You

by Phil Whitaker

  It’s so tempting, to prolong the session, try to tease more out of him, but I remember Peter Lyle’s golden rule: never go on. Something occurs in the final minute, that’s when it’s meant to happen. And never express your own take on an image – that can scupper the whole thing.

  So I stand once more. And Barry gets up and leaves.

  Next session, a few days later, he walks in and announces he had the first night’s sleep in years. He’s scrubbed up, too, and has had a shave. I’m blown away, and perplexed too, with no understanding of what’s gone on.

  We have another half-dozen meetings. Bit by bit, as he daubs seemingly random colours and shapes, always choosing those Neocolor crayons, he tells his story. It’s as though in occupying his hands, his mind is at last able to visit memory. He takes himself back decades – things often take years and years to surface – to when he was an NCO, and his troop was camped out in some isolated spot on exercise in Germany. The kind of night that brass monkeys elect to stay indoors. The lot of them staving off the sub-zero temperatures by gathering round a massive campfire. How his senior officer got roaring drunk, and they got into a barney about something he can no longer recall, and somehow in the mêlée Barry gets pushed into the fire and suddenly his uniform’s ablaze from top to toe and there’s people shouting and trying to pull his burning clothes off him and rolling him on the ground like a flaming carpet. Searing, excruciating, nerve-screeching pain. Eighteen months in a burns unit, multiple operations. You wouldn’t know it to look at him: the skin of his face is unharmed. But at one point he draws up his sleeves and shows me his arms: the glassy gnarled scar tissue where once there was supple flesh, hairless and purple and grim.

  I let him talk, and I listen. And I watch his movements, frenetic at times, at other times funereal. He works in primary colours, as though back in infants and learning everything again. And all the while, nagging away at me, I’m thinking: why the six-pointed star? The way that unlocked everything. I never find out, not directly, because I don’t think even Barry knows. And it doesn’t matter – the transformation is miraculous. Slowly but surely, Barry unfolds into a human being again, his sleeping evermore sound. His consultant seeks me out to express his amazement. At one point, though, I think I see it. Barry has a fleeting memory – his whole body alight, all hell breaking loose around him, and him craning his neck and holding his head up for all he is worth, which somehow keeps it out of the flames. The rest of him is scarred to kingdom come, but he can hide that under clothes. His scalp and his face – that which we show to the world – were saved. What he fixed his eyes on, when he was keeping his head so desperately aloft, was the star-speckled crystal night sky.

  End of training, you and your sister four and two. I’d sold a few pieces of my own work, and had one commission – three abstracts based on the curled forms and ginger tones of some North Oxford don’s beloved cats – but they’d made nothing more than minor contributions to the family income. A job was needed. I didn’t want to leave Oxford, it felt like home, and maybe there would have been something for me there. But Mummy wanted out. It got too difficult for her to stay. There was Clare, another mum down at the far end of Chatsworth Road, once a friend, now turned foe. Ditto someone called Jo. The bitter recitations of their betrayals and bullying. Triangular living. And Mummy’s carefully crafted story about her parents being ‘no longer around’ – told to all who ever asked, to shut out awkward questions as to why you had no grandparents involved. An old acquaintance of hers from Yorkshire came to live a few streets away, the daughter of some friends of Ted and Gloria’s. Mummy living in dread of her artful autobiography being exposed.

  The triumph with Barry. I’d decided on mental health. The job advertised at the West Country medium secure unit. Working with lads in their late teens, with the most troubled of souls. Attachment trauma writ large. On a predictable conveyor belt: born into abusive, neglectful, dysfunctional families; then to more of the same in children’s homes; graduation to young offender institutions then on to prison, with only Broadmoor left to go. There aren’t too many jobs going in art therapy, yet I was the only applicant. The four of us upped sticks and moved westwards.

  Stevie Buchanan. So far from the Wirral. So far from being Steve, and now with a family of my own. Two precious children. And a marriage that was fast tumbling down. Mummy, no longer any incentive it seemed to keep the cap clamped over the lens of her projector – she had her kids now, all she’d ever wanted to own. I became her latest perpetrator, victimising her in everything I did. I couldn’t figure out what was happening, trying to be a dad, getting to grips with my new career, living away from the familiar, with a wife who month by month became someone I’d never known. I knew nothing of Karpman and his triangle then. I had no idea how I’d become the person I seemed to have become.

  We staggered on through your first years at school, yours and your sister’s, living a weird existence. Me trying to persuade Mummy to get help, her telling me the marriage was done. I should have upped and left. But my Achilles heels. And the terror I felt for you both – the thought of your family disintegrating – was also terror of my own.

  An article one weekend, in the Guardian magazine. Mummy shoving it across at me: ‘That’s what you can do’. Some middle-ranking actress and her husband, living separate lives, conducting new relationships, but still living under the same roof for the sake of their kids. It wasn’t what I wanted, not for myself, not for you two. I carried on sticking it out. I see now that what self-respect I had was dwarfed by my fear of losing my family. Contempt unleashed. Derision at the way I would sit on the sofa, curled up with a book. Disdain for my art, and how little it brought in. Disparagement of the clapped-out Peugeot that was all we could afford. Humiliation at dinners with other couples, parents of your friends from school, Mummy vocally deriding sex as a filthy thing. The averted eyes of the others, them wondering what on earth must be going on. Her screaming at me: Why don’t you just go off and fuck other women! And then to truly scramble my thinking: those bizarre interludes, lasting months at a time, in which some random thing would cause me to be switched in my triangular roles – back from perpetrator to be rescuer again. Mummy scouring the internet for the best hotels to go for a weekend-a-deux, booking us a room with a Jacuzzi in the en suite. Dancing beguilingly in front of the mirror. Writing a card to me saying I was the most supportive partner she could ever have hoped for, and re-proposing marriage. Then just weeks later, finding her late-night stream of consciousness, the writing scrawled and unravelling: If I’m ever to escape depression, I have to be rid of him.

  Back to bitter cold hostility again.

  I should have upped sticks and left. But my Achilles heels. And that childhood terror of my own.

  We have a sense of ourselves, an internal image, formed from our attachment figures when we are young. As we go through life, it gets reflected back to us by the people we relate to, as though we get constantly to see ourselves in the looking glass. But what if we have stumbled into a grotesque fairground; what if we’re trapped in a bizarre hall of mirrors, every reflection giving an ever-changing but always distorted view of ourselves? Squat and ugly. Menacing elongated head. Hugely swollen praying mantis eyes. Bit by bit our sense of our true self becomes corrupted, malign. We no longer know who we truly are.

  Ma, Mark, Gerry, Julie – people who’ve known me for years on end, people who could have been correctives, mirroring back the Stevie they had always known. Gone. Cut off. I’d allowed myself to become isolated. Fatally. Distorted images were all I was shown. Achieving that isolation is key – it consolidates power and control. That’s why, I believe, Mummy isolated you from me, from your extended family. That way, it seems to me, you were hers to shape alone.

  My art took on strange new directions, disturbing abstracts, dark dark tones. Utterly unappealing for anyone to hang in their home. Year after year I failed to sell. I couldn’t even find a local gallery to ag
ree to an exhibition.

  Cash ever shorter. Mummy cutting her hours, embattled by fresh workplace bullying, by vindictive colleagues who meant her harm. Triangles, triangles. Then quitting her job altogether, saying she couldn’t go on. Every penny needing watching. Every penny soon gone.

  An email from an old contact, a chance to tutor a residential, like – once upon a happier time – Mark and I had done. I took a week’s leave, set off for a rambling farmhouse in Devon, sixteen aspiring artists to mentor. One, a beguiling life painter from London. Mercy. Kenyan skin taut over angular cheekbones. Sitting together in tutorial, discussing the nude self-portrait she was working on. Her lifting one leg up, resting her foot on the seat of her chair, her skirt sliding midway down her thigh, running her hands contemplatively up and down her calf. Me feeling so utterly alone. Why don’t you just go off and fuck other women? That wasn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was to be loved and known.

  Gaslighting, that’s what Prof calls it – the capacity to twist and re-remember reality to fit whatever is needed for the victim role. I had cheated on her. I was having an affair. Point-blank denial of all she had said and done. All that stuff, separate lives under the one roof, go fuck other women: a truly double-edged sword. It seemed that while I was emasculated, subservient, she could perfect her victimhood with the thought of what she’d had to give me carte blanche to do. I don’t believe she ever thought I would, though – I think she’d sensed my Achilles heels. The fury when I escaped her control. The blows from the other side of that strop-sharpened blade. The poor betrayed wife. The devoted partner cruelly undone. The eternal victim.

  And once I had gone, scapegoat expelled from the family home? For those few short months of interwar, she appeared to be basking in victory. She had rescued her victim within. Damsel in distress turned St George. But it couldn’t last. Just as cutting off Ted and Gloria, and Ellen, and Katy with the double-barrelled name, and Clare, and Jo, and Ma, and Gerry and Gaby, and your Aunty, and Julie, and Mark were never enough. It seems that, until and unless she sorts out the stuff in her head that makes it all true, the cycle has to repeat, endlessly. Over and over again.

  You. Tickertape chuntering. A projection screen for her inner distress. A fresh victim in need of rescue.

  More than that. It seems to me she has to have supply – of constant adulation, of never-ending admiration for the poor-me who has somehow made good. Those days and weekends when you were with me, over at Drake Avenue: were they interminable lengths of time without you as the mirror in which she could look? Without an adoring reflection to gaze upon, without that image of herself as perfect victim surmounting all that the world could do, was there nothing to see but that which truly lies within?

  Tell me if I’m wrong, but this is how things played out, isn’t it? Some of it I know; some I’ve surmised; still others I’ve pieced together from scraps of your sister’s conversation.

  She began sleeping in your bed with you.

  She would fall apart every time you came to leave.

  Blizzards of texts and Skypes, checking you were all right whenever you were with me.

  Taking you into her confidence, those secret chats about things only you were privileged to know.

  Referring to me as Steven – Daddy no more.

  Arranging things that happened to clash with whatever I might plan, meaning you had to choose. Daring you to abandon her.

  Drenching you with sympathy whenever I told you No.

  Hugging you supportively when you disrespected me on the phone.

  Uttering words that meant you had to see me, when every ounce of her being screamed at you: I can’t stand for you to go!

  Leaning on you so heavily that your young frame, sheathed in its pretty print dress, was buckling and crumpling like a tin can beneath a juggernaut’s wheel.

  It seemed to me that she had to have you.

  Then despite it all, against such huge odds, you started to win through. Our chat about the importance of relationships with both your parents. You moved your rabbit down. Colour coded your books for school. More and more like your sister, able to love me as well as her. Able to dance the Charleston in those months of interwar.

  I think it terrified her.

  It must have felt like she was losing control.

  It must have felt that she had no choice. That she had to do whatever it would take to have you for herself alone.

  FIVE

  Outbreak of War

  Across the river there’s the extraordinary castellated house standing on its own small island, the Thames flowing past on either side. 1 Folly Bridge. Brown brick, white-rendered statue niches. There was an art dealer lived here in my day, he ran a gallery from the downstairs. It was called One. Now it’s a riverside café, white metal tables on its terrace, the chairs tipped forward in mourning of the summer just passed. I can’t remember his name, the gallery owner. It’s on the tip of my tongue. A flamboyant character, gay as anything. He took some of my work, used to invite me in for long chats over coffee. I don’t think he rated my art, I think he just wanted to see if I was a potential conquest. He sold a few pieces, though, enough to make a difference to what I was earning training in art therapy. Enough to encourage me.

  What the hell was his name? Something unusual, like Vaughan, or Rupe – but it was neither of those. He was South African, originally. Smoker. With a heavy gold voice. A Svengali character to aspiring artists in the city back then. I’m frustrated that I can’t recollect what he was called.

  Other memories flow all too easily. Along the towpath there’s a great long hedge where we used to come, you and I, to see the ‘tiny birds’ as you called them in your toddlerhood. We’d crumble up bread crusts, then crouch at a distance, patiently waiting for them to feel all was safe, my legs sometimes going to sleep with the restricted blood supply. Then down they’d come, out from their privet sanctuary, first the few boldest, soon joined by a couple of dozen more. Sparrows. Pecking up the crumbs, tussling over the bigger bits. You loved to watch them. We hated it if a passer-by came; with a flurry of wings the tiny birds would be gone. It would take another long age before they reappeared.

  Off the towpath, on to the top of Chatsworth Road. How they flooded it one winter, a few inches of water sluiced over the pavements. You and your sister splashing through it in wellies, wondrous at how your world had suddenly changed. How it showed in exquisite detail the subtle relief of the roadways: in one place homeowners had the pumps out, stemming the rising tide in their cellars, while twenty yards away the tarmac rose gently and broke the surface like a whale’s back, and the houses remained dry. It was all managed. The river authority first filled the floodplains to the east of the Abingdon Road then, when they were at capacity, they allowed a controlled amount of water to wash out over Grandpont. The next winter, when the river again rose to overflowing, it was Kidlington that took the hit. Hard choices. Spreading the pain.

  On past 42, the Victorian terraced house that was your earliest childhood home. I pause for a moment and contemplate its cream roughcast render. The side alley where you used to help me sawing wood for jobs around the place. The hypericum hedging is overgrown. I picture us, extra-corporeal you and me, peering through that bay window, watching you sustain your first attachment wound. I peer up through the front right-hand window, trying to see if the stars might still be on the ceiling of what was your nursery. Unlikely, after so long, but for some reason I wish it were true. It is impossible to tell, though, not in the daylight. If I were to come back later, if the curtains were to remain undrawn, then maybe they might still be doing their glow-in-the-dark thing.

  Who are you now? I’m trying to reach you again, but feeling nothing but cold silence in reply. Twenty-one. Studying medicine, but still so young. At what age will you discover the sides to a story; understand that truths are refracted through prisms and lenses that have been fired in past furnaces, and
if the blast was white-hot then the distortion can be severe? It took me till well into my thirties; into my forties for the full extent to hit home. I may be dead by the time you get there – already I’ve lost contemporaries. The span of our lives is for none of us to know.

  The envelope arrived ten days before Christmas, thumping through the Drake Avenue letterbox one morning when I was home alone. The franking mark of Mummy’s solicitors. Wodges of A4 paper, copious court forms. Words leaping out at me. Emergency hearing, scheduled for a date just days away. Photocopies of your mother’s affidavit: how I had beaten her, tortured her emotionally and psychologically; how I had emotionally and psychologically abused you and your sister, too. Application for a prohibited steps order, banning me from contact direct or indirect, excluding me from a half-mile radius of your home and school. Faxes sent from her lawyer to your head teacher: there were grave concerns about me; if I came to school to collect you then the police should be called.

  Five days to prepare, and in the run-up to Christmas. Not a barrister to be had in the whole of the south-west of England. My solicitor – a well-meaning man used simply to batting about sums of money – saying he’d do his best for me, but he was no advocate. Getting me to pen my own affidavit: how Mummy’s perceptions were benighted, causing her to see abuse everywhere where there is none. The concern I have over your care-taking behaviour, how I can see you developing a burden of responsibility for keeping Mummy’s distressing emotions contained.

  Four days before. Two policemen at my door, arresting me on suspicion of domestic violence. Courteous. But anything I say may be used in evidence against me. They seem rueful about what they’re doing; they let me send Gerry a distress text before taking me to their car. Hand on top of my head as I was getting in. Five minutes down the road, heading for Yeovil and the nearest custody suite, their radio suddenly crackling to life. The CID man telling them to de-arrest me and take me home. Them telling me he’d interviewed Mummy, and decided it was a crock of shit. Dropping me off at Drake Avenue, coming in to check I was OK. Telling me how they see this time and again, most recently a week ago, always in the context of divorce or separation.