When the ghost came back
For nearly fifteen years, my mother has been a spectre.
When I was little, she made the devastating decision to continue her relationship with someone who did to me what should never, ever be done to a seven and eight-year-old: or anyone, really.
In the following decades, she did everything she could to keep the incident under wraps. I knew not to tell anyone. My dad didn’t know. She purposely distanced my brother and I from our half-brother, her son from a previous relationship, who was around 17 when it happened.
At the time, I didn’t understand. I thought the funny man mum lived with had done a bunch of things that were a bit weird. Really, the only time I’d felt a sort of dark chill in my chest around him was when he was drunk and was retraining me with my wrists, pulling me up in the air, making kissy faces at me while I (wearing nothing but Minnie Mouse pants) tried to struggle away. That didn’t feel good.
But when I told mum about the really bad thing I had woke up to him doing, I got a toy dog as a “sorry”. My brother got one too, a plush-furred terrier with a tartan hat. And that was that.
I held on to my toy dog for months. I called it Spotty, because the ribbon around its next was black with white spots. It slept with me every night. When mum and her partner took my brother and I up to stay on a boat for New Year’s Eve, the man pulled out the ship’s stamp - a wooden stump with rubber engraving of the tiny yacht - and asked if I wanted Spotty to have the stamp on its paw.
‘To make him a proper sailor,’ he said, his eyes a little wet and red. They were usually wet and red.
I admired the ink on Spotty’s paw many times afterwards. I made sure not to touch the synthetic fur, in case it would rub off.
And life went on. I don’t remember if she coached me not to tell my dad. He never knew until I told him many years later.
And then we started getting sex education lessons at school. That’s when I came to realise what had happened.
At the age of about ten (?), the concept of virginity was explained to me by a girl who insisted that tampons would break it.
I wondered if mine was broken? I really didn’t know. I had only known exactly what had happened because I woke up while it was happening, and that time he was only messing with my face. All the other things I wouldn’t understand were sexual until a few years later.
But that’s when a “willy” as my brother and I would call it, moved from being something really funny to being something horrifying.
I stayed at mum’s house for half the week every week, right up until I was ready to go to university. I always felt like I was in danger, but as far as I know he never did anything else to me. He did small, creepy things from a distance: the stares with a touch of darkness behind them, the pretending to have been passing my bedroom door and not actually listening at it, the lingering on my underwear as he piled it into the washing machine.
Or was I imagining that? Was I imagining the way he looked at my breasts as they filled out? Or when I saw him in the reflection of the kitchen window, staring at my arse while I washed a cup?
They seemed happy together, him and mum. The last time I saw them, her in her early fifties and him late sixties, they were holding hands while I scuttled after them in an ASDA. I was tagging along to their weekly big shop during a random visit so I could buy my own wine and not be shouted at for drinking any of her nightly Special Brew.
I still remember how furious she was when I, suicidal and self harming at the time, threw up in the guest bedroom from the hangover. All she cared about was that empty tin. It was like my laments about my mental state went right over her head.
When I moved away, I tried to keep in touch. But being away from them both and recently out of an abusive relationship, the creeping realisation that I wasn’t over what had happened to me as a little girl turned into an anger. A rage.
So, when she stopped bothering to text or call, I did too.
It was painful.
There were so many times in the last nearly fifteen years when I really needed a mother. I needed someone to invite me over, have biscuits and a cup of tea, watch some trash show together, and help me through what was happening. A lot happened during those years - some really, really fucking awful things. Really fucking awful things that were a direct result of her actions.
Because when at a young age you’re victimised, you are likely to fall into a process of revictimisation. Out of fear, in most of my cases. Or in the case of the abusive relationship, honestly not thinking I was worthy of better. My own mother saw the man who had hurt me as more valuble. What did that make me?
Nothing. Less than nothing.
Even my brother, who stayed in Yorkshire and continued to try to connect with her only to be rebuffed, reached the end of his rope after asking for her help during a terrible time in his life and being practically told to piss off. Not to mention, as a dad to a little girl now and knowing what happened when we were kids, some already horrific knowledge gained a new context.
When I tried to do myself in in October 2021, I called her. She did not pick up.
A few times since, I tried again. No response.
I wondered if she didn’t have my number. But of course, my brother would have given it to her if she asked. She just didn’t ask. She barely even spoke to him anyway. And she had entirely cut my half-brother off.
But maybe…maybe she didn’t have my number, and was too embarrassed to ask for it?
Even so, with the help of my therapist, I grieved her. I grieved the woman I wanted her to be, and the woman she was. I grieved the little girl who had her childhood taken away, and I grieved the man who hurt that child - the man my mother saw as more important than her own babies.
But
On the 6th January this year, my brother messaged me.
‘Just so you know, Mum’s in hospital.’
It was weird. I’d been dreading that message for long. My brother hadn’t heard from her in about a year. She had shut herself off completely and had been in hospital a while. The only reason she called him was to say that she was worried about her partner, now husband; that funny man with the often watery, red eyes.
Left at home on his own and needing full time care, he was liable to fall. He’d had a stroke some years before and mum was his carer.
They were both, my brother told me after visiting them both, “absolutely fucked”. That’s the medical term.
A heavy drinker all her life, she never slowed down. The last I knew, she was drinking at least four cans of Special Brew a night. In the near decade and a half since she’d raged at me for nicking and downing a can during a suicidal episode, she’d amped things up considerably. My brother lamented the sheer amount of half-empty spirit bottles dotted around what was our childhood and teenage years home. They popped up in every room like mini obelisks.
And she had barely been eating. She blamed her partner for that, since she was busy looking after him. Whether that is true is something we will never know. She’s never been one to tell the whole story. Or, you know, the truth.
I asked my brother if I should call her, text her, anything. Even after all this time I still wanted that mother. Still.
But she didn’t want to hear from me. She didn’t seem to believe she was that ill at all.
But she was. She is.
Knowing the details of my trauma and how mentally sick I am, my brother gave me info of the developing situation if I asked for it, or if it was important.
He never demanded I drive all the way up north to help out with things, and never complained. Despite how much hurt she has caused him (which is not my story to tell), he made and makes himself available for her. And she can be very difficult and obstinate. She always could be very difficult and obstinate.
My mother did not believe she has cancer.
Even after the years of symptoms, even after the doctors told her there was a tumour, even after all the tests and even after the fatal diagnosis.
Rectal cancer, advanced beyond any curing. Partly because of the size, mostly because of her health. Which, as you recall, is “absolutely fucked”.
Palliative only. A year, maybe.
When my brother relayed the news, my soul left my body. I was in my new home more than a hundred and fifty miles away, sitting on a carpet that still smelled of the previous tenants’ dog, as my three rats Borscht, Chowder and Oxtail fought over who got to sit in my lap.
For a moment I saw myself from the ceiling corner. I was looking down at a thirty-seven-year-old child.
She didn’t text or call. My brother told her I was waiting to reconnect, but as the days turned into weeks it became clear that she wasn’t going to be the one to rip off the plaster - maybe she thought I’d launch right in to having a go at her for the PTSD and CPTSD that has me, to coin the phrase, “absolutely fucked”.
But I’m not going to chuck that on a dying woman. All this time she’s ignored the elephant lumbering around the room, so it’s not like me bundling in at the end and pointing at the massive fucking thing rummaging through dusty bookcases with its trunk will make any kind of difference.
So, I texted her first. It’s okay if it’s too much for you right now, but do you want to reconnect. Yes, she replied, she would love to when she’s got her head around things.
I left it. She didn’t follow up.
A good week or so after, she got sent home from hospital. I decided to shove the elephant aside and followed up myself. Again, no pressure, but here is a video of me trying to manage my chaotic girl rats.
She responded to a photo of Honey Mustard dangling from the top of the cage and licking a plate of custard, with a heart emoji.
Her responses are always minimal. An emoji, a couple of words. I hold on to them like buoys in a dark sea. Years of nothing, and now I am ravenous for the crumbs.
My aunt, who I barely know, reconnected with my mum during this time despite her own set of trauma. She has been staying at the house as a help, just while things are sorted with the NHS.
I’ve not seen my aunt in more than twenty years. My mother has kept the truth from her all this time. She’d purposely distanced me and my brother from our own aunt so her sister might not find out.
But my aunt found out from my half-brother, who reconnected with her about a year ago.
I’ll never forget the text I got in February from my aunt, out of the blue - she apologised for not doing something at the time, all those years ago. She apologised for not protecting me. She apologised for the signals she saw at the time, the weird things she noticed but never followed up on. She, who had not even known about it, and can’t have possibly considered such a horrendous thing of her own sister and her partner, was apologising to the little girl I used to be. An apology I will never, ever get from my own mother.
My aunt is such a kind soul. It’s not her apology to make.
Mum was given one round of chemotherapy. The understanding is that she won’t survive another round. My brother called to let me know that if I’m ever going to see her again, I’m going to have to do it now.
This Sunday last I got in my ramshackle Volkswagen and drove three hours up north to a place I never hoped to see again.
I stopped only once to get petrol. I knew that if I did a proper break for food or a rest, I’d change my mind and drive back home. The closer I got to York, where all those horrible things happened, the more I felt the shadow of a colossus looming before me. The more my chest felt heavy, the more the flashbacks came.
I knew her husband wasn’t in the house. He’s in a care home now, brain a fried egg from another stroke. I’ve not even considered going through the boxes of brain bullshit regarding him, but he’s physically healthy so I have a bit more time to prepare myself. And I do want to see him - I want a different memory of him rather than the big, hairy man with kissy faces and a firm grip on my tiny wrists from my flashbacks. I want to see him as a frail old man who can’t hurt me anymore. I want the little girl in me to see that.
In any case,
Driving through the village, the passage of time washed over me. I recognised some things; the bright pink and yellow playground near the town hall, the boxes of flowers out the front of the bus stop, the dulled limestone bricks of the little chapel.
And then there’s the restaurant that’s popped up next to the village shop, the new benches where long ago I perched on sandstone steps waiting for a bus to town, the flats that have emerged from what I only remember as the burned remains of a mansion nobody wanted to claim.
The tarmac is new, fresh; it was soft on my car tyres - right up until the driveway to my mum’s house. The strip where the tarmac ends and becomes a dip into pebbles and moss is a portal into 2012, where time stopped the moment I left this place for good.
It’s a long driveway, between high wooden fences soaked with slimy moss. Every cell in my body tensed as I rolled along. The alcohol smell of that living room where they both watched TV every night, the feeling of being watched by him, the way the sunlight poured through my window in the mornings when he would tap on the door to wake me for school.
After I pulled up on the mossy gravel beside the front door, I sat in my car for the longest time. I’d been briefed that my aunt wouldn’t be back from seeing friends until about seven. I’d arrived at ten to. Should I wait for my aunt? Just how bad was it going to be? Was I going to get pummelled by all sorts of emotions the second I walked into that home that was never really mine?
For some reason, I brushed my hair. I checked my mascara in the rear view mirror. I used a dragon-shaped hairclip to put my hair up, like mum used to with a fish-shaped pin when I was a little girl if her partner took us to some posh restaurant.
I took the key from its hiding place, and let myself in quietly.
‘Hello?’ I said into a muggy silence.
It smelled like I remember.
Music played from somewhere. The living room? I recognised the song as a frequent track on Minster FM. She used to wake up to it when my brother and I were still sleeping in her bedroom as children.
I tapped on the door to the living room. There was a pause.
‘Yeah?’ a frail voice asked from inside.
I creaked open the door.
On a wheeled hospital bed sat a frail, emaciated old woman, surrounded by pillows. A walking frame weighed down with bags stood on the grubby carpet beside her, along with a coffee table piled with half-empty cups, a protein shake bottle, a sippy cup of water, a tablet in its sleeve, crossword book, untouched box of biscuits and a few documents.
Body cleaning wipes and an ineffective air freshener was perced on a hefty CD player system and its disconnected speakers. And a white Alexa unit stood beside a little stack of CDs. That was where the music was coming from. It was tinny. Just a little bit too loud.
The old woman was hunched over a large touchscreen phone, holding a touch pen in her grey, long-nailed hand. Her arms were so thin, she could barely lift them. I could see her pale scalp through her thin hair.
She looked up.
That’s when my sixty-six-year-old mother and I saw each other for the first time in nearly a decade and a half.
‘Oh,’ she said in a soft, gravelly voice, ‘hello.’
I felt like I had been punched in the chest.
I think it was a good thirty minutes of her talking about herself before she asked how I have been.
When she asked, she looked me in the eyes, and she looked so sad. Like a dog that knows it did wrong, but still wants love.
I started to cry when I told her about my suicide attempt.
She was quiet for a moment, then started talking about smart bulbs. The lamp had one. It had burst. It needed sorting.
She had not changed. She has not changed.
She will never be the mother I desperately need. She never has been.
My brother warned me. I knew what to expect, I suppose. But at the same time, I held on to that buoy in the dark sea. Even sat listening to her weak, husky voice, I searched for that tiny slip of brightness that suggests she might even consider becoming the woman that she should always have been for me, my brother, my half-brother.
Not long after, my aunt showed up – a beautiful woman inside and out that I was cheated out of knowing. We slipped away to the kitchen, where bags of unused adult nappies and boxes of stoma bags spanned the table that my brother and I had eaten dinner at years before.
I wasn’t there for long before I started struggling. I made a cup of tea and went back to try to talk to my mother. And I was getting nothing from her. Only complaints about what had happened to her the last few months, and complaints about her husband who obviously I was in no state to be talking about. It was true emotional turmoil.
Eventually, mum checked out. She could tell I was upset, but didn’t want to address it. She hunched over her phone again, pen in grey hand. I noticed how her collar bones looked like handles. I could see the nubs of her spine through her soft shirt.
‘See you tomorrow,’ I said.
‘Okay, love,’ she replied, not looking up.
The next morning, I went back round with my brother. While he was in the living room with the care nurse and my aunt, I hid in the kitchen to regulate my emotions without embarrassing myself.
That’s when I noticed the corkboard in the kitchen, bathed in a slip of sunlight through dusty blinds.
It’s pocked with yellowed notes. Leaves from pads left over after mum and her husband shut their hotel and restaurant nearly thirty years ago. Those red numbers at the bottom of each yellowed paper strip, the order number; take it to the chef, get the guest fed. My brother and I, seven and eight, watching the waitresses flit between napkined tables while we slumped on fake leather armchairs, waiting for Dad to pick us up for the weekend.
There in the middle of the corkboard, surrounded by pinned receipts and appointment reminders, is a short stump of paper yellowed by more than a decade of direct sunlight.
“SARAH”
And beneath my deadname, my mobile phone number.
30/03/2026