Rosalie Warren

Maisie, Moses and Migraine

© Rosalie Warren 2007

Startling lemon light with a hint of green – releasing a flood of sensation sharp as pain.

Now, when the yellow flickering appears, I know what to expect. But what I saw in those days was a simple bush, part of an unsuccessful hedge by the gate of Connor’s house. It was the only living thing among a mess of discarded rusty tools and a tideline of plastic rubbish washed up from the road.

A cluster of privet, roused from its winter sleep by the keen March sun, expelling in a rush of green the wavelengths not needed for photosynthesis. Its leaves, tiny tongues of flame that enveloped but did not consume.

I was six and Connor was my baby half-brother, just coming up to a year old. I passed his house every day on my way from school – a five-minute walk I nearly always did alone. Hopie, Connor’s mum, sometimes waved at me through the window. Once, she came to the door and gave me a pink wafer biscuit. I would have liked to stop and visit them but I didn’t dare.

Hopie was eighteen and beautiful, with long straight fair hair like a princess or a fairy queen. My ambition was to be her. When I announced this at school, everyone laughed and Miss Stephens started talking about role models. I worshipped Hopie so much, I knew I could only be happy by becoming her. I didn’t try to explain this to Mum. Not only would she not have understood, but she would have been angry in that eye-flashing way of hers.

The privet bush was different every day, sometimes brighter, sometimes paler. But every now and then it had a special look that signalled trouble. And the trouble, I’d discovered, always involved Connor.

I painted it at school one Wednesday afternoon and was pleased with the result. Miss Stephens called it ‘dazzling’ and I thought she liked it, until she began to criticise.

‘Most imaginative.’ That was a silly thing to say as I’d painted it exactly how it was. ‘But, as usual, Maisie, you’ve overdone things.’ She shook her head, which was too small for her body and sat on her collar like a wrinkly old apple.

‘No, that’s how it really looked,’ I began, but she was already putting my painting upside-down on the pile and moving onto Kaylie Marshall, who still drew stick people.

She gave me a last look. ‘It reminds me of Moses’ burning bush. Have you heard the story of Moses?’

No, I hadn’t, so she gave me a book from the class library to take home. The Baby in the Bulrushes, it was called. I was a good reader and she told me I would enjoy it.

I don’t know how I first made the connection between Connor and the bush. Mum was forever saying that Dad and Hopie didn’t look after him properly – they hardly ever took him out in the fresh air and they didn’t give him the right kind of food. Maybe I picked up my anxiety from her. I remember noticing, one day as I walked past the house, that the privet leaves were burning more brightly than usual. They reminded of the time I had flu, my temperature went sky-high and Mum wrapped me in a cold, wet towel.

I found out in the evening that Connor had been rushed to hospital that day with suspected meningitis.

A month or so later, the bush had a strange extra-greeniness about it that was almost blue. Mum told me not to be daft, but she went round to Hopie’s, just in case. Connor had fallen out of his cot (Hopie had forgotten to put the side up) and was screaming on the floor, cold and wet from his leaking nappy. Hopie was very upset. She and Dad had been fast asleep and hadn’t heard him. Like Mum, they both worked shifts, so they sometimes slept in the daytime. It was winter and their heating wasn’t working properly.

At the time, that sort of thing seemed normal to me and I didn’t question it. You take things in your stride when you are six.

It was a Thursday afternoon when it all happened. That day, the bush not only had a colour, it had a taste you got just by looking – a sharp, sour, lemon with a grainy sweetness like powdery sherbet on my tongue. I could hear it, too – the licking and crackling of the tiny leaves as they stole the sunshine like greedy babies sucking milk. I stared at it, afraid.

I thought of going home to tell Mum, but I had a feeling there was no time to lose. She was on her late-shift that day and would need waking up and telling the story six times over before she did anything. So I dropped my school-bag, ran up Hopie’s path and banged so hard on the front door I made my knuckles sting. No reply.

It was locked so I lifted the heavy fossil rock Dad and I had once found on holiday. I was still angry with Dad for stealing it for his new home; I’d seen it first and it should have been mine. Underneath lay the front door key. I put it in the lock, stood on tiptoe to turn it, crept in and paused a moment in the hall. There was a steamy smell of chips and drink and sleep.

‘Hopie!’ I called. ‘Daddy!’ Then, after a pause. ‘Connor!’

Silence. The kitchen and lounge proved empty so I ran upstairs. Still no sound, though I was sure someone was there, and felt a prickle of fear. Dad lay on his bed in the special way that meant he was drunk. He sprawled on top of the bedclothes in his clothes and shoes, his mouth wide open as he made a grunting snore much louder than his normal one. ‘Plastered,’ was Mum’s word for it.

After Dad went to live with Hopie, Mum said she didn’t know how Hopie managed to put up with him. I told her it was because Hopie was a fairy or an angel, and she gave me a funny look, then laughed.

I knew I couldn’t wake up Dad and, anyway, it was more important to find Connor. His little box-room felt empty when I peered in and I almost didn’t bother to look in the cot. But then I saw a mound under the elephant-patterned duvet and glimpsed his lovely golden hair, like Hopie’s but curly.

I lowered the side and tried to lift him out, though I stopped when I breathed a smell like a wet and dirty nappy but much worse. There was yellow sick all down his front and on the pillow and sheet. But the most frightening thing was his skin, a sweaty pale greyish-pink like school plasticine. I nearly threw up at the sight.

I didn’t think he was dead, because I’d seen Casualty on TV and he was breathing ever so gently, up and down, and his body felt warm. But I could see he was in a lot of trouble and I had to act fast.

Looking back, I suppose there were a number of things I could have done. Probably the most sensible would have been to run home and wake up Mum. But you don’t always think that way when you are six.

Into my mind flashed the story of Moses, the baby rescued by his sister Miriam from some people who wanted to kill him, the way they did in those days. She had put him in a little woven basket and hidden him on the river bank among the bulrushes. I loved the pictures. Miriam had black hair and big brown eyes and a sort of red cloak, but otherwise she looked like Hopie – the same warm, lovely face. Moses was chubby and gorgeous like Connor. The idea of floating Connor in a basket on a river had appealed to me. But we didn’t have a river – just the canal – and I didn’t know how to weave a basket.

The matter was suddenly urgent, no longer a daydream. I had to save my brother, which meant putting him in the canal. And as I didn’t have a basket, something else would have to do.

Then I saw the bruises. He had a purplish-black mark on his cheek and another high up on his forehead. I turned him onto his side and saw that his bare arms and legs (he only wore a t-shirt, nappy and pants) were covered in a rash of smaller ones. His limbs flopped as I turned him over, and he gave a little cough which brought up more sick.

There was a sound from the next bedroom – Dad waking up? I knew I had to get Connor out of the house, fast. I wrapped his duvet round him and, with a struggle, manoeuvred him out of the cot and across the landing. I stopped to check – no further sound from Dad. Getting Connor downstairs was even harder. In the end we half-fell together, though it was a soft, slow tumble and neither of us got hurt.

A blue plastic recycling box sat outside the front door, half-full of empty plastic milk-cartons. Suddenly sure of what to do, I tipped them out and made a nest for Connor in his duvet. He was too long for the box but in his floppy state it was easy to turn him on his side and curl him up so that he fitted. I ran back to the kitchen and pulled the tea-towel from its hook. Tucked in round Connor’s head, it was not tight enough to suffocate him but would hide him from nosey neighbours.

 I set off, dragging the blue box behind me by its attached net cover. The canal was in the opposite direction to the school, but there were no main roads to cross and I knew the way.

It took much longer than I expected and my arm began to ache. Bumping up and down the kerbstones was the worst. Halfway there, Mrs Robinson from the Spar saw me and said, ’Hello, Maisie, are you going to the bottle bank?’

I didn’t usually lie but it seemed the right thing to do. ‘Yes.’

She said, ‘That’s good – well done,’ and let me go.

The more tired I got, the more I thought of the privet bush, exploding with greenish-yellow light. Somehow it kept me going. This was my job, to save my baby brother, just like Miriam. Perhaps, one day, someone would write a book about me.

There was no-one by the canal. I was relieved, as groups of boys used to hang around there, swearing and throwing things into the murky water.

But sadly, as I’d suspected, there were no bulrushes, either.

‘Sorry, Connor,’ I said. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’ It was a  favourite expression of my mum’s.

The cloudy surface was only a few centimetres below the litter-choked bank. As I pushed Connor’s blue box over the edge, it began to sink. Panicking, I grabbed with both hands, almost falling in, and somehow managed to wedge it between an old fridge and the wheel of a half-submerged bike.

‘Good luck, baby brother.’ I turned to run, all of a sudden overwhelmed with a shocking sense of being in the wrong place, far from home. As I fled I started to cry, and by the time I reached our gate I was howling for my mum.

Approaching from the other direction, also at a run, was Hopie. Her hair flew out behind her as she yelled, ‘Where’s my baby?’, tears streaming down her face. As she reached me I saw she had a purple bruise like Connor’s on her cheek.

‘He’s gone mad!’ she said. ‘He’s hurt Connor and hidden him somewhere.’

I knew she meant my dad, but she was wrong – she had to be. Dad would never hurt a baby. He had hardly ever hurt me – only by accident, once or twice. I wasn’t supposed to mention it and Mum thought I’d forgotten. I had forgotten.

‘No, it’s all right,’ I said. ‘I rescued Connor. I put him in the canal. He’ll be fine now.’

But Hopie started screaming and the next moment she was phoning the police and we were waking up Mum and scurrying off to the canal. Mum and Hopie dragged me between them, both of them crying and Mum saying, ‘Maisie – how could you?’ over and over again until I was blubbering, too.

When we arrived, there was the sound of an ambulance siren behind the trees, and a little group of people near where I’d left Connor in his box.

 
*******

 ‘What you did wasn’t all bad,’ Hopie said later, when Mum had stopped yelling at me. ‘In fact, it turned out pretty well. If your dad had woken up he might have attacked Connor again, and maybe you, too. And you had the sense to put him on his side.’

Though turning Connor onto his side had been a fortunate accident, I didn’t correct her. I needed all the kindness I could get, after what Mum had said.

‘I tried to save him, like Moses – ’ I began.

‘I know, I know,’ said Hopie, though she told me later that she didn’t know – she had never heard the story of Moses in the bulrushes or the later one of how he saw the burning bush.

Connor had a fractured skull and concussion ‘from an earlier episode’. He’d stopped breathing, the paramedics said, a few minutes before they reached him. Any later and he’d have been dead.

But he wasn’t dead – he was going to be all right. Hopie said I’d done my best and she forgave me. Mum told me my dad would have to go to court and perhaps to prison. He had hurt both Connor and Hopie, and it wasn’t the first time. I started crying at that point and wouldn’t stop. I refused to believe it, the way you do when you are six.

I'm much older now – nearly seventeen. I still haven’t turned into Hopie and am beginning to doubt I ever will. She and Connor came to live with us when Dad went to gaol. He’s been out for a few years and I've seen him once or twice. He still denies everything, though I know the truth.

I’ve suffered from migraines since I was thirteen, and the aura that precedes them nearly always takes the form of a lemon-yellow privet bush, bursting with tiny tongues of impossible brightness, drowning me in a flood of memory as sharp as pain and as warm as melting butter.