‘We get on, you know, it’s not always been like this.’ He pointed at the house. ‘I mean, they’ve not always been so old and ill. They took me in when my mum died and for years they’ve looked after me. It’s just been these last couple of years that they’ve got so bad.’
‘Don’t you want any help though?’ I asked. ‘Me and Dad could make things easier I’m sure we could.’
Jon shook his head quickly. ‘They’ve changed these last couple of years. They’ve got scared somehow. They don’t like outsiders, they don’t like the council, they don’t like anybody coming round. You can’t come back and you can’t bring your dad here.’
He was agitated, blinking fast and one hand scratching the top of other. The skin was red and breaking. I reached across and pulled his hands apart. I was sorry I had come. I didn’t want to make it worse. I told him not to worry, I wouldn’t come back. ‘Why have you stopped coming to see us though?’ He looked to the track that approached the house.
‘They’ve been back again.’
You can only run so fast down a steep hill
My mum was manic depressive. She went through different phases and levels of illness but there was a basic pattern. She would start becoming manic, this would escalate until it reached a peak and then she’d hit a wall and drop into depression. Slowly she would come out of this. Things would be normal, sometimes for months, and then, eventually, it would all start again.
When mum thought I was old enough to understand what she went through, she sat me down one night and described what happened to her. She called them her ‘episodes’.
She started talking about when she ‘speeded up’. She called it her manic side, her mania. As she was telling me, she became excited, her eyes sparkled and she had to stop herself from grinning. She pulled herself to the edge of her chair and leant forward with her arms on her knees.
‘It’s like knowing everything in the world at once. It feels like I am in complete control and have the power to do anything. My thoughts are faster and all my senses are more intense. It seems like every blade of grass is in exactly the right place, every bird is in the perfect tree. Every person I meet seems so full of promise. It feels like I can do anything. If I wanted to write a book, I could do it. If I wanted to climb a mountain, it would be easy.’
In one manic episode she read a book that moved her so much, seemed so important and vital to her, that the next morning she went to the bookshop and waited for it to open. She was disappointed when the shop only had a couple of copies in stock, but she ordered twenty more. They were going to be sent to friends and family, posted out to people so they could see the importance of this book. By the time the bookshop phoned to say her order had arrived she had crashed. She was in bed, unable to get up, so Dad went to collect the books. They sat in our spare room, evidence of her mania. A few were given away, but in her calmness she seemed embarrassed by the idea.
The mania would manifest itself in other ways. She decided to write her own book. For a few days this was all she did. She was locked away, typing, typing, typing. My dad had to take her drinks, take her food and ask her to come to bed and rest. She didn’t listen to him though. I would go to the toilet in the early hours and see light slipping out from under the spare-room door. I could hear her fingers still racing over the keys. She had piles of reference books surrounding her and a mass of paper to her left showing how much she had written in such a short period of time. I asked her the next day what the book was about. She stopped typing for a few seconds and considered before replying. ‘It’s hard to pin it down. It’s about lots of things. Little things and big things. How everything interconnects, how everything works.’ I left her, pulsing away at the keyboard. She never did finish it. The crash came too soon.
I often asked if I could read it but I was never allowed. ‘When it’s finished, love’ was always the reply, but I didn’t see her write any more. She didn’t seem interested in what she had started. I found it and read some of it anyway. It was confusing. There were parts I recognised and understood from our life but there were parts that made no sense to me. It seemed full of tangents and dead ends. I thought at the time I was just too young to understand.
She continued with her description but became quieter. ‘After a while though, it starts to feel like you are moving and thinking too fast, you are no longer in control but are being controlled. It goes from being in charge of every thought in your head, every sinew in your body, to having no control at all. Thoughts aren’t being formed in your head, they’re being flung into your head. It’s hard to keep up with everything.’
She was wary as she described this side of the illness. She talked about it like it was a misbehaving child – like it needed to be watched all the time. She described how she drove home late one night from a friend’s house.
‘All the houses I passed were dark and all I could see were sad people sat in black rooms, swallowed by unhappiness. Outside each room, guarding or keeping prisoner, was a large black dog. I couldn’t shake the image. Even in daylight the next day that’s all I could see.’
She told me it hurt to be depressed, that it’s not like feeling down or sad or unhappy, that it’s all of those combined and multiplied by thousands. She said, ‘At the bottom of a bad period of depression, deep down into it, you see no way out. You are as far away from a way out as you have ever been and you can only see yourself going further down. It’s very, very nearly unbearable. Sometimes for some people it becomes absolutely unbearable.’
She realised what she had said and came to hug me and smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry about me, love. Don’t worry about me like that, ever. That’s just not in me that isn’t. And I’m doing well; I’ve been so much better since the last time, haven’t I?’
We only want to help
When Jon said ‘they’ he meant Duerdale Social Services. There were two of them, he said. A middle-aged man and a younger woman. He said they banged on the door and tried to peer through the gaps in between the newspaper-covered windows. He said they smiled all the time and shouted through the letterbox, ‘Mr Mansfield? Mrs Mansfield? Jon! Is anyone there? We need to come in and see you.’ Jon hadn’t seen them before, they were new, and he didn’t like the look of them. They seemed keen he said. His granddad told him to get upstairs, to stay out of sight of the townies. So he hid in a dirty room full of tat and dust until he finally heard the car drive off down the fell track and back towards town.
He wasn’t happy though. He told me he knew they would come back. Over the years he had come into contact with lots of social workers and he knew the ones who just filled in the forms and went back home to watch TV, have a drink and fall asleep on the couch and think no more of it until they were required to try again. He knew the ones who would write ‘Visit attempted’ and then two weeks later make the same half-hearted effort. But these two weren’t like that. They had gone round the back and tried the door. They had shielded their eyes from the sun and looked up at the bedroom windows. They went back to the car and checked notes and looked back to the house and consulted and wondered. They shook their heads and slowly climbed back into their car. They had lingered, he said. They meant business.
We sat in a silence for a few minutes and I tried to blink away the question that kept buzzing into my head. It seemed cruel, but then I thought about the smell. And the filthy rooms and the cats and the two old people, dirty and dying by degrees in their chairs and in the end I just blurted it out. I asked if it would be such a bad thing. I asked if things could be any worse. Jon held my gaze. He spoke like he was talking to a child. Slowly and clearly he told me that of course things could be worse.
Gaskin, hock
My dad had started a project. I found drawings and plans in his workroom when I went in to steal some paint. They were laid out on his fourth work surface: The Creative Space. Scattered in front of me were sketches of horses. Drawings of the legs, of the head and the body. They were done from different angles, all with mea
surements and notes. The pictures were broken down into sections and labelled: ‘crest, barrel, flank, gaskin, hock’. He always started with sketches. He would tell me that ‘art is in the detail’, as he slaved over the third draft of a design.
Laid next to the plans was a map of Duerdale Valley and he’d put a cross through the north-west corner of Brungerley Forest. The trees start only a couple of miles out of town and run for miles. Jon told me that it was quite famous locally. It was said that in the Middle Ages an old spinster lived there. Of course, an old woman living alone in the forest could only mean one thing: a witch. The locals agreed she should be put on trial but the trial never happened. When the magistrates turned up to take her to court they found her hanging from one of the trees on the edge of her camp. It was never discovered whether she killed herself or whether one of the locals got to her first. Ever since then there had been stories of witches from other areas visiting the forest as a pilgrimage, to pay their respects. There were rumours of a yearly gathering and some people believed it still went on to this day. Jon said we should visit the forest one day, that some of the trees were massive.
I smiled down at the diagrams and sketches. This was a good sign, a good thing. I waited until teatime the next day. I was sat with my pie and chips and Dad had his whisky. I blew on a hot crust of pie and said, ‘I saw your drawings.’
He looked up, surprised.
‘Of the horses?’
I nodded.
‘Oh … right’
‘They look good.’
‘Thanks.’
He lifted the whisky up to his mouth but pulled the glass away without drinking.
‘It’s an idea I had years ago but never did anything with. Do you remember the rocking horses I made?’
I nodded.
‘Well, I got the idea making those. They were always my favourite toys to carve. Something to get stuck into. But of course you have to stick it on some rockers and make sure it’s safe. It’s a toy, not a work of art.’
He looked at me to see if I was still with him.
‘I wanted to make a carving without any restrictions. A big bloody wooden horse. They can be huge, you know, and if you saw one of them charging at you, well, you wouldn’t be hanging around. Saucepan eyes, teeth the size of piano keys and legs that could kick your head off your shoulders.’
He took a short swig. ‘When it’s finished I want it to stand outside, not sat in a gallery or exhibition hall getting dusty.’
He leant forward, excited now.
‘Not in the middle of a park though, or on top of a hill. Just somewhere someone would occasionally stumble across. Almost like a secret. That’s why I’ve chosen Brungerley Forest. There are miles of unmarked tracks and dead ends, tracks that peter out, tracks that you aren’t even sure are tracks or just gaps between the trees. You can walk for days and not end up in the same place or walk for twenty minutes in one direction and end up back where you started. It’s disorientating.’
I’d noticed he’d been going out more but he hadn’t said where and I hadn’t asked. I was just pleased because going out more meant drinking less.
‘There would be no signs, no explanations, no interviews in the local paper. It would just appear. I often spoke about this with your mum. We both loved the idea but I never got further than just talking about it.’
I was stung by the mention of her. We hadn’t talked about her since she died but it was the most he’d spoken about anything in months and I wanted to keep him going.
‘What kind of wood will you use?’ I asked.
‘English oak; it will need to be well treated but it’s one of the best for outdoor carving. It will last for years.’
‘Will you need permission from the council?’
‘Probably, if they knew about it. But who’s going to tell them?’
We both smiled at the outlaw still lurking in him.
‘How will it stay standing in the wind?’
‘I’ll have to root the feet into the ground. It can be done. I’ll fix the hooves to iron rods and dig those deep into the ground.’
‘When will you start?’
‘I already have.’
‘Can me and Jon help?’
‘Course you can, I’ll need help.’
We grinned at each other and I saw deep in his eyes for the first time in months the glimmer of a twinkle.
An awful thing to think
Sometimes I’m too angry to sleep and sometimes I’m avoiding the dreams. And sometimes, for whatever reason, sleep just won’t come. It feels like my brain is wired to a slide show, flicking and jumping from one image to the next. When I have a night like this I just accept I won’t be sleeping. These are always thinking times and sometimes thoughts wander and scurry where you wouldn’t normally let them or want them to go.
This particular night my brain kept being drawn to this question: if I could have chosen who came to pick me up from art club that day, who would I have had driving the car, Mum or Dad? It was a horrible thing to think about but I couldn’t shake the question away. It kept jumping back into my head and it seemed like the only thing to do was address it so at least then it might leave me alone and let me rest.
I started slowly and I started with the positives. Mum was more outgoing, more affectionate and communicative. She was fun and silly but she always looked after me and could tell when I was upset or worried about something. My dad is calmer, more balanced and kind. He is gentle and creative and could be fun too. Of course they both had their other sides to consider. Mum had her manic depression to contend with, which meant that one day she could be climbing the walls with energy and the next day shrunken and shattered and in bed, curtains drawn, and Dad and me tiptoeing around the house, talking in whispers. Dad has always been quieter. He would never ignore me but he was often there in body with his mind elsewhere, lost in thoughts that seemed to entrance him and carry him off over the hills. There was also the drinking to consider, but I didn’t think it was fair to include this. His proper drinking started afterwards, and who knows how Mum would have reacted if it had been me and her left alone in a crumbling house in a crap town.
And I think that’s the point really. I’m not sure you can ever get a true answer. The dad I have now isn’t the dad I had before. He’s a different person and it would have been the same for Mum if it’d been Dad that had disappeared in a second. She would have changed somehow. Like we have changed. One person is gone and the ones left behind are altered so everything and everybody is different. And what I never really understood before any of this happened is that death means disappearance. A sudden full stop and a big empty nothing. It’s the ultimate vanishing trick.
Work and industry
It was a couple of days after my visit and Jon took me to a part of Duerdale I’d never been before. We walked from the town centre, behind the Town Hall and across Duerdale Recreational Park (which is a fenced-off area of gravel with three swings, a slide, and a scruffy patch of grass with a sign that says ‘No Ball Games’). When we pushed through the gate on the far side of the park my surroundings were immediately unfamiliar but Jon knew exactly where he was heading. He walked fast and I scuttled along trying to keep up whilst drinking in as many of the new sights as I could. On the lookout for ideas for new paintings. After a few rows of terraced houses we reached old red mills that were tall and stretched on for ever. We cut through between two giant mills on a tiny cobbled passage and I stopped and held my arms out. I could touch both walls with flat palms but I couldn’t decide if it felt like I was pushing the mills apart or stopping them close in together. I looked up at the thin line of sky that slotted between the walls and every bone in my body felt tiny and fragile. I hurried on, catching back up with Jon, keen now to be in open space. We left the cobbled passage at the next ginnel and rejoined the main road.
The mills were enormous. One building alone had a sign that showed it housed a plastic-mouldings firm, a carpet factory and a graphic printers. We pas
sed along on the road, through the noise of booming radio voices and the clunk-clattering of machines. Work noises jumped out from different windows and echoed and spun in the road, bouncing back off high brick walls causing a cacophony in the street. We crossed a dirty river that ran alongside the mills. Its banks were littered with junk: mattresses, prams, cookers and other debris, rusted and wasted out of recognition years before. The buildings grew into a state of disrepair the further we walked away from town and the screeching noise of the businesses gradually faded away behind us, dwindling to a murmured nothing. The final mill we passed looked like it had been abandoned the day it shipped its last loom of cotton; the entrance was boarded up and the windows were smashed. Only one window had survived intact and Jon pointed it out, a small corner window on the second floor. We both stared up at it for a while, wondering how it had escaped, it was an easy enough target, and then Jon started walking on again and I fell into step alongside him. I had an idea where we were headed but I hadn’t asked. Jon was still annoyed with me, I could tell, and I had a feeling I was about to be taught a lesson and that it was my duty to suffer in silence. We passed the last deserted mill and walked out into open wasteland. More junk congregated here, some of it in piles, some randomly scattered. We zigzagged our way through it all, crossed the busy circular road and arrived at the estates. The houses were small and squat, all regulation size and made out of grey breezeblock brick, the kind of brick that darkens in the rain. There was a low grey sky hovering above it all and for a few moments I was almost grateful for my disintegrating house. As we passed the regularly spaced road ends we could see kids further down in the maze of streets, wheelying on bikes, sitting on walls, looking for anything to do. Jon kept his head down and walked faster and I was right with him. We only slowed when we had passed the last clutch of houses and left the estates behind.
Luke and Jon Page 5