by Jane Jago
‘You mean me?’
‘Let the rope out a little bit, for God’s sake.’
‘Thomas is only nine,’ she protested unconvincingly.
David rolled his eyes heavenwards. ‘I’m not worried about Thomas. You have to stop doing this to Martin.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Making him responsible for your fears.’
‘Martin understands.’
‘Do you think that’s fair? It’s selfish!’
Rachel was stunned into silence. It was true: Martin was not a little boy any more. He was growing up and away from her, yet she still expected him to regulate his existence according to her fears. The control her anxieties imposed upon the entire family had become a network of superstitions. It was addictive. No amount of compliance satisfied her need for safety.
David was at the end of his tether. He had navigated this minefield with her for years and now, in one conversation, she could feel the walls of protection being smashed down. She knew he was right: she had to relax her grip and face her fears.
David saw the panic in her face. ‘I’m not trying to be cruel, but they’re my sons too.’
Rachel nodded, trying hard to hold back tears.
‘You lost one, no one will ever forget that, but it has to be about them now.’ He closed his arms around her.
‘Hey! Guess what we saw!’ shouted Thomas, racing towards them with Martin hot on his heels.
‘A blue-ringed octopus.’
‘What?’
‘He poked it with a stick and it turned blue.’ Martin looked at his mother’s tear-stained face. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing, mate. It’s just the wind in my eyes.’
‘Jesus, boys, those things can kill you,’ said their father.
‘We know that, Dad, we’re not stupid.’
Liam, 2008
He moved restlessly in his seat as he watched the other faces in the waiting room, anxious, closed, self-absorbed and bored. Convinced, like him, that no one carried a burden as heavy as theirs. Liam felt strangely removed from himself; he had already done his worst. Perhaps these people were still trying to hang on, to forestall theirs.
Inside the doctor’s office, Liam’s usual anxiety had disappeared, replaced by a sense of great relief as if he had carried his stone to a place where he could finally put it down.
Dr Rani Patma smiled warmly at him. ‘I’m glad to see you, Liam. Marriage is such a huge transition that I’m surprised you missed your last appointment.’
‘We were moving into a new flat and it wasn’t easy to get away.’
‘Catherine still doesn’t know about your counselling?’
Liam looked bewildered, unprepared for the doctor’s questions.
‘We did discuss alternative explanations.’ Dr Patma pulled her long, black hair back, and tied it into a loose knot as she spoke.
‘She knows I’m on medication for depression and anxiety, but the counselling hasn’t come up yet.’
‘It would be good to clear the way for your regular visits. Your therapy isn’t optional.’
‘I know that. I’ve only missed one visit and I called to reschedule.’
‘Okay. Tell me about married life,’
‘Catherine’s pregnant.’
Rani Patma fingered the ornate Coptic cross that hung at her throat. ‘How did that happen?’
‘She just did it. We’d agreed not to have kids – she didn’t want kids . . . She just went off the pill.’
‘She didn’t discuss it with you?’
‘No, she just thought if she changed her mind I’d change mine.’
‘How did you react?’
‘I couldn’t believe she would do that to me. I felt safe with her, but how could she possibly know what it means?’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘I told her what she wanted to hear. I’ve tried to have the right reactions. How can I possibly be a father? I would never have married her . . .’
The doctor studied his troubled face. ‘Basically, Liam, this is one of those things we talked about. A huge challenge thrown in your path, one you can’t move or change. You can only confront it or go around it. I take it that Catherine wants to have the baby?’ Liam nodded. ‘And you can give her no reason not to have her baby. You have a number of choices.’
Liam looked terrified.
‘You can step up and embrace becoming a father, run away from the situation – or you can tell Catherine about your past and let her decide what she wants to do.’ She waited for a moment for Liam’s response. He stared back at her. ‘If you stay with her and become a father, you will have to confront your demons. Confronting the suffering you caused will be very painful. If you tell Catherine, you will risk her rejection and perhaps exposure. She may not want you anywhere near her or the baby. You may need to be relocated all over again.’
He cradled his face in his hands and looked desperately at the doctor for an answer.
‘You have to ask yourself which is easier, which is safer, which is right, which is sustainable. Which is helpful to your recovery and which is fair to Catherine.’
He shook his head. It was all too much.
Dr Patma kept talking. ‘For instance, what will leaving her and the baby, without explanation, do to her?’
Liam remained silent.
‘How will she feel about carrying your baby when she learns about your past?’
The doctor got up from her armchair, opposite Liam’s, and walked across the room. ‘If you say nothing and face up to being a father, what are the possible outcomes?’ She folded her arms and sat on the edge of the desk. ‘Will you be an adequate father? Is the child at risk?’
Liam looked up at her in horror.
Rani Patma raised a supple hand. ‘I’m not suggesting he or she will be. These are simply the issues. What do you think Catherine needs right now?’
‘Me to be there for her.’ Liam’s voice seemed to be trapped deep inside his throat. ‘Me to be the child’s father.’
She nodded. ‘And what option appears easiest?’
‘To run away.’
‘Relocation, new job, new people. Is it really the easiest option, do you think?’
‘Initially, yes.’
‘What seems the safest option?’
‘For who?’
‘You.’
‘To run away.’ He rubbed at his face with his open hand. ‘To stay, to do nothing.’
‘Which is more frightening to you?’
‘Telling her . . . Having a child.’
‘Which is “right”?’
‘Getting out of her life. Staying. Telling . . .’
The doctor looked at him with compassionate eyes. ‘Which is sustainable?’
‘I can’t keep running away.’
‘Which choice is best for your recovery?’
‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’ He was sinking deeper into the mire.
‘Go through the choices. Leaving?’
‘Leaving doesn’t achieve anything.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Staying, being a father, could send me over the edge – could be dangerous.’
‘But if you do stay, if you do get through it, could it help you to grow? Could nurturing a child restore something to your life?’
‘I don’t deserve a child.’
‘Maybe you don’t.’ She considered. ‘But what about the child? What does he or she deserve? What do they need?’
‘Not me.’
‘What about telling?’
Liam looked away. ‘It’s too late for telling. I made a choice to marry and to have a life. I knew Catherine wouldn’t take me on if she knew the truth – who in their right mind would?’ He bowed his head. ‘There never was any question of telling her. It was a choice between letting her go or grabbing a life. I was never going to tell her. It’s not her burden.’
‘So would telling her help in terms of your recovery?’
‘I already know. It won’t.’
Rani Patma interlocked her fingertips, making a little temple of her two hands, and pressed the point to her lips. ‘Do you remember after the trial, when you first received therapy, you were obsessed with “growing” a new baby and giving it back to the mother? You even asked your own mother to have a baby for her . . .’
Liam began to weep. He remembered the dreadful longing and how he had dreamt of the child night after night, of growing a new baby inside his belly, of undoing the deed. He remembered his torment on waking to find that his dream was futile, that things remained as they were and always would.
He had tearfully begged his mother to have another baby and give it to the mother who had lost hers. He thought back to the endless months spent racked with anxiety, rocking his body back and forth on the little bed in his room in the secure unit. Eleven years old, utterly alone with his grief. For six months he had been too ill even to mix with the other children.
Finally they had convinced him that it was not possible to magic up a baby to replace one already dead. When at last he let go of his obsession and faced the permanence of death the real unravelling had begun.
Rani Patma waited politely for Liam to recover, then handed him a tissue. ‘It seems to me your mind was constructing a way to undo your actions and to restore life. Of course, the solution it offered was a magical one – obviously the past cannot really be undone by magical thinking – but what if you were to look at this baby as an opportunity for restoration, for the renewal of life?’
Liam wiped his face and listened.
‘Just as in your remorse you longed to grow and nurture a new baby to atone for your crime, what if you help Catherine grow and nurture this baby? Don’t you think that might help rectify what has been done?’
He sighed. ‘Nothing will ever change what happened.’
‘No, it won’t. The past is past, unalterable. Your choices can influence only the future. Perhaps you can sublimate all that pain and use it as an opportunity to give, maybe one of the few you will ever have. Maybe the real choice here is between existing and meaningfully existing.’
‘You mean dedicate myself to the child?’
‘You took a child’s life. Now it seems you have the opportunity to give life to one.’
Liam cried out, ‘But what if something terrible happens to him?’
‘Liam, do you really believe you are a danger to this child?’ Rani Patma looked genuinely shocked.
‘No! Not me.’ He looked up at her, injured by the question. ‘What if somebody takes him?’ He doubled over and brought his hands to his chest.
‘Is that your greatest fear?’
‘Yes!’ He knew what could happen, how short the time a mother’s back had to be turned.
‘Liam, loss is the risk that every parent takes when they bring a child into the world . . . Every father or mother’s greatest fear is that something terrible will happen to their child.’
Liam held his hands out in supplication. ‘I know.’
Alex Reiser, 2008
An imposing walnut corridor divided the operational core of the newspaper from the editorial and corporate offices, permanently blocking any view of the harbour from Reiser’s new workstation.
Pinned like a fly to the wall, facing out on what now seemed like the interior of a luxury barge, he was obliged to look all the way to the stern, where the new managing editor and his assistants presided over the room from a row of glass-fronted cubicles. The drawers on his new fitted filing cabinet opened with a quiet whisper and came to a stop without the familiar clunk. He was in the process of hurriedly emptying half the contents of one into a faded briefcase, hoping to get in and out quickly, when he was waylaid by one of the new editorial drones.
A Globe fixture, he’d been around long enough to have earned the leeway to finish most of his work out of the office, just so long as he stuck his head through the door for meetings and turned in the goods without rubbing his freedom in their faces. He stuffed one last file into the case and attempted to buckle the strap across the fat leather belly.
‘Hey, man.’
‘Hey,’ said Reiser, clamping the latch on the bag, and doing his best to look like he was in a hurry.
‘Man, that was a good piece on the Villawood detainees. You really nailed it.’
‘Thanks, Cal.’ Short for Caleb. Cal had proudly told him on first introductions that his mother had lifted the name from a character in a John Steinbeck novel.
Wow, man. He hadn’t bothered to point out that, unlike Cal, Steinbeck was pretty familiar with his Bible.
Just one more egg to suck.
‘Shame you couldn’t have run it all, especially the stuff about the connection with privatized prison interests.’
‘I think that came across. The pictures said it all.’
Cal was the kind of foppish pseudo-intellectual ferret who mooched round the floor at random intervals and sat on his subordinates’ desks, bovver-booted foot lifted over one knee, nodding sagely as he patronized seasoned journalists twice his age; people who could actually spell ‘succinctly’ without resorting to a mechanical aid.
‘I was thinking we could follow with a friendlier piece about the success stories of migrants from earlier waves of immigration.’
‘Excuse me.’ Reiser leant across him, pulled a USB stick out of his desktop drive and slipped it into his satchel. ‘Sounds a bit predictable.’
‘It’s all about the balance.’
Balance. Who gave a toss about balance? What did balance have to do with anything, apart from selling blocks of advertising space?
Late-twentysomething, Cal was representative of the cocksure, self-absorbed kind of graduate journalist who was being actively recruited to infiltrate every aspect of the paper, products of an era in which self-published, self-edited and self-promoting internet copy was churned out at five cents a mile. Technology-savvy young Turks with callow interests, they saw guys like him, who sat with a serious subject for months on end until they could reveal something more than the obvious, as top-heavy dinosaurs. Everything had to be fast, current and attention-grabbing, multiplatform cross-pollinated advertising content posing as journalism. Cal’s own stock-in-trade was punchy puff pieces about designer gadgets and rad toys for adult lads. Ho-hum. The kind of energetic fluff that snuck its way out of the advertorial section and crawled on its belly over to Arts and Lifestyle.
The days of the extended feature that crossed to the back pages were a thing of the past. Reiser had the sneaking suspicion that he was retained only as the paper’s token Jiminy Cricket with a loud-hailer, providing hobbled opinion pieces, cramped essays that provoked a few moments of uncomfortable thinking before they were reduced to an orphaned slug line, without context or consequence.
Increasingly, he craved the freedom of fiction, where he could construct his house from the ground up and move the furniture around, take the reader by surprise, turn out the lights, let them bump into the chairs, feel along the walls and find their own way out. Fiction was the answer.
Research and sound, logical argument were generally a waste of energy unless they could be brought to life by a story that forced the reader’s hand.
‘I’m working on something at the moment.’ Reiser tugged on the waistband of his flagging chinos and lifted them high on his arse. ‘A piece about societies changing attitudes to children.’
Cal looked entirely nonplussed.
‘Quite a long piece actually. Think Robert Bly and The Sibling Society.’
‘Right.’ Cal gripped both his elbows across his chest and did some ambiguous nodding. ‘I look forward to reading it.’
Reiser punched his arms into the sleeves of his quilted anorak and picked up his bags. ‘Off to the library,’ he said, giving the younger man a wink.
Danny and Graham, 1993
Sunnybank Primary School was surrounded by asphalt yards and playing areas; a group of children gathered on the marked basketball court. An obese boy on the baseline held up a volle
y ball and the children in the middle spread out. He held the ball to his chest and suddenly threw it towards the legs of a shrieking girl. It missed its target, skidded across the court and out the other side.
Danny Simpson stood apart from the game, watching as the ball rolled past his feet. He bent down to pick it up. He looked at the children on the court and made to throw the ball in one direction. Then, without warning, he tossed it at head height straight at the closest player. It connected with a smack. The boy held his stinging face as the game continued around him. Danny turned to walk away and found himself face to face with a female teacher.
‘What was that, Simpson?’
‘Bad throw, miss.’
The woman watched him with distaste as he dawdled along the pathway to the nearest building.
Sneaky, sly and cruel he might have been, but Danny Simpson’s behaviour was nothing compared to that of the new boy.
‘Good morning, class.’
‘Good morning, Mrs Barnes.’
‘I’d like you all to meet your new classmate Graham Harris.’ The teacher placed a hand on the shoulder of the mortified boy, who stood fidgeting beside her. Graham was tall and slender. He had a slightly fragile, out-of-proportion look about him, a large forehead and an undershot jaw, unreadable dark irises, and the kind of hunted expression that invited the attention of bullies. Danny was immediately fascinated.
‘Please say good morning to Graham, class.’
‘Good morning, Graham,’ the students responded, in a low chant. Some of the boys at the back laughed. Graham turned bright red.
‘Please sit down with the blue group.’ The teacher indicated a set of tables pushed together at the side of the room. Graham looked back at her, paralysed.
‘All our groups are represented by different colours,’ she explained.
Graham walked robotically towards the blue group.
‘All our readers are marked with coloured stickers to match the group’s abilities. This week is blue week, when we call on people in the blue group to present their work to the class.’
Graham stood behind an empty chair at one of the ‘blue’ tables.
‘You can sit down now, Graham.’
He pulled his chair out, bumping it into a desk in the ‘orange’ group behind. Danny sat staring directly at him.
