My Name is Kylie
I have wanted to write a story about this for a long time, but didn’t see how I could. Then I remembered Emily Dickinson’s advice “Tell it slant”
My name is Kylie. I’m eighteen and I work as a care assistant in what we are not supposed to call a mental home. That gives you a picture of me. You think. Thick, unemployable and common as muck. You think. “That ignorant foul mouthed girl” – that’s what I heard Queen Dracula call me. Queen Dracula is the administrator. Dried up old cow. I nearly went in and stuck one on her. You’d be ignorant, I thought, if you’d had to be mother to three little kids. School didn’t get much of a look in did it? I was too busy cooking, cleaning, minding, and worrying where the next food was going to come from when our mother’d drunk all our bit of money. But I didn’t say nothing. I just turned and walked away before she seen me.
Truth is I like working here. Now the kids are growing up I can work the shifts easier. I like working here, that is, since Mrs. Marsh come. Before, they just doled out pills to keep the patients quiet. Like Zombies, really, and when they talked it was mostly rubbish. Anyway, we were always short staffed. No time to listen. Then an inspector come and the old Manager left all of a sudden and the end of it was we got more staff, and Mrs. Marsh. There was less pills, and we got “Designated Association Periods”. All that means is time to talk, read the papers, play cards, or just have a cup of tea and watch the Tele with them. And we got some budgies, which I can take or leave, and a cat called Timmy, which I like.
When David first come he was “assigned” to me. They’d already cleaned him up when I got to see him. Seems he’d been living with his old aunt who’d died. Two weeks he was in the house with her before the neighbours thought they better call the police. So he was in a bit of a state when he come in and he wasn’t speaking much. Except for “Please” and “Thank you”. Funny that, I thought, nobody cares a shit whether you’re alive or dead. Didn’t do anything I suppose until the old girl started to stink. Notice that wouldn’t they? But all he remembers is please and thank you. Bloody marvellous I thought.
So it was a bit boring at first with him not talking. I did the newspapers and tried a book, but I could see he wasn’t taking it in. He didn’t even cotton on to playing Snap let alone Sevenses or Rummy. But he seemed content to sit with me and look out of the window. The only thing that really upset him was the dark. He couldn’t bear the darkness, so we left him a light at night to sleep with.
My littlest sister Ginny had one of those plastic pads, know the ones I mean? You write on it with a sharpish pencil thing then you push it in and out and what you done just disappears. She’d got bored with it, so I took it into work one day and showed it to David. I wrote my name, and I wrote his name, and he really seemed to like it. “Please” he said, and took it off me. I couldn’t make no sense of what he did though. Funny big square looking letters he made. No sense to what he was doing as far as I could see. Then he started to cry. I panicked and grabbed the pad to clear it. I didn’t want them to think I’d upset him. All he said then was. “Not Davy’s fault, Davy not to blame”. Over and over. After that I started to call him Davy, and he seemed to like it.
They cleared out his auntie’s house and a social worker brought round some stuff, personal stuff, little ornaments and photographs in frames and that. She couldn’t tell me anything. They’d never been involved with Davy or the aunt. She’d been one of the “I keep myself to myself” brigade. Makes sense to me.
So one afternoon we set to with a duster and a can of Pledge. I thought we would clean them up and put them on the shelf so he could look at them. That’s how it started, him beginning to talk a bit. He knew the pictures. There was Mam, and Dad and four children, Davy, a brother and two sisters. He remembered their names and he would spend hours holding them and looking at them. I wondered about them brothers and sisters. It wouldn’t have hurt them to visit once in while I thought. Where the hell were they? Why didn’t they come? Ashamed? Some people are. Bloody snobs. There was a picture of a Policeman too, with his arm round Davy and both of them grinning from ear to ear. “Bobby”, he would say and laugh. And when I said who was Bobby, he laughed more. One of the nurses said I didn’t know nothing ‘cos Bobby was what they called Policemen years ago. It wasn’t his name. So that was a good joke then between him and me. I would point to it and say “Is that your uncle Bobby then Davy?” and he would laugh, and that was good.
His favourite thing was still the writing pad. He would make the letters and very gently run his fingers over them so’s not to make them disappear. Time and time again he did that. And one night, when he was lying awake I gave him his mother’s picture to hold, and he did that same thing. Run his fingers over her face, careful, tracing around the eyes and the mouth and saying those words. “Davy not to blame, not Davy’s fault”. Till he went to sleep.
Progress was slow, that’s for sure. Talking more, but not making a lot of sense. I kept him naming his brothers and sisters, “The Four Pickles” his Dad had called them. Michael was clever, Bron was pretty, Sian was the littlest, the littlest Pickle. And going with Mam to the nice green field, that come up over and over. Then one day I was coming back from the chip shop, going as fast as I could to keep them hot till I got home, and it come into my head where I had seen letters like them letters he made, My Nana and Grandpa’s gravestone. I wondered then if I should take him to see it, would it help him maybe? But I didn’t say nothing to any of them. Didn’t want to make a fool of myself did I?
So all went along smoothly enough one small step at a time, quietly. I liked that. At home was still one long shouting match though she wasn’t up for it as much now, I noticed. The drink just made her sleep. And I had got crafty with my money. I had a Bank account for my wages now, so there was not much cash ever in the house. But she still got money. I didn’t like to think about how, or where from.
Every other week we took the patients out for the day, the ones that were mobile and could be trusted. We took them sometimes to the shopping centre, which was a bloody nightmare really, but they thought it did the patients good. Davy was OK to go. He had a bad leg, sort of dragged it behind him a bit, but he was all right on the flat. So there we were in the Minibus going into the Multi story. It was packed, and we had to squeeze into a space on the Lower Ground level that was sort of under the overhang of the stairs. A bit gloomy and cramped, but we managed to get everybody out with the usual fuss, and none of us expected what happened. Davy went mental. I know I’m not supposed to say that, but what else can you call it? He went down on the floor screaming and kicking. Motorists making for the stairs were staring at us, and there was general bloody panic to shut him up. They were trying to get a restrainer into his mouth. The sound in that echoing place was terrible. I just wanted the noise to stop, but I could feel something else. I could feel this anger boiling up inside me. I was angry. And then I could hear another voice shouting. It was me. I was swearing I expect, knowing me, something to the effect that he was not having an eff-ing fit, he was just eff-ing terrified of this dark, eff-ing tunnel of a place. I expect. I can’t remember. But I remember pushing past the others, and I remember the feel of the rough cold concrete on my knees, and thinking there go my bloody tights, and I remember knowing just what to do. I reached out, and it was a job to get near him with his arms thrashing about. But I got there, near enough to touch his face, and run my fingers over his face, and just say to him over and over, his comfort words. “Davy not to blame, not Davy’s fault”. The screaming stopped and he was quiet and we took them all home. End of that little trip.
Next day Mrs. Marsh called me in to her office. Here we go, I thought. Well no, she was very nice. Said I’d showed courage and presence of mind. I felt pretty damned good. She said some stuff I didn’t understand, about the Aunt’s affairs being in Probate, so the Solicitors couldn’t release anything that would give us any information about Davy. It would take months, so what I was doing with him was very valuable. She said.
Then she said that she had been “monitoring my performance”, and had I thought about studying for a qualification, which I was quite pleased about. But then she started going on about how if it was difficult for me with my home life she was sure my Social Worker would be there for me with help and advice. I was boiling. I went red, I know I did. Did everybody here know all my business? Did they talk about me, chew me over. I would have it out with that Social Worker. She had no right to go mouthing off about me. I didn’t say nothing. I nodded, said thank you, and got out of there as fast as I could.
Before this Probate thing came through though Davy was dead. It wasn’t expected. We knew he had a rough chest, you could hear it in his breathing and he coughed bad sometimes. He got an infection and within days it turned into pneumonia and he was gone. I never thought I could feel so bad. I did cry, I’ll admit that. Went into the cleaning cupboard a few times so nobody could see. I didn’t go to the cremation. The kids were on holiday from school and She was in one of her states, so I couldn’t get away. I didn’t want to, to tell the truth. Sounds stupid, I know dead people don’t feel nothing. I know that, but I didn’t want to see that box go through the curtains into the dark. I didn’t want to see it.
Mrs Marsh called me into her office again soon after. There was a few of them in there with her, nurses, psychiatrist, Queen Dracula. I was into some sot of meeting. They had loads of stuff now from the solicitor, his aunt’s stuff, and they had been told that Davy’s ashes were to go back to the place in Wales where he come from, to go in his parents grave. I couldn’t help laughing when she said the name of the place. One of them stupid Welsh names. It just made me laugh. There was dead silence and everybody looking at me as if I’d said the F word in front of the eff-ing Pope. Then Queen Dracula got up from her chair and shouted at me. I stumbled back against the filing cabinet, and she was calling me names. Mrs Marsh caught hold of her and said something to her about how old I was, and how would I know.
Know what? Know what? I wanted to get out. She tried to take my arm and I think I shouted at her to leave me alone. Everybody sort of edged out of the room and she sat me down and told me the stuff they had got from the solicitor. I couldn’t get it at first, what had happened in that place. But the Aunt had kept all the cuttings from the newspapers,the little school buried by the black mountain that crashed down on it . Why would you keep those horrible things all those years I thought. It was just one picture did it though. One picture of a Policeman, his face covered in coal dust, climbing out of the wreckage with a kid in his arms. He wasn’t smiling, but I knew who he was alright. And I thought of their names, the ones that maybe never come out of the darkness, clever Michael, pretty Bron and little Sian, Sian the littlest Pickle. But my Davy lived, with his broken leg and his broken mind, until his mother and father were dead and he went to the aunt. Then he come to us.
Walking home I tried to block the pictures out of my mind, but what kept coming were little children’s faces, and they were the faces of my Ginny and my Vicky and my Pete with the black muck filling their eyes and mouths, and them holding their arms out to me for help.
Friday night is our treat night, and that Friday I went past the chip shop and into the Chinese. I spent every penny on a takeaway, and cold cans of Coke, and one of them giant bars of Cadbury’s. And I got a couple of DVDs. God knows how I would manage the rest of the month, I thought, but when we was sat round afterwards, well stuffed, watching the Tele with the gas fire full on, I looked at their clean shiny faces and I was glad I done it.
Even She had picked at a bit of food, and was laid back on the sofa asleep. I got up from my chair and took her shoes off and put her feet up on the stool. I brushed the hair back from her face, and then I ran my fingers gently over it, around the eyes and the mouth, and I tried to stop them but them words come into my head –
“It’s not your fault.”
“You’re not to blame.”