You

by Phil Whitaker

  I look around at the others, working at their easels: Prof, Zambo, Blaze, Merc. They’re all immersed, focused eyes or furrowed foreheads as they’re absorbed by the projects they’ve set themselves. By day this space is populated by young men with attachment traumas so damaging, so profound, that they’ve spiralled right down, their lives mired in the murky sediment at the bottom of the pond. No prospect of getting anywhere near the surface again – if they ever were there in the first place – let alone breaking through and breathing alpine air. My therapy room. What do I really achieve here, though? Small gains, some times. Courtesy of the unit’s sympathetic director, and with appropriate security clearances, every couple of months this space becomes the evening venue for my session with our group. Art. Royal road to the unconscious. A place for us parents stranded in the no-man’s land of attachment trauma war.

  You don’t have to have any ability; there’s no difference between those who can draw and those who can’t. Representation is just one small facet. Colour, texture, juxtaposition, contrast, form, media, white space. Anything can express mood. Even so, Zambo’s charcoal sketch is impressively true to life: a huge mane-ruffed male lion, standing atop a rocky outcrop, one paw raised as though about to take a next step, his head inclined gently in regard of the cubs just managing to scrabble to the crest of the rise behind. By contrast, Blaze’s piece is abstract, tonal, surprising: overlapping squares of burnt umber, ochre, sienna. After the messiness of Rev’s session, I’d expected leaping flames; roaring fire, not embers. But even as I contemplate, I think I understand.

  Rev’s news – its sweet bitterness has affected us all. The gladness I feel for her makes hope for you both nearer, and at the same time more distant, impossible. Something about someone else breaking the finishing tape when you yourself have indefinite laps still to go. It must be the same for the others. Rev’s ex has controlled their children with an admixture of fear and reward – tumultuous anger if they ever even mention their mum; showers of gifts and treats and ­laissez-faire when they abide by his rules. I wonder how much easier it is for kids caught in that kind of bind to break free – terrorised as they must be by overt rage. Looking on, I’d say Mummy ensnared you in a different kind of mesh, woven from fibres of obligation and guilt. Obligation to worship her; guilt at anything she perceived as betrayal. Fear, too, but – it seems to me, at least – the fear you felt and feel is not about uncontrollable anger. It is fear of her utter disintegration were she to detect any hint of abandonment from you. That’s an altogether more diaphanous net – difficult to discern, even more difficult to untangle – adherent and suffocating as spider’s silk, drawing ever tighter around your flailing limbs, the more you struggle to be free.

  A glance at the wall clock: near enough the two hours gone. We were late starting, Rev bubbling over with her news, so there’s been less time for creation. Time. The stuff Zambo tells me, reporting his reading adventures in popular cosmology. How time, which we think of as constant, slows in the region of a gravitational mass. How a twin living up a mountain ages faster than their sea-level sibling. What is time? Our fourth dimension. It seems to pass ever more quickly as we age. We move through it, our lives branching endlessly with every decision and circumstance. Steps that can’t be retraced. Maybe myriad other existences unfold in alternative universes – perhaps there is a life in which I lecture in fine art at an Oxford college, where I meet someone else, have different children, or no children at all. A life in which there is no you. Would I want that, a world with so much less heartache? Part of me sings ‘My Sweet Lord’. If I’d been given a vision, a clear sight of what the future held for a younger me, would I have swerved away, left Mummy lying on that tartan picnic rug over the road from the Oxford Retreat, wished her the very best of luck with bullying Ellen and the rest of the repetitive victimisation she would experience, grindingly and predictably, until and unless she sorts out the stuff inside her head that makes it all true? No, for your sister. No, for you. But what about for me?

  I move on to Prof’s easel. Her work I usually find difficult to read. Always pencil. Sometimes just masses of messy scribbles, as though never satisfied with what it was she’d been trying to achieve. It surprises me in some ways, given the orderliness of her mind – though that might be the point. The choice of monochrome fits, though – the antithesis of the drama that has consumed her and her children’s lives. Her ex-husband, another attachment trauma victim – the mirror image of the screwed-up father who was emotion­ally un­available to Prof when she was a girl. Christ, how the patterns repeat. This evening, Prof’s piece is recognisable: a solitary wind turbine. She’s tried to give an impression of movement to the blades. Harnessing the wind. I wonder how she’s feeling about Rev. Joy, of course. But whether a part of her resents or despairs. Whether in a corner of her heart she wonders why she wasn’t the first of us to make a breakthrough. She’s the oldest of us by a few years. Her kids are young adults now – the older two, anyway – just like you. Does she fear her ex’s indoctrination will prove too powerful, that her love will never overcome? It’s a fear I all too often share. She clings to her inside-out knowledge of developmental psychology – that even though we deem people adults at eighteen, the average age to attain fully fledged critical thinking is more like twenty-­five. I lay a hand on her shoulder, and give her a smile when she glances up. She’s been such an encouragement to each of us at so many times. My own mentor when I joined. I wonder how far down the sands have drained in her personal hourglass. Sometimes, she must need encouragement, too.

  I don’t talk much during my sessions. I set things up, demonstrate the media available, make hints or suggestions, urge an absence of self-consciousness, then let everyone get on with it. If they ask something, or want to discuss their work, so be it. There can be value in interpretation. It’s as though a piece of art becomes an external embodiment, an objective vessel into which emotions are poured and can be talked about at arm’s length. But most often simply the process of creation returns the greatest rewards. Some kind of language other than words with which to articulate, process, and release.

  Merc I visit last of all. I’ve been aware of his stillness, how little he has been drawing. If I’m honest, I’ve been avoiding his easel, apprehensive at what I might find. What he’s going through. Last time he visited his son, Mark, the lad just screamed at him: You’re an embarrassment! I hate you! I hate having a cripple for a dad! You’re a fucking cripple! You’re no dad to me at all!

  Zambo has been meeting with him between times, enacting our crisis response. Merc’s been off work for a couple of weeks now, his sleep shot to kingdom come, his nerves all over the place. I’m sympathetic, I know how it feels, but I’m not sure sick leave is the wisest course. In my darkest months, when the hounds of hell were gnashing at me, fangs trying to gouge my flesh, it was this space here, and the rituals of working with colleagues and my chaotic charges, that kept me sane. Structure. Purpose. Maybe delivering the post doesn’t give Merc that. Maybe it’s too solitary, too mundane. Even so, I worry about him having so much time on his hands, time to brood on what’s being done. He needs location, not dislocation. He needs occupation for his mind.

  He gives me a wan smile as I approach, then turns to look once again at his A2. You only need one hand to make art. Even if you’re entirely limbless, a brush clenched between teeth will do. A child’s stick figure drawing. Round face with banana grin. Sticky out ears and tufty hair. Sausage body. Line-drawn limbs ending in splayed out feet and hand. Two legs, one arm. A boy’s-eye view of a cripple.

  ❦

  The unit is too far from the Half Moon to go for a post-session drink, but the others hang back for a debrief once the newbies have gone. Blaze in his MX5. Cheryl dropping Merc home in her Focus.

  It’s fucking amazing, I say to Rev.

  She grins and looks happier than a person can possibly be.

  Where is he tonight? I ask.

&n
bsp; Back at mine, she says. Her voice is shot through with exuberance. Playing on his DS and messaging his mates. It’s wonderful to see him so free. Back at his dad’s he had to be doing chores, or doing things with his dad the whole time, just to make his dad feel important and needed. He had to beg for time to do homework. She shakes her head and gives another grin. She’s still getting to grips with the snippets of what his life has been like these past few years.

  I have a twinge of misgiving: it must be so tempting, once a child returns, to spoil them, to make them feel this is the place to be. Christ knows, I’d find that hard to resist myself. But that would just be playing the same game. It’s a tightrope. But; for the chance to walk it.

  Prof either reads my mind, or else she has the same thought. She gives Rev a little pep talk about maintaining healthy parenting, enforcing sensible bedtimes and boundaries and meals and shit. Rev’s nodding and laughing, like she knows all this, and knows she should be doing it, and swears she will but just now she’s so over the fucking moon to have him back that she’s just going to roll with it for a precious few days.

  I’m kind of worried about Merc, Zambo says. Not to detract from your news, Rev – he holds out a placating hand – it’s truly great. But he’s troubling me.

  Merc’s been to the doctor’s, Zambo tells us. Flurried consultation, no real connection – left with a sick note, a prescription for antidepressants, and a few tablets of something to help him sleep.

  Has he got family, old friends, around? Rev asks. People to be with?

  Zambo shakes his head.

  What about counselling? Prof asks.

  Zambo exhales, short and hard. He doesn’t need to speak. We all know how hit and miss that is. I think back to the therapist I tried, shortly after the first anniversary of your disappearance – it’s true what they say about how grief resurges. Roland, his name was. I’d gone beyond anger, tearfulness, bargaining; I was dead inside, finding it hard to get up in the mornings, impossible to eat. Unable to muster interest in my own art, let alone the outpourings from my troubled charges in this room. Finally, I went for help. Found Roland on the BACP website. Older, wiser, loads of post-nominals. But so few people understand, even those supposedly qualified. They bring their own interpretations, shoehorn your experience through the holes in the shape-sorter of their own beliefs. Things that look like something else. If you don’t know something can happen, you can’t even consider it. I remember him, asking me what I thought the future held for you and me. I told him: I wasn’t even sure I’d ever see you again. I can picture him, smiling superciliously, smug in his professionalism, reframing your rejection as normal adolescent rebellion, and indicating that he thought the most fruitful line for us to work on was my tendency to catastrophise and fear the worst.

  I’m going to keep seeing him, Zambo says, but I could use some help.

  I could chip in, I volunteer. We’ve done this before, me and Zambo, shoring up a dad in despair, keeping their head above water until the torrents begin to subside. #drowningdads. I’d felt that empathic connection with Merc, right from the word go. The rescuer in me would find reward. I picture myself, inviting him round to my small studio in the outhouse behind my home, doing some extra work with him, helping him put flesh, muscle, on his stick-thin cripple-man. Maybe even growing it a new limb.

  Did you go with him? Prof asks. That last visit to his son?

  Zambo shakes his head. I didn’t need to, he says. He said someone else was going to come.

  We part with hugs and shoulder slaps, Prof, Rev, Zambo, and me. The core. I lift Rev clean off the floor, so powerful are the feelings that wash through me when I bear-grip her. Prof’s session next, in a few short weeks. I wonder what fresh news Rev might bring us then: her daughter back, too, perhaps; her son growing fast in his liberation.

  Last to leave, I go round tidying up the therapy room, unclipping A2s from the easels. People are free to take what they draw, but you’d be surprised how often they don’t. It’s as though the stuff, once out of their hearts, is best left behind. Prof’s pencil windmill. Zambo’s lion and cub. I pause, admiring it again. A memory: taking you and your sister to The Lion King, the stage show of the film you both so loved. Amazing animal costumes, soul-stirring music. The young cub, Simba, being led astray by the evil uncle. The father, Mufasa, always with his son even after he was dead.

  I move on, gathering Merc’s stick-figure cripple. Blaze’s sombre squares. Angel’s infernal maze. I feel faint uneasiness. It’s been a weird session. I try to put my finger on the cause of my disquiet. It’s the debrief, I decide. Normally we discuss all the newbies, Prof taking us through them methodically, one by one. I remember us discussing Merc, how I’m to help Zambo support him. But we didn’t mention Blaze or Angel at all. What’s true for me must be true for the others: I was so preoccupied with Rev’s breakthrough. It’s thrown us out of kilter, distracted our focus. It felt inappropriate to dwell on bad stuff when Rev’s news has been so good. And it’s sent each of us off into brooding about our own lost children. We didn’t do what we were supposed to do.

  I go to Rev’s easel last of all, thinking how cheering it will be to see her joyous seascape one last time. The A2 pad has a blank sheet uppermost. Rev, alone, has taken her artwork home.

  I douse the lights and lock my therapy room. I think of you, what you might be doing at that moment. It’s late, near enough half-ten. Perhaps you’re out at some pub with your mates. Maybe with a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend. I just don’t know. Possibly you’re tucked up in bed, reading. Or messaging on a group chat, or polishing off some forgotten essay, your room softly lit by a pool of bedside light. Do you think of your dad, alone in those moments? Who is the dad that comes to your mind? Which version of me?

  I drop the keys off at security, wish Jake a good night, and walk through puddles to where my car is parked. All the years our group has been meeting, all the fervent imaginings of reunification, of soul-healing. And now Rev and her son. The dreams can come true.

  I blip the lock, and climb in. The dreams can come true.

  Me

  I did art with dying grown-ups, with bald kids with cancer, with Down’s Syndrome people living in a supported home. Last placement in my training: adult mental health. Based at the old Littlemore – you might see it if you’re on attachment out that way, it’s just across from the Warneford. Not that you’d realise it was once a hospital. Once sold off, the developers gave it a fancy facelift and renamed it St George’s Park, a way of making things palatable to those purchasing luxury apartments in a former lunatic asylum. No idea why St George; it must be the dragon-slaying thing.

  I have this one guy. Barry. I don’t know much about him, not when he first pitches up looking bewildered and wrung-out, other than that he’s coming in a last-ditch attempt to relieve hideous insomnia. PTSD isn’t an accepted concept back then – sure, it’s been described several years before in the States, but it takes an interminable time for new understandings to catch on; an eternity till people round the world know such things can actually happen. No one in Oxford has the first idea. All anyone knows about Barry is that whenever he falls to sleep, he wakes soon after, screaming and sweat-soaked from intrusive nightmares. The psychs have tried all manner of drugs, the shrinks have done their talking stuff. Nothing has helped. The terrors are so traumatic Barry can’t vocalise them. It’s got so bad he doesn’t dare drop off anymore – he keeps himself going with constant coffee, Coke, fags, and Pro Plus caffeine. His mind is scrambled. He can no longer manage independent life. Barry has let go his grip, and withdrawn from the world. Barry is going insane.

  The first two sessions with him, a few days apart, are painful. He sits there, staring at the easel and the blank A2 for an hour and a half, won’t even choose a pastel or a pencil or a stick of charcoal. He’s got a fine tremor; it makes the smoke trail up from his cigarettes in wavy lines. His hair is lank. He stinks of BO. I
sit like the proverbial citrus fruit. I don’t do talking, not unless clients want to. Twice, I discover how long it takes for ninety minutes to tick past.

  The third session is more of the same, right up to the last moment. Just as I’m scraping my chair back and getting to my feet, he reaches out and grabs a Caran d’Ache – bismuth green – and draws a Star of David.

  That happens a lot. The really powerful thing happens right at the end.

  I sit back down, staring at the six-pointed star, my mind in overdrive. It feels like a breakthrough, and I’m so inexperienced I want to know what it means. I remember from his file that he used to be in the army, and suddenly I’m thinking concentration camps, and skin-covered skeletons staggering towards their liberators, and rooms stacked with skulls and bones. But he’s too young, he can’t have been more than a lad when the war was on. And he’s solid Berkshire, not a scrap of Jewish in him.