Читать книгу The Fragments of my Father - Sam Mills - Страница 11

I remember the moment I discovered what was wrong with my dad – or, at least, found out what label his illness had.

I was fourteen years old. Now that my dad was working as a clerk – his first job in a long time – and my mum had part-time work as a medical secretary, our house was less of a dump and even had wallpaper in some places. My bedroom was the corner box room upstairs. In the evenings, I could hear the wind battering the side of the house and the thrum of a wasps’ nest in the air vent. But I loved it in there; it was my hiding place, my cave. It felt more like a study than a bedroom. I had so many piles of books and lever arch files filled with my writing that I couldn’t move more than three paces without bashing into them. I was already keen to be a published author, though most of the books I wrote were derivative, borrowing from the romances I read, with little idea of how fantastical they were. I hadn’t the life experience to discern that men did not always bring happy endings.

Homework always came first, however. Mum had repeatedly impressed upon me that life had no future without a good education. Though I’d passed my eleven-plus I’d been destined for the local comprehensive school, until my mum intervened – fighting ferociously with the council to get me into the local girls’ grammar school. I had been sulky about the idea at the time: Mum had explained that girls did not perform as well when they studied in classes with boys, for both sexes just ended up showing off to each other. I’d thought: boys are just the thing I want in my class.

As always, Mum was right. On my first day, I’d fallen in love with the school. It was set in the sprawling grounds of a park; in the playground you could hear the yowls of peacocks from a nearby mansion. Local geography highlighted the class divides. Those who came from wealthy families lived in the big, white birthday-cake houses near to the school; those of us who were in the poorer division headed for the bus to take us on the long journey home. But class did not seem to matter so much, not the way it had in primary school. On my first day, I sat between a shy girl called Lucy, and Henrietta, the daughter of a Surrey vicar; and I got the bus back home with a new Sri Lankan friend called Eshani. For the first time in a long while, I was lucky enough to have good friends, and I treasured them dearly.

It was almost 7 o’clock by the time I finished my homework that evening – an essay about Lady Macbeth. Hungry, I went downstairs for dinner. Just four plates had been set at the table, as my older brother had recently left home; the shouts and babble of dialogue from the TV next door suggested my younger brother was watching Grange Hill.

In the kitchen, I found my dad pulling a tray of chips from the oven. He set them down on the surface and stared at them gravely.

‘You’ve burnt the chips, Dad,’ I pointed out casually. I didn’t really mind. I liked them that way, crispy and crunchy between my teeth.

My dad pulled off his oven gloves; I heard the pounding of his footsteps on the stairs. I watched the chips cool into a row of blackened fingers. As I ventured upstairs, I could hear weeping. I felt my heart thump, conscious that ignorance might be better than knowledge, that it might be safer to go back down.

The bedroom door was ajar. I crept closer. Dad was sitting on the bed, saying: ‘I burnt the chips, I burnt the chips’ over and over and Mum was there with him. Dad’s face was red, as if the tears he was shedding had been wrenched from his gut, and Mum was making shushing noises as though he was her child.

I crept down the stairs. In the kitchen, I walked in circles and chewed nervously on an apple. When my mother eventually came down, she explained that my dad had ‘schizophrenia’ and that sometimes it was hard to get his medication right. The amazement on my face startled her. ‘Didn’t you notice all the pills he takes?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you remember when he took off all his clothes and walked down the street and then none of the other children’s parents let them come to play for a while …?’ There was something oddly casual about her tone, as though we were exchanging gossip about someone else’s family. Our discussion was brief; I was too shocked to summon any questions about my father’s illness.

Later, after my parents had gone to bed, I sat in the bath and wept at this strange and sudden rewriting of our lives. Through the warped window glass, I could see the yellow lights of the house next door. I imagined the faint sounds of laughter as they sat and enjoyed dinner together: a conventional family, the one I’d fooled myself into thinking we were. At school I had been reading my nonsense poetry to my friends and they’d teased me for being ‘mad’; did that mean his illness was weaving its way into my words?

That night I was finally able to find the correct word in the dictionary. It informed me that schizophrenia came from Greek roots, skhizein meaning split/tear and phren, the mind. The key had turned.

The next evening my dad made tea again. A trio of us at the table: Dad, me, my younger brother. We ate in silence. It was a Tuesday, which meant Mum had her evening class for A-level psychology. Without her, the house felt empty and eerie; she always created a sparkle, a warm energy, a love that gave our home an ambient glow.

After dinner, I stood in the hallway and watched my father from the slit between door and frame. The beard he was growing highlighted his gaunt cheekbones. He was sitting in his armchair reading the Bible; this was his new obsession, something he clung to as though it was keeping him afloat in the world. Looking back, I wonder if he combated his voices by reading about men who had heard the voice of God giving them divine instruction; while he was labelled mad, they had been celebrated as prophets.

Upstairs in my room I got to work: I took an envelope from my rucksack containing a passport photo of my friend Anil. Using a Pritt Stick, I carefully glued the photo to a square of card with a college logo watermarked on its background. The next bit was trickier; I carved lettering into a rubber and used ink from my fountain pen to paint over the letters, before stamping it over the photo. The final touch was a dash of Blue Peter: a wrapping of sticky back plastic. And there it was – another fake ID. Anil had already paid me 50p for this. It was a way of earning extra money, since my weekly allowance was considerably smaller than most of my friends. It meant we could get into nightclubs with ‘proof’ that we were over eighteen. Nightclubs meant alcohol, boys, smoking: all the things that we missed out on at a girls’ grammar school where everyone was well behaved, wore coats that were the correct shade of navy, and where hems above the knee were forbidden.

I found myself thinking of Laura Palmer as I slotted the ID card back into the envelope. Twin Peaks was an obsession at our school. Laura lived a double life: her good girl, blonde, high-school sweetheart one, and her darker two-boyfriends-on-the-go promiscuous druggie one. (This splitting of people into two, normal self and doppelgänger, seemed to be a feature in the series as it went on.) That division was something I identified with. One half of me did my homework, achieved grade As, looked meek and innocent, was made form rep and obediently picked up the register each morning for my teacher; and the other smoked illicit cigarettes in the park on the way home, made fake IDs, lured boys on dancefloors, and shared fumbling trysts with them in dark corners in clubs. It seemed hard to allow the two to blur together and perhaps, I wondered, it was something the male sex found easier to do, to be whole, unified.

The ID card finished, I got stuck into my writing. It was becoming my addiction. When there was a knock at the door, I jumped. A stern silhouette appeared.

‘You’re not to have sex before marriage – it says so in the Bible,’ my dad intoned in a robotic tone.

I rolled my eyes in exasperation. Dad looked upset, then he was gone.

The next day I recalled the incident and felt lost, as though the dislocated exchange with Dad had had nothing to do with me. When I told my mum about it, she just laughed and told me not to take any notice of him, which made me feel better. And this was how I survived growing up with my father. I saw the same process occur in my younger brother – a distancing, as though my father was an unfortunate and obscure relative staying in the house, someone we all had to tolerate.

Much of the time Dad was so quiet he was like a ghost – though sometimes, when he was doing the washing up, I’d hear him shout: ‘Shut up! Shut up!’, trying to bat away the voices that swirled around him like a malignant wind. Once, on the bookcase by his chair, I found a list he’d made of rebukes to its torments –

I am not under house arrest

I am not a Muslim

I am a Christian

– all written in small, jagged capital letters with his favourite Parker biro. After this, I would check the bookcase every so often, seeking more eerie rebukes, but there were only shopping lists and details of Bible services.

As an adult, whenever I came home to visit my parents, Dad would hover in the background in silence. A friend of mine who stayed with us later recalled: ‘I remember your dad not saying a single word to me. It’s as though he wasn’t there.’ I know now that this is a symptom of schizophrenia: an indifference, an ephemeral, unengaged absence. But at that time all I knew was that my mum was like a best friend to me, while my relationship with my father was virtually non-existent.

One year, we all went to the cinema on Boxing Day. We saw the film Australia, and as the credits rolled and we emerged from the dark, I was surprised by the animation on my dad’s face. When I asked him if he’d enjoyed it, he said it was one of the best films he’d ever seen. Later, my mum explained: ‘His voice suddenly stopped speaking to him – he had two hours of freedom.’ Freedom: the word jolted me. Because he had stopped vocalising his battle, I often forgot that he was imprisoned in that cell, where a hostile figure talked at him all day. Whatever conversational tug of war was going on inside him had become a private anguish.

On the mantlepiece in our living room sits a photographic triptych of my mother, looking shy, smiling and pensive. After I’d returned from visiting my father at St Helier hospital, I found myself looking at her frozen expressions, wishing I could ask her for advice. Had she ever seen my father descend into catatonia? How would she have handled it?

We had lost my mother just over four years ago. Since she’d gone, I had not seen my father cry once.

My brothers and I had waited and watched him, always vigilant for signs of a breakdown. But he just carried on in his set routine. Over the years, the bandwidth of his attention and interests had narrowed down. He had no friends, only his family. He had no ambitions. Taking a trip to somewhere he didn’t know would cause his hands to tremble with anxiety. Routine held him together. He slept the same sort of hours as a cat. At night, he would spend twelve hours in bed and often napped in the daytime. His day was bookended by the taking of medicines – Lansoprazole and Lactulose first thing in the morning, Amisulpride and Clozapine last thing at night. His physique was also shaped by them: he put on a huge amount of weight, a side effect of his pills. He went to the local supermarket several times a day, but rarely ventured beyond the town, except for hospital appointments; the parameters of his existence were more akin to those of someone who lived centuries ago. The only dramatic change after Mum died was that he stopped watching EastEnders, (he and Mum had always watched it together). My brothers and I were divided as to whether this was a sign of an improvement in his mental health.

When I was away in Appley Bridge I would call him every night. Our talks would last ten minutes or so. We always had the same conversation, cheerful and superficial: I would ask him how the weather was; he’d reply that it was sunny/rainy/grey. I’d ask him if he’d eaten/fed the cat/gone out. He’d reply yes/yes/yes. Then I’d say goodnight. He always seemed pleased that I had rung. When I was back living with him, I would cook him the occasional meal. There was a companionable warmth between us, in that we shared the house but didn’t speak much. This continued for three and a half years, before suddenly, dramatically, things deteriorated.

September 2015 brought the first signs of trouble. My dad was taking weekly trips to the GP for remedies for corns, a tickle in his throat, a fit of dizziness, a small rash on his hand. Initially I felt anxious, because I knew from loved ones I’d lost that a tiny symptom can belie an illness that slashes and burns; and then I became immune to worry, because it seemed that minor illnesses were becoming my dad’s hobby, something to collect, to fuss and turn over and label. Then his tendency to hypochondria became manic. Stefan took him to the GP over an indefinable illness; on their way out, Dad began to weep. He was taken to hospital, discharged a few days later. He seemed strange, blurry, slowed-down, tasks taking twice as long as usual. I thought if I cooked for him it might help. I thought that rest was the answer.

That day in September, when it first happened, I remember setting down plates on the dining-room table for lunch. My eyes skimmed a stain on the carpet. My mother had lived her last days in this room, and the stain had been created by – a spilt drink? – a splash of urine? – now faded to a watermark.

I went into the hallway and called upstairs: ‘Dad, it’s ready!’

Two plates on the table. The empty place where she once sat, at the head. My appetite was always sharp. Still standing, getting impatient, I speared a potato and chewed it quickly. I called to Dad again. When there was no reply, I hurried up the stairs. ‘Come in,’ his quavery voice replied to my knock. He was sitting on the bed, looking at the clothes neatly laid out next to him – trousers, braces, shirt – as though he had been given a set of bad letters at a turn in Scrabble and couldn’t make a word out of them.

Kneeling down, I busied myself with peeling off his socks, pulling on taut crisp ones. But when I reached for his pyjama shirt, my hand paused. I hadn’t seen my dad naked since I was a child.

‘Why don’t you have lunch in your pyjamas?’ I suggested.

As he lumbered down the stairs, I thought: hang on, has he even taken his morning medicines? One of our kitchen cupboards now functioned as a medicine cabinet: I found a jumble of white boxes with scientific names and labels giving instructions for doses. In the dining room, Dad sat down before his plate of cooling chicken and vegetables. I passed him his pills. Silence; stasis. I poured him a glass of water and put the pills on a spoon. I raised them to his mouth. He opened it. I slipped them in and passed him the water.

I started to cut up his food. A piece of chicken on the end of my fork came up against his closed lips. He looked at me as though he couldn’t hear the words I was saying: Dad, it’s good to eat, you need to keep your strength up. For one surreal moment, I felt as though I was an apparition he did not believe in. When I called 999 they asked if he was breathing, if he was in pain, and I had trouble explaining his state: he seemed as though he was in a coma, yet he was awake. After I hung up, I took solace in the sound of him breathing in and out, but I could not make his eyes connect with mine. The fading light in them chilled me with a grief-flash: my mother lying in this room, on a makeshift hospital bed, the life seeping out of her. It was as though he was in a liminal state, body half-dead, mind in purgatory.

It took eight weeks for him to heal. Due to a lack of beds at the local psychiatric hospital in Tooting, he was transferred from St Helier to Tolworth hospital, where he shared a ward with elderly patients suffering from dementia. There he was medicated and nourished back to walking, talking, speaking health and discharged for Christmas. I had assumed then that the catatonia was a blip, a one-off. Perhaps he’d just got tired, run down, needed rest. Now that it was happening all over again, I could no longer dismiss it as an anomaly. This was the start of something new, a pattern I could neither name nor explain. I thought of all the years that my mother had looked after him. Why, after decades of stability, had he collapsed again – and why into such a strange state?