But I knew this was silly because he was our daddy and we'd only been on holiday with him a few weeks ago. Swimming in the sea, eating sandwiches, watching the little portable black-and-white TV he always brought with him in the hotel bedroom.
He picked us up. His car. Clean beige upholstery and cigarettes. The full ashtray which always made me cough. I don't remember what we said to each other after all that time, but I know we stopped on the way home to get some frozen food.
There's nothing in the house any more, he said. You'll see how different it is.
* * *
Our boy's attendance at school is getting patchier and patchier. Many days now he doesn't even pretend he's going to get up in the morning, doesn't even waste time talking about it.
In some ways this is a relief It means I don't have to go up there, trying to rouse him, seeing his pale face surrounded by half-eaten plates of food and mouldy glasses, crumpled Kleenex and old underpants. It also means we don't have to suffer his destructive and chaotic presence tipping everyone off balance at breakfast.
Most days we get an automated message from the school-attendance line, informing us that he isn't there and asking us to give a reason.
And I tell the truth.
We don't have a reason, I explain to the school answerphone. We think he ought to be there. We passionately feel he needs to be put on the spot, told what his options are. We've suggested his teachers threaten to expel him. But they haven't, so we really don't know what we can do.
I say these words - or something like them - several times a week. Some days I feel assertive and honest and resigned as I say them. Other days I just feel miserable.
He doesn't go to school because he knows he can get away with not going. He doesn't go to school because he's forgotten all about why he was going in the first place. He doesn't go to school, we are realising now with a sinking, tearing certainty, because he absolutely and definitely can't stop smoking cannabis.
When we challenge him about this, when we try to talk about skunk, he laughs at us.
I don't buy skunk any more, he says. Do you think I'm crazy or something? The guy I buy from, he's a really good guy. He goes out of his way to make sure it's not skunk.
But you used to smoke skunk?
Used to, yes. But this is mersh. Much weaker, OK?
But how do you know?
He rolls his eyes.
Because I trust the guy, OK? He doesn't want to fuck people's brains about with skunk, does he?
Doesn't he?
If he gets chucked out, says his father, he's out of here. I mean it. That's it. He's pushing eighteen and If he's not in education, well, I don't know if I can live like this much longer.
He says it partly to himself, to hear what it sounds like, and partly to me, to see what I'll say. I don't say anything.
Meanwhile our boy's routine doesn't waver. On days he goes to school, he gets up about ten and leaves after a shower and a bit of shouting. The relief in the house is palpable. The silence. The lack of tension. The quality of the air actually seems to change.
On days when he doesn't, he gets up at around two and maintains what feels to us like a steady and carefully judged campaign of aggression and belligerence. It's not that any of the individual things he does - stumbling around half-dressed, swearing and yawning and scratching himself, making a pot of coffee and enjoying it on the lawn, smoking a joint and playing his guitar wearing nothing but a pair of boxers - are so very extraordinary or intolerable in a teenager. More that he makes it quite clear that all of this is non-negotiable. That we have no say in how things will be in our home. The noise, the mess, the fury - we have no choice but to put up with it. In fact, if we complain, he seems to go out of his way to make sure the volume increases.
Sometimes, trying to work, I lean out of the window and beg him to stop singing. Just for a bit.
I just need half an hour, I tell him. Half an hour of peace so I can think.
He squints up at me as if he's forgotten who I am.
One more song, he says. And he turns straight back to his guitar because it's not a question. If! continue to object, or if! decide to go down there, he'll start one of his rants where he follows me round the house, shouting at me and asking for money. And If he does this, then I can say goodbye to work for a couple of hours or more.
I shut the window. I'm hot. I try to work. His voice continues. I push my fists in my eyes, hold back the tears.
If we ask him to clear up the mess he's made, he replies that he'll live as he sees fit.
As you see fit?
He grins.
Look, his father says as mildly as I've ever heard him talk to anyone, while you're standing there waiting for the kettle to boil, couldn't you just unload the dishwasher? Or wash up the pan you used for the sauce?
His son tells him to fuck off and stop being such a megalomaniac control freak.
That's a bit of a tautology, suggests his father. And all I'm asking is that you behave like a member of this family.
This isn't a fucking family, says his son, who loves to try and make out that we are - and always have been - supremely dysfunctional in all sorts of fundamental ways that do not relate to or involve him.
And some days I think he is right. Some days I wonder, What did we do to our child? What exactly was it? What toxic concoction of qualities did we two parents somehow bring to this young family of ours, to cause such a disastrous thing to happen?
And then I look at the photo I have on my desk of him fast asleep in his father's arms when he was just a few weeks old. A young, soft-faced man in an old brown jersey, eyes full of love. And a tiny baby boy, eyes tight shut, fists clenched, white shawl carefully folded around him by that same young man, who moved me so much when he asked the midwives to show him how to swaddle an infant properly.
In May 1829, your sister Sarah takes a trip to London with your mother and Harriet. They call on various friends - the Rowlatts, the Wrights, the Lears, the Dobsons and the Marcets. Frank Marcet is a celebrated surgeon, who belongs to the same clubs and sits on the same committees as your father. Your family and his are firm friends.
They go to the Bazaar in Soho Square, where they probably buy hats, gloves, handkerchiefs, shawls and lace, as well as some drawing and painting materials. Then they go to a watercolour exhibition. They drive around Hyde Park, go out to dinner and to the theatre, and attend a fitting of a new gown that's being made up for your mother. They go to the opera in Covent Garden:
We were in Lady Holland's private Box which Mrs Marcet had for that even. Our party consisted of our 3 selves, Mr and Mrs Frank Marcet & Sophy Marcet and MrJ. Prevost joined us at the Play. Mrs M was not well enough to go. We saw some very pretty baby linen which they were going to send to Geneva for Mrs M's baby, and for Mrs de la Rive.
They go to Crouch End, from where they take a pleasant walk to Shepherd's Cob Fields, and on the Sunday, as always, they go to church. They eat bride cake at a Mrs L's and then go on to an exhibition at Somerset House where they particularly admire pictures of the Duchess of Richmond by Sir T.E. Lawrence. Sarah is struck by the fact that Lawrence's pictures fetch up to 600 guineas each.
They go to Bond Street to admire statues of Tam O' Shanter and Souter John, done by a Scotch stonemason. And then on to the Spanish Bazaar in the Hanover Square rooms, which they find rather crowded:
All the lady Patronesses were ladies of quality, Countesses etc etc. We saw there Lady Morley who was much better looking than we expected, Lady Anson also and Lady Ann Coke. It was a very gay scene indeed, a great many fashionable people, buyers and sellers. The gentlemen seemed very niggardly inclined and were complaining of everything being so immensely dear.
On another night your father, who has now joined the party, takes your sisters to see the celebrated opera singer Maria Malibran Garcia:
The music is extremely fine, Mad Malibran is a most graceful actress and very interesting looking woman. An act was performed from '11 Barb
iere', Rossini; Mad Sontag who sang an aria divinely and looked most sweetly. A short ballet merely a divertissement.
The next morning they all get up at half past four and set off by telegraph coach for Carrow Abbey.
Your sister's journal of this trip sits on my desk by my computer, among the other papers and journals lifted from the box. And I'm flicking through it for the fourth or fifth time when I notice what I never noticed before. Right at the very back of the book, hidden on the inside-back page long after the journal has ended, a note, scratched in the faintest pencil. It takes me a while to decipher:
You must come too (to Epsom). Stay here and then I shall have the pleasure of talking to you. You've been forgetting how happy I am between [?] too. I'll do everything you tell me whatever I do. Ah, you are all perfection, I do not require any change. Take my [?] and [?] to each [illegible initials]. Come to find us to say goodbye. How long do you love [?] . . .
The writing is so faint, so almost not there, that there are a few words I just can't make out, words I have to give up on. What does it mean? And I can't quite tell if it's your sister's handwriting, the same as the journal, or whether it was written by someone else.
The only thing I'm sure about is this: almost two hundred years ago, under a card table, during a lengthy opera, or on the crowded edges of a bazaar, these words were hastily scribbled by one person for another to see: Ah, you are all perfection.
I'm looking at a secret two-hundred-year-old love note.
Our old house - our father's house - was different. We didn't live there any more. It wasn't the same. There were sad patches on the wall where pictures had been, dusty dents in the carpet where furniture had gone. The fridge was empty and the toilet bowl had a rusty ring. There was fluff on the carpet and a dead spider in the plughole of the bath.
Downstairs, though, there was a bigger TV and a brand-new thing, a video recorder. He showed us how you could be in the middle of watching a programme and make the people freeze. The Sale of the Century, New Faces. You could make them all go backwards and start again. When he showed us, we laughed and laughed and said: Do it again, so he did it again. For a while it felt like we had our old fun daddy back.
There was more whisky than there used to be and there were all the same old ashtrays, including the one where you pressed the button and it went around and the ash fell down, but they'd just been emptied not wiped. And he had another new toy, an electric organ (he had a talent which was that he could play any instrument by ear without music). He played it for us, hands all flat on the keys and cigarette held in the side of his mouth. When he played, his eyes went dreamy and his face turned into someone else's face and something about the electric texture of the music made me feel a bit sick.
Upstairs our rooms were sad and cold and all our ornaments were gone. Just fluff and dead flies on the shelves where our glass animals had been.
Well, they're gone because your mother took them, he said and we couldn't really argue with that. He said he wasn't replacing anything she'd taken. He said we couldn't really expect to benefit from being the children of divorcees.
I never asked her to go, he reminded us as he shook another cigarette out of its packet, and we felt sorry for him all over again.
He said it wasn't really worth turning the radiators on, now we, his own daughters, weren't living here.
But just for the weekend?
He shook his head.
They wouldn't get hot in time. And by the way, he said, he'd rather we didn't call that other house, our mother's house - the house where she was living in sin with That Man - home. This was still our home, this empty cold place with nothing on the walls.
OK, we said.
We listened to our father and we tried to be sympathetic. Maybe we were sympathetic. It wasn't his fault, after all, If he was a bit upset. I thought I'd be a bit upset too if I had my whole life taken away like that, in the space of one August night.
Even the dog, as he pointed out in a voice so angry it was almost a whisper. He told us he was asking our mother for the value of half of the dog: £8. The dog had cost 16 and so he was asking for 8.
I call a branch of Narcotics Anonymous that meets in Bloomsbury once a week. It's the only one in Europe that's specifically for under-twenty-fives.
The leader tells me it's fine for our boy just to turn up. Or he can call and speak to him first if he prefers. I tell him that the boy in question doesn't believe he has a problem and is unlikely to call. I just wanted to be able to let him know what was available.
Just give him the information, the leader says. You're doing the right thing. This way you're equipping him, so that when he's ready he can make the choice himself
My darling,
Please read this letter from your interfering mother who loves you so much.
I could be wrong (please forgive me if I am) but I still very very strongly feel/sense that you are smoking too much cannabis. I don't care how much you're smoking whether every week, every weekend or every day.
Whatever. I just have this hunch that everything (I mean school AND everything else, your music, your relationships, your sense of fun, everything!!) would go much more how you want it to go if you were able to stop.
Wait! Don't tear this up! Hear me out . . . please. I do know that feeling of wanting to get OUT of your head (you won't believe me but I've been there and used other things to get there). But why not try staying INSIDE your head for a while? It's may be not as scary or boring a place as you think. Your head is fascinating. You're turning it to mush with drugs. You know this and it's scary.
No, don't tear this up! Just read it, OK?
A NICE NORMAL guy called R. runs the only Narcotics Anonymous meeting in the whole of Europe for young(er) people. They meet every Friday in Bloomsbury. You can just turn up. The people are aged mostly between twenty and twenty-five though some are younger and the point is that though a few of them have moved on to heroin, most HAVE NOT. Most are just doing WAY more cannabis than they want to be doing. Plus (R. says) usually a bit of coke. Like you, in fact.
The reason they've (finally) given in and come to the meeting is they've tried very hard to smoke less but have failed. This scares them. R. says it does a person's head in when they're quite strong and intelligent and therefore presume they'll be able to kick something when they want to . . . then they decide they DO want and find they can't.
I very very much want you to try going to a meeting. All right, I can't make you. So you can:
a) Tear this piece of paper up (no, please don'tl).
b) Refuse to go because you're sick-of-me-interfering in-your-life-and-I've-got-it-all-wrong, but AT LEAST fold the piece of paper up and keep it in your pocket for when you change your mind.
c) Go to a meeting with ME next Friday 19th and I buy you dinner afterwards. . .
d) Go to a meeting on your OWN next Friday 19th and meet me for dinner afterwards . . .
Or just call R. on this number. He says you can call him at any time if you want to find out more. You can say I gave you the number or you don't have to. Just say you got his number from Narcotics Anonymous. He gets called all the time, it's what he does. He sounds really nice. Intelligent, sense of humour, kind of normal.
The thing is, I know we went on last year about you going into rehab but I think that wasn't quite it. I don't think you need rehab. But I think you need a reason (and some help) to quit something that you thought you enjoyed but is in fact taking over your life. I think you know this. These meetings (and NA itself) have only been running this long because they work. Most people decide to quit and do quit and get happy, get clean.
You can go to just one meeting or you can go when you feel like it or you can go every Friday. But it's worth a try. I don't see what you have to lose . . .
That letter. I spend time on it. I write it so carefully, choosing every word with the very best intentions. But reading it back now I wince as I see how badly I got it wrong. It's far too long, f
or a start, and it's trying much too hard. A boy can smell a mother's anxiety a mile off and this letter stinks.
I don't know If he ever really read it. But I do at least know that he took option b.
Because months later, clearing out the flat he's just been evicted from, the same flat where he abandons his cat, I find the letter - its once-sharp creases fuzzy with age, folded and zipped into his old jacket pocket.
Caroline Baron returns my call.
Oh I'm sorry, I tell her, I thought your name was Suckling.
No, it's Baron. Used to be Baron Suckling, I think, a long time ago, but at some point the Suckling bit was dropped.
I explain what I'm writing about.
Oh well, it's my father you need to talk to, she says. He knows everything. All I know, you see, is just what he's told me. He lives half the year in Tenerife but he's back soon. I can give you his email.
I thank her and say I'll contact him.
We're about to say goodbye when she adds: Did you know, by the way, that the curse continues? Yes, well, it's supposed to be the eldest male in the family and it always skips a generation but, twenty years ago when my cousin David died of a brain tumour, my father thought, Ah.
Your brother Sam's journals, kept while he's living in London and Ipswich, supposedly studying the law, but in fact putting far more energy into having a good time, are more revealing than Sarah's.
Sam always has plenty to say, doesn't he? He's lively, vociferous, likeably curious, a little bit full of himself, perhaps. You wouldn't exactly call him quiet and bookish - he never seems to opt for an evening in when he could go out. But he does like reading and seems to get through many of the notable volumes of the day (Anne Grey, Hallam, Preston, Blackstone, Allemagne), gobbling them in late-night bursts, or else at breakfast.
The Lost Child Page 14