by Matt Haig
My lenience had a reward: the hunger strike came to an end. I watched with attentive glee as the minced beef and mashed potato disappeared into your mouth, and enjoyed my own meal so much more for knowing its taste was being shared. Cynthia telephoned again, later, after we had finished the apple charlotte.
'Well done, Terence,' she told me, and confirmed my hope. 'Helen would be proud of you.'
After the call I followed the tender sound of cello music coming from your room, as you practised your piece for the Drama and Music Festival. My head leaned against your door, my eyes closed, and I lost myself in the divine opening bars of Beethoven's Pathétique. The sound of love, the sound of grief; the helpless, hopeful tears of the human soul.
A love song was playing. A man was on a large video screen, creasing his young face with forced emotion.
'That's the problem,' I told Cynthia, pointing up at this unkempt crooner.
Cynthia gave me that look of stern confusion I was becoming increasingly used to. 'What? Music?' She seemed appalled at the suggestion.
'No. All this false love they're surrounded by. All this exaggerated emotion. It makes everything so difficult for them.'
'For who?'
I gestured vaguely around me, at the young girls, flicking their way through rails of boy-catching outfits. 'For children,' I said. 'They are sold love as if it was another must-have purchase. They're bombarded with all this fake feeling constantly nowadays. They can't escape it. It's incessant. They are drowning in it. It's precisely what D. H. Lawrence prophesied.'
Cynthia rolled her eyes. 'Oh yes, D. H. Lawrence. The great moralist. Enlighten me, Terence, please. What did he say?'
'He said something about it. Oh, I can't remember. Something about how it will drive people towards insanity. They won't know how to feel any more. They'll have all this counterfeit emotion and never know their own feelings.'
Cynthia closed her eyes and shook her head. 'Have you listened to yourself, Terence?'
'D. H. Lawrence,' I said. 'Not me.'
'No. You, Terence. You.' I caught my own distorted reflection in the ridiculous bangle she was wearing. 'But I know what this is really all about.'
I sighed. 'Do you?'
The knowing raise of those thinned eyebrows. 'Yes, I do. You're just worried. It's her birthday. Bryony's getting older and you can't cope with it.'
'She's turning into someone else,' I said. 'It's like she's been infected with all this modern rubbish she used to be immune to. I want her to be immune again. It's unhealthy. She'll end up doing things she'll regret, when she's older, when she knows better, when she . . .'
Cynthia was staring over at a stand of accessories where an array of belts were hanging down. On the top of the stand was a row of hands. Mass-produced sculptures, cast in black plastic, intended to hold jewellery. They made me think of dead spirits reaching out to the living.
'Aren't those belts fabulous?' Cynthia said. 'I think I might get one.'
'Cynthia, are you even lis—'
My words died. You stepped out of the changing rooms, wearing a look I can only describe as Harlot Caught in a Cyclone.
'Oh, it looks great,' Cynthia said. 'Isn't it fun? Doesn't she look great, Terence? Terence? Terence?'
A sharp elbow to my ribs.
'Yes,' I said. 'From the neck up.'
I caught a boy staring at you, behind his girlfriend's back. A famished longing that sent a shot of fear through me.
'Oh, don't listen to your father,' she told you, as if you ever would.
You disappeared back into the changing rooms and reemerged to test Cynthia's opinion on a variety of combinations. Striped harlot. Knitted harlot. Polka-dotted harlot. I sat there and grumbled my fatherly way through each and every one of them. No. There was one I liked, wasn't there? The jeans with the green sweater. That was quite an easy combination to approve, given that it covered all the parts it should have, and didn't advertise your flesh like a pig's carcass in a butcher's window.
'Oh yes,' I said. 'That's more like it.' The kiss of death of course. You screwed up your nose and disappeared, re-emerging as Dracula's bride.
Still, it was a good afternoon.
We got along, with the aid of my credit card and Cynthia's warm witchcraft. We went for a drink and some walnut loaf at Betty's Tea Rooms, do you remember? You seemed happy, between the distant stares, to be with me. Out in town, on public view, with your father. Rome, it seemed, was forgotten. And so was the embarrassment I had caused in the field. We didn't speak of it. We let Cynthia lead the conversation, a narrow and happy path with the right kind of scenery. Reuben stayed in the bushes, even though we could feel him, ready to pounce on us at any moment.
'So,' Cynthia said to you, as a gleaming black talon addressed the crumb on her lip, 'are you looking forward to tonight?'
And she winked. Yes, she did. She winked. That saucy, theatrical descent of the eyelid closing me out of existence.
'Yes,' you said, smiling smirkishly. 'Yes. I am.'
Oh yes, that evening. Your birthday. It comes to me. The whole hideous shape of it perfectly intact. Except, of course, that one missing link.
I had dropped you off at Cynthia's and then loitered nearby, parked high on a kerb. My plan was to sit there a while, and see who had been invited. I saw Imogen arrive, dressed like a Victorian strumpet, but was relieved to see she had no boys in tow.
I was on the cusp of leaving when I saw it. The taxi. I sat there, watching, as it pulled up, gasped in unheard terror as it honked its horn and you and Imogen ran out, giggling, and climbed in the back.
Before I had fully appreciated the situation it was driving away. What could I do? There was no point rushing in and reprimanding Cynthia. My priority was to follow you, and make sure you were safe.
My first instinct was to speed ahead and overtake the taxi, forcing it to stop. But I remembered the way everything had deteriorated the last time I had embarrassed you in front of your friends. And what would have happened? You would have given me a boxful of lies and then sought even harder to defy me. No. I had to follow you. I had to find out all the answers for myself, and punish you later.
Yellow hovered through the foggy air. A kind of alien sickness spreading from the street lamps to infect the whole night. It made it no easier to see the car in front, transporting my daughter at speeds she wasn't made to travel at, but I held onto the chase, ignoring limits of speed and recklessness as I sped through the jaundiced vapours.
The taxi slid into the left lane and turned off at the next junction. I turned too, recklessly close. One twist of your neck and you might have seen the familiar headlights gleaming through the fog. To my infinite horror I realised we were heading towards Leeds, a city that cared as much for my daughter's well-being as a flame cares for the well-being of a moth.
I felt sick with anxiety. Where were you going at this time on a Friday night? The fog thinned out, and I slowed down to create more distance between the two cars.
All around me, the horror continued.
There are still Enlightenment thinkers among us who grasp at the idea of Progress as stubbornly as a three-year-old holds onto a forbidden toy. The idea that society is at its most advanced is a preposterous one. Scientific progress – yes, maybe, perhaps. But moral progress? Aesthetic progress? Social progress? These latter-day Diderots should ride their gilded carriages into the heart of the English city centre on a Friday night and measure how far the humans have come. Oh, what advancement they will find! Look, there's Progress throwing a bottle across the street! Look, there's Progress showing the world the dark crevasse of its backside!
I stayed two cars behind, safely invisible, as the Victorian architecture loomed above the street lamps and bar fronts, dissolving like an irrelevant memory into the night.
Your taxi eventually halted under a railway bridge where a queue of strange-haired boys (I saw only boys) waited to enter a door in the wall with the word COCKPIT hanging over it, a word which conjured all m
anner of connotations in my fevered mind.
'Cynthia,' I muttered to the empty car. 'You foolish, foolish woman.'
I parked next to a loading bay for a pizza parlour and waited, eyed with humorous curiosity by an underage chef on a cigarette break.
Cities try to shame us into action, as they know stillness is the preserve of the destitute, the dangerous, the dead. But there was no point rushing. I wanted to stay where I was until you were inside that place, that unknown Hell I was soon to enter. After all, I had to stay hidden from you and then find out how best to protect you. I had to know what this night would consist of, without my interference, if I was ever to steer you back onto the right course.
A group of women passed the car wearing angel wings and advertising their bad diets with the most ill-advised attire. They eviscerated a love song at high volume, a communal mating call uglier than any in nature, and blew me kisses. One held a large inflatable phallus and waved it in front of the car window.
I closed my eyes, and tried to fight him back, as the singing faded away into traffic. Then, taking a large deep breath of that sealed and untainted air, I went out, into the night, to watch my dear sweet lamb dance among the wolves.
The man at the door stared down at me from his giant boulder of a head.
'No, fella,' he said, 'Don't think so.'
I begged his pardon.
'Saint your scene.'
And which scene was it? I wondered. The pivotal turning point in Act Two, where a twist of fortunes is followed by the increasingly rapid descent towards tragedy?
'I have money,' I said. 'And I am more than prepared to pay the full cost of entry into your establishment.'
The boulder ignored me, looking behind and tilting left. A signal for the two young droogs next in the queue to enter the doorway. Meanwhile, my unstoppable mouth continued to plead with this rock-head, this St Peter on protein shakes.
'Listen, are you planning to let me pass, because I must inform you I have no intention of leaving.'
To which he responded with a most creative turn of phrase: '—— off, you ———— before I —— your face.'
I inhaled his words with dignity. 'Right, I see. Well, dear man, let me put it like this. You have just allowed a girl who is three years under the required age to enter your establishment. I know this because she happens to be my daughter. Now, as keeper of the gates, you have two choices. Either you persist in your present and rather offensive strategy and suffer the unfortunate consequences. Or you allow me to go inside and retrieve her. In which case I shall not be contacting your employer, or my close friends at the council.'
His eyes contemplated the parallel universe, devoid of councils and employers, where he was now merrily engaged in stamping my head into the tarmac.
'——,' he said, but let me through all the same.
A 'band' was 'onstage' playing 'music'. I saw a crudely designed banner indicating they were called the Cleopatras, which was strange as there were four Antonys to only one, impossibly angry Ptolemy Queen.
Did you know this band? Were you a fan? Was that why you were there?
It was like walking into a panic attack. No, that makes it sound too cosy. It was like walking into someone else's panic attack, someone I didn't know and didn't want to. Someone closing their eyes on a railway platform at a quarter past midnight, debating whether to end it all under the next freight train that passes through. (I once heard a Radio 4 nitwit say that if Beethoven were alive today he would be playing lead guitar in a rock band. No. He would be sitting on that railway platform, breathing into a brown paper bag as he prayed for the train that would finish him.)
I searched for you amid the groundlings, amid the jumping bodies that reached hungrily for the stage. The idea of you there, among these sun-shirking opium eaters, filled me with the same terror I had found when searching for you in Rome, a sense that I was losing you to evil forces of the night. Darkness and devils.
Cleopatra screamed as I pushed my way through. I turned to the stage and saw her wrestling with the microphone as though it were an asp, ready to sink its poison into her chest.
'Excuse me,' I said, but of course I had no voice. The music had stolen it. Indeed, that was probably what it was there for, to steal voices, to give flesh an easy triumph over conversation.
Yes. Bodies, bodies, bodies. The whole place was congested with them. That was all they were to me. Just bodies. What else could I see them as? What type of personality could have existed inside that place? The noise made thought and conversation impossible.
'Is there no way out of the mind?' asked the poet.
Yes, you go where youth goes. To the 'Cockpit' on the dying hours of a Friday. There you will find five hundred rocking heads becoming no more or less than the limbs below them.
Oh, Bryony, don't frown.
Please, don't shake your head in disgust.
I am ignorant in these matters. You think that, don't you?
You think I have no understanding of what it means to be young. To want to abandon yourself entirely and dissolve inside a moment. To desire feeling instead of thought. Oh yes, I know to you I have always been there, as parents always have. I might as well have been erected by the Druids.
A standing stone, from the time before time.
You never looked into my eyes and saw the long-haired youth who had once slugged back a glass of absinthe midway through a reading of Keats' 'Hyperion' at the Young Restorers' Poetry Club.
*
Eventually, I caught sight of you in your new clothes, alongside Imogen and the rest of them.
I weighed my options. Go over and drag you out of there and lose your trust for ever? No. I would wait and intervene only if necessary. I would hang back out of sight, dissolve among the smoke and noise and keep my distance.
Oh but it was hard, standing there, being jostled and groped as I tried to keep my eyes on you. They stood on my feet, they elbowed my ribs, they blew their multi-scented smoke into my face.
I saw a tall boy lean over and whisper in your ear. It was Mr Cadaverous. Uriah Heep. Other boys were with him, and I recognised some of their faces from the day I'd followed you into town. There was no sign of George Weeks, though. His mother must have spoken to him, I decided, and I gained a drop of satisfaction from the thought. The drop evaporated when I saw Uriah's long skeletal hand upon your back, sliding lower.
At that moment, someone spilt a drink down my shirt, a purplish liquid in a beer glass that left a stain. I ignored the sticky wetness against my skin and kept watching as the hand tested its luck against your hip. To my amazement you offered no resistance. Did you like him? I couldn't tell, but made no hesitation when I saw him head to the toilets.
When I got there he was in one of the cubicles, struggling with a catarrh problem. I waited, staring at myself in the mirror. At the stain that was drying on my shirt, fading pink. A stain that seemed to signify what I was, who I had become. Terence. Latin root terere. To fade out, to use up, to rub away. To disappear.
The slide of the weak metal lock, the shuffle of his feet. He washed his hands at the sink, at first ignoring my presence.
I would talk to the boy. That was my plan. I would address him politely, and present him with a lucid argument as to why he should not continue in his efforts to seduce a fifteen-year- old girl.
Then something changed.
I had the usual sensations. My brain tingled, my vision darkened but then, suddenly, I wasn't there. I wasn't in my own mind.
Or, more accurately, I was thinking thoughts that had not originated inside my own mind. You see, that was the first time it happened. That was the first time I saw something, a memory, that I myself (Terence Cave) had never experienced. Suddenly I was riding a bicycle and I saw that boy's face, his long cadaverous face, laughing at me, and I noticed his bony hand was pointing in my direction as I pedalled. Then I looked down, inside the memory, and saw that the bicycle I was riding was the present I had bought Reuben for his bir
thday a year ago that day. This was your brother's bicycle that I had been riding. And this, I realise now, was your brother's memory that I was reliving.
There was no further detail in the scene. There was the laughing Uriah, and there was the bicycle that Reuben (I myself) had been riding. All other details – weather, physical landscape, people accompanying either one of us – were entirely missing. Yet I must tell you that it was sharply believable. Indeed, it was so sharply believable that the question of whether or not I should have believed it did not emerge. The pain I felt inside me was so real it had to have been lived.
But as I said, such rationality arrived afterwards. At that moment I was so lost, so faded, so rubbed out, that anything Terence Cave had planned to say or do to this boy was completely irrelevant.
As Uriah posed in front of the mirror – changing the angle of his face, sucking in his already sunken cheeks, pulling his hair forward to cover one of those sleepy eyes – a strange force rose within me. My fists clenched as I tried to control this force. Yet I could no more steer it away than I could hold back dark clouds arriving in an empty sky.
I trembled with it, tingled with it, became dizzy with it, this relentless feeling of being pulled away from myself. And then, instead of the slow descending gauze I had known before, I suffered something more intense. A black flash – a completely dark blank – that I now recognise as the eclipse of my soul by another.
After that, there is the gap, the missing link.
I was there, staring at him in the mirror. And the next thing I can remember his face was bleeding in front of me as I pressed him by the throat into the wall.
There was a sudden flood of sound as the door opened and someone walked in. For a moment, I did nothing. I just kept the boy fixed against the wall. The door closed, and as Cleopatra's death cry faded I heard something new. A fuzzy, crackling sound. Radio static. Then a large and ominous shape entered my peripheral vision.