You

by Phil Whitaker

  I’ve got my life straight, put right the things that needed righting. Everything but you.

  But that is the power of forgiveness. That is how things should be done.

  Is this how, one day, it will be for you?

  Getting together with Harri has shown me just how much effect the years with Mummy had – the constantly distorted, ever-changing reflections coming back from her hall of mirrors, twisting and corrupting what it meant to be me. Harri has proved a straight-backed looking glass in which, once again, I get a consistent picture of myself. Shocking to begin with, to be honest. Paralysing fear of expressing a contrary view. Incapable of articulating my own needs. And so trepidatious sexually. It’s taken ages – we’ve been together four years now, and I’m still a work-in-progress – but bit by bit I’m rediscovering myself, regaining my confidence, learning to trust again that two people can respect and honour and enjoy each other without it being about power and control. And gradually I’m relearning that my value lies in who I am, not in what I do to shore up and contain another person’s ­ultra-fragile ego. It’s who I used to be, back in my early twenties, in the relationships I had then. Chisel blow by chisel blow I was resculpted – so insidiously, so incrementally, that I didn’t notice it happening; like watching children grow. Thanks to Prof, Rev, Zambo, thanks to Harri – thanks even to Art – like a much-despoiled painting, I am gradually being restored.

  It will be both different and similar for you, I imagine. The way it seems to me: you were still being formed these past seven years, you will have no reference points to look back on, no anchors to steady you in the storm. But I hope that, as you become ever-more independent, molded and melded by other influences – friends, tutors, colleagues – as you learn to trust the faithful reflections that come back from their mirrors, you will gradually discover what it truly means to be you.

  Me and You

  According to Zambo, you are no longer, physically speaking, the daughter I once knew. Every atom, molecule, cell, and tissue of your fourteen-year-old self will have long since been metabolised, excreted, exchanged, and resynthesised during the course of these seven years. In terms of pure substance, you are someone new. But iron filings in a magnetic field. Beams of electrons spraying moving pictures in a cathode ray. What is the force that sucks and patterns so much matter and energy into the being called You? What was unleashed, what narrative fired its unstoppable engines, when the conception occurred that would lead to you?

  Is there a Platonic form that exists outside spacetime? – Zambo again.

  If so, what charts prescribe its direction, the course it will take as it navigates life?

  Prof would say you’re the sum of your experiences. Born with certain characteristics – developed even in utero – but otherwise a blank template to be shaped by your every lived moment. She would see you as melded and molded by hierarchies of relationships, both for good and for ill. Straightened or bent on the anvil of your primary attachments; nuanced by other influences – friendships, relatives, teachers, club leaders; education, reading, travel – as you grow. Engraved by successions of triumphs and reverses, loves and losses, aptitudes and areas-found-wanting, times of industriousness and languid interludes. All played out against a predictable march of developmental psychology: the evolution of adult, independent, critically thinking you. And like us all, you will have your shadow side, those parts of your self for which you feel shame. The capacity to hurt, reject, be self-centred – addicted, even. How much you split these off and project them on to others. Or how much self-compassion you can find – integrating and containing them as just one facet of multi-faceted You.

  But in all that. In all that swirling, often contradictory amalgam of influences – what is it that helps us to choose? How do we know what it is to live a right life? What is the nature of the compass that guides us? Is it no more than just what feels good?

  Rev would say you’re a soul. That in the very heart of your being is an unchanging unique kernel. Mortal or immortal, the debate still rages – I doubt that, till death, we’ll ever know. But whichever way that particular cookie might crumble, Rev would see you as one more crucible in which the eternal conflict between opposing kingdoms is joined: love and hate, good and evil – the waxing and the waning of the moon. It’s a neat kind of story, Rev’s – giving us an origin for morality, no less – something neither Prof’s nor Zambo’s accounts can explain. And for Rev it is God, if you ask Him, God who will show you the way.

  The one-sided conversations we’ve had these past seven years – my monologues, your silences. All too easily, I realise, I fall into trying to explain you to yourself. Forgive me, please. It’s borne of love. To me, you will never cease being my daughter, the child I held just minutes after you were born. Fiercely determined. Fragile to criticism. Loving of animals. Bright as a button. Sporting aspirant. The girl who dangled upside down, thighs clamped round my waist, blonde hair spooling on the ground, looking at the world upside down. The young teen who, while still wavering in the storm raging around you, phoned her dad to hear his pride at some physics test result. The netball-passing interlocutor of a thousand current-affairs chats. The girl cycling alongside me down country lanes. My daughter, incapable of stopping your face crumpling as I drove off to the Peaks and you were unable to come. The half-pint two-and-a-half-year-old sat beside me, waiting for burgundy cars with Daddos Old and New. Watching the world go by.

  You are half-Mummy, half-me – genetically speaking, of course, but in a whole lot of other ways besides. Yet have you been taught – coerced, even – to hate, revile, cast out and keep buried one half of your history and ancestry? And in the process, is that how you have come to feel about that side of you, too? Even as you stand posing with schoolmates on prom night, your hands are clenched, and your smile gets nowhere near your eyes. You walk around trying to deal with the implied assertion that one half of you is bad.

  Whoever you are, I’d like to believe I know you. That email – with its callous, mummified rhythms. I dwelt in it for ten days or so, letting the paralysing punch to the solar plexus, and the all-too natural anger, slowly subside. Then I wrote back, expressing my understanding, and declaring my faith in the real you, the You that I believed would one day come through.

  Whatever you think of Prof’s model, it has much power, and there are certain gloomy things that it predicts. Do you, like so many of her YouTube testifiers, find it scary and hard to let people get close? That said, do you feel compelled to help others, and do you measure your worth by how much you please them, not by who you are? The prospect of becoming a doctor, healing the sick – does that satisfy something in your core? Maybe you have had – will have – relationships with well-balanced people; you might even have fallen in love. But deep down inside, is there something flammable that will not ignite? If so, then one day you may meet someone, a pitiful poor-me victim, and you may find yourself falling helplessly in empathy with their plight.

  Do you recognise this version of yourself, this portrait? Or would you tell me I’ve got it all wrong? Got you all wrong. What about this, then: in your twenties, or thirties, or forties or beyond – perhaps because of the disintegration of that relationship, and all the heartache it brings – at one point you might begin to reappraise the events of your earlier life. What you thought of as you rescuing your fragmenting Mummy might come to be seen in multiple lights. Did she devour you to shore up her own existence? In containing her emotions, were you also duped into unwitting roles? In one, did you become a sharp-bladed dagger, plunged again and again into your father’s heart, a weapon of hate and revenge? In another, might you have played the silent witness for Mummy’s latest victimhood – every fresh rescuer who entered her ambit beguiled? What else could possibly explain a child so ruthlessly rejecting their father, other than that which Mummy claimed about him must be the truth?

  Even as you wrestle with these possible new-found insights and the
feelings they provoke in you, one other thing, more terrible than them all, might threaten to engulf you. The secret knowledge that, at the time – dare I suggest this? – becoming Mummy’s golden child once again felt oh so good.

  If the burden of your realisations are too great then you might continue to defend yourself by splitting, projecting all that you recoil from in yourself on to those that you want, in fact, to love. If this is the case, relationships will fracture; there’ll be deep hurt and misunderstanding. But you’ve been taught how to deal with those, haven’t you? By cutting them off for good. Your life risks becoming a trail littered with broken loves and lives.

  These gloomy prophesies – how I pray fervently that they won’t come to pass. I’m no soothsayer, and I have no right to foretell your future. For all I know you will find your Prof, your Rev, your Zambo, and they will help you understand and exorcise the past. Or maybe it will be through Art that you will find your peace. Who knows? Certainly not me. Only you.

  Whatever. What you should be sure of: I love you, whoever you are. I understand, as much as anyone can, what you went through. And if ever it’s forgiveness you seek – even long after I am gone – then you have my absolution, absolutely. You were only trying to keep your world from disintegrating. You were only doing what, at the time, you believed you had to do.

  SIX

  Watching the World Go By

  From half a mile away, atop his tower on St Aldate’s, Old Tom sounds the hour. Three sonorous bongs reach my ears.

  Je me rends. Rendez-vous?

  I stop work and look up Chatsworth Road, with its watchful ranks of Victorian terraces, as though expecting to see you coming. There’s a squat elderly woman walking her Bichon Frise on an extendable lead, a couple of lads with skateboards, no one else in sight. What did I think, that you’d turn up on the dot, punctual after all this time?

  Seven years. Rev comes to mind. A biblical number. Seven days of creation. Seven years of famine. Seven times seven signals the year of jubilee. I do my best to guard against magical thinking. Just as likely you will take eight, nine, ten years, maybe longer. If ever. Prof often cites twenty-five as the average age at which full adult critical thinking is attained. That would be eleven years, by then.

  A memory: in a pub in London with Mark and some other mates, back when I was twenty-four, twenty-five. I don’t know what brought it on that particular evening, but I can still recall standing there, hand curled around my pint, feeling bizarrely disconnected from the banter and the chatter. An unpleasant realisation that our days of youth were all but gone. Was that my first real intimation of mortality? I don’t think so. Pa dying. The nights I would lie awake, my child-mind trying to grapple with the knowledge that one day I too would die. But it was about then, in my mid-twenties, when the charmed conveyor belt that had ushered me through art school, then out doing casual jobs while I tried to create a reputation for myself – Stevie Buchanan, fine artist – abruptly dropped me off its end. It was going to take years to make a breakthrough with my work, if ever I were to do so. I guess it was the onset of Prof’s adult thinking. Time to find something proper to do.

  The woman draws near me. Her dog, with its snow-white hair and fountain tail, comes to sniff at my feet. She gives a sharp command and a yank on its lead. I smile as she passes. She looks undecided for just a moment, then walks on without a word.

  I figure I’ll give it a couple of hours at least, even till dusk begins to fall. You might be busy, tied up in lectures. And it could take a lot of to-ing and fro-ing to pluck up the courage to come. In this day and age, with our lurking suspicions: what could possibly justify a middle-aged man sitting on a wall for that length of time? And in a quiet residential area, too, just round the corner from an outstanding nursery school. I raise my arm, bring the pastel back into contact with the paper, and begin to work on my sketch again.

  Cars pass at intervals. None is burgundy. I glance at each – why did I think you’d necessarily arrive on foot? Maybe you’ve got your licence now, perhaps you’ve bought a run-around, and figure you’ll do a drive-by before anything else. Or you might come by bike, helmeted, a scarf across your face, pedalling then freewheeling, and, with a casual glance, checking me out.

  A removals van vavooms by, creating a minor slipstream. My paper ripples. Suddenly, it’s as though I’m sucked sideways, but I’m not. My body’s still upright. I’m flying free.

  I’m surprised, it takes a moment to adjust. I float myself backwards, gently, like a kid in a rubber ring. On the wall below, artist’s easel in front of me, I am sitting frozen, my hand holding the pastel up to the paper, my eyes gazing into the distance as though trying to discern what it is they see. Crew cut hair. Faded jeans. The leather jacket you so loved, scuffed and dulled now with the passage of the years. I drift upwards, above the rooftops, peering casually through the veluxes and dormers of the ubiquitous converted lofts and the lives they contain. It feels like an age since I was airborne. I think of my stolid walks through this city, sensing your renewed disengagement, my soul unremittingly earth-bound, my feet made of clay.

  A current thrills through me. My weightlessness can mean only one thing. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge is buckling and yawing again.

  Like an Apollo off the launchpad, I thrust upwards, gaining speed. I overfly dog-woman, way down on the pavement, her pet jigging along in front. Their shadows. Little and large. Up over Hinksey Park, where I used to bring you and your sister to the swings. The lake. Frozen one winter. Me sending chunks of ice skimming across its solid surface, the glacial percussions making scintillating otherworldly sounds.

  I start to search the clear blue of the afternoon sky. North, south, east and west. There is no sign of you. But you must be coming. Nothing else can be powering my flight.

  That thought. The acceleration takes my breath. An incredible surge, propelling me like a thunderbolt. Gingerly, I reacquaint myself with my manoeuvrability, the merest intention sending me left then right. I hurtle along the course of the Thames, a couple of eights crabbing the water like bizarre pond-skaters below. It takes just seconds to reach Iffley, the lock gates like pinball flippers waiting to flick narrowboats up and down stream.

  I put in an arcing turn, screeching up the Cowley Road. A thousand take-aways. Jumbles of house-shares. Studentsville. Maybe you live round here. But there’s no trace of you if so. On over St Clements. The Plain. The Angel and Greyhound Meadow.

  Angel. Merc. Mark with his #deaddad. His #braindamagedmum. Angel, mute, rocking on her narrow bed in Southall, women’s version of Broadmoor. Her boys, the #madmum lies peddled by their father so grimly made to come true. Prof, Blaze, Zambo; the thousands on the secret forums nationwide, worldwide. So many children, so many parents, so much pain. So much pain. Even Rev with her two – reunited, but it’ll never go away. How do they deal with what one parent’s done to them, unwittingly, or maybe even deliberately, teaching them not to love, but to hate? On over Magdalen, deer in the deer park, dipping down to race the length of Longwall Street. My fear: that when you finally grasp it, the pain and rejection will simply go the other way. That your life will be blighted by disconnection, estrangement, whichever way this pans out.

  Left up Holywell Street, on past the music rooms, cornering hard round the curved Sheldonian. Understanding. Forgiveness. They’re the only remedy. All the crap, all the loathing and self-loathing – if we try to not deal with it, to box it away, top nailed down tight, we may bury it safely out of sight. But not out of mind. It will remain gnawing away at us, corroding our souls, to be cast out repeatedly but ineffectually, like tenacious evil spirits, projected on to anyone who by word or deed accidentally jemmies up the corner of the lid.

  I dive like all knowledge through the great courtyard of the Bodleian. Swoop like a swallow beneath the Bridge of Sighs. If ever you come back to me, that’s what I would wish to pass on. Understanding. Forgiveness.

  I barre
l straight upwards, college spires clutching vainly at me as I shoot past. Up into clearer air, the fumes and particulates staying fogged beneath. I imagine you asking: Do you forgive her, then? That is so hard. It’s one thing to forgive someone who is sorry, another to forgive an eternal victim who is always done to, and can never conceive that they themselves could do anything wrong. That, perhaps, is what you yourself may have to contend with – in your twenties, thirties, forties or beyond – if ever you try to confront her. Gaslights may flare. The truth that exists inside her head. It had nothing to do with her: it was the courts, the judges, the social workers, the lawyers. It was you. It was what you wanted; she was merely doing your bidding. Even as you challenge her with memories, will you find that everything was deniable, re-interpretable? Things you clearly remember: will she swear they never took place? Perhaps she will be angry that you could even suggest such things. If you’re anything like me, you’ll begin to doubt yourself, doubt your recollections, feel your grip on reality start to slip. But I have found my understanding. So, yes. It took so long – there was all the damage and destruction – not just to me; to your sister, and especially to you. But I understand and I forgive. Like Merc, like Angel; by no means everyone manages to wax the moon.