Extract from 'On an isle called Rotoroa'

‘….Mum came home a few days later.  She headed straight for the fridge and poured herself a carafe of wine.  When Dad had told us that everything was going to be okay, I took this to mean that Dad would be pulling out of Oklahoma! but he threw himself into it even more.  He was rehearsing for it that night.

     I tip-toed around my mother, trying not to say or do anything to upset her.  She remained fairly quiet herself, until the wine began to kick in.

     ‘Come here, Ivan.  Sit down with me.’ she said. 

     ‘Oh I-Jay…  What the hell are we going to do?’  Her eyes were glazing over.  Mum’s face folded up and her chin began wobbling, like an opera singer singing vibrato style.  Oh God, I don’t want to see my mother cry. 

     ‘You know why I was in hospital don’t you?’ she asked.  I shrugged and looked down.  Mum inhaled a puff of smoke and took another a mouthful of wine. ‘I tried to kill myself.  I took an overdose.’

     I started crying as well.  Mum passed me a hanky then she reached into her handbag and pulled out an envelope and tossed it to me. 

     ‘Here, read them all.’

      For the next 30 minutes I read her suicide notes. Her letter to Dad.  Her letter to my older sister Mary and her fiancee.  Her letter to John.  Her letter to Uncle Mike.  And finally, her letter to me.  It was devastating.  By the time I got to my letter, her handwriting had become barely legible, such was the effect the drugs had taken by that stage.

     ‘I can’t live without him I-Jay, I won’t live without him,’ she said bitterly.  I didn’t know what to do or say. 

     ‘You can’t die!  If you died then I want to die as well.’ 

      Mum stopped crying and suddenly looked alert.    

      ‘What?’ I asked.

      ‘Maybe he won’t leave her for me…but both of us?’ 

    

So began ‘the most exciting years of my life’.  I’d graduated from shooting make-believe aliens.  Now it was my duty to fight my family’s battle on the frontline. I had been a teenager for less than three weeks. 

    

‘Your teenage years will be the most exciting years of your life,’ Dad had promised only days before.  ‘Make the most of them.’

     How was I supposed to make the most of this?....’