, even knowing that the yelling was going on in the background.

The grown-up boy still sees his sister regularly. They both still see their parents regularly. Since the sister moved out of her parents’ home at age eighteen, there has been no yelling. Her brother has no idea that she only keeps in touch with their parents for his sake. If asked, he would probably say, “They fought like cats and dogs when she was a teenager, but it’s all fine now.” His sister, being an expert liar, would probably say the same thing.

By the time I’ve finished reading the story, I’m calmer than I was before. Calm enough to switch back to my Yahoo account. In the subject box of my draft email to Miss Stefanowicz, I type the words “Your test failed—my son did not.” Then I sit and stare at the screen and allow myself to think, really think in detail, about my family—not Adam, Sophie and Ethan, but the one I did not choose to be a member of: Mum, Dad and Lee—for the first time in my adult life. For some reason, I’m no longer scared of the thoughts.

Silently, I ask myself the long-avoided question: why didn’t Mum protect me? Why didn’t she ever beg or calmly ask or yell at Dad to leave me alone? How could she bear to see him persecute me day after day, when I feel like smashing Miss Stefanowicz’s head against a wall repeatedly for failing Ethan on one test? Do I love Sophie and Ethan more than Mum loved me as a child? Do I care more about their suffering than she did about mine? Or was she so scared of Dad that she was too afraid to question his treatment of me?

He wouldn’t have accepted that it was persecution. In his mind, it was good parenting: “You will bring yourself into line with how I want you to be or I will make you suffer.”

What about Lee? Why did he never come hurtling out of his bedroom screaming, “Leave my sister alone?” I know Lee loved me.

Do you? What about what he did behind your back?

Lining the shelf beside the computer are a dozen or so family photographs, framed. They’re mainly of me, Adam, Sophie and Ethan, but there are two of Lee—both of him as a very young child. It’s strange, given that we’re still in contact, but I have completely blocked Lee-the-grown-man from my mind. I’ve done so all my adult life. When we get together—when I can’t avoid seeing him—I arrange it so that I don’t really see him. I don’t meet his eye, don’t look in his direction. He must notice it, but no one else would. Whenever I can, I try to get Melissa on her own, see her when Lee’s not there. I behave in this way so that I can continue to keep my innocent baby brother alive in my imagination: the one in the photographs on the shelf, with the red tricycle and the royal blue zip-up sweater.