Our Little Cruelties

by Liz Nugent

  ‘He’s not answering,’ she said and began to weep.

  ‘God, sorry,’ I said, excusing myself. I was unable to deal with a woman’s tears, and my panic was increasing.

  ‘Your brother’s an asshole,’ Susan said, wiping her eyes dry and straightening her dress. I realized quickly that she meant the one she was married to, the one who wasn’t here.

  ‘Where did he go this morning?’ I asked her.

  ‘He said he was going to have a meeting with some lawyers from New York, promised it wouldn’t take more than an hour. He was supposed to collect the cake on the way home. Not a word from him. He’d better be in the goddam hospital because any other excuse is not going to wash with me.’ Her American accent became more pronounced when she was angry.

  ‘Do you want me to get the cake?’ I wanted to leave too and I didn’t want to come back.

  ‘No, it’s okay, Brian picked it up, but can you please help me with the other things? Food, serving, clearing up? There’s twenty adults and nineteen children down there. I can’t do it all on my own.’

  I was reluctant. ‘Okay, but can I have a shower first and a clean T-shirt?’

  She looked at me and sighed deeply. ‘Forget it, Luke, forget I asked anything. It’s all about you, isn’t it? Clean towels are on the shelf inside the door.’ She gestured towards their en suite over her shoulder.

  ‘But, Susan, I dressed up as Donald Duck for Daisy,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you’d invited half –’

  ‘Whatever.’ She left the room and slammed the door.

  Bitch. I had been trying to do a good thing. It wasn’t my fault that Will was probably screwing some trainee over his office desk.

  I took my time in the shower, cut my toenails on their bed. I shaved with Will’s razor and splashed on some nice-smelling aftershave. I chose a brand-new pair of Levi’s with the labels still attached from Will’s side of the wardrobe and a plain white Dolce & Gabbana T-shirt which looked no different to the Penneys one I’d just dumped in their bin, only clean.

  When I got downstairs, I could hear that most of the adults were in the dining room. Children were running amok in all directions. I headed straight for the kitchen. A girl I didn’t recognize was pulling a cork from a bottle.

  ‘Here, let me help you,’ I offered. ‘I’m Will’s brother, Luke.’ I filled her glass and found one for myself.

  ‘Hi, yeah, I’m supposed to bring this back in to the table,’ she said. I studied her again for a moment. Maybe I did know her. Had I slept with her? She was wary and darted out of the room.

  Brian came in bearing huge half-filled bowls of potato salad. I hid the glass on a shelf behind me. ‘Christ, Luke, you’re supposed to be helping. Will is still missing. I’m going to kill him. Here, grab those side plates and the paper plates for the kids. I don’t know where the dessert bowls are kept, they’ll have to do. And call all the kids in, we’re going to do the cake now. Have you got a light for the candles?’ Brian was being overly assertive. He clearly liked being the man of this house.

  I drained the glass of wine as soon as his back was turned, poured myself another from a different bottle and went outside to call the children in. Most of them looked at me uncertainly, but the two supervising adults hustled them inside. I followed. Brian met me in the kitchen. ‘Where are the plates I asked you for? Have you got a light?’ I assured him I did and grabbed a load of plates off the countertop. ‘Luke!’ he shouted at me. ‘Those ones are dirty. Can you not see what you’re doing? Those ones, there!’ He pointed to a stack of Rugrats paper plates. I picked them up and followed him into the room.

  It was heaving with people and noise. A Rugrats cake sat in the middle of the table and Daisy sat on her mother’s lap, ready to make her wish and blow out the candles. ‘Give me the lighter, Luke,’ said Brian, and I patted my pockets and realized that my lighter was in the pocket of the jeans upstairs on the bathroom floor. Susan glared at me while some other chivalrous smoker proffered his Zippo like it was a golden chalice.

  A loud woman excitedly said, ‘Why don’t we have Luke sing Happy Birthday? He’s the singer here, after all!’ and someone clapped and I felt the baby dance across my eyes. My body started to pump sweat again.

  ‘No,’ said Susan firmly, ‘let the kids do it. Luke is exhausted after all the hard work he’s done.’ She smiled sweetly at me, but not with her eyes.

  The kids sang Happy Birthday and Daisy blew out the candles and I slipped back out to the kitchen and attacked another bottle of wine. Then people started filtering through, looking for the cloakroom, their children, the toilet. I smiled and endured small talk as best I could while knocking back as much wine as possible.

  Then I noticed a hush and Will entered the kitchen, followed by Susan, physically pushing him out into the garden. Their voices were raised. People left quickly after that. Brian distracted Daisy with the age-appropriate rocking horse he’d given her. I realized I hadn’t bought her a gift. Susan came storming back into the kitchen, leaving Will outside, his face red with fury. ‘Is everything okay?’ I said redundantly.

  ‘Go home, Luke, and take Donald Duck with you.’ She went straight past me and a door slammed upstairs. I swiped a bottle of wine and left through the front door. Brian came out after me.

  ‘Jesus, he treats her so badly. Tosser.’ He saw the bottle of wine in my hand. ‘Hand over your car keys, you dickhead.’

  They were also in the pocket of the pair of jeans on Susan’s bathroom floor.

  ‘You’re both pathetic, you know?’ Brian said. ‘Absolutely pathetic.’ But there was something smug and superior about Brian. He enjoyed being the one who hadn’t disgraced himself.

  ‘Daisy didn’t even notice her dad was missing. That tells you everything you need to know,’ he went on. So self-righteous. ‘I’m going to drive you back to your place. You can get your car in the morning. I need to talk to you about the book anyway.’

  Back at my house, Brian sat me down. ‘I just read the first part and I love it. Obviously, we have to take the bits about Mum out, I mean, you can’t do that to her, it’s not fair. But the editor loves it too. You were always a mental kid, I don’t know why you weren’t taken to a shrink much earlier. All that stuff about religion, the first holy communion, the stigmata at Halloween, it’s brilliant.’

  ‘But, Brian, I’m taking that out.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m taking it out of the book. Kim and I have been revising it. It’s too … much. I don’t want all those stories out there. They’re too personal.’

  ‘But that’s what the publishers want, that’s what they’re paying for.’

  ‘I don’t care. They’re not going in the book.’

  ‘Look, your story is brilliant – how you go from being this disturbed kid to this mega-famous pop star, all the drugs and rehab. It’s story gold, bro.’

  ‘I’m not doing it.’

  ‘But don’t you see? It has a happy ending. You’ve recovered. All that shit is behind you.’

  I emptied the end of the wine into my glass and said the words for the first time. ‘Do you think so, Brian? I’m an alcoholic. I’m hanging on to my sanity by a thread.’

  He didn’t want to listen to me and started ranting about the £150k advance I’d had from the UK publishing house. If we didn’t deliver the book, we’d have to give it back.

  ‘They’ll get a book,’ I insisted. ‘They just won’t get the lurid detail.’

  ‘But that’s what they want, you arsehole! They’re hardly going to pay that kind of money for a biography of a squeaky-clean faded pop star, are they? I sold it to them on the basis of your freak-outs, your bad times. They want the dirt, that’s the best bit!’

  ‘This is my life we are talking about.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, I negotiated that deal and I need to get my percentage out of it.’

  ‘Brian, I can’t do it.’

  ‘Look, I wasn’t going to say anything, but I’ve just gone mortgage-agreed based on m
y cut of that deal. Please, Luke, don’t blow this on me. This is my first home. You’ve had this place since you were, what, twenty-one? If I don’t have the money, I don’t get the house.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Kim is going to have to be paid for the work she’s already done. The publishers are probably going to insist that you pay it.’

  ‘Then I will.’

  He begged, pleaded and wheedled for the next hour, alternately praising me for my bravery in telling my story and how much it could help other people, then threatening me that he’d tell Mum what I’d said about her being a witch. We were children again.

  He even went out and bought me another bottle of wine and I let him rant on while I drained it to the last drop, drinking myself sober. But I didn’t change my mind. In fact, I was now adamant that the book would never go ahead in any form. He left.

  The next morning, I was sick: physically sick and sick with guilt and fear. When I finally ventured out, two days later, I walked into my local parish hall and my first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

  27

  2016

  By 2016 I was in a good place. My recovery had started gradually two years previously. I had never been able to stick at AA for more than a month before that. I really noticed it one day when I went to the fridge and found I had all the component parts to make myself a full meal. I had gone to the supermarket earlier and usually those trips ended with a lottery of items spread all over my kitchen. I had always been prone to bouts of food poisoning because I forgot to put food in the fridge or to check use-by dates. I’d have bought a tin of tomatoes instead of beans but then I’d be so hungry that I’d eat them anyway. But on this particular day, I had bought fresh milk, bread, potatoes, a piece of steak and frozen peas. Even more surprisingly, I knew what to do with these items to make a coherent dinner, and have breakfast next day.

  I felt calm. I did not feel agitated or anxious or elated or depressed. I’d had some lucid days in the previous years, but this felt different. When people talk about depression, they refer to a ‘black dog’ that follows them everywhere, but I had been plagued by an entire menagerie of reptiles and insects and ravenous lions and bears. They were gone. I could taste the food. For the first time in years, my taste buds were working again.

  The only significant change in my life was that my mother had died late that summer of 2014. I hadn’t seen her for four years by that stage. She was scared of me and I suppose I had given her good reason to be. But I had also tried to make amends at times too. I sent her flowers on her birthday, bought her expensive gifts I could barely afford, but she did not acknowledge these gestures.

  Her funeral was ordinary, with just a few of her old showbiz pals in attendance, whose days in the limelight were also past. The siblings she had been so ashamed of all showed up. I couldn’t understand their loyalty to her. Brian brought a suit for me to wear and stood over me while I shaved. I was warned to turn up sober, not to make a scene or a fuss, but I felt okay. Maybe I should have been tearful. All I felt was relief. Will, unexpectedly, sobbed throughout. I had not been asked to be involved with the funeral planning, so I didn’t have to make a speech, though all three of us carried her coffin with the undertakers without any arguments. That was the only weight on my shoulder that day. I felt irrationally at peace, without being elated or artificially high.

  Will’s ex-wife, Susan, came with Daisy, their daughter, who must have been twenty by then. She appeared not to be talking to either of her parents and sat in a pew at the back, chewing gum and looking constantly at her phone. As usual, Brian was the only person she showed any warmth to. Her nose and eyebrows were pierced. Her eyes and lips were blackened with make-up. She usually avoided me at family occasions but at the post-funeral afternoon tea, she approached me looking for cocaine. I had given up on cocaine since the overdose, and even in my chaotic episodes I knew to stay away from it. She wouldn’t take no for an answer and demanded the number of my dealer. I told her to fuck off quietly and she spat at my feet and turned away.

  In the weeks after my mother’s death, I felt incrementally better every day. The craziness did not vanish overnight, but that particular autumn evening when I made my own dinner and ate it, washed down with a glass of water, I knew there had been a major shift in my psyche. I cleaned the flat, took clothes to a launderette, restored books to their shelves, CDs and records to their cases and sleeves. I changed the bedlinen on my salty bed. I took a long hot shower and scrubbed a week’s worth of grime from my skin, washed my hair and shaved. I went and bought a newspaper, and really, everything was news to me, because I had been living in my own bubble for so long that I was hardly aware of anything that went on outside the span of my two arms.

  Over the following days, I registered in my library, borrowed books that people were discussing on the radio, drank good coffee in coffee shops. I basked in this new feeling of normality, nervous though, that it would, like all other times, be temporary.

  During the previous decade, all those stories about my mental childhood and psychotic episodes had been sold to British tabloids. I don’t know which of my old friends or neighbours or former classmates sold those stories, but my train wreck of a life was out there in the open. I was a public joke to be ridiculed or a champion for the virtue signallers. My life had been lived mostly in fear.

  By Christmas of 2014, I had not seen the tiny baby for eleven weeks. In the intervening time I had returned to my psychiatrist, the only one I had trusted with the truth of that constant companion. He adjusted my prescription. I was on a low dosage antipsychotic drug and I took it religiously. I did not touch alcohol, gave up smoking and every other drug I’d been using, even weed, which I had used so frequently I barely thought of it as a drug at all. I returned to Alcoholics Anonymous, sat at the back and said nothing for the first four weeks, until one day an older woman invited me to introduce myself. Though it wasn’t my first time at AA, this time it was different – I felt I was among family. I probably should have gone to NA as well, but even though I had taken a lot of drugs, I never needed them like I needed alcohol.

  Other weeds interested me, and I wrapped up warm and dug in the rear garden of the flat I was renting. I tore up weeds and planted some seasonal shrubs. I went to my local park and asked the gardeners there for some advice. One of them recognized me. He was wary of any interaction. My encounters with the guards and psychiatric institutions were well documented in the press and across social media. But as embarrassing as those incidents were, I knew that I was a different and better person now. One of the older gardeners took me under his wing and, in return for advice, I would help him with raking leaves and turning soil and the more arduous tasks while the younger lads were on their lunch break.

  I communicated with my brothers. I told them I was well, at least for now. I asked them if I could help with their gardens. Susan was busy at the time so I did her garden too and helped her with the Marriage Equality campaign.

  By the end of the summer of 2015, I asked Brian if I might take back control of my finances. He was extremely reluctant to hand over the reins, but Will took my side and suggested I could sue Brian if he pushed back. Brian relented then and I quickly discovered he had all along been taking a hefty management fee out of my royalties, almost 50 per cent. And, of course, he had the big house I’d bought when I was twenty-one years old and sold to him ten or so years later for some reason lost in the mist of time. Brian was unapologetic when I confronted him.

  ‘I’ve been your manager, your agent, your accountant and your carer. I’m the one who had to drop everything every time you were arrested, overdosed or threatened to jump out a window and who’s to say you won’t go back there. I’ve earned every penny of that. And the house. You did stupid things with your money. I stopped it being wasted.’

  ‘By lining your own pockets?’

  ‘I saved you. Repeatedly.’

  It was true, I suppose. Brian had come to my rescue many times, but now I under
stood that he’d done it to justify the money he took; not out of love or care for me, but as a job.

  All three of us were single men now. Will and Susan’s marriage had long since broken down although he was still handsome and successful and could attract women. Brian had occasional girlfriends but nothing that ever lasted more than a few months. I tried to contact Kate again. I found her on Facebook. She was happily married with two children living in Italy somewhere outside Rome. I wanted to know why she had left me, why we couldn’t have helped each other through her miscarriage. She replied, saying she could not revisit the past, and cautiously wished me well. I felt wary of a relationship. I couldn’t ever see myself with a family. And who would take a chance on an ex-pop star with a history of psychotic episodes and drug abuse, living in a rented flat with no career and no future? And no guarantee that I would not slip back down into the abyss of mental illness.

  My royalties income going forward was not bad, now it was all assigned to me and I’d cut Brian out of the picture. My erratic and well-known history meant I would never qualify for a mortgage, particularly post-recession, but I didn’t have to work to keep the wolf from the door. However, I needed something to fill my days and I wanted to be useful. I asked Will if there was anything I could do in his company. I didn’t want to be the tea boy but perhaps I could train to be a cameraman or a sound recordist.

  ‘Christ, Luke, you don’t have a clue what a producer actually does, do you? I only hire crew when I need them, on a shoot. They work for me on contract. They are not my employees and I don’t train them. They are full professionals, and when I get work experience students in, they tend to be in their teens, not their forties. You’d only embarrass yourself.’