* * *
When he arrives at the drop-in centre the next day there’s no sign of Matt – or any of his seven pickled bloodhounds. Instead, the group is being led by a rather attractive middle-aged woman called Joan. The circle around her are slightly more palatable too; five of them – two women to her left and three men to her right, an empty chair on the far side marking the gender divide. One of the women is youngish with a child-weary face and hollow eyes, the other in her late forties and fat, with a head of thinning, dyed hair. The men look like labourers in their fifties or sixties. One of them is painfully anorexic. Joan welcomes Daniel as though he’s a newcomer to the whole business, and when he tells her he’d been there the previous evening she explains that meetings are normally attended only weekly – to allow time for essential reflection. She suggests that he sits through the session nevertheless, so that he can make an informed choice for the following week. He takes his place between the sexes. As the process gets underway it’s clear that Joan’s manner and approach is to be very different from Matt’s. She appears to have nothing to prove, no gold standard by which to judge people. She seems keener to listen, has her own set of questions on standby but is careful not to use them as her script, rather to stay with people’s responses and see where the session leads. She’s even clever enough to get Daniel talking. Of course he’s careful to keep to his own agenda, but he also finds himself wanting to please her. After reading out his notes from the previous meeting he begins to describe Alex’s condition, and the thoughts he’s had over the past day about caring for him. He’s careful to avoid any reference to the childhood accident and the mystery surrounding Alex’s return. Even so, Joan is clearly moved by the account and is hungry to know more about his feelings for his twin.
“We lost touch after we were kids,” he answers, carefully. “Back then it was good fun, mostly. I liked his toughness. Rough and tumble type, not like me at all. But he could be a swine too. Our dad died when we were only eight, and I think he never really got over it. He used to drive our mum bonkers – had her right where he wanted her.” He points his thumbprint at the floor. Joan’s look tells him she expects more. “Yeah, so it’ll be my duty to take care of him,” he continues, a little reluctantly. “You know, if something goes wrong and he’s not quite right when he wakes.”
She’s about to say something when some clever git interjects. “So what I reckon is,” he drawls, “you’re worried you’re gonna end up trapped like you was when you ’ad to look after your muvver.” The speaker is the emaciated ex-Punk. There’s a disturbing sense of earnest in his face. The man’s close-set eyes, half-curtained by loose skin, seem to peer right into Daniel’s soul. Joan is quick to take control.
“Thank you, Ian; I’m sure that’s helpful. Daniel, in your notes you described feeling a degree of resentment towards having to be your mother’s carer, because of the effect it had on your education. Could you expand on that a little for us?”
Peeved by this deflection, and starting to feel press-ganged now from all sides, Daniel refuses at first to answer and passes over to someone else. But a minute or so into the group’s trivial whinging he’s compelled to start again. Suddenly he’s blurting out how his mother had no right to depend on him the way she did; that she should have shown more self-control – drinking and smoking herself to death without ever thinking what harm it was doing to him. The outburst silences the whole group. The girl to his right asks if he feels okay.
“Okay? No I don’t feel okay actually.” He’ll not be back again, not for Joan, not for Gulnaz, not for anyone. “Frankly, I feel fuck-all these days.”
But again, Joan uses her mastery to calm him. Skilfully she reflects back what he has just told her, how this young mother had had to bear the loss of a husband and bring up two sons on her own; that to succumb to depression and illness is no-one’s fault. While Daniel’s instinct is to rubbish her words, he’s aware also of a shift somewhere within him. Homework is note writing as before. Joan gives out the same drinks advice as Matt, and instructs them on how to draw a genogram.
Physically and emotionally, the day has been long and tough. It’s a relief to make it back to the flat in one piece. Father Christmas, still leering out through the glass in No. 2, is down to one eye, giving him an obsessive wink each time the lights go through their cycle. ‘Ho, ho, merry Christmas!’ – nose flash – wink. ‘Ho, ho, merry Christmas’ – nose flash – wink. In Daniel’s experience big red noses have little to do with goodwill, or presents, or reindeer, or Lapland, but a hell of a lot to do with booze. Much the same might be said of Christmas in general. No wonder this Satan Santa disturbs him right now. Its message flashes away: ‘Ho, ho, indulge! – have a drink – nudge, nudge’. ‘Yes, yes, spoil yourself! – get bladdered – know what I mean?’ ‘Do it, do it, give in – let them all down – you know you want to!’
Ho, fucking ho, Santa, mate – go fuck yourself – Daniel winks back.
But then, maybe the message isn’t actually intended for Daniel at all. Maybe it’s meant for Mrs Cropley. Perhaps this is how she spends the festive season. He hasn’t seen her for months. Never a squeak from her during the day. No TV; no phone. All he ever hears is her snoring and elephantine nose blowing at night.
That night, he’s too tired for notes. Besides, there are still two days to go before Gulnaz gets back, and a week before the genogram is expected. It’s late on Saturday before he finally sits down again with his thoughts; too cold and blustery outside to do much else and the same old garbage on TV. On the little table beside him, next to the tumbler of scotch and opened bag of peanuts, sits his notepad of half-written comments, his pen wedged between them and the subsequent blank pages. He takes the book, opens it on his knee and starts idly writing names anywhere on the first fresh page, randomly, as they come to him. Each is partnered to one of two words, ‘alive’ or ‘dead’, and lines drawn to link certain pairs with certain others; lines of marriage, of birth, of cohabitation. He imagines everyone in Friday’s group, scattered around the town, all doing this right now. So many lines that radiate from his own name stop at the word ‘dead’. The pen touches the paper beside the ‘x’ of Alex. Each night Daniel has sat and watched him in his blissful sleep, never any sign of change, but the machines flickering and humming their joyful confirmation: alive. Alive! He writes it twice. Just to see the word next to the name brings a lump to his throat.
And these branches seem incomplete without one for Scoff and another for Gulnaz, two more names against which to write that uplifting word. He draws them in too. They feel every bit as important as his immediate family, and mean way more to him than the other shadowy characters. Had he ever shared a quiet night in with his estranged paternal aunt, a picnic or a New Year’s Eve party with his loopy maternal grandmother or a day in the country with his selfish and reclusive Uncle Martin?
The hard rain hits the window like handfuls of grit, the whisky warms him inside. Thoughts of his past; thoughts of his session with Joan; thoughts of his phone conversation with Gulnaz, and thoughts of their Christmas night together and a photo album of faded relatives and other forgotten faces. Thoughts too of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. Before he knows it, he is leafing through a very different kind of photo album: the choice moments of their trip to Shropshire that Gulnaz had captured on her mobile. Recalling those digital snapshots that failed so comprehensively to portray the sense of a living being – Daniel himself – against a shifting landscape, it occurs to him that actually photographs don’t embody memories, not really. Those onscreen images, like those trapped inside the family album, are wholly staged. Real memories capture whole events, small chunks of real time. No, not so much capture – catalogue. Events are pulled apart, using understanding and experience, and then stored. And he knows at once that he’d been wrong. Wrong about his mum’s photos. He could never have confused them with real childhood memories. Those memories really did belong to him. They were him. They were his past.
He rips out the page he’s been working on, places it to one side and begins with renewed zeal to make a neat copy of the genogram, starting at the top, vertical or angled lines for progeny, horizontal for match-making. The many branches of this tree converge inexorably as they descend, so many lines, so many lives, which finally root themselves into a single point. His own name.
It feels good to have located a place for himself at last.