You

by Phil Whitaker

  Three days before. Two social workers turning up to interview me about the ways I was supposed to have bullied and intimidated you down the years. Another crock of shit. Nothing I’m hearing, the social worker declared, clicking the lid emphatically back on her pen, is anything other than a normal-range parent might sometimes have to do.

  Crocks of shit, but their purpose was achieved, the damage was done. In court a few days later, the bearded judge acutely discomfited, having a go at Mummy and me, trying to tear each other apart. That’s how he saw it, the fuckwit. Shouted my solicitor down from saying anything. Too much power in such inadequate hands. Saying he had nothing to go on given the short notice of the hearing, nothing except the initial enquiries of relevant agencies, which had revealed investigations into me by both police and social services. As a precautionary measure, until detailed reports were obtained, I was banned from contact with you or your sister. He was sure I would understand.

  Afterwards, my solicitor didn’t know what to say. Apart from sorry. A loving dad barred from seeing his children, on nothing more than one woman’s word and a bunch of preconceptions. #dodgydad. #dangerousdad. We all know how cruel men can be.

  Until you’ve been in it, seen so-called justice at first hand, you wouldn’t believe it possible. But we know differently, me and my clan. People think it’s all he-said-she-said. No one wants to believe there could be such aggressive all-out war.

  Months it had taken for you to gain your confidence, to fit reliably into your other family home. Then another earthquake, and every tentatively reconstructed building came crashing back down. How did she play it with you? Oh my darling, how awful, the judge says you’re not to see Steven after all, that it would be dangerous for you to be around him. Did she pour out sympathy? I’m so sorry, darling, what a terrible shock. But what can I say? Steven’s brought it on himself, all the things he’s done. The judge has decided he’s a very bad man. And the judge must know best. He is a judge, after all.

  Five months to clear my name. Five months in which – is this how it was? – she could tell you her truths without any counter-experience of my love. Five whole months when, at the deepest level of your being, it felt like I had abandoned you. I can picture you, out on mother-daughter horse-rides, side by side, your sister – never the equestrian – elsewhere, Mummy murmuring confidences for your ears alone. How your sister’s too young to take this in; only you are old enough, mature enough, to understand. They will be your special secrets, yours and hers. How good it is to have you to confide in. The thing is, darling, the police actually arrested Steven. You know what that means, don’t you? And the social workers have been round. You don’t think they would stop him seeing you unless they were really concerned, do you? They must think he’s incredibly bad.

  What do you do when something like that happens? I felt I was falling, spinning into a bottomless void, hair dishevelled, clothes being ripped off me by the force of the wind, plunging down and down wishing it would somehow stop, anyhow stop, but knowing if it did it would be because I had slammed into the ground. Driving my car, thinking how would it be if I simply failed to turn, and ploughed straight into that wall. A moment of violent rending, then nothing. Thinking of your great-grandfather, those generations before, wedging himself in his chair, his lips and teeth wide round that shotgun barrel, stock jammed against the edge of the desk to prevent recoil. Feeling the cold smoothness of the trigger under his thumb.

  Google. You go to Google and try to find answers. And in this day and age it doesn’t take long to find people exactly like you. Secret Facebook groups, closed discussion forums. Thousands and thousands of members, up and down the country – internationally too. #dodgydads. #mankymums. Support groups in the UK, the US, Australia. Every now and then the mods have a shout-out: where do the newbies live? And you’re put in touch with others of your clan who live near you, the clan you hadn’t known even existed. Prof, and Rev, and Zambo, too.

  ❦

  The Chatsworth Arms, where I used to go drinking with my neighbour Gil after we’d played squash, is now a coffee shop and bijou B&B. A little further along there’s the intersection with Whitehouse Road. But this much at least is unchanged. The wall bounding the garden of number 164. Half a dozen courses of bricks. Height just perfect for a small child to sit on. Our watching-the-world-go-by wall.

  Two thirty. I’d planned to be here well before. Yes sir, your bus will definitely be running. You will definitely get your train.

  Bollocks to that. What time I have, will have to do.

  I sit myself down, the bricks cold through the denim of my jeans. Nothing on my phone, nothing from you. There never has been, not in seven years. Why did I think it would be any different now?

  What you have been through. On the surface, it looks straightforward: child rejects parent, parent must really suck. #fuckupparent. Simple.

  Only it’s so complex. You’re battered day after day with a narrative that doesn’t square with your experience. Some things are reinterpretable. So the ordinary boundaries of regular parenting – the rules and the expectations, the things you must and must not do – become oppression and bullying. All kids rail against their parents. What a mind-fuck, though, when one of their parents joins in with them against the other one. Other stuff – all the love, and goodness, and care, and compassion – that can’t be made to fit. And the picture that’s being painted is the one you must live up to – Crack! Yah! – if you are to be joined up with the herd. So you box it away, all the psyche-rending contradictions, hammer three inch nails in to seal up the lid, dig a deep hole in your heart and bury it, tipping from your mother’s mix of stone, sharp sand, and cement a load of glutinous concrete that will keep the contents from ripping your soul in two. Then you can live. Then you can survive. But the you that survives is not you.

  How do I know this? The times I’ve felt my faith waver, beaten and ground down by your implacable silence. Those times they would shore me up, Prof, Rev, Zambo too. Watching YouTube videos of adult survivors, confessing the hatred they’d felt towards their #fuckupparent, yet at one and the same time how they’d clung – in the quiet solitude of their room – to the cards, messages, and presents that had somehow got through. Hostages in their own homes. How the thing they now valued above absolutely anything is that their other parent never gave up on them.

  Art, you can’t give up. You mustn’t. She needs you. It doesn’t look like it, but she does.

  Prof, telling me that all these alienated kids are out there on social media, checking up on the parent they can’t love, wanting to know they’re strong and all right. Wanting to know that they don’t have to be responsible for their emotional welfare, too.

  Facebook. Prof advising me to change my settings to public. I couldn’t be sure at first. Occasional memes I’d posted would turn up on your public-facing page – that could have been coincidence; these things go round everywhere. But then Ma tripped and fell and fractured her wrist. I put a message up about it. Within half an hour your Grandma had an email from you, hoping she got well soon.

  You’re out there, watching.

  Dad-dy! A little jump up. Arms round my shoulders, legs round my waist. The innocent girl I know is inside you. Who needs to be allowed to love, and be loved by, her daddy, too.

  I take my canvas roll bag, extract my easel, erect it on the pavement in front of me. From time to time, cars come round the corner and pass by. None is burgundy – that colour is no longer even glancingly fashionable. I unfurl the A2 and clip the paper on the board. I’ve brought pastels and putty rubbers with me, in a seasoned wooden case that has seen much battering over the years. Pastels: capable of rendering the most evocative sketches. Possible, through pressure, to create some semblance of texture, too. As the hands of my watch draw closer to the hour, I begin to draw as I am waiting for you.

  Them

  Merc’s house is on an estate in Radstock, fiftee
n minutes’ drive from my village home. It’s a 1970s semi built of brick and uPVC, with an overhanging roof that forms a porch, which keeps me dry while I wait. The front door is double-glazed with swirly frosted glass, into which, the other couple of times I’ve visited, Merc’s pixelated form has coalesced as he’s come down the hallway to let me in. Though I ring again, and ring a third time, nothing moves.

  His adapted Astra is parked on the drive. Its headlights and radiator grille look like a face; its expression strikes me as forlorn.

  I’ve got his landline on my phone. I can hear it trilling from somewhere deep inside the house. I give it twenty, thirty rings then hang up.

  I call Zambo. Do you know what Merc’s up to, I ask. I’m off today, I said I’d drop round, but he’s not at home.

  Zambo doesn’t know. He doesn’t think he’s gone back to work, not the way he’s been. I have to agree.

  I don’t have Angel’s number, but Rev does. I write it on the back of my hand as she reads the digits out. I can picture them, Angel and Merc, off on some walk together, or round at her place drinking tea. It rings for a long time and I imagine the conversation: Do you want to get that? No, leave it, they’ll leave a message if it’s important. But eventually Angel answers. Hello, Angel, I say, it’s Art. From the support group? Sorry to trouble you. Have you got Merc with you?

  She hasn’t. She says she’ll come over. I say I don’t think that’s necessary but she’s gone, hung up on me.

  The back garden’s reached by way of a wooden gate. I have to get my hand over the top to slide back the bolt, but then I’m in. Weedy flower beds, cracked concrete pathway, mildewed TP trampoline. I have a sudden vision: Mark, Merc’s son, bouncing joyfully. It’s gone almost as soon as it’s come.

  The rain is steady, insistent. It’s cold on my shaven scalp. There’s a sliding patio door at the back of the house, locked from the inside when I tug it. I bang on the glass. Hello? Merc? It’s Art!

  Silence.

  Through the double glazing I see the lounge, running the length of the house, a plate and mug on the floor by the sofa. Huge TV in the corner, screen blank. This was the family home. His ex decamped without warning to her mother’s, taking their boy with her, controlling all access with fierce hostility. What would it be like to be living here still, surrounded by reminders? The Arsenal duvet on his bed, cold and unrucked night after night. The jumble of outgrown trainers in the cupboard beneath the stairs. The cot and the baby toys stored up in the loft, intended to be passed to Mark when he had children of his own.

  Like living in a mausoleum.

  No one in at the semi next door. The neighbour on the other side – a fat old dear with ankles the size of elephant legs – is out of puff by the time she answers my knock. Just for a minute I can’t remember Merc’s real name. Eric! No, she doesn’t know anyone called Eric. No, she doesn’t even know who lives there. There’s bitterness in her voice. They keep themselves to themselves. They’ve never done a thing for me.

  Zambo again, on the mobile. He’s way over in Portishead, supervising the affixing of labels to a billion bottles of continental beer. There’s nothing he can do. I’m on my own. He thinks I should call in a welfare check. I knew he’d say that. It’s in the crisis protocol Prof drew up for the running of the group.

  Prof’s phone goes to voicemail.

  Merc could just be out shopping. Or at a doctor’s appointment. Or having his prosthesis serviced or something.

  I hate to be dramatic, but I punch in 999.

  Rev rings me back a few minutes later. Any joy? she wants to know. I’m waiting for the police, I tell her, can you come over? Oh God, she would, really, at any other time, but Sam’s having a rough ride at the moment and she’s got to stay with him.

  The officer who attends is half my age. His radio keeps interrupting as I run the whole scenario through. No, I’m just a friend. No, he doesn’t have too many other friends, and I’ve spoken to those that I know. No, I don’t know who his next of kin are. No, they’re separated – that’s the whole problem – I don’t think he’d want her to be called. He does the same stuff as me – ringing the bell, trying the back garden, asking the neighbour – all with the same result. Every now and then, the despatcher squawks from the receiver clipped to his lapel: nothing from his employers, nothing from the hospital, nothing from police or fire or social, nothing from any agency at all. Then his inspector barks out, giving him the go ahead.

  He has some kind of battering ram in the boot of his Astra. A couple of feet of thick dense rubber, with handles near either end. Before he sets to, he radios for the boarder-uppers to be summoned to secure the property when he’s done. Takes a fucking age for them to come usually, he tells me, sounding pretty grim.

  He starts at the door, the ram thudding next to where the lock is. The whole frame jolts visibly, but nothing gives. Again and again. He grunts with each blow, like John McEnroe. Wood might splinter, cheap latches might pull off their screws, but Merc’s door is made of sterner stuff. It’s letting nothing through. I wonder if Merc will suddenly appear, in his PJs, still befuddled from the doctor’s sleeping pills, demanding to know what the hell’s going on. I wonder if the copper will have to smash the glass, reach a ginger hand round the shards, and release the lock from the inside. But then the next crashing thud does the trick. With a metallic clang, the door swings wildly in, smashing against the hallway wall.

  I don’t suppose I should have followed him, but he didn’t say not to.

  A few steps inside, leaving wet shoe prints on the post scattered on the carpet. There’s an absolute hush after the violence of the entry. The kitchen at the end of the passage, washing-up piled next to the sink. And there’s a view of the stairwell, rising to the top of the landing. Both bobby and I look up. The open loft hatch in the ceiling. The thick beige rope suspended from a distant rafter. Merc. Dangling. Completely still. Purple face. His black postman’s boots. The trouser ends pulled up mid-calf by the traction. The pale skin of his shins.

  Round and round my head, staring at his lifeless amputation: he’s not even got his prosthesis on. How the fuck did he manage the knots, with his one fucking hand and all.

  Then the copper’s shoving me out of the house like he’s suddenly brick scared and he realises I shouldn’t be there. And he’s talking tersely into his radio even as I back-pedal out into the porch. And I bash straight into someone coming at a pace the other way. And I turn to find an alabaster Angel, her eyes wide in disbelief.

  ❦

  I’m looking to Prof for guidance, hoping she’ll be the one to steady the ship that’s pitching and yawing all of a sudden in the violent storm. Drinks in front of us, the bonhomie of the Half Moon going on around us, utterly incongruous for this emergency meet. Rev couldn’t make it: her daughter, following hard on her son’s lead, has been in touch, is round there with them now. At any other time, how that news would have caused our hearts to soar. Prof – uber-rational Prof who, if she experiences emotion at all, always has it firmly labelled and indexed and studied with objective dispassion – is visibly rattled. She meets my eye but can’t hold my gaze. Zambo, brooding into his pint, berating himself silently. Everything’s gone wrong. Everything’s fracturing, fraying, going to hell beneath my feet.

  There’s nothing we could have done, I tell them. I think of the unit, the suicide watches, the 24/7 observation of inmates judged at high risk. And that’s the problem. You can’t spot the ones who will truly do it. The ones who make the loud noises, the cries for help, the ones who articulate their distress, they’re probably the ones not to worry so much about. It’s the quiet ones, nursing their self-hatred, the utter pointlessness of it all, the total entrapment they feel, fixed on the only solution they can see. They slip under the radar – they can even appear suddenly upbeat, as though things look all right for a change. Three of them managed to do away with themselves last year alone. One of the
m, that boy, Billy. Cardinal purple. Caput mortuum. Rest in peace.

  I had no idea he was feeling so low, Zambo says, staring at the head imperceptibly shrinking on the surface of his beer. I thought it was OK. He’d been to his doctor, hadn’t he?

  I think of his GP, shaking his or her head, saying: I thought it was OK. He’d joined some support group he’d found on the internet, hadn’t he?

  No one knows how desolate it is, how it rends the very substance of your soul. No one except the myriad others of this benighted clan. Us. We whose children have also died to us, even though they still live. Me, who lost you.

  Prof doesn’t seem able to speak. I want her to say: think of all the people we have helped these past few years. We can’t know how many might otherwise have gone under. I want her to put it into context. I want her to say that, dealing with what we’re dealing with, every now and then something is bound to go awry. But she doesn’t. I wish Rev were here. She isn’t. In the end, it’s me who speaks. And though they’re true, my words sound as hollowed out as dried-up gourds.

  Blaze joins us. Sorry I’m late, he says. He puts his pint on the table, and pulls up a seat. What a fucking nightmare, he says, shrugging his jacket off his firefighter’s shoulders. Isn’t it?

  Poor Merc, I say. I feel like shit.

  And I do. And then I feel anger, rising like a tornado inside me. The boy, Mark. #deaddad. His ex, telling him: Well, you were right about your good-for-nothing-cripple of a father. He’s really gone and done it this time. He’s only gone and killed himself! How on earth could he possibly think of doing that to you? There’ll be no money now, no more maintenance, what on earth are we supposed to live on? So selfish of him – so typical of him – I’m so mad at him I could weep.