Eventually I coaxed it out of her, it took us hours. From the nods, shakes, yes’s and no’s I gathered that this was most definitely NOT the first time. She told me, in a roundabout way that it had been going on from Christmas, which made 5 months of potential abuse. The state Esther was in suggested that it wasn’t exactly innocent ‘experimentation’, whatever the police may have decided...but I’m skipping ahead. That was not until 2 weeks later. Back in May, Mum was about to come home and I was about to ruin her life forever.

“Hi Mum”

“Hiya darling, you ok?”

“Erm, no. Can I speak to you for a minute?”

“Yeah sure, let me just get the bags out of the car-“

“No, Mum. I need to talk to you now. It’ll only take a minute. In the kitchen?”

She sat on the end of the bench at the table, and she looked exhausted. Still in her coat, holding half of the shopping, she listened.

And I spoke.

She looked distraught. As every emotion I was feeling came crashing onto her already worried face, I began to cry.

She said, “Where’s Esther?”

“Upstairs with Heather, getting dressed. She was cold in her robe.”

“Ok...” Then she sighed. That sigh said so much. Not to you, or to anyone else, but to me, who knows her so very well, it said so much.

It said ‘It was only a matter of time until something like this happened, I deserve it because I am a bad mother’.

It almost mirrored my internal dialogue, which was something like ‘It was only a matter of time until something like this happened, I deserve it because I am an awful sister’.

Then the question came, haltingly as if she wasn’t quite sure if it was allowed-

“Where’s Thomas?”

“In the living room, he’s been there since I walked in earlier”. Resigned, crippled by unconditional love, she dumped the bags and still in her coat trudged into the front room like a condemned man to the executioner.

The next two weeks passed in a blur of anguish. The only event which really stands out is having to tell my other brother, Matthew about what had happened. He had decided he didn’t want to be involved, and I knew how much this crushed Mum. I wouldn’t allow it. He was a member of this family too and we all had to deal with what Thomas had done. The flush of rage that descended on Matthew that evening, I hadn’t seen since we were both small and we were fighting over a bit of lego. It scared me now, as he stood, still my little brother but physically much bigger and more intimidating. He wanted to tear Thomas apart, of course. But instead, in the way only a little brother, who despite his size had clearly never grown up, would get revenge, he contented himself with putting a whole tube of laxatives in his tea.

Now everybody in the house knew. And Mum wanted to keep it that way. Had you accused her of wanting to ‘brush it under the carpet’ she’d have denied it, vehemently. She would have claimed she wanted to ‘deal with it in her own way’. However, such control was about to be whipped away.