You

by Phil Whitaker

  Then you wouldn’t come for weeks at a time. Or if you came you would have forgotten some schoolbook or some bit of games kit, anything that meant Mummy would have to come and collect you. Me and your sister left alone. Your grandma came from Merseyside on a visit. You didn’t show.

  You were being met with such grief. Impossible dilemmas, in which you were forced to choose. That Peak District trip with Gerry and his gang: your face crumpling, shoring up, crumpling again. The one time you managed to come for Christmas you arrived with eyes reddened, your face tear-streaked, utterly rattled by Mummy’s disintegration when you parted in the car. Days when you came after school and no sooner had you made it up to your room than she’d be on Skype, tying you up for ages telling you – what? How much she missed you? How desolate she felt when you weren’t around?It seemed that now I was no longer rescuing her, no longer tipping pint after pint of love into the heart of her, she had to find a new supply. You.

  Making your bed once. Finding the note under your pillow. Her handwriting. Telling you how a mother and daughter are made from the same whole, how they are two parts that nothing can ever separate.

  How did it make you feel? Wrenched apart, I suspect. How often I would find you, lying on your back on your bed, netball flicking. Hands, feet, hands. Hands, feet, hands. And – I imagine this; and I understand it, if so – amidst all the turmoil, a feeling of being special. Two-and-a-half-year-old you, sat on the floor of that Chatsworth Road sitting room, in your OshKoshB’Gosh dungarees, tracking her exit as she abandoned you in favour of your sister, your arms slowly falling from their carry-me supplication. That attachment trauma, running like a fault line through the core of your being. The pages of that tiny notebook, filled with neat rounded fountain pen writing. Trying to work out what you were experiencing. How your sister seemed to get everything right, and you to get everything wrong.

  Now this. It seemed to me that Mummy would disintegrate each time you left her to come to mine. Were you in genuine fear as to what she might do while you were gone? How were things when you returned? Perhaps no words were actually spoken, but cool withdrawal would have been equally eloquent at voicing the pain you had caused. And all those times you chose instead to stay away from me. I’d hear from your sister the things you’d been up to: shopping trips, canoe expeditions, visits to the indoor climbing wall. Was this what Prof calls love bombing – the showering of gifts and affection every time it was Mummy that you chose? If so, it must have felt like the rediscovery of your god-girlhood. Of course you would have felt special. Golden in fact. Of course it would have felt good.

  It strikes me you were like Charlie, Nancy, Thunder. Cast out. Accepted. Cast out. Adored. Push pull. Push pull. Push pull.

  How did it happen for me? Differently than it did for you, but seeing something of my own Achilles heels may help. That very thought. Rwanda, reports of the genocide there, being chilled to read how the Hutus, faced with such overwhelming numbers of Tutsis to kill, would machete-slice their Achilles tendons, rendering them unable to walk let alone run away, so they could be finished off at leisure. Hobbling them at a stroke. Rendering them at their mercy. Mercy. Mercy me.

  To begin with, the perpetrators were people in her own life. Ted, Gloria, her sister; various boyfriends and friends before my time. Then there was Ellen at work, of course, the beginnings of my being reeled on to the triangle. A couple of neighbours near our Grandpont home. The first one I witnessed up-close, though, was her oldest friend from college, Katy with the double-barrelled surname. I met her a few times, her and her dentist husband up in Leyburn, on our trips round Yorkshire. She struck me as a nice lass. Then, when Mummy was three-months pregnant with you, an excited girly phone call, telling Katy the news. I still don’t know exactly what was said: some remark from Katy about how Mummy must let her help choose names for you. The kind of innocent, pally thing anyone might say. Not for nothing are they called triggers. That tiny movement, barely perceptible; the power of the resultant explosion. The cold-blooded fury, once the receiver had been put down. Fulminating. How Katy had always been domineering, controlling; how she’d never allowed Mummy to run her own life. Tickertape chuntering, dust motes dancing. Katy: unwitting screen for a past-times show reel. She was cut off without a backwards glance. There were a couple of hurt, puzzled letters from Katy over the next few months, which went straight in the bin. An unreturned message on the answerphone. Then she never heard from Katy again.

  I didn’t know their history, didn’t really know Katy from Adam. Nor did I know Ellen. Nor the neighbours. Each instance in isolation seemed plausible enough. But then it started to happen with people I knew.

  Julie, an old friend of mine from Wirral days, come for an R&R weekend after her partner’s tragic early death. She called Mummy a bitch to her face, when I wasn’t around. She had the hots for me; Mummy was in the way of her ambition to have me for her own, now she was single again.

  My ma, your grandma, hot-footing it down from the Mersey to meet you after you were born. When I was out: Ma telling Mummy she wasn’t looking after me properly, wasn’t cooking me proper food. And Ma trying to prise you off her, take you in your pram round the park, because she didn’t think Mummy was fit to be a parent.

  Visiting Uncle Gerry and Aunty Gaby when your sister was just getting good at walking. Me and Ger out for a lunchtime pint, so we didn’t see Gaby laughing when cousin Tom kept pushing your toddler sister to the ground. Gaby telling Mummy to get over it, it’s just what kids do.

  Going to Lancashire to stay with Mark, my oldest pal from art school, and Sal and their kids, up in their Clitheroe home. How he made a flagrant pass at Mummy while we were out walking, the two families together. How dare he! She couldn’t bear the thought of his creepy lechery. She couldn’t bear to ever see him again.

  I knew these people inside out, Julie, Ma, Gaby, Mark. I tried to get her to see reason, tried to broker understanding of what was the truth – the stuff that had actually happened. But I was taking their side over hers, always believing my family and friends, when she knew, she knew, she knew. Where was my loyalty; where was the support she needed; where was the support she was due? Stone cold fury. Implacable withdrawal.

  And the doubts creep in. Mothers-in-law can be tricksy, can’t they? My ma wasn’t perfect. Who knew what could’ve got said when I wasn’t in the room. And, way back as a teenager, I’d carried a torch for Julie; maybe some of the old stuff had somehow seeped through. Gaby – well, we none of us like to admit when our own child is up to no good. Mark, though. I just couldn’t see it. The kind of guy you’d trust with your life. I’d been on a residential with him one time, sixteen artists and a couple of tutors cloistered in an old farmhouse for a week. There’d been a girl there, a foxy sculptor from Brighton, came on really strong to him. Said he could have her and no one need ever know. He told her no thanks, he wouldn’t do that to Sal.

  Perpetrators to her victim. I was to play the rescuer role. And if I wouldn’t play it, then there was only one other vertex available on that triangle for me. Perpetrator, too. Only she could be the victim.

  She never vocalised ultimatums. It seems that is not her style. Everything must be deniable, everything re-­interpretable. But as I tried to maintain those friendships, those family relationships, all there was, was this incredible emotional bombardment. How could I even think of doing that to her? Did she mean nothing to me? She hated it, felt undermined and devalued that I would even contemplate having anything to do with them, after what they had done to her. Grief, grief, grief. So in the end, I did my own cutting off, the only way I could find to lessen the pressure, dampen the tension. The only way it seemed possible to get through. No more visits from grandma, no more of us going to stay on the Wirral – just meet-ups for a couple of hours at a time at galleries and museums in Birmingham, Manchester, so at least she could still get to see your sister and you. Gerry and Gaby and their brood, not seen from one yea
r to the next, the occasional strained lunch at our place should they happen to be passing through. Mark, my old best mate, reduced to sporadic phone calls. Julie left completely alone to get on with her grief.

  Why the fuck didn’t I get out? Round and round my head it goes. It gets me nowhere. Condensing it, telling it like this, it seems so bloody obvious. In real-time, though, it happened so slowly, so incrementally. And by the time the patterns finally became clear, and I saw the doubts for what they truly were, I was well and truly trapped.

  Because by then there was your sister.

  Because by then there was you.

  ❦

  At the bottom of St Aldate’s, I cross Folly Bridge. The Head of the River, scene of many a summer drink, is on my left, behind it the gates to Christ Church Meadow, favourite haunt for an evening stroll. As I go, I reach out with my mind, try to find you wherever you might be. An unanswering silence. The Thames stretches away down a long straight, boathouses lining the banks like trepidatious bathers, where the eights and the fours and the double- and single-scullers all ply their watery trade.

  One year this river froze completely over. This was before you were born, or even conceived. Mummy came out with her camera. Two amazing photographs. Bottom-up rowing boats, overwintering on the bank, shot from above from this bridge. Their contoured hulls of varied colours – reds, blues, turquoises – all frosted by a light dusting of snow. In another, a line of mallards, waddling across the solid river, each seeming to be balanced on an inverted version of itself, the ice so clear green as to resemble becalmed water, those ducks like faith-filled disciples.

  I said she should enter the pictures for a photographic competition. They were both good enough to win. Neither did. But she was happy back then. Back then she would hold me, tell me how I had transformed her world, how unimaginably good things had proved to be. It swelled me with feeling, made me proud of what we were accomplishing, crafting a life of love after the bitterness of all she told me of her past. It seemed to make the cutting off of family and friends a price I just had to pay. I poured love into the heart of her. For a good few years I was able to fill it near enough to the brim.

  But the craving for drama is insatiable. Again and again that victim role needs playing out. Fresh perpetrators must come in an eternal stream. Rescue, rescue, she has to have rescue. The rescue that never came for her, back when she had genuine need.

  Two Achilles heels, one for each leg. You and your sister. The prospect of losing you. The fear of shattering your world. The need to stay in it, to give you the family you deserved. And my own tickertape chuntering, dust motes dancing. The need to rescue myself from the loss of my own family as I grew.

  As for you, once your own family had shattered. Somehow, despite all the joining up I sensed Mummy doing, the relentless push-pull, you seemed to be making it through. That conversation we had in the car, late in the summer holidays during my first year at Drake Avenue. Me explaining the importance of relationships with both your parents, with your wider family, and how relationships need time invested to keep them strong. It was some kind of turning point. Back at school, starting your next year, you proudly showed me the colour code you’d devised so you knew which books to bring when you came to stay. You moved your rabbit down. A pet for the new place. Lady. A massive Belgian giant cross. No one else had wanted her from the shop. You felt sorry for her, bought her for your own, so she would know love and what it meant to belong. We trained her together. Sustained scars on our forearms from habituating her to being handled. Put that harness on her and took her walking round the estate like a puppy on a lead. You became known as the girl with the huge bunny. You quietly enjoyed the local fame.

  Still there was pressure. The endless Skype calls, the flurrying texts. For the half an hour before she was due to collect you, you would be hotching about, words tumbling over themselves. Every time the same. Like an alarm clock had gone off inside your head, warning you of the grief that was shortly to come. But you were managing it. You were finding your way through.

  For those few months – that September, October, November – it was like I had managed it, too. Broken free to rebuild my life, yet kept the family that was so precious to me. We established rhythms: you and your sister coming every other weekend, every Monday and Tuesday. Dropping you at school, picking you up after, hearing about your days. Cooking for you. Playing board games. Going to the swings. Every week a new DVD in the post from LoveFilm. We decorated my new fridge with words compiled from magnetic letters that had come free with multipacks of Innocent Smoothies. Daddy; your name; your sister’s name. I constructed your wardrobe from a pine kit I bought off the internet, it fitted near exactly across the waist of your room. I left the hardboard back off, so you could step from your sleeping area, brush through your hanging clothes, and emerge into the secret study beyond with its bookshelf and its desk and its chest of drawers. We brought Lady indoors, took her with us to Narnia; laughed as she loped around, nose waffling. The rest of the time, when you weren’t around, I was working at the unit, and doing my own art in the little reception room I’d turned into a studio. For those few months, life felt good.

  But it seems it was intolerable for Mummy. It seems she had to have a supply, had to have someone pouring love into the very heart of her, each and every day. When you were away, did if feel as if her very existence was dissolving? Looking on, it was as if she had sensed your vulnerability; as though she had done everything she possibly could do to have you to herself alone. But it hadn’t sufficed. You were becoming more and more like your sister, able to love both your parents at the same time.

  Looking back on those few short months, I see us as Twenties’ flappers, dancing merrily, twirling our pearl strings, the tassels on our dresses flicking as we go about our moves. The Great War is behind us, we live now in peacetime, we’re throwing ourselves into a life that is good. We think of ourselves as the post-war generation. But our smiles are too broad, our Charlestons too fey; we have no idea how history will soon re-label us. We party under a shadow we’re not even aware of, that will all too soon render our brief gaiety unbearably doomed.

  Them

  Rev’s work is jubilant, there’s no other word. Huge sweeps of helio yellow genuine light, blending into cadmium red orange, all arcing over a cerulean blue sub tinged with dark streaks of phthalo blue. If you’re after an interpretation: a choral dawn over a glistering sea. It isn’t just the colours – vivid, vibrant – it’s the brushwork. Bristles loaded, her arm moves swiftly left to right, left to right, her bangles chinking, as though brooming out canker and cobwebs, leaving gleaming trails of fresh bright paint in her wake. Curtains drawn crisply back, sunlight bursting into a room.

  I watch her for a time, both rejoicing in her ebullience and feeling strangely subdued by it. Hers has been the news we’ve all long craved, and I hadn’t anticipated it affecting me the way it has. Just the week before, a text, out of the blue, from her son – sixteen-year-old Sam – after years of silence interspersed with caustic abuse. It said nothing: a simple Hi Mum. And it said everything. Something had shifted, the ground had buckled, the love she’d been indefatigably dripping in was, at last, bearing fruit. How we all dream of this moment with our own. How many YouTube testimonies we have listened to, and wondered when – if – our lost children could possibly do it, too. And now Rev. Sam. It had truly happened.

  Events had bewildered. He’d come round that evening straight from school, lots of hugs and tears and I’m-sorrys and please-don’t-say-a-words. They were up till midnight, unwrapping newspaper shrouds from around the things of his that she’d carefully stowed once he’d been gone a year. Sharing innumerable do-you-remember-whens? as treasured mementos were unearthed. Like an amazing Christmas. She couldn’t believe the speed at which his rejection had cracked and sheared away and fallen to the ground – even though we know this is what so often happens. The authentic child suddenly released.<
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  The thought, for me, of it happening for you. Daring to hope.

  At intervals: texts buzzing into Sam’s phone like bullets. His father, threatening all-sorts if he didn’t come home. Rev’s phone vibrating, too, threatening worse. Control. It’s all about control. These parents, the gaping wounds inside them, petrified that their child should love any one but them – the harm to them which that would do.

  I’m standing behind seated Rev, looking down on her auburn waves, the patch of pale scalp glimpsed at her crown. Her Indian cotton top. The slender shoulders beneath. Shoulders that have borne much. Now facing many new challenges: the precariousness of her son’s balance in the aftermath of his daring leap. Whether he will manage to stay upright, or fall back again. What impact the sudden shift might have on her still-lost daughter. How Rev must, to begin with, shield Sam from his father’s aggressive desperation – yet, in time, help him to come to understand, and to build a new, different relationship with his dad, if such a thing can be possible. It is never about winning children back. It’s about helping to liberate them so they can truly be themselves.

  I turn away from Rev, and move towards the next easel. Angel. She’d declared herself devoid of inspiration, so I gave her one of my exercises. She chose an oil pastel, Sennelier Prussian blue, and has been walking it in a continuous line around every inch of the A2, creating intricate patterns like the world’s most convoluted maze. At no point, I notice, do her lines cross over themselves – inside Angel is a fearful child, hemmed in by anticipated punishment for breaking rules. A shit time she’s had since our last session. Her younger son’s birthday, the first since she’d been banned from making any contact. She sent him a card, and a small present, some sort of transformer toy that he’s into. Her ex must have been cock-a-hoop; he went straight to the police. She’s been served with contempt papers – back to court next week, no idea what the judge will do: a fine, a suspended sentence, but it could even be prison. Rev said her distress was so great that she bit herself hard and long and didn’t even stop once she’d drawn blood. I can see the livid arc of teeth marks on her podgy hand as she draws. Imagine that: locked up for showing your child love. For fuck’s sake, as Blaze would say.