Break The Child: Epilogue: Through a Father's Eyes

Epilogue: Through a Father’s Eyes

I’ve cried a million tears and cried until I thought it would dissolve me. This time I’m crying for a new reason—I have turned the last page in my daughter’s diary and read the last word.

I wanted to read it forever, lying on her bed, crying into her pillow—the one she dreamed on and hid her diary under. I’ve laughed into her pillow at her silly words— the one she shed tears on over the loss of her first ever boyfriend when he couldn’t cope with what she had to cope with—and it was all too much for her. But she had that first love, she knew it, she held it, she felt it—and I am grateful to the little sperm squirt for giving it to her. It doesn’t mean that when I see him in the street with his arm around an old friend of Katie’s, that I don’t want to pulverise his face into the pavement for letting my little girl down.  

I’m sobbing because I want to read on. I want to read every meal she ever ate, ever dream she had, the thoughts in her head—all of them, and the words to every song she ever sang. I crave reading about our arguments, I want her to call me a dickhead. And most, most of all, I want to read about before, when my Annie was whole, and our life was sweet. I want to read her childhood through her words and relive it—every second of it in real time, for fourteen years.

I want that because I will never read her Future.

It was the flu.

In the middle of a pandemic, my little girl was taken by the flu. My Katie, who could cope with any dammed thing that life threw at her.

Her Death Certificate said, Cardiac Shock—a heart attack. It’s common in teenage footballers, they said. The flu virus damages the heart muscles and the first bout of strenuous exercise after they recover is too much for the heart. My Katie doesn’t even support a football team—what’s that got to do with my little girl?

We were building a life—me, Katie, and Andy. We made it work. She went out for one stupid run after an insignificant nobody from her old school called her fat after having a baby. They knew what Katie had given up—they knew what she’d been through, but still they called her names. my Katie was worth a hundred of any of those cruel children who had never walked a day in her shoes.

I hear her singing at night. She said the night-time feed at three in the morning was her favourite. She’d sit in the big old peacock chair that drowned her—just as her mother did with her—and she’d sing to Andy while she fed him. I hear her voice everywhere, they talk—Kate and Annie, I hear it in the flowers in the garden, the sunshine from the window and at night, from her room when I hear them giggling together.

In my darkest hour when I can’t face another minute, and it’s all too much and the bad thoughts come to me, she says to me, ‘It’s okay dad, we can do this together. I’ve read a book all about childcare.’

We will do it together, Katie and Annie and me—and he will be a fine man.

I tell Annie about Kate every day—but she’s a shell. She’s gone too and there’s nothing left of her here. Sometimes she smiles and I see them both in the smile. And when Andy drops his jammy toast soldier on the floor for the fiftieth time and giggles like only a baby who has discovered funny can—there they are. My girls.

He’s nine months old and crawling, every day he learns something new. And every day, despite the pain, he give me something to laugh at. He’s the gift from my girls. He is his mother, he is his sister and he is just—Andy.

It's because of Katie that I can’t go on—And Katie who taught me that I have to.

God will forgive me for reading her diary—and Katie whispers in my ear and tells me that I must forgive him—but it’s hard, you know.

There was a song that Annie use to sing. I stopped at the nursery one night. I was going to go in and sit with Katie and Andy—but I didn’t intrude, I watched from the door. Katie was singing her mother’s song to Andy.

You’ll never hurt the woman in me, but you might hurt the child. You’ll never break the woman in me, but you might—break the child.

And there he is, bang on cue, His Lordship is awake, and there’s nobody to see to him but me—his two-teeth smile is all mine. I was up all night, Andy thought it was playtime and wouldn’t settle. I’ll have to go to him— and in the words of my daughter. Hang on, I’ll be  right back, have to see to him before he…

The End