‘People expect you to get over it’
More pictures of the two-year-old are shown. Arran blowing out the birthday candles on his second birthday cake. Gillian remembers how she often heard him in bed singing to himself “happy birthday…” followed by ‘whew’ as he pretended to blow out the candles, over and over.
In February, Arran was found hanging from a blind in his brother’s bedroom after a tragic accident.
“He was excited about everything he did,” says his father Shane, who’s from Australia. “I enjoyed watching him eat his dinner. He’d always eat it. And he was good to go to bed. But he was difficult to give out to.
“He had a presence when he walked into a room. It was not that he was noisy — you just knew that he was there.”
I ask if they still feel his presence in the house. They both nod. “We’ve kept his things, his shoes, coats and toys,” says Gillian.
Arran hated the cold.
“Must have something to do with his Australian blood,” says Gillian. “When it snowed earlier in the year he wanted to stay inside but when it was warm you couldn’t keep him inside.”
They couldn’t put his body into the frozen ground and decided to have him cremated instead. They’ve kept him close by.
“I have to think he is around, I have to believe he is with my mother who died two years ago,” says Gillian.
“People expect you to get over it, but they didn’t see all the traumatic bits,” says Shane. “They weren’t in the house when he was found, there weren’t there when they stopped CPR in the hospital, or when I had to carry his dead body to the morgue.
“Most people don’t go through that kind of trauma unless they have been through a war, in the military. This was our little child.”
It comes as no surprise to hear the tragedy has taken its toll on their relationship. “It’s a rollercoaster,” says Gillian. “One is up and one is down. We go through different phases.”
The Sudden Infant Death Association has been of enormous help. Both are availing of the counselling support it offers.
Shane Malley, who works as a piping engineer, designed the house from floor to roof. He is proud of his work. Schooled in safety in the workplace, he applied industry standards to the house.
The fire alarm is wired into the phone. There is a CO2 detector. The doors are difficult to slam because of the seals he ordered. The windows, which come from Sweden, only open four inches at a time to prevent a child falling through. The oven door is double glazed to keep heat in.
All power points are covered with child-proof tops. The stairs has extra wide threading to ensure the children could walk up and down safely.
The car seats are top of the range Recaro, which protect against side impact. Since Arran’s death, they have installed a CCTV monitor in the kitchen covering all the bedrooms. It comes with night vision.
The Venetian blinds were adjusted easily enough but he could not find a way to cut the continuous steel-beaded cord in the bedrooms. The windows in the boys’ rooms are full-length and the cords at 190cm hovered over the window sill — they should have only reached halfway.
Shane thought of hooking them up on the wall but reckoned they boys would only want to unhook them with their toy swords. “I looked and looked and didn’t try to find out more,” he says. That these cords posed a lethal danger to his children never struck him at the time.
Up until the latest EU standard on blind safety, published last February, there has been no specific guidelines regarding the installation of blinds.
Gillian feels angry. “Arran was a solid child — he weighed 16 kilos (two and a half stone). Something should have broken under his weight. When the gardaí came they queried why the frame had not fallen away under his weight.”
Later, Shane tested his full weight — 83 kilos — with the steel cord around his neck. “I was astounded the blind did not come off the wall,” he says.
With two children to look after, family life must go on. Gillian went back to her part-time job in Brown Thomas, Cork, after seven weeks: “I was afraid to leave it too long.”
“Our hopes, plans for the future have been changed in a way you never wanted them changed.”
I see three sets of ceramic hand-prints on the wall outside the children’s bedrooms. Arran’s tiny hand prints are a priceless memento. So too are his handprints on the glass panel along the stairs.
They refuse to clean it.
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