Travelling in a Strange Land

by David Park

  And if we were to make a collage of your childhood, Daniel, there’d be lots of good things with which to halo your head and at intervals I reignite their memory and try to stir some warmth. But today there is no time for this and I try only to identify the start and that isn’t the same as when Lorna and I first knew we were losing you because it must have come before that. But maybe not even you know the when, the where and the how, any more than you were able to give a reason for anything that happened, almost as if things just did happen without reason or meaning and you were mostly a spectator, a bemused bystander to your own life. And you’d sometimes smile and shrug your shoulders as if they were unknowable or had only some vague connection with you and so you weren’t ever fully responsible for them. And you always had the advantage of what gets called charm, a lightness in your eyes, so your face never held that sullen expression beloved by teenagers. It was only much later when you were fully committed, when you were in over your head and powerless to step back into who you once were, that you’d stop smiling and it’s one of the saddest things that the time when you had the greatest awareness of what was happening was also when you had least ability to save yourself. Maybe just like those two men who fell through the frozen air with everything locked in that final motion and hands powerless to find a hold. And I sometimes think that I or anyone else couldn’t save you, couldn’t find you and pull you free, because you weren’t able to let me or let Lorna do any of the things that might have made that possible. But this thought gets blighted by the image of the farmer never giving up and digging with his spade to the sound of the dog’s barking and how with his hands sunk deep he pulls the black-faced sheep from its burial place. Sometimes I try to tell myself that it was because you loved us both that you held yourself apart, stayed hidden, or that you wanted us to think of you as you once were, but I find no conviction either in this attempt at comfort because by the end I know you weren’t able to think of anyone else: not me, not your mother and especially not yourself.

  Why did you need it? In my time I’ve needed different things but mostly love to ward off loneliness and the sadness to which I now know I’m vulnerable. But never even for a moment did I ever think I would find this thing I craved in anything except another person so I struggle to grasp what prompts those who think so differently.

  And what I want from my body is to stay as focused and balanced enough to see me through each of my days so the thought of willingly taking anything that might affect this just fills me with confusion.

  ‘Why do you need it?’ I asked once in one of those last conversations I tried to have.

  ‘I don’t need it,’ you answered with all the smiling self-delusion of the person who thinks they don’t need help because they’re in control. And in the end that’s what destroyed you because right from the earliest times – the experiments with the sometimes legal and before the final slide and fall – you always believed you could hold your balance, stay sure-footed. Walk that high wire and never ever slip.

  Now I think I should have asked instead, ‘What is it you need?’ because if you had known the answer to that then we could have tried to find it and there’s nothing we wouldn’t have done to help that search. But what if it wasn’t that you believed you’d never fall but that you no longer cared if you did? I can’t think of that without journeying into a realm of suffering that will produce collateral damage so I turn away from it.

  Lies and absences become the pattern of our days. Lorna hates a lie because she has this strict moral sense that can’t help but be angered by this intentional deviation from the truth. I never feel the right to judgement because I know that lies are mostly just things we tell to avoid either pain to ourselves or someone else. But I also know that their consequences are unpredictable and we have no way of controlling where it will lead us in the end. It’s of other things, however, that I am mindful when we’re sitting with you in the police station. It’s the first time I’ve ever been in one and you’re sixteen and we wait in a seating area that has the feel of an A&E department with its plastic chairs, bruised surfaces with a preponderance of black scuff marks from trainers, and posters that exhort us to report various crimes such as domestic abuse and remind us of a range of civic responsibilities. There is one from a charity with a suicide-prevention telephone number and as we sit with a group of other people who avoid eye contact with each other I think that it really is an alternative A&E and most of the people who come here are damaged in some way and in need of care.

  And Lorna and I are hopeful that we’re going to get it because we’ve not done well recently and when you break the rules we make, cross the boundaries we’ve tried to set, we don’t have any meaningful punishment that we can bring to bear on a sixteen-year-old. So we’re feeling a little helpless and unsure of what to do about your lies and absences. Of the way even then you’ve started to use your home as a stopover that you no longer invest anything of yourself in, that you’re always passing through. So here we sit waiting for you to encounter a higher authority and receive a formal warning for underage drinking and antisocial behaviour. And I don’t know if we’re more upset by the drinking or the fact that you thought it was just a bit of fun to throw eggs at an old-age pensioner’s house who had the temerity to tell you off for the disturbance you were creating. And what your mother and I need more than anything is to see something in you that resembles remorse and if we can’t see that then we want there to be the fear that coming face to face with the police should engender.

  I look at your expression but can’t read anything and I want to shake you when you start playing with your mobile phone but Lorna tells you to put it away with a sharpness in her voice that makes some of the waiting heads turn.

  There’s a man in motorcycle leathers, his helmet on his wrist like a bracelet; a mirrored couple who are equally badly overweight and wearing matching grey tracksuits where even the stains seem synchronised; an older man who holds a letter in a way that makes it seem as if he’s offering a public explanation for his presence; and a young woman permanently on her phone with what looks like a black eye under heavy make-up. The police who come into the station throw us all a disinterested, cursory glance before they disappear down a corridor. The officer at the desk acknowledges them with the briefest nod and does his best not to make eye contact with any of us.

  Eventually we get called and shown into an interview room where a policewoman young enough to be your sister asks if she can call you Danny and you say yes even though we think she should call you Daniel and then calmly outlines the future consequences of your actions, the potential implications for career and life prospects, but it’s not what we want. We both look at each other with disappointment because we know that it’s not journeying anywhere further than your surface so all your nodding of your head and serious face might fool her but we’ve seen it assumed before and don’t buy into it. But what is it we wanted from this talk? For her to shout and show you the hangman’s rope? For her to take you by the throat and shake you into some better sense of yourself and responsibility to others? I don’t know but as we drive home in silence I understand fully for the first time that there’s no help coming and everything is down to us, then when Lorna and I are in bed that night we try to tell ourselves that it’s a phase that lots of kids go through and hard as it is you’ll come out the other side and everything will be all right. Everything will work out all right. Everything will work out all right in the end. It’s a kind of refrain we sing to each other, something to lull us into an easier sleep.

  But it’s never all right and even if you don’t bring them round very often I don’t know who these new friends are except they’re not kids from school and although I try not to be judgemental I don’t like the look of them. And you’re asking me when I first knew you were taking? The start of the summer some weeks after you’d left school for the last time and I came down in the night to find you in the kitchen. I sleep light so I heard you coming in and when you looked at
me I just knew. It was something in your eyes, something different to everything that had gone before, as if you were seeing me in some way that was altered and that there was something separating us that travelled beyond the normal distance between father and son. And I was so frightened that I couldn’t even ask you because if I had and you had lied I would have known for sure and in that moment I didn’t know how to deal with that. I guess you knew that I saw because you started staying over with friends more often, coming home to sleep and change your clothes. Coming home to steal.

  Lorna has searched your room, gone through it with a fine-tooth comb but found nothing, even though like me she knows nothing about drugs and might not even recognise anything she discovered, but I think she knows better than anyone with a mother’s instinctive awareness of changes in her child’s appearance, changes in appetite and routine. And your possessions of value have slowly disappeared and you tell us that you’re storing them with friends because you want to share a flat in Belfast when you start at art college because you’ve managed to get in on the strength of your portfolio and just for a while we find in that a better hope for the future. But other things go missing as well. Things that don’t belong to you. Money, and smaller objects at first that you think won’t be noticed and which you can turn into cash. But none of them matters so much as what disappears in you. You hear me, Daniel: none of it mattered so much as what we lost in you. So who are you now?

  Stand with me and look at yourself in the mirror. See your sallow skin and see yourself thinner so your clothes hang on you, and your eyes – the one thing you can never hide – red-rimmed, pupils shrunk, and despite your weight loss it’s as if your body is a burden to be carried. See that there’s something heavy inside you, something hidden to us but which you carry and we know is there.

  The absences grow longer. You mostly don’t answer our calls. We’re both waiting for you one night when you do come home and we sit at the kitchen table without the light on, our cups of tea grown cold, and sometimes we hold hands for strength. When we fall into silence I hear a moth looking for admittance and fluttering against the glass, the drip of the tap, the sound of a distant car. The only light is that which filters in from the hall so you don’t see us at first and jump a little when you do then take a glass and fill it with water.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Lorna asks.

  ‘Just out with mates? What’s wrong?’

  ‘You’re wrong. That’s what’s wrong, Daniel,’ she says. ‘Now sit down because we need to talk to you,’ and part of me is glad that she’s taking the lead. ‘We can’t go on like this,’ she tells him. ‘You coming and going and we know that you’ve changed and not in a good way. We think that you might be taking stuff – stuff that isn’t good for you.’

  ‘What stuff?’ you ask with a half-hearted simulation of confusion that barely convinces yourself and when you shrug your shoulders I can see your skinny shoulder blades rise and fall under your T-shirt. You lift the glass to your mouth and your wrists are bony knobs.

  ‘We’re not fools, Daniel. Why don’t you be truthful with us now and we’ll do everything that we can do to help.’

  You look at the table. I look at it too. It’s the same table where we’ve shared a lifetime of meals, where we’ve played card games and homeworks have been done. It’s the same solid table that has anchored us, around which we’ve all sat, so let it be the sounding board for truth. But you have other holy objects now and you’re not ready to give them up.

  ‘So you think I’m doing drugs, that I’m a junkie?’ you ask with a better show of indignation.

  ‘No one’s saying you’re a junkie. No one’s saying that but you’ve changed and we’re scared because we don’t know what’s going on.’

  ‘Nothing’s going on. I just go out with a few mates, have a couple of beers, play some computer games. Just like half the world.’

  ‘If you’re in trouble we want to help,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re on about. A few beers isn’t going to hurt anyone.’

  ‘We’re not talking about a few beers,’ Lorna says. ‘You’ve lost weight, you don’t eat properly and you’ve changed. It doesn’t feel right, Daniel.’

  She stretches her hand across the table to take yours but you don’t open it to hers. In that moment I think of the sculpted fingers that so enthralled me the night you were born and how they clasped mine.

  ‘Your mum’s worried. I’m worried and Lilly misses you – she’s always asking where you are and when you’re coming home. She really wanted you to see her in the school play.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘That you had to go to the art college for an interview.’

  ‘I’ll make it up to her,’ you say and I’m pleased because it feels like you mean it but I know in this moment I’ll cling to any hope that’s offered. And if I could I’d rewind the years until we’d be sitting round this same table and playing Happy Families and trying to make our families complete by our honest giving and taking.

  You stand up and take your glass to the sink then say goodnight and leave us still sitting at the table with Lorna only able to hold back the tears until we hear your footsteps on the stairs. Absences and lies all through that summer and you hardly bother with Luke any more as you become not much more than a shadow that moves across the house and then fades into missing days. And that shadow makes the house cold, sends each of us turning into ourselves because we don’t know how to be around you or even how to talk about you when you’re not there. Lilly alone tries to put things into words but struggles to find them and then comes to understand that whatever is happening has to be added to the list of things for which adults don’t have answers.

  I think, Luke, there was a time when you looked up to him without it ever crossing into hero worship and even when that faded at the end of your teens you still stay loyal so when I try to ask you about your brother you simply shrug in a blanket disclaimer and make it obvious that you’ve nothing to spill, no insights you’re able or willing to share. And there’s not much practical help from any of the outside agencies we approach apart from the type of advice we’re already familiar with from the Internet because it has to be our son who does the asking and that’s not going to happen. So, Daniel, it has to begin with you and nothing is possible unless you want it. And only once do I think that might happen and it’s one morning at the end of the summer when I can feel the season’s first slow slippage into change and I have to go up to the North Coast to take photographs for a new tourist brochure that I’ve tendered for and won because I probably offered to charge about half the going rate and you ask if you can come with me. Just out of the blue you ask if you can come. And before we can stop her Lorna is almost singing and talking about making sandwiches until I persuade her not to fuss and we’ll pick up something on the way. Then she understands the risk of breaking the fragility of the moment’s decision and lets us go without fanfare.

  We’re in the car, in the car together, Daniel, and the one thing I’m not going to do is talk about anything except what you want to talk about and even if you don’t want to talk it doesn’t matter. So at first we just drive and then you start to look at the music available and when you find the Johnny Cash CD you laugh but I tell you it’s not what you expect and I insist on playing the track ‘Hurt’ and it suddenly becomes sadder than anything I’ve ever heard and I have to look away and force myself not to cry.

  And I know you’re listening too but don’t know what you’re thinking until it’s too much and I’m glad when it’s over. I’ve never played that track again. Can never play it again in my whole life.

  ‘We could put something more cheery on like The Smiths,’ I say and you almost laugh again.

  ‘I heard them every other night coming through Luke’s wall for I don’t know how many years. Misery at midnight.’

  ‘I like them – they’re a good band for a man who suffers from anxieties.’

  ‘What
anxieties?’ he asks.

  ‘Just about everything under the sun,’ I say but don’t expand and then regret it because it might be a way of admitting that I too am flawed and vulnerable but try to keep on going and not yield to the temptation of giving up.

  You rifle through the CDs and put on The National and I say it’s a good choice and you grin when I tell you that when he sings about racing like a pro now, for about a year I thought he was saying racing like a pronoun. We stop at the Dark Hedges and I try to get an atmospheric picture that doesn’t include tourists, parked cars or farm machinery on the road but it’s almost impossible. You take some shots with your phone and then we head to the rope bridge at Carrick-a-Rede that connects the mainland with a small island and where you need a head for heights. I’m not comfortable on the moving narrow structure but you stroll across and stop in the middle and look down as all around you Japanese tourists take selfies with their cameras and phones on sticks as if they’re holding up magic wands to cast a spell over themselves. I go to take a picture of you as you walk ahead but you see me and shake your head so I don’t and wait until we’re both on the island then, looking back, take some shots. You ask to take one and I explain the camera, hand it over and don’t want the moment to end. Then when I’m walking back and resolutely not looking down my path gets blocked by some people taking selfies and suddenly I have to get off the bridge and set my feet on solid ground so I brush past them and this time you are laughing which sounds sweeter than any music.

  ‘So you’re scared of heights,’ you say back in the car as if pleased to discover a weakness.

  ‘Not scared. Just uncomfortable. But everybody has something that scares them. Your mother can’t do spiders. And when there’s one in the bath I have to get it out and it’s not good enough to wash it down the plughole because she says it might just climb up again.’