Because of You

and he pitied the paucity of their ambition.
Julius also had actual scars, from heart surgery he’d experienced as a very young child. The marks across his chest were testament to a very serious operation he’d undergone to correct a rare heart defect. The staff at the hospital in London where he was born noticed how blue he was and how little he fed. His breathing was shallow and he gained virtually no weight in the first few weeks. The doctor eventually told his mother the frightening news that he had something they named ‘coarctation of the aorta’, which they explained to her meant that part of his aorta was too narrow, thereby causing the left ventricle of his heart to have to work much harder. It could mean a problem with lack of blood flow to the lower half of his body if it remained unresolved, so she agreed to the proposed surgery. Julius was plumbed in wrong; basically there were serious errors in his piping. During the substantial surgery, the surgeon had to excise the section that was too narrow, and stretch the remaining tissue around the small Gore-Tex tube which replaced it. The operation was entirely successful and little Julius was soon able to go home with his mother and grew up without any further health issues other than the odd check-up. By the time his two younger sisters came along, Julius was fighting fit, and at age five he was pretty much assuming the role of the man of the house. The father figure he longed for, he became.
Except he wasn’t very fatherly. It was the position and status he desired, not the emotional responsibility, but being the only boy and the eldest, and the most prized by his mother (in no small part because she felt she almost lost him very early on), he had the figurehead role bestowed upon him, and he liked how important that made him feel.
Julius was going to MATTER, whatever it took, however many other people might have to be swept aside to achieve it. Ironically, Julius didn’t notice that those he was repeatedly sweeping aside, namely his mother, his two younger sisters and his wife, were in fact the very people he mattered the most to. They were ultimately the ones who endeavoured to love him best, despite how challenging that was, especially as he began to gain some purchase on his meticulously planned career path. The first whiff Julius had of any kind of status he might gain was when he took part in a school debate about the death penalty and why it was abolished in 1965. He was the only candidate to propose the return of such a penalty in cases of murder. He was extremely dramatic and persuasive when he recounted the grisly details of various murders he had researched, mostly brutal ones. The sixteen-year-old Julius re-enacted the events with great showmanship and plenty of vigour, eventually pleading with the audience of fellow fifth-formers at his grammar school, as if he were the prosecution attorney in an edgy crime series:
‘And so I urge you, upright citizens that you clearly are, to consider the moral justice of capital punishment. Look inside your own hearts, your own consciences, and surely what you will find is the incontrovertible truth that if, God forbid, someone killed your mother brutally, like this, it would be the only right thing to do, the biblical and justified RIGHT thing. That, my friends, however unpalatable, would be the neat and correct ending to any murderer’s life. I rest my case.’
When, inexplicably, he received a round of applause for his impassioned argument, Julius’s world changed. The possibility of power was no longer a whiff, it was a graveolence. Julius reframed himself in that instant as a potentially significant person and he relished all the attention it brought him. Little did he realize then that this kind of limelight is the worst poison for a psychopath such as he.
It would feed
feed
feed
feed his monstrous
ego, and it would lead him to seek out his approval and his love in all the wrong places.
And it would also allow him to repeatedly and selfishly forget all the sacrifices his family had made to help their golden boy on his way.
Julius finished his loud phone calls and came back into the room where his wife and baby were. The midwives had gone for now; the baby was wrapped up tight and dozing in the see-through plastic crib next to Anna’s bed. He flumped down into the chair at the end of the bed and, without a single glance at his daughter, yawned a huge, cavernously loud yawn, uttered, ‘God, I’m knackered …’ and promptly fell fast asleep, mission accomplished.
Anna, barely resisting the urge to sleep, was trying to remain upright so that she could share this precious time with Florence.
She didn’t even want to blink really, so as not to forgo a moment where she could be looking at Florence’s beautiful little face. She couldn’t stop staring. ‘Look at you, tiny one,’ she whispered. ‘Who are you actually? I know you, you lived inside me, but now you’re here, I don’t think I do know you after all. You are yourself, aren’t you? A whole new person of your own, bless you. Welcome, darling Florence. There were two of us. Now there’s three. And you’re the best one of us all …’
‘Bah.’
A strange involuntary grumble coming from her conked-out husband made Anna look over to him. She watched Julius as his head slowly lolled forward on to his chest, and he started his familiar caveman rumble of a snore, leaving her to watch over Florence. Anna imagined that this would be the first of many nights just like this, where she would be alone with the responsibility.
She didn’t know that there would never be another.

1 January 2000
The tinkling of a hospital teacup woke Hope up. It was still early, around