“Why?” He asked, frowning. His forehead wrinkled, creating deep waves of skin.
I shook my head. “I…I don’t know. Something’s really wrong but she didn’t say.” Why I thought I’d get any comfort telling him I had no idea. I wanted and needed someone to tell me I was panicking over nothing and that the ice-cold fear I felt was unnecessary. Reg was never going to do that for me. I know who I needed and he was the one person I couldn’t call. He’d told me to stay away.
“Well, let me know before you leave.”
Wanker. “Sure,” I said in a daze and turned around, going back into my office.
Something is very, very wrong and I think I know what. I’ve always known, so why was I in shock?
I sat down at my desk and carefully placed my phone in my handbag. Gripping the handles between my fists, I watched the clock tick by. She wouldn’t be long. Soon I would know what’d happened. Soon my worst fears would undoubtedly be realised.
“Nell,” Harry snapped. “Someone’s here for you. In future can you save personal calls for your lunch break?”
I ignored him completely as I stood from my desk and walked out. I didn’t have the energy to worry about them at the minute. Nan was outside reception. She looked awful, had clearly been crying and was pacing back and forth.
“Nan,” I said, bursting through the doors. “What’s happened?”
Which one of them?
“Oh, Nell,” she said, falling into my arms and sobbing. “I’m so sorry, darling, but it’s Mum.”
I went through the motions of pulling her back and asking what’d happened, I got in the car with her, put my seatbelt on, and turned the dial to full heat. I was so cold I couldn’t stop shivering.
“Nan, I need to know what happened,” I said calmly.
“There was an incident.” There was always an incident. “They were upstairs when things got out of hand. I don’t know what happened next but your mum fell down the stairs.”
They were throwing punches and didn’t think about where they were.
“Fell? She fell?”
“Love, I’m so sorry.”
The air was sucked from my lungs and I doubled over. It hurt so much I felt like I was being ripped apart. “No… No, she can’t be.”
“Nelly…”
My mother was dead. I squeezed my eyes closed and leant against the window. It hurt so bad. “But… Fuck! Why? I don’t understand why they couldn’t just stay away. I asked them, pleaded with them, so many times,” I said, breaking into chest rattling sobs. “She can’t be dead.”
“Shh, lovey, you’re going to be okay,” she replied, forcing her words through thick emotion.
“What happened?” I sobbed.
“They were arguing and it got out of hand. Dad… Your dad is in custody.”
Fucking hell.
“I promise you’ll be okay.”
How was that true? One of my parents was lying on a cold slab of metal and the other was behind bars. I had no idea how to handle the situation or what I should feel other than utter despair. There were so many questions flying through my head, so much guilt I carried for not doing more to make them stay apart.
My parents were okay on their own but together they were toxic and they didn’t care about anything or anyone around them – not even their own daughter.
I sat in Nan’s car trying to piece everything together. How it happened. What would happen next? How I was going to get through losing them both. How I would find the strength to say goodbye to my mum and even accept that I wouldn’t see her again. Every painful question had the same agonising answer: I don’t know.
Mum was dead. Dad was responsible. And the only surprising part to me was that it’d taken this long to happen.
“Are you okay?” Nan asked, periodically wiping her eyes as she drove.
“No, I’m not.” I was having an out of body experience. I was crying while I felt robotic and somewhat detached. “You?”
She shook her tight permed head. “I just can’t believe it… We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
Get to the bottom of it? We knew the basics. We knew enough to understand what had happened. They fought all the time; they were so violent that this was the only place it could end.
Was she more concerned about Dad when her daughter-in-law was dead? Right now, no matter what the circumstances were, I couldn’t care less about Dad. I just wanted to be with my mum.
Nan pulled into a parking space at the hospital as close to Accident and Emergency as she could get. Mum had come in through A&E so that was the best place to start. We didn’t know if she would’ve been transferred to the…morgue yet.
I froze up as we raced through the automatic doors. The rushed journey here gave us something to do but now we were here, the last step was seeing her dead. Was that really how I wanted my last moments with her to be?