Now Luke
Now
Luke
Luke,
I used to tell you stories about your father while you slept, whispering them into the darkness so your dreams would be filled with colour and light and love.
Of course you couldn’t understand, but I wanted to somehow pass on to you the strength and passion of this most amazing human being as if by osmosis.
I loved him, and not just because I’d fallen in love with him so passionately and intensely as a girl of nineteen. My first love. My only love.
He was the person who inspired me and understood me, my mentor and my saviour.
You look just like him. So much so that when I first saw you in that restaurant, it was like him being brought back to life. It still is sometimes. The re-emergence of you, such a happy event, one I have longed for, has also brought me to the brink of despair. I’m not always sure I’ll be able to bear it, this constant reminder of what I lost.
And so I must tell you the truth about your father, write the words that I can never speak. The horrible, ugly truth and my part in it. I will spare nothing.
Your father was Jacob Earl, the lead singer of a rock band called Disciples, set for great things. Their second album had just come out and after he died it went to number one in the charts.
Jake had severe depression, which stemmed from a troubled childhood and pursued him as a young adult. He had good patches when he was happy and creative, and it was during one of those times that we met. He really believed he’d kicked the depression once and for all and so he threw away the medication that was meant to keep him stable, and I allowed him to do it. I didn’t understand.
I want you to know how excited your father was about my pregnancy; an accident, it’s true, but we both wanted to keep you. He said it was the best thing that had ever happened to him. And it would have been, I know that.
Jake fell into a deep depression while he was on a European tour; by the time he came back he could hardly speak. The day he was due to go into a psychiatric hospital he hanged himself from the bedroom door while I was in the kitchen.
That he died on my watch is something I shall never forgive myself for. Please just know this. He loved unborn you with all his heart. He was the best man imaginable and you are just like him.
Alice
The letter from Alice heralds my breakdown. Letter, photographs and an old newspaper cutting of the two of them at a gallery opening, caption: Jacob Earl, singer of Disciples, and artist girlfriend Alice Garland at Robin Armstrong Gallery in Mayfair .
In the photograph you can clearly see the swell of Alice’s pregnant stomach, but the thing that derails me is the way these lovers are looking at each other, inflamed by love, at the height of their beauty, on the precipice of success, a snapshot of greatness. I hold Alice’s letter in my hands and I weep for the man I never met and the life that was taken away from her, and for things I cannot name. The crying lasts all day and I can’t explain it to Hannah, who fusses over me, trying to understand the mix of hopelessness and sorrow that has swept over me; how could she when I cannot comprehend it myself?
It’s dark when my mother arrives, summoned by Hannah at some point during the day. She sits beside me on the bed, holding my hand between hers; she calls me ‘my poor boy’. Her hands are warm, dry and cracked from gardening; she smells of lavender soap.
‘Don’t try to talk,’ she says when I begin to apologise. ‘There’s plenty of time for that. And don’t feel you need to explain either, because you don’t. I understand.’
‘Alice …’ I say, and she shushes me.
‘It’s all right. Hannah told me who she is, and I understand, completely, you wanting to find her. Don’t feel bad about not telling me the truth; I understand that too.’
Her kindness is hard to bear, of course, and somewhere beneath the encircling madness I realise it is guilt that pins me to the bed. Guilt about Christina, guilt about Alice. The man who hurt two mothers would be a better title.
Who knew that a mental breakdown would affect the body just as much as the brain? For the all-encompassing dread I feel has given me limbs made of lead, a tight, bronchial chest, palpitations, sweats, dizziness and a surfeit of panic attacks, one after the other, which convince me I am about to die.
An emergency doctor is called out and I weep for the duration of his visit while Hannah and my mother whisper to each other in low-pitched, anxious voices. I am crying for Jacob and Alice, of course, for the destruction of their dream, for the life the three of us were not allowed to have. I am crying for a man who was once so desperate he hanged himself days before his child was born. But I cannot find the words to explain any of this, and the doctor diagnoses burnout and prescribes antidepressants and a fortnight off work.
After he’s gone, Hannah lies down on the bed next to me and holds my hand while I cry.
‘You’ll feel better as soon as the pills start to work,’ she says, and I manage to nod.
‘Do you think you might sleep?’ she asks, and I close my eyes, feigning tiredness, relieved when she gets up and goes downstairs.
All I want is to get back to Jacob. I cannot explain it, this bizarre communing with my dead father, but it is the only thing that matters, the only thing there is right now.
Alice sent me a photograph of Jacob in school uniform, aged around nine or ten. There is something about this picture that draws me in more than the others; I cannot stop looking at it. He is a handsome boy with his dark eyes and his sharp cheekbones and his full mouth; indisputably like me in this image. When I showed the photograph to my mother, she burst out crying, this woman I cannot once remember crying in my childhood.
‘It’s you,’ she said, when she was able to speak. ‘He is you.’
Now when I look at the photo, I absorb his solemnity, an adultness that belies his age. This boy who looks out at me knows more than he should; his life is not bikes and football and chips and chocolate. He looks at me and I look at him and in some bizarre, unexplainable way we are connected by pain; we know each other, we are each other; it is enough.