by Liz Nugent
She departed again in another taxi and I quickly turned away from the press and ran back indoors. They shouted through my letter box: ‘Do you have any comment to make on why you were fired from your job at a Parisian school twenty-two years ago, Brian?’
FUCK.
I swung the door open again.
‘In 1995, I was teaching English in the Institut Charles Sorel. A young student, Arabelle Grasse, became obsessed with me. I did absolutely nothing to encourage her, but she told some of her friends I was her boyfriend. When the headmaster implied I was having some kind of improper liaison with her, I punched him, and was fired on the spot. That is all that happened and you won’t find a shred of evidence of anything else. If any of you even hint at me being a paedophile, I will sue you and your newspapers.’
I turned on my heel and closed the door behind me. And that’s when I realized the scale of the mistake I had just made. I knew exactly how they’d run this: ‘Brian Drumm denies paedophilia rumours.’ I should have said nothing at all. I was about to be ruined.
Why had I opened my mouth to the press? It could all have been sorted calmly and quietly, but I had given them my denial. And Will had spoken to the bloody journalist in the first place.
I sat up late watching Twitter. Already my name and the word ‘paedo’ were linked in tweets. #DrummFamilyFreakShow was a hashtag already, lifted from Daisy’s blog. I got hostile emails from clients requesting to be taken off my books with immediate effect. I didn’t respond to anything. About midnight, there was an unmerciful pounding on the front door that I couldn’t ignore. I found Luke on my doorstep, eyes rolling back in his head, swaying like a blade of weak grass in the wind. He was drunk.
I let him in. He shouted abuse at me for selling his stories to the media. I denied it.
‘What are you talking about? Who told you that?’
‘Will!’
‘Luke, why are you drunk? This is really bad. You can’t believe anything Will tells you any more. He hates me because I’m Daisy’s dad.’
‘What?’
Clearly, Luke was the only person who hadn’t been watching the social media storm that had exposed our whole family. He’d been drinking for twenty-four hours after three years of sobriety.
‘Will I call Mary for you?’
He slumped on to the sofa and quickly passed out. Christ, this was the last thing I needed.
I was hoping my days of looking after Luke were over. I removed his shoes and threw a blanket over him. I locked all the booze in the house into the pantry, left two pints of water and Solpadeine on the coffee table, and a large plastic bowl on the floor beside the sofa. I rang Mary.
‘Brian! What the hell is going on? Where is Luke? I just got back from Galway to all these messages and my apartment is trashed and I can’t get hold of Luke. His phone is here. Are you really Daisy’s dad? What is going on with your family?’
I didn’t go into much detail about the family end of things but warned her not to believe anything she read about me being some kind of child molester. I reassured her that Luke was with me but told her he was upset. I didn’t want to tell her he’d fallen off the wagon. I knew it would jeopardize their relationship.
‘Can I talk to him? Please?’
‘He’ll call you in the morning, Mary, okay? It’s been a really long day.’
‘Has he had a drink?’
I paused for too long before I denied it.
‘Tell him not to come back until he’s been sober for forty-eight hours, and get him to a meeting as soon as you can. There’s one in Blackrock at one p.m. tomorrow. Make sure he goes.’
I resented how it was just assumed I’d be the one to take care of Luke. I was no longer his agent. I owed him nothing.
Fuck Will. In one day, he had destroyed my career, my relationship with my daughter and my reputation as well as Luke’s sobriety and, possibly, his relationship with Mary.
I turned off my phone, took the battery out of my doorbell and went to bed.
In the morning, I made strong coffee and toast and got Luke to shower before I agreed to tell him anything. He was shaking and tearful. He looked terrified.
‘Brian, did you really sell my stories? How could you do that to me?’
‘Look, I never said anything that wasn’t true, and most of the time they were things that had happened in the distant past. I badly needed the money. And I was keeping you in the public eye. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, right?’
‘You did all that for me?’ His sarcasm was evident.
‘I hated teaching, and you refused to write the book, remember? It wasn’t malicious, I swear. I’m sorry, I just … needed the money.’
‘Christ, it’s always money with you. I don’t know how I let you take this house from me. You really took advantage of me. I wasn’t well in the head.’
‘Yeah, well, look where you ended up last night when you weren’t “well in the head”. I hope that was a temporary slip, Luke, you have to stay away from alcohol and whatever drugs you were on last night.’
‘Are you going to tell the papers about this?’
‘No, the papers are more interested in Daisy and Will and me than they are in you, Luke. It should make a nice change for you. There are a few things I need to tell you.’
Luke was shocked to discover I was Daisy’s dad. He didn’t remember that I’d told him last night.
‘Brian! How could you do that to your own brother?’
‘He did it to me first, and –’ I remembered – ‘he did it to you too. Remember Kate?’
‘What about Kate?’
‘Will had an affair with her before you met her. Don’t you think it was strange that she dumped you after you were engaged?’
‘But she never told me that! She had a miscarriage.’
‘I know. Susan and Will split up because she found out about him and Kate. He was desperate to save his marriage. I wouldn’t put it past him to have blackmailed Kate in some way. Susan was never going to take him back while Kate was a member of the family.’
‘What? Who knew about this? My God, is there nobody I can trust? We’re supposed to be family.’
I wasn’t finished burying the knife in Will.
‘You know that Will hit Mary when she worked for him back in the day?’
His face paled.
‘My Mary? My girlfriend?’
‘Yes.’
‘But she never mentioned it.’
‘He treats women like shit. Yes, I made a few quid out of you when it was financially necessary, but Will is the one who really betrayed you. What did he ever do to help your career? When you were looking for acting work, he did nothing. Direct your anger in the right direction, Luke.’
He said nothing but shook his head violently as if there was a bumble bee inside it.
‘I can’t take this. I can’t take it.’
‘Luke, come on, nothing changes for you. You’re a film star with a cool girlfriend, leading a sober life, right? This was a slip. I’m driving you to an AA meeting in Blackrock. Stay here tonight and then go home to Mary tomorrow, and ask her, just ask her what happened between her and Will. From what I remember, he used and abused her, like he did everyone else. She was probably too embarrassed to tell you. Don’t ruin what you have with her. Look where she has brought your life and career. Don’t fuck this up. She’s crazy about you.’
After I dropped Luke to the meeting, I called Susan. I had barely thought of her all weekend, but I couldn’t bear to think that Will might be the person consoling her after all the trauma.
‘Susan?’
‘Yes.’ Her voice was faint, weak.
‘Are you okay?’
‘I have lymphoma. Burkitt lymphoma. I’m in St Vincent’s. They’re doing blood tests and scans. Brian, I’m scared. I’m really scared.’
A lightning strike of pain crossed my forehead.
‘What is that? Cancer?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who’s with you? I
s Will there?’
‘No, I was trying to get hold of him.’
Why him? Why always him?
‘Stay put. I’m five minutes away. I’m coming right now.’
I was with Susan when a doctor asked to speak to her in private. She insisted the doctor could speak freely in front of me. Dr Shaw asked what my relationship to Susan was. I thought it was a strange question, and when Susan said I was her brother-in-law, Dr Shaw asked again if she was sure she didn’t want to speak to her in private.
I knew there was something serious going on. Susan had already been admitted to a private room from A&E because treatment needed to start straight away. She had nothing with her, no overnight bag, not even a toothbrush.
Susan was perched on the bed, looking pale and sick. I took her hand, but she shrugged it away.
‘Whatever it is, please just tell me!’ she begged Dr Shaw.
‘Your blood-test results came back and – well, there’s no other way to put this, but you are HIV positive.’
Susan looked at me and we both looked at Dr Shaw like she had lost her mind.
‘That’s not possible. It’s a mistake.’
‘We did the test twice, to be sure.’
‘It’s a mistake.’
‘I’m afraid not. Now this won’t necessarily affect your treatment, and an HIV diagnosis is very treatable and really, in the ordinary scheme of things, nothing to be worried about, but as Burkitt’s is a particularly aggressive form of cancer, we have to start you on chemotherapy straight away and we have to be very careful of infection. Of course, we will start you on antiretroviral drugs too …’
Afterwards, the doctor asked Susan if she had any questions.
‘How long have I had this virus?’
‘It’s really not possible to tell. If you have indulged in any needle-sharing activity –’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I’m sorry, I understand you’re upset, but if you didn’t contract it through blood transfusions, and there are none in your medical history, then we must assume it was through sexual contact. Your partner may not know he has the virus –’
Susan glared at me.
I had an HIV test the next day. It came back negative. I almost cried with relief. Susan insisted that if it wasn’t me who had infected her, it must be Will. She hadn’t slept with anyone else in two years, not since that morning I’d found her with Will. She had sworn off men after that. There had been some men in her past, but nobody except Will or me in the last six years.
Two months later, Susan died from pneumonia, an infection she was unable to fight because of her compromised immune system from chemotherapy. The medics said it was not HIV or AIDS that had killed her, but that did not stop me from blaming Will for her death.
40
January 2018
Luke
I had been cast in two other films with big-name American and UK directors. I had moved to LA temporarily in October 2017, where my new agent was, where the work was, to live the dream. It was supposed to be the pinnacle of my career, but it didn’t feel like it. Mary tried to be understanding about my depression. She wondered if taking on a big role so soon was too much, but I enjoyed the character I was playing. The sets were dark and gloomy, almost candle-lit. A welcome contrast to the blinding sunlight of the boulevards of LA. The rest of my life had fallen apart, as had my family. I felt like my brothers were aliens. They had both betrayed me in all kinds of ways and I felt like the child my mother had rejected all over again. Mary stood by me, but I knew I was pulling her down.
Susan died. Her cancer was advanced and virulent, but it was pneumonia that killed her, just two months after diagnosis. Brian and Will were both distraught.
Her sister, Lynn, had flown in and banned all of us brothers from visiting. Lynn reported she was very weak, but incredibly angry. She knew her death was imminent. My brothers were devastated to be excluded from her life at the end.
Daisy blogged about it all, unable to stem the flow of the anguish she had been dealt, spewing it all out on to the page for 400,000 strangers to see. Her followers were her tribe, her real family, she said. We couldn’t stop her. Daisy slept in her mother’s hospital room, feeling overwhelmed by guilt for the way she had refused to speak to her mother until she learned that Susan’s condition was terminal. Susan couldn’t let go of her anger, even at the end, rueing the day she had met the Drumm family, furious with Daisy for abandoning her.
Lynn, obeying Susan’s final wishes, made it clear that none of the Drumm brothers were welcome at the funeral. But I saw the photos in the newspaper. Daisy, open-mouthed and wailing, surrounded by her friends and fans, but too young to recognize the difference.
I had managed to track down Kate, who admitted that Will had forced her to have an abortion and to break up with me by threatening to expose their affair. She had left me for my sake. She cried over the phone. I hung up.
Mary told me the truth about Will too. She had been infatuated with him when she was his young assistant. He used and abused her. Daisy had caught them drunkenly fighting when she was just a child. Will had hit Mary in public at the Cannes Film Festival. I was outraged. The #MeToo campaign was in full swing and Will’s behaviour had made the headlines, initially because of Daisy’s blog and what she had witnessed at Cannes, but then the floodgates had opened and soon there were fifteen different stories from women who had been bullied or sexually harassed by Will.
Brian released his HIV test results to the media. Daisy had blogged about that too. Will remained silent. How many women had he infected? Had he told them? Brian had proven his innocence in the French schoolgirl scenario, but people said there was no smoke without fire. Twitter mobs piled on to take down each one of us brothers, to investigate every detail of our past, and when they weren’t sure of the facts, they made them up. On Twitter, everything was black or white and devoid of facts, nuance or understanding. I got a certain degree of sympathy because my indiscretions were the result of mental illness and were in the past.
Except that my mental illness wasn’t really in the past. The baby was back now, dancing in front of my eyes whether I was awake or asleep. It screamed in pain and told me I was bad and useless and that my life wasn’t worth living. Vodka helped me sleep, but now I was a secret drinker. Mary had come with me to LA. She was doing movie deals and I could no longer avoid the publicity trail. It was in the contract of the distribution deal. I made sure the interviewers could not ask me anything about my brothers though my previous career as an erratic pop star with mental health problems was always dragged up. I put a little vodka in my water bottle and sipped it through these interviews. I sipped it while filming my new movie. I sipped it through AA meetings, sitting beside Mary, holding hands and reciting the Serenity Prayer.
Mary knew the revelations about my brothers had shocked me. Will, Kate and the abortion; Brian selling my stories to the tabloids. She made sure I was back in therapy, but this LA shrink was different from anyone I’d seen before. Dr Mukherjee was a small Indian woman who insisted on going back to the beginning. She wanted to know why I felt that my mother hated me. When I explained that I thought I was the product of a rape or an affair and told her how my mother had treated me, deprived me, ignored me, burdened me with shit I was way too young to handle, Dr Mukherjee asked me to dig into my past and discover why. It was homework. I wasn’t going to bother, but Mary insisted I try. I couldn’t talk to Will or Brian. I finally flew back to Ireland to see Auntie Peggy, well into her eighties now. I had lost touch with her years ago. But she still lived independently and welcomed me with warmth and kindness. She told me she was horrified by what she had read in the papers about us all, and shocked by Susan’s death.
Peggy was the person who finally told me the simple truth.
‘You have to understand, Luke, your mother gave birth twice in fourteen months, and two months after Brian was born, she was pregnant again. She really didn’t want another baby so soon. Your father, wel
l, he worshipped your mum, particularly in those early days, he really wanted to look after her. We were orphans and all he wanted was to protect her. Our fostering situations had not been good, and we hardly knew the rest of our siblings because we’d been torn apart as children. You know contraception was completely illegal in those days. Your birth almost killed her. She was in hospital for weeks. She had to have blood transfusions. She was terrified and I think it traumatized her for life. I tried, Luke, I really tried to make her see that it wasn’t your fault. I know she was hard on you. I tried to talk to her about it, but you know what your mother was like.’
‘Why didn’t you ever tell me this before?’ I asked her.
‘It wasn’t my story to tell, love. And you need to know something else. Your mother was raped, many years later, and I think that brought all the trauma back.’
‘She told me about that rape. I was only twelve or thirteen at the time.’
‘Did she?’ Peggy was shocked. ‘But I think that explains why she told you. Those two incidents, your birth and the rape, they were linked in her mind. Pain and fear. I think she might have been a little unhinged. Your … illness, it’s not unique in our family. We told everyone our parents had died in a tram accident but your grandmother committed suicide when we were tots. Our father disappeared. Moll and I were fostered, but the rest of our siblings grew up in orphanages.’
‘How did your mother die?’
‘She threw herself under a train. Moll was the youngest, she was barely two years old. I was only four.’
‘But she told me my father’s aunt had done that?’
Peggy shook her head. ‘No, it was our mother. It was so shameful in those days. A suicide and then our father vanishing, to Scotland we think. He never came looking for us and we never went looking for him. I thought about it years ago, tracking him down, but your mother was horrified by the idea. And as the years went on, it became pointless because he couldn’t still be alive.’
