You

by Phil Whitaker

  That’s Prof’s bimetallic hope-fear. That her kids will break free. That they won’t.

  That’s my hope-fear for you, too.

  Russian dolls, that’s how Prof conceptualises her son and daughters. Outer layers, hard with brittle shellac, painted smiles like fixed masks. Hidden within, right at the centre, their authentic loving selves, shrunken and miniaturised – the children they once were; the loving, trusting people they could one day be. It’s how she deals with every scornful text, every block on social media, every declaration of hatred: those are their defensive shells speaking, parroting their father’s propaganda. Somehow, she manages to let it wash past. Every message she sends, every card or letter, she addresses not to their snarling exterior but to the wounded child buried deep beneath. The child who loves their mum. The child that has had to entomb their craving to be loved by her.

  I think of you like that sometimes. Like a Russian doll. I cling to the hope that the real you – the you I raised and lived alongside and knew so well for fourteen long years – is trapped inside there, able to blossom back to life once free. But other times the impenetrability of your carapace seems never-ending – seven years without so much as a word – and it overwhelms me with despair. Two whole years away, into your third at university – how free, and for how long, do you need to be? Sometimes what hope I have seems impossibly puny against the all-too tangible prospect that this is how it ever more shall be.

  Next to Prof, Zambo is staring at the far wall. I follow his line of sight; he’s studying a depiction of Christ in his passion, half hidden in the gloomy shadows. The bloodied figure is buckling under the weight of his cross. Zambo’s faith is in non-violence. He saw so much of it growing up – brutal beatings from his Rhodesian Army colonel father; butchered white farmers and flayed black freedom fighters during the independence war. His determination is never to raise a finger against anyone. He’s like a muscle-bound, six-foot-four Gandhi. The rage we all experience at times – the nerve-searing agony at being denied relationships with the most precious people in our worlds; at the damage and harm being done to those we are hard-wired to love and protect. The fury at the professionals – their failure to recognise what’s going on right under their noses. Even more, their unwitting collusion – what’s a poor judge to do? It’s this rage that fuels the stories that make it to the papers – the assaults, the murders, the suicides. Zambo is so powerful he could kill with his hands. He could maim, inflict terrible counter-pain. His potency terrifies him, lest he let slip his control and prove to be the kind of creature he has never wanted to be.

  Blasting clays is his release.

  Christopher . . .

  Taylor . . .

  Kitty . . .

  Mark . . .

  Rev’s Geordie accent is eerily haunting, delivered sotto voce like this. The naming of names. There’s something tranquil about the acoustics in the church – the solid stone walls that have stood for centuries, the high vaulted ceiling. It strikes me: there’s no echo. It’s as though sound, once uttered, is absorbed softly by the very fabric of the building, like snowflakes landing on wet ground. It’s as though Rev’s words are actually going somewhere. As though they are being heard. Last on the list, she enunciates your name.

  Your name.

  You.

  I hear it with surprising equanimity. In the early years, it would constrict my throat, lurch my gut, cause my vision to mist. How far I’ve come. Rev’s bangles chink as she adjusts her position. Unbidden, I picture you, standing across the kitchen from me – you must have been ten, eleven – the pair of us passing your netball repeatedly back and forth, me detailing the current government’s betrayals, my analysis of the likely outcome of the impending general election, telling you about the great British tradition founded by Screaming Lord Sutch. You, lapping up the grown-upness of a politics talk with your dad. Declaring that when you were old enough, you would definitely vote Monster Raving Loony. We did them a lot, those sessions of netball-throwing chat. A long phase; you loved it so much. No idea how it came about – it just evolved. I would lark around, doing funny throws: under one leg; another from behind my back. The metronome of ball-to-hand, ball-to-hand. Dad to daughter, daughter to dad. Back in Rev’s church, I am lightly stroking my arm with my fingertips. My skin sensitivity feels heightened, sitting here listening to her incantations, and my touch traces tingling lines. When I swallow, it sounds loud and deliberate. I can smell faint traces of incense. There’s a deep peace. I could be in heaven.

  Stories. We have to have our stories. Prof’s: the capacity for therapy to heal psychological and emotional wounds. Rev’s: the victory of love over hate. Zambo’s: peace over war. Mine? I don’t know. I’m not quite sure. The power of art to create beauty out of the very worst?

  Rev’s silence stretches on, inviting contemplation. Merc is next to Zambo. Tears have slid on to his cheeks. Hearing his son Mark’s name. I’m not perturbed – there’s so much crying goes on in this group, and it’s mostly in Rev’s sessions. Spiritual wounds. Letting it out will do him good. He’ll have no idea what his own story might be yet – he’s still in the shock of the blitzkrieg. Maybe that will be it. Something like the Blitz. The grim determination of a bombarded nation not to succumb. Heroic Spitfire and Hurricane pilots, paltry in number, defying what should have been insuperable odds.

  Angel is on Merc’s other side. I watch as she puts out a hand and rests it on his good arm. He glances, gives her a weak smile, and shakes his head once, as if to say what-am-I-like? She gives him a quiet smile back. Another story beginning to unfold: love in the midst of trauma.

  Rev is speaking again, she hopes no one will be offended, but she would like to say the central prayer of her faith. There are nods, and grunts of permission; no one demurs. She begins. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

  The opening lines roll over me. Her voice has an affecting sincerity. I can almost reach out and touch her belief. She’s so sure that her god has this, that in the fullness of his time he will bring resolution. I wish I had her faith. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Amen.

  I can’t ever forgive what she’s done!

  It’s Blaze speaking. Shouting, actually. He’s sat next to me but my attention has been on the other side of the circle. Suddenly I’m tuned into him and I can feel his agitation. Now I’m aware of it, I realise I must have been sensing it earlier, while Rev was praying, but unconsciously I tuned it out. I turn to look at him; he’s staring at Rev, his hands braced on his knees.

  What she’s done? It’s unforgivable!

  There’s an embarrassed silence, some people looking at Blaze, others looking at their laps. But he has to be allowed space to speak. His court appearance went as I knew it would. Prohibited steps order banning any contact with his children, pending the outcome of a Cafcass report that will take months to complete. When finally it comes in, I can predict the contents: it will note that no evidence has been discovered to support the allegations made against him. An absence of evidence. And it will also note, with portentous emphasis, that his children’s expressed wishes and feelings are to have nothing more to do with their dad. The damage will have been done.

  I know, Blaze, Rev says, her voice cutting across the curdled air. It seems impossible just now. Forgiveness is long and difficult. But if we don’t let go of what’s been done, then bitterness will consume us.

  Blaze gives a snort.

  We owe it to our children, Rev says, to be whole, happy parents when they do eventually come.

  And where’s all your praying got you, then? Blaze’s tone has an unpleasant edge. It hasn’t brought your kids back, has it? Your god’s not done you any favours, has he?

  I flinch on Rev’s behalf. Her daughter and son, eighteen and
sixteen, still blocking her, still returning unopened the cards and presents at Christmas, and birthdays, and exam times. The school won’t communicate with her any longer, either; says the children don’t want them to.

  No, she says to Blaze, her voice measured, He hasn’t brought them back yet. But He gives me strength to carry on. And He gives me wisdom as to what to do.

  Respond to rejection with acceptance. Hatred, with love. Blows, with the other cheek. Her favourite bible story has become the prodigal son. How she yearns for that sweet soul-healing, the day she gets to welcome them home.

  I can’t believe you people! Blaze is on his feet now, gesticulating. All sat here, just accepting what’s happened. What’s wrong with you? You should be out there, banging on doors, leaving no stone unturned, doing everything you can to save your kids. Not sitting around bleating about forgiveness and stuff, and lighting poxy candles. For fuck’s sake!

  I look to Prof to take a lead, Zambo even, but they’re just sitting there, as if weighing his words. The atmosphere, so calm and contemplative, now fizzes and froths, like a massive rock’s been slammed into a pond. I’m his mentor. I feel some responsibility.

  The thing is, Blaze, I tell him, we’ve all been exactly where you are, and there’s nothing you can do. I know you won’t want to hear that, but it’s true. No one recognises what’s happening to our children – none of the people who should – they simply don’t believe such things can happen, it’s not in their worldview. Their whole system is geared around kids’ wishes and feelings – and none of them has the first idea how easily those can be corrupted and skewed.

  Me, standing on that night-time landing, flannel pyjamas, listening to Ma downstairs retching and vomiting and moaning with yet another sickening migraine. Fearing she was going to die, just like Pa had died. Pleading with God to take me instead. Those were my sincerest wishes and feelings. I desperately wanted to die, because that way she would live. There’s no rationality in a young mind when it comes to attachment figures. Nothing but magical thinking.

  I’ve had it! Blaze yanks his jacket off the back of his chair. My lawyer, he says, turning to look at us again, my lawyer says there have been cases, cases where judges have seen through this kind of shit!

  Sure. Finally, Zambo speaks – he takes a keen interest in legal affairs. There’s Parker in the High Court, and Macur at the Court of Appeal. But they’re in London, and they’re at the cutting edge of things. Out here in the sticks, in the family courts, they’re decades behind. Art’s right: you haven’t got a hope in hell.

  Blaze pushes roughly past me. I listen to his footsteps as he leaves. Oddly, they do echo. I think about going after him, but it would only aggravate things. He needs time to cool down, at the very least. Maybe that is the path he’ll have to follow. Maybe only by dashing himself against the blinkered legal system will he finally accept the reality. I don’t think he’s ready for what we do.

  To be honest, it’s a relief that he’s gone. The turbulence in the air seems to subside a little. I won’t give up on him, not unless he wants me to. But it’s a journey he’s on, and he’ll have to spend as long on each stage as it takes. I do get it. Every now and then, even after I’d come to understand it all pretty well, I used to get times when I’d worry I wasn’t doing the right thing. Fantasies of finding enlightened judges, Cafcass people, lawyers; the gnawing feeling that I was letting you down by not keeping at it relentlessly. But the reality would soon reassert itself: so many others on the forum, up and down this country, elsewhere in the world, all finding the same accursed thing. Zambo says it’s like Aids. How, to begin with, doctors just kept dealing with the weird illnesses that they could see in front of them – the Kaposi’s, the pneumocystis, the whole-body thrush. It took a long while for some bright spark to say: hang on a minute. More years to work out what was underlying it. Still longer for that knowledge to disseminate around the globe. The trauma for you of ongoing court battles, repeated interviews with social workers, everyone prodding and probing you, trying to work out what was really going on. And you trying to study, equip yourself for your future. It wouldn’t have been the right thing to have done.

  Rev has a portable CD player beside her chair. She reaches down and presses play. Choral voices, male monks, chants from somewhere called Taizé. Some semblance of peace is restored. Behind her, on the wall beyond the altar, Jesus hangs on his cross, looking on. I stare at him awhile. Rib cage straining, sinews taut like ropes in his nailed-on arms. Son of God, or preternaturally enlightened man – either way, he was ahead of his time. Born into a world where power alone talked. Where the law itself prescribed vengeance – eyes for eyes, teeth for teeth. Murders, even, for murders. Could I do what he did? Find understanding and forgiveness for people who’d scourged the flesh off my back, spat on and mocked me, driven lengths of iron through my limbs and hoisted me aloft to suffocate under my own weight? I really don’t think so. Prof says he was the original psychotherapist, his talk of god’s grace a metaphor for the compassion and self-compassion we all so desperately need. Zambo says he wasn’t a lone voice. He can rattle off a whole load of Ancient Greek myths that told the same story – that the only way to end cycles of violence is for someone somewhere to find it in them to forgive. To wax that moon. Either way, he was one mighty figure, that Jesus. I give him a silent nod of respect. He stares back, unblinkingly.

  Rev’s Taizé chant comes to an end. She winds up by getting us to write the names of our missing children on Post-it notes, which she then invites us to burn in the candles’ flames. Not to cremate, you understand. To send you, in the smoke, somewhere better, somewhere else. Finally some verses from the Old Testament: Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will hold you with my righteous right hand.

  I find I know it well enough by now to say along with Rev in my head, replacing the word God with Dad. Like a solemn promise.

  We wish Angel and Merc a good evening, and I go with them to the heavy wooden doors at the far end of the nave. I linger for a moment, watching their retreating backs as they cross the dark car park. They get into Angel’s white Focus, and drive off together. Blaze’s MX5 is nowhere to be seen: he’s driven off into the night. I shut the door and turn the key.

  Well, that was fun, Rev says when I rejoin the others, who are stacking the visitors’ chairs and sorting the table out.

  Don’t be too hard on him, I say. I think: I wonder where Blaze is right now? Whether he’s roaring his sports car along narrow lanes, the powerful engine giving voice to his rage, his frustration, the dazzling headlights greening night-black hedges to either side. He’s in the pits just now. I remember nights like that, unable to sleep, my mind turning-turning, going out driving for the sake of driving, accelerating hard through some village or other and wondering what it would be like not to turn the wheel at the bend up ahead, ploughing into the high stone wall instead. A way to end the pain and grief.

  It’s the anger, Art, Prof tells me. He needs to find some constructive outlet. Is there anything you can do?

  Boxing would be good, I think, or a martial art, but I’m not into either of those. I think about the wood for the stove in my sitting room, how a session splitting logs with an axe leaves me spent and tiredly relaxed. I don’t know, I tell Prof, I’ll have a think. I’m sure I can sort something out.

  How about Merc, Prof asks Zambo. How’s he?

  Zambo is holding a stack of chairs, about to take them through to the parish room. Oh, he’s struggling, he says, he’s had some nasty texts of late. Zambo rests his load down and tells us what’s been happening for Merc. How his son has started replying to messages with declarations of hatred. That’s one thing I’m thankful for. Most of our clan get vilification and insults – Prof, Rev and Zambo have all been on the receiving end of tirades from their children at one time or another. There was the low-grade disrespect during your ti
me of wavering, back when you were still managing to come occasionally to Drake Avenue – calling me rigid, accusing me of ranting at you, putting the phone down on me when I called you up – but not much more than a normal teenager might do. After I lost you, all I ever got was impenetrable silence. I know you denigrated me to others – I gleaned that from teachers, and from your sister; and Mummy delighted in telling me how much you hated me in her occasional scraps of correspondence. Prof reckons your lack of direct derision is a good sign – that while you’ve split me off, you haven’t buried me as deeply as many kids do. She says it’s like you’re just the other side of the wall, listening.

  Merc, though. It must be soul-destroying, the first time your child starts savaging you.

  Prof’s ahead of the game. It’ll be tough, she tells Zambo, next time he’s due to visit – it could be quite a critical moment. I picture Merc, latest gift in his one good hand, sitting in that armchair while Mark hurls abuse at him, the smug women either side not bothering to disguise their delight. Perhaps you could accompany him when he goes, Prof suggests to Zambo, at least sit in the car outside?

  Zambo nods and says it’s a good idea. He picks up the chairs again and heads through the connecting door to the hall.

  And Angel? Prof asks Rev.

  Surprisingly buoyant, Rev says, her hands full of extinguished candles. She’s got a birthday coming up, but she seems to be doing remarkably well in spite of that.

  Prof shakes her head. That worries me, too, she says. It’s almost like she’s in denial.

  I laugh. I don’t think it’s denial she’s in, I say. And I tell them about Angel and Merc having come in the one car.

  Prof’s not happy, but neither Rev nor I share her concern. It’s like two shipwreck survivors, Prof tries to explain, they’re adrift in high seas and they should be hanging on to floating debris, not each other. If one goes down, they’ll both drown.