I was back in that one, burning memory. I was sixteen, maybe seventeen. I was in my room, alone. My copy of Hospital Sketches was open in front of me. I was copying the illustrations, to learn how the body worked.
It was silent in the house. My four younger siblings were at school, and my older brother at work. I had chosen to stay home, as I had lost any desire to go to school, and had I been allowed, I'd have not returned save for my exams. In truth, I hated school, despite my supposed "potential." My classmates were at best, keeping me around for the purposes of utility, and at worst regarded me with scorn, for reasons I am to this day ignorant of. I had tried my best to be polite and friendly, but such attempts were met with displeased silence, or more often, went unnoticed.
I heard the door opening downstairs. It was Mother, judging by the footsteps. She knew I'd not been in school, and wasn't happy judging by their speed. The door to my room flew open, and she entered, snatching away my book. "Are you serious, Aspen? Do you think this is acceptable?"
I said nothing, because regardless of what I said, the outcome was not changed. "Excuse me, Aspen I am speaking to you, do you think you're too good to go to school?"
"It's not that, I've finished the cirriculum myself. I don't need to go back until my exams." I said.
"That's not the point," Mother said. "You need to learn to act like a human, and stop thinking you're different to everyone else!" I was human, I thought. Or at least I was back then.
"You think you're better than everyone, that going to school is beneath you, that's why nobody likes you. You have a superiority complex!" She continued still.
I still said nothing neither of her points were actually true, I just viewed nobody as above or below anyone else, a way of thinking that for some reason is frowned upon by people who are supposed to be "above" me.
"Do you realise that nobody wants to be around you? Do you think that makes you more intelligent or interesting, because it doesn't, it's pathetic!"
Thats when I saw tears falling onto my paper. They were mine, yet, I hadn't noticed I was crying. This sort of berating was a common occurence, and yet still I wasn't totally numb to it.
"Oh great," Mother said, "now the waterworks start, do you think you're going to get off just because you cry? Everybody knows it's all fake. Stop hiding in your room, and have a little bit of humanity like the rest of us!"
I got up and left the room. My ears were ringing, and I couldn't think straight. I left the house, and kept walking. I knew a route that went around Ringsend and Sandymount. It was a two hour route, and during the day, it was usually quiet.
I'd walk it as I always did if I felt upset. I usually came back in a better state. Once I had walked some two-hundred metres and my home was no longer visible, the buzzing in my ears and overwhelming sense of pressure abated somewhat. There was a cruciform sensation of tension, no restriction in my shoulders and back. The walk was only a temporary distraction. Eventually, I'd have to return, and the cycle would begin anew.
I felt a deep hatred for the very idea of power there and then. With enough power, you decided what was right, reality itself bent to your will. With enough vitriol, and apparent distaste for your one of your own progeny, you could create a pariah to bear the brunt of everyone's hatred, both direct and indirect.
How I wished I had been born normal. There was no explaining to anyone how very normal things felt abnormal. Every conversation was a checklist of rules to be obeyed, the correct facial expressions had to be made, I had to appropriately react to statements, I had to stand, gesture and look at people properly. These things came naturally to everyone else, it seemed. Honesty was the biggest scam of them all. The performance of honesty was valuable, whereas whether or not it was acceptable to lie changed with the reason for doing so, or who you were lying to. People had little issue with lies that flattered them. Honesty was the same. The inconvenient truth was worse than lying, and the truth itself was more a consensus than a fact.
I had a sixpence in my pocket, not enough to make any reasonable attempt at leaving more permanently.
Doing the maths, I'd be unable to leave home within the next few months, my part-time job as a librarian paying too little to allow for me living on my own.
The shadows were beginning to lengthen on my return via Sandymount. I saw a figure hanging around by a streetlight as I turned a corner. It was my older brother, Daniel. He was two years my senior, and an exact physical copy of Father. I approached him, not surprised by his prescence. He knew my route, and worked in a bank nearby as a clerk.
"What was it this time?" He asked as I stopped in front of him.
"I didn't go to school today." I answered. "I don't need to go back until my exams."
Daniel rubbed his face in annoyance and took a deep breath. "Aspen, for fuck's sake..."
"What?" I asked. My statement was correct. I had all I needed to finish the cirriculum by myself.
"Why are you so... difficult? Honest to God, everyone else can behave normally and you, you make life difficult because you throw a tantrum if something isn't the way you want it to be." Daniel began. It was the exact same script as my parents followed. I looked at the ground, then at him, and began to walk away.
"Aspen, this is what I'm talking about!" He called after me. "You don't even look at people when they speak to you, and you walk away mid-conversation!"
"Aspen!" He shouted, following me.
I broke into a run. I didn't care anymore. I wanted to be alone.
I could hear Daniel following me as I ran. I turned into an alley I didn't know but it did little to deter him. My feet splashed in fetid puddles, my steps revrberating up old, damp walls. Daniel could easily outrun me, at least if he caught me, the liklehood of him ratting me out was low, he preferred to go unnoticed even more than I did, as he had a fondness for going out drinking, and was courting a woman who was ten years his senior. I had only met her once, and didn't see why my parents would have any issue, she was quite nice.
I turned another corner into a filthy alley. Scrambling over a rusty fence, into an abandoned yard. It was a dead end. Daniel was over the fence after me in a heartbeat. "Aspen, calm the fuck down! You can't run from everything you don't want to deal with."
I looked at the mossy ground, not saying anything.
"Aspen, you are very difficult. I know that whatever it is about you making you that way, you can't control it. That doesn't mean people won't dislike you, and you're not doing yourself any favours." He continued, maybe he was trying to pacify me. My ears were still buzzing.
"They'll put me in a sanitorium." I said quietly. I'd been threatened with such a fate by Mother on multiple occasions, in front of my siblings. The ensuing crying on my part only being taken as evidence of her case.
"Nobody's putting you in a sanitorium. I won't let that happen." He assured me. "You can come and live with me and Rose, if you have to. Now can you please come home?"
"Ok..." I said.
"Come on." Daniel said, nodding in the direction of the fence, "Over you go."
I once again scaled the fence, and waited for Daniel to follow. As he climbed over, his trouser leg snagged on the rusted fence, and he collapsed over the fence with an irritated grunt. "Bollocks..." he growled, seeing his shirt sleeve cut to ribbons and a blooming crimson stain on the fabric. I looked at him, a litte shocked.
"How's it look, medicine man?" He asked me, grinning. I took his arm and examined the cuts. "Its...it's...lacerations, with abbrasion from the rust. We should wash it out once we get home. The wounds are shallow, so it'd be ok to leave them exposed to air."
"Sounds about right." Daniel said, taking back the arm. "Right. Home it is." We began making our way home. "Daniel?" I asked at some point.
"What is it?"
"When are you and Rose getting married?"
Daniel made a sound somewhere between a cough and a laugh. "That...is a good question. "Don't know. Don't even know if we'll get married. It's a complicated situation, with our families."
"Why?"
"Well, Aspen, we're very... orthodox as a family. Whereas Rose's family is more...liberally minded. Mother and Father consider them to be...of low morals, in a way, and that's before you account for the age gap." He explained, picking his words carefully. "It'll work out in the end, hopefully. What about you? Have you your eye on anyone?"
"No. I... don't think I'll ever..." I began.
"Is that lack of interest or lack of success thus far, what about that Frost girl?" Daniel probed.
"The second, leading to the first. She tolerates me, she would likely have no interest in much more." I answered.
"Well that's the attitude to have. How would she be interested if that's how you think?" He said, elbowing me.
I didn't respond for a while. "I wouldn't want her to have to put up with me, long-term."
"Jesus, somebody's gloomy. I think Mother's gotten inside your head."
We made it home soon after, Daniel passing his injury off as a fall, after slipping on a patch of moss. Father was home, but didn't seem to notice us. I went back upstairs to finish my drawing, only to find my book had been taken. I was unsurprised but still annoyed. Coming downstairs, I saw my father at the foot of the stairs. I was about to have a repeat of earlier's lecture. Frankly, I can't remember what he said. The memory is all white noise, sprinkled with lines I'd heard a thousand times over.
"Hiding away... no consideration... arrogant... and you think you're hard done by... no interest... act like a human.
I can't say any of it had an effect on me. I'd heard it all, almost daily, for years now. Both my twin sisters flitted about, taking apparent pleasure in the day's show. They rarely recieved serious criticism, being the youngest, although that wore thin, not that they were fifteen.
After this, the next week passed relatively uneventfully, that was, until Daniel developed a curious twitching in the muscles of his jaw. I noticed it one day at dinner.
Within a week, it had become obvious he'd contracted tetanus. I remember the seizures, his body arching and convulsing, him often choking and on several occasions breaking bones in the throes of his disease.
Above all else, I remember being able to do nothing, and the guilt. He caught tetanus from that damned fence. I had done this to him. No amount of drugs or antitoxin that I, nor the doctor could procure could help him. The advice I'd been given to pray was entirely unhelpful. It felt insulting to Daniel to stand asking the same god who infected him to help him. Daniel himself was rendered mute by the lockjaw, and to add insult to injury, had bitten off a signifigant portion of his tongue.
The worst part? He didn't die. It would seem that fate had been feeling particularly cruel, for rather than die with some dignity, Daniel had been reduced to a paralysed husk, entirely dependent on Rose to care for him. He was still that way last time I saw him, at Christmas. There he lay, managing small grunts or squeaks to communicate.
I did, for what little help it was, install a board at his right hand, engraved with different letters. This small, paltry effort at granting him freedom allowed him to slowly spell words, communicating his words. Rose handled the situation with beyond admirable courage, staying by Daniel's side, and even marrying him in a private ceremony, where the priest came to the house to officiate. Still, my guilt hadn't abated any. The notion that had I not chosen to run away that day, had I not jumped that fence, he'd still be alright. I cursed the fact that I hadn't been the one to be infected. What made me deserving of a normal life?
I would come to relive those months, over and over, in both sleep and waking. It was inescapeable, like night itself. I saw Daniel's frenzied, strained form in every patient to have a seizure, the futile doses of sedative in every syringe. I poured my very being into medicine, hoping against hope to atone. It had been unsucessful thus far, the memory as fresh in my mind as the day it had happened.