My phone rang, cutting out the music on my headphones. It was my mother.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked. ‘You’ve been gone for hours.’
She sounded concerned, as if she was preparing to grab her coat and perform an intervention. This would have been an overreaction had it not been Christmas. If someone disappears at Christmas time it’s never for a good reason. At best, they’ve left the house in a panic to source a last minute, terrible gift. At worst, or close to it, they are standing on the edge of a cliff and contemplating their next move, like I was.
The coastline in my hometown of Withernsea is fragile and perilous, built of soft, vulnerable clay. Each day the waves collide with the cliff face and drag a little more of it into the sea. Several feet of these cliffs are lost in this way each year, making them the perfect suicide spot for the idle. I knew that if I stood there for long enough, I wouldn’t have even needed to summon the energy to throw myself off them. Just give it enough time and the ground would have made the decision for me, disappearing beneath my feet like a supervillain’s trapdoor.
‘I’m fine,’ I told her. ‘I’m heading back now. Millie just wanted a long walk.’
Millie is my aged dog, who strained at her lead while I spoke, desperate to peer over the edge and sniff at the unknown below. When I’d adopted her a few months earlier, it had been predicted that she wouldn’t make it to Christmas. Yet here she still was, wobbling onward. The image of me with Millie seemed to calm my mother down. Because really, who kills themselves 2with their dog? Especially a tragic one. But I found myself picturing it all the same. Toying with the image of me hopping off the cliff, my body descending, my hand raised above my head as I gripped Millie’s lead. A Victorian aeronaut attempting to take flight by holding on to a dog-shaped balloon. I shuddered. From the thought, the cold weather and the tiny compulsion in me that was telling me to do it. Jump!
‘Are you still there?’ my mother asked. I realised then that I’d stopped talking and all she’d have been able to hear was the fierce coastal wind and the absence of her son.
‘Sorry, yes,’ I said. ‘I’m here. Sorry. I’ll be back soon.’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘See you in a bit. Love you.’
‘Love you.’
This was big-guns talk. We’re a loving family but we don’t show it in obvious ways. We don’t dole out ‘love you’ unless we’re really worried about each other. You get a ‘love you’ on your deathbed and a few more during bereavements and heartache then, like fine china, they’re packed away and kept for best. In this instance my mother’s ‘love you’ meant ‘Don’t you fucking dare.’
And I wouldn’t. Not anymore, at least. I’d been here several times over the years, in this place, or places like it. Places, edges, that had long ago fallen into the sea. I could have easily fallen in along with them but decided against it, and now, it seems, I didn’t have a choice anymore. I considered my teenage daughter Effie, safe at home in Manchester with my ex-wife, preparing for Christmas morning and rightly oblivious to the thoughts in my head. Of my precarious position on the cracked rim of the world. She was enough reason for me to stick around. But there was something else too, an obligation I couldn’t quite grasp, pulling me inland. The unfinished business of living, I guessed. 3So, while I couldn’t give in to the urge to jump, it didn’t mean I couldn’t think about it, and although it was freezing and getting darker, I waited on the cliffs a little longer. Mulling things over, listening to the insistent throb of that tiny compulsion, while Millie circled me, wrapping her lead around my legs. Whether by instinct or accident, holding me fast.
*
When I’d arrived at my parents’ house on Christmas Eve, my mother was concerned, worrying about my inability to smile or eat because as a child these were two of the things I’d always done best. ‘You used to wake up each morning with a smile on your face,’ she’d say, happy that she’d given birth to a being of such relentless sunshine. And because she has always shown love through feeding, it was pleasing to her that I was also a boy who ate everything on his plate then immediately pined for seconds. There was clearly never a time back then when she thought she’d have to consider me glumly wasting away.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I’d said, pre-empting her questions as I made my way into her house, sad and gaunt and making a circus of carrying large gift bags through the door. Lumpy paper ones filled with awkwardly shaped presents and clinking wine bottles. I huffed and I puffed and I fussed and I kissed her on the cheek. Her dogs rushed towards me excitedly and I crouched to welcome them, embracing the giddy, fluffy distraction of their enthusiasm.
It helps that my mother knows that I can sometimes be dramatic. That ever since my teens I’ve tended to feel things intensely, my default setting during times of trouble being to announce ruin and proclaim that the sky is falling on my 4head in particular. My elder sister, Becky, can be the same way, making it a well-worn family trait and therefore nothing for our mother to worry about. So, she could comfort herself with the idea that this was just one of my displays of high emotion, and that I’d clearly decided to exhibit that emotion in the manner of a drama student fumbling their way through a scene that required interaction with multiple props. I was all about the bags and where to put them. Chattering about whose was whose. About lost gift tags and the trials of Christmas shopping. Familiar with this sort of behaviour, it could appear to my mother that this was all sound and fury signifying, if not nothing exactly, then at least very little. She didn’t know that the death compulsion I was feeling that night was strong and real, and I was having to navigate it just as I have ever since I first began to feel it as a teenager, crushed under the vice-like pressures of my own dedicated portion of collapsing sky.
‘Everyone has a worst Christmas of their life,’ my mother said, unable to stop herself from acknowledging my sorry state. ‘Yours is just happening right now.’
There is a wisdom in statements like this, the ones that remind you to get some perspective during challenging times. But I need them six months down the line. Not in the moment, when it’s all happening. When all I could think about was how comforting it would have been to curl up on the floor, dissolve into the carpet and wait for someone to hoover me up. What I want at times when my life goes off the rails is to be told that there has been a big mistake, a clerical error. That I can go back in time, forget that any of the bad stuff happened and carry on as happily as I did before. I want comforting, deluding, distracting nonsense, not words that make sense. So, at times like this I often feel like it’d be a greater kindness to put me out of 5my misery. Bludgeon me with a spade maybe or poison my drink. Push me into speeding traffic, so I might get to enjoy the comforting escape of a coma. But don’t tell me it’ll be okay. I know it will be. It always is. It has to be.
‘It’ll be okay,’ she said. ‘You’ll get through it.’
The details of why I was feeling so low are not really interesting enough to get into. Rooted in a basic relationship failure that I was in the process of blowing out of all proportion. Boy meets girl and they fall in love. Girl breaks up with boy a few days before Christmas. Because boy doesn’t do feelings in half measures he reacts as if no one has ever experienced such pain, stops eating or sleeping and becomes a useless puddle of grief and troubling thoughts. Boy’s mother tells him to come home for Christmas because boy has called her from the produce aisle of a Sainsbury’s, where ‘Lonely This Christmas’ is playing over the store PA system and he wants to know exactly what kind of psychopath would write a song like that, let alone play it in a supermarket. Boy accepts that his mother does not know the answer, but agrees to come home, disconnects the call and weeps. Old woman in supermarket gets annoyed at boy because he is having a breakdown in front of the milk and she’s trying to reach for a four-pint bottle of semi-skimmed. Boy realises this, picks up four-pint bottle of semi-skimmed and tries to hand it to old woman. Old woman refuses bottle because it now has tears and snot on it, tuts at boy, reaches past him and grabs a bottle of her own before bustling away. Boy stands alone in the produce aisle, holding a freezing cold, four-pint bottle of snot-coated semi-skimmed milk and listens as ‘Last Christmas’ begins to play over the PA, thinking ‘This kind of behaviour is why she broke up with me.’ It was, as people like to say, a story as old as time.6
‘When did you last eat?’ my mother asked.
‘I’ve eaten.’
‘But when?’
‘Yesterday?’ I said, regretting my honesty immediately. ‘Sorry, I meant this morning. Before I set off.’
My mother is brave and strong and stoic and while I am not particularly, I still feel that I need to protect her from bad things. To shield her from any information that I think might upset her, in part because I am her eldest son but also because I wasn’t always her eldest son. Before me there was Robert, who was brave and strong and stoic until he wasn’t anymore. Until he decided that life was too much and that comforting words no longer cut it. So, I could not give in to my more flamboyant urges and flounce through the door, shrieking ‘Mother, fetch me the strychnine. I am bereft and need to die immediately!’ before collapsing onto the sofa like a string-snipped puppet. I had to put on a show of being capable. But I did it weirdly because I was still me and I was losing my mind. Just like every time I have felt this way before, I have needed to come home to my family and fix myself, and to do that I require everyone, myself included, to behave as if nothing has changed and nothing is wrong.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘We don’t have to talk, but you need to eat something. You’re wasting away.’
This was neither true nor a valid concern, I’ve not seen evidence of my ribs since the Thatcher government. But it was important to her that if we were not going to use our mouths to talk about our feelings, then we would use them to eat. This was something a Jewish ex-girlfriend of mine had always endorsed.
‘We need to fress,’ she’d say, when life got hard. ‘It’s a Yiddish word. It basically means eat your feelings.’ And because our 7relationship had been turbulent, the kosher deli near our home became our sanctuary. Our hallowed ground. Where our problems were stuffed into our stomachs.
My family’s blood, like everyone’s really, is a real mix. We’re Jewish mixed with Irish itinerant, Swedish and Scottish. The Jewish heritage comes from my mother’s side of the family and it shows. The trope of an anxious mother healing her loved ones through food is as familiar to our home as the sound of my three siblings and I arguing over access to the only bathroom in the house. While my family never referred to comfort eating as fressing, the act has always been in our DNA, and it was in my mother when she made a call and booked the family in for a Christmas dinner at Withernsea Golf Club, just a short walk from my parents’ house.
‘Lovely!’ I said upon hearing this news, baring my teeth in what I hoped looked like a smile and not as if I’d just slowly pressed my heel onto a thumbtack. There’s a point I sometimes reach where I go beyond eating my feelings and food loses its appeal entirely. When I get like this you could sit me down in a Michelin Star restaurant and I would react to each dish as I’d been presented with the contents of a sun-baked medical waste bin.
I was just wondering how long I could maintain my forced smile when Becky arrived, and it transformed into a genuine one. Her appearance at the front door incited a flurry of chatter and darting dogs. Then my father descended the stairs, calling out to my mother.
‘Janet, where’s my checked shirt?’
‘You’re wearing it.’
‘No, the other one.’
‘I gave it to the charity shop.’8
‘When?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. 2003?’
This back and forth felt like watching a tired but much-loved music hall routine, and it was exactly what I needed. These warming and fortifying diversions from the black cloud I’d dragged into the house. And because my family wasn’t acting concerned, I was able to settle in and enjoy them being loving, annoying and normal. Reminding me that whatever else might be going on, however I might be feeling or what I might have lost, I was going to be a part of this team for as long as we all lived. The one thing that could not be allowed to change.
Once clothes had been decided upon, we all bundled ourselves up in coats and woollens and headed out of the house, looking like Christmas card characters as we picked our way to the golf club’s tired, prefabricated clubhouse. It was here that the brief, protective spell of normality would be broken, and I would come to sit and stare, bilious, at an extra-large two meat roast. Ordering this had been both a trial and a performance. The young lady serving at the bar had presented us with the meal options, solely roasted meat dinners, available in a range of sizes. My mother ordered herself a small.
‘We don’t do small. We do medium, large and extra-large,’ the young lady said.
I could hear my father speaking loudly as he seated himself at a seasonally laid table in the dining area nearby. ‘But that means medium is small,’ he said. ‘That’s stupid.’ His creeping deafness meant that he could still hear just enough about a situation to form an opinion of it but couldn’t regulate the volume of that opinion when it left his mouth. ‘Isn’t it though? It’s stupid.’ It was nice to see him this way, difficult and animated. When I’d last visited, back in September, I’d taken him 9to hospital so he could see a consultant about a list of ailments so concerning that he had been reduced to a worried, grey shape in a waiting room. Now, here he was, all arms and opinions, a blaring disruption in a Christmas jumper.
Becky quietened him down, but the young lady didn’t seem to hear him in any case, too focussed on me and my pending decision. My mother looked at me and I found myself ordering a large.
Hearing this, the bar manager sidled over to intervene, tying on an apron as she moved.
‘They can’t have large,’ she said in a broadcasting stage whisper. ‘We’ve no large plates. Charge them for larges and we’ll give them extra-larges.’
‘We can’t do large,’ the young lady said, her fingers hovering over the till. ‘So, is that a medium or an extra-large?’
I glanced at my mother again.
‘An extra-large please,’ I said. A bold demonstration of ‘I AM FINE AND YOU DO NOT NEED TO WORRY.’
It’s strange, this need I feel during difficult times to act in front of my mother given that, as a child, I was completely resistant to any kind of a performance. Especially as it’s what she’d always wanted from me.
My mother is a passionate performer, always looking for an excuse to apply greasepaint and parade about in front of an audience. She’s in her seventies now but still performs in a dance troupe, as a member of the local choir and as part of a pirate singing group, in which she travels the country roaring shanties in coastal towns while dressed like a drunken sailor. She wanted us children to share her enthusiasm for the spotlight and it was clear that part of her looked at my siblings and I and saw potential for her own merry little band of von Trapps. 10
Being the eldest, Becky was the first to find herself being crammed into a sweat-inducing polyester outfit and shoved into a chorus line. Whether she was a blackbird baked in a pie or the fart-addled rear end of a pantomime horse, she suffered it with the stoicism of a regularly humiliated prisoner of war. Robert was bolder and more cocksure, willingly taking the lead in Oliver at the age of ten, his voice pure and bell-like as he performed a saintly rendition of ‘Where Is Love?’, giving no indication that, by that age, he’d already started smoking and carrying a flick-knife in his back pocket. But it was Becky’s plight that interested me the most, because it came with costumes. I was particularly drawn to the flying monkey outfit that she wore in an amateur production of The Wizard of Oz. Unlike in the movie, it was entirely brown and topped off, for reasons known only to our mother, with a glitter-specked afro wig. I loved it so much that I insisted she let me try it on, tights and all, so I could pose for a photo. And the image still exists somewhere, of me standing in our living room, cock-hipped and sassy as a tomcat, so effervescent with showbiz pep you’d think I’d just pirouetted out of a successful audition for Starlight Express.
But this kind of display meant nothing. You may have seen me happily strutting around our house dressed like Carmen Miranda but threaten me with a stage and I’ve seen people box-up feral cats with less fuss. I was deeply afraid of public humiliation and failure, an anxiety fuelled by the acute self-knowledge that I was exactly the kind of kid who might somehow wander out in front of an audience with his dick poking out of his fly. So, the fact that I behaved one way at home and another outside of it, dogged in my resistance to the stage, was perceived by my mother as a considered act of screwing with her. 11
‘Come on,’ she would insist through gritted teeth, nudging me towards the stage during rehearsals in the town hall. ‘It’ll be fun.’
But I knew what fun was and it didn’t involve a room full of people booing at my adolescent penis. So, I’d hold my ground until she gave up. What I didn’t reckon with was that I was absorbing the need to perform by osmosis. That over the years I would feel drawn to stages. First in bands, strapping on guitars and stepping out in front of audiences to sing amongst waves of protective distortion and clattering noise. Then eventually alone, to read stories and talk. And now, it seems, to stand before my mother and put on a show in a golf club. Because growing up in our house was a lot like being the lone non-smoker in a room; you can abstain all you want but given time you’ll still end up smelling like an ashtray. And if you spend enough time around my mother then, one way or another, you’ll somehow find yourself in stage tights.
The lady at the bar handed us a number of small, laminated tickets, each labelled with the size of our order and to be handed in at a carvery once the food was ready. I looked down at my ticket. EXTRA-LARGE. Extra-large is not a meal size, it’s a t-shirt size. It’s the size of underwear I buy. I mentioned this to my mother.
‘That reminds me,’ she said. ‘I’ve got you a three-pack of pants. Your dad doesn’t want them.’
‘Well, that’s something to look forward to,’ I said, as we settled ourselves down at the table. Then I realised that it actually was, my future hopes bound up in the promise of rejected underpants.
I looked around the room at the other diners, who were largely dressed in Christmas jumpers and Santa hats, braying 12with advent bonhomie. Not, apparently, hoping that they’d be the lucky recipients of a swift heart attack or the sudden, blessed release of an aneurysm. But these things were on my mind. These exit options. But I obeyed the family rules: we do not talk about our feelings, we eat them; and we do not leave each other, we remain until time or sickness decides otherwise. So, I was left to sit in my situation and stew, silently praying for a catastrophic biological intervention and if that failed, at least I had new underwear. This was just how it was now. We all had to stick around and see this thing through. All of the things. Life. Relationships. An extra-large Christmas dinner in a wind-lashed portacabin on the Holderness coast. The nausea of it all.
The bar manager announced that the food was ready, and we each queued up at the carvery to receive a teetering plate of food, then staggered back to our table, a trail of dropped peas in our wake. As I settled into my seat my mother nudged me and nodded to the next table, where a man with a white beard and a Christmas tree-shaped hat was just sitting down with his family.
‘That’s the No.1 poet in Withernsea,’ she whispered.
He spotted my mother and raised a glass in her direction.
‘Alright, Jan?’ said The No.1 Poet in Withernsea.
Everyone knows my mother. She can’t walk the streets without someone hailing her from a shop doorway or stopping her for a chat. A cast of characters with shifty noms de plume arrive at her front door each week to offer crates of fish or short-dated biscuits at bargain prices ‘… because it’s you, Jan.’ Part of this is because Withernsea is a small town, and our family has lived in it for almost thirty years. But also, because my mother’s burlesque troupe, the Ruby Red Performers, reached the 13semi-finals of Britain’s Got Talent in 2015 and their routine was one that understandably persists for anyone who witnessed it. In a town where everyone knows everyone else, this is at least one way to stand out.
‘You should interview him for your book,’ she told me.
‘Maybe …’ I said absently, picking up my knife and fork and surveying my food, the daunting meat and vegetable landscape of an extra-large.
I’d been given funding to write a book about Holderness – a collection of essays about what it was like to live on this forgotten stretch of the Yorkshire coast. I’d been traveling the area for months, between Spurn Point and Flamborough, making notes about life on the coastline and interviewing people who live and work there. I wanted the world to know about this place and how it felt to be connected to it, to recognise how strange and damaged it was, but still love it. My mother knew that I’d recently spoken to Dean Wilson, a lovably idiosyncratic writer who light-heartedly markets himself as ‘the second-best poet in Withernsea’ and she didn’t want me to miss out on the poet she considered to be the best. I enjoy this, the enthusiasm she has for what I do. She likes to tell people about my work, to point out that I’m doing something creative.
‘Adam’s a performer,’ she’ll tell them with a note of pride that causes a mix of self-consciousness and appreciative warmth to rise in my chest. ‘He’s a writer. A storyteller.’
But she has always been proud of us kids, all of us, whatever we’re doing. I could make it my enthusiasm to kill rabbits with hammers and she’d still find a way to take pride in the form and endurance of my swinging arm.
I looked down at my plate, piled high with golden potatoes and roasted meats. Swimming with grease-veined, fawn-coloured 14gravy. It looked toxic to me. The thought of putting it inside my body made me queasy. But it was Christmas, and this was Christmas dinner with my family and my mother dearly needed to see me eat something. I knew why. I knew what she was thinking and fearing, and I couldn’t tell her that she was correct. That, in that moment, I would have chosen the great beyond over a pig in a blanket. But unless you’re raised in a death cult you can’t in good conscience really tell your mother that all you want for Christmas is for her to shoot you in the head at the dining table, so instead I stabbed at a roast potato and thrust it into my mouth. An act that resembled hunger but was closer to that of wolfing down a foul-tasting medication. It landed in my stomach like a thudding rock, where it rested and sizzled.
I was aware that my mother was watching me eat. There was a responsibility with each mouthful and my consumption became performative, like I was a daytime TV presenter. One of those people whose job it was to stand in a studio kitchen, place a forkful of freshly prepared frittata in their mouth and react as if they’re experiencing the apex of a juddering orgasm. But because eating had always been the kind of labour I could really put my back into, being forced to treat it as a trial that needed to be overcome felt like a compounding of my situation. A trading of a joy for a misery. I looked at the meat, which seemed at that moment to be impossibly and overwhelmingly dead. Not a plate of food, but of corpse slivers. The concept of eating them made me feel morbid and cannibalistic.
‘Eat up,’ my mother said. I avoided the meat, speared a ball of stuffing with my fork and popped it into my mouth. A small voice in my head said, ‘Brains. You’re eating brains, Adam.’ I was aware that the voice was Kiefer Sutherland’s from the movie The Lost Boys. That my internal monologue had been 15corrupted to the point where it was being narrated by a movie vampire. But mostly that this was not a good or sane experience to be having. I followed up the stuffing with a floret of cauliflower.
‘There,’ my mother said. ‘That’s better isn’t it? To have something good inside you.’
I smiled and nodded through bulging cheeks, building up the courage to swallow. It didn’t take much, and this wasn’t especially noble behaviour. Your family and friends are the people you should sacrifice everything for, even when that includes sacrificing yourself. And really, there are tougher ways to do it. I wasn’t having to head off to war or donate a kidney or anything, I was eating cauliflower, which should only really be a challenge if you’re a toddler having a rigid-limbed tantrum in a highchair. I felt my mouthful collapse to mush and swallowed. My mother gave an almost imperceptible nod of satisfaction then turned her attention to her own plate.
Her friend Jim was sitting at the table next to ours and he leaned across to ask me about the book I was working on. He was interested in the angle I was taking and the things I’d be covering. I wanted to say the book had changed. Mutated. That it would now be a book about committing to writing a book about the Yorkshire coast when all you want to do is kill yourself. But this was not a time for theatrical displays of honesty, and I found that it was actually good to have something to talk about, grateful for the excuse to use my mouth in a way that didn’t require chewing. So, I talked about my travels and my history and the people I’d met.
‘You need to write about the poverty,’ Jim said, skating a potato through a slick of gravy then popping it into his mouth. ‘And the pirates, obviously.’ 16
Jim is a member of my mother’s pirate group. He wants the town to be known for fun things, for the sea shanties, the family festivals and community events, but he’s neither blind nor an idiot. He knows that the town is dwindling. Fading. Tumbling into the sea. He knows the problems. So, I tried to lighten the mood.
‘I’ve been speaking to a man about a werewolf at Bempton puffin sanctuary,’ I told him, my arms animated and gesturing like one of those inflatable, noodle-limbed men you see outside car dealerships on American TV. My movements almost, but sadly not, upending my plate. ‘And there’s a guy who has been investigating UFO sightings in Bridlington …’
This show of excitement was enjoyable, making me giddy about my work, and I found myself believing in that excitement. It became a small rip in my self-imposed blackout curtain, letting a spot of light through, and it felt like it would save me if I just kept picking at it. Then Jim upset the thought by placing a slice of rosy-pink flesh into his mouth.
‘The gammon’s excellent,’ he said.
My stomach lurched instantly, and I felt the rip in the blackout curtain close up. I looked down and nudged at the meat on my plate with a fork.
‘I’m full,’ I said, meaning that I was about to be sick. ‘I’m going to wrap it up for Millie.’
I placed the slivers into a napkin, hiding them from my view, bundling them up like a gift, and waited. For everyone else to finish up, but also for the oppressive, suffocating sensation I was feeling to hurry up and smother me. I didn’t know then that it would be another two years before we’d all sit down for dinner like this again, and that COVID-19 was about to cut me off from both my family and the coastline I 17was supposed to be writing about. So, I didn’t savour that time, choosing instead to concentrate on the pressure that seemed to be building in the room. A force so great and focussed on me, I was worried it might dislodge my head from my neck and fire it into the ceiling like a champagne cork. This sensation only eased when everyone began rising in their seats and pulling on their coats, getting ready to traipse back to my parents’ house, where I would kneel on the floor and praise the quality of our Christmas dinner while feeding scraps of it to my dog.
‘I didn’t want her to miss out,’ I’d said to no one in particular, then I strapped on her lead and the two of us headed out in the fading light towards the cliffs.
*
Millie sat down on my feet and I looked out at the sea, at the bright moon, a circular rip in the blackout sky. I put my iTunes on shuffle, hoping it would land on a piece of music that was appropriately moving and cinematic while I stood on the pouting lip of the cliff, dramatically feeling. I wanted a song that would make this a moment. Help me decide, even though I felt that the decision had already been made for me. But what I got was Prince’s ‘Starfish and Coffee’, a pop song about breakfast. Still, it created a moment of sorts. It flooded my ears. And better suited to dancing than jumping, it obliterated my urges. The lyrics not potent or significant but vital, distracting nonsense.
You can’t kill yourself to ‘Starfish and Coffee’. You can’t kill yourself with your dog. And you can’t kill yourself in Withernsea. You’ll be okay. You always are. You have to be. 18While no one speaks of them, articulates them, those are just the family rules now. So, I headed back to my parents’ house, Millie by my side, her aching limbs grateful for my movement. No longer interested in what lay at the bottom of the cliffs, she pulled me in the direction of home.