Sweet Sorrow(52)

A bit blue, that was one of the terms we’d used. Not himself, sad. Things on his mind. Concerned, anxious. A bit down, down in the dumps, in the mouth. Disappointed, suffering from a setback, under the weather, knocked back, confidence taken a bit of a knock, money worries. It was remarkable, really, our ability to devise coy phrases and euphemisms, like a parlour game in which you’re not allowed to use a particular word.

And that word came bracketed with other terms – ‘clinically’, ‘chronically’ – which gave it an unnerving, medical edge, because if it was chronic enough for a clinic, then surely the psychiatric ward and the Bin couldn’t be far behind. We took what comfort we could from linking his condition to his circumstances, the loss of business, the bankruptcy, the break-up of his marriage. In the face of these bad breaks it was only natural to be a little grumpy, down in the mouth, blue. When circumstances got better, then the sadness would go away too.

But the malady had a deeper hold than this. His two great loves were music and my mother, and both had abandoned him. In giving up his own ambitions and taking up business, he had compromised for the sake of his family. Now he had failed even in that compromise, and this was not something that you shook off or got over, much as we’d have loved that.

Sometimes I wished that he’d cheer up just for my sake. Sadness and anxiety are contagious and at sixteen, didn’t I have enough to worry about? And it was boring, too; this torpor, the fussing, the hours spent behind closed doors, emerging with red eyes, the flashes of irrational and malicious fury and the embarrassment that followed. Boring to have Mad Dad sulking round the house, boring to listen to his pessimism and self-pity and negativity, boring to inspect the barometer of his mood when I came through the door.

Predicting that mood was made harder by two recent developments. My father had always been what was commonly called a ‘social drinker’, a little boozy but only in company, in a good-natured way. He drank at gigs but only after he’d played and never more than three pints, and then he’d tell stories and jokes, flip beermats and do tricks with matches.

Now he drank every day, spirits as well as beer, methodical and solitary as if it were a private hobby. It alarmed me more than I can say and if he asked me to join him I would always decline, not because I didn’t like alcohol – God knows that was not the case – but because I didn’t want what he had. Whether accompaniment or catalyst, drinking meant self-pity, introspection, lethargy and now, more commonly, rage. When I was very small, he’d respond to spilt juice, to crayons on the wall or broken plates with nervous laughter and an exasperated tug of his own hair. Now it was as if he’d discovered a new emotion and was embracing anger with the same passion other mid-life men give to marathon training or rambling.

The most trivial infraction of the household rules, a coat on the floor, a mug in the sink, an unflushed loo, would bring on an awful, contorted fury, made all the more terrible through being accompanied almost simultaneously by regret. You could see it in his red-rimmed eyes, his horror at this loss of control even as he snapped and bawled – why am I doing this? This is not who I am. And just as he discovered anger, I found out the pleasure of provoking it, and of feeling finally old enough to stand chest to chest and shout. We’d both discovered terrible new voices, and I confess I sometimes deliberately provoked him just for the satisfaction of reflecting the rage back into his face. It was a squalid, shabby kind of pleasure, like rousing an animal in the zoo by banging on the glass, and the only consolation I had was that in the aftermath we’d be excessively polite, lying head to toe on the sofa and watching old movies until he could sleep.

And here was the other development. On his bedside table there now stood a small cluster of brown bottles, the medication that he’d started to take to ‘even things out’. Someone more well informed than myself might have seen the bottles and been pleased that he had a helping hand, some professional guidance. Like bankruptcy, prescription drugs might seem alarming but at least there was a process underway. Given time, we’d come out the other side. Perhaps he wouldn’t need them any more.

But no one said this and, under the influence of film and TV, I was incapable of seeing a brown bottle of pills without imagining the owner tipping his head back and guzzling the lot. Few things are more compelling than our parents’ medication, and soon the bottles began to exert a terrible pull on me, and when he was out I’d go and look at them, press down and unscrew the lid, examine one of the pills in my palm, looking for … I don’t know what, but I’d note the warning labels. ‘Take as prescribed. May cause drowsiness. Do not combine with alcohol.’ Really, he might as well have had a loaded pistol by his bed.

And now this possibility joined the roster of terrors and anxieties that accompanied me through the night and on until morning, and it occurred to me then, just as it does now, that the greatest lie that age tells about youth is that it’s somehow free of care, worry or fear.

Good God, doesn’t anyone remember?





Culture


‘Madam, an hour before the worshipped sun peered forth the golden window of the east—’

‘One more time.’

We’d meet every day in the same spot beneath the tree, working methodically, the progress like crossing a jungle bridge, hopping happily from board to board, picking up momentum, then stumbling as my foot punched through rotten wood.