Narcissism for Beginners

by Martine McDonagh

  ‘The governors were very good to me. I suspect Mr Todd had a hand in persuading them to let me stay on at the Lodge. He brought gardeners in from the village to do Frank’s job. Three men to do the work Frank used to do on his own – no wonder he had a heart attack! I knew one of the new chaps from my days up at the Grange and he told me they were under strict instructions not to change anything Frank had done, not to do anything that might upset me, just to maintain things as they were. The only time they came close to the Lodge was on their way in and out, and except for that one man – I forget his name now – who used to give me a cheery wave if he saw me, they all kept their heads down. It wasn’t as if Frank was Capability Brown or anything, but I appreciated their respect. “Stay in the Lodge for as long as you need to,” the governors said, but after six months I couldn’t stand it any more and moved away.

  ‘He was a lovely man, Mr Todd. Lifelong bachelor, we used to call them in those days. The absolute opposite of Frank, who always had dirt under his nails no matter how hard he scrubbed them and smelled of damp earth and rotting leaves in the autumn. “Call me Alistair,” he said, and then made a habit of popping in to check I was all right. When I got a job in the local greengrocer’s shop to tide me over until Frank’s money came through, he came every Wednesday afternoon, when I’d be home because the shop was shut for half-day closing. I’d say regular as clockwork, but I’ve never had much luck with clocks; Frank used to say my animal magnetism upset their workings. All we’d do was sit drinking tea and eating cake and talking about Frank. He’d always ask after Robin too, but when I passed on his regards Robin always claimed not to know who I was talking about.

  ‘When Frank’s insurance money came through I moved here for a fresh start. I found a job as a dinner lady at the primary school down the road and joined the church and life became very busy, what with working and all the new friends I made. It wasn’t like at Applesham where I never saw a child other than Robin from one week to the next, despite living in the school grounds. Here children would knock at my door when they came to play in the park and I’d give them a sweet or a biscuit and in the summer I’d leave a jug of iced squash and some paper cups out for them. Some of them bring their own children now, so I always keep a biscuit in the house. I always made sure to be home on my own for Robin’s monthly visits, though.

  ‘Before I left the Lodge I cleared all my old presents out of the trunk to make more space for his packages. That was the most fun I’ve ever had in one evening. I poured myself a glass of wine – I don’t make a habit of drinking alone, but it seemed like a special occasion, all my birthdays and Christmases come at once you could say – sat on the floor and opened them all one at a time. Most of it was junk. Have you ever sniffed twenty-year-old talcum powder?’

  A few years back I would have sniffed anything vaguely powderish. I keep that thought to myself and shake my head.

  ‘Well don’t bother, it smells of nothing. And don’t bother trying to peel the wrapper off a twenty-year old bar of soap either. There were a few boxes of stale chocolates, which I didn’t dare open, put them all straight in the bin. Some of the linens were pretty, hankies and whatnot, so I took those down to the charity shop.

  ‘I wasn’t short of money in those days, what with my wages and Frank’s pension. I could afford to buy shop jam instead of making my own, and a ticket to the cinema in town once a week, and sometimes if I felt wasteful I’d go to the bingo. All those little changes joined up to make my life unrecognisable from the way it used to be. I never gave a moment’s thought to Robin’s parcels of money in the trunk, and even if I had been dirt poor I wouldn’t have touched them.’

  I stifle a yawn, and smile apologetically when I realise she saw me.

  ‘If Frank had come back from the dead, I dare say he wouldn’t have known me after I moved here. You wouldn’t think so to look at me now, but I was still an attractive woman in my fifties and sixties. I never felt the need for another gentleman friend after Frank though, I enjoyed my freedom too much.

  ‘Then Robin stopped coming. The first time, I was beside myself with worry thinking he was ill or had been in an accident. When he’d missed two visits I went over to the phone box on the green to call his landlady in Brighton supposing she would know if anything had happened to him. When I eventually tracked her down, boy did I get a shock. Not only was Robin about to become a father, but he was in prison! She either didn’t know what he’d done or she didn’t want to tell me, she just said where he was and gave me the address: HM Prison, Isle of Sheppey, in Kent. I wrote three or four times, but he never replied to any of my letters. I supposed he was too ashamed of himself to write back. I never did find out what he’d done. Do you know, dear?’

  I say I don’t, and that I’ll let her know when I find out. But that was before I knew, right?

  ‘I only saw him once more after that, in 2000. I suppose he’d not long been released. He’d grown a big bushy beard and was dressed all in white as if he was stopping by on his way to a judo class or a pyjama party. He drove up in one of those big camper vans – not the small, hippy kind, more like the ones people my age clog the roads up with after retirement. Not that he was driving. I don’t think he ever bothered learning to drive. He had another young man with him, very well spoken, very polite. Tom, I think his name was, or Thomas. He gave me the creeps.’

  ‘Thomas is my guardian,’ I say to pre-empt any further insults.

  She chews on her cheeks a bit more.

  ‘Well, anyway, Robin comes in carrying a big green holdall, breezy as you like. Of course I knew why he’d come: his allowance would have dropped off while he was in prison. So, I come in here, thinking they’re both behind me, but when I turn around only the Thomas chap is there. Your father’s gone upstairs. Thomas keeps me talking, asking me questions about the house, about my job, small talk really, and all the time I’m listening to Robin’s footsteps upstairs. Thomas acts pleasant enough, I suppose, but it feels a bit uncomfortable, as if he’s been told to corner me in my own sitting room. Then, it can’t be more than a few minutes later, I hear a thud on the path outside and Thomas’s eyes flick to the window and he interrupts himself to say, “Well, Mrs C, it’s been very nice meeting you, but I need to go back to the van now to make sure we don’t get a ticket.” And off he goes. “No need to see me out,” he says. And I’m thinking, a ticket, here?

  ‘While I’m waiting for Robin to come down, I watch the other one pick up the holdall – Robin’s thrown it out of the bathroom window – and carry it over to the camper, casual as you like. Next thing, Robin comes charging down the stairs and into the sitting room. I’d never seen him exert so much energy; he’d always been such a languid chap. Too much being carried and wheeled in early life, if you ask me. “Sorry I can’t stop,” he says and gives me a big hug, something he’s never done before, it brings tears to my eyes. I watch him walk over to the van and all I can think of is how thin he is, that I should have offered him something to eat or made sandwiches for his journey. I didn’t even get a chance to ask him if the baby was all right. And that was the last time I saw him. I got the dog after that. Not this one, his mother.’

  She pauses a few seconds to pet Binky.

  Wait, Binky’s a boy dog?

  ‘He’d emptied the trunk, of course. I didn’t dare think about how many thousands of pounds he’d driven off with or what he was planning to do with it; it was none of my business.

  ‘I tried calling his landlady again a couple of months later to see if she had any news or an address for him, but the man who answered the phone said he was looking after the house while she’d gone to live up north and had never heard of Robin. I wrote a couple of letters to her address in Hove in case her post was being forwarded, but when nothing came back I had to give up. For a short while I had things all muddled in my head, got all worked up thinking Robin had passed on a bad gene and you’d been stillborn like my Sharon, and then I remembered he wasn’t my son. Old age does that to yo
u.’

  Mrs C insists on making us lunch before I leave. We have cold ham, beets, tomatoes and cold potatoes with a suspicious blob of yellow cream on the side of my plate that she tells me is salad cream not mayo and forces me to try it. I have to say it actually is quite delicious, not bland like mayo, and I take a picture of the bottle to send Thomas so he can pick some up on his next trip to Burbank. Mrs C kind of sucks her food and I have a hard time staying at the table, but at least the sucky technique requires her to keep her mouth shut once the food’s inside it. Binky sits on a chair at the table and watches us eat.

  ‘He likes you,’ says Mrs C. ‘Do you have a dog?’

  I tell her about the GD, about how we rescued him, and somehow we skip from that to the tomato tomato conversation. Yeah, it doesn’t really work written down. I’ve often wondered why the rule doesn’t also apply to potatoes, but Mrs C doesn’t know and neither does Thomas, we’ve had the same discussion at home a million times. It’s just one of those mysteries of the English language. We get, by way of tomatoes, potatoes and the whole deadly nightshade genus, to talking about Agatha Christie’s poison plants garden. Apparently her friend helped build it. ‘Frank would have loved it,’ says Mrs C, and sighs and says, ‘There are so many different ways to die,’ which reminds me of my weird night scenes. I generally don’t think about them during the day. As soon as I go to sleep I forget they ever happen, until the next time.

  Dessert is another cup of tea with a chunk of ginger cake – which she emphasises is bought from the market, not home-made; I get the impression she’s done with cooking – and more chewing and sucking.

  She gives me a second chunk of cake wrapped in foil to eat on the train and makes me promise to come visit again when I’ve finished my investigations. She says she’ll wangle us a special pass to go see the poison plants when the garden is closed to the public. I actually would like to do that. And apologies to fungible, but wangle is my new favourite word.

  Before I check out of the hotel – late but I wangle off the extra charge by lying about having gotten lost – I’m emptying out my backpack to separate my clean clothes from the not so clean, and that’s when I find Thomas’s envelopes. Before I turned twenty-one, I don’t think I ever got a letter and now every motherflipper is writing to me. Letters must be a feature of adult life. He must have shoved them into my bag when I wasn’t looking and I guess he doesn’t want me to read them all at once because they’re in separate envelopes, numbered one through five. He knows I can only take in so much information at one time. I open number one.

  Dear Sonny. There are things I still haven’t told you.

  Uh oh.

  That’s not how the letter actually starts but it’s what my eye puts together out of all the words on the first page. Too much already. I toss the envelope and fold the letter into my pocket to read on the train. If I feel up to it.

  Things We Can’t Undo #1

  I go all-out and travel first class. I need to be relaxed to think about everything Mrs C’s told me, not tense and distracted the whole journey because of other people’s sticky mouth noises and one-sided upspoken phone conversations. I look out the window a while at the pink rocks on one side and the ocean on the other. It’s not that I forgot about Thomas’s letter, more like I’m consciously choosing not to remember it, but then the train turns inland and we’re into open country and all there is to look at is sheep and cows, so I get it out of my bag. It’s short, just one page.

  Sonny,

  Wherever you are when you read this letter, I hope things are beginning to piece themselves together for you. The past is a giant jigsaw puzzle and I’d hate for you to reach the end of your trip with whole sections still unaccounted for. Sorry, that’s a terrible start. What I’m trying to say, by way of rather clumsy metaphor, is that there are things you don’t know about me, that nobody knows because I’ve never told anyone. Suffice it to say, I still have major amends to make with many people, above all with you.

  Where to start. Do you remember that time I completed the programme and you asked me why I needed to start over again?

  Thomas messed with drugs when he was younger too, so, when I started going to NA, he did as well, to show solidarity, he said.

  I gave some glib reply about the cathartic value of forever digging deeper when in truth I was doing the exact opposite. I’m not saying it’s all been a charade, but I’ve tripped over step nine without reaching resolution too many times now to maintain any delusions.

  In case you don’t know the programme – and why would you, right, your life is perfect? – step nine is about making amends to those you have harmed.

  When I saw you get to step twelve and go straight back to step one without really being able to articulate why, alarm bells rang and I knew it would be impossible for you to get clear without knowing the whole truth. I’ve waited until you were mature enough to handle it, and I have to admit to being more than a little scared even now that what I have to tell you will throw you off kilter again.

  So, before I go any further, I want to tell you that it’s been an absolute honour and a privilege to be your guardian these last ten years or so. You are a remarkable young man, Sonny, and have faced challenges head-on that a person of twice your years and life experience would run from. The upside has been a varied and interesting life, but, as we both well know, varied and interesting is often only a minor crisis away from chaotic and precarious. But I am convinced of your strength and that everything you have faced up to and dealt with so far will stand you in good stead for what comes now, and for the future, however varied, dull, chaotic or peaceful you decide to make it. I have to believe that, and so must you.

  When you’ve read these letters, I will completely under­stand if you choose to cut me off. Andrew and Ruth have both promised to be there for you if you need someone to talk to. They are both good people. The best.

  What the hell?!

  As for what I have to tell you, I’ll try not to bore you by repeating things you already know, this isn’t about me, but inevitably there will be moments. All I ask is that you please just take your time and hear me out, read each letter in turn, and please, keep reading to the end, however long it takes.

  Okay, that’s enough for now. My envelophobia, letterphobia, whatever, has kicked in again. I’m not ready for what comes next, whatever it is and whatever Thomas believes. I get out my tablet and book a hotel close to Ruth Williams’s address in London and then, to stop my mind asking questions about Thomas’s letter, I watch some SOTD. I write Thomas a message to tell him I found his letter, then delete it without sending.

  Tonight’s death scenes: an old man falls out of a hammock; a young guy skis into a tree. I don’t know if these are real deaths that I’m tuning into telepathically, which are happening to real people in real life/death at the exact moment I tune into them, or if they are happening in some other space-time continuum. Or maybe they’re hallucinations brought on by self-inflicted brain damage. I never asked anyone else if they ever had the same experience and I never told anyone about mine, not even Thomas. If one starts up and I don’t like the way it’s going, I have a simple strategy. Open my eyes and watch SOTD instead.

  Ruth of the Living #1

  Ruth Williams still lives in the same house she lived in when you met her, back in the late 1980s, way before you had me. I check out the satellite view of her address and locate the roof of her house at the top of Parliament Hill, next to Hampstead Heath, one point four miles and twenty-seven minutes by the most direct walking route from my hotel.

  Ruth functions better in the morning so we’ve arranged for me to be at her house by nine. I walk over there real slow, enjoying that everyone else is either dragging kids to school or rushing to get to their job, all fresh out of the shower, stinking of perfume and aftershave and all the other chemical crap people wash down the pipes to pollute the water supply. I know it’s wrong but I can’t help thinking that now I’m a multimillionaire I could live my w
hole life without ever having to do any of that shit.

  The streets are still wet from overnight rain and the air is damp and chill and grey clouds block the sunshine every few minutes. I picture you, the young woman who became my mother but never my mom, making the same journey thirty-some years before, your long hippy dress trailing in the dirt, beads jangling on your wrist. You stop to hug one of the big old trees that are evenly spaced along both sides of Ruth’s street. But all that turns out to be a false imagining. You only started to dress like a hippy after you moved to Scotland, as a kind of disguise. In my experience, disguises only make people stand out more; you only have to watch the Z-list TV stars shuffling self-consciously along Hermosa boardwalk in their big-hat-and-shades disguises while every normal person is hatless and relaxed to know what I mean. I guess they want people to look at them really or else they wouldn’t be on TV in the first place. Even I could have told you that dressing like a Deadhead was never going to stop my dad finding you.

  If I was nervous to meet Mrs C, then the words don’t exist to describe how I feel on my way to Ruth Williams’s house, and that’s because Ruth is the first person I ever met, not counting my dad and Marsha Ray, who knew you really well.

  Ruth doesn’t shout at me through the door like Mrs C did. In fairness to Mrs C, she didn’t know I was coming whereas Ruth does. She opens her door with a wide smile and holds a hand out for me to shake. When our hands connect, one of us is trembling and I can’t be sure it isn’t me. I’m grateful she doesn’t attempt any awkward observations about which parent I resemble most, just lets me be myself and only compares me to the version of me she met when I was very small. My anxiety eases off a little.

  Her living room has a huge fireplace and the furnishings are minimal compared to Mrs C’s clutter. I wonder if it’s a gas fire that can be lit easily like the one we have in RB. It’s supposed to be summer, but I am really feeling the cold. But I guess I can’t just walk into a stranger’s home and insist they light the fire. All I can do is stare at it hopefully.