Sweet Sorrow

by David Nicholls

  Mum left Dad in the spring of 1997, though I suspect that she’d been planning her departure for some time. My father’s business – a small chain of record shops – had finally succumbed and in the miserable winter that had followed the final closure, we’d found ourselves increasingly reliant on her determination and resilience and powers of persuasion. How would we manage without her? Thinking about leaving must have felt like choosing the moment to leap from a runaway train: no sense in staying on board, no way of jumping without pain.

  And so she hung on. I remember the brisk, unsentimental energy she brought to clearing out the salvageable remnants of Dad’s last shop, boxing up the remaining stock, pulling up the carpet, like the footage of families inspecting the damage after a disastrous flood. I remember, too, the smile she’d summoned up in the carefully phrased presentation, telling us that we would be moving out of the family home. Selling would release some equity, whatever that was, to pay off some debts. The new house, smaller, different but perfectly nice, would give us all a chance to start again. Catch our breath, get back on our feet: it was the language of the boxing ring, and Mum was the coach, dedicated and unshakeable as Dad slumped, bruised and beaten, on the stool in the corner.

  Late that night, unable to sleep, I came down and found her in the kitchen, going through paperwork. Longing for reassurance, I forced myself to say the word.

  ‘So are we … bankrupt?’

  I saw her shoulders stiffen. ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘You and Dad talking.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t eavesdrop.’

  ‘You were shouting, so …’

  She’d reached out with her hand over the back of the chair and beckoned me over. ‘Well, yes, technically. Not us, certainly not you, but Dad because the business was in his name, but actually – it’s not a disaster!’ I let her reassurances wash over me. ‘Bankruptcy’s just a legal term, it’s a way of settling debts when something fails, not fails, ceases to trade. It’s a clean slate; it means we don’t have people knocking on our door. We just … liquidate everything and give everyone their share.’

  ‘Their share of what?’

  ‘The assets, whatever we’ve got left to sell.’

  I thought of the ripped-up carpet, the shelves, the box of CDs labelled ‘World Music’. I did not hold out much hope for the debtors and yet I knew my father was pathologically honourable about money. He had borrowed heavily to save the business and as each shop had closed in turn, the necessity of paying back the debt had required further debt on secret credit cards, personal savings transferred to business accounts until there was nowhere left to hide. As a kid, I used to sneak unwanted vegetables off my plate and simply drop them on the floor, and my father’s strategy was scarcely more sophisticated. He was the architect of a pyramid scheme in which he was both the scammer and scammed, and when the whole thing inevitably collapsed he was left standing, stunned by unpaid bills, unpaid rent, unpaid wages. To fail to buy his round of drinks in the pub was a kind of agony to him, and so to not pay his staff … irrespective of the clean slate offered by bankruptcy, the failure had turned him into a criminal, a thief.

  Still Mum hung on. ‘Really, it’s an opportunity in disguise. All things considered, it’s actually a good thing,’ which made me wonder, how might we manage if something bad were to happen?

  So Thackeray Crescent was a kind of penance, and that’s how it felt. With the first heavy rain, great grey rosettes of damp appeared on our bedroom ceilings. The cost-effective storage heaters left us writhing and sweaty at three in the morning, shivering and blue-nosed at four in the afternoon. When we’d been shown the house for the first time, Dad had explained how submariners, crammed together on long tours of duty, overcame claustrophobia by taking just a few possessions, stored away immediately after use and always in the right place. But instead of living a life of efficient minimalism, we were perpetually struggling to find places to put stuff. We’d viewed the house unfurnished, and now the curved walls meant that the furniture, the washing machine and TV all intruded into the rooms as if advancing on us. Nothing was flush and nothing looked right. One hundred little irritations – cupboard doors that didn’t close, a sink too shallow to fill the kettle, a bath too small for Mum to straighten even her short legs. ‘I just want a flat wall to put a picture on! A corner, a corner I can put a chair in!’ She had always possessed the ability to laugh at adversity, huddling in a tent on windswept Exmoor or waiting for a car mechanic on the hard shoulder of a motorway, but now that gift was failing her, and she was slamming doors, kicking walls, throwing shoes: ‘Why are these here? This is not where we put shoes!’ Das Boot, Mum called it. No wonder submariners went insane. It wasn’t the fault of the house but even so, I wonder how many otherwise stable families fracture because of the faulty double-glazing, the trauma of underpinning, the little twist of rage that starts each day.

  Our parents became strangers to us, abducted and reprogrammed as adversaries. From the ages of, say, twenty-one to sixty-five when they officially became old, I had always assumed that adults stayed pretty much the same, and parents in particular. Wasn’t this the definition of adulthood, an end to change? Wasn’t it their job to remain constant? Now my father, known for his amused, baffled mildness, became increasingly angry, an emotion that we’d barely witnessed before now. With too much time on his hands, he became obsessed with ‘home improvements’, struggling to replace the fogged bathroom mirror, the leaky skylights, the collapsing shower rail. He’d screw shelves into the plasterboard walls with the end of a teaspoon, fix the resulting cracks with filler mixed in a cereal bowl, applied with the butter knife, then block the sink with leftover filler and there’d be more doors slammed, more screaming through the fragile walls.

  Mum’s response to all this constriction was to straighten up and burst the confines. Seemingly without effort she got a job at the local golf club, helping to co-ordinate events, weddings, anniversaries, seventieth birthday parties. This was the kind of institution she’d once have dismissed as provincial and square, but she had always been efficient, persuasive and capable of great charm and the money was far better than anything she could have hoped to earn back on the wards. If you’ve run the night shift on an overcrowded geriatric unit, she’d told them, then the Rotary Club’s AGM could hold no fear. In fact, they were pretty much the same thing! This was her pitch, and it worked, and we got used to her pulling on a pair of heels early on a Saturday morning and hearing the car return in the early hours of Sunday. She began to paint her nails and to iron her blouses in front of the TV. A blouse! The idea of my mum owning such a thing as a blouse or a slip, a pencil skirt, a Filofax, her own email address – the first time I’d heard of such a thing – was bizarre, but something we could live with if it meant less anxiety about the electricity bill. Perhaps we might even get used to Dad’s alarming presence at home now, the forced and manic jollity he brought to serving up breakfast, checking our homework, doing the big shop. We were catching our breath, we were getting back on our feet.

  But still a deep disquiet lingered and Billie and I would lie in our bunks, twisting with anxiety as we listened to the voices, alternately snapping, shouting, soothing. ‘I think Dad’s going mad,’ said Billie one night. ‘Mad Dad.’ And that became our secret code for those moments when we’d catch him, standing and staring and staring.

  Mum hung on. She made new friends, worked longer hours. She got the praise and the overtime, changed her clothes and her hair and Dad would see this and be uncharacteristically mean and sarcastic. She had always been staunchly and unsentimentally left-wing. Now she wondered – was it possible to get the bride’s helicopter to land on the 18th fairway? Now they avoided each other’s gaze, except for the times when my mother answered her mobile phone – a mobile phone! – outside of work hours, at which time they would glare at each other with barely suppressed fury while she spoke in a voice he no longer recognised. It wasn’t just love fading away. Respect and understandi
ng were going too, with nothing we could do to stem the flow, and fear for where this might end began to wrap around and smother my every waking thought.

  Just before the Easter of my final year, I returned from another undistinguished day to a silent home. I’d presumed the house was empty and so was startled and shouted out loud when I went to the sofa and found Dad lying there, his face scoured red, his hands pulled into the sleeves of his jumper.

  ‘Mum’s gone, Charlie,’ he said.

  ‘What, to work?’

  ‘She’s met someone else. I’m sorry.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Dad?’

  ‘Please, my love, don’t make me say it. She’s gone. She’s gone with someone else.’

  ‘But she’ll be back, right? She’s coming back?’ I had seen my father cry a few times but only at a party or a wedding, a sentimental reddening of the eye and never this awful grimace. It happened, I’m sure, but behind closed doors. Now here he was, curled up in a ball as if protecting himself from blows, and I wish I could say that I instinctively embraced him or tried to offer some comfort. Instead I stood some distance away, a bystander unqualified to take action and unwilling to get involved, too panicked to do anything but run outside, scramble back onto my bike and race away.

  Billie was turning into the close, returning from school. ‘What’s wrong, Charlie?’

  ‘Go and see Dad.’

  Her eyes opened wide. ‘Why, what’s happened? What’s happened!’

  ‘Go!’ I shouted, glancing back to see that she had broken into a run. My sister, twelve years old, would know what to do. I pounded on, out of the estate, around the ring road, to find out if she’d finally let go.

  Best Behaviour

  The golf club was an absurd building, as puffed up and pompous as its members. Whitewashed and crenelated, it would have made a fine location for some Agatha Christie whodunit if it weren’t for the 1980s conservatory glued to one side, and on visits with my mother I’d grown to hate the place, the odour of aftershave and gin and tonic, the guffawing from the bar, the piped classics, a loop of ‘The Blue Danube’ that followed you even into the loos, where incomprehensible golf cartoons hung at eye-level. I hated how Mum behaved when on the premises, the voice she put on, the ridiculous waistcoat. ‘Best behaviour’, she’d say. I was not prone to bad behaviour but those words made me want to snatch a heavy-headed club from one of the bastards in the lobby and set about the bowls of pot-pourri, the little packets of shortbread, the wing mirrors of the BMWs and Range Rovers in the car park, which I sprayed with gravel now, jumping from my bike and leaving it, wheels spinning as I hurtled into the lobby.

  Excuse me, can I help you? Are you looking for someone? Excuse me, young man! Young man, stop! The receptionist slapped at the bell, ding-ding-ding, as I looked left and right and saw Mum approaching from the bar, clack-clack-clack, that brisk little pencil-skirt walk, smiling – smiling! – as if I’d arrived to discuss the rates for the firm’s Christmas dinner-dance.

  ‘Thank you, Janet, I’ll deal with this. Hello, Charlie—’

  ‘Dad says you’ve left home.’

  ‘Shall we go through here?’ She had taken me by the elbow and was marching me across the lobby –

  ‘Is it true?’

  – like a security guard, as if I’d been caught shoplifting, and now opening doors to conference rooms and offices, looking for somewhere to hide me –

  ‘I left you a letter, Charlie. Did you read the letter, Charlie?’

  ‘No, I came straight here.’

  ‘Well, I did ask him to give it to you.’

  – and finding each room occupied, she smiled her professional smile and crisply closed each door.

  ‘Mum, is it true?’ I wrenched my elbow from her grip. ‘Tell me!’

  Her smile faltered. She took my hand and, holding it tightly, touched her forehead against mine for a moment, then looked sharply to left and right then to a door behind us, barging at it with her shoulder and spinning me into a hot muffled cage of a storage cupboard, sound-proofed with toilet rolls and hand towels. We stood amidst the mops and buckets.

  ‘Charlie, you can’t come here—’

  ‘Is it true, though, are you moving out?’

  ‘For the moment, yes.’

  ‘Where to? I don’t understand.’

  ‘It was all in the letter.’ She tutted. ‘I told him to give it to—’

  ‘Just tell me! Please!’

  She sighed and, as if deflating, allowed herself to slide down the door, folding her legs beneath her.

  ‘Your dad’s not been easy to live with these last years—’

  ‘Really? ’Cause I’d not noticed that—’

  ‘—not easy for any of us. I’ve done my best, I think, to hold things together, and I do still love him, I love all of you. But …’ She paused, frowned, licked her lips and then selected the words one by one. ‘I’ve made another friend. Here. At work.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I put this in the letter, I don’t know why he didn’t give you the letter—’

  ‘Fine. I’ll go and get this famous letter …’ and I began to clamber over her, kicking at buckets, knocking mops to the ground.

  ‘Don’t do that, Charlie. Sit down. Sit down! I’ll tell you! Here!’ She grabbed my hand and pulled me to the floor so that our legs were tangled, jammed up against the bales of toilet roll. ‘His name is Jonathan.’

  ‘He works here?’

  ‘Yes, he runs corporate events.’

  ‘Have I met him?’

  ‘No. Billie has, when she’s come into work with me. And no, he’s not here today, so don’t get any ideas.’

  ‘And how long—?’

  ‘Couple of months.’

  ‘You’ve only been here since January!’

  ‘Yes, and since then we’ve become really good friends.’

  I gave my best bitter laugh.

  ‘You’re not being very mature about this, Charlie.’

  ‘Really good friends. You sound like you’re nine—’

  ‘Okay, lovers then. Is that better?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Mum—’

  ‘Because I can treat you like a child if you want, if you’d prefer that?’

  ‘No, I just want—’

  ‘—me to explain what’s been going on, and that’s what I’m trying to do. I don’t mind you being angry, I expect you to be angry but I also expect you to be respectful and listen. Okay?’ She kicked out at a bucket with her toe. ‘Christ, I wish I had a cigarette!’

  I patted at my pockets.

  ‘And that’s not funny either. Do you smoke?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Because if you smoke, I will kill you—’

  ‘I don’t. Just tell me.’

  ‘I met Jonathan here. He’s a widower, two girls, twins. He’s a nice man, very nice and we used to talk a bit. I’d tell him about Dad and he was very understanding, because he’d been a bit down himself, so he knew what that was like, and we were friends and then we were … more than friends. Don’t look like that. These things happen, Charlie, you’ll know one day. Being married – it’s not as simple as loving one person all your life—’

  ‘But that’s exactly what it is! That’s what marriage is meant to be. Look –’ I grabbed at her hand, peeling her finger back to show the ring was still there, and she grabbed my hands and squeezed them tight.

  ‘Yes, yes, meant to be, yes, but it’s fuzzy, Charlie, it’s messy and painful and you can have strong feelings for different people, absolutely sincere and strong. You’ll understand when you’re older—’

  Even as the phrase left her mouth I could see her try to suck it back, but too late. It enraged me even more than ‘best behaviour’ and I kicked out at the door, and she pressed her hand on my knee, placating. ‘Stop that! Stop! Charlie? Listen, I have no doubt that your dad’s the love of my life and you shouldn’t doubt that either. But I’m his nurse now, not his wife or partner, his nurse, and somet
imes – sometimes you can really get to hate the people that you’re meant to care for, hate them because you’re meant to care for them—’

  ‘You hate him?’

  ‘No! I don’t hate him, I love him – didn’t you hear me? I put this all so much better in the letter—’

  ‘Just tell me!’

  ‘Oh, Christ! I’m—’

  But her voice snagged on something. An oily glint came to her eyes and she closed them and pressed her fingertips hard into the sockets.

  ‘I’m tired, Charlie. I’m just very, very tired. It doesn’t do him any good, my being there, and I can’t spend my life looking after him. To you I know I’m ancient but I feel too young to spend my days just … stuck.’

  ‘So you’re leaving.’

  ‘For a while, yes, I’m moving out.’

  ‘You’re running away.’

  ‘He doesn’t want me there either! He knows about Jonathan, things have been said, it’s impossible—’ She groaned, exasperated. ‘I’ve done everything I can do! Everything, you know that, unless you want more of me and your dad, years and years of us shouting and screaming and hissing at each other in the middle of the night—’

  ‘When I got home, he was curled up in a ball—’

  ‘Oh, Christ – I’ve not done this lightly, Charlie, it’s not for giggles; I’m doing it because I think it’s for the best!’

  ‘Best for you maybe.’

  ‘No, for everyone!’

  ‘Cruel to be kind?’

  ‘There’s an element of—’

  ‘Cos it’s certainly fucking cruel—’

  ‘And that’s enough of that!’ she said sharply, then growled and dug her fingers into her hair and pulled as if trying to hoist herself up. ‘Christ, Charlie, you’re not making this easy.’

  ‘Did you want me to make it easy?’

  ‘Well, yes, to be honest, yes, I wouldn’t mind,’ she snarled, then exhaled, taking a moment to correct herself. ‘No. You say exactly what you want to say.’ She put her hands across her eyes, like a visor. ‘What do you want to know?’