Falling out of Heaven

by John Lynch

  I would slowly pull my pyjama bottoms up. I would feel ashamed of my erection, it was hard and needy, I was disgusted at what had been awakened in me. It was evil and so was I. I’ll let you go in a minute, child; I just want to tell you about the long dark night that followed, when he slept beside me. I felt his milk dry on me, cake my hand, some had got onto my belly and made it itch. I spent the next little while scraping him off me, using the sheet and the corner of my pyjama top. Then I concentrated, little one, I used every ounce of my thinking to wish him dead. I imagined all possible scenarios and I bent my will into making them happen. I saw him being beheaded. I saw him lose his guts in one go with the quick shiny swish of a large sword. I imagined him falling under a train and heard the wheels mash his bones into powder, and saw his blood flowing across the tracks like a red river.

  Yes, I know, it’s too much for you to take in, but one more thought to take with you, sweetheart, for all that, for all the pain I wished him, and myself, I still wondered how I could make him love me.

  Breaking Free

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Tender.’

  ‘That’s a good word for it.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘I don’t want to diminish what you’ve just done by crawling up your backside and saying…Oh you know…That was marvellous…Such bravery…This isn’t an American TV show…But…’

  ‘But…?’

  ‘But it took a lot of guts to do what you just did.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘Right…’

  I can’t look at him, I am afraid to in case I crack wide open like a rotten tree trunk, so I gaze at the floor or out the window.

  ‘There are people who spend their lives skirting what ails them. I can think of one or two not a million miles from here…’

  ‘I feel like someone has had their hands at my throat for the last hour,’ I say.

  ‘That’s normal. You’ve held that shit inside you for years and it’s caused you no end of pain. From here on in it can only get better.’

  For the first time since I’ve spoken about my father I look at him. He smiles at me as if to say, believe, all you have to do is believe me.

  ‘You’re still very angry and that’s understandable. When you spoke to the child you were bitter and resentful but that will change in time. It has to. There are things to do. People to talk to. Your sister. Your wife. But there’s time for that. Today I want you to look after yourself. Right?’

  ‘Right…’

  ‘Have a walk. Smoke your head off. Anything that will help you come down from this height that I’ve taken you to. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘This isn’t like taking a drink, Gabriel. It’s not an instant fix. It will take time. Although I’m guessing that by the end even the booze no longer did what it used to.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is a long-term thing. This is about healing.’

  I look at him and smile. He nods. Outside in the cold November sky the sun has broken free of a cloud, I watch as the light bleeds across the garden, igniting the branches of the trees with colour, and just for a moment everything seems possible.

  Touched

  In the days that follow we are taken to meeting after meeting in various parts of the city. Each time we are asked to open our ears and listen, give in, give in, our counsellors urge us. I try and sometimes I am sure that I can feel something like peace steal across my heart. Other times I am not so certain and I sit there fidgeting, eager to be free, and I take refuge outside in the cold air chain-smoking until the meeting is at an end. Frank told me that if I wanted to I could go on experimenting and fall even further, maybe into the arms of death this time. I met him again at a meeting off George’s Street in the centre of the city and smiled when I saw him. Again he followed me outside when I’d had enough and stood a polite distance from me until I turned round and greeted him.

  ‘You’re no different to me, son. No different.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I spent most of my first year in the cold outside at meetings. Half in, half out. You know?’

  ‘It’s just…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The God business.’

  ‘Right. The higher power stuff?’

  ‘Yes. The higher power stuff.’

  ‘You have trouble with it. It’s normal.’

  ‘My mother…She believed, Frank. She believed so much it hurt her, it caused her pain. She had a gift. She thought she had. And…’

  ‘It sickened you.’

  ‘Yes, it sickened me. Because…’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘She spoke in tongues. She said it was the voice of the Holy Spirit moving through her. She would make me pray…Force-feed me…And fuck, I don’t know, Frank…I don’t know…’

  ‘And your old fella?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘How was he with all this?’

  ‘He touched me, Frank…He touched me where he shouldn’t have…’

  I didn’t mean to say it, but out it sneaked like a thief leaving a house that he’s just burgled. We both looked at each other. I broke it and looked away tugging hungrily on my cigarette. I stamped my feet as if to shatter the quiet that had settled between us.

  ‘That’s a bastard,’ Frank said after a moment.

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘A right fucking bastard…’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘Who’s your counsellor?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Who’s treating you at the place up the road?’

  ‘Thaddeus.’

  ‘Have you worked on it with him?’

  ‘Yes…Yesterday, no, the day before…It was tough…’

  ‘I’m sure it was, son.’

  ‘So when I’m sitting in there…You know…I look around and all I see, all I hear is God this and that. It fucks me off.’

  ‘Ignore it.’

  ‘Right, ignore it. The whole thing in there is built on it. It’s the fucking foundation of the programme.’

  At this point someone came outside. It was the small man who had greeted people as they had arrived, nodding and smiling, indicating where there were spare seats. He had irritated me. I remember thinking that no-one could be that happy, that it was a biological impossibility.

  ‘Please, gentlemen, please can you keep your voices down.’

  I thought about having a go at him, but I knew that it would only make the situation worse. Frank could see it in my eyes and spoke quickly before I had a chance to reconsider.

  ‘Apologies, Harry. Point taken.’

  ‘Right.’

  For a moment neither of us said anything. We listened to the soft murmur coming from the room behind us as the meeting greeted another speaker. I lit a second cigarette and offered Frank one. He shook his head.

  ‘You know,’ he said. ‘I’m fucked sometimes if I believe there is a God. But if it’s of any help, there is a hell. I should know because I’ve been there. And from what you’ve just said so have you.’

  ‘But heaven, Frank…Heaven…When does that kick in?’

  Shotgun

  I don’t trust the memory that is rising in me. I can feel it moving up through the dark of my mind like an alligator moving in on its kill. It is of my father and he is crying. I am young and I cannot sleep. I have come downstairs to get a drink of milk and I see him there in the white snow light of the TV screen. The programmes have ended for the night and he is sitting staring at the fuzz a dead channel makes and tears are running down his cheeks. I freeze where I’m standing, my hand poised above the stair rail, my eyes widened with concern. I watch as he puts a can of beer to his lips and then hear the forlorn gasp that comes from him as he drinks. He looks older, broken and his head is deep in thought. Where has it come from this picture, this image? I have no recollection of it, and my first impulse is to dismiss it. But it is begging for admittance, it is cryi
ng to be given life in my heart.

  I am frightened. I don’t want him to see me and yet at the same time something in me wants to reach out to him to tell him it’s alright. It baffles me. He is not the father I remember; he is smaller and more beaten by life. His clothes seem loose about his body. He begins muttering, half words, drunken language of fever and wistfulness. He shakes his head and then forms a fist and holds it up in the ghostly light of the television and stares at it for what seems an eternity. If I turn and go back upstairs he will hear me, if I continue down he will see me. In my memory I can feel the hard patter of my breath. I feel sorry for him; I want to tell him that I know the dark too, that I know the demons that lurk in the hallways of a man’s soul. But that boy who is watching him has yet to drink from the deep water where anger lurks like cholera. All he sees is a man on the edge of terror. It is not a memory I remember being made. I don’t feel it the same way as I do many of the others. It doesn’t live in the redness of my blood. I’m imagining it, I tell myself, it is nothing more than whimsy but when I see him reach down and pull his shotgun up from the floor I realise that what I’m being asked to remember occurred. I know because of the stab of pain I suddenly feel across my gut. I also know because I can taste the steel of the gun barrel as he puts it to his lips as if they were my own. I think of all the times that I had wished him dead, for him to dissolve like last night’s snow on a busy main road and now here I was looking at a man one step from giving me what I had always wanted. It puzzles me why I have never been visited by this ghost from my past before. I can feel my small boy’s hand form a fist. I see my father’s jaw close around the twin barrels of the gun, how the tendons tauten. His eyes blink furiously and I know that he is looking for that moment of courage, that still place in his mind where he can leave himself behind and pull the trigger. He doesn’t. As he pulls the gun out of his mouth his body convulses and is racked by sobs. I know that this is my chance to sneak back upstairs safe from detection under the cover of my father’s cries.

  Like My Own

  It is two days before I leave. I am in bed. The room has that empty hush that night brings with it. I have spent the last hour or so trying to sleep. Soon I will leave this place and rejoin the world. I know that it will be difficult. I tell myself to trust what has happened in the last few weeks. I don’t remember falling asleep, but I must have done, because when I open my eyes again I know that time has passed. I sense him before I see him. He feels like a soft July wind brushing against my skin.

  He looks like me. I know that he has been watching me sleep. At first I tell myself that I’m dreaming. Maybe I am, sometimes I can’t tell, that has always been my problem. He is younger than me, not in his body, but in his eyes, they are alive with hope and joy plays in them like a foal stretching its legs for the first time. It unsettles me. I shift in the bed and try to speak to him but he shakes his head as the words begin to form in my mouth. He smiles, he knows that I am afraid and he is trying to reassure me. I have spent the last few weeks fighting my way back from the dark land where drink took me, where thoughts spiral into madness and pain and the last thing I need is to go back there. This time I think I will never come back, but wander there among the black clouds like a bird that has lost sight of land.

  He begins to speak to me. I recognise the voice. It is like my own but softer and it reminds me of the days in my youth when the world was like a meadow in summer, fierce with flower and colour. He speaks of my fall and how it began when the long winter came and held our house in its icy grasp. He shows me the pain in my father’s heart by pointing to his own. He talks of my mother and my sister and how they did the best they could. He says that I was wilful, and that I was made to be broken, just like everyone else, he told me.

  He says that madness had saved me and that now it was time to let it go, to let everything be. Don’t fight, he says to me, stop fighting. He tells me that my journey has been like so many others that he has seen and that the skies are full of falling souls. He says that he can’t stay but that it was important that we met again. You don’t remember? I shake my head no, and he smiles. It was in the rain a while ago, he said. I called you my twin and you called me the devil.

  The Last Day

  This is not how I saw this day when I thought about it in the last four weeks or so. When I wake I feel the usual sense of foreboding lying across my heart and have to cajole my mind into coming to. I have breakfast as usual and then join the others for the morning check-in. New people are arriving all the time. I look at their grey skin and their bloodshot eyes, and remember my first days here. Alf is taking the roll call and he sits at the head of the room and gently explains to the newcomers to listen and not to feel beholden to speak, we are here to look after you, he says. When it is my turn, I introduce myself and say that it is my last day. I get a round of applause, Greg slaps me on the back. I smile and afterwards I make my way to my room to finish packing. No. I expected at least some sunlight to herald the beginning of my new life, but all I see is rain, the sky seems to be full of it. I could feel Alf’s eyes on me as I spoke in the recreation room. I know that he wanted me to say it, to spit it out, that I was an alcoholic, but I didn’t. I think of the number of times in the last few weeks when they have all had a go at prompting me, at goading and cajoling me. You’ll use again, they all said, you’ll end up back at square one, or worse. I think of that day when Thaddeus hunted me down in group therapy and I faced him down. I remember Greg and how he had stuck up for me.

  I think of the places my mind took me to and how by the end I believed every image it sent me. Some things I remember, some I don’t, and my curse will be that over the next few months these things may come to haunt me. I want to see my son again, to hold him in my arms and to reassure him that the other man has left for good. I am nervous and I can feel my legs wobble slightly as I make my way to reception to leave my case there. I have one more session with Thaddeus and my wife will be there, then I will leave this place.

  I walk across the large garden past the bench that I have sat on so many times in the last four weeks. I recall when they moved me from the lock-up ward, escorting me across the wet grass, making sure I did as I was told. I stand for a moment and think of the man I was when I arrived. I imagine I see him moving towards me, I see the vacancy in his stare and the way his hands fidget at his sides as if at any moment he will be broken by the thoughts that shoot around his mind. I watch as the men on either side of him glance at him making sure that he doesn’t make any sudden movements. As he approaches I see the animal that lurks in the corner of his gaze and I know that this is the most important day of his life although it will take him some time to see it. He looks heavenwards. I know that he is searching the sky for his shape as it falls towards the earth. As he passes I find myself praying for him. At first this takes me by surprise but then I realise that when a man is dying he will take anything he can get.

  The Quiet Friend

  My wife is looking at me. For the first time since I care to remember there is something like love in her eyes, but there is also pity, which I don’t care for.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ she said. ‘My God, I didn’t know…’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you…I couldn’t tell anyone…’

  I get up and walk to the window. I have spent the last hour speaking about my father, how he came to my bed and ripped the love for the world from my heart. Thaddeus is with us as always. He had quietly spoken to my wife before I began, asking her to listen and under no circumstances to interrupt until I had finished. She had nodded and looked at me as if to say what is all this about? Then she had sat opposite me, put her hands in her lap and licked her lips as if she was about to eat a meal she wasn’t sure about. I know that my stay here has been leading up to this, that if I wanted to get on with my life in any ordered way I would have to break the back of these memories that have enslaved me since I was a child. I look back at my wife and see that Thaddeus is leaning over her, whispering to her.
I am not crying; it surprises me. When I thought of this moment in the last few days, I always saw myself shaking from the horror of what I had lived through, my speech halting and raw with emotion, and my eyes full of tears. But it’s not like that; the truth when it comes is a quiet friend. It tells you that the world is simpler than you thought, that pain equals pain and that hurt people hurt people, just as my father had hurt me and I in turn had hurt my wife, and my son, and anyone who had ever reached out to me.

  I see my father differently now, my mother too. I know that they were frightened just as I am. I feel sorry for him, for the man he became. I know that I am luckier than he was, that I have a choice, that I stand at a crossroads. He never had that chance. He had been broken by the beast that he had been given to tame.

  ‘Gabriel?’

  Thaddeus is standing beside me. His eyes are warm. He gently runs his hand across my left shoulder.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘I’m…I feel relieved, Thaddeus.’

  ‘Good man.’

  Yes, the truth when it comes is gentle and steady. It enters the room without fanfare. It sits beside you, patiently waits for you to recognise it.

  My wife and I spend the afternoon together. We don’t speak much, there is no need to, there has been too much talking recently. We sit and watch the parade of winter clouds across the sky and the crows as they flit between the threadbare trees. I like the stillness that has settled over me. It is clean and it is pure. I can look at this scene in front of me and not want to change it or myself for that matter. I know now that this is my story, and that others have theirs. And your story will always ask questions of you, and it will keep asking you until you reply. We are all broken, we all need fixing. Some people never heal. I think of Clive and his eight or nine stays in treatment, always bolting whenever he came near to the dark secret that had caused him to poison his life and the lives of those around him. Maybe I will fall again, I don’t know. In this second as I look at my wife’s profile and the lines around her mouth that age is putting there, and see the strong force in her gaze, I realise that for so much of my life I have missed these things, the glow in someone else’s eyes that says that the world is not as lonely or as terrifying as you think. I want to put that right. I tell my wife and she smiles at me. For the first time she doesn’t throw it back in my face, or question what I’ve just said. She just lets it sit there between us, for what it is, a hopeful wish from a man who has spent too long in the dark. She tells me that my son misses me, that he always has. She puts her hand on mine and I let it stay there, feeling her warmth. She says that the future is waiting for us both. I nod and suggest we try and walk some of it together. She says nothing for a moment. The she looks at me and says: ‘We’ll see…We’ll see.’