by James Damm
Segregating himself alone in his squalor, the television stayed switched off, knocks at the door went unanswered, and he had ripped the phone out of the wall. Bitterness, anger and a mean, animalistic hatred brewed inside Mike, who wanted nothing more than to suffer in dark isolation.
After what could have been two or three days, Mike stopped giving a fuck; counting the resentment of his own thoughts was losing its edge, but the need to be angry hadn’t subsided. The thing about mental self-harm was eventually the triggers became blunt and fresh instruments were necessary to produce the same fury.
In the hallway of his house there were photos, talismans and knickknacks everywhere. From an outside perspective, it was all cheap tat but there was a story behind it all – personal and historical slices of a time gone by. Planting his feet in a house he’d walked for decades, Mike tried to look at it all with fresh eyes.
A tour of Mike’s home was more like a museum than a house. Sporting medals, holiday photos and report cards all hung from the walls as a living monument to a boy always destined for greatness. Whether boxing, rugby or running, the boy was the best at whatever he tried. With the intensity, drive and discipline he’d instilled in his son no matter what, he’d eventually be the best. But the boy commemorated by his father was not the son people would expect – it was David, rather than John, whose life plastered the walls.
As Mike worked the walls, reminiscing about fishing trips, walks and sporting events, the absence of John grew larger with every step. A stranger trying to learn about Mike would picture one son, not two, as if a deliberate attempt had been to erase John from existence. Yet as Mike studied his surroundings, he justified himself to an invisible witness. Mike loved both his sons, there was no favourite or preferred child.
Sickness had come and robbed him of David. Short, powerful and blunt, the illness had consumed David and rotted his body inside and out. No matter how good a mentor Mike had been, regardless of how driven and capable his son had become, the disease had no care who it targeted. But Mike had never loved one more than the other, had he? Maybe he had designed the shrine to the son he lost, and that explained the mismatch.
But Marco’s words rang in Mike’s ears.
That was the kind of man he was.
The words from Marco’s story haunted him. Was Mike deluding himself, blocking out the reality? Parenting solo had been hard, diminishing and difficult to get right, but he’d loved those boys, fathered and mentored them as best he could. The comments had echoed and bounced in his brain for days. Rattled each time they repeated, Mike silently raged further. Yet there were still no signs of John.
Pulling his glasses from his eyes, Mike leant back in his seat and tried to remember. His brain rattled for recollection, but something clouded the memories in fog. Angry, drunk and bitter. So many of those years were a blur where he felt like he was in the passenger seat rather than in control.
From what he could recall, Mike remembered fondly what it was like to be a mentor, to have the attention of two inexperienced boys who clung on every word. Like every father-son relationship, there came a time where the boy would ask the man for advice. Bullies at school had been stealing John’s lunch, pushing him over and humiliating him in front of his classmates. The teacher’s advice had been to tell them, but Mike had raised no snitch. They earned respect and in the background, on the quiet, he advised John to fight back, to take a beating if he must.
Two days later John returned home sobbing, the mud on his clothes and grazes on his skin visible. Mike had waited outside his door, listened to the weeping, but felt nothing but pride. The stories of bullying stopped and as a father, he felt his work was complete. Had the guidance driven the boy to hate him? The purpose was to build resolve within his son, to strengthen, not weaken him.
Mike unscrewed the cap from the wine and took another deep swig from the bottle. It fucked his head, his mind all over the place. David had always made sense, always been the good older child made in his image, whereas John had been the outlier. When Mike said left, John went right; when Mike pushed him in a direction, it only made John drift further away.
That was the kind of man he was. The statement was stirring him up like crazy. Somewhere in his thoughts, Mike had grabbed a ladder and was halfway up, intending to reach the attic. The crawlspace over his head was a museum of trash that slowly revealed itself. Over several years, anything in the way got shoved out of sight rather than cleared. Forget the hallway pictures, the truth would lie up in the darkness.
The space lit by a cheap torch, Mike hauled himself up after quite a struggle, getting too old for such exertion. The expected junk was up here: broken toys, prams and discarded clothes in trunks. As Mike sorted through the jumble, it scared him that nothing triggered any memories. Most of the possessions up here were ones he’d have bought himself with Maggie out of the picture, yet they stimulated nothing. Baby clothes, toddler outfits, school uniforms and toys all drew a blank reaction. Had those heavy drinking days clouded so much?
After much searching Mike came across a box, tucked into the corner which caught his eye. This time he knew exactly what it would be, and his heart sank in his chest. Yet his hand grabbed it and brought it down with him. The family photo album that nobody had updated since the day Maggie passed.
In it were heart-breaking amounts of empty pages; Mike never had the urge to take many photos after Maggie. As he sat flicking through, images of a happy family greeted him. A beaming baby and panting toddler with a proud mother and father behind. Never much money but always the best they could muster – there were walks, picnics and small trips to the beach littered in there.
The last photo was of Mike beaming, a smile he couldn’t recognise. In one photo a toddler David stuck out his tongue and in the other John looked utterly confused and lost. Better times, simpler and happier. Months later, those boys would be motherless and Mike left alone to parent them.
It was the absence that hurt the most.
The wine bottle smashed against the wall, and Mike swept the album to the floor. Drunk and furious, Mike had found an unfamiliar method by which to torture himself. Yet as he staggered back towards the ladder, his eyes fell onto an open page in the album – a barbeque with other adults who had kids of their own. Who were they? Then it clicked.
Mike knew where he needed to go.
Hammering on the door, Mike could see no light on inside. Would she even still live there? Rage and stubbornness meant he rejected any possibility of that not being the case. Besides, who born and raised in Bellington really got out? Through darkened streets he’d stumbled, along pavements and paths not walked in over a decade. With his memory, was he even getting it right? Finally he came upon a place that matched up with his memory; now dark, it was hard to trace whether the comparison he was making was accurate.
“LINDA!” Mike bellowed. “LINDA HUGHES.”
Somewhere to the side a light flicked on and the curtains of an upstairs window twitched. At the window was a woman in her fifties, with dyed brown hair and squinting eyes. Right street, wrong house. He was sure that was Linda.
“LINDA!” Mike yelled as he stumbled over front walls in the window’s direction. Progress was slow over such hurdles, but still Mike kept leaping.
“SHUT THE HELL UP, SOME OF US HAVE JOBS IN THE MORNING,” an angry voice yelled from an unknown window.
The front door was thrown open, light spilling out into the night. A woman in a dressing gown appeared and Mike fell to her feet. Staring down at him was a stern and unwelcoming expression he hadn’t crossed paths with in years. The face he pictured in his mind was younger. Had it all really had been that long ago? Hands on hips, Linda did not look happy.
“Mike? Jesus Christ, it’s half eleven at night,” the woman squinted down and spat. “What the hell are you doing here? Someone will call the police.”
Sobbing on the floor, Mike’s chosen words neither came out in the intended order nor made much sense. “Heroin in my boy. Th
ey found heroin in him, Linda. It’s all my fault.”
“Get inside,” Linda spat again as she half-dragged, half-helped Mike through the front door.
Linda pulled Mike to a chair where the room spun around him. The sound of a kettle boiling, smacking porcelain and cupboards being thrown open echoed around him.
Slamming a large jug of water on the table before him along with a glass, Linda ordered him to drink. “We don’t even speak until that’s looking empty. If I’m even to give you two minutes of my time, I want Michael Fitzgerald to be coherent and sober.”
Mike murmured a response, and with little accuracy poured himself a drink. Linda joined him sternly across the table and true to her word remained silent as she watched him swallow back water. A cigarette and a coffee. It was nearly twenty minutes, and her second cigarette stubbed into an ashtray, before she finally deemed him to have drunk enough.
“You keep going,” she instructed. “What is it you want, Mike?”
His head spinning considerably less, Mike focused on Linda. A former neighbour, she had regularly babysat for the boys in the early years before moving across town. Maggie became close with her, confided in and bonded with her. Mike was never high on her approval list. Why had he wanted to see her? Where else could the boy have received enough help to stay away? No friends, no family and seventeen. The boy should have come crawling back. He didn’t, and that required help.
“I need to know where the boy went after he ran away,” Mike stammered. “He’d have come here, whether he got your help or not – this would have been one of the few places he knew he would be welcome.”
“I expected you over fifteen years ago,” Linda chided. “He came here, crying his eyes out and in a state. You had beaten him again and said some unforgivable things. He begged me to make sure he never had to go back. I watched a teenage boy at rock bottom beg for an escape. I told him there was always a bed here for him. He said he needed to go further, as far away as he could. So I gave him all I had in cash, two hundred pounds, and the next morning he got a bus out of here. I never saw him in person again, aside from on the news, just like you must have done. But you know all that. So why did it take you fifteen years to give a flying fuck about your son, Mike?”
Mike swallowed some more water. “He was better off without me. The longer I left it, the more I knew he must have been okay.”
“A nice excuse to shift the responsibility but you’re right, he was better off without you,” Linda snapped. The years had not softened the anger in her eyes or fury in her tone. “Do you even remember what you told him? I will answer that myself so you don’t manipulate it. You told your youngest son you wished it was him that had died, not Maggie or David. After all that boy had been through, what kind of monster were you?”
Mike had no excuses left. Had he really said that? Time had wiped the memory of the words, only leaving faint remembrance of the outcome. Nothing surprised him anymore; the chilling anxiety and bitterness in his body after a drink a permanent fixture. Internally he told himself that he hadn’t meant it, he loved the child but there was that side to him that clamoured to hurt others as much as itself. Racist slurs, homophobia or many evil taunts had left his lips in the past, anything to twist the knife enough to tear a reaction out of the kindest of souls.
“After what happened with Maggie and the cancer, David and his sickness, I let myself self-destruct. I’m sorry every day that John was around for that.”
“Sorry every day? Are you even listening to yourself? There was no sickness for David, he killed himself. Hanged himself in your own home,” Linda said, shaking with fury. “Tell yourself he was ill, tell anyone who cares to listen that a rapid sickness took him away. Absolve yourself of any blame, but deep down I know you remember the truth. You had two boys who needed a man and a father to step up to the plate. Instead, they had you. You pushed and you pushed those boys, until both of them snapped.”
The sensation was like Mike was falling without the ground in sight. His stomach turned and his body felt light. Of course he remembered what had happened to David: suicide, two years older than John, he hadn’t coped well with the loss of his mother. To fill the void Mike had poured attention into him, be it sporting or school success, hoping it would be enough to pull him through. Hindsight was a wonderful thing. The warning signs were all there, yet Mike had missed them. There was no coming back after the moment they lowered the casket of his first-born son into the ground.
“When you and Maggie were first married, we used to joke that there was the truth and then your amended version. We used to mock the alternative reality in your head, one where you could never not be the hero. It wasn’t a gag though, it went deeper than that, didn’t it? You can’t even separate the truth from the lie anymore – you aren’t even sure yourself.”
Linda laughed when Mike offered no response. “Why are you even here, Mike? On a holiday in your own past? A tourist in your youth? Let me tell you how I really feel now Maggie nor the boys are in earshot. I told her to leave you a hundred times. I had begged her to. But Maggie, bless her heart, stayed torn between her love for you and the chaos that came with it. Then she found a lump, cancer, and any resilience she had crumbled. It was swift, too far along, and it was an injustice in this world that such a wonderful woman like her died and you stayed behind. One look at you and I can see all the torture and pain you have endured over the years, but it still can’t make me happy, not after all you inflicted on that poor innocent family.”
“Anything you say I can’t disagree with,” Mike admitted. “I was a terrible husband, a worse father, a drunk and a violent one at that. I’m not here for forgiveness, sympathy or some kind of redemption. I’m here because I want to know the truth about the boy and I can’t even answer you why. Maybe it will make it seem all worth it? That he turned out okay despite all my influence? Maybe it is a selfish trip. I will die soon, every inch of my body is screaming at me to stop with the drinking, but I know that if I stop the rest of me does too, it runs too deep these days. You don’t owe me anything, but what do you know about the boy?”
Another cigarette was lit as Linda, hands shaking with rage, smoked. There was a decade of hatred in her body. Her face winced and curled up in some kind of revulsion every time her eyes even flicked at Mike.
“He wrote me a letter a year or two later,” Linda confirmed. “All you need to know is that he was okay. He landed nowhere worse than he did that night. He seemed happy.”
A wave of relief washed over Mike before being replaced. The boy had run away from home, ended in a place safe far from Mike. A soldier and eventually a superhero. Yet the idea he landed nowhere worse was a falsehood. Somewhere heroin came into the mix.
“They let me see the body. He had heroin in his bloodstream,” Mike said, his voice cracking. “He was an addict and any idea he died okay is a lie. I need to know what happened.”
Concern grew in Linda’s face. She could see no lie in Mike’s face, but she remained cautious, hostile. “What do you want from me?”
Mike shrugged awkwardly. “I came here because you were the next logical step in the story; I guess what I need to know is where he ended up next. At some point he joined the army and after that flew into the sky. Outside of those sketchy details, I don’t know a thing. And I want to. It’s too late to make amends now, but I want to know what happened to my son.”
Linda shifted in her seat and took another drag on her cigarette. “I don’t think John was ever in the army.”
It was Mike’s turn to survey Linda and see no lie in her face. “What makes you say that?”
Linda got to her feet. “I’m showing you this for him, not you.”
Leaving the room, Mike heard boxes being opened in the next room as he finished his water. A few minutes passed by and Linda returned with a sheet of paper.
“Two years later he sent me this letter as a thank you. I saved it because the words were kind and it meant something, even after all this time. I
will let you read it, only so you can get a sense of what I mean.”
“Read it.”
“What?”
“I can’t read, Linda.”
“You’re joking.”
When Mike said nothing, Linda laughed and shook her head. “That makes sense now. A violent man who could never express what was going on in his head in words. How does that even happen?”
“They kept telling me I’d get it,” Mike replied, embarrassed. “Yet the years went by and I never did. It was like reading Chinese. Eventually school was just about surviving. I was in fights, I was defiant, I was a clown, I was a disruptor and eventually I got expelled. After that I went down the pits with my dad and uncle. I didn’t need words after that.”
Linda paused as if absorbing a new side to Mike. It made his eyes look down, but her stare remained in place. Eventually she got whatever she was after, nodded, and Mike was secretly thankful she resisted mocking further.
Dear Linda,
For nearly two years I’ve begun this letter, but never quite found the words that seemed right to finish it. I can only say I’m sorry for that. You told me to let you know when I was safe, but I selfishly delayed doing so. Enclosed you’ll find every penny of the two hundred pounds you gave me that night, and a little more. I know you’d say it wasn’t about the money, that it was mine to keep, but pride meant I felt I owed you it back someday. This letter is to let you know I’m not just safe, but doing better than that.
I can never repay you the true amount I owe you for what you did that night, but I hope this update lets you know just how important it was and my future. I live in Leeds now, have my flat and a job. None of it is fancy – I work nights as a cleaner hoovering office blocks and emptying bins. But I love it all, and it’s mine. For the first time in my life, I can honestly say I’ve carved out something of my own. I’m putting myself through college to get qualifications that hopefully means I can have something better-paid someday. None of it’s really a plan, but I’m planting seeds for the future, making sure I have as many options as I can.
