Sweet Sorrow(63)

‘All right!’

‘Down there, just unfasten it and take it off! The red button! For Christ’s sake, Charlie! Come here …’

I contorted myself over the gear stick and felt her face wet against my neck.

‘Am I a terrible parent?’

‘No.’

‘But have I been?’

‘No.’

‘But I’m a terrible teacher, yes?’

‘Yes, you are a terrible teacher.’

She snuffled into my neck. ‘I do love you. And you’re going to be fine,’ she said, ‘you’re such a bright boy.’

But she was a lousy actor too and the blatancy of the lie, the hesitancy with which she told it, sent me clambering out of the car. I arranged my school bag over my shoulder, raised one hand and walked the short distance home, taking out my keys in anticipation of the part of the day that I dreaded most of all.

Because my father’s madness was the most spectacular of all, and the idea had fixed itself in my head, possibility shading into probability then certainty, that my father would kill himself and I would be the one to find him. I used to speculate on the circumstances of this at night, then during the school day, anxiety growing as I neared home. Would he be in the bedroom or in the hallway, in the bathroom or lying on the sofa? It didn’t even matter if this was one of his good days, smiling when I left for school, hugging me sentimentally at the door. If anything, this made disaster more likely because – another cliché from TV – acts of self-destruction were always preceded by just those displays of affection, delivered with glazed, numb serenity. ‘I love you, son, never forget that’ and then you come home and – one more cliché – the envelope is on the table, propped between the salt and pepper. No, nothing signalled disaster quite as clearly as a parent saying ‘I love you’.

My adolescent mind had a limitless capacity for this kind of melodrama, and I wish I could have directed my mental energy in some other direction. Instead, these grim scenarios became so fixed and plausible that quite often my hand would be shaking as I turned the key, already shouting, ‘Dad, I’m home!’ Sometimes he’d be on the sofa watching a black-and-white movie, at other times he’d be asleep, downstairs or up, and I would check that this was the right kind of sleep, that the brown bottles were in place, caps tight, no alcohol in sight. If he wasn’t home, I’d be incapable of calming myself until he returned, and only then could I slip into our banal domestic natter: what to eat that night, what to watch.

‘Shouldn’t you be revising?’ he’d say.

‘I revised at school,’ I’d say.

‘Important times,’ he’d say and we’d leave it at that. I’d try to make him laugh if I could, providing an ironic commentary on whatever was on TV. If that failed, if he seemed not to be hearing me, if he lay down on his side or poured himself another whisky, then I would endeavour to lure him upstairs.

‘Don’t fall asleep here, Dad. Come to bed.’

‘I want to watch the end.’

‘You’ve seen it before. Come to bed, don’t fall asleep on the sofa.’

‘You go on up, son.’

And so I’d stalk off to bed to dwell on what I’d read about combining alcohol and pills, and the worry would start again.

And through all this, I don’t think I ever said the word ‘depression’ out loud. It was taboo, and I would no more have shared my fear and confusion with a teacher or friend than confided my sexual fantasies. Honesty was dangerous and even if Harper would not have used it against me, I had no doubt that Lloyd would.

When, many years later, I finally told Niamh some, not all, of this, she told me that I sounded like my father’s carer. Immediately, I recoiled from the word. ‘Care’ suggested compassion, integrity, selflessness and devotion and I had none of these virtues, not one. I’d certainly not told her the story to elicit the admiration that’s due to those who truly care. The more my father required sympathy and compassion, the more I offered up pity and contempt; the more he required my presence, the more I disappeared. He frightened me and when I wasn’t frightened I was simply furious; furious to be robbed of my peace of mind and power of concentration when I needed them most, furious at being scared of something as banal as opening the front door. Bored too, bored of his zombified state, of the perpetual air of distraction that surrounded him like a cloud of flies around his head, of the impossibility of change. I didn’t want anything as corny as a role model, I just wanted someone who got up every morning, someone capable of smiling in a way that was neither creepy nor contrived.

Everything good that I wished for my father, I wished for my own sake. More than anything, I wanted him to be how he used to be. For the best part of my childhood, he’d been funny and cheerful and affectionate. Now even his good moods seemed unnatural – what did he have to be happy about? I blamed him for our poverty, for driving Mum away, for my failing at school. I worried about him when he should have been worrying about me. Couldn’t he see that things were going wrong? Not a carer then. Was ‘resenter’ a word? ‘Live-in resenter’?

That’s only natural, Niamh assured me; it would be weird to feel otherwise. But in one final flourish of care-lessness, I couldn’t bear the physical change: the sag of his flesh, pale and damp like the skin beneath a sticking plaster, the stooped shoulders, the dabs of unnameable whiteness in the corners of his mouth, the toenails like shavings from the horn of an animal. Just as a smile is said to light up a face, unhappiness had made him ugly, to me at least, and at some point, I no longer bothered to disguise the distaste, wrinkling my nose, shrugging his arm away. With youthful priggishness, I wondered – why can’t the old man look after himself? I was sixteen years old; people wrote anthems about this time of life, and wasn’t I entitled to joy and fun and irresponsibility, rather than fear and fury and boredom?