Free A Trick I Learned From Dead Men by Kitty Aldridge Page B

stroll towards the lane. I have a gander. I don’t think it’s right, some Nordic knob chasing an A-level student on a public highway, ditto GCSE, it makes no difference. It’s not on, that’s all I’m saying. If I see anyone suspicious I’ll have a word.
    The lane is empty. Just Crow laughing his head off. Private joke, I assume. I leave him to it.
    I can’t put my finger on what’s gone wrong in my life. Mainly it’s Ned. Not his fault per se, he’s just a pain in the arse. He wasn’t born deaf. At four months old he caught measles off me. She set up his crib beside her bed and watched him through the bars. I remember his cry, like one of the farm strays.
    I used to spy on them through the door crack, wishing she would come back to me, watch me sleep instead, wishing I was iller than him.
    By the time he was seven months old she had to admit Ned was deaf as a result of his bout of measles. We were not inoculated. The GP told her it might be permanent. It was.
    A poison cocktail, she called the MMR vaccine. A time bomb. No one knows what’s safe, she said. The doctors are experimenting on our children.
    This was all about baby Tom from her childhood. I reckoned it so. I’d put money down. As a kid she’d played with baby Tom’s big sisters, up Copthorne way. After he was born, baby Tom had been given the whooping cough vaccination from a toxic batch and was brain damaged. Everyone in the village knew. All the mothers nattered about it. She still went on about it and baby Tom’s mother, all these years on; a saint, she called her. Over twenty years back but fresh in her mind. Things can haunt you just as well as ghosts. For our own protection we weren’t inoculated; as far as she was concerned the doctor’s verdict that vaccinating me would have protected Ned was rubbish. She liked a good ruckus with a person in charge.
    Deafness is not a disease, she told the doctor at the surgery. There’s nothing wrong with my son. Ned is a clever boy, hearing or deaf, she said. And no, she would not consider a cochlear implant or a hearing aid, not now or ever. You can’t force me, she said. I have rights.
    So does he, the doctor said.
    I stared at the doctor. I took my time. I thought about punching him. Smashing his face into his desk. Breaking his nose, splitting his lip. Talking to her that way. She refused to sit on a chair, she gripped my hand instead, swaying, head high. I am a mother, she told him, I know what’s right.
    The doctor rubbed his eye as he spoke. The vaccination works, he said, it protects children. He sounded at his wits’ end.
    There is evidence that the vaccine is unsafe she replied. It will probably be proved, she added. I have done the best for my boys. We shall see, won’t we?
    She had the last word. She swept out, leaving all the doors open, like royalty. I was proud. She stood up to him. She was a warrior. And the fact that my brother was deaf was not my fault in any shape or form. No way was I to blame. She said so.
    She never mentioned baby Tom. I didn’t know why then but I do now, no one likes to admit to ghosts, it’s like admitting you are afraid.
    She waited for her day to arrive. Then in 1998 it did. Andrew Wakefield declared the MMR vaccine was responsible for autism. She bought a bottle of red wine and we toasted her in the kitchen while she cooked spaghetti.
    Hallelujah! she said.
    We gave her three cheers. Hip hip! While Ned looked silently on.
    You were saved, she said, holding my face in her hands, by the skin of your teeth.
    Thanks, I replied.
    She loved us. Let sleeping dogs lie.
    *
    W HEN THE ALARM goes off I do not get a sinking feeling. Raven says his heart sinks every single day. I would rather go to work than stay here, listening to trampoline twangings . I have borrowed Raven’s hair mousse. RokHard, it’s called. It will do the job re my wavy fringe. I can’t see Lorelle going for curls, frankly. Speaking of which. I have not heard a dicky bird. I am concerned