Chapter Nine: The Daubings
I woke around 6am. I checked on her.
She was zonked out, in a bizarre position – curled up like a foetus with forehead pressed against the wall.
The duvet was shoved down to her feet. I could see dampness pooled around her incontinence pants.
That was hard to see.
I remembered how dutifully she would lift me on to a potty in the middle of the night.
I wet the bed right up until I was about ten, I think.
Sometimes, Mum wouldn’t come upstairs from the hotel bar in time, and I’d have already wet the bed. But she never shouted. She let it air out, moved my sleepy form to the dry area.
Over at Dad’s house, it was different. I reckon Dad thought being pissed off – pun intended – would make me learn to stop. If I woke up in the middle of the night in a puddle of urine, I kept it uncovered and curled my little body around it, sleepily praying that it be dry by morning.
If I slept right through and woke up wet, I’d frantically dab at the puddle with clothes, or put the duvet over and hope Dad wouldn’t fling it back to check.
He usually did. And he was always very angry about it.
But he didn’t know wetting the bed at my age was directly attributed to having being molested. He had no idea I had been molested.
Decades later, seeing my mother had moved herself from the wet patch triggered all sorts of sad memories. I remembered how cold her hands felt as she lifted my little body onto that potty, how she smelled of alcohol and perfume, how she gently put the duvet over me afterwards.
I grabbed a towel and laid it down over the patch, then gently pulled the duvet up to her chin. She stirred in her sleep, but did not wake.
I went to the sofa in the dining room, and fell into a nap.
At 9am I was jarred from a fitful sleep by my aunt and big brother J coming in to the house. T went to talk to my sleepy but chatty mother, and J rifled chaotically through the larder for cleaning supplies.
‘You alright?’ He nodded, passing with arms full of cloths and spray bottles.
It was so strange, suddenly knowing this man. Mum had successfully engineered it so I had no idea who my own brother was. It made me feel sick.
I stared into my coffee. If I thought about it too hard, I was going to get very angry at the weak, dying woman bound to that tiny bed in the living room. There was a lot of things I wanted to scream at her.
Why did you commit your life to protecting a paedophile?
Why did you manipulate me and D, and even T, into distancing ourselves from your own son, J?
What made you need to keep D and me away from T, when her husband was dying?
How dare you hurt your children and your sister?
When I was twenty years old, my younger brother D had a bit of a crash out.
He was angry that The Man Who Is Not My Father never saw punishment. There were various phone calls, between me and D and then D and mum and then mum and me. She was doing everything she could to stop D calling the police.
She called me and she said the most awful thing.
‘You know, when you were little, J was a bit…weird with you.’
Mum tried to plant the seed of an idea that it wasn’t The Man Who Is Not My Father who molested me, but her own son. My big brother.
I told T this in the kitchen now, while I sipped my coffee. She nodded. She already knew about that.
‘Around the time it must have happened,’ she said, holding a Mr Muscle poised in her hand, ‘your mum told me she found J in bed with you.’
Bile rose in my throat.
‘That didn’t happen,’ I said.
And it didn’t.
I was nonced when my younger brother and I didn’t have beds at mum’s place: we alternated between a piss-stained camp bed in mum’s bedroom and the other side of her mattress.
Even when J was living with us as children, I don’t remember him even hugging me. With ten years between us, we had zero in common and if anything I annoyed him.
‘Well, no.’, T said, ‘Of course J didn’t do that. And I said to [T’s late husband] what do you think about that? And he said just ignore it, it’s probably nothing. And I thought about it a lot but I never said anything.’
The Man Who Is Not My Father was a friend to T. Her husband used to go out to the pub with the guy.
You’d never, ever think that a friend could be a nonce. It’s the last thing you’d think, because it’s so horrifying.
It’s horrifying.
Mum wanted me to have spaghetti bolognaise and garlic bread with her for dinner.
‘I’ll send you some money,’ she said, pawing for her phone. I was surprised to get a notification of a couple of hundred pounds landing in my moth-filled account.
‘Er, Mum, I think you’ve sent me too much for spaghetti bolognaise and garlic bread.’
‘I’ve not.’
‘No, you have…’
‘I know what I’m doing, it’s for petrol too.’
She repeated the amount at me. She’d managed to navigate her banking app, but couldn’t write coherently or remember the time any more.
I was impressed and yes, I did accept the money. A dark part of me felt entitled to compensation for nearly 15 years of on and off therapy tackling her and her partner’s actions.
She was happy for me to pop to the shop now that she knew her sister was in the house. Between T and Alexa, she had enough people to shout at.
‘ALEXA,’ I heard her yell as I left, ‘TURN ON YORK…YOUR MIX RADIO.’
At the shop in the town square I stood in the alcohol aisle, a microwave bolognaise tucked under my arm.
It probably wasn’t a good idea to be drinking while looking after with a dying woman.
But this was winding up to be one of the worst times of my life. And during the worst times of my life previously, I’d not had a mother to turn to – I’d turned to alcohol instead.
I left the aisle, hands empty, and scanned the chocolates for mum’s requested Walnut Whips and After Eights. I found the latter, stared at the packet for a moment, then turned back on myself.
I grabbed the neck of a pinot grigio. Fuck it.
Back at the house, I dumped my shopping bag on her bedside table.
‘I couldn’t get either of those Deep Heat sprays you wanted. The pharmacy was closed.’
I braced myself for a kicking off, but she looked at me mildly.
‘Oh,’ she managed. ‘Bugger.’
‘I can drive to a big pharmacy at Monk’s Cross, that’s still open.’
‘No love, it’s fine.’
I got the impression she didn’t want me to leave the house. She didn’t want me to be gone again.
‘But I did find you some After Eights,’ I beamed, pulling out the box. She lit up. ‘And I got this cheese spread for you. It’s supposed to be really strong. Like the cheese you said came in barrels.’
‘Oh aye?’ She reached out. I handed the pot to her. Her outreached fingers missed it by about six inches.
‘Why aren’t you giving me it?’
‘I am, Mum…’
I guided it in to her palms. She peered at the label.
‘Well, we can give it a go, can’t we?’
I made her some toast.
‘Oh my god,’ She said, chewing on one of the soft toast fingers. ‘This spread is amazing.’
‘Is it?’ I laughed. I felt oddly proud to have done something right for a change.
‘Oh, it’s gorgeous. What brand is it?’
I had to fetch her the tub again because she didn’t believe I’d read the brand name right. Seriously Strong cheese spread. She rolled the tub in her fingers while the other hand tried to hold the toast.
‘This is dead good,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to put some on the next Asda shop.’
‘I’ll let T know,’
Poor T was the only one mum trusted to do the online Asda shop. It was a nightmare of patience.
Unlucky for me though, mum wanted to check her husband’s direct debits and T was too busy cleaning upstairs.
‘Go look in my handbag. There’s a yellow book. It’s got the passwords in it. And get my tablet.’
Oh God.
I was touched and…confused?...to see the little yellow book was my homework diary from when I was thirteen; one I’d thought I’d lost, had replaced by school, and then given to Mum.
When I handed it over she fumbled through the pages with shaking fingers.
‘Give me a minute.’
I sat with the tablet on my lap, open on the bank login page.
She leafed through her little yellow book. And she leafed. And leafed.
‘You have to give me a minute,’ she said, after about ten. She actually woke me from a half-snooze by saying that.
Another ten minutes.
‘Do you need me to find it?’
‘No!’ she snapped. ‘Just wait.’
I waited. Upstairs, J and T shared a joke. I could smell window cleaner.
I opened up Wikipedia and found some rabbit hole to go down. Did you know Ebola is a prion disease? Prion diseases are horrifying. There’s one that keeps you alive for ages without sleep for even a minute.
‘Right.’ She woke me from my reverie. ‘The password is,’
‘Hang on!’
‘I thought you were ready!’ She snapped, hands falling to her legs in genuine exasperation.
What followed was nearly twenty minutes of her reading out a username character by character, followed by password character by character. Every time, some details were wrong. Every time, it was my fault the login wasn’t working.
Eventually, I moved the footstool back so I could read the usernames and passwords over her shoulder. She’d been reading them wrong – missing just one character, sometimes multiples.
‘Oh, it worked!’ I exclaimed. ‘I must have forgotten to refresh the page!’
She looked at me with genuine disdain.
‘For someone with a Cambridge degree, you’re quite stupid aren’t you.’
I bit my lip.
‘Right,’ she said eventually, ‘I need you to log in to my phone account now.’
I considered punting myself into the nearby river.
‘So who’s here now?’ Mum demanded.
‘T, and your son J. They’re cleaning.’
‘J’s here?’ She exclaimed, face lighting up. ‘Can I see him? Get him to come see me.’
J was still tackling the black mould in the bathroom when I wandered in to fetch him.
‘She really wants to say hello,’ I said. ‘She was so excited when she heard you’re here.’
J looked surprised, a little abashed.
My story is very different from his, but I understood the confusion – to live through many long years of your mother shutting you off, to suddenly clamouring for your attention was a lot.
‘I’ll come down in a minute. Let me get this done.’
A wicked part of me poked my brain while I made mum another drink of lemonade and orange.
All these years, her children had wanted her so badly, and she wasn’t interested. Now the tables were turned, wouldn’t it be…deliciously cruel…to tell her I hate her and leave forever.
A fizzing feeling rose from my base up through my chest. A peverse joy at the idea of breaking her heart even a fraction of the way she broke mine when she chose the man who nonced me over her own daughter. I felt a little dizzy.
Then a cold wave washed over my chest. I thought about her crying. How miserably she sobbed to me the few times in the last couple of weeks when she realised her mortality. How she occasionally looked at me with genuine, adoring love from a tiny body barely capable of moving.
I couldn’t do that to her.
Shortly after I took mum her drink, J stomped into the room.
‘Hiya!’ She beamed at him. Her gums showed. I noticed a part of them looked black.
She wanted a hug. J pretended to have a bad cold which he didn’t want her to catch. I could see the turmoil turning in his head like a foamy wave. He didn’t know her any more than I did.
‘Right.’ Mum said after a bit of small talk, ‘You’re to go upstairs and get Toby for me.’
J glanced at me.
‘Who the hell is Toby?’ He mouthed.
‘I don’t friggin’ know,’ I mouthed back.
‘ARE YOU LISTENING?’ Mum snipped, making me jump. ‘Toby is Billy’s partner in crime.’
‘Oh, right,’ J said. ‘What’s he look like?’
‘IF YOU WAIT A MINUTE, I’LL TELL YOU.’
J and I pursed our lips, I tried not to laugh.
‘He’s got a blue jumper,’ Mum said after a long pause, ‘and a red hat.’
To be honest, that didn’t narrow it down much. The piles of teddies in her bedroom were all wearing RNLI gear – often with blue jumper and hat.
But off J went dutifully.
He returned shortly with a teddy the same size as Billy. One which was wearing a red hat and red scarf.
‘That’s him,’ mum said when J presented him gingerly. I was impressed. There was so many teddies up there it was a wonder he’d found the right one.
She wanted Toby next to Billy. She sat with her teddies flush against the wall, looking pleased.
I was dealing with an especially massive cobweb in the pantry when mum called for me again. For a dying woman, she sure could shout loudly.
‘I need you to go get J,’ she snipped when I bundled in.
I wandered into the kitchen. T told me that J was outside. So I grabbed myself another SlimFast shake and scrolled my phone.
Shortly after, J slouched back into the kitchen.
‘I just needed a minute,’ he said quietly. He must have struggled to see all those teddy bears piled up on the drawers.
It hit me too, then, how lonely mum must have been. With her husband disconnected mentally and – according to her – violent, she had nobody but her teddies.
I remembered D telling me after the initial visit at the start of the year, how all her many teddies were lined up on the back of the sofa “so they could watch TV or something. It was dead weird.”
‘She’s asking for you again,’ I said.
Off J went to the living room.
Shortly after, there was a huffing and a series of thuds from the landing.
T and I wandered through to the foyer with interest.
J was attempting to drag a heavy chest down the stairs. Despite being filled with the relatively light crochet and knitting gubbins, the chest itself was solid wood and apparently not the lightest.
‘I feel a bit useless,’ I said to T, as we watched J huff and puff around the wooden case. He dragged it along to the little flat part of the stairs, sweat poking from his brow.
‘We’re helping by looking pretty,’ T offered.
‘Yep,’ I said, well aware on four hours’ sleep I looked like absolute shit.
J pushed the chest over the carpet into the living room, huffing loudly.
‘Right,’ he gasped when mum looked up at him, ‘it’s here. Where you want it?’
‘Where I can see it.’
I moved the chairs around. We found a place for the box to her liking.
‘That’s fine,’ she said finally.
Given the state of her, I knew mum was never going to crochet again. But it was enough to make her think that she would. At this point, everything was about making her happy.
But it was bloody hard.
Tired from telling her family members what to do, mum passed out with Toby and Billy propped in her arm. T collared me.
‘I need you to put together a coat rack,’ she said. ‘It’s upstairs, in The Man Who Is Not Your Father’s room.’
T had been setting the room up for the carer. It was cleaned well, although years of dust lay stubbornly on the skirting boards. The flatpack coat rack waited for me in a slim cardboard box.
The Man Who Is Not My Father’s room used to be mine, when I was a teen. Back then, I filled it with books and beanbags and chaotically-arranged piles of clothes.
The room which greeted me now was spartan; only a bed, tall lamp, bedside table, and a small pile of nautical notes in the far corner.
It was bizarre walking in, nearly a decade and a half since those slats kissed my feet.
It was even more bizarre to see the bed base that I’d been abused on.
I have no idea where that bed base was stored all that time. It might have been stashed in the garage; up on the rafters away from view.
Honestly, the fact The Man Who Is Not My Father managed to pull it from the garage to put in an upstairs bedroom by himself was impressive considering he’d been recovering from a stroke.
The king-sized bed base has four drawers – two on either side. It’s embroidered with golden thread. The drawer faces are plush with padding. I can remember pressing them with my tiny fingers, watching the material depress and fill out.
Back then, I only knew it as Mum’s bed. I had no idea that The Man Who Is Not My Father slept in it when my brother and I weren’t there.
I used to sit in the slip between Mum’s bed and the piss-stained camp cot. That felt like my special place, where read my picture books. I’d prop myself with my back on the plush bed box, little feet on the camp bed, reading some hardback about witches or the great plague or astrology.
Mum got me a toy horse that came with nail varnish vials. It was some newsagent knockoff of Fashion Star Fillies; a popular 1980s series of toy horses with bright manes and accessories.
My horse had leg warmers and hair clips, I remember that much. I also remember it was white, and the packaging showed pristinely-shaped varnish glitter flowers on the rump of the toy.
As far as I recall it didn’t come with stamps, so eight-year-old me tried to replicate those flawless shapes by freehand. I sat on the dusty brown carpet, carefully unscrewing the varnishes and dotting my toy with the watery fluid.
I wasn’t very good at it.
I got a lot on my fingers. I wiped the excess off on the plush drawers of the bed box, repeatedly pulling the duvet down as if this would hide the marks forever.
The varnishes were fluorescent, 80s colours – lime green, hot pink, bitter orange, highlighter yellow.
Mum never said a word about those daubings. She must have seen them.
I can’t remember if I dabbed those soft drawers before or after I woke in the night to the thing that grown-ups do.
But it was that particular part of the bed – already daubed or not - above which my face was lying when The Man Who Is Not My Father put his semi-erect penis in my mouth.
He thought I was asleep. Perhaps I had been on previous occasions. I will never know how many times he did it.
I hope that was the only time he did it. But I do remember waking for school and feeling like my privates were hot. I do remember waking with a weird taste in my mouth. I do remember waking with a crusty substance on my cheek, my forehead, my chin.
I cannot tell you how it felt to see those daubings thirty years later.
I stared at those fluorescent thumbprints for a good ten minutes, even as the coat rack poles slipped in my hands. It was surreal. My big brother scrubbing away at the mould in the bathroom, my aunt calming my angry mother directly underneath me – this was now, this was not thirty years ago.
I was not that little girl sleeping on a bare mattress threaded with gold polyester, woken by a wrinkly cock pressed on my tongue.
And yet, I was that little girl. I was a little girl at the age of thirty-seven.
27/06/2026