Narcissism for Beginners

by Martine McDonagh

  ‘I ditch the wheelbarrow and start to run and the van engine starts up and my legs won’t go fast enough, like in one of those dreadful dreams. I see the gun poke out of the driver’s window and instinctively turn my body away even though I don’t quite believe it’s real. Next thing I know there’s a bang and I’m falling face-down on the tarmac. It all happens in slow motion. The pain in my leg is excruciating. When I look up, the camper is gone, and you are nowhere to be seen.’

  ‘What, so I was kidnapped?’

  ‘Yes. And I was shot in the back of the knee by an air rifle to keep me from getting to you. I dragged myself along the road towards the school but an ambulance came before I even got there.’

  ‘‘What happened after that?’

  ‘Not a lot. I was in hospital for a week and the police came and took statements and what have you. I’d reported an incident with your father a month or so before, so everyone drew the obvious conclusion: that you’d been abducted by him. Or a professional hired by him. Whoever shot me was a crack shot all right, and it was unlikely your father would know one end of a gun from another.’

  An alarm is ringing in my head. I ignore it.

  ‘And as far as we knew he couldn’t drive. Your photo and your father’s were on the front page of the newspapers for a day or two but apart from the usual nutters there was a poor response from the general public. It would have been easy enough for your father to not look like his picture. A shave and some normal clothes and hey presto, the perfect disguise.’

  ‘That incident you mentioned. What kind of an incident?’

  ‘Och, well, your father had come to the house late one night, demanding to see you, and we’d refused to let him in. We tried to explain that you were asleep and that to wake you up then would confuse you, and that it would be better to introduce you gradually with some explanation from us beforehand about who he was. You already knew I wasn’t your natural father – your sperm father as your mother used to say. Anyway, that set him off shouting, about not needing to be formally introduced to his own son. We shut the door then, but he carried on, screaming at us through the letterbox, giving the door the occasional kick, calling your mother a whore and me a loser, so I called the police. Of course he’d gone by the time they arrived. You slept through it all, didn’t stir.’

  ‘I’m no different now,’ I say. ‘I sleep through earthquakes all the time at home. When did you say this happened?’

  ‘About a month before you disappeared. Your father wasn’t long out of prison.’

  Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Thomas can drive. And he’s had an intimate relationship with guns, right?

  ‘I’m sorry, Sonny, I was stupid enough to think that that visit would probably be the end of it. It was naïve to think in this day and age that a few hundred miles would keep someone like your father away. According to him, you were his property, and he was always going to come and claim you.’

  By now we’ve climbed the low scrubby dunes above the beach, looked out over the oily grey sea and turned back to follow the same trail home. The sun’s going down and our surroundings are disappearing into the gloom.

  ‘Did you think I was dead? What about my mom? He took me to Brazil, you know.’

  ‘Aye, it felt like you’d died all right. The police said it was possible but not likely, given that they hadn’t found a body. They couldn’t find your father either so him smuggling you out of the country was the most likely scenario. I didn’t know you’d gone to Brazil until Thomas called the first time. As for your mother, when I came out of the hospital she’d gone too and I’ve never seen her since. I assumed she’d gone back to Brighton or London, but no one we knew down there had seen her. I thought it was possible she was with you and your dad and the police agreed. You know, we never were a couple in the traditional sense. And you called me Andrew, not Daddy.’

  He gives me this weird look, kind of apologetic and sad. The same look Philip gives Shaun in SOTD when they’re in the Jag and Philip’s about to die and transform into a zombie. I think maybe I should smile and nod like Shaun does and show him I understand that despite all that’s happened he loves me like his own son, but he’s cool, he doesn’t need me to do that; he just keeps talking.

  ‘A year or so afterwards a letter came from your mother. In it she said she had made a decision to start a new life. She’d gone back to London and met an American man there, married him and was going to live over there.’

  ‘She went to live in the US?’

  ‘I didn’t know for certain, the letter was posted in England and I never heard from her again. I was relieved she wasn’t with your dad, but it made me more worried for you. I thought you might know where she is. Thomas said he had been trying to track her down.

  ‘I still have all your things, you know, all your toys and clothes. Up in the attic if you want to see them?’

  I’m on the floor in Andrew’s sitting room, next to a pile of kids’ crap that he’s tipped out of a box: a tambourine; a few stuffed animals (none of these has an eye missing or a stitched-up stomach like they do in the movies; they all look pretty new, as if I never touched them); an entire plastic zoo in miniature, zookeepers and all, but no two-headed snakes. I tell Andrew about my two-headed-snake phase. Seriously, it went on for months. Most weekends Thomas drove me to LA zoo so I could stand in front of the vivarium where the two-headed albino corn snake lived, while he sat drinking coffee from a flask and staring at nothing. Thomas can sit and stare for hours. The notice on the tank said: This snake has two brains and one stomach. It wouldn’t survive long in the wild because having two brains restricts its ability to move quickly to escape predators. I guess I was hoping to be there the day it ripped itself in two. I guess that was my transition phase from Brazil to Redondo. We stopped going to the zoo when I signed up for the Galaxy U12s and all my weekends got taken up with football.

  So I’m sitting there surrounded by all this shit, and the shit and I are surrounded by sections of racetrack. The racetrack I remember. Now.

  Andrew goes out to the store to buy new batteries for the controls and to pick up Indian food. When he asks if he can get me a beer or anything while he’s out I tell him I’m straight edge and he says he doesn’t drink either. Andrew doesn’t consider it in any way abnormal to be straight edge, I guess because he did the whole LifeForce thing when he was young.

  While he’s gone I set up the track, clicking the sections together like he showed me. I build it so it runs under all the chairs, transforming the entire room into a Grand Prix circuit. A simple oval, no fancy figures of eight like the pictures on the box. When he gets back I ask Andrew if he thinks Shaun and Ed might have had a racetrack when they were kids in the days before computer games and he knows exactly what I’m talking about. He has SOTD on DVD.

  I take the red car and Andrew’s is blue. We speed around the bends and the cars shoot off and smash into the baseboards or roll into the central island where I’m sitting with my toys and my chicken tikka masala. And I must have felt real safe with Andrew as a kid because I feel real safe with him now. That’s why I tell him about me. About the Galaxy and how I fucked it all up with the drugs and everything. I assume, living where he does, that maybe he doesn’t know about crystal meth, but he’s seen every episode of Breaking Bad. We don’t watch it at the House of Reformation for obvious reasons. Our zombie viewing embraces the undead and avoids the soon-to-be-dead.

  He wants the whole story so I tell him, about that first sleepover in Palos Verdes, about selling Thomas’s computer, about failing the drugs test at the Galaxy, all of it. Andrew says drugs are a universal problem. It’s worse in these small places where there’s nothing to do, and even if there were stuff to do there’s no money to do it with because there’s no much work (not a typo, that’s how he says it), people are depressed and the winters are long. And drugs are cheap as drink. Familiar stories, different people. Not so much of the overprivileged cohort coming down from the belief that they don’t
have the brains to be the next Steve Jobs or Beyoncé, despite what Mommy and Daddy have told them their whole lives, and realising that the only way to maintain the delusion of feeling different and special is the getting high scenario. (That’s not me, by the way; I always knew I wouldn’t be the next Lionel Messi and Thomas never gave me any of that pushy bullshit. I’m just a straight-down-the-line fuck-up, thanks to you and my dad.) As we’re talking, I kind of get the impression Andrew already knows about me. It’s just a hunch.

  ‘When did Thomas contact you? The first time, I mean.’

  Andrew puts down his car controller and leans back against the sofa. Looks me straight in the eye. ‘Well, I don’t know if the first time counts, because I didn’t know the contact was from Thomas. A private detective came to the door one day, looking for information about your mother. I was still at the old house so it would have been twelve or so years ago now. He wouldn’t tell me who’d employed him so I assumed it was your father, maybe looking to send you home. I had nothing to tell him anyway besides what I just told you, about her writing to say she was marrying an American. Do you not know about this? Thomas said he was going to tell you.’

  ‘He wrote me a letter. I guess it’s in there, I didn’t read it all yet.’ I don’t tell him why I didn’t read it all yet.

  ‘Ah, right. Well, the next time was a phone call from Thomas himself, completely out of the blue. In 2009. The conversation got a bit heated, or my side of it anyway, but Thomas just kept apologising, over and over until I ran out of steam.’

  I think I already know the answer to this question but I ask anyway. ‘What was he apologising for?’

  ‘It’s tricky, Sonny; I don’t know what’s for me to tell you or what you should hear direct from Thomas. I thought you’d know all of his side of the story by the time you got here.’

  ‘So you’ve spoken to each other since 2009?’

  ‘We’ve kept in touch. I’d say we’ve become friends, albeit at a distance. He’s told me everything.’

  ‘Right, so he’s told you he’s a murderer?’ I guess I’m pissed that I’ve been kept out of it.

  Andrew uncrosses his legs, crosses them back the other way. Scratches his nose. Tries to appear calm. ‘No, I can’t say he’s mentioned that. Who did he murder?’

  ‘Tell me what he was apologising for and I’ll tell you who he killed.’

  ‘Okay,’ he says, looking unsure. ‘He apologised for two things: for taking you away, and for shooting me in the leg. He said he was following orders from your father. He wasn’t all bad, Sonny. The reason the ambulance came so fast was because he had stopped at the telephone box and dialled 999.’

  Fuck. I knew it. I fucking knew it.

  I guess I’m just sitting there staring because Andrew says, ‘That’s my side of the deal – now tell me who he murdered.’ So, I tell him about the other guru guy and then we both sit there a while not speaking. I break the deadlock.

  ‘So how come you became friends with him? Why didn’t you tell him to go fuck himself?’

  ‘Because he needed help, with you. He was trying to deal with you and your problems and on top of that he’d had a letter from your mother saying your grandmother on your father’s side had died and that at the age of twenty-one you were to inherit whatever was left of the family fortune. He needed your birth certificate and I still had the original.’

  ‘So he’s also been in touch with my mom? She knew where I was living?’

  ‘Well, she wrote to him about that. But Sonny, it’s after midnight, and it’s been a long day. Let’s get some sleep and talk about it tomorrow.’

  Thomas always told me he was a liar and a cheat, and when someone tells you that stuff about themself it makes them honest, right? It makes you trust them. I can’t sleep. I can’t even close my eyes. I lie in bed in the dark listening to Andrew brushing his teeth in the bathroom. I hear him moving around in his room until eventually the noises stop and his snores come fluttering through the wall like clouds of glassywing moths. I work out what the time is in Redondo and imagine myself calling Thomas, forcing him to tell me the truth, what he knows about you. But I’m an emotional coward, I can’t do confrontation, and I don’t want to wake Andrew. I’m done talking.

  I sit up and look out the window at the stars. The moon isn’t full but it’s big and bright enough that I can see its reflection on the ocean in the distance. There’s no other light and weirdly this reminds me of Brazil before the commune, of going with Maria to visit her family by the sea and sitting on the beach with her at night all snuggled up in her arms and listening to her made-up stories about the stars.

  I switch on the light and rip open the envelope of Thomas’s next letter.

  Things We Can’t Undo #3

  Sonny, do you remember the Surubim-rei? Stories about it gave you nightmares in Brazil.

  Sure I do, but, in case you don’t know, the Surubim-rei is a huge, malevolent amphibian, a bit like the oarfish that Thomas and I saw washed up on Catalina Island, only it lives in rivers – the São Francisco river in Brazil to be precise. And it’s mythological. The Truka people, who live in Cabrobó, believe it attacks their fishermen in their boats and winds itself around the legs of cattle at the water’s edge and drags them into the river. Cool, right? They sing songs about it and sit huge carved wooden figures in the prow of their boats to frighten it away.

  When they found Guru Mehdi floating face-down in the river, they assumed he was a victim of the Surubim-rei. I’d never heard the stories at that point so when a delegation brought his body to Ken’s clinic, shouting about the Surubim, I misheard it as your father’s name, Guru Bim. I genuinely believed they had somehow divined the truth and, thinking my number was up, was all ready to confess, but then Ken explained to me what was going on.

  There’d been a couple of deaths in the commune since my arrival, neither suspicious, one of old age, the other the result of a lengthy illness. In both cases funerals were held the day after the death, with the body buried in a kind of wicker coffin in a small graveyard on the periphery of the commune. Mehdi’s death was dealt with in the same way, although his funeral was a much bigger deal, and the wailing and carrying on continued for days. Meanwhile I was planning my next step, which was to bring your father to Quilombo Novo and restore my lifestyle to its former state of degradation.

  Once a fortnight, the boy with the cart, Fabio, came by to drive Ken to the clinic in Salgueiro to stock up on medical supplies. When he was next due I waited out on the road to give him a letter to post in the town and slipped him fifty reals to ensure his errand was kept secret, especially from Ken. The letter was addressed to your father in Olinda, telling him to come exactly one month later.

  I should explain how I came to be so much in your father’s thrall.

  I wouldn’t say your father kept himself to himself in prison, but he gave nothing away, only told you what he wanted you to know in order to get what he wanted. He made no apologies for himself, introduced himself as Guru Bim right from the off, and in the end that’s what got him through, nothing to do with me. Despite the way he came across he was in no way soft. He didn’t need me to earn his privileges for him and he certainly didn’t need my protection.

  He could switch on the charm when it suited him, but he never made the mistake I’ve always made: he never ingratiated himself to anyone, always managed to arrange his business so that any sense of obligation fell to whoever he was dealing with. He was the master of the transaction – you do this for me and I’ll give you that in return, but only as long as it benefits me – he should have been a Wall Street trader, or a politician.

  Basically any one of those guys who makes your life really shit, pushes you down so low that you believe them when they say they’re going to make it all better.

  Please don’t misread this as an attempt to demonise your father and underplay my own wrongdoing – far from it. Despite the differences in our upbringing – me the overprivileged waster, him the poor orphan
ed manipulator, or so I believed – we were equals in so many ways.

  He taught me how to meditate (a handy short-term fallback when drugs were scarce, albeit a poor substitute) and before long he was teaching meditation to the hard men, even some of the screws. It was down to him that we both served minimum sentences.

  When I got out I found us a big old house to rent in the Lake District, near Keswick, chosen partly for its proximity to a recommended dealer. Then I went about finding out where you were living with your mother. I hadn’t bargained on Andrew; it was typical of your father to only give half the story, the half that would inspire me to do his bidding and miss out the information that might make me think twice.

  The day he got out of prison, I picked him up in my old car and drove him to a garage in north London that sold camper vans on behalf of Aussie travellers going home. He picked the one he liked, told the salesman we would part-ex my car, handed over the difference in cash and we were on our way. He thrust your mother’s address, which I’d sent him a few weeks before, under my nose and told me to drive him to Scotland – via Torquay – which, you may realise by now, is something of a roundabout route. He had money in Torquay, stashed in an old lady’s house. When I asked where the money came from, he said Father Christmas. It wasn’t funny but I laughed because it was the first (and last) time I’d heard him make any attempt at anything resembling a joke.

  The journey to Scotland took a long time. Maybe even days. When you’ve done a stretch in prison the value of time changes, slows down, expands. We didn’t rush in any case, stopping for meal breaks at pubs off the motorway, cigarette breaks, pee breaks, meditation breaks. I would sit and smoke a couple of hours away while your father meditated at the top of a hill. We arrived in Drongnock after dark. The house was a bit off the beaten track so I couldn’t get the van close enough and your father tore me off a strip for not having driven up to stake it out in advance. Eventually I parked up in a layby up the road and he ordered me to wait inside the van. Secretly I think he relished the added drama of seeming to have walked all the way from the Isle of Sheppey, as if on some kind of pilgrimage. He certainly looked and smelled as if he had. I’m sure I did too.