Annie Christie's Family Fictions:
Episode Seven
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: One strong one only.
Description: Things to do on Mull while your family falls apart.
_____________________________________________________________________
Casey, I’ve not thought about these things in a long time, and the memories are pretty painful even in the writing, so I’m sorry if I’m not giving you the bits of the story you most want to know. All I can do is work my way through it. My family fictions. And at that point I remember feeling like I was being crushed by the weight of skeletons falling out of the family closet.
Everyone else seemed to be taking it a lot better than I was. Well, Ollie didn’t seem either up or down – but then nothing outside of his head seemed to mean anything to Ollie in those days. And Ellie was up and out with the lark. She was gone before breakfast, which was when I surfaced.
‘Where’s Ellie,’ I asked as I sat down to my cornflakes. It was addressed to mum but Marco answered. That, predictably, got on my wick.
‘She left early – off to play with her new friend,’ he said.
I didn’t give him the satisfaction, or courtesy, of a reply. I just sat there, silently wishing him dead.
‘Would you go and find her and bring her back before lunch?’ mum asked.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘We’re planning a picnic this afternoon. Marco’s going to drive us to the Silver Sands at Calgary Bay.’
As if nothing had happened. I couldn’t believe it. I nearly choked on my cereal.
‘Are we taking the boat?’ Ollie asked.
What? Was he playing along? What the hell was happening here? I gave him a glare which told him that we needed to sort this out – alone. And left the room.
Outside, Ollie followed me and said, ‘Why are you being such a prick?’
‘I was going to ask you the same question,’ I said. ‘Don’t you…’
He cut me off before I could launch into my whole betrayal of our dad speech.
‘It’s done,’ he said. ‘What can we do about it now? And I’m bored here anyway.’
I was obviously getting no support from him. So I went off in search of Ellie.
I found her over by Castle Dare, just sitting looking out into the loch.
‘No Alasdair today?’ I asked her.
She shook her head. And then she cried.
It’s a terrible thing to see your sister cry. I don’t mean when she’s young, when kids cry all the time over anything, like when you’ve given her too much of a Chinese burn or trodden on her pet newt or burned the hair off her Barbie. I mean when she’s crying for real. And the most terrible thing about it was, I knew what she was crying about and I wanted to cry too. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I just put my arms round her and said, ‘Don’t worry, you’ve still got me.’ Like that was anything of a consolation. I knew it wasn’t me she needed.
I told her what mum had said about the picnic and she stopped crying. She fixed me with a look I’d never seen before. Sunny Ellie’s face was clouded with defiance.
‘I’m not fucking going,’ she said.
She swore. Ellie never swore. She’d never needed to. She never even said as much as ‘shut up’. But clearly she felt she needed to vent her spleen now.
‘No, me either,’ I said. ‘So the only question is, do we go back and tell them we’re not coming or do we just not turn up?’
‘If we don’t turn up they’ll come looking for us. They’ll send him,’ she said, and I wasn’t sure for a moment if she meant Ollie or Marco. The amount of vitriol in her voice I kind of hoped she meant Marco, but I just wasn’t sure.
‘Right, well let’s go back and tell them to get stuffed,’ I said, hoping I sounded braver than I felt.
She looked at me with her big, tear-stained eyes and said, ‘I want to stay here.’
There was a moment’s pause. I didn’t know what to say.
‘I can pretend none of it’s happened as long as I’m here,’ she said, confirming what I’d been thinking. I wanted to say – ‘It has happened. We have to deal with it,’ but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth.
I could see her pain. I knew I had to protect her. My pain was mine to deal with but my little sister had just been abandoned by her father and betrayed by her mother and I was all she had left. So I had to step up to the plate. However bad I felt, she was feeling it worse. This is the price of divorce.
Everyone says that divorce is commonplace, that children are resilient. That they get over it. Believe me, Casey, you never get over your family betraying you. Never. The dynamic of a family is a unique and fragile thing. Everyone is supposed to know their place and to buy in to the rules of engagement, so to speak. It’s where you’re supposed to feel safe. And when the adults throw all that up in the air – well it doesn’t matter if you’re four or fourteen, it rocks your world and it shapes the rest of who you are for ever. Parents don’t see this. They move on, they get on with their new lives and the children are expected to adapt. Which they do.
I cannot imagine how appalling it is to be a child of whom one or both parents die, but I’m sure it’s not the same kind of grief as that of the child who loses parents who keep on living. Losing someone you love is probably the worst thing you can experience in life, but when you lose someone who is still there, out there somewhere, and who you cannot reach, that’s a particular kind of grief and it leaves a particular kind of scar. There is no getting over it. When you change things for a child you change the child. You change the way they look at the world, you change their social being and most of all you change their confidence. We are meant to grow and change naturally, not by being ripped out of the ground we’ve been nurtured in and stuck haphazardly into a different pot. Expected to flower all the same, as if nothing has happened.
I felt then that I would never trust anyone ever again. Time hasn’t substantially changed that emotion. Of course, Casey, I got on with my life, I grew up, I ‘dealt’ with it all and I love you now. I love you so much that it hurts. But it does hurt, Casey. Because I know how badly wrong things can go. I know how people can damage each other and I’m afraid of that for you and me. Never mind any children we might have. Of course I want children. Of course I want a future together, but the spectres of the past weigh heavy in me even now and I just want you to know that if I seem less than committed to our life together or less than what you’d like from me, there is a reason. There are a number of reasons.
I know I’m not the only person this ever happened to. But it happened to me. And that’s the reality I live with. It’s the only reality I know. I thought I had a happy family. That was taken away from me. I thought I was one person, with one set of relationships and that was all torn up in front of me and thrown into the waste bin and I was expected not to mourn its passing. I guess I’ve not dealt with it even now. I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for who I am but it’s not my fault. It’s what they did to me. If you think I’m making excuses then you just don’t understand what I’m saying. And I think you will understand, Casey. I hope so. I need you to understand me if we’re to make our life work.
Back then, on a sunny morning in August as I flicked midgies from my face, walking down the track towards the cottage, with all these feelings gestating. The full awfulness of my future was nascent in the immediate raw pain of my present. I was fourteen years old and I was angry as hell at them all.
My intention was to go in, tell them all where to get off, and then head back for Ellie. But I hadn’t taken their responses into account, of course, had I? I’d forgotten they weren’t just projections of my anger and despair. They were people in their own right with their own thoughts and their own agenda. I’d forgotten that. It’s the curse of the teenager and some people never outgrow the self-obsession. Maybe none of us ever really do.
‘Ellie says she doesn’t want to go, mum,’ I started. I wasn’t speaking to him. I wasn’t going to look at him, or speak to him, and I certainly wasn’t getting in a car with him.
My mum gave me a look of what I can only describe as terrible sadness. It was like looking at Ellie but in grown up form. And even though I blamed my mum for it all, I blamed Marco more. He was the cuckoo in the nest. He was the family wrecker. And it was as hard for me to see my mum’s pain as it was to see Ellie’s. She was my mum. I loved her, despite what she’d just done to our family.
So I added, ‘She says the long journey will make her car-sick.’ I guess I was trying to protect them. Ellie and mum. But it was buying into the secrets and lies game and I felt sick to my stomach.
Still nothing from mum.
‘I’ll stay and look after her, mum, don’t you think that’s best?’ I didn’t know what else to do. I needed to focus my hatred on Marco. Beating up my mum wouldn’t solve anything. But how could she…? I still couldn’t get my head round what she’d done. What she was doing.
Of course, in a moment, mum pulled herself together in the way that only grown-ups know how to do. By that time I guess she was an expert at painting the façade on. But I’d seen her sadness. I’d felt it and I’d responded. She would know that at least. After. If there was going to be an after all this.
‘Well, there will be other days,’ she said.
Of course, that was just the point. There wouldn’t. Not now, not ever. Those days of happy family picnics were gone, because we weren’t a family any more. The enormity of it crushed me then, but there was the smallest part of me that started to realise that my mum had been feeling this crushing pain ever since my brother Alasdair died. That her family had been lost long before I was even born. We were just her second chance and it’s true the first cut is the deepest. We couldn’t make up for what she’d lost. Ever. Which was nobody’s fault, it was just a fact of life.
Marco wasn’t having any of this. ‘Come on, Vic,’ he said, ‘it’s a beautiful day. Everyone can do what they want but you, me and Ollie want to go to Calgary, so get your glad rags on.’
Glad rags. What was wrong with the man? He had no idea what was going on here, did he? But then he’d already binned off his own wife and kids. Why should he understand about our family when he clearly didn’t have any real feeling for his own?
To my amazement, mum rallied and got her ‘glad rags’ or at least her sun hat and specs together and headed out for the car. Her voice, forced bright, called out for Ollie to pick up the hamper, which he did.
I was out of my depth. I gave him a glare as he went past.
‘Leave some food for us in the kitchen, eh?’ I said.
‘Whatever,’ he grunted back at me.
And as they went towards the car, I saw Marco put his arm round Ollie’s shoulder. Ollie didn’t shake it off. I wanted to kill them both.
Left alone at the house I was in a complete confusion of rage. I’ll admit, I sat and cried for a bit. There was no one there to see me. Then I pulled myself together. For a moment I forgot about Ellie and I thought about how I could get off the island and find my way back to Edinburgh and Dad. Then I realised that running away wasn’t an option. I couldn’t be a child now. This was something I had to face up to. I had to grow up, like, immediately. Be a man.
I decided to phone dad and find out what was going on. There was a pay phone in the cottage and I had some change so I dialled our home number. No response. Predictably. It was eleven thirty in the morning. Dad would be at work. I didn’t know his work number. I cursed myself. I should have known it. But Dad had never been ‘real’ to us except when he was at home. I mean, I’d been into his office about three times in my life. Met his secretary, seen his desk, but no, his life outside home – most of his life – was a complete mystery to me. To us all, it seemed. I wished, more than anything, that I had been more than a child. More than someone just needing a dad. At that moment I wished I’d paid more attention to my dad as a person. But I hadn’t. What kid does? That’s the point of parents, isn’t it? They’re there for you. Except when they aren’t any longer.
So I had nowhere to run to and no one to talk to, except Ellie. I picked up some crisps and a made a couple of sandwiches from what was in the fridge, grabbed a couple of cans of Irn Bru and went off to find her. But when I got to Castle Dare, she was nowhere to be seen.
Swearwords: One strong one only.
Description: Things to do on Mull while your family falls apart.
_____________________________________________________________________
Casey, I’ve not thought about these things in a long time, and the memories are pretty painful even in the writing, so I’m sorry if I’m not giving you the bits of the story you most want to know. All I can do is work my way through it. My family fictions. And at that point I remember feeling like I was being crushed by the weight of skeletons falling out of the family closet.
Everyone else seemed to be taking it a lot better than I was. Well, Ollie didn’t seem either up or down – but then nothing outside of his head seemed to mean anything to Ollie in those days. And Ellie was up and out with the lark. She was gone before breakfast, which was when I surfaced.
‘Where’s Ellie,’ I asked as I sat down to my cornflakes. It was addressed to mum but Marco answered. That, predictably, got on my wick.
‘She left early – off to play with her new friend,’ he said.
I didn’t give him the satisfaction, or courtesy, of a reply. I just sat there, silently wishing him dead.
‘Would you go and find her and bring her back before lunch?’ mum asked.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘We’re planning a picnic this afternoon. Marco’s going to drive us to the Silver Sands at Calgary Bay.’
As if nothing had happened. I couldn’t believe it. I nearly choked on my cereal.
‘Are we taking the boat?’ Ollie asked.
What? Was he playing along? What the hell was happening here? I gave him a glare which told him that we needed to sort this out – alone. And left the room.
Outside, Ollie followed me and said, ‘Why are you being such a prick?’
‘I was going to ask you the same question,’ I said. ‘Don’t you…’
He cut me off before I could launch into my whole betrayal of our dad speech.
‘It’s done,’ he said. ‘What can we do about it now? And I’m bored here anyway.’
I was obviously getting no support from him. So I went off in search of Ellie.
I found her over by Castle Dare, just sitting looking out into the loch.
‘No Alasdair today?’ I asked her.
She shook her head. And then she cried.
It’s a terrible thing to see your sister cry. I don’t mean when she’s young, when kids cry all the time over anything, like when you’ve given her too much of a Chinese burn or trodden on her pet newt or burned the hair off her Barbie. I mean when she’s crying for real. And the most terrible thing about it was, I knew what she was crying about and I wanted to cry too. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I just put my arms round her and said, ‘Don’t worry, you’ve still got me.’ Like that was anything of a consolation. I knew it wasn’t me she needed.
I told her what mum had said about the picnic and she stopped crying. She fixed me with a look I’d never seen before. Sunny Ellie’s face was clouded with defiance.
‘I’m not fucking going,’ she said.
She swore. Ellie never swore. She’d never needed to. She never even said as much as ‘shut up’. But clearly she felt she needed to vent her spleen now.
‘No, me either,’ I said. ‘So the only question is, do we go back and tell them we’re not coming or do we just not turn up?’
‘If we don’t turn up they’ll come looking for us. They’ll send him,’ she said, and I wasn’t sure for a moment if she meant Ollie or Marco. The amount of vitriol in her voice I kind of hoped she meant Marco, but I just wasn’t sure.
‘Right, well let’s go back and tell them to get stuffed,’ I said, hoping I sounded braver than I felt.
She looked at me with her big, tear-stained eyes and said, ‘I want to stay here.’
There was a moment’s pause. I didn’t know what to say.
‘I can pretend none of it’s happened as long as I’m here,’ she said, confirming what I’d been thinking. I wanted to say – ‘It has happened. We have to deal with it,’ but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth.
I could see her pain. I knew I had to protect her. My pain was mine to deal with but my little sister had just been abandoned by her father and betrayed by her mother and I was all she had left. So I had to step up to the plate. However bad I felt, she was feeling it worse. This is the price of divorce.
Everyone says that divorce is commonplace, that children are resilient. That they get over it. Believe me, Casey, you never get over your family betraying you. Never. The dynamic of a family is a unique and fragile thing. Everyone is supposed to know their place and to buy in to the rules of engagement, so to speak. It’s where you’re supposed to feel safe. And when the adults throw all that up in the air – well it doesn’t matter if you’re four or fourteen, it rocks your world and it shapes the rest of who you are for ever. Parents don’t see this. They move on, they get on with their new lives and the children are expected to adapt. Which they do.
I cannot imagine how appalling it is to be a child of whom one or both parents die, but I’m sure it’s not the same kind of grief as that of the child who loses parents who keep on living. Losing someone you love is probably the worst thing you can experience in life, but when you lose someone who is still there, out there somewhere, and who you cannot reach, that’s a particular kind of grief and it leaves a particular kind of scar. There is no getting over it. When you change things for a child you change the child. You change the way they look at the world, you change their social being and most of all you change their confidence. We are meant to grow and change naturally, not by being ripped out of the ground we’ve been nurtured in and stuck haphazardly into a different pot. Expected to flower all the same, as if nothing has happened.
I felt then that I would never trust anyone ever again. Time hasn’t substantially changed that emotion. Of course, Casey, I got on with my life, I grew up, I ‘dealt’ with it all and I love you now. I love you so much that it hurts. But it does hurt, Casey. Because I know how badly wrong things can go. I know how people can damage each other and I’m afraid of that for you and me. Never mind any children we might have. Of course I want children. Of course I want a future together, but the spectres of the past weigh heavy in me even now and I just want you to know that if I seem less than committed to our life together or less than what you’d like from me, there is a reason. There are a number of reasons.
I know I’m not the only person this ever happened to. But it happened to me. And that’s the reality I live with. It’s the only reality I know. I thought I had a happy family. That was taken away from me. I thought I was one person, with one set of relationships and that was all torn up in front of me and thrown into the waste bin and I was expected not to mourn its passing. I guess I’ve not dealt with it even now. I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for who I am but it’s not my fault. It’s what they did to me. If you think I’m making excuses then you just don’t understand what I’m saying. And I think you will understand, Casey. I hope so. I need you to understand me if we’re to make our life work.
Back then, on a sunny morning in August as I flicked midgies from my face, walking down the track towards the cottage, with all these feelings gestating. The full awfulness of my future was nascent in the immediate raw pain of my present. I was fourteen years old and I was angry as hell at them all.
My intention was to go in, tell them all where to get off, and then head back for Ellie. But I hadn’t taken their responses into account, of course, had I? I’d forgotten they weren’t just projections of my anger and despair. They were people in their own right with their own thoughts and their own agenda. I’d forgotten that. It’s the curse of the teenager and some people never outgrow the self-obsession. Maybe none of us ever really do.
‘Ellie says she doesn’t want to go, mum,’ I started. I wasn’t speaking to him. I wasn’t going to look at him, or speak to him, and I certainly wasn’t getting in a car with him.
My mum gave me a look of what I can only describe as terrible sadness. It was like looking at Ellie but in grown up form. And even though I blamed my mum for it all, I blamed Marco more. He was the cuckoo in the nest. He was the family wrecker. And it was as hard for me to see my mum’s pain as it was to see Ellie’s. She was my mum. I loved her, despite what she’d just done to our family.
So I added, ‘She says the long journey will make her car-sick.’ I guess I was trying to protect them. Ellie and mum. But it was buying into the secrets and lies game and I felt sick to my stomach.
Still nothing from mum.
‘I’ll stay and look after her, mum, don’t you think that’s best?’ I didn’t know what else to do. I needed to focus my hatred on Marco. Beating up my mum wouldn’t solve anything. But how could she…? I still couldn’t get my head round what she’d done. What she was doing.
Of course, in a moment, mum pulled herself together in the way that only grown-ups know how to do. By that time I guess she was an expert at painting the façade on. But I’d seen her sadness. I’d felt it and I’d responded. She would know that at least. After. If there was going to be an after all this.
‘Well, there will be other days,’ she said.
Of course, that was just the point. There wouldn’t. Not now, not ever. Those days of happy family picnics were gone, because we weren’t a family any more. The enormity of it crushed me then, but there was the smallest part of me that started to realise that my mum had been feeling this crushing pain ever since my brother Alasdair died. That her family had been lost long before I was even born. We were just her second chance and it’s true the first cut is the deepest. We couldn’t make up for what she’d lost. Ever. Which was nobody’s fault, it was just a fact of life.
Marco wasn’t having any of this. ‘Come on, Vic,’ he said, ‘it’s a beautiful day. Everyone can do what they want but you, me and Ollie want to go to Calgary, so get your glad rags on.’
Glad rags. What was wrong with the man? He had no idea what was going on here, did he? But then he’d already binned off his own wife and kids. Why should he understand about our family when he clearly didn’t have any real feeling for his own?
To my amazement, mum rallied and got her ‘glad rags’ or at least her sun hat and specs together and headed out for the car. Her voice, forced bright, called out for Ollie to pick up the hamper, which he did.
I was out of my depth. I gave him a glare as he went past.
‘Leave some food for us in the kitchen, eh?’ I said.
‘Whatever,’ he grunted back at me.
And as they went towards the car, I saw Marco put his arm round Ollie’s shoulder. Ollie didn’t shake it off. I wanted to kill them both.
Left alone at the house I was in a complete confusion of rage. I’ll admit, I sat and cried for a bit. There was no one there to see me. Then I pulled myself together. For a moment I forgot about Ellie and I thought about how I could get off the island and find my way back to Edinburgh and Dad. Then I realised that running away wasn’t an option. I couldn’t be a child now. This was something I had to face up to. I had to grow up, like, immediately. Be a man.
I decided to phone dad and find out what was going on. There was a pay phone in the cottage and I had some change so I dialled our home number. No response. Predictably. It was eleven thirty in the morning. Dad would be at work. I didn’t know his work number. I cursed myself. I should have known it. But Dad had never been ‘real’ to us except when he was at home. I mean, I’d been into his office about three times in my life. Met his secretary, seen his desk, but no, his life outside home – most of his life – was a complete mystery to me. To us all, it seemed. I wished, more than anything, that I had been more than a child. More than someone just needing a dad. At that moment I wished I’d paid more attention to my dad as a person. But I hadn’t. What kid does? That’s the point of parents, isn’t it? They’re there for you. Except when they aren’t any longer.
So I had nowhere to run to and no one to talk to, except Ellie. I picked up some crisps and a made a couple of sandwiches from what was in the fridge, grabbed a couple of cans of Irn Bru and went off to find her. But when I got to Castle Dare, she was nowhere to be seen.
About the Author
Annie Christie is a pretty ordinary person, except that she was born Annie Christie and then married a man called Christie and so is still called Christie despite having taken on her husband’s name. She sometimes wonders if she should have called herself Christie-Christie: but who would believe that?
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project and is now happy to be welcomed into McStorytellers with her first published serial, Family Fictions.
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project and is now happy to be welcomed into McStorytellers with her first published serial, Family Fictions.