I slacken my furious pace, begin to cruise at altitude. Oxford is spread like a toy town below. The cars like corpuscles in its arteries. The parks, quads, and meadows that allow this city to breathe. North, south, east and west. You are nowhere to be seen.
My energy dissipates, my velocity slows further; how wrong I have been. This abrupt flight, I was sure it meant you were coming, but as so often before, waving from this distant shore, I am ahead of myself. Ahead of you.
I swing over north Oxford, the huge Edwardian houses of the Woodstock and Banbury Roads. And face up, once again, to reality. Beth comes to mind. A junior doctor, just like you will be, late in her twenties, on a forensic psychiatry rotation. Attached to the unit. Allotted a half-day to spend with me, to learn about art therapy. A personable lass. I got her to do one of my exercises, drawing the hairstyles she’d had at various stages of her life. She found it funny to begin with, but soon settled to the task. It often opens up reflection, memory. The ponytail she’d worn at the age she was when her parents split up. The asymmetric bob she’d had when her father died. Liver riddled with cancer. Do you miss him, I asked. A dismissive shake: he wasn’t a nice man. She told me, as though in a confessional, how he’d ill-treated her mother, cleared out the house and left them with nothing once he’d gone. How her mother had to go crop picking just to make ends meet. I didn’t go and see him again, she said, her voice dropping, not even when I heard he was terminal.
Maybe it was true, what Beth had been told – maybe it was the stuff that actually happened. Or maybe it was only true in the head of her mum. Either way, I didn’t go there. Too late. The damage done.
Will you be like Beth, progressing through your training, your post-graduate studies, unshakable in the myth of your #dodgydad. That is what happens to some. The emptiness of the sky, the unbroken blue, tell me that, still now, that must be the case for you.
But. All of a sudden, a realisation. I’ve been assuming I would encounter you here, up in the crisp autumn air. How wrong, how wrong. My rediscovered capacity for flight – it may still mean you have decided to come.
I drop like a kestrel, down towards the city again. Hurry, hurry. Carfax, St Aldate’s, Folly Bridge. I can picture you standing there, beside your immobile father, increasingly worried, shaking my shoulder, calling Dad, Dad, Dad. The movement causing the pastel in my stiffly extended hand to repeatedly scuff the paper. I streak down the Abingdon Road, my slipstream aquiver, racing to get back inside myself. Sharp right, and there ahead of me: the watching-the-world-go-by wall.
My easel has gone.
You’re not there.
Neither am I.
Or, rather, we are.
I have travelled in time.
I hover, helplessly fascinated, watching us. A dad and his half-pint daughter, sitting side by side, two dollies on his lap. A car takes the corner. An old Allegro. It’s burgundy. The Daddos go mad, leaping and squealing. Burgundy! Burgundy! My cod-ventriloquist’s voice. You’re laughing, you’re ending yourself. It’s the funniest funniest sight.
The pain, it’s unbearable, twisting and wringing me from inside to out. Blindly I shoot heavenwards – one thousand, two thousand, three thousand feet. On and on like a space-exploring mission. I have, I have to be free. Eight thousand, nine thousand, ten thousand feet.
Finally, eventually, the pain begins to subside. The deafening thunder abates. I slow, stop, then levitate. The air is rare here, thin; I have reached incredible heights. Even the curvature of the earth has become apparent. Brown-green land, gun-metal sea, wispy clouds. I can make out the edge of the continent, across the strip of the channel, where Romania and Italy have become the first to recognise in law the phenomenon that has happened to you. Far away, on the opposite side of this globe, Brazil and Mexico, which have also legislated to make it a criminal offence. But it takes so long. So long. Years even to settle on a name, a label to describe the process of poisoning a child against their mum or their dad. Implacable hostility. Pathogenic parenting. Transgenerational attachment-trauma transmission. Domestic violence by proxy. Strange to think I should have become a subject of domestic violence – me, capable Stevie B. It is violence, though: subtle, incremental, deniable, but violence all the same. Even stranger that you should have been used as the weapon to assault me. My Achilles heels.
Names, names. Gradually, those in the know have settled on parental alienation. I gaze down on our benighted planet, imagine the countless Profs, Revs, Zambos – even Arts – working to spread this new understanding. How these concepts take years, decades, to begin to take hold. We’re so complacent. Oh, sure, we know all about those pop stars, cartoonists, coaches, clergy, TV presenters, politicians, DJs – knobbing young kids throughout the ignorant seventies. We shake our heads in wonder at how no one could see what they were up to – that they were able, audaciously, to hide in plain sight. We’re oh-so-much wiser than all those erstwhile authorities – the bishops, the inspectors, the managers, the police – who dismissed the accounts of those who dared to blow whistles. It just can’t be true. That stuff doesn’t happen. It must just exist in their fantasists’ heads.
I start to glide, soundlessly. Far below, off to the east, along the flight path into one of the London airports, jumbos are strung out, their headlights glittering like rare precious beads. At some point, it will catch on in Britain, we will wake up and recognise what’s being done to thousands of kids. Too late for you, though. And too late for me. And would it have helped, to have criminalised Mummy? Probably not – she needed reams of help, not a sentence. It might sober the lawyers, though; prevent them playing their sickening game. And give pause to the judges, the social workers – the unwitting colluders. The people whose job it should have been to stop it happening to you. But the day will come. The day on which, when a child coldly rejects, people assume not that there must be something very wrong with the outcast parent, but ask instead: what might be going on with the other one?
My spirit has quieted, the sheer tranquillity of the troposphere. I steepen my angle and start to descend. Names. I am Art. I am Stevie, Stevie Buchanan. Once upon a time I was Steve. Steve to Stevie. I thought it marked the start of my new life. But I see now that it didn’t. Only once I’d created a family of my own, faced the terror of losing them, and then lost them for real – and survived. Only then could Steve rest in peace.
Only then could I truly be Stevie.
Art.
Me.
You changed your name, too, so I heard from your sister, back when you went into sixth form. You adopted a contraction, a popular short version. That decision; I think I understand: was it one way you could start, ever so gently, the process of prising yourself free? No hint of abandonment of Mummy. No suggestion of rejection. The beginning of the ongoing, snail’s-pace progress in discovering what it means to be you.
What is this utter yearning, undimmed within me, this unquenchable drive to see you? A memory, from that years-ago visit to Mummy’s childhood home, before she cut Ted and Gloria out of her life. Daylight, the morning after that private home movie view. Coming outside into the crisp Yorkshire air. Ted in the yard, the cacophony all around. Him, separating lambs to be turned into meat. Hefting them aloft with fearsome power and dumping them behind a line of hurdles. The frantic, panicked bleating between the ewes and their young. Piercing cries, shredding the soul. This utter yearning, it is as ancient as nature herself. The need to know that my child is all right.
There is no sound here, nothing but the susurration of the wind. The stage you are now, it’s a time of natural detachment, perfectly normal not to give the folks back home a second thought. We parents, we never own our children, we only ever have them on loan. To start with, we do everything for them. But the course of a childhood should be a masterclass in letting go. We debated a lot – Prof, Rev, Zambo and me – how long to carry on. How long to keep dripping the love, to keep waving from this dis
tant shore. Some of our clan never stop, through thirties and forties and beyond. Till death do us part. But there comes a point where a child becomes truly an adult, responsible for writing the story that has become their own.
That fuck-wit bearded judge, bless his soul. The one thing he did do – ripping me away from your sister, from you – was to grant me one hour, as long as I wasn’t alone. Your grandma, hot-footing it down from the Wirral. The four of us gathered in quavering jollity in the lounge at Drake Avenue. Christmas tree all set up ready for the big day that would not now happen. Me telling your sister, you, that come what may – come what may, I will always be your dad. I will always be there for you.
I saw that register in your eyes. In the merest inclination of your head.
Perfectly normal not to give the folks back home a second thought. But they’re there, our primary attachments, running through us like a wick through a candle flame. Yours with Mummy: from what I saw, inherently insecure. Golden child, outcast, golden child once more. But then, in that second enmeshment, what made you so precious was not who you are, but what you could do for her.
Yours with me? I have kept that promise I made. I keep it still. You will look back and always know that your daddy never abandoned you. But maybe it’s time to rest this aching arm. Maybe it’s time to leave the rest with you.
❦
I’ve done with thundering, hurtling, screeching. My descent is as soft as a sycamore seed’s. Drifting down to re-enter myself: to pack up my easel, stow my pastels and putty rubbers, get to my feet and recede. Oxford swims serenely up to greet me, opening her streets like arms widened for a welcome embrace. The confluence of the Thames and the Cherwell like an arrow, pointing to Grandpont where my body awaits.
Just for a second there’s a lurch. A figure, standing next to me, alongside my easel. But I quickly make out it’s a man, balding head like a holy monk in aerial view. Not you.
Back inside myself, I keep my movements slow. I turn my head to look at him.
I said, he says. I said, I can’t work out what it is you’re drawing.
I let my hand fall to my lap, pastel stick in my fingers, its dust pigmenting my skin.
I know, I say to him.
He huffs, then turns away, and sets off up Chatsworth Road.
I wonder how long he’s been stood there, peering in the direction of my gaze. Scrutinising the houses, the trees dotting the grounds of the nursery school, then comparing it with the work-in-progress on my A2. How long did he wait, reluctant to disturb an artist in his reverie, before clearing his throat and interrupting, and asking what’s the connection between the two?
It would have taken a lifetime to explain. I shake my head and lift my hand again. My sketching is swift, efficient, honed by the decades I’ve spent practising my art. In fifteen, twenty minutes, it’s finished. The picture I’ve done for you.
I knew better than to come on your birthday. That, I know, you will have spent with Mummy – probably through choice, but certainly because you felt obliged. So I left it a week before proposing this trip to the watching-the-world-go-by wall. This drawing is yours. My birthday gift for twenty-one-year-old you.
Will you recognise yourself as that baby, just eight or nine months old? The look of delight I’ve captured on your podgy face. Your hair wisping about you. Your little body flying absolutely free.
And will you recognise those hands as mine? The pigment staining on my fingers. The palms cupping gracefully, with creases a fortune teller could read. Hands that never stray far from you. Hands that, as gravity asserts itself and you begin to fall, are there to catch you again.
I had hoped you would come. I had dreamed, in the smallest of hours, that I would hear your footfalls, look up to find your willowy beauty, hear your cry of ‘Da-ddy!’. I had craved the chance to give you your present in person.
But no matter. That is what life is like on this distant shore. Back home, I will roll up the paper, slide it into a cardboard tube, take it to the post office in Hinton, and buy stamps with which to send it to you. I have no address, and if I post it c/o Mummy I have no faith it will get through. But in a few months’ time, your sister will return from her travels. I rarely ask anything of her in connection with you. But this will be an exception.
Will you look at it? Who knows. Maybe you will put it in a cupboard somewhere, or the bottom of a drawer, furled in its cardboard coffin. But maybe at some time, later in your twenties, or your thirties, forties or beyond; perhaps when you’ve had children of your own, and know how precious they are to you. Maybe then you’ll find that dust-gathered artefact, slide the paper out, and look back across the years at me and you.
I stand, and sling my canvas roll-bag over my shoulder. It feels lighter now for some reason, and I do a double-take to check I’ve put the easel in. But I have. I begin the long walk back up Chatsworth Road. My heart is leaden. I have no stomach for staying over. I will head back to Somerville, create some fiction for the bemused porter, collect my belongings and catch a late train home. Back to Harri. My cottage. The Cloth Road Artists. The life I have for myself. A Facebook post will soon come from Guatemala or wherever it is your sister has got to by now.
I pass our old house. The same memory: how I decorated the ceiling of the room that was your nursery. Pale blue, with fluffy white clouds, so that during the day it resembled the sky. And how I stuck numerous stars across it, made of a translucent plastic that glowed in the dark. So that when you woke in the night, you would still have the sense of the heavens above you.
I wonder if subsequent owners have over-painted it, burying it beneath new layers of white. Or whether it’s like that still. I glance up at its window, but it’s impossible to tell.
I’m still there, teetering on my step ladder, paint brush in hand, pot of cheap blue emulsion slung over the crook of my elbow, when a raucous squeal jerks me back. A bike, completing its brake-juddering stop right in front of me. The young woman cyclist landing a hasty foot on the pavement to steady herself. Looking up to see her stranger’s face. Hearing her voice.
Daddy?
You.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Phyl Thorpe and Jane Stewart, who generously shared their experiences as practising art therapists during the course of my research. I couldn’t have created the character of Stevie Buchanan without them. Thanks also to Phil Saul for making the introductions.
My friend and fellow writer, Martyn Bedford, provided a characteristically astute appraisal of an earlier draft of the novel, as well as unstinting encouragement and support.
Thank you to Robyn Whitaker for Sree and André; to Jo Roth for the well-timed comment about flight; and to Hilary Arden, Simon Crouch, Alex Wade, Sue Whitaker, Jason Cowley, and Bridget Whitaker, all of whom made invaluable contributions.I am also grateful to many people I cannot name: the parents and grown-up children who shared their experiences of parental alienation during the writing of this book – in person, and via the closed web communities into which I have been welcomed.
Parental alienation causes serious harm, but it is as yet poorly understood and frequently unrecognised. Among this novel’s readership there will be people who realise for the first time that there is a name for what they themselves experienced. For anyone interested to learn more, I can recommend Dr Amy Baker’s seminal Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome: Breaking the Ties that Bind. Dr Richard Warshak’s Divorce Poison is also very informative, as is Understanding Parental Alienation: Learning to Cope, Helping to Heal by Karen Woodall and Nick Woodall from the Family Separation Clinic in London. Karen Woodall’s blog (karenwoodall.wordpress.com) and the website of Dr Nick Child (www.thealienationexperience.org.uk) are excellent online resources.
I am fortunate indeed to have such fantastic publishers in Jen and Chris Hamilton-Emery, together with the whole crew at the mighty Salt. My agent, Jonny Geller at Curtis Brown,
has given much support over the years, and I’m also grateful to Jonny’s eternally capable assistant, Catherine Cho.
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