The End is Where We Begin by Maria Goodin (open ebook .txt) 📕

The nurse in the corner, gathering up towels, glanced at me with an expression of concern. She knew what I had been thinking, I was sure of it. I turned away, red-faced. Could everyone see right to the core of me?

I had wanted him dead. Hadn’t I? I had wanted it to be over. No, no, I hadn’t wanted him dead. Of course not. Not really. I just…

“You have a beautiful, healthy son,” said the midwife, smiling encouragingly at me.

I couldn’t see inside the bundle of towels without stepping nearer, but my legs were like jelly. I couldn’t move an inch.

I glanced at the clock again.

It would soon be Monday morning. Less than nine hours to go until class started. Maths. There had been days when I thought a Monday morning couldn’t get much tougher than that.

Yet here I was.

I remember my mum asking: “Do you understand what asthma is, Jamie?”

She sat next to me at the kitchen table, her head cocked quizzically to one side, her face a picture of maternal solicitude. I had been given a glass of chocolate Nesquik as a treat, which was strange because I wasn’t even ill.

I sucked on my straw and nodded, wide-eyed and sad-looking, playing up to the increased care and attention. I wasn’t exactly sure what asthma was, but any explanation was bound to be boring, and stuff happened all the time that I didn’t understand without it ever seeming to matter. Besides, my sister was in the corner of the kitchen angrily spreading Marmite onto a piece of toast and I wasn’t about to expose my ignorance to her. It sometimes felt like her very reason for living was to mock and belittle me as much as possible.

My mum gave a little smile. “So what’s your understanding of it?” she asked gently. “Tell me what you know.”

I sighed quietly and felt myself physically deflate in the chair. I should have known she would call my bluff, she always did. It was the teacher in her, always double-checking other people’s understanding. Is this what she did with her students, even though they were all grown-ups? They must have found her really annoying.

“You can’t breathe,” I mumbled, unwilling to attempt any further elaboration.

“Wow, everyone’s right, he really is a genius,” mumbled Laura, through a mouthful of toast.

“Laura,” said my mum sternly, glancing in her direction, “I wasn’t speaking to you. And use a plate please.”

“I can’t even see what all the fuss is about,” said Laura, ignoring my mum’s request, “loads of people have asthma. It’s not like it’s even a big deal.”

“I didn’t say it was a big deal.”

“Well, why are you even talking about it then?”

“This doesn’t concern you, Laura.”

“Why is everything such a big deal when it involves Jamie? God, I could try to hang myself from my window and no one would sit down and have a heart-to-heart with me about it.”

“Don’t you have something you need to go and do?” asked my mum, tersely.

“Yeah, Laura, me and Mum are trying to talk,” I risked. I would never normally goad Laura, but Mum and I felt like a team right now. Or at least I thought so, until she shot me one of her warning looks.

“Shut up, you little dweeb,” my sister muttered scornfully.

“Laura!” snapped my mum. “Go do something. Homework, for example, if you can remember what that is. And, for God’s sake, stop rolling your school skirt up like that, I can practically see your knickers.”

“No, you can’t,” Laura sighed theatrically. With a roll of her eyes, she made for the door, cramming toast into her mouth and poking me hard on the back of the neck as she stomped past, the scent of body spray and Marmite wafting after her.

“Ow!” I shrieked, grabbing my neck as if I had been stabbed and looking to Mum for justice.

My mum just sighed and rubbed her forehead.

“So, anyway,” she began again, attempting to re-establish her air of concern, “it must have been a bit scary, what happened at school today.”

I stared at her, unsure which way to go. I was quite enjoying the sympathy and could easily milk that, but at the same time I was nine now and didn’t want to look like a sissy. I took the middle ground and shrugged, which was the most accurate reflection of how I was really feeling. I hadn’t actually given the whole “incident” (this is how it was described to my mum when she arrived at the school) much thought. In fact, I’d quickly been distracted by the hunt for a two-headed magpie that Tom swore he’d seen up on the roof of our classroom. Perhaps the “incident” had been scary for the short time it lasted, but I assumed it was a one-off thing, like a nosebleed. Those seemed to appear out of nowhere, for no good reason, and could be scary, all that blood dripping onto your white school shirt. But they passed, just like the asthma had. I figured that, like nosebleeds, asthma was “nothing to get your knickers in a twist about”, as my dad would say.

My mum reached out and stroked my hair.

“It must have been quite worrying when you didn’t know what was happening. But it’s not something you need to be scared of if it happens again. Quite a lot of children have it. It’s not uncommon. It just makes it a bit difficult to breathe for a while. The airways get a bit inflamed, a bit unhappy, and that makes them go a bit narrow.” She made a tiny space between her thumb and forefinger to demonstrate her point. “There’s medicine for it, to make it better, like a little pump, and it’s nothing the teachers haven’t seen before. Mrs Dray didn’t seem too worried, did she?”

This was put out there more as a statement than a question, so I shook my head because I could see my mum was trying her best and I