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  I’m wondering, too – wondering how on earth he got there. Wondering quite what a high-end limo has to do with anything. The others look bemused, too.

  Mercury, Zambo says, as if disappointed that he has to explain. The winged messenger? Ancient Roman god of communication? He gives Eric a half-smile. That’s what you do, Eric, isn’t it? Deliver the mail?

  That’s the thing about Zambo. He looks like a thug. But underneath he’s extremely well-read, and as cultivated as Radio 4.

  Eric? Prof asks.

  Well, OK, Eric says. If you think so.

  Blaze and Merc sorted.

  Cheryl’s more tricky. A lull falls. People look at their drinks, at the table, anywhere but at Cheryl, whose expectant smile gradually fades the longer it goes on without anyone coming up with anything. It’s awful. It’s not that I actually have any ideas that I have to self-censor. It’s just that her size dominates. She must be a twenty at least. Great rolls of flesh press against the cotton of her dress. I’m so afraid that I might suggest a name that has even the faintest fattist connotation that I can’t think of anything at all. I glance swiftly round: Prof, Rev, Zambo – they’re struggling with the same thing, too.

  I wonder about, says Eric – Merc – at last. He looks a bit embarrassed, as though he shouldn’t be coming up with anything at his first meeting.

  We all nod encouragingly.

  Well, I wonder about Angel, he says. He turns to Cheryl. You look like what I always imagined an angel to be.

  It’s perfect, in a Rubenesque way. There’s generalised glass-raising, and grinning, and toasts to Angel. Who goes fetchingly pink and looks tremendously happy. Eric also appears chuffed, and for the first time I notice the tremor gone from his hand when he places his glass back on his beer mat. This is the power of kinship, camaraderie.

  This group, I love.

  There’s so much shame swirling round when someone’s stone-cold rejected by their child. You think: what must they be like as a person, as a parent, for the kid to have done that? It’s obvious, isn’t it – what other conclusion can you possibly draw? They must be a monster. A fucking monster. And right at the front of the queue of conclusion-drawers, the hapless mum or dad themselves. They’re thinking, Christ, I must have been really really awful – and I didn’t even know it. That’s what goes round and round your head, through the long wakeful hours. You try to fight against it, try to hang on to all the things you thought at the time were plain loving and good. But even as you cling desperately to the edge of the reality-cliff you thought you knew, the fact of your child’s rejection, their sudden hatred for you, is like a macabre Moriarty, prising your fingers off the rock one by one by two. You are completely, utterly wrong, you must be. I felt it, the shame of it, the shame of being reprehensible, an outcast, the lowest of the low. What Prof, Rev, Zambo, gave me was, they gave me reality back. The reality that I am good enough as a parent – that being a good parent is precisely why I’m now in this hell. They saved my life. They helped stop the contagion in its tracks. They shored me up to become a transitional person. And that’s what we hope to do for the newbies, for Blaze, Merc, and Angel too.

  ❦

  I hope you don’t feel got at. This is not to make you feel guilty. That’s one of my greatest fears, that the more you understand of what happened, the more you will be consumed by remorse. I can’t bear the thought of you going through life limping and staggering under a burden like that. The sight of Caitlin’s grief. None of this was your responsibility, even though it looked like something you yourself elected to do.

  Listening to Angel, did you wonder about those well-honed letters from her boys, condemning her as an irretrievably unfit mother? Did it make you think of your own email to me? A perfunctory two lines, breaking off all contact, asking that I respect it. You finished with your name. No love. No acknowledgement of all I have been to you, you to me. The thing about emails is they’re timed precisely. This was sent just eight minutes after you’d have got back from school. Just days after the last lovely evening we spent together, excitedly discussing our long-dreamed-of trip to Italy – Florentine art, and the Siena Palio. You had just turned fourteen. You were good at English, as you are at pretty much everything. But: so I ask that you respect it? That’s one hell of an adult turn of phrase.

  You spent the whole of the next week off school ill. Amid the shock, the eviscerating pain, my mind stunned as though by a cudgel blow – amid all that, the thought of what you were going through. How you must be teetering, on the verge of falling apart. You didn’t; you held it together. Got back to your books and your studies. But I knew.

  Sometimes I tell myself: forget it, walk away, don’t even think of trying to sort it out, you’ll only load more crap on her shoulders. Let her go. But you’re so bright. And there’s the alt.narrative of your sister’s life. You’re likely, as you progress through adulthood – in your twenties, thirties, forties or beyond – to work it out. Like Caitlin, like Prof’s countless other YouTube testifiers. It’s a long life, in many ways. So many others have trodden this path before you. If you get there, if the pieces fall into place, how will you feel? Will you desperately need somehow to hear me saying: this wasn’t your fault? You were not responsible? There was nothing else you could do?

  ❦

  It’s later now, the fires are dying, the crowd has thinned, and the bar staff are cashing up the tills. Blaze, Merc, and Angel have left for their homes; only the core of us remain.

  Rev, says Prof, you should mentor Angel. There’s general assent: woman-to-woman makes perfect sense.

  As for the others. Prof looks at Zambo, then at me, weighing things up. At length she says, Art, you take on Blaze. I nod in agreement, though in truth I’m a bit nonplussed. He’s consumed by anger at the moment, is Blaze. It’s natural, something I completely understand, but it will make him tricky to work with. When we’re flooded with rage, it has to have somewhere to go. And if it can’t go where it properly should, then often, like lightning, it seeks the nearest path to earth. I don’t much relish the thought of acting as conducting rod, but I guess from time to time that’s what I will have to do.

  Zambo, Prof says, that leaves you for Merc. Zambo says a brief, Sure. I’m aware of a twinge of jealousy: Merc is the one I’m drawn to, the one who provokes my protective urge. But I accept Prof’s decision – I guess what’s true for me is also true for Zambo.

  Would things have worked out the same, if Prof had made a different call? There are no re-runs in life; we’ll never know. It haunted her later; she tormented herself with what-ifs. I gave her back some of her own advice. Prof, I said, it’s not your responsibility. You did the best you could. What others choose to do is for them and them alone. She knew I was right, intellectually. But that didn’t help all the shit feelings, which she carried back with her to Switzerland or Sweden or Holland, or wherever it was she ultimately returned to.

  Were we complacent? Did we think, just because we’d found our ways to cope, that others would necessarily manage it? Maybe, but I don’t think so. Sure, we’d had successes with other members, but Prof was always alive to the potential for the trauma to perpetuate itself, for the contagion to spread. That’s what we were doing, trying to wax that moon. I said to her once, a casual remark, how alike we all were: her, me, Rev, and Zambo. We’re a self-selecting population, she told me. We never get to see the ones who get sucked into the drama, they never track down our group. They’re elsewhere even as we’re meeting, cuffed in police cells, sectioned on psych wards, critical in hospital, or cold as tundra in the morgue.

  Me

  Who am I? Maybe you think you know. Maybe you have a settled opinion. If Prof’s to be believed, most of your happy memories of me have been scrunched and squashed and boxed away like so many ill-fitting clothes in an attic trunk, never to be shown the light of day again. A few select garments remain: times when, like any good parent, I
would tell you No when what you wanted – what you felt entitled to, in the raging egocentricity of childhood – was Yes. Times, sure, when I got things wrong – who doesn’t make mistakes? Those choice few already unflattering outfits have been trimmed and re-hemmed by Mummy, their cut unrecognisably altered; the cloth has been embroidered with elaborate stitch-ups, embellished and transformed into something other. The end results have been draped on a voiceless tailor’s dummy and pronounced: There! That is your father.

  None of that is me.

  I am Stevie Buchanan. Steven James Buchanan, to give me my full name. Steve to my Ma and Pa, unless I was in trouble over something. Born in the late Sixties in the old Heathfield Maternity Home out Broomborough way. Born on that strip of land surrounded on three sides by water: Mersey, Dee, and Irish Sea. Wirral. The Wirral, as, to everyone thereabouts, it is most often known.

  We were well-enough-to-do, at least to begin with. Pa was a naval architect at Cammell Laird. I don’t know the history, how it came about, but he married Ma late, was into his forties when my brother and I came along. The earliest memory I have is of doing a drawing with him – no idea how old I would have been. I loved the cool precision of his propelling pencils. We were doing a picture of the companion set that stood on the hearth beside the grate. It was all coal fires back then. I remember it so clearly: the elegant parallels of the dangling handles, then the way each implement branched out into its particular termination: poker, brush, tongs and shovel. Drawing was something to do to entertain me; something he was good at, something he could pass on.

  I don’t have too many other memories of him, in fact. We don’t, really, do we? – remember much of our time as kids, growing up. I can picture us, him and me, going to the beach at West Kirby, and walking out to Hilbre Island at low tide. Clambering together over Thor’s Stone, the red sandstone rough on my hands and bare knees. Goggle-eyed trips to Toy and Hobby in Birkenhead. But that’s about all.

  Don’t die young, not if you can help it. I was ten, Gerry twelve, when Pa succumbed. Some kind of lymphoma, I now know. I guess he was ill for years – that strange ­pressure-cooked sense I have when I think back to my early life. Days at a time he would disappear. We weren’t told he was in hospital. They kept it hidden from us. I don’t know if he even knew he was dying. He never said goodbye. He just vanished from the home as he so often did, only this time he never returned.

  Ma: Gerard, Steven, come here. I have some bad news to tell you.

  Ma, crumpling, sobbing, as she tried to get the words out.

  Me, instinctively putting my arms around her. Wanting, with every ounce of my being, to make it better. Being utterly unable to.

  Kids didn’t go to funerals, not back then.

  Ma, disappearing for a whole number of days, just like Pa had used to do. Aunty Maggie coming to look after us. How we were expected still to go to school, like nothing had happened. Fretful, unable to sleep, thumping on the floor to make it sound like I’d fallen out of bed, anything to get Aunty Maggie to come up and see me, so I knew someone was still there, so I knew I wasn’t alone in the dark, so I knew there was someone who wouldn’t just disappear.

  Jumbled recollections after. Gerry going off the rails, pinching money from Ma’s purse, thieving from the newsagents at the top of the road with some of the lads from school. A local bobby came round; I can still picture his helmet sitting there on top of the upright piano. Then he went away, Gerry, was sent off to boarding school. I guess she thought it would help him. I guess she didn’t know what else to do.

  Two down, two to go.

  Ma, short of cash, needing money for the fees, some of Pa’s old friends helping her out with a secretarial job at the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board. Across the river to Liverpool every day. Me going to the Rimmers’ after school, having my tea there. The times I wouldn’t take my coat off, keeping it on for hours, waiting for her to come fetch me when she got back home.

  The things I did to their lad, Barry.

  Ma, weeping by the fire of an evening, when she thought I’d gone to sleep. Me creeping down the stairs, scared that the treads would give me away, but for why I’ve no idea. Going in to give her a hug. Wrapping my ten-year-old arms across her heaving shoulders, trying to hold her together, trying to stop her falling apart.

  Nothing I could do to make it better.

  Ma, beset by migraine, moaning and retching, me in my flannel pyjamas hotching about on the upstairs landing listening to it all going on down there, scared witless that she, too, was going to die. Praying to God to please please take me instead of her.

  Barry. Little runt of a lad, a few years younger than me. I’d hit him when no one else was around. Give him Chinese burns. Make him cry. Then I’d deny I’d done a thing when Mrs Rimmer came, furious, to see me. Going blue in my face with lies.

  I was sent away to boarding school, too.

  The sternness of the teachers, the leering snideness of the prefects, the bewildering lessons, not being able to take the first thing in. I remember being terrified of everything. So shy I would hardly speak. Looking back, I was on the verge of selective mutism. The trauma of it all. Gerry was there, a couple of years ahead of me, in the thick of a gang. I was an embarrassment. He didn’t want to know.

  I took refuge in the art room. Making pictures. Mr Mills, the only kindly teacher I knew. I remember one painting, of a market stall, loving the three-dimensional effect of the wet poster paints as I daubed glistening blobs of different colours to represent apples, oranges, potatoes. And that disappointment – crushing, out of all proportion – when I returned the following day to find the picture dried out, and all the fruit and veg flat and cracked.

  I did shit at O-levels, no more than Cs in most of them, only Art was an A. They didn’t want to let me through to sixth form but Ma pleaded with them. She had sobered by then into a strange kind of existence. Whole terms on her own, working at the Board, socialising with a motley collection of other shipwreck survivors come the weekends. She never met another man, though; there was no internet then. Half-terms and holidays, back we’d come – Gerard, her arrogant eldest, and me the dullard younger son. She did her best to love us, but by then we’d become semi-strangers – painful remnants of a life she’d once known.

  I took Art at A-level, got another A. Scraped an E in English, and sank in History with a U. There was only ever one thing I was going to go on to do. None of the prestigious colleges would even look at me. But Hatfield Poly was less picky. I enrolled for a Fine Art BA.

  Something about it, taking my own step, the first time in my life I hadn’t been storm-tossed by events that I couldn’t control. Leaving the Wirral, going somewhere no one knew me. That day moving in with my trunk packed with my possessions, meeting other freshers on the corridor, finding an instant rapport with a guy called Mark a few doors down from me. Also studying Fine Art. Him asking what my name was. Me telling him: Stevie.

  Stevie. From that day on I became Stevie Buchanan. I found my voice. The lad who sounded like he was a Scouser, only he wasn’t, he was from somewhere called the Wirral. A year doing life drawing, finding I was bloody good at it, me and Mark the best in our year. My confidence grew. I thrived on the criticism of my work, the kinds of commentary from tutors that laid other students low – I found no discouragement in it, only the drive to improve. At art school I reinvented myself. At art school I changed unrecognisably. I started to become what I soon thought of as me.

  Only I did and I didn’t. I see that now. We do and we don’t. We think we’ve left our pasts behind, but they are with us, permeating our souls, hidden, unseen. Puppet master hands, twitching our limbs, directing our choices. Only when we become conscious of them, only once the veil is pulled up and the workings revealed, can we begin to exorcise them. How is that self-consciousness to be achieved? Unless we know to go looking – and unless we are sufficiently brave – it will be life that has to try
to teach us those lessons.

  That’s how it was for me.

  Twenty-one. Two and a bit years already at university.

  How is it, I wonder, for you?

  TWO

  Baby Changing

  The connection at Didcot isn’t due for a while. I stand on the platform, bags at my feet, getting my bearings. Under the rafters, next to the departures screen, there are signs for the Ladies and the Gents, and one for Parent With Baby-Changing Facilities. Beyond those, a café. I never got that coffee in Bath; I have a sudden craving. Between me and caffeine, though, there’s a man in a bright red jacket, with a huge belly and a Brian Blessed beard, and some kind of uncontrollable waving going on. He’s pacing about, muttering, and flapping both hands over and over like a fledgling trying to achieve flight. Tourette’s, I wonder, or plain simple oddness. I exchange a secret smile with a young woman. Her long brown hair is tied back in a pony tail; she’s wearing a woven cotton top, thigh-length, vertical stripes of varied blues, that makes me think of Peruvian panpipe buskers. She has a gentle feel. I think my presence reassures her. I guess I look capable – leather jacket and crew-cut – a comfort when there may be madness close by.

  Much as she tugs my protective instincts, she’s on her own. There’s coffee to fetch, and other things I need to do. I send Peru girl an apologetic look, give red jacket man a wide berth, and take myself out of the autumn chill.

  Steam rises from my polystyrene cup. The weak sunshine is warm behind the glass. I sit at my table, open the Guardian I’ve purchased, and adopt the pose of someone intent on the latest news.

  Then I’m out. Slipped through the gap between door and frame, tickled by the brush of the draught excluder. A half dozen revolutions round red-jacket man, spiralling up like a will o’ the wisp. As if to say: this is how to do it, this is how to fly. Then I’m up, near vertically, a missile launched from a silo.