The latter question was the one he answered, and the answer was simple: it was only last year that he’d found Sarah. By now we were on our second or third circuit of the gardens; we’d reach a tacit understanding that the privacy of this spot, in the rain, was more conducive to our conversation than any enclosed space would be. In the middle of the path he paused, arms wide, presenting himself. ‘I mean, look at me,’ he said. ‘I ask you: do I look like I was brought up by a woman like her? No, I do not. You don’t get my type in her world, do you? Would I be talking like this if Sarah had been looking after me? No, I would not. She was a fucking mess – no offence – but I think I’d have come out a bit smoother than this if she’d been in charge. You know what I’m saying?’
The story was that, when Sam was eighteen months old, Sarah gave him up. ‘She gave me away, or I was taken away. Don’t know which. She said one thing one minute and another thing the next. Whatever. She couldn’t cope. Didn’t want to cope. I don’t know,’ he said, and he glared at the tarmac, seemingly upset for an instant, before raising his bitterness to smother any further signs of what he felt. ‘No chance of her family taking me for a bit. Other families, the old folks would lend a hand, wouldn’t they? But with her folks it was: “Here’s a few grand to take care of the bastard – now fuck off.” Ever see pictures of her mum when she was young?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I answered, which was true.
‘What, never?’
‘No, never,’ I told him.
‘OK,’ he said, with a sceptical shrug. ‘Nice-looking woman, her mum was. Very classy. Great bones. You could see where Sarah got it from.’
Here I was being invited to remark on the beauty of Sarah, but I said nothing.
‘But a vicious old bitch, wasn’t she, the mum?’ he went on. ‘You know the story about the cat?’
I did not know the story of the cat.
‘OK,’ he said, delighted to be able to rectify my ignorance. ‘This is when Sarah was at school. Fourteen or thereabouts. One night she stays out an hour later than she’s supposed to. Not the first offence, but still – not a major crime, is it? Next day, mum decides to teach her a lesson: so it’s “Say goodbye to Lady Paws.” Cat vanishes that afternoon. Removed, just like that. Mother never told her what she’d done with the animal. Cruel stuff, no?’
‘I knew there were problems,’ I said.
‘Problems, fuck yes. One way of putting it. The mother was an evil old cow, that’s another way. Never wanted kids and should have had her ovaries bricked up to stop her having them. And the time she put all Sarah’s stuff out in the garden? Chucking LPs out the bedroom window. You know that one? I mean, that’s no way to treat your daughter, is it? Doesn’t matter what she was up to, you don’t do that, do you? And the father, he was a right royal pillock, wasn’t he? Seemed to think that paying the pocket money was the beginning and end of his involvement. “I give you twenty quid a week, you love me like I’m God all fucking mighty” – that was how it was supposed to work, wasn’t it? Banging all his secretaries, wasn’t he? And anything else that came his way, from what I heard. Great one for working late, if you get me. You know about Sarah finding the knickers in his briefcase, yeah?’
It was no longer possible to give him no response. ‘I hadn’t heard that, no,’ I said.
‘Yeah – he’s off to the office in the morning, she hands daddy his briefcase, the thing comes open and what do we have here? Nice pair of lacy undies. One careless lady owner. The mother knew what was going on, yes? That was the deal. He provided the posh frocks and the big house and the holidays in the tropics while the kid’s farmed out to some aunt or uncle out in the fucking sticks, and he’s allowed to go sticking it into whoever will do the business in return for a Gucci handbag or some other bit of crap. Parents like that, no wonder Sarah was a fucking head-case. I mean, she was a wild one, fair enough. But you’ve got to ask yourself: which came first? Shit parents or fucked-up girl?’
The idea, plainly, was to goad me into a defence of his alleged mother. Seeing, however, that the tactic wasn’t working, he told me that Mr Williams had died a few years back; the old girl was still clinging on, but was now totally ga-ga. A lawyer had advised Sarah that her mother had become so delicate and confused that she needed to be in residential care, which was absolutely fine with Sarah, so Mrs Williams had been shipped off to some well-appointed institution in pleasant rural surroundings, where, according to Sam, she had become prey to the notion that she was in some way related to Princess Diana and had been shut away on the orders of Someone Very Powerful. ‘What goes around, eh?’ said Sam, with some gratification. Sarah, apparently, had been to see her once, but the old woman didn’t say a word to her, except to tell her that the chief beneficiary of her will would be ‘a donkey hospital, or something fucking stupid like that’. His nostrils were stiffened with anger as he said it. ‘Can you believe it? Telling her that she’s worth less to her than a load of knackered ponies. I should go around and give the old bat a seeing-to,’ he said. ‘I’m fucked up because of her daughter – well, one reason I’m fucked up – and the daughter was fucked up because of her and her useless dick of a fucking husband.’ And then he said to me: ‘She must have talked to you about them, yes?’
‘Once or twice.’
‘That all?’
‘Yes. They weren’t central to her life. She didn’t talk about them.’
‘But you must have wondered?’
‘Wondered what?’ I asked him sharply, because his tone now had something of the investigating officer in it.
‘I mean, asked yourself: how did she get like this?’
‘Like what?’
‘Oh come on,’ he moaned. ‘You know like what. She told me. She was messed up.’
‘I wouldn’t say that.’
‘What would you say, then?’ he asked, as you’d ask someone who was denying that the earth moved round the sun.
‘I wouldn’t say she was messed up.’
‘Are you telling me she went loopy when I arrived, and before that it was all rinky-dinky-doo? I don’t think so, somehow.’
‘It happens,’ I said. ‘Strange things can happen to a woman when she has a child. Some become depressed. It’s not uncommon. Maybe—’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ he broke in. ‘She got that all right. She told me all about it. Not a natural cuddler, and all that bollocks. But she was more than a bit mental before that. And after. Been up and down like a roller coaster since she was a kid. That’s what she said. A head-case – her words, exactly.’
‘She wasn’t a head-case,’ I stated.
The firmness of my reply made him pause. ‘Well, OK,’ he said. ‘I’m only reporting what she told me. That’s all. She said she didn’t know what day of the week it was, half of the time. Her parents thought she was just being a pain in the arse. Typical moody teenager and all that shit. But she was seriously in the dark stuff and they didn’t notice, or didn’t want to know.’
The insinuation was obvious: that I had been as stupid or as selfish as her parents had been. ‘She wasn’t a head-case. If she told you that, I think she might have been exaggerating. She had a tendency to exaggerate. She liked a touch of drama.’
This prompted a glower and some furious head-shaking. ‘No,’ he answered. ‘No. You’re wrong. Touch of drama hasn’t got anything to do with it. She was just telling me what had happened. “These are the facts: I wasn’t right in the head.” She wasn’t hamming it up. She wasn’t making excuses for herself, like: “It wasn’t my fault. I was off my head. I’m not responsible.” It was like it was someone else she was talking about. “These are the facts” – that’s what she was saying. She wasn’t making a drama out of it. That wasn’t it. She was giving me the facts. For a long time she wasn’t right in the brain. But now you’re telling me she was as right as rain when you were around, so – what am I meant to think?’ He jiggled his hands about, cupped, testing the relative weights of a genuine article and a fake.
I was tempted to walk away. Instead, after counting to ten, I told him that the young woman I’d known, all those years ago, was not someone I would describe as being not right in the brain. ‘She had her ups and she had her downs,’ I conceded, ‘but not as extreme as you’re making out.’
‘Her ups and downs?’ he repeated, as if beginning to work at the flaw in an alibi.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Ups and downs, the same as a lot of people.’
‘Then a lot of people are in deep trouble, that’s what I’d say. I mean, she had them really bad. Really really heavy. Like it was “Hello birds, hello trees, hello pretty clouds” one day and “Fuck me, I want to die” the next.’
‘When I knew Sarah she wasn’t always the steadiest vessel,’ I responded, ‘but that’s as far as I’d go.’ I was dismayed by myself: I was almost bargaining with him.
‘And she was doing a lot of dope, she said. Is that true, or not, would you say?’
‘She wasn’t the only one.’
‘What? You mean you did too?’ he said with a short laugh at the thought of it.
‘Not a lot. Every now and then. Same as everyone she hung out with, more or less. It was just what you did. You had a drink, you had a joint.’
‘Right. But we’re not talking about every now and then, are we? We’re talking about a lot. She said she was out of her tree for days on end. A whole week without being straight for a minute. Away with the fairies.’
The implication, clearly, was that I had in some way exploited the drug-addled young woman. ‘That’s not true,’ I stated, with more sharpness than I’d intended. His face contorted in an expression of pained bafflement, as though he had been asked to accept two absolutely irreconcilable versions of events; he was about to speak, but I stopped him. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘we’re talking about you, not about Sarah.’
‘OK,’ he said, palms towards me, appeasingly. ‘But it’s the same thing, isn’t it? I mean, that’s why I’m here, because of what she was like, and I’m just trying to get a clearer picture, you know? That’s all. I just want to make sense of it,’ he said, but the forlorn note did not convince; he didn’t strike me as a young man trying to make sense of it – the picture was already clear in his mind, it seemed to me. I pointed out that we were running out of time, so he’d better get on and tell me what he had to tell me. Well, he said, what he had to tell me was that Sarah had been a disaster as a mother. One afternoon she’d gone out to the shops and left him at home. This was not long after he’d been born, he said, so she’d have been leaking all over the place, yet somehow she forgot that he existed, and not for a couple of minutes – for two whole hours, until it suddenly occurred to her that she had a son and she’d left him asleep in her bedroom. This story prompted another: she’d fallen asleep in the park, with Sam in his buggy beside her, and didn’t wake up until some shrieking woman shook her awake, to tell her that a dog had taken the baby’s teddy bear, which it was ripping apart, no more than ten feet away. Another time, he said, she’d left him behind in a supermarket; and once she’d left the balcony window open and a woman had come banging on the door, because she’d seen this baby’s head peering out between the bars. ‘Another thirty seconds and I’d have been through,’ said Sam. I was finding it hard to imagine that Sarah would have told him these stories; and if she had, and they were true, why had I never heard anything from her? If she’d been in such a state, would she never have called me? It didn’t make sense, and I was going to say so, but then he was telling me about Sarah’s breakdown.
One night, around five o’clock in the morning, a taxi driver found her outside a branch of Boots, hammering on the door; she seemed to think it was five o’clock in the afternoon; she was wearing a raincoat over a winter coat and not a stitch under that. Not even shoes. So Sam was placed in care; the idea was that he would be sent back to her, once she’d recovered, but the people in charge soon came to think she would never be capable of raising a child, and she couldn’t muster the strength to resist them. ‘Myself, I don’t think she did much resisting,’ said Sam. ‘She told me straight out: “I should never have had a kid.” That’s what she told me. Like she’d forgotten I was the kid she was talking about. Know what else she told me?’ His face now registered a dazed incredulity, and a grain of something comical. ‘She said she nearly had me scraped out of her. Actually got as far as the clinic, but then couldn’t go through with it. She told me that.’
For the next ten years he was passed from family to family. He was, he admitted, a handful. ‘I had issues, as they say,’ he mocked. ‘It was like having a little fucking gorilla in the house,’ he said. He’d ended up with Mr and Mrs Hendy, in Birmingham. (And no sooner had he said this than I could hear – so clearly that I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t heard it earlier – a West Midlands note in his voice. Most of the time, though, it was London – or working-class southeastern England – that I heard.) They were nice people, he said. He liked them a lot. They were very good to him – ‘more patient than I’d have been with a little bugger like me’. But it was always a holding operation – they were looking after him until he was big enough to fend for himself, and fend for himself was what he wanted to do, as soon as possible. ‘Families weren’t for me, at that time,’ he said. Neither was school: having been habitually AWOL, he left school the day he reached leaving age, with no qualifications whatsoever, unless you counted the cross-country trophies. He worked as a labourer for a while, but got into trouble with a foreman and had to move on. He fitted tyres, swept streets, dug holes in roads – and then he joined the army.
His first posting was to Northern Ireland, which was mostly dull as fuck: ‘watching the rain come down in South Armagh, taking shit from the natives’. He’d joined the army to get some action, ‘but the only action in Ireland was jumping out the way when some fuckwit decided he didn’t fancy stopping at a roadblock. You wouldn’t believe how boring it was,’ he said. ‘It got so I really wanted to have a go at someone,’ he said, and I could sense that we were approaching some sort of confession. ‘It got to you, these arseholes giving you shit all the time, calling you a British cunt and all that, and they’re standing there in a Man United shirt with Beckham’s name across the back, and I’m thinking: hold up – last time I checked, David Beckham was a British cunt. Worse than that: an English cunt. I wanted to say to these fuckwits: “Look pal, it’s not my fault you’ve got no fucking work, is it? You think I’m enjoying this?” It drove me mental, I’m telling you. I was getting dangerous,’ he said, and the look in his eyes was the look of a dangerous young man. ‘Every day I wanted to drop somebody. Every fucking day, I was just itching to have a pop, but there was nothing we could do. If some dickhead felt like giving you shit, you just had to take it.’
By the time the tour was over he was regretting the day he’d signed up, but then the CO walked in one morning and announced that they were going to a place where he could guarantee they’d be using their weapons. ‘Those were exactly his words: “I guarantee you’ll be using your weapons”,’ said Sam, eyes wide at the thrilling prospect. The CO was right: within days of landing in Iraq they had fired their guns in anger for the first time. ‘It wasn’t dull, I’ll tell you that much,’ he murmured. ‘Fuck me, it was so not dull it’d make your head explode. From week one, it was as much action as you could handle. Drive down that road’ – he stuck out an arm, envisaging the road ahead – ‘and there’s a one hundred per cent chance of contact. An ambush. One hundred per cent. Could be a gunman, could be RPGs, could be something nasty by the road – but it’d be something. And everywhere stank of petrol and rotting bins and shit – trenches full of it. No kidding – I’ve stood in piss and shit up to my armpits. You take cover, you get down, and sometimes that’s the only place to go. And so fucking hot your brain turns to glue. After a month, I was having dreams of Armagh. I wanted dull again, more than anything in the world. I dreamed of standing in the pissing rain in a field of mud, counting the cows go by. I’m telling
you, it was horrible. Really fucking hardcore. Horrible.’
He’d been talking quickly, non-stop, for maybe ten minutes, but now the words petered out. He halted, and wearily wiped the rainwater from his face. ‘You’ve no idea,’ he told me. It was not an accusation. ‘Maybe I’ll tell you about it, some other time,’ he said. He checked his watch and then offered a hand; I shook it, and he kept hold of my hand for a moment, looking at me in a way that seemed to be asking what I thought about the story he’d told me. ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ he said.
‘I do,’ I told him. ‘Of course I do. It must have been terrible. I can’t imagine.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s right. You can’t imagine. But that’s not what I meant. I meant you don’t believe I am who I am.’
I couldn’t immediately think what to say; he was right.
‘You want proof,’ said Sam. His eyes were dulled by disappointment at my attitude.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you did say you were going to bring—’
‘Yes, I know what I said,’ he interrupted. ‘But I haven’t.’
‘OK,’ I responded, then supplied the question he was waiting for: ‘Why not?’
His reply was not immediate. For a few seconds he regarded me, sullenly, before answering: ‘Because it’s raining.’ I couldn’t tell if this was intended to be a joke of some sort. His look was asking me what I made of his answer; a smile began to form, but it was not good-humoured. He took a deep breath that rushed through his nostrils, squinted at me, and said, almost in a whisper, bringing his face close to mine: ‘You think I’m lying, don’t you?’
Though he claimed to be my son, at this moment I felt it was possible that he would turn very hostile, possibly violent, if I didn’t measure my words. ‘No,’ I said, ‘that’s not what I think.’
He stepped back and folded his arms. ‘So what do you think?’ he asked. His expression now was one of disinterested curiosity.
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