40

Daybreak found me by the sea. The brass band inside my head had abused its instruments all night, to the rhythm of my pulse. The pain didn’t abate as the night wore on, and Thomas’s words wheeled around inside my mind.

I hadn’t been able to take any more of what he was saying and had run out of the hotel. After several long hours of driving around the city, as if sense was to be found in its dark, empty streets, I went home.

Chris called me from outside my bedroom door, but I ignored him, just lay there, silently praying he would just go away.

‘Your car’s outside, John. I know you’re in there,’ he said.

I said nothing.

‘We need to talk.’

I could say nothing.

Then after more hours of struggling for sleep, I struggled into my clothes and drove to the seaside.

The ocean was a wide wedge of blue at the end of the car park, and as I trudged towards it I wrapped a rug around my shoulders that I kept in the car boot for just such an occasion. When I reached the water’s edge I sat on a large boulder and looked out across to the Isle of Arran.

The sea was lapping at my left foot, and I wondered how it might be just to immerse myself, to let myself fall in, allow the waves to fill my lungs and the current take me away to far shores where none of this would matter. It would be easy enough, just a small movement and I’d be in the water. Then my clothes would be too heavy, pulling me under, and the chill sea would fill my lungs.

It wouldn’t take long to die in a cold sea like that.

But doing nothing is a form of decision, isn’t it? So, that’s what I did. Watched the sun rise into a frigid, colourless sky, feet, hands and face numb, my mind stuck in a place where nothing and no one would ever make sense.

The conversation of the previous night still played on in my head, taking its tempo from the fall of the waves. I had refused to listen to any more of Thomas’s explanation. How could he say such things?

Then Liz had appeared. ‘The kids are napping.’ She gave me a little smile, but it froze on her lips as she read the atmosphere between us.

‘How can you say these things?’ I had hissed. ‘Nonsense. Utter fucking nonsense.’

Thomas shook his head, and looked like he was going to retort until Liz took his hand and sat down. Then she turned her attention to me.

‘John, you need to listen to what your brother has to say.’ Her voice was calm and certain. ‘It has taken him years to be able to talk about what happened to him as a kid. If you’d been by his side all these years and witnessed the effect of some of his nightmares, then you wouldn’t doubt for a second the truth of what he’s telling you.’ There was a certainty in her voice and body that stilled every thought in my head.

‘Please listen. It may be uncomfortable to hear and it will hurt you, but it is what you have come here for, isn’t it?’ She then kissed Thomas on the forehead and left.

‘This is all a bit … I just…’ My words tailed off as I struggled to explain my feelings.

‘I don’t blame you. It’s how I would react if I were you.’ Thomas held his hands out, palm up. ‘Please. Just listen, ok?’

His hushed and sincere tones as he went on to explain how the impact of what had happened had affected his life, his honest pain and his open body language, convinced me that he was in fact telling what he knew to be truth. Every syllable that he uttered rang clear with it. I just didn’t want to hear. He spared me no detail and answered any questions that I interposed into his soliloquy with a quiet calm, as patiently as any father would answer his child.

‘The day after the cop forced me to give him a blowjob, Mum asked me to go the shop. So I grasped my opportunity. I took nothing with me; I wanted nothing, not even the clothes on my back. I was terrified, to be honest, but determined to get away. I wanted everyone to think I was dead. I didn’t want anyone to try and find me, so I cut my finger a little and I let the blood drip onto my shoe and left it down by the railway in the hope that everyone would think the worst.’

‘I’ve got that shoe,’ I said quietly. ‘I found it in a box in the loft. Dad had a stash of stuff to remember you by.’

‘He did?’ His surprise at this was genuine, as if he couldn’t believe the man cared for him.

‘So did Mum. I found a wee box above her wardrobe. That’s where I found your birth certificate.’

‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what to do with that.’ His mouth was open.

As he continued to talk our conversation was punctuated with long, deep silences, as if that hush held the meaning of his words and allowed them to be carried deep into our minds. At times I dipped out of hearing, the buzzing was so loud in my head, the pain building deep in my skull so that I lost focus.

‘God, I could tell you some stories. Teenage boys can be pretty popular on the streets.’

‘Jesus.’ What else could I say? There was a whole world of trauma in those few words.

‘It was a complete mind-fuck. Was I gay? Is that why this was happening to me? Was it all my fault? I was completely confused. What was my actual normal sexual response? And what came from fear and necessity? You do what you need to survive, right? Sex wasn’t really a pleasure for me; it was a commodity, something that I could use to put food into my body and clothes on my back. I had no education and no skill, just a mop of dark hair, a warm hand and a willing mouth.’

‘Oh, Tom,’ I croaked, my sympathy for him a vice around my throat.

We sat in silence as I fought for words that might offer support. Words that might count for something. He broke into the quiet before I could say anything more.

‘Liz has been a godsend. I don’t know what I would have done without her.’ The force of his emotion tugged at the corners of his mouth. He laughed. ‘You know, I spent so much of my life denying myself any emotion. I couldn’t admit I had any feelings for anything or anyone. I couldn’t admit that I liked someone. I couldn’t even let myself feel any anger. Anger was an emotion, therefore it was not allowed.’ I squirmed in my seat at a description that could have been about me. ‘I put on this tough persona that no one could reach and no one could read.’

‘How did you meet Liz?’

‘When Robbie and I got to London someone told us to hang about outside Euston. Lots of Scots got off the train there and they’d maybe be kinder to a kid begging with a Scottish accent.’ He smiled. ‘First person we bumped into was Liz. She was begging and took exception to our plan. Told us to fuck off.’

As he continued to unburden himself I just sat there, meeting his gaze, my expression as neutral as I could manage, while my mind was a whirl of shock. This was almost too much to listen to, and if that was the case, how awful must it have been to live through?

‘Sometimes I feel so angry that it is all I can do to keep sane, but you can’t go on like that. You can’t let the bitterness eat you up. The best revenge is a life well lived, eh? I came across something that Buddha said and it helped.’ He clasped his hands before him as if in prayer. ‘“If you pick up a hot coal with the thought of throwing it at someone, you are the one who gets burned.” Every time the hate overwhelms me, I think of that.’ I was getting the impression he had a store of such aphorisms, and a mental box full of other techniques that would help pull him out of the black fog in his own head.

He then began to question me about myself and my life. But my answers were sharp, to the point. Although he had been extremely open, in the manner of someone long used to sharing what had gone on in their most secret of moments, I wasn’t quite ready to share.

‘I went to Dad’s funeral.’ He said after a particularly long silence.

‘You did?’ I scanned my memory for faces. Came up with nothing. ‘How did that go for you?’

He shrugged. ‘I felt nothing.’ He fiddled with his glass. ‘That’s a lie. I felt a whole lot of things: sorrow, relief, anger … it brought back all of those confused and conflicting emotions that I thought that I had dealt with.’ He put his glass down and ran his fingers through his hair, his eyes pools of weariness.

Just then a memory slid in. I was a boy. Only eight or nine. A dinosaur toy in each hand. A wisp of steam obscured someone leaning over me in a bath.

‘Are you alright?’ Thomas asked, his voice full of concern. ‘You went all white there.’

‘Yes … I’m fine,’ I replied, wondering what the hell was happening to me. ‘I’ve just got a bit of a headache.’

I was brought abruptly back to the present by the sound of a large dog, scrabbling across the rocks. He was a yellow Labrador and when he noticed me he ventured over to investigate, his tail high in the air on a slow wag. A pink tongue lolled inches from my face as he sat back on his haunches and tried to work out what the man thing was doing sitting down at the edge of the sea. He leaned his head to the side, quizzically. Then a male voice shouted ‘Bob!’ and with a spurt he was off. How I envied that dog his simple life. Food, a walk, somewhere warm to sleep. Wouldn’t it be nice if life were that easy?

For the millionth time within the last twelve hours I continued my inner battle. How could I reconcile what I knew about my parents with the obvious agonised truth I had just heard?

‘Christ, you look like shit,’ Paul said when I met him in the pub later on that day.

I raised an eyebrow at his honesty. ‘Thanks, mate … and thanks for coming to meet me.’

‘Are you okay?’ His voice was heavy with empathy. ‘And should you not be at work?’

‘Migraine,’ I said, holding my head in my hands.

‘So what the hell are you doing here?’

‘I don’t know if it’s a migraine. All I know is my head hurts like fuck.’ I looked over at him with eyes squinted half shut. ‘Enough about me. How are you?’ He looked disgustingly healthy.

‘Have you taken any pills?’

‘No, Mum,’ I answered. ‘I hate taking pills.’

‘Don’t be such a man. Take a bloody pill for chrissake.’ He leaned forwards on his chair as if something had just occurred to him. ‘Remember those headaches you had while we were at school? You went for all those brain scans and stuff.’

‘I did? I was?’ How much of my life had I forgotten?

‘You were in some state then, mate. Did they cure you or what?’

I could feel my head spin. My pulse racing. How could I have forgotten something like that? ‘No, they … eh … just stopped. I don’t know. I can’t remember, it was years ago.’

As if trying to give me a moment to marshal my inner resources Paul handed me a lunch menu from the stand in the middle of the table. ‘What do you fancy?’

I took it from him and pretended to read it, aware that he was studying me from behind his.

‘I fancy a good old burger. You can’t beat a burger,’ he said with false cheer, and then began to recount something of little importance that had happened to him. But he trailed off.

‘If you want to talk…’ he began.

‘I was down by the sea most of the night.’ I shook my head slowly. ‘It would have been so easy just to fall in, you know?’

Paul’s face was bright with alarm. ‘Jesus, John, you should have called me.’

‘It’s alright. The moment passed. I wouldn’t really have topped myself.’

‘Talk to me,’ he said.

‘I thought it would do me good. Get out of the house…’ I said while getting to my feet. ‘I can’t … I need to go.’

‘But…’ he began to reply, then read something in my face that stopped him. ‘Go home, buddy. Gimme a shout when you feel up to it, eh?’

While I sat with Paul, memories had jumped into my mind, like photographic stills. They must have been my memories, for I was their centre, but each announced a surprise that my heart and conscience could hardly bear. I forced my mind out to the present and, like a startled fawn, scared from the brush by a predator, I caught myself looking around me, abruptly reminded of my surroundings.

I knew Paul would listen. Would believe. But finding the right words and saying them aloud would mean that all of that had happened and that was a truth that was too terrible to contemplate.

When I arrived back at the flat, I quickly drew the curtains in my bedroom, swallowed I’m not sure how many painkillers along with a generous slug of whisky and collapsed onto the bed. The pain crushed at my head and I curled up in the foetal position, my knees pushed against my elbows, which in turn pressed the heels of my palms into my tightly closed eyes.

Each eye squeezed a tear out from behind my hands. I gave in to them and gave myself up to them. Great heaving sobs wracked my body as I ceded myself more and more completely to my sorrow. I wept for Thomas and Chris. I wept for Angela, but most of all I wept for me. The tears poured fast now. My past could no longer be ignored. It was there in sharp, incomplete fragments, which now demanded that I face them, deal with them and put them back in their proper place.

Unsure that I had the courage for the task, I swung violently between denial and acceptance. I had to face my past if my future was to have any worth. If I wanted to live my life productively, I would have to look, to recognise, to remember fully.

Tears had been my solace only twice in my life before that night. Each time I had watched from afar as my emotions took over, like a spirit watching over its near-dead host. This time, however, I didn’t have the luxury of that detachment. My last thought before troubled sleep took mercy on me was for the other two episodes when tears occurred. One was on the night I severed my relationship with Angela. The other was on the night of my thirteenth birthday.