When I am doing a film in Ireland, am I really doing a film in Ireland? Or am I in a static tangle, like Christmas lights in the attic, knowing one bulb – but not which bulb – won’t light. I am dealing with people and situations, which may or may not conform to the common consensual banner ‘making a film in Ireland’. I could get fixated on anything. To what am I to tether my unblinking assessment of the external? Thankfully Nicola has come to do my hair and make-up but also to midwife me back and forth between the real and the unreal, my home and my family, the film set and the trailer, the cosmos of spilled interactions that could stain my day. If you work in entertainment you will be aware of the galling cliché of the actor who chums up to the crew with the unspoken, ‘Yeah, I guess I’m just more at home with the horny-handed sons of the soil than with other pampered thesps’ subtext; ‘I guess it’s because I’m a muthafuckin gangsta’. Well, I’m one of them. You should see me chatting football with me homies, eschewing the pleasures of the officers’ mess to get down and dirty in the trenches. Comedy will always be my religion because so few things are just one thing and so many things are everything at once. This state of proletariat solidarity is both a cringey pose and entirely sincere. It is both a managed effort and completely who I am. I both entirely reject my childhood in Grays, Essex, and the fraught awfulness of my interactions with my shift-worker stepdad, not even – actually just my mum’s live-in boyfriend – and entirely accept that I am, marrow deep, made there. I come from there, there where I never belonged.
Gary is one of the blokes who looks after the trailers, the trailers that make up base camp, where actors hang out, lights, kit and cables are stored, the production offices are located, toilets, food, the hub around which the set, where filming takes place, orbits. I chat to Gary about stuff. I chat to one of the other blokes on the crew, Ray, about BJJ and he hooks me up with a teacher nearby. Gary tells me one day about his sister, how her son, his nephew, died at eighteen from overdosing on a bad batch of MDMA. ‘Would you talk to her?’ he asks.
I see him every day over the course of the production and it is, all in all, a fairly typical experience. The usual blend of joy and boredom, unlikely moments in strange places. This is a kids’ film and has child actors in it. They come with their own unique input. But, as with the Mamma Mia Immersive Dining Experience, the real trick is being present, not just in my head watching this stuff happen. On the last day of filming, after my Wonka-esque goodbye gift of ice creams has been administered with maximum potential disruption – in this case, me driving an ice cream van, siren blaring onto a live set and issuing sensitive child actors with sugar-laden desserts – I return to my trailer, content to be wrapping a film without having caused any unnecessary aggravation. Aside from the ice creams. Gary taps on the door. When I open it he already has his sister on the line.
I take the phone and close the door and the always slightly absurd ambience of the on-set trailer, in spite of my daft costume, immediately becomes calm and sacred. Kerry tells me that she is in Brent Cross shopping centre. ‘Excuse me,’ she says, and moves somewhere quiet. I sit down and picture her there. I breathe and prepare for her story. She is tentative and tearful for a few syllables, but propelled by tremulous certainty. ‘James was a beautiful boy. More than my son he was my friend. So clever and sensitive. Not a druggy kid. He didn’t do drugs a lot, I know he didn’t. I didn’t want him to go out that night. I wanted him to stay in. I wish I’d stopped him. I couldn’t sleep, I kept looking at my phone. I had a bad feeling. At one fifty-eight I got a text, “I’m all right, Mum”, at two fifty-eight I got another one from his phone saying “James is dead.”’ At this point the frequency, the intensity, the sharpness of tone changes, the grief is piercing and I try to fall backwards into purpose. ‘My boy died on the street, Russell, on a pavement with three hundred people watching. Outside a club. He was dead by the time he got to the hospital.’ I try to breathe and reach beyond my own lack of experience, my own inability to know something so profound and painful and source something useful. ‘I’m getting grief counselling and they say I have to let go because the grief is going into my body and making me ill but I don’t want to let go because I deserve it.’ Then the terrible sound of a mother’s pain.
I am not qualified to handle a mother’s grief. I have no training in counselling or experience of this poignant and unanswerable despair. In this moment, though, I am on the phone to a grieving mother and the practical and rational limitations simply cannot be allowed to prevent me giving her the comfort and love her situation demands. William Blake did a series of engravings based on the Book of Job, rendering in immaculate tableaux Job’s trials and suffering. It is as if Blake through his art and the Bible through the means of prose refer to the same subliminal truth, as if this story, the Book of Job, contains essential truths that we can only behold fleetingly and through the lens of image or language. In one tableau, Yaweh, or God, from on high shows Job ‘the behemoth and the leviathan that I made, as I made thee’. These creatures as rendered by Blake are dreadful and uncanny. The dumb, muscular, skinless beast, all sinew and mouth. The deep-dwelling sea serpent ever present but invisible in its awful depths. When regarding these silently screaming images the horror of God’s power is awesome, more terrifying though is the suggestion of ambivalence and that implicitly God the creator is not only good. In these images Job and Yaweh look the same, as if both the man made of flesh and the divine father are enshrined within a single form. These hypnotic tableaux induce a visionary state where we confront that God is within us and our own moral choices determine God’s values. That the capacity for darkness and unconsciousness is as much part of the individual’s psychological make-up as the inclination to love and kindness. That we have to be good because if we are not good then God is not good, that God’s grace is realized through us and if we do not realize it then it does not exist. Like a terrible quantum equation where our intentions create all that is manifest. Do not be lost in the leviathan deep. Do not be trapped in the dumb carnality of form, transcend; transcend that God may imbue the world with his grace through you.
Knowing my own limitations I do not answer from myself. Knowing the hopelessness of such pitiless despair I do not attempt to placate with platitudes. I offer love. I offer this stranger, this woman that I am confronted with, the best of me, such as it is, in the hope that within me, within her, within us all, is the capacity to heal and be healed. There is no code in language, no silver bullet that can undo this pain but beyond language, beyond form, beyond death there is, there must be, connection. We cannot allow the universe to be unconsciousness and carnality, because we have the choice, because the possibility, the potentiality for love exists in all of us. Its existence as potential is also its demand for realization.
Aside from the love, comfort and forgiveness that anyone would offer a grieving mother I suggest that Kerry meets two of the mentors in this book, Manya and Meredith – healers, mothers, strong women who will be able to hold her pain for her until she is able to. I arrange for her to meet Liz Burton-Phillips, founder of DrugFAM, a charity that offers support to the bereaved relatives of drug users. We meet and attend a conference together in a Holiday Inn, so close to a roundabout you have to breathe in at the buffet. Liz set up DrugFAM when one of her twin sons died of a heroin overdose fourteen years ago. She has the cosy potency of a Harry Potter witch. She used to be a headmistress and has the easy authority that good ones have. Some people take the shock of trauma and somehow allow it to project their life in a new direction that seems to me to be about devotion, about serving others, about turning pain into love. At the conference people wear name tags that bear their own name and the name of the person they have lost. I suppose due to the nature of addiction, most of the attendees are parents. As the new father of two daughters I tiptoe through their grief with reverence and dread, knowing and not knowing the tears cried every time I meet someone else’s eyes. I meet Kerry and Gary there. They are tawny-brown and unbowed people, attractive and sparky salt of the earth, good working-class people with fine values that have fought. Kerry I see for the first time and she is attractive and determined. Hardened by pain but still, thankfully, joyful.
We go into the conference and there are DrugFAM staff, mostly people that have previously used the service, and about 120 relatives and it’s not easy to tell who has lost a relative twenty years ago and who is still in the full beam glare of recent bereavement. Liz has asked me to speak. There is a podium, a pull-down screen, round tables with tablecloths and bowls of not only Mars Celebrations but also Cadbury’s Heroes on them. I am introduced by a long and unfussily kind, birch-like man called Peter, who I’d briefly engaged with in the corridor and ended up falteringly crying with. I cried, he didn’t. I told him about a woman I know who’d lost her son twenty years ago when he was eighteen, through illness. She said of course that he was a lovely young man and how painful the process of his death had been. She said that her father had died recently, just a year ago, and recounted that after her son died, while still at the hospital, while the room was full to the ceiling with new anguish, her father had said to her, ‘I am sorry. I am sorry that I brought you into this world to experience such suffering.’ The words her father spoke, this awful apology, the agonized wish to undo all life because of the extremity of suffering, to rewind your own child’s life because it inexorably led to unlivable sadness, scored me when I heard it. I told the tall man because of the context, because I was about to speak to people with comparable experience. It worked like a code on me as surely as if it were my pin number and I seeped self-pity.
From the podium I spoke from the perspective of an addict in recovery, alive not through any moral superiority but through luck and opportunity, neither of which their relatives were sufficiently granted. I told them, as Peter advised, that they could celebrate their relatives’ lives without shame or stigma. I told them that my incessant prayer is that I will be spared the pain that they are living. But I know my children will die as all our children will die, that in prayer I just hope to negotiate the order of our departure. Let them become elderly sisters with well-lived lives, let them reach beyond the limits that have contained me, let them discover themselves and the beautiful world and how to connect to the permanent over the transient. Value integrity and honour over glory and pleasure. Kindness and truth over prestige and power. Let me as their father instil, or awaken, what they already seem, by their faces, to deeply and wordlessly know.