And Jamie’s disappointment was huge. I had no need to look down at him to know it – I could feel it rolling off him, deep noxious waves of it. Just to have me in no doubt, he told me so himself.
‘I’m disappointed,’ he said solemnly. ‘I can feel it here, right here.’ He placed his hand low on his chest and rubbed it up and down as if trying to relieve some digestive ache.
‘Next week, Jamie,’ I assured him. ‘We can all go next week, the three of us. I promise.’
‘I’m in pain,’ he persisted. ‘Severe pain.’
‘You’ll get over it,’ I replied shortly. ‘Next week, I said. Let’s go.’
I took him by the hand and led him out to the car. January light hung low in the sky, oppressive and tightening the muscles across my chest. I hated these winter months, the gloom that rose in my heart; summer seemed an infinity away.
‘This isn’t the first disappointment,’ Jamie said, as I held open the door for him. ‘They’re beginning to mount up. I can feel the pressure.’
‘That bad?’
He nodded and sat in. ‘Yes, that bad. I’m only telling you for your own good.’
‘Be a man,’ I blurted. My own disappointment in letting him down now made me brusque. ‘And put on your seat belt.’
There is, of course, no such thing as a simple disappointment, a small disappointment, to an eight-year-old. Fatherhood has taught me that feelings like these only come man-sized, brutally disproportionate to the cause, never calibrated to the dimensions of a child’s world. They come with crushing intent, fully capable of annihilating their fragile universe. The wonder is that any child can survive even the slightest of them.
We drove back towards the city centre, the traffic loosened up now after the early rush hour. Jamie sat silently in the back seat. A glance in the rear-view mirror showed him gazing out the side window, his moon-pale face pinched with the effort to hold back the tears.
He happened into my life over eight years ago, waking a dream of fatherhood that took me completely by surprise when it presented itself out of the blue some time before my thirtieth birthday. Before that, all my visions of children came with a completeness about them, which Jamie’s arrival had totally confounded. Nothing in my idea of fatherhood had warned me about the fact that children do not drop fully formed out of the sky, nor of the ad hoc nature of fatherhood that is its day-to-day idiom; basically, nothing had warned me against screw-ups like this.
‘Someday,’ he called suddenly from the back seat, leaving the word hanging in the air.
We had pulled into the first of the two roundabouts on the western edge of the city. Rain was falling, that resolute early-morning drizzle that tells you there will be no let-up for the day.
‘Someday,’ he repeated, eying me in the rear-view mirror.
‘Someday what, Jamie? Speak up, don’t be mumbling back there to yourself.’
‘Someday,’ he said, ‘when you’re sitting in the visitors’ gallery of the criminal court listening to the jury returning a guilty verdict on all charges and hearing the judge hand down the maximum sentence with no recommendation for bail, you will probably be asking yourself where did it all go wrong. Well, just to set your mind at rest, you need look no further than this morning.’
‘That bad?’
‘I’m only telling you for your own peace of mind.’
‘Thank you, that’s very kind of you. I’ll remember that when I’m organizing your appeal.’
Eight years ago I blundered out of my twenties, a feckless decade of drink and dope-smoking lived out against a soundtrack of white-boy guitar bands, a decade funded by various under-the-counter jobs and the most gullible welfare system in the western world. The setting up of the nation’s second-language TV station drew me out, pallid and blinking into the light. Being fluent in Irish scored me a contract subtitling the German and Scandinavian cartoons that bulked out the station’s Irish-language quota in its early days. A month-by-month contract had opened out to a yearly one and all told I had now turned in seven of them. Each year I resolved to find something permanent and each year the relevant deadlines passed me by. This last year I had graduated from cartoons to captioning the station’s twice-weekly soap opera, which now, in its fifth year, was responsible for a big percentage of the station’s advertising revenue. A job that took me all of thirty hours a week left me with more than enough time with which to split parenting duties with Martha, Jamie’s mother.
Back then the advent of a new TV station on the outskirts of this city had drawn a new type of female into the light. Upmarket and eager, all short skirts and high boots, they had a radiance that gave them allure in a city that till then had seen heavy boots and woolly sweaters as the uniform of bohemian aspiration and left-wing politics. And even if the majority of these new sirens were merely continuity announcers, weather girls and bit-part players in soaps, this did not diminish their glamour one bit; the city was grateful for the colour and open optimism they shed about them. This was Martha’s milieu. She, too, had the looks and the stand-offish poise of a young woman with plenty of choices. Therefore, when I met her, it was somewhat gratifying to find that, in fact, her status was similar to my own. She, too, worked temporary contracts, honing scripts for continuity announcers and weather girls, all the time dreaming of an alternate life where she wrote code for video games, specifically strategic world-building games. At the time, she was working out the end of her current contract and thinking of moving to London where she hoped to find work in one of the many design studios that had sprung up after the launch of the PS2.
Six months after we met, a casual affair was brought to its senses by an unbroken blue line running through the window of a pregnancy test kit. Much solemn talking ensued, once more the old weighing of things against each other, only this time between two minds equally adroit at seeing both sides of any story without ever necessarily reaching a decision. Finally, however, we did rent a semi-D in one of the new estates on the city’s outskirts and settled down to bringing up a child between us.
After three years we had to face up to the fact that we were hopelessly out of love. With the leaking away of all physical desire, our relationship bottomed out to a colourless haunting of each other, a leaching away of all feeling from our togetherness. We woke up to the conclusion that, were it not for the child between us, we would long ago have gone our separate ways. Some time in Jamie’s third year we sat down and tallied up the cost of our lives together. All things considered, it hadn’t been too expensive. One beloved child and the enrichment of sense and soul he had brought to us more than offset any regrets for dreams we had set aside on his account. Speaking for myself, it was the kind of balance sheet I could live with. We talked into the night, mapping out the details of an amicable separation, the terms of which would come into effect three years down the road when, we blithely reasoned, Jamie would be more of an age to cope with the trauma. We gave each other the love-you-but-not-in-love-with-you speech, agreed on the you-deserve-better postscript and then sat there ashamed of ourselves, quietly appalled that after three years and a child together this was the best we could do by way of a row. How could we have felt so little? Then, in a rush of gratitude towards each other, we made love for the first time in months. The following morning, embarrassed by such blundering intimacy, we renewed the vows of the night before.
When the three years were up, we sat Jamie down between us and told him that his family would now be divided between two houses. His reaction was muted, no hysterics or anxious pleading, no face-down pummelling of pillows. He walked into his room, pulled the door behind him and was not seen or heard of for the rest of that day. He came out later that evening and asked for something to eat, his face flushed, his whole being pulsing in a haze of anxiety.
A couple of weeks after that he began wetting the bed.
Lately he’s got this idea, more accurately an obsession. How this idea has taken hold of him I cannot properly say but Martha dates it to the time o
f our break-up, the weeks and months after I moved out of our semi-D and into a two-bedroomed flat in the city centre. She speculates that it’s all part of the break-up trauma, a childlike but nonetheless canny ploy with which to win treats and privileges off both of us. I listen to Martha because she is smarter than me and more attuned to the nuances of our child. Also, with her background in game programming, she is always likely to see chains of cause and effect.
But this time I have a feeling she’s wrong. Jamie’s conviction runs deeper than the circumstances of our break-up; it seems to come from the very depths of him, stirring something bleak in his young soul, filling him with words and ideas completely out of scale with his age.
One day he stepped into the kitchen draped in one of my old T-shirts and wearing a baseball cap back to front. His hands barely poked beyond the cuffs of the short sleeves and the baseball cap threatened to fall down over his eyes. It was a flashback to my grunge past, to a time at the beginning of the caring decade when, paradoxically, serial killers were valorized by a section of my generation as great counter-cultural heroes, heroic transgressors. The image leaped out in red ink, Michael Rooker in the title role, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
‘Where did you get that?’ I asked.
‘The box.’
‘I thought I told you.’
‘Yeah, yeah – look at this.’ He held up the newspaper and tapped a headline in the middle of the page. ‘Kids Happy in War Games’, it read.
‘Tell me what it says. Sit down, this spaghetti is done.’
He pulled out a chair and sat, spreading the paper out in front of him. ‘It says that children have become bored with swings and slides, too girly, they think, no thrills in them, no danger. Playgrounds are lying deserted all over Europe, no one using them. Then someone in Sweden had the idea of bringing in special-forces engineers to design these assault courses and now kids can’t get enough of them.’
I laid the plate on the table and handed him the fork and spoon. ‘Eat up. Those playgrounds will be closed down in a year. Health and safety, public liability, injuries and litigations, they’ll be lucky to stay open.’
Jamie shook his head. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. One broken elbow and a concussion – that’s the injury list for twelve months in one of those playgrounds.’
He folded up the newspaper, took off his cap and fell to eating. ‘What do you make of that, what does it mean?’
‘Not with your mouth full.’ I handed him a napkin and he drew it across his mouth, streaking an orange blur halfway to his ears. ‘What would I know, kids are daft. Who knows what goes on in their heads?’
‘That’s true, look at me.’
‘Look at you indeed. Do you want to stay the night?’
‘Yes.’
‘Finish your spaghetti and then call your mam.’
‘I already have.’
A couple of weeks after we split up, Martha told me that Jamie had begun wetting the bed. Martha took him aside and asked him about it. If fear and disappointment come only in man-sized dimensions, so too does embarrassment. When it was mentioned to him, Jamie bolted from the kitchen and slammed the door on his bedroom. Martha bought a rubber sheet and told me not to say any more about it to him. A week later he brought the subject up himself.
‘I need something,’ he said. ‘I’ll come straight out with it.’
‘Yes.’
‘No beating around the bush or anything.’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘A request.’
‘Which is?’
‘You won’t like it.’
‘Jamie!’
‘A beating.’
‘A what?’
‘A beating.’
He was framed in the doorway, a little study in misery. Once more he was the child wrestling with outsize miseries that threatened to engulf him.
‘What have you done, Jamie? Whatever it is it can’t be that bad.’
‘It’s not what I’ve done, it’s what I’m going to do.’
‘And what exactly are you going to do that warrants a beating?’
He pulled the chair out from the table and sat in. This is his way whenever he has something big to get off his chest. It seems to give him confidence, putting him in a position of strength, in so far as a child is ever in such a position. But just then he looked hesitant, teetering on the threshold of a great disclosure but unsure of how to begin.
‘What is it you are going to do?’ I persisted.
‘I come from a broken home,’ he began.
‘No, Jamie, you come from a home divided between two houses, you spend an equal time with each of us, whoever you want.’
He shook his head, the flaw in the argument too obvious even to him. It was at times like this I had the feeling Jamie was streaking ahead of me, gaining on truths and ideas that by right I should have been handing down to him.
He spoke irritably. ‘By any definition of the normal family, I come from a broken home.’
‘Jamie, I’m only guessing but I don’t think this is what you want to talk about.’
‘I wet the bed,’ he gasped desperately.
‘Yes, I know, it’s not a big thing, you’ll get over it.’
‘I can’t stop, each night I say my prayers and each morning I wake up covered in wee.’
‘God has a lot on his mind, Jamie. He’s a busy man, you might have to wait your turn. But wetting the bed is no reason for a beating.’
‘I’m going to do something bad, something really bad.’
‘We all do something bad at one time or other. What is it you’re going to do?’
‘I’m going to kill someone.’
‘That is bad,’ I conceded. ‘Do you know who this someone is – it’s not me, by any chance?’
He threw up his hands in a gesture of unknowing. ‘I don’t know,’ he said with some exasperation. ‘You’d want to take this seriously because you’ll probably blame yourself later on and I wouldn’t want that.’
‘How do you know you’re going to kill someone?’
‘There are signs,’ he said, ‘indications.’
‘This is that T-shirt. I told you before about going through my stuff.’
‘It’s not the T-shirt,’ he yelled suddenly, ‘you’re not listening.’
I held up my hands. ‘OK, I’m listening now. What signs?’
‘Like I’ve said, I come from a broken home and I’ve started wetting the bed.’
‘And that’s enough to turn you into a killer?’ I felt distinctly odd discussing this with my eight-year-old son. Once more this sense of weightlessness came over me; I felt buoyant, unmoored from myself. From what I remembered, none of the parenting manuals Martha showed me had ever covered this kind of situation. However, I was certain also that I had to see this conversation through to the end. ‘What has this to do with wanting a beating?’
‘The broken home and the bed-wetting are two of the classic signifiers of serial killers in their youth. The third one is parental abuse. In order to have a complete profile I need to have a beating. That is where you come in.’
‘Why would you want to kill anyone?’
‘It is not that I want to kill anyone – it’s just that that is the way it is going to be.’
‘This is ridiculous, Jamie. I’m sorry, there are no beatings here today.’
He looked at me sadly and sighed. ‘You have a responsibility,’ he said softly. ‘Sooner or later the corpses will start turning up. Two with the same MO and signatures might be a coincidence, but three points to a serial killer. We have to give the investigation every chance. If we put a full profile in place now, that would put a halt to me before I get into my stride.’
‘This is nonsense, Jamie. This conversation is at an end.’ I got up from the table; he grabbed my wrist.
‘He was quiet,’ he said fervently, ‘he kept to himself a lot.’ He fixed me with a glum stare. ‘That’s what the neighbours will say when I’m being led away. Of course
, long before that there will be all the other signs – the low self-esteem, the sexual inadequacies …’ His voice trailed away.
‘I’m sorry. There’s no beatings here today. Or any other day, for that matter.’
He raised his voice. ‘I’m only telling you, the child is the father of the man.’
I talked to Martha about this the following day. She had finally moved her computer into the small box room I’d used as a work space when I’d lived there. A couple of personal items around the room claimed the space as her own. One of Picasso’s blue women hung on the wall to her back and a series of little marble Buddhas stood ranked along the window sill, which looked down over the back garden. She knew nothing about Jamie’s big idea.
‘He hasn’t mentioned anything to me about it. It sounds like a father and son thing.’
‘Does he spend much time on the internet?’
‘Only an hour or two each day, the laptop on the kitchen table where I can keep an eye on him. John, he’s a good boy, I can’t stop him doing everything his friends are doing at the moment. He has it tough enough as it is.’
Every time she talks about Jamie I can see him in her face, the ghost of him flitting through her features: the same wide spacing of her eyes across her nose and the freckles on her forehead that stand out so vividly during these winter months. And it is already clear that if Jamie keeps growing at his present rate he is going to meet the same problems buying clothes as his mother – the narrow hips on which skirts and jeans drape sullenly and the skinny wrists that protrude beyond sleeves that are never long enough. It pleases me to see these shades of Martha in him; this continuance gladdens me. As for myself, while I take it for granted that there is indeed something of myself in my son, I can never quite put a finger on what this something is. If I press Martha on the subject, she tells me airily that we are both the same age.
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