It is a mantra of repetition – the same walk on the same side, the same seat. I think I maybe built my neural pathways from early on. I constructed my own memories. In the absence of family, I crafted the familiar from the unfamiliar, found comfort in the cold. It could be that it is like OCD, repetition in a quest for safety. Perhaps I feel more vulnerable than I like to admit but I will go with politeness for now.
SEPTEMBER 7. A call from Tony: the new DNA confirms Christy as his uncle: 99.8%. He and Christy are happy, he says. I am content for them too. I don’t want to carry my mother’s contagion, her family-eating plague, but I can’t see how it computes. If Christy is Tony’s uncle, can Frank still be my dad? A couple of days later I call Christy to congratulate him. I had thought to ask whether we should retake our test. But I hear the blessed relief in his voice and I haven’t the heart.
I know my mother, he tells me, the woman she was. The uncertainty had plagued him, I think. For him and Tony the search is over. Right’s returned to the O’Toole world. We talk about the importance of family. Of its measure of a man. You are both my nephews, he says. We’ll have a meal when you come up.
I guess that is the next step, to meet Tony, my other Michael, my four O’Toole sisters. I tell myself I wasn’t seeking certainty. I think with goodwill we can paper the cracks. Maybe I can be their elder brother. Maybe Frank can be my dad. We will tread carefully. It looks like it isn’t over yet. The fat lady hasn’t laughed.
I can’t find my humour in my writing. It’s not how I’d tell my story if we had wine. Laughter is how I neutralise hurt. I turn it into a tale, make it funny, make it mine. Here, somehow it is still solemn; my wife’s a little worried it’s not like me. Melancholy has settled like river mist. I tell myself it is temporary, it will be burnt back by the sun, I am still tunnelling, making my escape. I should be free of it soon.
Fathers and brothers. Men and boys. I had pined for the company of women and girls, for my mother, for much of my life. Men were tougher to get close to. I’d thought my longing for a mother was because Mum felt less loving than Dad, but history shows it isn’t so. It was easier to love Lilian when she was out from under Dudley. She was gentler company, light to Sheila’s shade.
I had a brother, a father, a few close male friends. I was comfortable with making myths. I must be nature, not nurture – my ‘real’ dad the reason I differ from my siblings. Where did the greed and ambition, the words, come from if not from him? I wasn’t looking for specifics. I had thought to trace my tribe.
He’d been a fantasy figure, my father. For a brother I had Christopher: my conflicted relationship with boys and men in one. Pull, push, pull, push. Push. Now I have four new sisters and two brothers, five of them friends on Facebook. Perhaps they will bring me closer to my father in a way I couldn’t be with my mother. For my O’Toole clan, I am a link to their dad, reliving his life before they were born, his love before he was lost. Maybe it’s not my place to be a child finding his mother and father but to be a big brother to them all. It is what I do, what I have always done.
Mothers and daughters. Women and girls. Lilian pined for an adopted daughter but Dudley insisted on sons. Too late for their own, he picked up a pair second-hand, slightly damaged with wear and tear. Lilian fed us, read us stories, walked with us to school. We were sent to church. She purged us of Sheila’s sin, nervously scrubbed at the stain. Puberty, of course, was impossible. We were past our sell-by date. No one buys pubescent boys except maybe my other mother. Sheila had cornered another market where everything had a price. You could buy on approval, lease if you liked. Satisfaction or money back.
I haven’t had the hunting dream for a few months, though I still sometimes wake, heart thumping, adrenalin pumping, as though I have escaped. For now at least, knives are sheathed, sitting somewhere maybe, waiting in a bar, behind a blind corner – who knows? I’d like to think it is over. Decades of being prey is long enough. I wonder if it was processing terror, doomed to repetition, reliving a moment over and over until it fades. But there was no diminishing of the dream. One day it was there and now it is gone. I don’t know what it means, my silent night. Have my hunters moved on or are they still lurking in my shadows? Night time will tell.
A year in the garden. From summer to summer. From green growth through dead winter, back to life. Leaf, flower and fruit, lush moments before the fall. We have had rain and sun and snow. There have been towering sunflowers, bean structures, amaranth swaying in the wind. Wigwams have gone up and fallen. Poles have been put up, taken down and packed away. There have been many kinds and colours of lettuces, beets and radish, other roots. Fragrance has flavoured the food we have made, rosemary, fennel and thyme. We have roasted homegrown corn on site, cooked Mediterranean soup. Winter-sown onions, shallots and garlic are sitting in my kitchen waiting to be fashioned into autumn meals. There have been many successes and a few failures (the fragile-plant stockade, raining death down on parasites). Whatever the weather, I have been there. I have been too cold, too wet and too hot. I have hoed. I have been bitten. I have weeded and watered. I have nurtured and nourished small plants through their short life. I have been constant. I have shared food and flowers and saved seed for another year.
I don’t know what I would have done without it. The healing would have been slow. When I have been troubled, when I need to be alone, it has been there for me. I care for it, I coax it. It has forgiven me for abandoning it when I had a broken leg.
A year in the life. Summer to summer, one father to another. Through gloom and despair and back. Digging land and memories. Throwing away rose-tinted thinking. Shining light in forgotten corners. Starting with an homage to an old man, then seeing him in high definition, the full 360 degrees. From loving him, losing him, to loving him less, though this is likely temporary. Reading and writing about the two boys. Trying to deal with the facts. My mothers: one scary and skinny, the other monstrously fat. Both falling short. Hearing stories from my sisters I will never be able to share. Dudley and Christopher, the two towering men in my life. Both absent for long years. Now both dead. Trying to please Dudley, taking his name. Trying to please Christopher and taking his too.
A year of putting them both to rest. A time of trying to find peace through the truth. A return to therapy when I was done with it. A time of toxic boxes about a life in care that wasn’t. I am ready to put them away.
Finally talking to Ray. An invisible, unreachable nearly-dad whose name I will always bear. Discovering more about Allan Beale, his baby months in an orphanage. About Alan Jenkins’s sicknesses – his stigmata signs of neglect. A year spent calming a scared little boy. The one to wear my too-many names. Time spent with Peter Drabble, forgiving his treatment of Chris. Feeling relief I am not him any more, though I have grown to like the kid and his confidence, like a fast-built Chinese city towering over the swamp he once was.
It has been time to let Christopher rest. I have found a place where we can grow marigolds and nasturtiums year after year.
I will take a breath before exploring Allan O’Toole. Meet his brothers and sisters, dig for their memories of another dead and distant man. Open my dusty closets. See what fits and what’s to go to the charity shop.
A year of gathering thoughts, strength and information. Peeling layer after layer. Holding back tears, trenching for laughter. Hunting for happiness on a riverbank. Putting everything back in its place, cleaned and dusted. Grime, grease and cobwebs gone. For now there is a contentment, hard fought for, perhaps, but won.
A year older. It couldn’t wait any longer. They are dying around me. I limp. Reclaiming who I am. Who my brother was.
This year has been my ghost train, a fairground trip on a slow boat without oars. Ghoulish figures, luminescent with menace. People from my shadows, archetypes of fear: the sexually voracious, monstrous mother; the absent stepfather; the cupboard under the stairs; the hellfire preacher. Predatory men flashing blades and cocks. Through the shade, a Peter Pan boy on a mission, to e
scape, to save himself, his broken brother and sisters. There is light now in the tunnel, the ghosts are exposed as painted ply. The cobwebs cling, but they are fake. The fears and memories shrink as they recede. The sticky hands are less insistent.
December
In Loving Memory
Our dear dad and granddad
Francis Anthony O’Toole
Born 13th June 1931
Died 28th November 1984
Aged 53
DECEMBER 4. Thirty-one years late. He is long gone. The flowers I have brought from London lie under the new headstone he shares with Irene, mother to his other children, who died last year, November 29, the day after him. Tony has left me alone for a few minutes to make sense of it, to try to feel something.
Here he is at last, Frank my father, the dad the baby craved. This the man whose genes I share, lying in a box under Irene in the Liverpool earth. Memories now for others, a skeleton figure I am here to flesh out. The wind rips at my coat. I changed three times before I left home. What to wear to meet your dead dad and your new brothers and sisters?
Trees shake, flowers lie blown in the grass. The gusts pull at me. I am cold. I try to conjure knowledge from the stone, from the chrysanthemum and carnations, from the green glass pebbles that cover him. I try to feel him, let him feel me. Would he have been happy I am here? The Barnardo’s baby would have wanted to stand at his father’s grave. I get into the car with my brother. It is time to meet his wife.
The Blob, in Liverpool, once Yates Wine Lodge, a sprawling room with rows of tables for four. Old men drinking Guinness and lager with the same friends in the same chairs for, say, 31 years. Only the name over the door has changed. Frank drank Scouse ‘Aussie white’, not Chardonnay. Brown like sherry, 17 per cent proof, it’s sweet and flat like yesterday’s Tizer, served with ice and topped with lemonade. It is powerful booze for working-class men and women and people who drink on a bench. I can almost see him here at the table with Tony, Mick and Bernadette.
Micky 10 Tops, his kids call my kid brother. He is always cold, his hand when I shake it more chilled than the wine. He is a little jumpy, has been like this perhaps all his life: the only one born outside Liverpool, he had meningitis as a baby, one eye blue, one eye brown ‘like David Bowie’. Aged eight, an early smoker, he’d burnt his feet from matches he hid in his socks while he slept. When he was around the same age, Frank had made him and Tony drink a bottle of navy rum after he discovered they’d been stealing his. Mick has calmed down since his accident – brain damage from a fight where he hit his head on a kerb. He leaves early to take his tablets. He and Tony have a soft toughness, a tough softness. They remind me of Christopher.
Bernadette, the youngest like our namesake aunty, has my pale, slightly hooded eyes. She talks a mile a minute. We are all nervous. Bernie is military: 16 years in the army, she served in Iraq. She is funny and fast. She does the speaking and tells the stories. About their dad waking them up when he was back from the pub, playing loud music, having them dance. They adore him. Their mother Irene said they’d put him on a pedestal, and it is noticeable while we talk how mythical he is. The same few phrases and stories return. The pub, the dancing, the drinking, the boxes of chocolates, a warm but remote man in their lives. It is as if they, too, have held on to scraps of cuttings, piecing him together from scant memories. We walk, we eat, we talk, we drink. It is a loud Friday night in Liverpool: thin tops, short skirts, big curlered hair and high heels. A woman holds tight to her friend’s shirt trying to walk downstairs on towering shoes. ‘We are like elephants,’ she says as she eyes me up. She slides down the bannister, skinny skirt around her waist.
There is a rift between the siblings. Bernie and Tony don’t talk to Paula and Debbie, though Bernie talks to Donna, who won’t talk to Tony. The next morning I meet the big sisters, my second batch of O’Tooles. They look alike. I can see my other sisters in their sadness; something of early Sheila in their shape. It seems Frank had a type.
It is 11am, a December Saturday, we are in our Sunday best. Paula, Donna, Debbie and I. Paula is the eldest. She was a day off 21 when her dad died. Irene died on her fifty-first birthday. She’d been nagging Mick about what to wear when we meet and was concerned about what I’d make of the pub. She wanted him to make a good impression. I tell her I liked the Blob, though not the Aussie white. I could imagine Frank sat with his mates at the same table night after night, drinking strong wine and navy rum. We walk slowly around ‘Paddy’s wigwam’ – Liverpool’s Catholic cathedral of Christ the King. We light candles in the reconciliation chapel. We settle in the refectory and drink tea. We exhume Frank from their memories. They ask about me, I ask about him. We laugh, I choke a little. Irene was 17, Paula says, when they met in her home town. Frank was in his thirties, though he told her he was 21. His children had always thought they had a brother from the photo their mother found in their father’s suit. I make it to seven children for both Sheila and Frank. One of 13, like my dad.
Paula and Tony had tried to trace the blond boy to a B&B on the Isle of Man but it was an electrical shop when they found it. The feeling was always there, though, of an older brother in the ether. Our four hours fly. Frank was away a lot and spent most of his time in the pub when at home. Occasionally he would take one of them with him and buy them shrimps (of course), then send them home.
He never said I love you, they say. You couldn’t come downstairs in your pyjamas, only fully dressed. They had to leave the room if his friends came. They went to their grandma’s once a week. Could only speak if they were spoken to. After Paula moved out, she’d return to make his breakfast every day. It is still raw, the wound he left.
Tony says Paula was more of a mother than Irene. She says he was a naughty boy. But the big sisters won’t talk to Tony and Bernadette now. It is not the time to pry.
They walk me to the train, have trouble crossing roads. They are hesitant. It might be my fault. We have a lager in the Lime Street station bar. Frank drank here too. They share photos. Frank as a young man, and later where you can see his life leaving him. Paula gives me his navy papers, a photo with his mates. By the time I get home my stomach’s twisted but I got to hear what my father was like as a dad. I stood at his grave and said hello.
I am an iceberg. Most of me is hidden. I feel drained as if I have given blood. It went well with Frank’s family. They were gentle and kind. It was almost mundane but now I am flooded like the Lake District. My defences have been breached. My strength is ebbing, my stroke feeble. The shore recedes. I am underwater. Time to float, to trust (if I can), to see where I land.
The next day, I am back at the allotment. It is warm for December. Damp. The tagetes and nasturtiums are lifeless now, unable to hold on. I gather them in my arms. I use just hands. No tools today. I roll them into bundles. Collect them for compost. There is seed where they lay for next spring and summer. I scatter it.
I lift turnips and chioggia, pick parsley and chervil. I buy a chicken on the way home, pack it all in a pot and into the oven for Sunday dinner. I am in need of comfort food.
I am sick of being sad. The useless search for useless family, my elusive peace of mind. Someone once said that kids in care are angry, with no one to draw their rage, like removing venom from a snake. And it was anger that undid my deal with Dudley, corroded my love for Christopher, sometimes still eats me now. And here it is again: intoxicating fury like whisky, stupefying, almost hate.
I wasn’t early-wired for rationale, had no adult understanding of my teenage mother, my feckless father, the poverty of love. All I knew was I was on my own, ripped from tit and home.
And here the raging child is grown powerful now. Ready to burn it all out. Obliterate. To call in napalm, to carpet bomb. Like My Lai, like Calley, I am almost eager to lay waste. Time, then, if I can, to limit collateral damage. To stand back from the button.
I will fill a bag with seed. Take a bus. Prepare ground. Lay out string. Sow. And wait for calm. And calendula.
I always knew I was more capable than Christopher. Though he was better with his hands and feet, best with boys, I was good with girls, Lilian, Dudley, school. I knew this would matter. I could attract someone to take care of me. I knew that in a war (and I knew that was what it was) it was better to talk yourself out of a fight, no matter how good your fists. I always knew, simply, I was luckier. And in that was everything.
I’d escaped Sheila and her men, scabies, impetigo, herpes, rickets. I’d survived TB. I could talk (and did I talk) and charm and smile. I could make you want me. I was more elastic, stuff didn’t stick with me. Though now it sits longer.
The thing with Frank O’Toole has been hard to keep down. I had come to believe I was good at this: tracing Lesley, Ray, Sheila, new brothers and sisters, rediscovering Christopher. I had room for them all. But a lost father was too rich and raw to process. He is still stuck in my throat, undigested. I will be bent out of shape till he is.
The year of the fathers. Of finding Frank, doorstepping Ray, reading Dudley’s disturbing thoughts. I didn’t discover Francis O’Toole in time. Thirty years is a lifetime late. The young man to a young old man, now a long time dead. I know a little of what a childhood with him was like but the closer I get leaves him further away. I read his navy service records, pore over his pay and identity book. I stare at his sloping signature. I have them both, my mother’s and father’s now. I have seen their names in their script written before I was born: Sheila’s is childlike, less sure of herself; Frank’s has an extravagant slope. I have semiology in place of certainty. I read the runes.
Plot 29 Page 19
