by Liz Nugent
Oh, there’s another stereotypical thing that isn’t true. We don’t recline on sofas during a consultation. It’s usually a comfortable armchair and there are loads of boxes of tissues within reaching distance in case of crying. I’ve done a lot of crying.
‘So, Luke, how are we feeling today?’
‘I don’t know how you’re feeling, but I’m okay, I suppose.’
‘Just okay?’
‘Well, if I was feeling fantastic, I wouldn’t be in here, would I?’
A pause.
‘Have you been having the nightmares since we talked?’
‘Which ones?’
‘Have you seen the baby?’
‘I don’t want to talk about that. I’ve told you that before.’
‘The night you were admitted here, the reports say you were terribly agitated about a baby. But in our last session, you agreed that the woman in the woods is in your imagination. You know, Luke, sometimes when we talk about things we’re scared of, it helps us to quantify them and see them for what they really are.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I’m particularly interested in the baby you talked about that night and I’m wondering what it might symbolize in your life?’
‘You’re the psychiatrist, you tell me.’
‘Okay, I’ll try. But you’ll need to help me. When did you first “see” the baby?’ He did the rabbit ears thing. I sighed deeply.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Was it when you were a child? Or later? After you became famous?’
‘Yes, after.’
‘And how did it first appear? We haven’t established if the baby is a boy or a girl, have we?’
‘I don’t know what it is. It’s too small to tell. I was in Berlin, I think, or Düsseldorf. I know it was Germany.’
‘And when was this?’
‘1992. Five years ago. Springtime.’
‘Yes?’
‘I was in bed.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes … no … there had been a girl, but she’d left by then.’
‘And had you taken any … substances?’
‘Not much. I had to be up early for breakfast TV. We’d gone back to the room after the gig, got some room service, a couple of bottles of beer, and we did a few lines of coke each, that’s all.’
‘Did you know the girl? Did you have sex with her?’ He coughed. ‘I don’t need any details.’
I looked at him, weighing up whether he was some kind of pervert. I’ve seen a lot of shrinks and you’d be surprised how many of them try to make everything about sex.
‘Yes, I think her name was Hilda, or Gilda. She had done my make-up earlier that day at the stadium.’
‘Was she a friend? A girlfriend?’
‘I suppose. For that night anyway.’
‘And did you see her after that night?’
‘No.’
‘Were you still high when you saw the baby? From the cocaine?’
‘No, the buzz had gone, but I was still awake. That’s one of the side effects, you know?’
I saw judgement in his face.
‘I know, I know, it sounds careless to take a drug like that when I had an early call next day, but I was used to it by then. I’d often taken way more on a night out without bloody hallucinations.’
‘Luke, I’m your psychiatrist and it would be irresponsible of me not to remind you how these substances might have a negative effect, particularly for someone with your … sensitivities.’
‘You mean, someone as mental as me.’
‘That’s not the term I’d use. But let’s get back to this hotel room. It was late, you were alone. What happened?’
I shoved my hands under my armpits, feeling suddenly cold.
‘Luke?’
I shifted uncomfortably in the chair. I wished I was reclining on a sofa because then I wouldn’t be facing him.
‘I looked down at my hand and there was a baby curled up in it. Tiny. It fitted into my palm, wriggling around, crawling up my fingers.’
‘A human baby? It couldn’t have been a mouse, for instance?’
I stared at him. ‘No, it wasn’t a mouse, it was a baby person. It had arms and legs and its mouth was screaming.’
‘In pain? Could you hear the screaming?’
I thought about it. ‘No, I couldn’t hear it, but I could see it. And yes, it was in pain. I was wide awake. I wasn’t asleep. I definitely wasn’t asleep.’
‘Okay. Now you know, Luke, don’t you, that it’s not possible for human babies to be so small?’
‘What I know is that you don’t believe me. What I know is that what I saw was not possible. What I know is that I saw it. I still see it, regularly.’
‘I believe that you believe you see it, Luke. How did you feel about it, the first time?’
‘Nervous. Protective.’
‘How do you think it got there?’
I winced, because the next part of the story made me sound even more deranged.
‘The old woman put it there.’
‘The woman from your nightmares, yes? How do you know she put it there? Did you see her?’
‘The old woman was sitting in the corner of the room. She told me to open my hand. And then she disappeared. I never saw her again. And she’d told me she was going to give me a gift, a few nights earlier.’
‘In your dreams?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay, let’s concentrate on the baby. You said you felt protective of it. Did you feel like it was your baby?’
‘I don’t know. But I didn’t want it to get hurt.’
‘Who would hurt it?’
‘Me.’
I was in my final week in the psych unit and was needed back on the road. I felt calmer by then, the meds had worked their magic and I wondered yet again why I’d stopped taking them. When I was being good, I could perform and not embarrass myself, and I could not figure out why I had let things get so out of control. When I was myself, I knew there was no baby, there was no woman in the woods, nobody was trying to kill me. This time Sean had asked my brother Brian to act as my ‘minder’. The previous minders, drivers and security guards, had been easily persuaded with cash or groupies to source the drugs or alcohol that I wanted, or to sneak me into Mayfair clubs. They weren’t smart enough, however, for the tabloids, who sent their reporters in fishnet stockings and thigh-high skirts with their tiny digital cameras to catch me snorting cocaine in a brothel. My clean-cut boyish image was long gone.
At twenty-six, I was too old to be the enfant terrible. I was fed up with singing the same songs night after night after night. I was so bored of all the pointless key changes going into the last chorus to make the song last three and a half minutes. They told me I had to replicate the radio sound. I was not allowed to experiment with my own music. I was jaded by hotel rooms and tour buses, late nights and fast food, quick fucks with strangers in dressing rooms. I was tired, really tired.
Mum came to visit with Will. Neither of them wanted to be there. I could tell. Perhaps they’d made an ‘I’ll go, if you go’ pact. Will brought a cake that Susan had made for me. Coffee and walnut. I used to love that cake. I always liked Susan.
Mum asked if we could go and sit in the garden because the ‘nutters’ made her nervous. Will laughed and I led them out to the smoking courtyard. Everyone in the psych unit smoked. There wasn’t a lot else to do. There were only two other nutters out there at this time, but both were self-contained, one calmly muttering to himself, the other staring at the sky in a trance. I was in way better shape than either of them.
‘What’s the food like?’ said Will.
‘It’s okay, I guess.’ My taste buds had disappeared two years ago, overnight. I got no pleasure from food, had to be reminded to eat all the time because otherwise I would forget. My weight loss was ‘a concern’ for the record company. I needed to look healthy, not emaciated.
‘You were always such a picky eater,’ said Mum, ‘whe
n you were a boy.’
‘That was Brian, Mum. Luke always ate everything,’ Will interrupted.
‘Oh, you know, I think you’re right. It was Brian. Nothing on his plate could touch anything else and he wouldn’t eat anything green except peas.’
‘So, I was a good eater then?’ I asked Mum.
‘I can barely remember – I suppose you must have been.’
Will put his hands on the wrought-iron table. ‘So, back on tour in six weeks, Luke. Looking forward to it?’
I shrugged. ‘Yeah.’
‘Because, I mean, pop careers don’t last for ever. You have to be practical. If I’m honest, you’re lucky you’ve lasted as long as you have. And I wouldn’t worry about that tabloid shite. There’s no such thing as bad publicity. I mean, people will buy tickets to your gigs just to see what state you’re in. It’s all box office at the end of the day.’ This was Will being kind.
‘Brian’s going to be my personal assistant. Sean thinks it’s a good idea to have a family member with me, a stabilizing influence.’
Mum laughed. ‘Good for Brian, that’s a promotion for him rather than selling your tat.’
Will was annoyed. ‘What, so Brian is going to be paid more just to hand you a towel and show you where your dressing room is? For fuck’s sake!’
Even though Will had just produced his first film, he always resented it when Brian got anything that Will didn’t think he’d earned. He often referred to Brian as a loser and a waster. He’d flipped when I told him I’d put Brian on the payroll after Paris two years earlier.
‘It makes sense,’ I said.
‘Yeah, to you. Was this his idea?’
‘No, Sean suggested it. It’s good.’
‘You know,’ said Mum, ‘in the beginning, I blamed Sean for –’ she waved her hand towards me – ‘but he’s the only person who’ll ever give me a straight answer these days about what’s going on when you disappear for months on end without contacting me.’ She smiled. ‘It’s your illness, isn’t it? We can’t blame anyone else for that. Your father had an aunt that got hit by a train and everyone knew it wasn’t an accident, though we all pretended it was. So there’s a bit of madness in his side of the family. You wouldn’t do anything like that, would you, Luke? Disgrace the family like that? I don’t think I’d be able to cope with the shame. Promise me, Luke, you’d never do anything like that?’
Will looked both disgusted and horrified, as if she had placed a turd on the table between us.
‘Mum! You can’t say things like that!’
‘Why not? Everyone’s thinking it. Every time you have one of your episodes, Luke, we all wonder, is this the time he’s going to finish it completely? We’re worried sick and I’m fed up not talking about it. If people were more honest, there’d be fewer suicides in this country. Everything always being brushed under the carpet. I’m sick of it.’
‘Mum, I’m well now and I’m leaving here on Thursday to go back into rehearsals for the tour. I’m on my meds and I feel stronger than I have in a long time. Something is wrong with me. I have a disease called manic depression, or neurosis, or paranoid schizophrenia, or maybe something else entirely, with a new name they’ll come up with next year. I don’t know how it’s going to affect me. The last thing I want to do is to die, and that’s part of the reason Brian is going to be by my side every step of the way. He’ll make sure I stay on the meds and off the other drugs.’
‘Brian! He’s such a good boy!’ said Mum.
Will gripped my shoulder as they were leaving. ‘Stay in touch, then,’ he said.
I hugged Mum and she let me, for a moment. ‘Keep it up,’ she said, and I felt good. I couldn’t remember us ever hugging before.
21
1978
It was William’s tenth birthday and he was allowed to have a party. I had prayed that year that I might have a party for my first holy communion, but we just had a family lunch with Auntie Peggy, Uncle Dan and Aunt Judy, and cake. I realized it was selfish to pray for things I wanted for myself so I prayed that William would have one. After all, a party is for everyone, not just the birthday boy. We’d never had parties in our house before that. Mum said it was too small for ‘marauding hordes’. We usually went to Teddy’s Ice Cream on our birthdays and then out for dinner to a café. Our house wasn’t small, and it certainly wasn’t too small for my parents’ parties where there’d be thirty grown-ups.
We were sent to bed early on those nights, but often we’d be woken by the laughing and singing and piano playing. One time, a drunk woman fell into the bedroom I shared with Brian and started to hug and kiss us. I didn’t know what to do, but Brian went down and fetched my dad who appeared and steered the woman towards the upstairs bathroom.
Boys in my class pestered me about not having birthday parties. I was invited to their parties and they couldn’t understand why I wasn’t returning the invites. I told them the truth. Mum doesn’t like boys my age. Some of them suggested my mother was too ugly to be seen, or too fat to get out of bed, or that she was locked up in the attic because she was crazy.
It was easy to disprove these stories because everyone knew well that Mum was a famous singer and travelled nationwide regularly, giving concerts. Dad said the boys in my class were jealous because my mother was a celebrity. They desperately wanted to see what a famous person’s house looked like. Eamon Patterson’s dad was a newsreader, but everyone said his house was ordinary.
Because Mum always appeared in long and glamorous dresses on stage and television, with teased hair and sparkling jewellery, I think they expected a mansion. Our house wasn’t exactly that, but it was bigger than the other boys’ houses. We had five bedrooms. And the house wasn’t attached at one side to another house like the other ones on our road. Mum and Dad shared one bedroom, Brian and I shared another, and William had a room of his own. Mum said Brian could have a room of his own if he wanted, but I didn’t want to be on my own so Brian always shared with me.
The biggest room upstairs after Mum and Dad’s was always referred to as ‘the dressing room’. It contained racks and racks of Mum’s dresses, a free-standing full-length mirror, a large chest of drawers containing shoes and jewellery and belts and scarves, and a long dressing table scattered with pots of lotions, potions, lipsticks, hair rollers and a weird-looking instrument for curling eyelashes. We used to play in there sometimes when Mum was away or tied up on the phone. But woe betide us if we were caught. The spare bedroom had a piano in it and Mum did her vocal exercises there every day.
For William’s party, Mum and Dad had pulled out all the stops. They had decided that William’s friends were old enough. They greeted all seven boys and William showed off his new tape recorder. The boys ran through the house and did one circuit of the garden with Dad and a rugby ball, but it was freezing and Mum was frantic that William would dirty the white cricket sweater she’d bought specially even though none of us played or had any interest in cricket. A hired magician arrived to put on a show. He made a cake out of a bunch of flowers and did tricks with cards. We were all disappointed at the end when he hadn’t made a rabbit appear out of a hat or cut a lady in half.
Then we had the party food in the dining room: cocktail sausages, triangular sandwiches and chocolate Rice Krispie cakes. A boy sitting beside me, Graham, asked me if I was a neighbour. I was confused for a moment.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m William’s brother Luke, and –’ pointing to Brian – ‘that’s our other brother, Brian.’
Graham nudged the boys on the other side of him. ‘Here, these guys are William’s brothers!’
A boy on his left shouted over with certainty, ‘William hasn’t got brothers, have you, William?’
The room went silent for a moment. Mum was standing behind William at the head of the table. ‘William!’ she said. ‘Haven’t you told your friends about Luke and Brian?’
William ignored the question, threw a handful of Smarties in the air and caught one in his mouth. The ot
hers started doing the same thing while Mum asked again, ‘Why haven’t you ever mentioned your brothers?’
William always walked to school separately from Brian and me. He never waited for us, always running to catch up with his real friends. William’s friends knew us from school, but they had no idea we were related to William.
Later, after the clean-up, Dad declared we were not having any more parties until we were fifteen and no longer acted like savages. Mum laughed at him and patted William on the head. ‘Happy birthday, son,’ she said, and we listened to ‘Mull of Kintyre’ again on the tape recorder.
That night, after we had all knelt and said our prayers, I said to Dad, ‘We’re all brothers, aren’t we, Dad?’
Dad lifted me up on to his shoulders. ‘You sure are, boys, you sure are.’ William pretended not to hear and swung some rosary beads over his head like a lasso.
22
1994
I was lonely. When I was on tour, I was surrounded by people, security, assistants, accountants, managers and girls, but when the merry-go-round stopped and I had to get off and go home to my big empty house, I realized there wasn’t really anyone I could call. Besides the fact I don’t like talking on the phone (I can never imagine the person on the other end), the many people who wanted to be in my life didn’t actually want to spend time with me. I could buy drugs from them or I could share drugs with them, I could have sex with them or I could get them into the Library Bar in Lillie’s or the VIP area of Renards, but they didn’t want to have conversations with me. They pretended to, but nobody actually listened. And even if they did, how could I ever tell them about the baby that followed me around everywhere, the old woman who had haunted me day and night and then vanished?