Sweet Sorrow

by David Nicholls

  I’d promised Fran a week of my time. A week, I felt, was long enough to give up without misleading anyone but – she must have known – the idea of leaving had faded day by day, and it wasn’t just Fran that kept me coming back. As the individual faces of the company had come into focus, I’d grown to like these people and even to imagine a time when I no longer thought of them as ‘these people’. In the same way that accents are contagious, I’d found myself adopting the company manner of irony, archness, deadpan. They made jokes and their faces didn’t move at all. They spoke as if they hoped that someone was writing it down, conversation that aspired to dialogue, stuffed with inverted commas and in-jokes. They teased each other too but without malice. Accustomed to the blunter tools of sarcasm and abuse, I wasn’t sure that I could pull this off but every now and then I’d say something and the company would laugh and I’d have that sensation, pok, of sending a ball into the sky. Yet just as often the conversation would take a turn that I couldn’t follow and I’d find myself swiping at the air.

  They were talking about college. Exam results were due in the last week of rehearsals and if all went to plan – everyone knew that it would – then Fran, Lucy, Colin, Helen and George would all be joining Alex at sixth-form college. Though they liked to pretend differently, I knew that Harper and Fox would be going too, friends old and new at a party I was not invited to. Now conversation was spiralling off further into futures that they pretended were treacherous and uncertain but that we all knew were gilded and assured, because these were the book-token kids, smart and diligent and talented. In two more years they’d leave this town and migrate to cities famous for their nightlife and music and culture, their lively political scene and cafés. In candlelit bedrooms, they’d have meaningful talks, making friends who’d introduce them to more friends, then more and more, loosening the old ties to make way for the new in a branching tree of friendship, of connections and opportunities. The contrived sense of jeopardy was too much to bear. It wasn’t an issue of class and education – or not just of class and education – but of that other, more precious commodity, not unconnected: confidence.

  I’d fouled up any chance I might have had to take part in this conversation and now I could hear the voice in my head grow sarcastic and resentful. Was university a safer choice than drama school? wondered Alex. Was a medical degree too much of a commitment? asked Lucy. Envy is corrosive but at least there’s a vigour in envying those you hate, only something sour and lonely in envying those you like, you love. Rather than making the sourness apparent, I stood and walked away, not theatrically but not invisibly. It’s hard to do anything invisibly with a broom handle dangling at your hip.

  In the orchard, I lay down beneath the farthest apple tree and closed my eyes, and soon I heard the swish of the long grass.

  ‘If you don’t come back, your beetroot will go cold,’ said Fran.

  ‘You can have it all. I mean it.’

  A number of hard apples had dropped prematurely from the tree, uncomfortable beneath my back, but I remained where I was, listening as Fran settled cross-legged at my side.

  ‘I don’t blame you, ducking out of that one,’ she said, tugging at the grass. ‘It’s quite boring, isn’t it? Exam results. Hopes and dreams.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. I just don’t have anything to say, s’all.’

  ‘I think everyone just presumes that you’re going to be a professional actor,’ she said, and waited. ‘Does this help, Charlie, or …?’

  ‘Sort of. I like you here.’

  ‘I heard you had a bad time.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Lucy, Colin …’

  ‘Oh, God.’ At that time there was nothing worse, and nothing better, than being talked about.

  ‘They were nice about it, they weren’t gloating or anything. They just said … People were concerned, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, I did fuck up.’

  ‘Maybe you did better than you—’

  ‘Yeah, people always say that, like I’m just being modest. But no, I mean I really fucked up. Walked out, left whole pages blank. I drew pictures in my history exam. By the end I wasn’t even turning up, so unless, you know, someone sat the Comprehension paper disguised as me …’

  She was silent for a while, for which I was grateful.

  ‘Exams are bullshit though, aren’t they? I mean it’s just a knack, like learning a card trick. Someone like Miles, I tell you now, it’ll be “A”s all down the page, A-A-A, like a fucking … scream, but he’s still … well, he’s not thick, but certainly not any smarter. He’s just been taught the trick. What I mean is, it’s the system that’s fucked up, not you. Besides, it’s good to kick against things. I wish I could. There are definitely times I want to just wipe everything off the desk and walk out, but I’m way too conventional.’

  I took this in politely, gratified by the rebellious spin that she’d managed to give to failure. The truth was, I’d not deliberately kicked against anything, had no quarrel with formal education and no clear motive. I’d have been delighted to thrive in that system, and there were definitely circumstances in which I might have done better, might even have done quite well.

  ‘So what happened?’ she said, eventually.

  ‘I think I was making a point. It’s just now I’ve got no idea what it was. Aren’t we meant to be going through lines?’

  ‘Not today. So what happened? Tell me.’

  ‘I think … I think I went a bit mad.’

  Examination

  We’d all gone a little mad, each in our different way.

  For me, it showed up most markedly at school. The promise I’d once shown had been leaching away for some time but now, with exams looming, that process seemed to accelerate. ‘We’re worried,’ said Mr Hepburn at Mum and Dad’s last joint parents’ evening, ‘that Charlie is on course to fail.’ Dad slumped a little further in his chair. Mum reached for my hand but I pulled it away and returned to rolling my school tie up into a tight little scroll, letting it unroll then rolling it up once again.

  ‘We don’t understand,’ said my mother. ‘He was doing perfectly well.’

  ‘He was, and now he’s not, and we’ve tried, we’ve really tried. Haven’t we tried, Charlie? Don’t you think that’s fair?’

  That night, Mum came into our room while my sister slept, knelt by my bed as I lay facing the wall, cupping the back of my head with her hand. ‘Want to talk?’

  ‘No. Just sleep.’

  But each night I’d lie awake, the only sixteen-year-old insomniac in the world, and in the day suffer a bone-weary nausea like jet lag, or what I imagined jet lag to be. A clouding-over in my head, like steam forming on a mirror. Foggy, stupid I suppose, though the word was never used by anyone except me as I gave another fumbled answer, a sentence that petered out into nonsense; stupid boy, stupid, stupid, stupid. I’d fall asleep with my head on my desk then, half awake, stare at textbooks as impenetrable as Sanskrit, and my gaze would drift to the margin, then on to the grain of my wooden desk, and I’d lapse into that same dumb, frozen state in which I’d sometimes catch my father and think, Oh God, not me too.

  For my sister, the madness manifested itself as withdrawal into near muteness; evenings in the public library, lunchtimes in the school library or, on the rare occasions when I saw her outside, alone at the far reaches of the playing field. She had always been the clever one but now books were something that she used to conceal her face. She might as well have been holding them upside down. In less turbulent times we’d argued over the TV remote or the injustice of bedtimes, disputes that now seemed trivial and irrelevant, yet we’d not worked out how to replace them, and passed in the corridor without speaking. Once or twice, I saw her duck around a corner to avoid me. Once or twice I did the same.

  Mum’s madness was a kind of mania, frantic attempts to make amends. Three, sometimes four times a week after she’d moved out, I’d find her waiting in the car at the school gates, where she’d wind down
the window, beckon me over and offer me tea and cake at the Cottage Loaf. I’d climb in, abducted by my mother while my sister, presumably, walked home alone.

  In the café, no sooner did the cake arrive than the tea things would be pushed to one side and out would come the revision guides, fresh from the local stationers. ‘So what shall we do today?’

  ‘Mum, I can do this by myself.’

  ‘How’s French? How’s your Biology?’

  ‘I’m not doing Biology.’

  ‘You are!’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Well that was a waste of money,’ she said, and dropped the guide onto the floor. ‘Okay, English. Lord of the Flies, yes?’ She took the York Notes and opened it at random. ‘Talk to me about … the character of Piggy in Lord of the Flies.’

  As an educator, Mum’s great gift was her ability to instil a mutual sense of panic and futility. She had always been content to leave teaching to the teachers. Now she was like someone waking late for the airport, cramming clothes into the suitcase, unwilling to accept that the flight has already departed.

  ‘The verb voir …’

  ‘To want.’

  ‘Not “to want”. To want is vouloir as in voulez-vous. Charlie, that’s not even French, that’s just Abba. Voir. Come on, you know this.’

  ‘Okay, to see.’

  ‘Yes! Voir, past tense. Go!’

  ‘…’

  ‘Go!’

  ‘J’ai …’

  ‘Come on, j’ai …’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You do!’

  ‘Shhh. Keep your voice down!’

  ‘But you do know!’

  ‘Mum, you saying I know won’t make it true!’

  ‘But you used to be so, so good at this!’

  ‘Mum …’

  ‘We were always led to believe you were doing really well.’

  ‘That’s not true!’

  ‘Or better than this, at least. Come on, you must know French. What have you been doing for five years! Put your tea down. Here, look at the answers for thirty seconds, and we’ll try again.’

  And so she would panic at my lack of knowledge, and I would blank because of her panic, and she would panic because I was blanking, and voices would be raised and one or other of us would storm out in scenes unheard of in the Cottage Loaf. We’d drive past the remains of our old shop in a crackling silence, back to the new house, where I’d leap from the car. The weeks passed, five until the exams, then four, then three, two, like the countdown timer on a bomb. With one week to go, she parked at the end of the crescent, well out of sight, and asked, ‘How’s Dad?’

  ‘The same.’

  She nodded, chewed on a knuckle. ‘Well. He just needs to get enthusiastic about something again.’

  ‘What, like a hobby, you mean?’

  ‘No! Is he thinking about work?’

  ‘Sometimes. I don’t think he can at the moment.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, he’s nuts, Mum!’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘All right, he is mentally unwell.’

  ‘He’s having a hard time.’

  ‘Yes, getting out of bed, brushing his teeth …’

  ‘All right, I know! But what can I do, Charlie? Tell me what I can do and I’ll do it.’

  I didn’t like being asked what to do by my parents. Even if I’d had an answer, she was no longer listening but sat curled around the steering wheel, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. ‘I know the timing’s all wrong, I know I should be there, and I hate leaving things to you, hate it, but I wouldn’t help if I was here, I can’t, it’s impossible, it would be total war. I make things worse, Charlie! What do you think that feels like? Knowing that you make someone so unhappy.’ She started to cry and only then did I relent, reaching to embrace her but being jolted back by my seat belt. I twisted more slowly, trying to fool the braking mechanism, was halted again, tugged at the belt—

  ‘Just unclip it!’

  ‘All right!’

  ‘Down there, just unfasten it and take it off! The red button! For Christ’s sake, Charlie! Come here …’

  I contorted myself over the gear stick and felt her face wet against my neck.

  ‘Am I a terrible parent?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But have I been?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I’m a terrible teacher, yes?’

  ‘Yes, you are a terrible teacher.’

  She snuffled into my neck. ‘I do love you. And you’re going to be fine,’ she said, ‘you’re such a bright boy.’

  But she was a lousy actor too and the blatancy of the lie, the hesitancy with which she told it, sent me clambering out of the car. I arranged my school bag over my shoulder, raised one hand and walked the short distance home, taking out my keys in anticipation of the part of the day that I dreaded most of all.

  Because my father’s madness was the most spectacular of all, and the idea had fixed itself in my head, possibility shading into probability then certainty, that my father would kill himself and I would be the one to find him. I used to speculate on the circumstances of this at night, then during the school day, anxiety growing as I neared home. Would he be in the bedroom or in the hallway, in the bathroom or lying on the sofa? It didn’t even matter if this was one of his good days, smiling when I left for school, hugging me sentimentally at the door. If anything, this made disaster more likely because – another cliché from TV – acts of self-destruction were always preceded by just those displays of affection, delivered with glazed, numb serenity. ‘I love you, son, never forget that’ and then you come home and – one more cliché – the envelope is on the table, propped between the salt and pepper. No, nothing signalled disaster quite as clearly as a parent saying ‘I love you’.

  My adolescent mind had a limitless capacity for this kind of melodrama, and I wish I could have directed my mental energy in some other direction. Instead, these grim scenarios became so fixed and plausible that quite often my hand would be shaking as I turned the key, already shouting, ‘Dad, I’m home!’ Sometimes he’d be on the sofa watching a black-and-white movie, at other times he’d be asleep, downstairs or up, and I would check that this was the right kind of sleep, that the brown bottles were in place, caps tight, no alcohol in sight. If he wasn’t home, I’d be incapable of calming myself until he returned, and only then could I slip into our banal domestic natter: what to eat that night, what to watch.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be revising?’ he’d say.

  ‘I revised at school,’ I’d say.

  ‘Important times,’ he’d say and we’d leave it at that. I’d try to make him laugh if I could, providing an ironic commentary on whatever was on TV. If that failed, if he seemed not to be hearing me, if he lay down on his side or poured himself another whisky, then I would endeavour to lure him upstairs.

  ‘Don’t fall asleep here, Dad. Come to bed.’

  ‘I want to watch the end.’

  ‘You’ve seen it before. Come to bed, don’t fall asleep on the sofa.’

  ‘You go on up, son.’

  And so I’d stalk off to bed to dwell on what I’d read about combining alcohol and pills, and the worry would start again.

  And through all this, I don’t think I ever said the word ‘depression’ out loud. It was taboo, and I would no more have shared my fear and confusion with a teacher or friend than confided my sexual fantasies. Honesty was dangerous and even if Harper would not have used it against me, I had no doubt that Lloyd would.

  When, many years later, I finally told Niamh some, not all, of this, she told me that I sounded like my father’s carer. Immediately, I recoiled from the word. ‘Care’ suggested compassion, integrity, selflessness and devotion and I had none of these virtues, not one. I’d certainly not told her the story to elicit the admiration that’s due to those who truly care. The more my father required sympathy and compassion, the more I offered up pity and contempt; the more he requir
ed my presence, the more I disappeared. He frightened me and when I wasn’t frightened I was simply furious; furious to be robbed of my peace of mind and power of concentration when I needed them most, furious at being scared of something as banal as opening the front door. Bored too, bored of his zombified state, of the perpetual air of distraction that surrounded him like a cloud of flies around his head, of the impossibility of change. I didn’t want anything as corny as a role model, I just wanted someone who got up every morning, someone capable of smiling in a way that was neither creepy nor contrived.

  Everything good that I wished for my father, I wished for my own sake. More than anything, I wanted him to be how he used to be. For the best part of my childhood, he’d been funny and cheerful and affectionate. Now even his good moods seemed unnatural – what did he have to be happy about? I blamed him for our poverty, for driving Mum away, for my failing at school. I worried about him when he should have been worrying about me. Couldn’t he see that things were going wrong? Not a carer then. Was ‘resenter’ a word? ‘Live-in resenter’?

  That’s only natural, Niamh assured me; it would be weird to feel otherwise. But in one final flourish of care-lessness, I couldn’t bear the physical change: the sag of his flesh, pale and damp like the skin beneath a sticking plaster, the stooped shoulders, the dabs of unnameable whiteness in the corners of his mouth, the toenails like shavings from the horn of an animal. Just as a smile is said to light up a face, unhappiness had made him ugly, to me at least, and at some point, I no longer bothered to disguise the distaste, wrinkling my nose, shrugging his arm away. With youthful priggishness, I wondered – why can’t the old man look after himself? I was sixteen years old; people wrote anthems about this time of life, and wasn’t I entitled to joy and fun and irresponsibility, rather than fear and fury and boredom?

  In one other sense, care was almost the opposite word because sometimes – and this was something that I would never say out loud – sometimes a part of me wanted the catastrophe. All children, I’m reassured, fantasise about the death of their parents but rarely in such plausible circumstances. At least if something happened to him then I’d get the attention and sympathy I felt I deserved; at least I could get on with things, whatever those things were. These thoughts seem shocking and shameful to me now, and the only defence I’m able to come up with is that I both hated and loved my father more than anyone in my world, the strength of the first emotion proportional to the second. I could only hate him like that because I’d once loved him to the same degree.