Flashback Friday: Never Spoken Twice

Thirteen years ago, I wrote a piece called ‘Losing and Finding Myself’—a linear account of grief, rage, and reinvention in the wake of my mother’s death. At the time, I wrote with a burning sense of injustice: toward my school, which mishandled her passing; toward the silence that followed; and—though I didn’t quite admit it—toward her, for dying too early and leaving so much unsaid.

But something has shifted.

This isn’t a rewrite. It’s a second glance.
And this time, I haven’t looked away.

In Never Spoken Twice, I look not just at what was lost, but at what was handed to me without consent. I see now that my mother didn’t just die young—she entrusted me, too young, with things that she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—share elsewhere. I became the keeper of what she couldn’t say out loud. It wasn’t a secret. But it stayed one.

Where the earlier piece marched forward, this one spirals.
It follows memory’s own logic—not in sequence, but by ache, by image, by stitch.

This isn’t about tying anything up. It’s about stepping back through a doorway I once escaped through—and noticing what I carried with me.

Never Spoken Twice

I didn’t know who I was, but I knew I was wearing scarlet.

Scarlet that had flared too loud, too wrong.
I held them up on the school bus home from London—jeans that looked like they’d survived a disco knife fight.
“Flares,” someone scoffed. “Out of date.”
I said I’d fix them. Drainpipes. Sleeker. Sharper. Something that cut the other way.

I didn’t want to be looked at.
I just didn’t want to be the kid you had to feel sorry for.

That was November. Six months since May.
Since the house got quiet in a way we didn’t know how to fill.

Backtrack.

My mother’s eyes had turned yellow.
Not metaphorically. Not poetically.
Yellow from the inside out—jaundiced, liver-failed, ghost-lit.

She wore tinted glasses to hide it.
Smiled through it. Worked through it. Until she couldn’t.

She told me once that a drunk had harassed her in the street—for wearing “sunglasses” on a grey winter’s day.
I don’t think she told my dad. Only me. Like the words had nowhere else to go.
And I knew—not in words, but in weight—that I wasn’t meant to share it.
Her shame folded into me, quiet and heavy.

Cirrhosis, they said.
And people assumed the rest.
But my mum wasn’t a drinker.

It started with “bad nerves”—before we had the words to talk about mental health.
When I was nine, she began having severe stomach pains—bad enough that she’d lie on the floor, hoping they’d pass.
I remember her whispering to me that something wasn’t right. That it felt worse than anyone was letting on.

Her own doctor was on holiday, so she saw a locum at the practice instead.
He didn’t examine her—just glanced at her notes and said, “nervous stomach.”
She told me later how angry she was. How dismissed.
And I knew—even then—that I wasn’t meant to repeat it.

That was the start of it: not just the illness, but the secrecy.
Her pain became something I carried too.

More pills followed. Stronger ones. Librium. Valium. Nobrium.
Prescribed like reassurance. Taken because she trusted them.

When I was thirteen, she finally had surgery—too late.
That’s when they saw the liver damage.
She lived four more years. Slowly. Quietly. Bravely.

Sometimes she still confided in me, like she didn’t have anywhere else to put it.
Her body failing. Her eyes yellowing. Her shame.
It felt like being trusted with glass. I held it carefully. I said nothing.

She died in spring.
I returned to school a few days later.

My brother had gone to speak with the head of the Sixth Form.
Asked if I could take a week off, and be excused from the mock A-levels.
“Too inconvenient,” came the reply. “Special circumstances will be considered.”

They weren’t.

I showed up. Signed my name. Opened the exam paper.
Then stared at nothing for three hours.

When the results came, I’d failed everything.
Single digits. Beyond recovery.

At the next assembly, Mr. Sutherland read out our names.
Made us line up. Got in our faces—three inches close.
Same question, over and over:

“Why?”

He reached me last.
Breath sour with pipe smoke.
“My mother died,” I said. “My brother came to see you.”

He turned away. No apology.
Just: “You’d better all get to your lessons.”

Sometimes grief doesn’t knock.
It gets barked at in a hallway.

By autumn, I wasn’t trying to be found.
Just trying to vanish more convincingly.
My dad drifted inside his own silence.
The house too—walls settling, threadbare quiet, drawers refusing to close.

I signed up for the school trip to London.

No one knew who I’d been.
I kept quiet on purpose.
The city blurred past.
It felt like slipping out of something heavy.

That day, I bought two bags of clothes and a version of myself I hadn’t tried on yet.
The scarlet jeans were my favourite mistake.
I didn’t tell anyone that.

At home, I went digging.
My mum’s haberdashery leftovers lived in every drawer: buttons, hooks, scraps of forgotten fabric. A tin of zippers too.
Our house was a museum of unfinished repairs—drawers that wouldn’t quite close, pins in cushions long since hardened, patterns folded around parts she never cut.

I hacked at the jeans. Cut out too much.
Couldn’t get them over my heels.

Stood there feeling ridiculous—and something else I didn’t have the language for.
Maybe shame. Or maybe just being seventeen and breaking in two quietly.

Then I found two zippers in the tin.
Slid the teeth through my fingers like they might bite.

And I sewed them in—careful, crooked, mine.

That night I wore them to a punk event in Chesterfield.
Paired them with a shirt I’d butchered into cooperation.

I walked in zipped tight—scarlet loud, stitched with something like survival pretending to be defiance.
And for once, no one saw the mourner underneath.

People from the old world would stop me in the street.
“What’s happened to you? You used to be such a lovely lad.”
“I still am,” I said. “You just can’t see it.”

Grief didn’t disappear.
It just changed outfits.

What I learned that night wasn’t how to become someone new.
It was how to carry silence in a way that didn’t drown you.

The jeans didn’t fix anything.
But they carried something.
A shape I could step into, even if I didn’t fill it yet.
Even if I couldn’t name what I was becoming.

A refusal, maybe.
A resistance.
A re-threading.

And in that stitched-together crowd—scarlet flashing under pub lights, safety pins glinting like tiny rebellions—
I found others who’d been reassembled too.

We weren’t healed.
Just stitched together enough to keep facing forward.
Just mended enough to stay upright.

I don’t know what happened to those jeans.
Maybe they unraveled. Maybe I grew out of them.
Maybe they’re still folded in the back of a drawer that smells like dust and dye and my mum’s last breath.
Maybe next to her tinted glasses—still trying to hide what couldn’t be hidden, even from herself.

But they weren’t just clothes.

They were a doorway.

And for a little while, I stepped through.