by Liz Nugent
I bought an acoustic guitar. I hadn’t played in years. I strummed at it for a few days, but somehow I knew that music was not my thing. It was a career I had accidentally and catastrophically fallen into. I wondered if I could sit at a desk and sell insurance or maybe work in a library. I contemplated going back to college and finishing my engineering degree but over twenty years had elapsed. I would have to start again with the teenagers. What does a middle-aged man do with his life when his CV says ‘former pop star’?
Word spread that I was in recovery and had regained my marbles. A few offers came in. Did I want to go into Celebrity Big Brother or a reality jungle show? The money they were offering was eye-watering, but I wanted a job that meant something, not a springboard back into the tawdry side of the limelight. Brian thought I was mad to turn down the offers. Will drily said I’d caused the family enough embarrassment without doing it on live television.
I met a guy I had known from the old days at an AA meeting. He had been a music journalist then, had dismissed my talent as ‘infantile shite’ in a broadsheet, but we had both got absolutely off our faces one night at a film premiere and I had found him on my kitchen floor the next morning in a pool of his own vomit. I had no recollection of this until he reminded me during the tea break. I laughed, told him he had no need to ever remind me. His name was Kevin and he was now the editor of an online newspaper. When he asked me what I was doing, I was embarrassed to admit I spent most days at the cinema or watching films on DVD. He asked me if I’d like to write some film reviews. The money he was offering was barely worth talking about and I didn’t know if I could write, but I knew I had strong opinions about film.
‘Sure, give it a go,’ he said. ‘Send me sample reviews of the best and worst films you’ve ever seen, and I’ll see if you’re up to it. All I’m looking for is opinion, but it might help if you did a bit of research into the history of film and film-making.’
Now I had a project. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to write reviews, but I was definitely interested in acting and the whole film process. I watched endless documentaries on the history of film. I went to the library and got books on the subject. I went to Pulse and signed up for a course on film-making for beginners. One of the tutors was a woman called Mary Cullen. She seemed familiar. After that first class we got talking. She reminded me that she used to work for Will as a Development Executive. She now had her own production company. Even though she didn’t say much about Will, I got the distinct impression she did not like him. I invited her for a coffee to pick her brains about framing a scene and the importance of lighting. She gave me a list of films to watch that were good examples.
Over the course of the next few months, Mary and I became friends. She was pretty, and she was also pretty direct. I liked that about her. She asked me about my mental health, how long I had been stable. She pointedly asked me how supportive my family had been. I explained that I’d burned my bridges and I couldn’t keep asking them for help. She told me about the time Will and Brian had gone to New York to bring me back after 9/11. I had only the vaguest memories of that time and felt ashamed as she told me the second-hand details as she’d heard them. I dimly recalled watching the Twin Towers fall, on a television in a shop window in New York, watching it over and over again. I had no recollection of Brian and Will coming to get me or of coming home to Ireland.
I had lost years of my life. My past was a jigsaw puzzle with so many missing pieces. I didn’t even want to find the pieces because I wasn’t sure what horrors they held. Mary realized I was upset when I told her. She tried to make me feel better by confiding that she too had her demons. We were both AA members, though we didn’t attend the same meetings. She had been sober for four years. She admitted to some hair-raising details from her own past. We started going on cinema dates. There was nothing romantic about it. Alcoholics Anonymous had no hard and fast rules about relationships or dating, but the thing most of us had in common was a past strewn with failed or destructive relationships. Sex was not something I missed particularly. I had slept with hundreds of women in my pop-star days. You can actually get bored with anything if you get too much of it. Kevin laughed when I said that, but it’s true. I was happy to be celibate, happy to be studying and learning, happy to have two good and supportive friends in Mary and Kevin.
One night I ran into Will as he was walking Daisy’s old dog. I mentioned that his former assistant Mary was a friend of mine.
‘That bitch?’ he said. ‘She’s trying to compete with me for all the same funding rounds. I gave her her first job in film and now she’s trying to get ahead of me.’
‘Oh, come on, Will, there’s at least five companies in Dublin making multiple projects, just like you. I’ve never heard you giving out about the others.’
‘Yeah, well, the others are my mates. We all worked on each other’s projects at one stage or another. We came up through the ranks together.’
‘What? But so did Mary. After she worked for you, she went and worked for Ed and then Rebecca, and now she’s out on her own. Shouldn’t you be pleased that your protégée has done well for herself?’
‘Mary’s a liability. You’ll soon find out.’
‘Yeah, well, she’s my friend now. She’s sober.’
He shrugged.
‘Did she do something to you? Why the animosity?’
‘She should still be making coffee and ordering flowers for the boss’s wife.’
‘Is it because she’s a woman?’
‘Oh, fuck off, Luke! Don’t you start with this gender shit. It’s all anyone is talking about these days. Feminism is fine when it suits women, but they still want you to mow the lawn, take out the bins, buy them flowers and take them to fucking Paris.’
I knew that my history with women was nothing to be proud of. I had probably used women badly in my time, but I had never thought I was better than women or that they mattered less than us. I had been in love exactly once, with Kate, who made me a better person. Maybe we would never have worked out. The miscarriage killed our relationship. She refused to attend counselling about it, refused to even discuss it. I don’t know how she could switch off love like that, because I was certain that she loved me. I definitely loved her, but then what good did it do me? As soon as I lost her, I spiralled downwards again into my own personal hell. Was it worth it, loving someone, if you were going to lose them?
Will talked of women as either sex objects or inconveniences. Even though he and Susan still hosted the occasional Christmas dinner together, he never talked about her affectionately; mostly it was criticism about how she had raised Daisy, how she had failed to monitor Daisy’s weight. I would point out that Will was also Daisy’s parent, but I always backed off when he got angry about this. Daisy had been his pride and joy, but she’d been living an aimless life, had switched college courses several times, come out of the closet, gone back in, was drifting from job to job, and it was clear – to me anyway – that she was a habitual drug user. It takes one to know one. Then, quite suddenly, in 2015, she seemed to clean up her act and move in with Brian. He was launching her media career. Will had a huge bust-up with Brian about this. He wanted me to go and counsel Daisy that a media career was a bad idea, using myself as an example. I wanted to stay out of it. But I hated that Brian and Will wouldn’t talk to each other. Now that I was experiencing normality, I wanted to find my family again. I wanted to hear from them what they’d made of our childhood. Did they see as clearly as I did that our mother had mistreated me? I had never raised the issue of my paternity with them and my suspicions that Dad might not have been my father. I wanted a family truce but their arguments over Daisy meant I was not their priority.
I got on with my life. Despite my intention to stay away from performance, I found myself more and more attracted to the idea of acting. Out of the blue, one weekend, Will had gone on an absolute bender and ended up crying down the phone to me from a hotel in Wexford. He had never asked for my help before, but I went
down and sorted him out, brought him home and put him up, thinking that now was my chance to play on his sympathy. I’d helped him out of a potentially career-damaging situation. I asked him if he would try me out in a minor role in his upcoming TV series, but he laughed at me. It pissed me off. It was a supporting role playing the main character’s dad. I could easily have handled it.
I took up an adult acting course. I didn’t tell anyone I was doing it. A few of my classmates knew who I was and knew my history but most of the youngsters had never heard of me so it felt like a proper fresh start. The fear of being the oldest in the class vanished when we started playing theatre games and doing improvisations. By the end of the first week, I’d played a seven-year-old girl with a skipping rope for a prop, and a grocery store manager handling a complaint from an irate customer. We all bonded pretty quickly because one of the first things we had to do was all these trust games. I had never really had trust issues. Perhaps one of my many problems was that I trusted everyone.
When we got to working with texts by Ibsen, Carr, Miller, Friel and Chekhov, I found slipping into character as easy as putting on a comfortable old pair of shoes. These lines written by the giants of theatre had been tried and tested, and performing them was a pleasure. It was so completely different to singing in an arena full of teenagers screaming my name. You could barely call both of those things performances, because they were such wildly different beasts. For me, acting involved listening intently to the other characters, picking up on cues, finding something new in the text, surprising myself and surprising the small audience of ten or twelve fellow students and tutors.
One evening, Kevin and Mary and I went out for dinner and I told them what I’d been doing. Kevin worried that acting might put me back into a dangerous spotlight. Mary thought it might be a form of therapy for me. I had been stable for over two years by then. A few weeks later, Mary sent me a script for The Star Maiden and asked me to send her a self-tape of me playing the role of a doctor. The script was really good, written by a young French-Algerian woman. It was about a middle-aged woman whose monstrous, controlling husband had kept her locked up for twenty years. The story followed her after her husband’s arrest and her release, how she negotiated her way in this new world and tried to find the children she had given birth to in captivity. I was to read the role of her psychiatrist.
‘Mary, seriously?’
‘Well, if anyone knows how psychiatrists work, it’s you,’ she said. She felt it would be a good start for me, if I wanted to do something professional. She would send my tape to her casting director. I emailed the footage and hoped to get the part. The next morning, Mary said the director and the casting director wanted to see me. I felt optimistic. When I went in, there was a camera set up in a bare office with lights and a lot of young people with clipboards. The English director, Ian Foster, an old man, shook my hand and asked me about films I liked, where I’d trained, etc. I only realized when we were introduced that he had directed two of my favourite films of recent years. We talked passionately about the themes and the psychology of the characters until we were interrupted by Niamh, the casting director. This was a screen test. Ian was old school. Most directors these days relied on actors’ self-tapes, but Ian wanted to meet the people he was going to work with.
I immediately felt a pressure behind my eyes, a film of sweat burst through my skin and in my mind I was back in a student pub waiting to go on for that first performance.
They asked me to read several different roles. Ian explained a little about each character. I locked eyes with him and listened intently, terrified that the baby was back and was going to whisper something evil or poisonous in my ear. I faced the camera and gave it everything, possibly raising my voice a little too much. I left the offices feeling I’d blown it. I felt the hollow in my neck but there was nothing there.
At my AA meeting that evening, I talked to the group about it. I didn’t go into details about the baby, just being suddenly overwhelmed. They assured me that my feelings, my sweating, my nervousness were completely normal. ‘Everyone feels like that going for a job interview,’ Margaret said, and all the members nodded in agreement. ‘Just hand it over,’ said Margaret, ‘it’s out of your control. Remember, accept the things you cannot change. You can’t help feeling nervous. The important thing is that you weren’t tempted to have a drink or anything else afterwards. That’s really good, Luke.’
Mary rang me that night. She wanted to call over to the flat. On arrival, she couldn’t contain her excitement. ‘You got the part!’
‘Really? I thought I’d blown it, with being so nervous.’
‘No, Luke, you got THE part! Not the lead, obviously, but you’re playing her husband.’
‘What? No way!’
‘Yes, it’s a much bigger role. You’re in all the flashbacks and the present-day prison scenes.’
She pulled a bottle of sparkling elderflower out of her bag. ‘This calls for bubbles! Fake bubbles but bubbles all the same. You’ll have to go through a medical because of your track record but you’ve been so healthy for nearly three years, I don’t see it being a problem. Luke, we’re going to make a film together!’
‘Wait, what? No, God, I don’t know. I only wanted the smaller role. I’ve been famous. It was terrible. What if it all starts again? What if he comes back?’
‘What? Who? Luke, you’re a different guy now, you can handle this, and I’m producing it. We’ll do it together.’
She took my face in her hands and kissed it. I kissed her back. Within minutes, we were tearing each other’s clothes off. I led her to my spartan bedroom and laid her carefully on the bed.
‘Are you sure?’ I said.
‘Are you?’ she replied.
We laughed like teenagers and I pulled her to me and held her close, smelling her hair, kissing the back of her neck.
‘I think we’re sure,’ I said as she turned towards me and for a moment we just stared at each other, as if seeing the other person for the first time.
I knew I loved her right then. I will never understand why it took me so long to see it.
‘Mary,’ I said, ‘I need you to know. I have a lifetime of baggage. I could relapse at any time, and if I do, I’ll be this massive burden to you. You need to be careful for your own sake.’
She looked up at me. ‘I’m not the cure, Luke. We both know it. But I’m here and I really think I always will be. Let’s just take it a day at a time, okay?’
‘Okay.’ I was so turned on and so frightened. I didn’t want to lose her, ever.
Two days after the funeral, I received a call from the crematorium to let me know that the ashes were ready for collection. We needed to go and select an urn.
I felt a moment of panic, as if having his ashes would be like having him back, accusing me of murder. Out of guilt, I chose the most expensive urn from the undertaker’s website, a metallic version of a Ming vase. I did not dare to open the lid.
My brother and I argued over what to do with these ashes. The urn stood on my mantelpiece for a week, just so visitors could see and offer condolences, but I didn’t want it in my eyeline. There was no Banquo’s ghost type scene, but the urn unnerved me. I put it at the back of my drinks cabinet. Then I rang my brother and asked him to take it. He refused. ‘You could put it in the bin?’ he said, and I wasn’t sure if he was serious. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Aren’t ashes supposed to be scattered?
We met to discuss where to scatter the ashes. We tried to remember any particular place he liked and realized we didn’t know him that well. And in that conversation, I realized we did not know each other well. We drove and then walked out to a scenic spot near Glendalough, an ancient monastic settlement, and scattered the ashes there. It was a place we had all been to before, as children and adults. It was as good a place as any.
We spent that night talking about our collective youth, our parents, our absent brother. No tears were shed.
We talked about Daisy, w
hat was to be done for her, how we could help her. We agreed to try. We agreed.
Brian
28
1978
Dad did the cooking in our house most of the time when Mum was working. We’d walk home from school, Will ignoring Luke and me, keeping as much distance as possible between us, and Auntie Peggy would be there with a pot of soup ready for us, or we’d all go to Aunt Judy’s house if Paul was well enough, but either way, Dad would have dinner on the table at six o’clock. Some of the boys in my class thought this was funny and said that my dad must be a sissy. I didn’t know what a sissy was, but I knew it wasn’t cool. If Mum wasn’t working, she would make dinner for us and then eat with Dad when he came home later.
I think Dad enjoyed cooking. But things were never fair at our dinner table and no matter how much I complained about the situation, nothing changed.
First of all, Luke insisted we say grace before dinner to thank the Lord for our meals. It would have made more sense to thank Mum or Dad, but it meant we had to wait for Luke’s endless prayers before we got to eat. Dad allowed this. Mum didn’t.
When Mum cooked, Will always got bigger portions than me, and Luke got the smallest. I’m glad I wasn’t Luke, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. Mum said that Will was bigger and he needed more. He wasn’t even an inch taller than me. Though Luke was two inches shorter than me. That was fine when it came to broccoli or cauliflower, but when he got more ice cream than us, I would cry and protest, and Mum would threaten to take my dish away altogether.
Dad was more slapdash about portions and who got what. How much food you got on your plate from Dad was random, though if there was an extra bit of cake going, Dad always favoured Luke and told Will and me, ‘Your brother is only small, give him a chance.’ A chance at what? He was only eleven months younger than me. And Will was fourteen months older. ‘He has some catching up to do, don’t you think?’ And it’s true, I suppose, that Luke was not as robust as Will and me, but the unfairness drove me mad.