The Hauntings
I’m writing this from the squishy old sofa in the dining room of my teenage home. It’s the second night of caring for my previously no-contact mother, just gone half ten. She’s been asleep for a little while – every time I pass the living room, I peek at the slip of space between the door and frame to squint into absolute darkness.
I have to listen hard for gentle breaths. They are irregular, and very quiet. A few times I’ve been tempted to tiptoe over the faded carpet and put my palm under her nose to check. I wonder if she ever did that to me when I was a baby.
The elephant stands in that room, in a corner where twenty years ago I perched at an enormous computer monitor, posting inane crap on a MySpace page.
There’s barely anything else in there now. One worn sofa, a modern flatscreen TV on glass stand, the solid wood coffee table which used to sit in the waiting room of the hotel she and her now husband ran. There’s a patch on the underside where I, bored aged seven, scratched away a load of varnish with the cap of a pen.
The elephant is weak, wizened, its eyes are sallow and grey – but it’s still there. And she won’t address it. And neither will I, at this point. When her husband did to me what he did when I was a child, she became a victim too. I can’t imagine how much turmoil she went through. It makes me sad to think about how heartbroken she must have been.
I wonder if the trauma killed her emotions altogether.
I barely slept last night. All I could think about was the ghosts in this house – I saw them in my mind’s eye. I saw my brother and I, 14 and 15, walking in to our new home for the first time.
I remember feeling a bit odd right off the bat. Not because it was – is – a decent-sized house in a nice area; but because it was the first time we’d live in a family house. And that meant me and my brother, my mum and her future husband were a family.
The incidents that I remember happened in a grotty maisonette attached to the back of the hotel. There, mum’s partner had his own room and my brother and I slept in mum’s until we were about ten.
Then, we all moved into a part of the hotel, where my brother and I’s rooms were isolated on the third floor of the narrow townhouse directly attached to the hotel. The four of us used to have dinner in the spacious dining room, surrounded by round tables decked with waterproof cloths.
But this house; this was smaller. More intimate. With a separate living room and dining room, three bedrooms, spare room and a bathroom it was already way bigger than the poky little number my dad lived in alone, half an hour away. But that was different. Dad was my dad, and he had never even glanced at me the wrong way.
Mum and her partner decorated before my brother and I arrived. Framed pictures of Spitfires, navy vessels, and some of the relics from the bar at their then-closed hotel: a wooden wall sign claiming “Guinness gives you strength”, a map of Scotland pinned with the best whiskey distilleries, a great round shield gifted by Yorvik Viking Centre boasting signatures from famous hotel guests.
‘That’s Ian Lavender’s signature,’ I can remember mum telling me the Monday after he signed it, her face flush with Bacardi and coke and heaps of blusher. ‘Ian Lavender from Dad’s Army.’
I, about nine, had no idea who Ian Lavender from Dad’s Army was. But you can guarantee I went to school the next day and told my classmates that my mum had hosted Ian Lavender from Dad’s Army and he had signed the big shield hung up in the bar.
My brother and I didn’t argue over who got which bedroom in the new house. I refused what would become the spare room, since it was directly next to mum and her partner’s bedroom.
I chose the room on the opposite side of the landing, down a short turn of a corridor. It was larger than the adjacent room my brother took, but being uncarpeted and laid with creaky varnish floorboards it was much colder.
My reasoning was that if someone tried to creep into my room in the middle of the night, I’d hear them in the corridor first and then certainly hear them on the bare creaking floorboards.
I didn’t assume that my mother’s partner was going to do anything again. He never touched me, even innocently like on the shoulder or while holding a door open, since the incidents. But it was a consideration I made consciously. My chest was filling out, my hips were becoming rounded, and it didn’t matter how much I hid in baggy clothes – I was becoming a woman.
At half eight this morning, I woke up to York Mix radio played a little too loudly from the living room. Through the wall, I heard those tunes my brother and I as children woke up to each weekday in mum’s bedroom – Wake up, it’s a beautiful mor-ning. Bit of Boo Radleys. Followed by some Bryan Adams, then a cheeky bit of Ronan Keating. Some modern artists mixed in there too. It was jarring to hear Sabrina Carpenter’s crooning right after The Beautiful South song (“Song for Whoever”) that used to play while mum dragged a brush through my hair before primary school.
Despite being exhausted, it was not easy to fall back to sleep on the squishy two-seater sofa. I did so fleetingly, having my weird half-conscious dreams where I see the room around me, and the ghosts of myself and my brother and mum’s partner imprinted there.
When the carers came at half ten, I had to get up. I heard the whine of the bed controls moving my mother around, and the soft voices of the nurses.
Do you want to have a wash? Do you need a hand with your bag? Let’s just sit you up a bit for a minute. Have you managed to eat anything yet today?
To her credit, mum only referred to me as Louis when talking to the nurses. The one time she said Sarah, she corrected herself.
When I blearily wandered in to the kitchen to flick the kettle on, the nurses followed.
‘Louis,’ the younger nurse with a face like a perfume model asked, ‘we’ve got to give you this to give to your mum.’
A syringe and a bottle of medicine.
‘Cos we can’t administer it,’ the ethereally pretty nurse continued, ‘we aren’t qualified. You have to do it.’
I looked at them both. The other nurse, also much younger than me and with the most beautifully straight hair I’ve ever seen, shrugged.
‘I know, it doesn’t make sense,’ she said, in slightly less of a Yorkshire accent than her co-worker.
When they left, I gave my mother the syringe. It was an anti-sickness medicine, two syringes which she could administer herself. She washed it down with dissolved paracetamol in a glass of water.
‘I need to sit up now,’ she croaked gently. That meant I needed to hold her wrist and she mine, and pull her up. She was so light. Her arm so thin my thumb and forefinger had no trouble touching around her wrist.
‘That’s lovely, thanks love,’ she said, after pressing her buttons to prop herself up in bed.
She wanted orange and lemonade in her sippy cup. I did that for her. She was grateful. Sometimes she made a little joke, and I’d see a tiny glimpse of the woman she was before the incidents.
God, I’ve missed that woman so much.
Before going into the village to pick up my emergency prescription, I poked my head in to the living room to see her hunched over her phone.
‘Have you got any spare change?’ she asked.
‘Well, no.’
‘Oh never mind then.’
‘No,’ I insisted, ‘what are you after?’
‘Can you get me a copy of The Times? But if they don’t have The Times, don’t bother,’ she added.
‘Sure,’ I said, someone under severe financial distress as yet unaware of the price of the Saturday copy of The Times.
It was odd walking that path down to the high street, as I had done many years ago. I saw the exact corner where I collapsed crying aged 19 after my brother had one of his crash-outs and stormed out of the house – his anger at what mum’s partner had done often bubbled over during that period. There’s a lavender bush there now.
When I got back, I peeked in to the living room to see my mother faceplanted on the blanket like a cat. Her little teddy bear (Bertie?) was perched beside her, turned towards her spindly arm.
I propped her newspaper on the end of the bed, and went to catch up on some sleep.
The calls for me were frequent in the following hours.
Usually, it was for something out of her reach. At one point, I had to work out why the bed wasn’t working. She didn’t want any food, but she did an online order for some Milkybars.
‘I can get them from the shop if you want,’ I offered, my face stained with tears as I prepared to go for another walk.
She looked pissed off at me.
‘I’ve got some coming on Monday,’ she said.
I knew full well to leave it at that. She’s probably not going to eat them anyway. At this point, I’m not sure she can.
She wanted to sit up again. I pulled her up, my palm around her wrist and hers on mine, and she wobbled on the soft mattress.
‘Oh bugger,’ she said, looking at me from the cushions. ‘I’ve fallen back down.’
Again, my palm on her wrist, hers on mine. She weighed very little.
She sent me out so she could change her stoma bag in peace. A few minutes later she called for me again.
‘I can’t get the spray to come out,’ she said, holding up a little aerosol can. Some stuff to dissolve the glue that holds the bag to the stoma.
It was already shocking enough to see my mother have to lift up her shirt, breasts that thirty-seven years ago fed me, resting beside the deflated skin of her belly button. She looked like a crinkled balloon.
But to watch her peel away the sticker of the stoma bag with her long-nailed fingers, asking for me to spray where the glue stuck too hard; that was a lot for me. That was a huge amount for me. I tried not to look, because I know she’s embarrassed and grossed out, but it’s hard not to when you’re angling some spray around a very stubborn sticker.
‘It’s disgusting,’ she muttered, more to herself than me.
My heart broke for her.
I thought about my brother, my dad. If they were in this situation, I wouldn’t bat an eyelid. I’d probably make jokes about it, and they back.
But her…this woman who for the last fifteen years was a spectre – a stranger that shouldn’t be such…it felt odd. It felt like I was encroaching, and I had no way of comforting her because I don’t know how.
She dealt with the rest of it herself, until the carers came again.
‘Are you okay, Louis?’ The ethereally pretty one asked when she found me hiding in the kitchen. I was not okay. It all came flooding out. The ghosts, the spectre, the cause of my haunting.
Bless her, she looked so concerned. I was mortified to have offloaded all that on her, but once I started I couldn’t stop. It was like a burst faucet.
She said it was horrifying what had happened to me. She said she would talk to her head nurse about counselling and extra support. She kept saying ‘I can’t make it not have happened’, as if it were her responsibility.
Horrifying.
It’s odd. I’ve spent the last thirty years seeing it as just some funny thing that the funny man did.
But the ethereal nurse is right. It was horrifying. It is horrifying.
I’m finishing this post at 2am. I had to stop a few times to have a cry, and to check in on mum. She keeps making noises, like she’s fighting someone in her sleep.
An hour ago, I heard her ask her Alexa to turn the fan heater on. I creeped to the door, poked my head through to see whether she had gone back to sleep.
‘What you want?’ her groggy voice, surprisingly loud, popped from the darkness. I just about shit myself.
‘Just checking on you,’ I replied, calmly as I could manage.
‘Blurrghhh’, she offered.
I’ve heard her talking in her sleep since then. Even with a wall between us, I can hear the panic. I don’t dare to think what she is dreaming of. Hurt people hurt people.
But she will never tell me. She will never tell me just how hurt she is.
Those paintings of spitfires and whiskey and navy paraphernalia are exactly where they were the first time I ever walked into this house. There is not a single photograph of me, or either of my brothers.
It’s like we were never here at all.
05/04/2026