This wasn’t her.

Every part of me knew that. It wasn’t in her nature to do this.

This wasn’t her.

About the Author

David Challen is a domestic abuse campaigner. He successfully campaigned to free his mother in a landmark appeal that recognised the lifetime of coercive control she suffered. David continues to speak out against violence against women and girls and is an advisor to the Domestic Abuse Commissioner for England and Wales and an Ambassador for the Prison Advice and Care Trust (Pact) and the Employers’ Initiative on Domestic Abuse (EIDA).

The Unthinkable is his first book.

This story is dedicated to the child I forgot and for the mother I saw.

For John

Memories.

Some are familiar, their surfaces smoothed by the years until they fit into the palm of your hand, into your life story. Some are colossal and jagged, and you only rediscover them when you least expect to. And the really painful ones, well, you don’t want to touch or see them ever again.

But how can you leave your past in the past if you haven’t ever explored it? How can you survive memories you haven’t held up to the light?

People often want to know what it was like, my childhood. Sometimes they ask me straight. Their voyeurism desires something they can hold up in front of them, hard and definite and grotesque. Something concrete. Something that explains it all. Something that confirms it won’t happen to them.

But terrible things happen all the time. To everybody. To anybody. The unthinkable parts of life are sitting just below its surface. Waiting to trip you up.

Prologue

It began as a normal Sunday morning.

‘Are you ready?’ she said as she climbed into the driving seat of her red Ford Ka.

‘Yeah, coming, Mum,’ I called, shutting the front door and jumping into the passenger seat.

It was subdued in the car – the atmosphere of the overcast day weighed down on us. In good times my mum would have been chatty on these drives to my work, cajoling me into laughter. I would be more taciturn, trying to ready myself for yet another working day. I was twenty-three years old, and in an emotionally selfish phase. The pressure of a working day spent constantly forcing a smile onto my face for customers left me unavailable to her. But on this drive she didn’t try to coax conversation out of me; instead she was lost in her own thoughts.

I was still living with her, but we weren’t living in our real home. It was a new house, fifteen minutes’ walk away from the old one where I had grown up with my parents and elder brother, James. Mum and I had moved there after my parents’ marriage had gone through its death throes eighteen months ago. It was a quiet and soulless red brick house, hived off in a gated community. Inside it was sterile, more of a shelter than a place we could call home. Life ever since had felt an octave off-key; the house’s furniture was different, flimsier, not the comfortable trappings of my childhood. Bog-standard flatpack furnishings to get us by until we started again. The leafy suburban streets and lanes were as known to us as each other, but we came at them now from the wrong direction. It was as though we had been trying on a different life for size, and it was the wrong fit.

Mum pulled up into one of the parking spaces outside the restaurant and I climbed out of the car, unthinkingly. Just as I turned to shut the door, she leaned over, right across the passenger seat, and looked me deep in the eyes. Her own blue eyes crinkled with intensity at mine, her mouth drawn downwards so that her lips almost disappeared. It was as though she was trying to locate and fix on something within me, trying to speak to the child still within.

‘You know I love you, don’t you, David?’

The cool of the car door handle was frigid in my clamped hand. This intensity was all off. I was used to hearing ‘I love you’, but this wasn’t that. This was an opening, or a closing. But it was also 9.30am. My shift was starting, and I didn’t want to be late.

‘Yeah … yeah, of course. I love you too,’ I said, turning to go.

But the unease didn’t lift and it forced me to turn back to look at her, just once. She didn’t return my gaze, and a frown was now etched across her face as she settled back into her seat, her lips still folded in on themselves. She had closed off.

By the time I reached the back entrance of the restaurant, she was gone. I didn’t have time to cross-examine it, so I stitched a smile across my face, opened the doors and began my day.

A large party of eleven came in just as the lunchtime rush had slowed to a trickle of tables. I had already dealt with their complicated drinks order, and was readying myself to ask about food, when my manager appeared in front of me.

‘David,’ he said, ‘do you mind heading up to the locker room for a moment? I need to speak to you. I’ll be up in a minute; just wait for me there.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ I said, taken aback at his serious tone. I headed up the stairs into the locker room. Its heavy door with a porthole window shut heavily behind me. I’ve been fine today, haven’t I? I thought. No tables complaining, nothing massively delayed … And it was there, pacing around the hot little upstairs room, that I caught a glimpse of something shocking through the window: heading towards me at speed was my mum’s cousin, Noel. And looming behind her was the hi-vis jacket of a police officer.

My sense of space and time loosened with the shock and knowledge that something very bad was about to happen. I was a child again, hurtling through space, knowing I had fallen, waiting for the pain to hit.

And then time sped; Noel had me by the shoulders. She was forcing words out, forcing them into my comprehension:

‘David.

Your

dad’s

been

found

dead.’

The air around me screamed.

I threw anything within reach on the floor.

Your dad’s been found dead.

Now I was on the ground. Flailing.

The last words I had said to him; the insults.

Noel caught me round the waist. My body resisted my mind. My hands burning from the blow after blow I was raining onto the thin metal of the surrounding lockers. A policeman at the door, waiting.

… I am gathering my stuff from my locker …

… now I’m downstairs, still wearing my apron, I can’t find my uniform hat …

… now I’m in front of my familiar station, fumbling to hand over my work stuff, in tears …

… I can’t start a sentence, finish a sentence, utter a single word …

… My hands are shaking and someone, somewhere, is saying it’s fine … don’t worry … don’t worry …

… I’m standing in the middle of the packed restaurant with a police officer at my shoulder …

… outside it’s afternoon and rain is falling, there is a police car parked in the side road, and I am getting into the back …

… none of it computes.

My father’s body.

Found.

Where is my mother?

Somewhere through the seething mass of static, the words:

‘Beachy Head’.

My mother is there,

she is on a clifftop,

ready to jump,

and people are trying to talk her down.

… my father is dead.

Were they jumping together?

She is still alive …

he jumped and she didn’t?

But.

He was found at our home …

The police car drives us to Noel’s house. I curl up on the sofa in the bay window of her sitting room, marooned. A police officer stands at the door, walkie-talkie crackling intermittently, his uniformed presence a looming spectre.

I will never get out of this room.

The entire gravity of my world shifts to Mum.

Can they rescue her?

Will she jump?

Everything I have stands on that precipice with her.

But she is still here, and I am still here.

We are both still in this world at this moment.

She wouldn’t let me and my brother go.

She loves us too much.

She won’t leave us.

Will she?

Time collapses into one singular point all around me.

Here are the things I didn’t know then.

On Saturday 14 August 2010, the day before, my mother had gone to see my father at our old family home in the morning. They were clearing out the garage together. She had been attempting a reconciliation in spite of their separation and his treatment of her. That reconciliation came with strange conditions he had set. And still she went over. Her need for him overwhelmed everything else.

Dad insisted she go out to buy some ingredients to make him lunch. Used to taking his orders, she trekked out to the local shops in the pouring rain.

As she was cooking and serving up bacon and eggs at home, she noticed that the home phone had been moved. She dialled 1471, to check the number of the last caller, and listened to the automated voice spiel out the number of a woman that she knew he had been seeing since their separation.

As Dad ate the lunch she had made him, she asked him, ‘Am I going to see you tomorrow?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t question me, Sally,’ he had replied.

And with those words, my quiet and fearful mother picked up a hammer and hit him. More than twenty times to the head. She then went upstairs to change out of her bloodied clothes.

When she came back down to the kitchen, she covered his now-lifeless body with some old curtains, wrote a note and placed it on top of him.

I love you. Sally.

Before leaving, she cleared and washed up his dirty pans and dishes. When she arrived back at the new house we were living in together, she typed up a longer note and printed it out, changed her clothes again, and returned to our old home’s kitchen once more to leave the new note on his covered body.

When I got into her car the next morning, Mum had already placed a little plastic stepping stool behind my passenger seat. After dropping me off at work, she had driven for two hours to Beachy Head. When she reached the car park, she called Noel and told her what she had done to my father, and gave her numbers for my brother and me, asking her to pick me up from work.

She hung up and got out of the car, taking the little stool with her, which she used to climb over the fences between her and the cliff edge. She then headed out along the headland to find a spot to jump from.

A chaplain who often patrolled the cliffs for jumpers spotted her. She tried to get away from him, but he followed her to a precipice and tried to talk her down.

Noel didn’t do as she was told.

She called the police, who went round to our family home, broke down the front door, and found my father on the kitchen floor, just as my mother had described.

I have no clear memory of when I realised my mother was responsible for the death of my father. I can’t remember those sentences coming out of anybody’s mouth. It was a knowledge without words, a creeping build-up of unthinkable certainty.

My mother was the cornerstone of my morality. She was kind and compassionate; my guiding shepherd.

This wasn’t her.

Every part of me knew that. It wasn’t in her nature to do this. Let alone to my father, who she’d always loved in spite of everything.

This wasn’t her.

That night, I dreamed in vivid technicolour that my father was standing at the foot of my bed. I was trying to tell him about my life, my hopes and ambitions, pouring it all out.

Whatever I said, however I tried to reach him, he just stood there, in silence. Unmoving. Unreachable. It was a feeling that was horribly familiar.

And then I woke up, and I was alone in the room, and he was gone.