Flesh and Blood

by Stephen McGann

  Now this sacred heart risked being scarred by contact with our separating futures and our sensual new experiences. The young McGann children were beginning to seek different answers. The boys were fresh-faced actors in a vibrant and permissive artistic industry. My younger sister Clare had been accepted at London’s prestigious Imperial College to study science. After 120 years the McGanns were emigrants again – but this time sailing towards something of our own, and not away from something suffered in common. This would ultimately bring the sacred custody of our hearts into conflict with older hierarchies. And, for a time, with each other.

  The geographical and economic dislocation of British families like ours became a common feature of the country’s sociology from the eighties onwards. Many northern parents like Mum and Dad watched with a mix of pride and sadness as their kids moved away for new lives and careers elsewhere. They’d had their own relatives close at hand when they were young. They may have been financially poorer, but they’d been rich in other ways. The support of family, church and community was a binding force that gave extended families a moral purpose and a social cohesion. Now it was gone. Post-war parents hardly saw their busy professional children, and would have little contact with their gadget-rich grandchildren. Meanwhile, those heavily mortgaged sons and daughters could no longer depend on the child support of a nearby aunt, or the familiar consolation of the family priest. Church attendances declined with an increase in the more purchasable deities of the new consumer age. The post-war promise of free education had delivered for working-class parents like mine, but it was achieved at another kind of cost – one their hearts had never budgeted for.

  For now, though, there was still Dad sat in his old chair when we returned for our occasional visits – the melancholic constant around which our family formatted. As long as he sat there at its centre you could believe that the old order we’d grown up with still endured. An unshifting rock against which we could hurl rebellious teenage kicks in order to propel our new identities forward.

  It wasn’t to last.

  The call came late one evening. I was sitting in Mark’s flat in London. It was Mum. Dad had been rushed to hospital. It was his heart. The doctor said it was serious. He said he was unlikely to make it through the night.

  The world shifted. I was just twenty-one; Mark only nineteen months older. Like most people of that age we thought life existed purely as a theatre for our own unique joys or sufferings. We didn’t yet comprehend that subordinate part we all play in life’s more significant commonalities. Like the death of a parent.

  We dashed back to Liverpool. We were in luck. Dad hadn’t only survived the night, but he’d rallied. The vision of his children turning up beside his bed seemed to galvanise him. Dad’s heart was finished, the doctor told us. His mitral valve had failed, and his other organs had started to wilt under the burden. It would only be a matter of days.

  As it happened, Dad lived for another week. And I can honestly say that I got to know him better in those last seven days than in the twenty-one years that went before. A change slowly came over him while he lay there in that hospital. At first he approached his declining condition like a challenge. ‘If I could just eat something I’ll feel better,’ he’d say. But gradually he absorbed the truth of it. I watched his shoulders drop – a life’s worth of tension and anxiety released. He was just sixty, and still without the resolutions he felt his past courage and pain had warranted. It gave him a quiet, dry smile – a vindication of his belief in life’s capacity for disappointment. And yet he was strangely liberated by it. Once his life had truly amounted to the sum of all of his anxieties, he found himself free of its tyranny. He didn’t just walk open-eyed into the shadow of that valley, he strolled.

  Dad became unusually talkative and reflective. One or two of us would be there at any given time, so we’d each get some time alone with him. It was wonderful. In one such moment, I asked him to recount his war experiences to me again. He’d told me it a dozen times when I’d been younger, but now I wanted to hear it in the spirit of a definitive account – an oral record that I could take with me after he’d gone. Dad knew what I was doing. He smiled and ruffled my hair. Then he began to talk. Quiet and unhurried – from the very beginning of his service to his demob. There was none of the old tension that came with it. Just the memory. A final testimony free of emotional chains. Compassion for his comrades. Fear expressed with honesty. Courage described simply. Now, when I think of him, it’s this man I remember. The kind, wise, reflective, brave man – standing at that fearsome threshold in all of our lives, but responding to it like he did on that beach. Rising to meet the worst of things with knowledge of his mortality, and a courage that comes from somewhere else.

  Eventually the daily visits reached their sad conclusion. Dad slipped into fitful semi-consciousness, and the family gathered for a final vigil. It lasted through the night and into the next day. We watched his failing body still fighting the inevitable, still stubborn, his beleaguered heart refusing to surrender. Towards the very end he wanted to go. He was ready for it. It just wasn’t quite ready for him.

  The end came around noon. His breathing grew intermittent: snatched gasps, seconds apart, decreasing gradually until we listened for them like echoes of a distressed voice on a distant hillside. Then they were gone. My father’s body underwent a profound change. The physical transformation between the two biological states of life and death – from person to corpse – is startling to witness for the first time. Within a minute the cheeks grew hollow, the jaw dropped, the blood drained from the flesh. Wherever my father had been, he certainly wasn’t there now. By the time the nurses answered our bedside alarm they found my family staring at kilograms of inanimate skin, sinew, muscle and bone.

  Dad’s funeral Mass took place in Sacred Heart parish church. We were surprised by how packed it was. Strangers told us how Dad had personally helped them or shown them kindness. We thought of the man in that chair and his stubborn melancholy. This new person was a revelation. Someone he’d never shown to us. For years afterwards, my work in drama was informed by the father I discovered at that funeral. Every human being possesses facets to their nature that can’t be accounted for in the hasty character assessments of others – dimensions of character that are a mystery even to themselves. Dad was more things than the role the family had assigned to him, and far more than the role he’d assigned to himself.

  When the funeral was done, there was only the sombre bureaucracy left; an unassuming paper trail left by the dead. These documents seem so trivial when our grief is fresh – discarded refuse that demeans the enormity of our loss. Yet history knows the value of these unregarded things; the broken pottery thrown into a Roman well, or an unassuming death record in an archive. We imprint ourselves onto this world in so many tiny ways, and this incidental refuse can later be invaluable to a wider understanding. I’d been an amateur genealogist for about four years by the time my dad died and I’d learned the hidden value of what the past can throw away. My mum knew this too and so she bestowed a small honour on me. She asked me to go and sign my dad’s death certificate at the local register office.

  © Crown Copyright

  I have the document in front of me now. Dated 2 August 1984. Dad’s heart, and his life, reduced to terse diagnosis: ‘Left Ventricular Failure’. There’s my twenty-one-year-old signature, careful and unworldly. Qualification: Son. On the surface it all looks so bloodless – so lacking in human warmth. But look closer and it pulses with life. This was my genealogical love letter to Dad – a document bonding our two names together forever, stuffed into a bottle and thrown overboard into the ocean of time for our descendants to find. It was the first time my signature had ever appeared in public records. I was telling posterity that someone called Stephen McGann had lived in this time and place, and had wanted the world to acknowledge the life and beleaguered heart of the father he’d loved.

  A single record in the public archives is like the single beat of
a family’s heart over time. In isolation it tells us very little about the health of the wider organism. Yet when the beats are combined across the years, an underlying rhythm is revealed. The flow of declared love pumped through the arteries of history.

  Following Dad’s death, there was a shift in the balance of my family. Subtle at first, like the erosion of a familiar coastline, but visible over time. Dad had provided a fixed reference point for the extent to which the rest of us had progressed. Because he’d been so unable to adapt himself to the changes in our lives, he came to stand for the past we’d all escaped – a staid home port that each of us had abandoned for a new promised land, our chronometers synchronised to his distant longitude. To Mum he’d been the anachronistic patriarch she’d divorced to become free; to the children he’d been the caring but melancholic parent, baffled by the worlds we now moved in. Yet once this fixed reference point was removed, the remaining family members were forced to navigate their separate ways by reference to the positions and values of each other. This would prove a more hazardous ocean to sail.

  The brothers shared the same theatrical agent, who watched over our public lives with a matriarchal flourish. It sometimes felt as if Dad’s role at the head of our childhood table had simply been replaced by our agent at her office desk. She chose the career paths she believed each of us should take, and she selected auditions for us according to her own estimation of our talents. It was all rather odd. Novel at first, but increasingly discomforting. The private hierarchies we’d lived under since childhood had been reconstituted in the public realm – like a scratchy home movie projected onto a CinemaScope screen. One minute we’d been a family like any other – flawed children trying to discover who they were and what they weren’t, with all the petty arguments, competing affections and contested statuses. The next minute we were ‘the McGann brothers’ – a motley conglomeration of lookalike siblings caught in the vague stare of the public eye. I’m not complaining. We’d all been very lucky, and as a living it beat the hell out of getting shot at or throwing coal into a ship’s furnace. But we’d never planned it that way and it became increasingly difficult to resolve the two worlds we now inhabited. I remember once walking into a TV studio with my brothers to do a chat-show interview. As the assistant tried to focus our minds on the impending live transmission, two of my brothers were busy having a heated argument. One was accusing the other of stealing a pair of socks from his chest of drawers the week before. The argument only paused when the studio applause began, and it continued as soon as the interview finished. Back then, our public life was something that took place in the gaps between private disputes over underclothing.

  And what about my sister Clare? The public perception of the McGann family as consisting only of acting brothers left little space for this brilliant, non-acting, high-achieving undergraduate sister. Her gender became a barrier to the public perception of what my family was, and her academic achievements were out of kilter with what now seemed most desirable as a career path for the children. All of that educational attainment Mum and Dad had worked so hard to give us now seemed rather passé.

  I’ve often wondered what would have happened if we’d all pursued different career paths after school. I suspect many things would have been easier. But then I’d never have seen the wonderful things my brothers achieved as actors. I’d never have watched each of them wrestle with their courage and talent in the way they did. In the end, our response to life was the same as for our ancestors. The same as for immigrants everywhere. We did what we could with the things we’d been dealt.

  The McGanns, for all their artistic fancies, were as itinerant as their seafaring forebears. We’d simply exchanged distant ports for provincial theatres and film studios.

  The trouble with an itinerant life like drama is that it can lack a firm anchor – a way to understand oneself by reference to a fixed place or person. It’s easy to drift from job to job, and to forsake personal character development for the thrill of playing other people. The boys all loved each other, but we needed to understand ourselves a bit more. Who were we, finally? What did our own kind of love look like? How did it reveal itself? Our careers might have specified the public things we were, but without the will to love beyond its specifications we’d never really be the people we could be, and never find that junction point for a new kind of family relationship on the stagnating branches of our tree. Our lives cried out for a bond we could willingly share, and not just one we were given. It was no longer enough to accept the compulsory loves assigned to us as children. It was time for us to choose a love of our own.

  I watched as the older boys embarked on new relationships outside of the family. I was fascinated by the way that these new partners exposed facets of my brothers’ characters I’d never known before, and how the romantic choices they made shifted the nature of their relationships with the rest of us. They were now anchored to someone they’d chosen to love, and it was allowing them to see themselves more clearly. To see what their love looked like.

  My own love life was rather less revealing. I had relationships, some of them committed ones, but all of my romantic involvements seemed to lack an essential element of conviction. An anchor.

  Then, suddenly, I found her. And from that moment everything was different.

  *

  Firstly, I don’t believe in love at first sight. I find it a rather trite idea – a self-confirming post-hoc justification for a love we build by hard endeavour.

  Secondly, love at first sight is exactly what happened to me when I first met my wife. So what do I know?

  It’s 1986. I’m twenty-three. A young actor. My dad’s been dead for two years. I’m living in a council flat in east London, and I’m auditioning every day. One day I get a call from the agent about a play in Liverpool Playhouse called Shamrocks and Crocodiles. It’s by a new writer. They’ve asked to see me in Liverpool for the lead part later that day. I look at my watch. I have a hundred things to do, and getting a train to Liverpool isn’t one of them. I’m grumpy, but agree to go.

  I’m due to meet the writer and director at six in the evening. I pick up a copy of the script from an address in London and catch the train at Euston. I’m tired. I grab a cup of instant coffee from the buffet carriage and settle down to read the script before the meeting.

  Then I wake up. The play is brilliant. Searing, intelligent and thoughtful. So elegantly written. Poetic and brutal. A story of a Liverpool family torn by the sudden death of their father – something that feels resonant to me. I turn to the front of the script to read the name of the author.

  Heidi Thomas.

  She’s new, the agent had said. I’ve never heard of her. I try to imagine what she might be like. The themes in the play are far too mature and deftly crafted for her to be a young writer, so my guess is that she’s a mature woman who’s begun writing late – perhaps a mother returning to work after raising children, or a wizened academic on a second career.

  I’m met at the stage door of the theatre by the director and taken through into a small room. As I enter, Heidi Thomas rises to greet me.

  I’m speechless. She’s young – early twenties like me, but with a complexion and elfin figure that makes her look like a teenager. She identifies as a Liverpool native, but sounds like the head girl of an Edwardian convent school. This woman – this girl – wrote that beautiful, brutal, black-humoured script?

  We begin to discuss the play. Heidi starts to speak, her high-toned staccato sprinkling the room like birdsong. It’s easy to assume that the rapidity of her words denote a lack of reflection or acuity. But I quickly see it. Elusive at first, then more clear. There’s a razor-sharp edge beneath the rapid-fire song, planted there like tripwire in the warm grass. A devilish wit beneath her verbal camouflage.

  Heidi is one of the most subversive people I’ve ever met. She sports a surface gentility, while hiding a penetrating emotional voice in the spaces between her words. There are many clever people who still don’
t hear it, who assume that surface tone is a reliable indicator of content, or that assumption is the same thing as insight. Heaven knows I’ve been wrong about so many things in life. But I was always right about Heidi Thomas. I saw her qualities right away – and my heart was soon banging so loudly in my ribs as I sat in that interview that I feared she’d hear it.

  It soon becomes clear where the raw emotion in the play comes from. I can see it behind her eyes. There’s a restlessness. Something that wants to be seen, as well as wanting to see. Our eyes keep flashing a look to each other as we talk. In those moments she holds her exposed and wounded heart out to me in one hand while indicating to it with the other – wanting me to see the sacred parts of it, wanting me to know she’d heard my own heart’s beating.

  When the interview is done I leave the theatre in a daze. That night I lie in bed with my heart still pumping. I had to get that job. I had to see Heidi again. Had she felt it too, or had I imagined it?

  She had felt it. When I’d left the theatre that evening, Heidi had raced out into the nearby city square to find me. In her head a single word repeated itself over and over.

  Found. Found. Found.

  *

  I got the job and in those weeks of rehearsal for the play, Heidi and I fell irredeemably in love. We’d stay in the rehearsal room during lunch breaks, and we’d talk and talk. Heidi had lost her father suddenly a few years before, as well as her brother David. Her bloodline was Irish and Suffolk labourer. Her humour ambushed you with its wicked edge. We knew we loved each other, but we both had partners. Although we could have concocted some justification to go with the desire we felt, it mattered that we didn’t. What we had was something else, something requiring a different kind of bonding.