You

by Phil Whitaker

  Somewhere along Oxpens, the ice rink like a landed UFO beneath, I finally draw alongside. We stay in formation for a moment, twin streaks in the autumn afternoon.

  Then a sudden kick as though from my afterburners; I notch up an incredible acceleration. A glance behind; through the blistering air I can see you are with me, doggedly, determinedly.

  We follow the train tracks back across Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, to Somerset beyond. We are Flying Scotsmen, our journey fast-forwarded at one hundred times speed. The irony is not lost: I’m retracing my day’s travel. And it gives me no pleasure, having to retake the lead. But this, I think, will help you to see.

  There, nestled in the valley, delineated by its twelve-foot security fence. Low flat-roofed buildings, sprawling staff car park, the swinging red barrier controlling exit and entry. This place you used to hear so much about, yet never before have seen.

  We dive down, clear the barbed wire atop the fence like nerveless steeplechasers, and close on D block beyond the stand of beech trees. In through a window that’s open but impassible to any but us, thick metal bars spanning the aperture from lintel to sill. Hovering now by a fluorescent strip light and you start to take in the scene – the cupboards, the trays full of materials — of my therapy room in the medium-secure unit. Is it strange at last to see where your father works? There’s an easel in the centre of the space, faced by two chairs, me in one, an inmate – Billy – in the other. He’s in his late teens, is Billy; we’ve worked together a few times already. His hair sticks up in random tufts, as though he’s just got out of bed. My glasses are the oblong metal frames I wear now I am in my middle years.

  You watch me open a wooden box of fifty acrylics. My voice: What colour is speaking to you, Billy?

  Deep red-maroon. Caput mortuum. Some call it cardinal purple, on account of its popularity for depicting religious robes.

  Billy starts to work the paint across the paper, a stiff three-quarter-inch brush, describing furrows like a ploughing competition. The tone is old blood and mourning. The texture is ridged like a frowning brow. Look at us: Billy and I are two adults in roles. He is a persistent young offender; I am an art therapist. We are in the middle of a Karpman triangle, occupying the healthy space right at the centre of its equilateral walls. Maybe, a little bit, we’re off to the edges: victim Billy and rescuer me.

  His hand begins to move more quickly, back and forth, applying more pressure, imparting greater depth to the crevices he’s creating in the pigment. I tell him: your brush strokes are becoming more vigorous. What happens if we stay with that for a while?

  He becomes absorbed in those side-to-side movements. They are mesmeric. Things are happening deep inside him, in the areas of himself that words cannot express. At the end of each run, his brush corners like a car in a handbrake-turn. Back on itself, accelerating again across the easel. Periodically, he loads more paint, giving himself more to work with. He doesn’t seem to want to change the colour, even to blend it. The A2 sheet is a glistening rich russet but it’s far from uniform, peaks and troughs scattering and absorbing light in infinite variegation.

  Art is the royal road to the unconscious. Finding a language for things that can’t be spoken. It’s not just the image, it’s the way it’s produced. He starts jabbing at the painting, the bristles splaying, causing flowers, or starbursts, or explosions, to bloom.

  Tell me how that feels, I say to him.

  The jabs come harder, gouging pigment clean down to white paper, stark scars.

  Tell me how that feels.

  But he’s gone too quickly. Sometimes colour, texture, creativity access deeply suppressed emotion with shocking rapidity. Suddenly Billy is stabbing at the paper, denting it, depressing it, shell craters in no man’s land.

  How does that feel, Billy, I ask, trying to keep him with me.

  The latest stab, the brush heels-out, skidding sideways, ripping a hole.

  Does that –

  In that moment, I know he’s gone. Something about my voice, my words; perhaps the dynamic of pedagogue and pupil. Something has displaced Billy from the space at the centre of the triangle. I’m on my own.

  Billy, I say, trying to get through to him.

  He throws the brush; it rebounds off the easel.

  Billy, I say, trying to hold the centre ground.

  Gripping the wooden frame he hurls it to one side, as though trying to cast it forever from his life. It crashes to the floor.

  We’re no longer two adults. Billy is a frightened, traumatised child. He has leapt to one corner of the triangle and is once again consumed by his victim role. And every triangle needs three angles; every victim needs a perpetrator, and craves a rescuer, too. I can feel the pull of it, the way his behaviour is sucking at me, like a giant eel from its underwater cave, trying to draw me on to one of those other two vertices. I resist, try to stay in the middle, try not to be pulled out on to the triangle with him.

  I can see you’re feeling very angry, Billy, I say. My voice is resonant. My words are unhurried. My accent is deepest I’m-your-pal-Stevie-from-the-Wirral.

  But Billy now has to have it. He has to have drama. We have shifted a rock in his garden and all manner of squirming creatures have been revealed. He has to hit out, squash them and beat them, and stop the repulsiveness of their very being. But he can’t. They’re inside him. They’re a part of him. All he can do is cast them out, project them on to some external thing. Then he’ll have a target, something he can vent his rage upon. According to Rev, with her Biblical cast of mind, a scapegoat. And right now, for Billy, the scapegoat is me.

  The easel, lying on its side on the floor. Billy glances round the room, his movements wild. I see his gaze fix on the fire extinguisher, brick red in its bracket on the wall.

  Don’t, Billy, I think. I think: It’s not too late. Come back to the middle of the triangle with me.

  Shall we finish the session there for today? I say.

  But he’s gone. Like a teetering tightrope walker he loses his balance. With a bound that knocks his chair backwards, he’s over at the extinguisher, two hands on it. He rips it like a mauled ball, and hurls it towards me.

  I’ve already left my chair, anticipating the action. He needs me in perpetrator role, someone to flail against, someone to hurt back. The red cylinder sails through the space where a second before I had been sitting, and clangs against the far wall, sending plaster flying.

  And that’s how it works. This is a fluid triangle. Billy moves between different roles, occupying them simultaneously. Did you clock it: how in acting out victim, in projecting his shit on me, Billy actually becomes a perpetrator, though he doesn’t recognise it. I’m no victim, though – I can look after myself. I contemplate trying to restrain him, but I don’t relish the thought of the enquiry. I do need a rescuer. I hit the red button by the entrance. Klaxons blare. The noise baffles Billy, buying me seconds to step smartly outside, push the door shut behind, and turn the barrel bolt to keep him contained.

  They may be my rescuers, the two uniformed men who arrive in a twinkle, but to Billy they are fresh perpetrators to his victimhood. He’s throwing all sorts around inside the room. At one point I hear splintering wood. They step in swiftly during a lull. Get Billy in a safe restraint. He bucks a few times, tries to stamp on their feet, but soon his fury is spent.

  Security take him back to his room. A doctor will be called. He’ll be drugged to calm him. He knows this, I know this. As he gets escorted along the corridor – facing backwards, heels dragging along the floor, each security guard with an arm clamped under one of his – he has new perpetrators. He gives me a pleading look, trying to remind me of all the trauma, all the shit he’s suffered to be here in the first place. Trying to suck me on to the vertex I most readily get drawn to, that of rescuer. A word from me and these guards might be stood down. He is victim again, and this time he induces different feelings
in me. But I’m having none of it – I’m resolute here in the centre – there have to be consequences to his acting out. I’m no longer an enabler, me.

  A horn blast.

  Suddenly I’m sucked, in a bewildering kaleidoscope of colours and impressions, down a wormhole.

  And I’m back in myself, striding streets in the centre of Oxford. No time to register what’s happened. The car pulls up short, ABS firing like a Gatling, its bumper finally halting just inches from my legs, which have seized in shock. I raise an apologetic hand to the driver. He gives me an exasperated look, his own hands flying up in a what-the-fuck gesture. I step back on to the pavement at the end of St Giles. He drives on past. I wait till it’s clear and I can cross Broad Street in safety.

  I feel rattled, shaken. And not just by the car. You’re nowhere to be felt or seen. Are you still back there in that West Country medium-secure unit, outside that door in block D, surveying in wonder the damage that Billy in his maelstrom caused? Are you watching a former me ruefully righting his upended easel, trying to clamp the extinguisher back in its bracket, painstakingly gathering the tubes of paint that Billy flung to every corner of my therapy room, replacing them in their rainbow arrangement nestled in the slots of their wooden case? Will you know how to get back from there, now that I am no longer with you?

  No doubt you will. You are no longer a child; you’re perfectly capable of solo ethereal flight. But I wonder what you made of what you saw.

  Triangular life. This, I believe, is how it is for Mummy. For years I played rescuer to her victim – and we stayed remarkably fixed in those roles for six, seven years, through a whole carousel of perpetrators whirlygigging round her never-ending drama: her family, her friends; my family, my friends. But if you’re anywhere on that triangle, sooner or later those roles will shift, swap, mutate.

  All she ever wanted was children. First you. I remember how pleased she was, proud even, to resume our sex life just weeks after your birth. She laughed about it, post-coitally, conspiratorially – what would the midwives say? Then, a couple of years later, your sister came along. Two of you. Family complete. All of a sudden, all that energy consumed in sustaining the trappings of a normal relationship was no longer necessary – I see that now, with the bitter benefit of hindsight. She seemed to let loose her grip, her muscles worn out with fatigue, and the lens cap fell to the ground, never again to be seen.

  Ticker tape chuntering. Dust motes glistening. The projector, unbridled now, playing on me. Yet another perpetrator to validate her rescuer need.

  If I expressed a different point of view: I was an oppressive bully. Trying to keep a handle on the family budget: I was subjecting her to rigid financial control. That time when you got a conduct mark for disobedience: I was siding with your hateful teacher for thinking that maybe she’d had a point. Things snowballed. Time-honoured endearments, mutually understood flirtations, the touches and caresses that once upon a time had meant only love and welcomed desire. All these now recast as the actions of a lecher, a pervert, a pest, unclean. My world was turned on its head, reality was upended and flipped on its arse.

  And you. The fluidity of that triangle. The interchangeability of roles. I’d be helping you with your maths, the pair of us poring over your books on your bed where you always worked, me trying to dredge up the first thing about balancing equations, or geometric symmetry. Your door would burst open. She’d be standing at the threshold, staring. A normal moment – a dad and his daughter, square in the middle of the triangle, wrestling with algebra – felt instantly tainted. The very act of her observation, from the vantage of her rescuer vertex, would triangulate victim-you, and perpetrator-me.

  ❦

  Through the pedestrianised centre, past Carfax tower with its 99 steps and its views of the Oxford skyline. No planning permission will ever be granted for a building to be constructed above its height. Down St Aldate’s, the town hall and city museum. Old Tom in his belfry at Christ Church.

  So many things told through cards. How that Mothering Sunday – one day after we told you your parents were divorcing, one day after you learned your family would no longer be – out we went for lunch. Some tarted-up inn on the Mendips. Gastro pub. Roast beef. You ate hardly anything, you who so love your food. Your sister: question after question, trying to get a handle on how life was now going to be. Sometimes reassured, sometimes feeling aftershocks from the quake. Coming for hugs from me, from Mummy, anything to steady her feet.

  You. Unable to speak. Withdrawn into yourself. Still in shock. Numbly unable to compute the reality. Broiling with anger and with grief; with shame and with disbelief.

  Your daddy no longer loves me.

  Your daddy.

  Your.

  Baited line landing on water.

  WE ALL LOVE YOU!

  Soft lips close around cold sharp steel.

  A few days after, putting some things in your room, finding the Guess How Much I Love You card on your bedside table. Little Nutbrown Hare and his Mummy. Love you to the moon and back. Mummy’s writing: how you had ruined her Mother’s Day, but how she still loves you anyway.

  Pull. Push. Pull again.

  Barbs digging in through skin.

  Them

  There are thirteen candles on the table, guttering in the draughts that play through this ancient building. Thirteen. Three for Prof’s. Two each for Zambo’s, Rev’s, Angel’s, and Blaze’s. One for Merc’s lad. And one for you. The flames flicker, twisting and jinking this way and that. It’s as though they’re desperate to break free, but find themselves tethered, like failed escapologists, to the wicks that run through their cores.

  Zambo’s session at the gun club is pure fun, but Rev’s can cause problems. People react differently. Rev’s thing is God, of course: Jesus, the Bible, that kind of thing. Some of the parents who’ve journeyed with us have been religious – quite a few, in fact; maybe it goes with the territory. Maybe when your life comes crashing down, that’s when you turn to a god. We had a guy called Asif with us much of the previous year – I was mentoring him. He was a practising Muslim, and I figured he’d hate Rev’s stuff, but he proved me completely wrong. He and Rev made all sorts of connections, finding loads in common between their respective faiths. Agnostics like me and Zambo, we generally roll with it, happy to pick up what wisdom we find wherever we can get it. It’s the atheists who struggle. They tend to be every bit as fundamentalist as the most dyed-in-the-wool born-again, and the bedrock of their belief system is to reject all that Rev has to say. We’ve had a smattering who’ve stomped off part-way through her sessions. I’m wondering how Blaze and Merc and Angel are going to take it.

  Rev is up front, closest to the altar dais, her eyes closed, her hands together. We’re ranged in a loose circle, on plastic visitor chairs borrowed from the parish hall next door, the candle-bearing table a focal point in the middle. The lights in the body of the church are dimmed. The thirteen flames cast restless shadows of us on the stone pillars and walls. Unquiet spirits. Rev does her utmost to make things ecumenical – this is a meditation, not a prayer time. She asks us to focus our minds on our children, and to call upon whatever higher power we might rest faith in to bring them protection. She goes through, naming them, leaving a couple of minutes silence between each and every one.

  Ethan . . .

  Jeremy . . .

  Emily . . .

  Zac . . .

  I close my eyes, imagining them in turn. I don’t know their faces, not really. I’ve seen photos of some of them, but what they actually look like is beside the point. They’re easy enough to conjure: once carefree children who have suffered the living bereavement of losing a parent. Whose love for their mum or dad has been curdled into hate. Whose primary attachments have been mashed and splintered like so much green wood. The confusion, the pain inside. The desperate need to survive, to find a way to cope with a world that was once happy a
nd light, and is now turned dark and forbidding by the conflicts in which they’ve been embroiled. I picture them as though in snaps taken during the time before war: tousled boys, plaited girls, big eyes, cheeky smiles, flawless creaseless skin.

  Sasha . . .

  Maxwell . . .

  Sam . . .

  Jay . . .

  The naming of them. A roll call of the living lost. Rev always does them in random order, but never puts her own first – everyone’s children are equally important to her god. I sneak a peek at the others. Prof has her eyes closed, but not because she’s a believer. Her higher power is academia; her faith is in the piles of papers and ranks of textbooks that line her study shelves. She believes that through understanding the psychology of what’s being done to them, by tailoring her reactions and responses to be precisely the opposite of what her children’s outward behaviour seems hell-bent on provoking, she can eventually save them. Attachment bonds preserved. Her faith is in cognitive development – that one day, when they finally gain independence from their father and critical thinking emerges, they’ll gradually, haltingly come to understand what went on. And when they do, Prof’s steadfast refusal ever to abandon them – despite their every protestation that that is what they want her to do – will become for them her most precious gift. It happens – as so many of her YouTube testifiers bear witness. Young adults who have achieved reunification, and whose love for their outcast parent burns unquenchably bright again. But it doesn’t always happen, as we’re only too well aware. Our secret Facebook forum is populated by thousands of parents going through the same all around the world, some of whose kids have never come back, not even after thirty years.