Chapter five: Jack the Lad

This is not a fictionalisation. This is really happening to me, right now. Every word is true, and I am in distress. I find solace in words, and hope others going through something similar do too.

Apr 16, 2026

My mother had one radiotherapy treatment a few weeks ago, localised at the considerable tumour in her lower back. Since the cancer is so advanced, and she’s been unhealthy for years, doctors denied additional treatment under the assertion that it would kill her.

Ironically, she’s got one of the more successfully treated types of cancer.

But because she is who she is, she suffered right through to stage four for years, ignoring symptoms and numbing the pain with alcohol. Not me, my brother, my half-brother or her sister had a clue what she was going through. My mother cut herself off from her own family and made The Man Who Is Not My Father her world.

For the last few years she was looking after him, or trying to, I suppose. After his stroke, he never got his brain back. Crippled in half by various hernias, he was barely able to get up the stairs.

I still haven’t been to visit him in the care home, where he’s been for the last few months; from what I understand, he is violent to the nurses and needs a team of four carers to keep him safe. Of course a tiny, miniscule part of me cares about such a constant figure from my childhood, but a larger part doesn’t especially want to be revictimised by a monster who probably wouldn’t recognise me anyway.

In any case, the woman lying in the poky hospital bed in her own living room was put there by her own actions. And she knows it too.

‘It was my decision,’ she told me sadly, holding on to her little stuffed bear. ‘I chose to get married to him. I chose to stay.’

She had a tough time looking me in the eye. I didn’t mind. I was slowly coming to see her as what she still is – a deeply traumatised woman let down by others just as much as she let down her children.

I’d come to stay for a few nights, to give my aunt respite. Mum was sad, I’d come to sit with her for a bit. Still confined to bed, she pinched at her duvet cover and shuffled on her pillow.

I glanced at the mantlepiece, where a vase of fresh flowers sat. I’d bought them for her on my way here, so she’d have something nice to look at from her bed. She’d been surprised, and pleased.

It was the afternoon by this point, I’d opened the curtains so she could get a bit of sunshine. It had been at least three days since she’d been able to sit up on her own.

‘The worst part was the colonoscopy,’ mum said after a silence.

‘Yeah,’ I said, fiddling with the cap of a water bottle. ‘I hear they aren’t much fun.’

‘It was because I was alone,’ she added quietly.

Well of course you were alone, I thought. When she had the scan a few months ago, the only one of us she was occasionally talking to was my brother D; and he hadn’t heard from her since a year before when he’d asked to move in during a tough time and she’d told him to piss off.

‘And I couldn’t talk to him about it,’ she said, meaning The Man Who Is Not My Father.

‘Oh, was he already…’ I spun my finger at my temple, ‘…by that point?’

‘He had been for a while. I told him I was scared about the appointment and he just…’ she shrugged. She looked so sad.

‘We would have come, if you’d have told us about it,’ I snipped. ‘Or, I mean, D certainly would have. Why didn’t you tell him?’

‘I don’t know,’ tears pooled in her eyes, and she held the little bear between her cold fingers. ‘When I was going in, I realised all I had was Billy.’

Who the fuck is…oh! She means the teddy bear.

That gave me a bit of a gut-punch, I have to say. This woman had no reason to cut all of us off outside of protecting The Man Who Is Not My Father. She’d seemingly arranged it so D and I would keep our half-brother J out of our lives, and have no relationship with our aunt or late uncle, because mum didn’t want word getting around about the molestation.

Off the back of that, J had his own childhood trauma ignored, and D struggled through raising his own little girl in a world where he automatically saw every male as a threat. The three of us had no support, no explanation when the bad things happened before we were old enough to understand. Everything was brushed so far under the rug that even now, while dying, this woman refused to pull it all back out.

But she didn’t deserve to go to a terrifying medical appointment with only a stuffed bear for moral support. Nobody deserves that.

‘I’m sorry that happened to you,’ I said. And I meant it.

She looked down at Billy. A softness crossed her face.

‘Thank you.’

Mum called out for me from about half ten at night. She didn’t shout my name – either my real one or the deadname she knew me by - just a mumbled statement.

I thought she was talking in her sleep at first. But when I perched near the door, I heard:

‘I’m desperate for a drink.’

I wandered into the darkness. The constant pump of the air mattress was soft, regular. Reassuring.

‘Alexa,’ I said, ‘turn on Lounge One.’

The Amazon assistant made a dinging noise.

The lamp in the far corner lit up.

There was a bottle of water and a sippy cup of juice on the table beside the bed, but it seemed she couldn’t roll over by herself any more. She was turned away towards the wall, hands bunched up against the flat of her chest.

‘Here’s your water,’ I said, reaching over her shoulder to give her the little bottle.

A long-nailed hand emerged from the duvet and struggled to grasp at the plastic. Her skin was so pale, so cold. She could barely hold the bottle up, I had to help her tilt it towards her mouth.

When I took the bottle back, she looked at me in the half-light. A look of recognition seemed to pass over her face.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘You okay?’

She shuffled with irritation.

‘I need to put my knees with my knees,’ she said.

Oh. Okay.

‘You need to put your knees with your knees?’

‘Yes!’ She snapped, angry now. ‘I need to put my KNEES with my KNEES!’

I had literally no idea what this meant, so I sort of moved the blankets around a bit.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘you put your knees with your knees and I’ll make sure your duvet is right.’

She curled into a fetal position, arms wrapped around her knees. A pause. Her breathing slowed a little, face relaxed. Clearly, this was her knees with her knees.

‘I’m cold,’ she muttered.

With both radiators and a fan heater on full blast, the room felt hotter than the sun.

‘It’s quite warm in here, do you mean- ‘

‘I’M FREEZING.’

‘Okay, okay,’ I skipped over to each radiator and turned them down. Judging by how she pushed her duvet back down over her legs, she was confusing too cold with too hot. I’d already researched that part of terminal restlessness, frantically stabbing queries into my phone at gone 1am in exhausted desperation.

Soon after I quietly cranked open a window (she would have flipped out if she’d heard it), she calmed down. As the cool breeze passed over the bed, she fell into a muggy sleep.

That is, until fifteen minutes later when I was wandering into a muggy sleep of my own.

‘I’m not right,’ she called out. My body got to her bedside before my brain did.

‘Ummurgharbh?’ I asked. She looked at me.

‘You what?’

‘Sorry, did you call for me?’

‘Yeah. I can’t get comfy.’

Duvet discarded, she’d managed to bunch herself up at the very top of the bed, back pressed against the headboard, knees and thighs flush up against her withered stomach. One elbow was digging into the wall while the other was somehow tucked underneath her.

‘Do you want to stretch your legs out a bit?’ I asked, hands poised at the duvet edge.

‘Yeh.’

I carefully grabbed at her bare, emaciated ankles, and slowly pulled them down towards to end of the bed.

‘Is that better?’ I asked.

‘Yeh,’ she muttered, before pulling her knees back up to her belly.

I bit my lip. I must admit, it’s hard to keep your temper when; 1. You’re not a palliative carer and nobody told you that this symptom is normal; 2. You’ve had barely any sleep in the last three days; 3. The patient came back into your life when she decided she really, really needed you to help her and; 4. Said patient is partly responsible for how fucked up you’ve been most of your adult life.

One of the hospice nurses told me mum’s “not being able to get comfy” could mean a number of things. It could mean she’s too hot, too cold, she’s in pain, she’s thirsty, she’s hungry. Not unlike in a baby, mum’s brain told her she was “not right” and not bothering to offer much information after that.

‘Are you in pain?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she snapped.

I rifled through medicine bags in the kitchen and did her a full dose of oxycodone (painkiller) and a syringe of anti-sickness medication, just in case she was queasy and not able to articulate it. At this point, I was so knackered I’d have happily performed a one-man Hamlet show if it meant she’d let me sleep for an hour.

I handed her the plastic syringe. Her long-nailed hands didn’t seem to know where they were going. Trying to help, I put her fingers around the syringe and moved the end towards her mouth. The plastic tip almost popped into her nostril.

‘Oh!’ I laughed. ‘Sorry!’

‘I don’t want it in ma nose,’ she said, wrinkles around her smile creasing like crepe paper.

‘Here.’ I tried to guide her hand again. She pushed the syringe end directly into her own nostril.

‘Oi!’ I helped her pull it back down towards her mouth, ‘You just told me you didn’t want it in your nose! I’m getting mixed signals here!’

Her eyes closed into a slit as she chuckled wheezily, and she managed the get the whole syringe of medication down.

‘Ew, it’s gross,’ she muttered. ‘Alexa? Where’s my water.’

‘It’s here, what you asking Alexa for?’

‘I don’t know. I’m confuzzled.’

Confuzzled. That was one of the odd words and phrases she’d use when D and I were little. Like “toosipegs” for teeth, “fizzog” for face, “playing silly beggars” for anything not working properly, “daft apeth” for anyone being stupid, “is it ‘eckers like” if she didn’t believe some tall tale my brother or I were telling.

I can still hear her now, popping up into the flat on an evening to tell us to “brush us toosipegs and wash fizzog” before bed. How she tucked our little bodies under duvets, one of us on the other side of her king-size mattress and the other on a piss-stained camp bed beside.

I can remember how her breath smelled of Bacardi, and how the scent of her perfume lay at the duvet edge like a fading ghost as I drifted off to sleep.

Approaching 1am, I was dozing on the sofa in the dining room when I heard mum call out again.

‘Alexa’, then silence.

Usually, she would ask Alexa to turn on or off Lounge One or Two. Confused, I muted the audio of the show I was falling asleep to.

‘Alexa,’ she said again, with a little more urgency.

I got up and stood by the darkened living room door, hunched over like Nosferatu.

‘Alexa!’ She practically shouted.

‘Are you calling me Alexa?’ I said, wandering in.

‘Yes. No. I don’t know who anyone is anymore.’

‘It’s okay,’ I laughed, ‘I get days like that too.’

She did one of her cheeky chuckles. It was odd to see her actually being friendly with me, I’d only ever known her to practically hate the ground I walked on. I wondered if the medication was making her less of a bitch.

Not ten minutes later I heard the call again.

‘Alexa?’ Her voice was a soft creak, like a hinge in the rain.

Oh, she means me.

‘Alexa,’ she repeated, more firmly this time, ‘water.’

Oh. How Black Mirror.

‘Louis is here,’ I said, ‘and your water is right here.’

Mum struggled to open the cap, but managed.

‘I’m sick of this,’ she muttered.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I get overwhelmed too sometimes. Sometimes I can’t cope.’

‘My daughter Sarah is a bit like that,’ she muttered, without smiling.

That’s when I realised: she’d been so chirpy and calm with me because she didn’t know I was Sarah. She didn’t even know – or had forgotten - I go by Louis now.

She thought I was a St Leonard’s Hospice carer called Alexa.

I watched her as she fell into a fitful sleep.

‘I love you,’ I muttered.

Even as I said it, I didn’t know if it was true. I knew I loved Mum, that woman from my distant memory and my dreams and the fantasies I’d had about some soft kind woman keen to gossip and go for coffee and hear all about what I’ve been up to.

But it wasn’t Mum in that bed. It was mum.

She said nothing, but brought her knees further up into herself.

Tears in my eyes, I watched the day’s first rays of sunlight shine onto the ceiling.

In the late evening, I gave her some lorazepam and painkiller. It calmed her a lot, and she became very chatty with me. She wanted to talk about biscuits, her favorite chocolate.

Since she was in a good mood, and I was in need of self-medicating, I poured myself a glass of wine. It was so nice to just talk to my mum, to have a good chat about absolutely nothing. I soaked up every moment of her high spirits.

‘Gimmie my phone,’ she said at one point, ‘I can’t remember the name of that really good chocolate.’

I watched as she prodded an invisible screen a few inches to the left of her phone screen. She didn’t know what she was doing, but she was happy.

My half-brother J had been over in the afternoon. Mum had dozed through his visit. After ten years not seeing me and fifteen not seeing her, J struggled with the sight of the emaciated woman in the hospital bed.

‘I need to get my head around this,’ he muttered, in the kitchen afterwards. Thankfully his wife came along with him; I can’t imagine how awful that bus ride back into York would have been if he were on his own.

‘He was hard to deal with,’ Mum said now, putting her phone down, ‘J was really hard to deal with when he was a kid.’

Well, yeah. Mum had packed J up and fled his abusive father when he was barely eight. The poor lad had seen his father beating her up. In the short time I spoke to him during his visit, it was clear those punches were still felt forty years later.

She started talking. A lot. About the struggles of the abusive marriage, about bringing up a damaged child. About being so young and scared of the man who is supposed to love you. I listened and I sipped wine and I handed her fruit pastilles when she asked.

Then:

‘While we’re talking about secrets,’ mum said with a wry smile on her face, ‘I may as well tell you. Nobody knows this.’

I braced myself for something daft; maybe she’d lied about liking all the bullshit craft projects my brother and I brought her as children. Maybe she had some money secured away somewhere. Maybe she still had feelings for my father.

It was none of those things.

‘[My dad’s name] isn’t Sarah’s dad,’ she said matter-of-factly.

I felt a cold wave wash over me. My glass of wine was halfway towards my mouth. It froze there.

‘He isn’t Sarah’s dad?’ I repeated, buying my brain time to digest.

‘No,’ mum said. She was being absolutely erudite. I recognised the look from my childhood, when she would reminisce about happy memories.

After a pause, I asked:

‘Who is her father, then?’

‘They called him Jack. Because he was a Jack the Lad,’

She was grinning now. I could see her gums, a happy twinkle in her eye.

‘He was a jack the lad? Or jack of all trades?’

‘Both,’ she nodded. ‘He was a real charmer. Tall, blonde hair. He was an absolute stunner.’

She still thinks I’m Alexa, I reasoned internally. If I’m going to get anything out of her, I need to keep calm and reasonable.

‘So,’ I asked levelly, ‘you were cheating on [my dad]?’

‘Well, you know how they say someone is “a bit of a lad”?’

‘Of course,’ I replied.

‘Well…I was “a bit of a lass,”’

She chuckled gently.

She didn’t marry Dad until a year after I was born. I’d often wondered why that was the case. And honestly, I’d often wondered whether I was my dad’s kid; I’ve got the dark under eyes, but so did my mother’s dad.

‘So, you were having a good time, basically,’ I said, swallowing hard.

‘Ooo, yeah. There is one other bloke it could be, but I don’t think so.’

‘Why do you think Jack is the one?’

‘It’s the eye,’ she said, now bringing a fruit pastille to her mouth. ‘Jack had it. Sarah’s got the same thing. The eye that doesn’t work.’

I felt a bit sick.

‘He was 19,’ she added. ‘He was a real charmer. I met him through my sister.’

She would have been about 28 when I was conceived.

‘Did [my dad] know?’

‘Yeah. I even said to him, how do you know this baby is yours? But he …brushed it under the rug. That’s what he does.’

She wasn’t wrong. Knowing my dad as I do, I’m certain he did that.

‘Did you tell Jack?’

‘Oh, nooooo. He left to join the army a while later.’ She paused to muse a little, then smiled warmly. ‘But then me and [my dad] had D, and he and Sarah looked so alike when they were little. There’s a photo I took of them both in the bath, and they could have been twins.’

I know the photo she was talking about. I confiscated it from The Man Who Is Not My Father’s briefcase after I broke into it, aged 22. I still don’t know what it was doing in there. I don’t really want to think too hard about it.

‘Do they look alike, Sarah and Jack?’ I asked. I could feel my eyes burning with tears aching to come.

‘Just around the mouth,’ mum said thoughtfully.

‘Don’t you think you should tell her?’

Her mood changed like a switch.

‘No.’

‘I think you should,’ I pressed with some restraint. ‘I think she should know.’

‘No, I can’t. Anyway, let’s stop talking about Sarah, let’s stop talking about Sarah.’ She flapped her hands as if flapping at a fly. ‘Did you find the Mini Rolls?’

I sat and watched her eat the Mini Roll, my heart beating hard in my chest. She was really enjoying it. She looked calm, happy.

‘You know what,’ she said through a mouth of cake, ‘It’s so good to get things off your chest, isn’t it?’

During an ebb in mum’s ensuing soliloquy about chocolate and cakes and biscuits, I dipped out to my car promising to be back in a few minutes. She didn’t question it; she was too busy poking through a tube of fruit pastilles.

Dad picked up after a few rings.

‘Yeaaurgh?’ It was 2am. He must have been asleep a good few hours already.

‘Dad,’ I gripped the steering wheel with my free hand, and tried to keep my voice calm. ‘Mum has just said I might not be yours.’

He spluttered a little, then paused.

‘Well, there was a young guy sniffing round about the time she got pregnant…’

‘You’re fucking kidding me?’ I nearly screamed. ‘She said there was some nineteen-year-old she was seeing?’

‘Yeah, there was. He kept pursuing her.’

Oh my god. Oh my god. Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.

‘But you’re my dad!’ I shouted. ‘You are my dad! You’ve always been my dad!’

Not one to regulate my emotions easily, I quite frankly freaked the fuck out. I’m telling you, I don’t think in my life I have had such a crash out – it was tantrum-levels, the violent swinging and screeching of an overgrown toddler.

Thankfully mum’s house is surrounded by fences and bushes, so likely no-one saw my car shaking and bumping about as I punched and kicked the doors, dashboard, my own body.

Dad confirmed all that she had told me, aside from the assertion that I wasn’t his kid.

‘I never wondered,’ he said while I sort of curled up into a ball of pain in the footwell. ‘Well, sometimes I did. But then when you were growing up I saw how much you looked like my brother, or my mum. I never thought you weren’t mine.’

It took a while for me to calm down.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ I breathed eventually. I felt like someone had clipped my anchor chain. I felt so incredibly lost and scared and upturned.

‘Whatever you want to do, I’ll support you. If you want to go down the DNA route, we can do that. But really, it doesn’t matter. It won’t change anything.’

I knew that. Despite how much he struggled as a single parent, and how angry he used to get, he was always there for us. He still was there – why else would he pick up the phone at gone 2am?

But I felt heartbroken. This was painful, the weight on my chest was unbearable. I’d worked so hard in the previous years to get past the subconscious fear that my own dad wanted to do to me what The Man Who Is Not My Father had done, we’d only just started hugging and telling each other we love each other. And now this?

I actually sniggered to myself a little when I thought of what I subconsciously call my mother’s partner. Now I had a Man Who Is Not My Father…and a Man Who Might Not Be My Father as It Turns Out. And a Man Who Might Be My Father and Has No Clue I Exist.

And if so, then I didn’t have a half-brother and a brother, now. I had two half-brothers. And maybe more half-siblings? An entire family? Who were they? Were they good people? Or bastards? Would it make sense at my age to even bother connecting with them?

Exhaustion washed over me.

‘You’re okay,’ Dad said. He sounded exhausted too. ‘You’re okay, love, we’ll work it out.’

I don’t know. I don’t know what I want.

I don’t know who I am.

13/04/2026