Coming Undone by Terri White (ebook reader with highlight function .TXT) 📗

Then they push me into the ambulance and slam the doors shut, shutting off my New York air supply. The ride uptown can’t take more than thirty minutes, but each one of them stretches out like an elastic hour. Not being able to move when you feel panicked is terrifying. Every bit of your body wants to thrash, pull against the ties and make a run for it. But you don’t. You lie very still, not moving a muscle, trying to forget you have muscles, a body under the belts, blanket, sheet. You breathe in and out, close your eyes, head on chest. The sounds rage outside but inside the only noise is the tap-tap-tap of the young ambulance tech texting on her phone. When we pull up to a stop and I open my eyes, she has a small smile playing on her face. She looks so free. In that moment, I hate her.

They wheel me into the hospital, up in the elevator, and then we’re buzzed in from behind locked double doors. As they push me past the room I’ll come to learn is for breakfast, lunch, dinner, supper, chair yoga, music therapy, group therapy, a row of heads turn around, their eyes landing on the new arrival. I keep looking straight ahead.

CHAPTER 6

My life began a long way from New York, in the village of Inkersall, just north of the Derbyshire town of Chesterfield. It was 1975 when my mum and dad first collided. My mum, running from her short life; my dad static, propping up the bar of the rough pub they met in. She was fifteen and living in a house teetering on a fault line. Perhaps the path to each other had already been forged, was simply waiting to be walked.

Her mother, my grandmother, loved to go out dancing and my grandfather loved to drink. He would be dead at fifty-six, their marriage burning and boiling up until the moment he died of a heart attack. Nana fingered the single earring, orphaned decades earlier by a blow to the head outside the working men’s club. She told the story of the night he broke her nose, blood spraying long and high up the wall of their neat front room. This was the world in which my mum lived, learned who she was and what she wanted.

Their love crackled bright and quick after a chance meeting in the pub and a wedding was quickly arranged for the day after her sixteenth birthday. My grandad, horrified and furious, made Mum an offer: a horse in exchange for her calling off the wedding. She loved riding more than pretty much anything; anything, it would seem, except my dad. The offer was swiftly rejected, the source of much claimed regret in decades to come.

In another quick act of perhaps easy-seeming rebellion, my brother was in her belly almost as quickly as they became hitched, entering the world a month before her seventeenth birthday. I joined them one year and 364 days later.

Much is disputed, but what isn’t is that their marriage was a disaster. He was jealous. He wouldn’t work. Their fights turned physical but only after Grandad died. When there were no other men around to protect Mum’s face, her body. Before long she was painted with bruises and waiting for the latest broken bone to fuse back together. There was a story she shared of the time she was pregnant, punched to the floor and kicked in her swollen belly. Another, of the Christmas she couldn’t see the turkey across the table; both eyes blackened and swollen completely shut, my newly widowed Nana closed-mouthed beside her, warned not to make it worse, because worse it could be. Still another, of the time he outlined, graphically, what would happen if she left him (as she eventually did), how he’d set fire to the house with us all inside.

Mum wasn’t his only target. He picked my brother off the ground by both ears and threw him against the wall. He punched me into the fireplace and sat on Mum as she screamed on the settee and I screamed for her in the ashes. That was the one, she says, that prompted her, finally, to take us and leave.

We escaped to Nana’s and he didn’t, in fact, set fire to us. The memories in the decade that follow are hazy, incomplete. There was, very quickly, a new, younger woman. Blonde with ‘CUT’ and dotted lines tattooed across both wrists, she was from one of our town’s toughest families. He drove a three-wheeled Reliant Robin, and the rare times we would visit him, we’d sit in the back, over the wheels, heads bouncing into the low ceiling.

They married quickly too, his reception in the working men’s club ending with linked arms and ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’.

The second White Family lived just six miles away, yet they only featured in snatches of my early life. There was a campsite holiday, our bags hastily packed after Dad knocked on the door unexpectedly after another extended absence. Upon arrival, my brother and I were sent to a small pouch in the back of the big family tent, which backed into a hedge. The rest of them slept together in the main section. At night, we sat with them in the communal area, drank Scrumpy out of brown bottles and listened to horror stories about murderers and ghosts and psychopaths before we skipped quickly back beneath the hedgerow. On the second night, while we were sleeping, the spending money Mum had given us to share for the week disappeared.

That holiday was a one-off, and for the most part, when it came to my dad it was waiting and wondering: where was he? When would we next see him? There was one afternoon in their house when we watched him kick his Alsatian dog with the steel toe of his boot. There were the days we spent cleaning his house