How the Trouble Started (10 page)

I often think of them. Wonder how they’re doing. I know they must blame themselves for what happened. They
must
blame themselves. I hope they do. They have to at least share some of the blame with me. Every time I think about it I always come back to the same point. They shouldn’t have let him get outside. They should have been more vigilant. More careful. Maybe that’s why they split up. Maybe one of them thought the other one was more to blame and that ruined the relationship. Maybe the one who was more to blame has trouble breathing sometimes too. Perhaps they’ve never had any real friends since it happened either and aren’t allowed to tell people about it for fear of being judged. It would serve them right. I’m being cruel, I know, but sometimes I want to be. Slowly, gradually, over the years, it’s ruined me. And it’s been clever that way. It let me think for a while that the consequences were manageable. That reason and clear thinking could keep it at bay. But you can’t keep your mind as strong as fortress walls for ever. You will wake up in the middle of the night and the walls to your brain will be as mushy as gravied potato. Some nights you will dream, and you can’t stop dreams. Some mornings when you wake you’ll be attacked before you get a chance to raise your guard. And after each attack it takes longer to rebuild the walls, and you know that there will be another attack on its way and you get tired and it becomes harder to keep your head above water, and you start to wonder if trying to keep your head above water is worth it any more. Fiona was worth it. Jake was worth it. I knew that. What Jake’s mum didn’t seem to understand was that every step he took could be his last. She appeared oblivious to the fact that little boys can go from alive to dead in a second. That risk is everywhere. I’d learnt early that death isn’t only something that you slip into in old age, it isn’t something that sits below the surface of the world and tiptoes in at the end of a long life. Death is now. Death is present. It’s with babies and kittens as much as it’s with the old and ruined. It’s there on the sunniest day of the year and it isn’t ever going to go away for any of us. The little boy I killed was called Oliver Thomas.

Eventually the quarry turned blue, the trees turned black, the birds stopped singing and I grew cold. It was time to go home. I went in through the back door and straight up to my bedroom. I made enough noise so she would know I was back, but she didn’t even come and shout. I couldn’t sleep. I was wired to the moon, as fizzy as a dropped can. I found it hard to catch my breath, to get air properly into my lungs. Thoughts wouldn’t settle and ran into and over each other and I didn’t even attempt to find any sleep. Everything, all of it, such a mess. I didn’t know where to start.

The problems with my breathing began when I was ten years old. We hadn’t been in Raithswaite long the first time it happened and there was no forewarning, nothing to suggest what was coming, so when I woke in the middle of the night feeling like I was suffocating, unable to get air into my lungs, it was terrifying. I tried to think my way through the panic. I couldn’t breathe, you need air to be able to breathe, and all the air is outside. I opened my bedroom window and pushed my head out into the cold night, but it made no difference; even though oxygen was all around me I couldn’t get any of it through my nose and into my chest. I was drowning inside myself. My panic trebled at this realisation. I banged through to Mum’s room, slammed the light on and shouted, ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe!’ Before she had chance to do anything I charged down the stairs, flung open the front door and ran out into the street. I fell to my hands and knees, gasping, still trying to get air into my lungs. Mum followed me out, grabbed my shoulders and pulled me up. She held my head in her hands and looked me in the eye and told me to stop panicking. I didn’t know what she was talking about, I wasn’t panicking; I was dying. ‘I can’t breathe,’ I gasped, ‘I’m going to die.’ She told me she’d rung an ambulance and that we should wait inside where it was warm. She helped me into the house. The operator on the phone had told Mum that I should have a glass of warm milk before the ambulance arrived. ‘A glass of warm milk?’ I was unsure. How could I drink when I couldn’t breathe? Mum made me sit with my head between my knees while she warmed the milk in a pan. We’d been sat at the kitchen table for thirty minutes before I realised that no ambulance had been called, no rescue was coming. But at some point in that half an hour I’d remembered how to breathe again. I was still shaky and scared, but my lungs were working and my nose was allowing air to pass into them. When I finished the milk Mum took me upstairs and put me to bed and told me I needed to calm down. ‘If you let yourself get wound up like this you’ll be in for a very long life.’ I lay in bed frozen stiff, expecting death to return at any moment. But I did make it through the night and by lunchtime the next day I’d started to forget about it, forget how terrified I’d felt.

Two weeks later it happened again, and then again a couple of days after that. It started to happen so regularly that it was a relief to get through a day without feeling I was suffocating. Each time I was sure that I really was dying, that all the other times had been leading up to this one, and that now 
survival
 was impossible. But Mum didn’t believe me. She told me it was a reaction to what had happened back in Clifton. She said my mind was playing tricks on me and I just needed to calm myself down. ‘Stress can do funny things to your body,’ she said. I’d never heard anything so stupid. I didn’t
think
I couldn’t breathe; I
couldn’t
breathe. I couldn’t get air into my lungs. It was nothing to do with stress; something had gone wrong with my body and unless it was sorted out I would die. After much pestering and pleading I was finally allowed to see a doctor, but she made me promise that I wouldn’t mention Clifton. ‘If you breathe a word about that they’ll want to get inside your head. They’ll want you to tell them all about it and how it feels and that will set you back.’ I didn’t want to mention Clifton, I had no interest whatsoever in mentioning Clifton. I wanted help breathing and staying alive. Clifton was the last thing on my mind right then.

The doctor was an old man with a white beard. He looked like Father Christmas.

‘What’s brought you here today then Donald?’ he asked.

‘He says that he can’t breathe and he’s dying,’ my mum said.

‘Is that true Donald? You think you’re dying?’

I nodded.

‘That sounds serious. Let’s have a look at you.’

He asked me to take my shirt off and pushed a stethoscope to my chest, then my back, and listened. ‘Take a deep breath now Donald please.’ Then he held my tongue down with a little wooden spatula and shone a torch in my throat and my ears. He told me to breathe into a plastic tube as hard as I could and made a note of the result. He took my pulse and blood pressure and asked me to do twenty star jumps and ten press-ups.

‘How’s your breathing now?’ he asked.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes I can’t breathe.’

He made some notes on his computer and looked at me and said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you Donald. You’re as healthy as any ten-year-old child I’ve seen.’

Despair hit me. Tears started to come. If a doctor didn’t believe me, how was I going to get help from anyone? He saw my distress and cocked his head at me. ‘I’m just going to ask your mum a few questions Donald. Is that OK?’

I nodded.

‘Is he an anxious child?’

‘He has his moments,’ my mum said.

‘Has there been anything recently that could have caused him upset?’

‘We have just moved here from another town. He’s started a new school.’

‘Is that it Donald? Do you miss your old friends?’

He was so far away from understanding that it felt impossible to steer him in the right direction. I didn’t say a word.

‘It’s a big change for a young lad. Especially if he is a bit sensitive. It will take time for him to adjust. Give it a few months and he’ll be charging around Raithswaite like he was born and bred here. Physically there’s nothing wrong with him. Nothing at all. Get him playing football, get him playing outside, wear him out. He’ll be so tired that he’ll forget he’s supposed to be dying.’

He smiled at us both and Mum stood up to leave.

It happened again that afternoon at school. Dread filled me from the inside. ‘I can’t breathe,’ I told Mrs Sutton. She sat me down in the school office and made me breathe into a brown paper bag. She rang my mum but my mum refused to come and pick me up. She told Mrs Sutton that we’d been to the doctor and there was nothing wrong with me. I was putting it on for attention, she said, and they should send me back to class. Mrs Sutton didn’t send me back to class straight away. She left me with a glass of water and my brown paper bag and I sat on a chair outside the office for the rest of the lesson. I carried that brown paper bag around everywhere after that day. I never left the house without it. I was convinced that it was the only thing that could save my life.

It took me years to work out that I was suffering from panic attacks. I heard a woman interviewed on the radio and her words froze me to the spot. She was describing exactly what had been happening to me for years, and those two simple words summed up the terror so well. Panic attack. I took myself off to the library and looked for books. There was a whole shelf of them to choose from so I went with the one that had been borrowed the most:
Live a Life Free from Panic
by Sue Cotterill. The attacks kept 
coming
, but the book did help, I learnt to cope with them better. The threat doesn’t go away though, the threat is always there, and even when there hasn’t been an attack for weeks you know one may be waiting in the wings. They are clever like that. You can’t drop your guard because as soon as you do, as soon as you think you are safe, an attack will charge at you from nowhere and leave you terrified and shattered. What I never understood was why other people had panic attacks. I had good reason but why do housewives and accountants and dinner ladies suffer? Not everyone can have done something as terrible as I had. What reduces normal people to shaking, quivering wrecks?

I had made a decision. I was going to help Jake. I primed Mum early; Saturday night I would be round at Tom Clarkson’s, we were going to watch some films and I was going to stay over. She eyed me suspiciously.

‘Who’s Tom Clarkson?’

‘A lad in my English class.’

‘You aren’t going to be drunk in the park?’

I shook my head. ‘He has some new films he wants to watch.’

‘I didn’t think you were one for films.’

She meant she didn’t like me watching films. She thinks they are all loud and stupid and violent.

‘I like films,’ I said.

She was unsure, but didn’t argue further, it was done, and I’d booked myself Saturday night away from the house. Saturday afternoon I met Jake at the playground and gave him his instructions for the night.

I packed a small bag with some essentials. I’d bought some chocolate biscuits and drinks to see us through the night because who knew what she had to eat and drink in the house. There was a tricky moment just before I was leaving. Mum came up to my room and said she wanted a number for Tom Clarkson’s house, in case of emergency. My brain worked quickly and I told her that they only had mobiles and I didn’t know the numbers. I got away with jotting down a house number and a street name and said a silent prayer that no emergencies occurred.

It was a close, muggy evening and even though the sun wouldn’t be setting for a few hours, the threat of a thunderstorm hung in the air and heavy clouds darkened the town. As I headed away from our house there was a deep rumble over the other side of Denple Hill, and I thought about the town we’d left behind eight years ago and wondered if the same thunder had visited them too. It had been a hot day, and normally by now the town would be cooling down, relaxing into the evening, but the heat was trapped by the clouds and clung to the streets. Suddenly I felt uneasy about it all. The tension in the air added to the tension in my shoulders and I was on the verge of letting the panic win. I had to breathe deeply and slowly to stop an attack from mounting. As I got closer to the town centre there was the odd spot of fat rain falling and I thought about the impact of rain. Would rain make her give up on her night out and stay in? I didn’t think so. I thought she needed her Saturday night and her thick-necked man in his black shirt too much. The rain never quite breached the clouds anyway. Splat, splat, splatter and then nothing. I was at the steps by the dentist’s for seven and sat and waited. It wasn’t long until the street became busy and I even recognised a few faces from the time before. Some of the ladies were rearranging themselves as they walked along, making sure that dresses were pulled up at the front and down at the back. The men were in short-sleeve shirts or T-shirts, despite the threat of rain. Tanned arms as thick as babies’ heads were on show, stretching the material out to busting point. I contemplated my puny arms and wondered if they could ever end up as wide as those out on the streets below. It seemed impossible. She was earlier this time, I saw her about half seven. Different dress, same handbag, same small, fast steps. As soon as the back of her head disappeared into the black of the Social entrance I was up and off.

I started to feel good during the walk across town. I was out. Out for the whole night. We’d have a great time, do whatever he wanted, and then he could have an early night and a proper sleep. He could wake up feeling refreshed for a change, a brighter morning in front of him. The streets were quiet now. People were either already out or settled in for the night. A breeze had finally prised its way underneath the clouds and was working its way through the town. It felt good on my neck and underneath my shirt, and the sweat on my back began to cool. Fifteen minutes after I left the dentist’s step I turned onto Fox Street. I walked a few yards until I reached the gravel track that ran behind the houses. I followed the track and walked to the back of Jake’s yard. I closed the yard door quietly behind me, stood still and listened. Some of his neighbours’ windows were open, the houses trying to lure the breeze, but the breeze not yet worked up enough to leave the streets and move indoors. There was Saturday night TV noise coming from the house on the right: laughter, clapping, whooping, a split-second silence and then noisy adverts. I felt safe stood there. The yard walls were high so nobody could see me unless they were in one of the back bedrooms of the adjoining houses looking directly at the spot I was stood. But there was nobody at the back bedroom windows on a Saturday night, nobody looking. I took the few steps to the back door and pushed the handle down. It didn’t budge. I tried again, pushing the handle harder this time, but the door wasn’t for shifting an inch. I was angry for a second. I’d told Jake. I’d told him all he had to do was say nothing and unlock the back door after his mum had gone and everything would be perfect. I caught myself. I was being silly. He was just a little lad. My anger left me quickly. It would be too early for him to be in bed so I knocked on the back door until a small, distorted figure appeared through the frosted glass, making his way forward. The lock clunked and he pulled open the door and I squeezed in.

At midnight the storm finally hit. I knew it was on its way because the clouds had dropped even lower, the air had thickened and there was nowhere for all the energy to go so it had to turn in on itself to fight a way out. Just like Mum and her silences. We were up in Jake’s room, the light was off and I was stood close to the window watching the storm accumulate, enjoying the drama of it all. Jake was in bed, fast asleep, not making a sound. We were safe and dry and the 
weather
 couldn’t touch us. The weather couldn’t touch us until the first bang went off. It sounded like the belly being torn from under the town. Jake shot up with the force of a jack-in-the-box. ‘What was that?’ His eyes as wide as his old friend Harry’s.

‘It’s thunder,’ I said. ‘It’s a storm; it’s going to be noisy. Do you get scared?’ I could tell, looking at him, that he was scared, terrified, in fact. I moved over to the bed and sat down and told him to lie back. ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of,’ I said, just as another panel of thunder dropped and shook the street. His face told me he didn’t believe me, and I understood; this was some of the loudest thunder I’d ever heard and I was sure that to an eight-year-old it could sound like the world was ending. I thought it best to distract him. Distraction: a panic attack technique. I told him all I knew about thunder, that whilst it might sound horrible, it’s only the sound of lightning, and lightning is just electricity in the atmosphere. It didn’t have much effect; he lay there, still terrified, looking up at the ceiling, then across to the window, dreading the next explosion. ‘Do you ever daydream Jake?’ I asked. He wasn’t listening, he was too intent on what was going on outside. I took hold of his hands and told him to close his eyes and breathe slowly. I asked him what he wanted to be when he was older. ‘Astronaut,’ he said, without having to think. Just like me back then. ‘OK. Imagine you’ve done all the training. You’ve been preparing for months. You’re walking to the space shuttle with your helmet under your arm. And then you’re in the shuttle and you’re strapped in.’ Another wall of thunder hit and Jake flinched. I told him to keep his eyes shut, to concentrate on what I was telling him. ‘You’re in the shuttle Jake and they’re counting down to lift-off. You can hear the roaring and the shuttle is shaking and then you’re leaving the ground and pushing up into the sky.’ He gripped my hands tighter. ‘The whole spaceship is shaking and the noise is huge and your head is wobbling like it might explode and then, suddenly, it’s calm and quiet and you’re cruising through space.’ A flash of lightning lit up the room, I kept going. ‘You unstrap yourself and now you’re floating in the spaceship. You’re doing slow-motion somersaults and swimming through the air.’ I described the planets as he sailed past them. I described Earth as it faded away to the size of a blue full stop. Looking at him there I could see myself eight years ago, my bed a spaceship, vanishing into space, dying to escape. Slowly the storm began to move away and Jake’s hands relaxed in mine, his face softened. The thunder was rumbling more than exploding now. I started leaving gaps between descriptions, there was no reaction from him, and I could see he’d fallen back asleep. He was flat on his back, nose pointing to the ceiling. I let go of his hands and placed them at his side. I caught his tiredness quickly and curled up at the bottom of the bed, just meaning to rest my eyes, to be close if the storm returned, but I was too tired and fell asleep myself.

I woke up feeling nervous. I checked my watch and saw it was half five and light out and the storm was long gone. I pulled myself up and sat down next to Jake. I gently ruffled his head and he moaned and twisted. I said his name and he squinted at me. ‘It’s light now Jake, it’s early in the morning, I’m going to head off.’ He nodded and put his thumb in his mouth. ‘Are you going to be OK now?’ I asked. He nodded again, his eyes closed and he was back in the land of sleep again. I leant down and kissed his forehead lightly. He was warm and smelt of sleep. I looked down at him and wondered how he would have coped with the storm if I hadn’t been there. I didn’t want to leave him but I dragged myself away, down the stairs and down the hall, towards the kitchen and the back door, wondering where I could go until it was time for me to go home. I pushed open the kitchen door and she was there in front of me, asleep in a chair, her head resting on her hands on the kitchen table. The air in the room sour and thick. I didn’t move. I rode out the panic that rushed my body. Before I decided what to do the head in front of me lifted up. Two unreadable eyes looked at me before the head dropped back to the hands. I stayed where I was, unsure what would happen next. I don’t know how long I stood there watching her, looking for a sign of movement, but none came. I backed myself out of the room and out into the hall. I opened the front door as quietly as I could and closed it the same. I ran as fast as I’d ever run down Fox Street, away from Jake and his mum and their house.

I couldn’t go home. It wasn’t yet six and an early return would provoke questions and I didn’t need Mum’s attention all over me after what had just happened. I pushed open the door to the haunted house and leant back into it until it closed shut. My heart thumped and my legs wobbled. I stood against the door in the dirty old hallway and tried to calm down. It felt strange to be there at that time of day, to be there alone. And even though it was a battered, desolate house, where nobody had lived for years, it still had the hushed feeling of early morning. I walked quietly up to our room, crawled under the plastic table, curled myself up and prayed for a sleep that refused to come.

In the afternoon tiredness hit and I told Mum I was going upstairs to read. It was a heavy, deep sleep, and I woke groggy and in a dark mood a couple of hours later. Had she seen me? I know she’d seen me, she’d looked right at me, but had she
seen
me? I’d heard lads at school saying they couldn’t remember anything because they were so drunk, but I didn’t know how much of that was truth and how much was talk. I wished I’d been drunk at least once in my life so I would know how you felt, so I would know what you remembered and what you forgot.