You

by Phil Whitaker

  And the boy. Mark. The broiling emotions. Ever seared on his brain: the memory of screaming at his father, I hate you, you’re an embarrassment, you’re a fucking cripple! What the fuck is he supposed to do with that? The attachment trauma, grief compounding grief, resounding down the years of the boy’s life, breeding and self-replicating. Chewing up Mark’s soul, spitting it out, moving on to people he might partner, children he might father, ravenously consuming everyone in its path.

  I’m lost in my thoughts, numbed by that vision of blackness. I don’t know how long it takes. I’ve lost track of things. But at some point, Prof lets out a groan.

  Angel, she says. Where is she?

  Oh fuck. The time. It’s slipped past us, it’s turned an acceptable window of lateness into a probable no-show, and none of us have noticed. Angel.

  We all think the same thing.

  It’s me who ends up driving. The four of us, tense in my old Renault, wipers going, the sodium-vapour street lights casting their mournful orange glow. As we’re going, the thoughts tumble like bombs from a Lancaster. Angel. Her beloved boys turned hateful of her. Banned even from sending them cards on their birthdays. Faced with a fine, maybe even prison, for doing that exact same thing. Self-esteem already in her boots, now this utter desolation. Then finding that glimmer of hope, that fragment of love in Merc the winged messenger. The coy glances. Having them returned. Those few tentative steps towards building something new, something that might be a semblance of good. But so precarious, so feeble in the face of the onslaught. Maybe enough of a raft for Angel to cling to. But not for Merc. She was nowhere near enough to stop him from going under. She turned out to be no good. And Rev should have been supporting her. Ordinarily Rev would have wrapped herself round her size twenty body like a life jacket, with its light to attract attention, with its whistle on which to blow. But Rev’s tied up in her own radically changed world now. Her children need her, and, as with any of us, her children must come first.

  It’s like a horrendous groundhog day. Angel’s flat, the only temporary place the council could find for her, above the William Hill on Midsomer Norton High Street. The unrequited bell. The echoing bangs on the door. The neighbours professing ignorance. Utterly weirdly, it’s the same bloody copper who answers our call. He can’t believe it’s me, either, standing there with my motley crew. But for Blaze, I think he’d probably arrest me – two in one day; I must be up to no good. But he and Blaze know each other from shout-outs. Blaze’s presence seems to settle his nerves.

  Same fucking battering ram. As he thuds it against her door, my mind’s wildly fearful. Women don’t generally do violence like men do – it’ll be something like an overdose of pills. Maybe she’ll still be alive. Maybe a hospital can save her.

  The cheap plywood puts up minimal resistance. This time, the bobby tells us all to stay put. We stand at the top of the stairwell – Prof, Zambo, Blaze, Art, a ragged, altered core – our ears straining for any clue from inside, not daring to say a word. After a full-blown eternity, the PC emerges, shaking his head.

  Wherever your friend is, he tells us, she certainly isn’t here.

  ❦

  I don’t know, but this is what I picture.

  Angel, her heaps of flesh juddering, her eyes red from weeping, blipping the key to open her Focus with its 1.0 engine, the most power she has ever known. Dropping her handbag on to the passenger seat, and landing herself alongside. Firing the ignition. Driving into the night, with its cloud-obscured moon.

  Was she in two minds? Did she head for the pub to start with, half-thinking that she would attend our emergency meeting? I honestly don’t know. Maybe she even got there, parked in the Half Moon car park, next to Blaze’s pillar-box red MX5. Maybe that was all it took to decide her – that colourful reminder of Royal Mail delivery. It is often something trivial, or left-field, or seemingly random, that flips the points and diverts the train.

  As she drove off? As she wended her way through the lanes and carriageways that would lead her to Keynsham and her now decided destination? I guess she was thinking of Merc, and the fragile shoots they had dared to allow to grow. The grief they had shared over their children. Maybe she was going over and over how Merc used to talk about Mark, the pride in his voice, the way it would crack suddenly under the burden of his loss. Perhaps she was going over and over Merc’s description of that last agonised visitation, the crossed-armed mother and grandmother flanking the bristling child, screaming his hatred of his cripple dad, their gleeful expressions saying we-told-you-so. Maybe all of that. But much more besides. Running in her mind’s eye: pictures of her own two boys, laughing and playing in a sandpit, riding their bikes round the cul-de-sac where she once lived, cuddling up on the sofa for stories, now cruelly dismissive of her, fleeing from her the last time she saw them, completely aligned with their dad. And his mocking barbs after he’d shut them away indoors, standing out there in front of the house, his hands gesticulating, his face contorted by disgust: Look at you! You miserable fat cow. You were shit as a wife, and shit as a mother. You’ll never see your kids again.

  It will have been difficult driving in that anguished state. Roughly wiping wetness from her eyes, snot snivelling out of her nose. Did she have tissues? Did a big pile of them, scrunched up and discarded, grow on the passenger seat alongside her bag? I’ll never know.

  I imagine she looked quite a state, standing outside that Keynsham front door. Trembling and slime-streaked and utterly consumed. Who answered? It must have been Merc’s ex – perhaps her mother hovering behind, eager to see who was calling at this evening hour. Were they relishing the drama? Were they hoping for a neighbour, an acquaintance, having caught wind of the news? So terribly sorry to hear, it must be such a shock; I mean, I know you’d split up and everything, but even so. Did she open the door, Merc’s ex, with a half-smile on her face, expecting unctuous felicitations and a chance to play the poor newly widowed?

  All I hope is that the boy, Mark, was nowhere around. That he was safely ensconced in his room.

  The first blow must have been one hell of a surprise. The sheer heft of the car jack – the only weapon Angel had at her disposal – slamming into her nose. I picture her standing there, Merc’s ex, blood suddenly spurting from her nostrils, any trace of a smile completely erased, struggling to compute this crazed, demented stranger who had appeared from out of the night. Did she know she was anything to do with Merc? Did she recognise her from a glimpse of the fat woman sat outside in the car during Merc’s last visit? Even before she’d had a chance to comprehend what was happening, the danger she was suddenly in, Angel will have raised her arm again and brought the steel slamming down with another mighty impact. Fracturing her left cheekbone. Smashing her face in. Only, her face is no longer a face – it’s a projection screen. Playing on it: Angel’s ex, screaming You miserable fat cow. Shit as a wife, shit as a mother. You’ll never see your kids again. The fuckwit judge: I’ll jail you for sending your son a card for his birthday.

  I guess she went down then, ex-Mrs Merc, dropping like the proverbial sack of potatoes. Perhaps that further fuelled Angel’s fury, appearing as though she was trying to hide her face. It will have been the blows to the back of the head that did the most damage. The mother didn’t try to intervene, I guess quite sensibly. She ran back inside and summoned the police. By the time they got there, Angel was spent, sat staring blankly at the neat privet hedge, her mind irretrievably scrambled, beside the body of her insensate victim. Neither of them would ever speak again.

  Me

  These days, I’m in the Cloth Road Artists. Painters, sculptors, ceramicists, glass-blowers, the whole shebang. Entry requirements: doing something in the visual arts, and living in any of the towns and villages in this narrow belt of West Wilts and East Somerset that once upon a yesteryear had a thriving textile trade. It’s how Harri and I met. She works in porcelain, her studio’s up a rickety staircase in an outb
uilding on the Stowford Manor estate – vases, lamp stands, and graceful forms that have no actual function. As white as a field of virgin snow, smooth as Egyptian cotton, the most sparing use of deep indigo giving definition and signature. She’s not much over five foot. She wears an oversized blue boiler suit, heat-proof gloves and welder’s goggles when she’s firing, blonde hair tied back, wisps escaping round her temples. I fell for her gradually – it took me a long time to find confidence again in whom I might choose. A long time to trust once more in what other people elect to show to the world. It took time for her, too, after her own journey. You’d like her. Your sister does. Maybe one day you will get to know her, too.

  I’d all but given up on my art making its mark. Maybe that was what it took – a letting go. I’m still surprised by what some of my stuff fetches in Bristol, London, Manchester, Edinburgh. Bizarrely enough, Madrid. Enough for me to take on a job-share at the unit. I won’t leave, though, not till I retire. It’s my muse. I’ve given up abstracts, landscapes, still lifes. These days I do portraits. Of the lads that come to me for therapy. Any that consent, that is, but hardly any refuse. It must be weird for them, so out of kilter with their lived experience – dysfunctional, abusive, neglectful attachment figures; children’s homes; young offender institutions; prison. But it’s like I’m giving them a present – they who never get gifts for birthdays or at Christmas. Someone taking an interest. Wanting to paint their faces. Someone believing they’re a fit subject for art.

  I never thought they’d be commercial. Certainly not among the folk with the money to buy stuff. It just goes to show. What it is: I’ve become practised at capturing them – cracking and discarding the layers of Russian doll till I get to the shrivelled child at their heart. You can make them out, those tousle-haired reception kids in their shorts and spandex polo shirts, hovering mirage-like somewhere in their embittered, angry, time-hardened faces. I think that’s what moves the buyers, the dealers and collectors. Glimpsing the human. The vulnerability in tempered steel. Maybe the But-for-the-grace-of-God of what might have been. With the governor’s permission, I give each of them a sitting fee. For most, it’s one of the few times the world has sent anything their way.

  I don’t see much of the others any more. Prof was devastated by what happened. She left the group, and the group soon disbanded. She retreated into her books and papers, resolving to focus on theory and let others take on the practical work. She’s still active on the secret forum – I see her posts from time to time. She’s back in her home country, she landed some academic post in Rotterdam or somewhere. Could be she’s an actual Prof these days. Her younger daughter came back to her, last I heard. The older two are still in the UK, but they have both left their father’s home now, and with their growing independence they’ve started responding positively to her DMs.

  Rev was tied up for months on end, helping her two deal with the fallout. She got in touch ages later and we went for a drink at the Half Moon. Her son and daughter had turned around incredibly fast, and were counter-rejecting the father – understandable, and it was how he’d taught them to relate, but not what Rev, me, or any of us would want. Rev’s challenge – the challenge for us all – is to help our children learn to manage the interpersonal stuff with boundaries and dialogue, not by cutting off and propagating further abuse. Rev’s euphoria at them coming back had been quickly sobered by the realisation of the mountainous terrain still to travel. So much pain, confusion, hurt; though at least they could now know her love. She was too preoccupied to talk much about Merc, or Angel, and what had befallen them on our watch. It saddened me at the time. But she’s all heart, Rev. No lack of compassion. It was just exhaustion from what else was on her plate.

  Zambo started to make headway with his boys, too. Tentative, secret meetings for milkshakes and Nandos. It was going well, they’d met up a half-dozen times, then one of them let something slip and suddenly their mother knew. She retaliated with a midnight flit. First thing Zambo knew, his boys were in Kentucky, somewhere only she, with her dual nationality, could go. Three thousand miles. Zambo might have stopped her with an injunction, if he’d had but time. But the world is so small now, there’s no difference pinging emails from five or five thousand miles away. He retreated to Cape Town, works for one of those big wine companies that mass produces stuff that looks like it comes from a single vineyard, only it doesn’t. We chat on the forum sometimes, mainly about cosmology and quantum mechanics and shit. He lives in the hope that, some day in the future, one or both of his lads will be tempted by the brais, the surf, and the African sun, and will come to seek their father.

  Blaze. I felt a responsibility. Even though there was no group any longer, I was his buddy, his mentor, so we kept meeting up for a while. But things petered out. He couldn’t resist the pull of war. He won one battle – got his name cleared and the contact order restored. You’d think there’d be consequences for those making false allegations, perjuring themselves in court, but there aren’t. The fuck-wit judges see it as so much rough trade, and are glad just to get out the other side. So he’s locked in sequential returns to court every time his ex breaks the order and refuses to allow the kids to come. He wasn’t able to entertain our strategy, what Rev calls dripping the love in, what Prof terms waving from this distant shore. Far less able to embark on the long road to forgiveness. Last drink I went with him, he’d managed to persuade a judge to get psychological evaluations done: on his ex, him, both of the children. It won’t get him anywhere, I doubt. It’s still too early here in the UK – the concept of what’s being done to his kids has yet to catch on. His battle will rage a good while yet. I don’t know how it will unfold. I think of his twins, though, pale-faced and shocked by the shells that continue to rain down. But I don’t criticise. We each of us have to find our own path, the way our conscience dictates we fight for our children. It was not Blaze who declared the war.

  I saw your sister through to the end of sixth form, spending half her time with me, half with Mummy. A strange partitioned existence for her, two lives across a divide. Periodically she would waver – just as you once wavered – especially in the run-up to you leaving for university, when I guess Mummy renewed her campaign to win her for her own. It would alarm me, seeing the same signs in her as I used to see in you, but somehow she always managed to resist it, prevent the splitting. You’re different personalities. Plus she never had the attachment trauma you did – you sat on your two-and-a-half-year-old bottom at Chatsworth Road, your beseeching arms sinking as Mummy appeared to reject you. The reverberating insecurity in your primary attachment. In succumbing to the pressure you experienced, in supplying Mummy with all she seemed to require, in stepping into your golden child role, you actually shielded your sister, let her off the hook. There looked to be some scapegoating – times she would recount how mean you’d been to her, you just a puppet on Mummy’s strings – but by and large you seemed able to resist that further descent into lording it over your sibling as well. I tried to create a world in which she could talk about Mummy and you, but on the whole you remained on the other side of her wall. She made it to her gap year travels with her attachment relationships ragged but intact. There’ll be less for her to repair as life unfolds.

  I have made my own amends. I managed to restore some semblance of a relationship between Ma and your sister, so she at least has one grandparent that she’s known. Gerry was brilliant: during the months I was fighting for my life, he was on the phone every week, bolstering me up, cheering me on. I was still mired in that pervasive shame that comes from false allegations: you know you’re innocent, but you feel the weight of judgement and opprobrium from all around. Smoke and fire, soot and flame. Stevie, you fuckwit, Gerry said, I’ve known you since you were born. You’re fucking weird in all sorts of ways, but I know a pile of horseshit when I see one. In an unexpected way, me going through such trauma seemed to repair the schism that had opened between us after Pa died. I went up to stay with
him the Christmas Mummy declared war: he took me out for a beer, leaving Gaby at home with their boys. Gerry, I told him, I’m sorry for cutting you off like I did. He looked at me, gave me a grin, and said: Forget it, you moron. You were trying to keep everything together, that’s all. You did what you had to do.

  Mark, my old art school mate, was just as forgiving. Roared with laughter when I told him about the pass he’d supposedly made to Mummy that time. But he got it, how the accusation manifested itself to me as a double-bind – junk my friend if I wanted to keep my kids – how I’d felt I had to walk a precarious tightrope to keep the family together. It was as though everything was suddenly normal again, talking it through with him, and him being so amused. It was though everything I used to believe about the world was proved to have been right all along.

  And Julie, with her new partner, Greg. Tall guy, neat beard, works as a risk assessor. How great to see her back on track, after the hammer blow of losing her man. She wouldn’t even let me apologise. Just looked at me and said: you’ve been through a nightmare, we both have. But we’re out the other side. And with a fierce hug that contained all our histories and the losses we’ve known, that was that.

  I needed to track down Barry Rimmer. The little runt I used to beat up on, whose wrists I would redden with Chinese burns – stranded at their house after school, the lad with the #deaddad, waiting for his Ma to come home. Google’s fucking useful. I made a pilgrimage, back to home turf, struck as ever by the strength of everyone’s accents – and how diluted my own is after years of living down south. Barry’s taller than me now, must be over six foot. He works at Everton, on the catering staff, running a bar in the VIP suite, even though he’s a lifelong Liverpool fan. We went for a coffee at Stanley’s on Great Howard Street. It was weird meeting this man who used to be Barry, trying to see the little kid. And there was tension there, coming from me as much as from him. Not knowing how he’d react. We took our flat whites over to the table and I told him: I wasn’t sure you’d even remember me. Oh, yeah, he said, I remember you all right. I fucking hated you. You were a right cunt back then. I nodded, and I told him: I know, that’s why I wanted to see you. To say I was sorry. He looked at me for a silent second, then did his own nod. And said he appreciated it; that it was good of me. We left it at that, and fell into sharing stories about the old days instead, of growing up on the Wirral. And it turns out he married Samantha Carrigan, who everyone thought was incredibly fit. Runt gets supermodel. They’ve got two kids, two girls, one at uni, one at drama school. He’s done all right for himself, has Barry. We parted as friends.