There was a noose hanging down from the banisters. Made from that bright blue nylon rope that gets washed up on seashores. The kind that Dodge uses for making chair seats.
I’d run all the way from the hotel. I couldn’t wait around for a cab, difficult to get at that time in the centre of Chichester, anyway. When I burst into the hall, Jools was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, tears were pouring down her face.
‘Where is he?’ I demanded.
‘In his bedroom.’
At least not in hospital. But that reassurance was swept away by the thought that she might have moved his body there. I rushed past her up the stairs and threw myself against Ben’s door. It opened easily.
He lay on the bed, with a whisky bottle in his hand. He looked up at me. ‘Sorry, Ma,’ he said.
‘Why, Ben? Why?’
‘Sorry. Just the tension. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand being me any more, Ma.’
‘Look, I know what it’s about, Ben.’
‘Do you, Ma? Do you really?’
‘It’s not that important, you’ve got to understand. All right, so you didn’t win an award in some animation festival. The TOCA Film Festival in Turin? What does that even mean? It doesn’t mean your Riq and Raq film is rubbish. It doesn’t mean you’re rubbish. It just … Oh, Ben …’
And now I couldn’t stop the tears pouring down my face.
After a long silence, Ben said, ‘But I didn’t lose, Ma. Riq and Raq won.’
I remembered, with Oliver, it had been the same. When he’d achieved something, when the tension broke, the depression came flooding in. Like when we’d been through a really bad patch financially, then suddenly he got a twenty grand commission for a commercial animation. He went down for three months after that.
I said to Ben, there in his bedroom. ‘The noose? Would you have used it?’
‘Oh yes, Ma,’ he replied.
I sent a text to Tim Goodrich. ‘Sorry. Family crisis. Will explain.’ And then I dared to put: ‘Love, Ellen.’
But could I explain? And would he understand my explanation? Or would he just think he’d wasted an evening with a gauche, post-menopausal woman who’d led him along and lost her nerve at the last minute?
He texted back straight away. ‘No worries. Get back to me when things are sorted. X T.’ Which could have meant anything. And the worries I had at that moment definitely took precedence over my so-called romantic life.
The means by which it was achieved is not one recommended in most manuals of parenting, but the night that followed was the best family time the three of us had shared since Oliver’s death. And the catalyst, I’m afraid, was alcohol.
Waiting in panic for the results of the TOCA Award from Turin, Ben had already made his way down most of a bottle of whisky. Jools favoured pink gin, of which she seemed to have a ready supply. And I, full of Tim’s largesse at the Chichester Harbour Hotel, joined Ben topping up on the whisky.
The first thing I insisted he did was to take down the noose. Then Jools said it should be ceremoniously burnt in the back garden. I found some white spirit I’d used when I last did any decorating, and we doused the rope in that. Then we laid the noose on a paved area and Ben – Jools demanded it should be Ben – put a match to it.
I hadn’t seen nylon rope burn before. It wasn’t what I expected. The blue strands melted and bubbled, as the rope coiled in on itself like some sci-fi serpent. A whitish smoke played around it and there was a smell of fish in the air.
And as it burned, my two children – and ‘children’ was the appropriate word on this occasion – started to do a war dance around the burning rope, whooping, hollering and chanting in some made-up language of their own. I had seen them do this before, but not for nearly twenty years. And, back then, Oliver joined in too. I never did. I wasn’t disapproving. I just watched them, as I did again that Saturday night, in admiring astonishment.
The irrelevant thought came to me that what they were doing, imitating some primitive tribal ritual, would now be condemned as ‘cultural appropriation’. But that didn’t worry me. Nor did what the neighbours thought. Actually, the neighbours might have objected to the noise, but that would have been all. Cultural appropriation is not a major concern to the good burghers of Chichester.
When the last wisp of white smoke had dissolved into the darkness, we continued our drinking in the sitting room. We continued our talking too.
A lot came out. Perhaps inevitably, it was all about Oliver. And not before time.
At first Jools talked most. I’d heard some of it in the previous few days, since I’d rescued her from Herne Hill. But the pink gin opened her out in ways I could never have expected.
And no, I didn’t emerge unscathed from her cataract of commentary. She actually said out loud that she thought I’d always favoured Ben. It wasn’t something I’d really worried about before. My son was so like his father that I could never be unaware of his vulnerability and so yes, maybe his sister had suffered as a result. But Jools had made herself so unapproachable, getting through had always been a problem.
The other significant revelation she made was the guilt she felt for Oliver’s death. When she matured into her teens, it was inevitable that the cuddly bond he’d had with his infant Juliet should change to something less intimate. As she grew more morose and bolshie, she had shrugged off his hugs and deliberately not laughed at his jokes (even though she still thought they were funny). In other words, she had behaved like any other teenage girl but, in the light of her father’s suicide, she had started to believe that it had been caused by her behaviour. It was then that she had begun to shut herself off from unwelcome emotions.
By the time Jools handed the baton of criticism over to Ben, they were both very drunk. Mind you, so was I, so I’m not about to get into a pot-and-kettle routine. And Ben too had some gripes about the way I’d looked after him. Phrases like ‘being over-protective’ and ‘not letting me lead a life of my own’ swirled around in his denunciation. I tried just to take it all, not to let it get to me. In our drunken state, there was no point in starting arguments. See how much of it any of us remembered in the morning.
In characteristic style, Ben’s mood had suddenly flipped. The release of tension over the TOCA Award, whose first effect had been to turn him suicidal, was replaced by a giggly excitement about the fact that he had won. Ben Curtis’s Riq and Raq film had actually won a prize at an Animation Festival in Turin! It was an accolade to be put on his professional CV, one that could never be taken away from him.
And sure, he didn’t know how prestigious the Turin Festival was, where it ranked in the grown-up animation world he so wanted to join, but it was a start. His profile would grow. He might be asked to show Riq and Raq at other animation festivals. It might lead to offers of work, even the Holy Grail of getting an agent.
Ben Curtis might have failed to complete a degree course – I hadn’t realized until then how much that failure rankled with him – but he had won a TOCA Award at the Turin Animation Festival!
By now, he was getting rambling and repetitive. His eyes kept closing and he lay full-length on the sofa. Jools had been asleep for some twenty minutes, curled up in an armchair like she had when she was three. I got up to turn the sitting-room lights off, leaving the door ajar to let in a glow from the hall. Then I curled up in my armchair and let my eyes droop closed.
We felt more like a family than we had for nearly ten years.
And Tim Goodrich belonged to another world.