She said that sometimes when somebody survives something catastrophic, the people around them begin quietly organising their entire emotional lives around keeping that person stable. Then eventually they become exhausted and resentful and ashamed of the resentment.
I did not tell her that sometimes when C phones me at three in the morning singing Christmas songs, I stare at the screen and let it ring out.
Or that occasionally when he starts talking about presents I feel this horrible flash of irritation before the guilt arrives immediately afterwards.
Or that there are moments, tiny moments but real ones, where I miss the old C so much that being around the new one physically hurts.
Because for all my guilt about how other people treat him, there are still moments where I catch myself wanting a break from him too.
And that’s unforgivable.
I took him shopping once, to Asda in August and he became a bit shouty and aggressive because they had already started putting Halloween decorations out.
“This is what’s wrong with this country now,” he said loudly beside a load of plastic pumpkins. “Christmas gets completely ignored. Losing our cultural identity.”
People had started staring by then.
The cashier looked at me in that awkward way people do when they think something strange is happening but are not yet sure whether they should pretend not to notice.
So I leaned forward slightly and quietly said, “Sorry mate, he’s unwell.”
The cashier nodded immediately and suddenly became overly gentle in that horrible customer-service voice people use when they realise somebody is mentally ill.
I’ll be honest, the sentence came out far too easily.
Sorry mate, he’s unwell.
Like that explained everything about him.
C means a lot to me, and I will never define him as a condition.
He wandered out of the shop, still muttering about Christmas while I paid for the bags. While I was standing at the till, two women behind me in the queue watched him through the window.
One of them laughed quietly and said, “Honestly, they should keep people like that at home.”
The other one replied, “Was he one of those vegetable ones?”
Then she lowered her voice further, though not enough.
“They always seem unstable, don’t they?”
I looked down at the card machine and pretended I had not heard while one of them added, “Poor shop staff. You never know what they’ll do.”
I did not say anything.
That silence afterwards sits in my stomach now, even more than her comments do. I could have said something.
C was standing outside in the heat with his Santa hat slipping sideways over the green stem on his head, staring happily at fake snow spray in another shop window.
Later in the car he asked if I thought the cashier seemed upset. I told him no.
A few weeks later I found C sitting outside his flat in the middle of heavy rain still wearing the Santa hat.
The red dye had started running slightly onto his orange skin, and he looked freezing.
I asked what he was doing, and he said he was waiting for carol singers.
“It’s getting late for them,” he admitted.
I sat beside him whilst cars hissed past on the wet road.
After a while he said, very quietly, “Do you think people liked me better before?”
I thought he meant before the accident.
Then he added, “Before all this.”
I told him of course not, but he kept looking ahead.
“When I was younger,” he said slowly, “people used to act weird before they even spoke to me. Like they’d already decided something.”
The frightening thing was the clarity in his voice.
“I thought after uni maybe it would stop,” he continued. “You know, because adults are supposed to be better. But they just got quieter about it.”
Rainwater dripped from the edge of his hat.
“Now they look at me and all they see is someone broken.”
I opened my mouth to reassure him, but nothing came out.
Because for one awful second, I realised he knew. Perhaps not the full picture, but enough.
His mum does not visit very much anymore. Some people judge her for that but honestly, I think unless you have lived with something like this you should probably keep your opinions to yourself. There are some types of grief that wear people down slowly over years.
She said to me once in my kitchen, while holding a cup of tea she never actually drank, that sometimes she thought maybe it would have been kinder if he had died in the accident.
Then she cried almost immediately afterwards, as though she could not believe she had vocalised it.
And the horrible thing is that I understood what she meant, even though hearing it made me feel sick.
Bits of the old C still appear every now and then when you least expect it. A certain look, joke, or flash of irritation. The old C is trapped somewhere inside all this and it’s unbearable.
Like seeing somebody through frosted glass. You can still recognise the shape of them, just not reach them properly anymore.
A few months ago he spent nearly half an hour helping me sort my taxes out while complaining about government inefficiency, and for those few minutes he sounded exactly like himself again. Then, almost without transition, he started singing Jingle Bells under his breath while searching for a stapler.
Afterwards I just sat in my car for ages, crying and unable to pull away for the journey home.
For ten minutes, he had been back.
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