You

by Phil Whitaker

  Zambo I love, too.

  The Half Moon is our regular haunt. Draught Wadworths, woodburners, nooks and crannies, antique tin-plate advertisements arrayed around the exposed brick walls: Golden Virginia, Fry’s Chocolate, Empire Gin.

  There’s a crop of new members here this evening, three in one go, after some months of it being just the four of us. Prof is outlining the rules of the group, all the housekeeping stuff: how often we meet, what to do if someone hits a crisis between times, the importance of mutual respect and confidentiality. I check them out while Prof’s speaking. Two blokes and a girl. She’s some sort of care assistant, Cheryl is, and clearly finds much comfort in food. One of the guys, Roger – Rog – is a fireman, the other is a postie named Eric. I find myself wondering how on earth he does the job, what with his sawn-off arm and all.

  They all appear dazed, hanging on to Prof’s words like they’re inflatable rings that might just keep them afloat. My heart goes out to them; I would like to seize each of them roughly and give them a fierce hug. I don’t, of course, it would freak them out. But I know how they feel – I felt exactly the same, back at their stage, back when I was first caught in the maelstrom.

  What do they think of me, I wonder? Leather jacket, grey hair shorn in a number one cut to disguise its sparseness. A day’s worth of stubble on my jaw. I look like a #dodgydad, too. The trouble the others had, fixing on a new name for me. They tried out Claude, Leo, Pablo, but couldn’t find anything that seemed to fit – they didn’t know too many painters, to be fair. For a while I thought I was going to be Vince, even though I have both my ears. Vince. I didn’t like it; it sounded menacing, had a rodent-like quality – monosyllabically harsh compared with the sing-song Stevie I am used to. But the others seemed amused. In the end, though, they came round to my way of thinking. Rev it was who came up with the pun on plain old art. So Art, I became.

  Prof, Rev, Zambo, and Art. Other members come and go, but we are the core.

  Eric the postie is troubling me particularly. His hand is shaking every time he reaches for his beer. He can scarcely control it. Eric, get a grip, for Christ’s sake. I can’t stop staring at his other sleeve: half-empty, the redundant material of the lower part pinned up at the shoulder. Emphasising his elbow stump. He has a receding chin. He looks vulnerable, feeble. How the hell is he supposed to protect himself, let alone those he loves? I feel a rush of incredible anger: you just shouldn’t do something like this to someone like Eric. I take a mental step back, do a quick bit of Prof-coaching. These are my feelings, I’m projecting them on to him. I’m not his rescuer; this is his journey. I can support Eric, help him. But his problems are his problems. And mine are mine alone.

  Just as yours are yours, I break to remind myself. I can offer myself in help and support. But I must not intrude.

  Zambo feels it, too, though, I can tell, the same impulses about Eric. Every now and then I catch his eyes straying to Eric’s amputation. Like me, Zambo is living it: all the things Eric must struggle with – dressing and undressing himself, cutting up food, even going to the loo. Imagining the unkind comments, the sniggers he must run into from hurtful people. And now this new, brutal, psychological amputation. Zambo’s fingers are tight round his glass. Leave it, I will him. Leave it, Zambo. It’s a tough one. A bunch of empaths with a disabled person joining their group. There are bound to be what Prof terms transference issues.

  Prof isn’t exactly a professor, she’s a psychologist, psychology lecturer, something like that. What she doesn’t know about attachment trauma isn’t worth knowing. I watch as she talks to the newbies, outlining the format of our meetings, the rolling programme of activities. Her neck is slender. Her peach coloured jumper is knitted from some sort of fluffy wool, a frizzy haze shimmering round her like an aura. The fact that she’s been blighted by the same plague as the rest of us – with everything she knows, with all the theory at her fingertips – is both depressing and consoling. Depressing because for someone like her to have lost her kids shows just what we are up against. Consoling because I think, well, if superheroes can’t prevail then what chance for mere mortals like the rest of us?

  Prof has finished the introductory bits. She asks the newbies to give us a run-down of what’s been happening to them. They look awkward, glancing at each other, seeing if someone else will dare to be first. In the end, it’s Rog who volunteers, taking a big breath before he begins.

  Rog is embroiled in battle. His lawyer managed to secure an order that his kids – a boy and a girl, eleven-year-old twins, non-identical obviously – should spend every other weekend with him. It was going along OK for a few months, but then suddenly there were tears and distraughtness in the car every time their mother came to drop them off. Most of the time his ex drives them right away again. He texts her, asks what the hell’s going on? What can I do? she texts back. They don’t want to see you, end of. She’s not forcing the kids to go through something like that. He should try and start thinking about their feelings, too.

  I recognise the pattern. I wonder if you do. How a little while after I moved to that rented place on Drake Avenue, you started to leave something important, some vital school book, back at Mummy’s, so she’d pick you up straight away and you wouldn’t end up staying. Leaving me and your sister alone together. Again and again. Or how you would just fail to show up in half terms and holidays when your uncle and aunt and cousins, or your grandma, came to stay.

  Four times Rog has been back to court, he tells us, trying to have the order enforced. Rog is pugnacious, a man of action, that much is clear – how else can you be when you’re sent in to tackle infernos every day of the week? I watch the spittle flecking his lips, the colour heightening his cheeks, as he fulminates against the injustice of it, the impotence he feels. The court won’t do anything, beyond ordering more social work reports, which simply note the escalating disinclination of the children to have anything to do with him. #dodgydad. The months have ground on, become a year. He hardly ever sees his kids now, and when he does the meet-ups are fraught with upset and bad behaviour. I imagine the stress in his meetings with his solicitor, who is doubtless ruing the day Rog came a-knocking at his door. Rog is heading for a contact centre order next, I reckon, or maybe just phone calls. A staging post on the way to losing them for good.

  Prof thanks him, then turns to Cheryl. She looks momentarily mute, as though now the time has come to vocalise her story, she has been struck completely dumb. That, too, I recognise. When she does speak, I have to sit forward to be able to hear. I wish some of the others in this pub would pipe down – boozy chatter, jokey tale-telling, the scroosh of the espresso machine from behind the bar. Cheryl has lost hers completely already: two boys, eight and ten, writing surprisingly articulate letters to the judge saying she’s a horrible mother, how they’ve always been scared of her with her crazily veering moods, begging him to let them live exclusively with their dad and to stop Cheryl having anything more to do with them. #madmum. The social worker’s report, confirming the distress that any contact from the mother causes. Well, faced with that, what is a poor judge to do? A prohibited steps order, Cheryl tells us, and I see her eyes welling up. No form of communication permitted with her kids at all. Not even texts allowed.

  Fucking hell, I think, you poor woman. Is it worse for a mum? No, just a different pool of conclusions for everyone to jump into. Men are bastards, angry abusive drunkards. Women have depression, general patheticness, mental health gone wrong. As soon as an accusation is made, it’s like a label’s been applied. It’s like a tattoo in blue capitals right across the forehead – it’s all anyone sees.

  Eric’s situation is particularly vexing. He indicates his dismembered arm: because he’s disabled, he can’t be left in charge of a child – that’s what his ex’s lawyer persuaded the judge, anyhow. How can that possibly be, you think. Ah, she’s clever, ex-Mrs Eric – or at least her solicitor is. He stressed to the judge the import
ance ex-Mrs Eric places on an ongoing father-son relationship, and in view of that she’s offering to allow Eric to visit every other Sunday afternoon, for two hours at a stretch. Well, thank you, ma’am, how refreshing to see someone with their child’s best interests so close to their heart. Eric stares into space as he describes it for us. How he sits in an armchair on one side of the room. How his ex and her mother flank his son on the sofa throughout. Eric brings a gift every time – a box of chocs, a comic or a magazine – handing it across with his one remaining arm, and tries to make conversation with his fourteen-year-old lad for as long as he can. No eye contact, grunting responses. Long periods of pained silence. The scowl-faced women on either side, arms crossed like bouncers. After two hours he gets up to go. No one else stands.

  Can you imagine the humiliation? The messages it sends to the boy?

  Eric’s tremor has worsened as he talked. He tries to steady his hand by holding on to his glass. Immediately, his knee starts yammering like a pneumatic drill. His nostrils are flared, his eyes dilated. It’s one thing to feel the effects. Quite another to be forced to sit and participate as the agony unfolds. Imagine: your child, the son you’ve loved and played with and laughed with and comforted; who’s come to you for help or advice or a cuddle or just to chit-chat about every amazing thing they’ve learned that day. I think: I am so mad at these women I have never even met I could grab hold of their heads and smash their faces on the table, either side of my pint glass, if they were here right now. Lording their power and control over this one-armed man, destroying a boy’s love for his dad as they go. That’s how I feel. That’s how it makes me feel. I know I wouldn’t – I’m a good user of the road. But that’s how this shit works, how it breeds and reproduces itself like a virus, a contagion. That’s what this poison wants to induce me to do.

  Prof is speaking again. Her voice has a seemly seriousness to it, an aural balm, promising a different sort of power. A waxing moon. She thanks the newbies for giving us an idea of their stories. We’ve all, she says, casting her eyes round the table, we’ve all been in – are in – similar situations. I nod. Rev smiles. Zambo is lost in his thoughts; I sense that he’s wrestling with the same impulse to do something retributive to ex-Mrs Eric, too.

  Over time, Prof promises, looking back to Cheryl, Rog, and Eric, you will build an understanding of what is going on, and what you can and can’t do about it. She pauses for a moment, to give her words time to penetrate. What were they, did you think? Words of hope? Hardly. But at least not words of despair. The first words of not-despair these three casualties of war will have heard.

  She says: let me show you something. She pulls her iPad from her case, moves her wine glass aside and props the tablet up so the newbies can see the screen. I’ve watched the clip countless times, we all have – Prof, Rev, Zambo and me. A woman called Caitlin, speaking at a rally in Washington DC. In 2007, for Christ’s sake. How agonisingly long it takes for new understanding to catch on. Prof hits play on her YouTube app – this is her favourite testimony, she uses it every induction meeting. Caitlin’s voice comes from the speaker, arriving across years and space to join us at the Half Moon. She’s a brave lass; she’s twenty-two, twenty-three, talking to hundreds, maybe thousands, of people. Standing behind a white podium, the mic on its stand in front of her. Her voice is wavering – nerves, emotion; there are tears wetting her cheeks. I listen with the rest of them as she describes how, even before they separated, her father began building a picture of her mom as neglectful – always out at work, never any time for you kids. She doesn’t really care about you. She doesn’t really love you.

  And seeding in their minds that he was sorely neglected, too. A poor-me man. And that he was the only one to truly love them, to be there for them. It went on for months, drip-dripping poison, gradually turning their minds, so that, when the divorce eventually came, they clung to him, drank up his protestations that they were his whole world, that he was so happy that they’d chosen to stay with him, how it meant more than anything, meant that his life had true meaning. And they didn’t need their mom. She was never around, anyways. Always off galavanting with friends, coworkers – never a thought for the three of them back home. Caitlin’s voice cracks as she confesses how she came to truly hate her mom. Cut her off completely. Ignored every card, text, email she ever sent.

  There’s a long pause while Caitlin recomposes herself. Behind her, the long banner tied to the railings, besloganed with the name of the organising body – Bringing Children and Families Back Together – ripples in the breeze. Further back, the White House stands impassively. An airplane inches across the sky overhead, its engines just audible. A horn from distant traffic.

  Gathered again, Caitlin resumes her story: how, after years of rejecting her mom, she got to the stage of leaving her dad’s home to go to college, and started to see the world through different eyes. Began to wonder. Eventually, after a year of indecision, she made contact again with the woman who’d given birth to her. Didn’t dare say a word to her dad. So began an amazing but disturbing journey. She learned the other side to the story: how her mom had been the only one willing to go out and win the bread, how her heart used to break at the sacrifices she had to make, how devastated she’d been as her precious children had slipped like quicksilver between her fingers when finally the marriage was done.

  I look round the newbies – Cheryl, Rog, Eric – all of them staring transfixed at the screen. I wonder if they feel the same way I did, watching Caitlin for the first time. Imagining you, in your early twenties, maybe your thirties, perhaps your forties or beyond, coming to your own realisations. Seeing in Caitlin’s distress your own remorse and grief. Aching for you.

  Caitlin winds up to a wave of applause. Prof kills the iPad and sits back in her chair. It’s just a taster, she says, of the battle that lies ahead, and what you’re fighting for. She pauses. Around the table we are all thinking of our children. A memory: in the midst of your time of wavering, how one day, quite out of the blue, my phone went, and it was you. Excited by some great result in a physics test. That’s fantastic, I told you, I’m really proud of you. That moment of authenticity, unguardedness, in which you’d been able to be once more the you I always knew – needing to share this triumph, and hear your daddy’s congratulation. And another: we were going to the Peak District – you, your sister, and me – to join Uncle Gerry and his clan at a holiday home. How at the last minute Mummy arranged a trip of her own which squarely clashed, so I ended up going alone. I had to drop something round for you on my way. Your face, as you stood at the front gate while I put my seatbelt back on and started the engine – it kept crumpling, then you’d pull it back together, then it would crumple again; it was more than you could control. I waved cheerfully as I drove off, then pulled up half a mile away and sat howling like a wounded wolf.

  Prof speaks again, interrupting everyone’s thoughts. Caitlin, she says, Caitlin is just like your own children. Remember her – every time you get blocked, or ignored, or suffer a tirade of abuse. That’s not your child or children – they’re simply doing what your ex-partners are having them do. It doesn’t matter what it looks like to anyone else; it doesn’t matter how much hatred and scorn they appear to have for you. Inside each of them is another Caitlin. At some point, maybe in the far distant future, they’re going to need to know you didn’t walk away, just like Caitlin’s mom refused to do.

  The muscles in Rog’s jaw visibly stand out when he clenches like that. Cheryl is close to tears. Eric’s tremor is more pronounced than ever.

  But enough for now, Prof says. She folds the iPad away, then shakes out her hair. First thing we need to do, she tells them, is give you new names.

  That always catches newbies unawares; they’re simply not expecting it. They glance at each other. It’s all right, Prof says, it seems a little strange, but there are very good reasons for it. She doesn’t elaborate; it’s different for us all. For Prof, it�
�s the assumption of a new identity, a psychological trope to endow courage and fortitude. For Rev it’s more a biblical thing; apparently, God was forever re-naming those he chose — Abram became Abraham, Jacob became Israel, Simon became Peter the Rock. And so on. Zambo has a different take on it, more like going undercover, becoming a secret agent in a bush war. As for me, I think of it as giving a title to a piece of work, an encapsulation of all that the painting is for.

  Prof looks round the table. So, she says, what does everyone think?

  I can’t get past Rog and Eric. I can’t think of anything else: a fireman and a postman joining us simultaneously. They simply have to be Sam and Pat, no other names will do. But it would be beyond tactless. It would be verging on cruelty. We can’t call them after children’s TV characters.

  Suddenly Rev is laughing. She raises a hand like a kid in class, bangles jingling down her forearm like a slinky. How about calling Roger Blaze? she says. Her Geordie accent somehow communicates the very essence of camaraderie. We’re all pals together, and laughing at the madness and the pain is the best thing we can do. Blaze. Yep, that’s brilliant. There are murmurings of approval from everyone. Rog himself looks very pleased. Blaze it is.

  I wonder, Zambo says. All eyes look at him. I realise these are virtually the first words he’s spoken tonight. I wonder, he says again, about Eric being known as Merc.