* * *
A chewed biro hovers over a notepad, the page blank but for an idle doodle in the margin. The only way to cope with the next few days and stay focused is to establish a routine. He’ll go to this drop-in centre on both Thursday and Friday. Whatever they ask of him he’ll oblige, just so long as they sort out his drink and anger in time for Gulnaz’s return, and get his head properly together for the day when Alex comes home. He roughs out a timetable. Up at eight, shower, Cipramil tablet, breakfast for two, Greenalls from nine thirty to five thirty (main meal at lunch time), up to the hospital by five forty-five to sit with Alex for an hour, on to the drop-in centre for seven, home a little after nine, do whatever homework he’s been given, in bed by midnight.
He rises from the kitchen chair, tears out the page and Blu-Tacs it to the fridge.
The routine runs smoothly enough until the first drop-in session. From the moment he steps into the cold, bare surroundings of the community centre he knows it’ll never work. Seven other guys, all middle-aged and overweight with droopy bloodhound faces, huddle on plastic chairs in a half circle around a kid who looks fresh out of school, who duly declares, “Hey, I’m Matt.”
Matt soon turns out to be even more of a prat than he looks; arrogant, self-important, superior, smug and, on the evidence of it, totally untrained. To entrust any inner feelings to this dickhead, or indeed to any of this bunch of losers, is about as likely as entrusting his pin number to a gang of convicted thieves. Alex and Gulnaz are the only things stopping him from throwing in the towel before the first bout.
All newcomers are required to introduce themselves and, worse still, to make some kind of physical contact, like a handshake, a high five or a manly hug. If only a smack round the chops would qualify. “Okay,” continues Matt with his unnerving smile, “so Daniel, perhaps you’d like to tell the rest of the group your main reason for coming here today.” In case the question is too complex for these Neanderthals he qualifies it with, “Do you have a problem with alcohol that you wish to address?” It’s an easy enough question to dodge. Asked next how they would each describe their lives at that moment Daniel wavers slightly, but a little self-deprecating humour gets him safely through. “Great! Not worth a lot, but just great,” he laughs dismissively.
It’s becoming apparent that nothing anyone says is to be picked up and explored in any depth. Matt only seems interested in getting through his checklist of questions. Quite when and how they’ll be allowed to demonstrate any newfound understandings related to drinking and aggression isn’t made clear. Perhaps they’ll all pass the medical on the strength of attendance alone, and the simple ability to open their mouths and put words into some vaguely coherent order.
“Describe a positive thing about yourself,” Matt says next.
At first, Daniel is stumped by that one, his powers of invention failing him at the crucial moment. Then, to his surprise, he thinks of Scoff, and of his slavish service to the poor beast. No need to fabricate the truth there; it’s something he’s genuinely proud of. And then there’s the way he looks after his body, and his ability to conjure up a decent meal for a woman – he’s on a roll now. After reeling off these qualities, which stand in marked relief to the shallow drivel offered up by the others, Daniel is inspired to announce that he has ‘untapped potential.’ Someone from the group asks cynically what’s holding him back and is nearly told to mind his own bloody business, but instead, with certificate now in his sights, Daniel charges for the chequered flag with his set-piece about his education being messed up looking after his sick mother all through school. The resentment in his voice comes through a little stronger than intended. He only hopes it hasn’t tripped him up at the finishing line.
And soon after that, the session ends. Their homework – what Matt calls the ‘Programme’ – is to write up and expand their notes, and reflect on what they reveal. If they meet with friends socially they are not to discuss the session. They should have alcohol-free days every other day and not more than two drinks in between: try to alternate them with non-alcoholic drinks. The instruction raises more than one eyebrow.
What, from all that, is worth committing to paper? In the time set aside for note writing Daniel can only stare at the session’s scribbled words and tap the pen on his teeth. Really, just two things stand out with any clarity: his brief moment of self-pride, and the statement that his life just now felt pretty worthless. He’s struck by the contradiction between the two, and more importantly between this sense of emptiness and his constant ambivalence about Alex – one minute promising to fulfil his dreams, the next threatening to mess up his life. But if life is so empty, so utterly stalled, then maybe change, of whatever kind, isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe it’s exactly what he needs to escape this perpetual stalemate. The breakthrough is a small one, but enough to persuade him to return the following evening.
An hour later, Gulnaz rings from London. He chooses not to mention the session just yet and she doesn’t ask. She tells him briefly about her course, about her excitement at meeting eminent figures whose books or articles she’s read. But he’s not really listening. Suddenly though, she’s apologising.
“You’d wanted to tell me about your father yesterday, and I stopped you. It was selfish of me. I’m ready now to hear what you were going to say, if you still want to.”
His father…
…His father.
Yes, he does kind of want her to know.
Suddenly Daniel can’t think how to begin.
“Well, yeah, the Falklands thing at the pub. It made me angry. Coz my father went there – I don’t mean to the pub – I mean to…”
No, no, not the right place to start at all.
“It’s just that, you see, I always saw my dad as…”
As what? So much of it was hearsay, and yet so deeply personal too. It was always there, twisting the way Daniel understood the world; the way he saw himself. He tries to think. Shameful really how his father’s face could sometimes be hard to recall – his real face, in motion, not the frozen moment of a photograph. His voice even more so. Only the intangible things come to mind. Forces that tug on the present. The ever-measuring yardstick. His father’s punctuality, his insistence on order and discipline, his neat haircut, his upright walk.
A father who was a hero, that much was beyond question. What rank he held, how long he’d served, Daniel could tell Gulnaz none of that. Only that his brave dad had been ‘called up’ and sent away to war across the waters from Plymouth. No-one had ever told him which ship it was that carried Richard Sebastian George and Martin Greenall off to the South Atlantic. For years he hadn’t even a clue where the ‘Falcon’ Islands were. Some bird sanctuary off the coast of Scotland, he’d vaguely thought. A boy in his class with a broad Scottish accent had been from a place called Argyll, so his assumption was that the ‘Argies’ also lived there: savages in kilts trying to drive out the English. During those dark months of April and May 1982, whenever the TV or radio news came on, his mother had banished them from the room, turned down the volume and closed the door. Sometimes she would emerge full of lightness and fun and take them out and buy them things. Other times her mood had been black, her eyes reddened, her voice edgy and hoarse. On those occasions she would just sit in the shadows, chain-smoking away, and if either he or Alex made any kind of fuss or asked any questions they’d be straight to bed and their father would be ‘Sure to hear about it when he came home’, a threat guaranteed to snuff out any hint of insurrection.
One by one these memories offer themselves up as Daniel’s starting point. But each needs the others to make sense. In fact he’s already speaking without having reached a decision, picking up from where they had left off on Christmas night. He’s taking Gulnaz back to the boat on the shore: her suggestion that Alex had been heading down to reach it and not just leaning over the cliff edge, and adding in Alex’s words that have now come back to him – words that confirmed she was right. He tells her how their mother had brok
en the news that their father wasn’t ever coming home, how he’d lain awake at night telling his brother of a secret submarine and Alex’s certainty, when seeing the upturned boat, that their dad had run it aground and needed their help down on the rocks. He recounts the days after they’d all said their goodbyes, how their poor mother had struggled on alone with two wild children to control. Sometime before Alex’s accident, there had been a service for his father. No coffin, because there was no body for them to bury, but a line of men in uniform standing to attention and someone reading from a list of names. And then their guns were firing. Was he present, or was it on the telly? The first time his uncle had walked in through the door and stood there before his mother Daniel could only watch from the top of the stairs. It was the first time he’d seen his mother sink to the floor, wailing and crying, then sobbing and moaning and then just being still. The first time, but certainly not the last.
Everyone called his father a hero – the headmaster, their neighbours, the shopkeepers. Even Margaret Thatcher had talked of heroism and sacrifice and justice and liberty. That’s what heroes did: they upheld liberty and justice by fighting pitched battles with enemies on foreign shores. And the most heroic of them got killed.
It isn’t told quite like this to Gulnaz of course. He stumbles, he reiterates, he makes light of heavy matters and vice-versa. He lets her guide him with her prompts and questions, her empathy and understanding. He lets her do the emotional stuff.
“That’s why those students caused me to lash out. Like they were poking fun at my dad. They were rubbishing everything he stood for. They don’t know what it means to be a hero. I had to do it – for him. Maybe another time I wouldn’t have, but what with Alex and everything, all I saw was red, just for a second. I wouldn’t have taken it any further.”
After an agonising silence Gulnaz says, “You know, I think that’s why I stopped and talked to you at the cemetery.”
The connection between this and anything he’s been saying is lost on him.
“Sorry?”
“You weren’t just someone I’d seen there before. It wasn’t only that you looked lonely. Or just about me and my break-up with Greg. There was a bond. As though we were destined to meet. I think I must have sensed it.”
“Er, all a bit too ‘Twilight Zone’ for me, sorry.”
She remains undeterred. “What happens to someone when they go through something like that? You lose a father when you’re nine, and months later a brother. A twin brother.”
“Dad left when I was eight.”
“Okay, eight then. What does that do to a child? You spend the next, what, ten, twelve years caring for your sick mother.”
“Yeah.”
“Even setting aside everything that’s happened in the last few days, what does it do, Daniel?”
He’s starting to feel seriously uneasy. This doesn’t sound like the Gulnaz he thought he’d begun to know. What does she mean, do? Is she suggesting he has a screw loose? Is she about to hit him with something heavy?
“I think there’s a couple of things you should know about me too,” she says.
Okay, something heavy indeed. Something he really isn’t going to need right now.
“You see, in some ways we’re kindred spirits, you and me. Over the years, one by one, you’ve lost everyone in your life who’s mattered to you. So now you fear attachment. People die around you, and when you’re attached to them it hurts too much to see them die. So you just shut them out.”
Oh, is that what he does. A shrink too now then, not just a pretty face, not just a damned good cook, not just a brilliant nurse.
“How much harder then,” she continues, “to deal with someone who’s put you through all that having the nerve to show up again. I don’t mean you’re not overjoyed to see Alex alive. Of course you are. But there’s anger too, for which you feel guilt. So you turn that anger onto yourself. And perhaps a little onto me. When you drink and get into trouble, it’s a way of beating yourself up.”
“I thought you wanted to tell me about you.”
“I do,” she insists. “I’m just trying to establish why we’re such a good fit.”
Fit?? Did they fit together? Only two days ago she was threatening never to talk to him again.
“You sound like a psychiatrist,” he says.
“Do I? Yes, I guess I must do. Sorry. Too many hours spent in these lectures! It’s just that, you see, I’ve also lost both my parents. I have no brothers or sisters. My grandfather passed away just over two years ago.” Her voice sounds a little unsteady. “But instead of shutting people off, for some reason I cling to them instead.” With a humourless laugh she adds, “Even when they’re a complete swine like Greg.”
Daniel isn’t convinced. Naturally he’s sorry to hear that Gulnaz’s parents are dead, but everyone gets parted from their parents eventually. It doesn’t automatically make them an emotional wreck. In any case, her father wasn’t a national hero like his. And grandfathers? Two a penny. Their situation was hardly comparable. To lose a twin brother, now that was something. You had to be a twin even to begin to appreciate something like that.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she says. Oh, she does? A psychiatrist and a psychic. “But the way I lost my parents was awfully traumatic and, like you, I was just a child. And my grandfather took the place of my parents – he was my one link to my past and to my country. His death left me with nowhere I could call home. And nobody to make me feel secure.”
Daniel wonders where exactly she plans to take this.
“You okay?” she asks. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I just wanted to open myself up to you a bit. You know, it’s what people do?…
“…Daniel? Are you still there?”
“Er, yeah. Yeah. Um, sorry about your parents.”
Well, for crying out loud, what more was he supposed to say? With great relief he hears her take a long breath, as though this particular train of conversation has run out of steam.
“I’d better go. It’s getting late. Early start tomorrow. See you Monday.
“Night, Daniel.”
“Good night.”