Shtum (16 page)

He’s on the floor, his legs awkwardly wound around each other like a stretchy children’s toy. Saliva is dribbling from his mouth and he’s mumbling incoherently.

‘Do you need the toilet? Is that it? Were you trying to get to the bathroom?’

The cancer has constricted his throat to a needle eye, making it impossible for him to eat without the regular thimbles of Oramorph that relax him enough to take anything down. This and the chemo have wasted him. Wires of silver hair have begun to poke through the back of his head. He weighs nothing. I rearrange his body and put him in the foetal position, then gradually into a sitting position. His pyjama bottoms glide to the floor and his nakedness appals me and, as I lift him into a standing position and hoist him into my arms like a baby, he urinates on me. Burning hot and smelling of rubber.

I carry him to the bathroom and gently place him on the toilet. His head rolls to the left and I kneel at the right of him holding him steady.

‘Was it the Lorazepam? Did I give you too much?’

He has trouble sleeping because he can’t breathe. Lying in my bed for the past few nights has been like attempting to sleep in a carpenter’s workshop.

He doesn’t have the strength to strain, but the cocktail of chemicals and cancer cells that has gradually replaced the blood in his veins is doing its job. His backside is running like a tap.

Jonah is at the door. I smell him before I see him.

‘Go back to bed, Jonah.’ But he doesn’t move. I should be glad, glad that the discomfort of his soiled nappy woke him up, that he realised – on some level – he needed changing.

‘Jonah, go back to bed, please go back to bed, I’ll be in soon, I promise. Jonah, please.’

My pleading has led to tears. Dad is half-smiling, but there is no malice there, just the flushed, skewed mouth of an imbecile.

‘I am not wiping your arse, Dad. Not yours too, please not yours too.’

But I reach for a fresh toilet roll and thrust the entire thing between his legs with my head turned away and roughly push and pull it a dozen times before throwing it into the bath. I grab his arms and wrap them around my neck and lift him to his feet by his waist.

His bed sheet is wet, but there are no clean ones left so I place a large towel over the wet patch, lay him down on his back and cover him with the duvet. I look at my son.

‘Your turn, Jonah.’

The night takes pigeon steps while I sit on the floor in the hall. I turn to Radio 4 for company and judge time’s passing by the hourly chimes of Big Ben.

Dad is between sleep and death but not captured by either, yet. It’s now 5 a.m. and I’ve tried Emma, but she’s a voicemail junkie these days, so I sit vigil by the side of his bed with my hand on his corrugated chest, timing my own breathing with his in a futile effort to finally bond us in some way, any way. Jonah has mercifully stayed in his room and I hear him giggling in his bed. The dawn hours are finally here.

My father is going to die.

No last-minute flight to a New York clinic.

No miraculous, unexplained remission.

Just a horrid, undignified end.

He’ll be philosophical despite the pain.

And I hate myself because I’m in pain.

And even more so because I resent him for it.

For making me need him and then fucking off when he’s supposed to watch over me.

I phone social services at 6 a.m. ‘My father’s going, it could only be hours. I need someone here to wait with Jonah for the school bus while I go with my father to the hospice.’

‘Someone will be there as soon as possible, Mr Jewell.’

She arrives at 6.30, just as they carry the unconscious remnants of my father into the ambulance and I climb in after. Through the ambulance’s blacked-out rear windows, I see Jonah skip back into the house as we set off for Hampstead Hospice.

Rollercoaster

He is settled – I have time to wait that long – in a bed with a morphine drip in his twig of a left arm and a nurse gently bathing him as he lies unmoving. I tell him I’ll see him later, although I can’t be sure. Maurice arrives as I leave and we embrace awkwardly.

‘I wish you mazel,’ he says, his eyes teary.

My phone rings on the walk down to Hampstead tube, a number I vaguely recognise but can’t quite place.

‘Hello, Ben?’

‘Maria? Where are you?’

‘At Heathrow. I just wanted to wish you luck. I’m so sorry I can’t be there to celebrate with you and Jonah.’

‘I wish I had your confidence,’ I say. ‘Anyway, you’re going on an adventure, put all this out of your mind.’

‘Not possible, I’m afraid,’ she says. ‘Remember our deal?’

‘The postcard, of course.’

‘Well, I’m changing the terms,’ she says.

‘Not sure that’s legal.’

‘I reserved the right, check the small print,’ she says.

‘Okay, what’s the deal?’

‘You must email and keep me up to date.’

‘I promise,’ I say.

‘Good. By the way, how’s your dad?’

‘Hanging in there,’ I say. ‘Please be careful, Maria.’

‘Around snakes or Latin men?’ she giggles.

‘Both, please.’

‘I have to go, they’re calling my flight,’ she says through more giggles. ‘And remember, write to me!’

‘I will,’ I say, as the line goes dead.

How many cigarettes can I smoke before entering this non-descript building? The butts decorating the rain-mottled pavement at my feet suggest enough to join my father in the next bed with unnecessary haste.

I haven’t worn a suit for months and I’m dishevelled, stained, creased, unshaven.

The waiting area is like a catalogue for budget office furniture. I appear to be the first of our ‘crack squad’ to arrive and settle in a royal-blue tub chair. This is not what I imagined – no wood panelling in sight, no powdered wigs. Functional and quiet, businesslike. The mood belies the purpose, I think, and the anxiety I feel. I wish I had swiped a couple of Dad’s Lorazepam. Instead, I go back outside.

She approaches me like a pickpocket.

‘Today is about Jonah, not about you and me. Okay?’ Emma’s lips are set in a determined pout. I light another cigarette as she heads into the building. I knew she would be here, but I feel marginalised by her presence. Resentful of her riding in like Sir Galahad to save the day. I remove the photo from my inside pocket and stare at Jonah’s faraway eyes. This is for him, all else follows.

Valetta is the next to arrive, wheeling a hand-luggage-sized suitcase, and within ten minutes there are six of us crammed into a cupboard of a meeting room. The airless space and the body heat is making me sweat and – after the night’s exertions – I’m conscious that a few more pound coins could come my way if I stand by Holborn station during evening rush hour.

‘The first good news is the judge,’ Valetta says from the head of the table. ‘She’s generally sympathetic. I’ve come across her before and she takes a dim view of a lack of preparation.’

‘There’s more good news?’ I ask.

‘The local authority’s brief, De Vries. He’s South African – easily riled. Your basic arse.’ She leans forward in her chair and stares me down. If this were a rugby match she’d be an All Black performing the haka.

‘Listen, Ben, Emma, you are going to hear some things today from the opposing side that will upset you, things that you believe to be false and things that you know for certain are false. Whatever happens, and I mean
whatever
, do not react – don’t grimace, gesticulate, get up from your chair, and do not interject or interrupt. That is my job. Do you understand?’

I nod.

‘We have a good case. I don’t like to lose.’

‘But we’ll have a chance to say something, won’t we?’ I ask.

‘Yes, the judge will invite you and Emma to talk about Jonah at the end of the proceedings.’

I glance at Emma, she is looking down. A hundred thoughts of what she’ll say are vying for my attention. I instinctively reach for the typewritten sheets in my inside pocket, words that I have sweated over late at night for weeks. I hate what I’ve written, how can I claim to know so much? What right do I have to deliver them? If only he could—

There is a knock at the door.

‘Okay, that’s two minutes. Does everyone have the paperwork in order? Good, then let’s go.’ She suddenly stops. ‘Oh, Ben, how is your father?’

I can’t find anything to say as I step into a mystery future.

IN THE FIRST TIER TRIBUNAL
SPECIAL EDUCATIONAL NEEDS & DISABILITY

Between

(1) BENJAMIN JEWELL

(2) EMMA JEWELL

Appellants

and

WYNCHGATE COUNCIL
Respondent

Attendance

Ms Valetta Price, barrister, represented Mrs Jewell and Mr Jewell – who attended the hearing. Their witnesses are Ms Anne Birch, independent Educational Psychologist, Ms Claudia Lack, independent Speech and Language Therapist, Ms Jennifer Smart, independent Occupational Therapist and Mr Hugh Challoner, Chief Executive and Principal of Highgrove Manor School, observing.

Mr Francis De Vries, barrister, represented the LA. Its witnesses are Dr Anita Kaur, LA Educational Psychologist, Mr Donald Davies, Deputy Manager Social Services, and Ms Claire McDonald, NHS Highly Specialist Speech and Language Therapist.

I sit behind the main players with my head against the wall, trying to stay awake, the fatigue partly from last night’s trauma and partly in anticipation of the traumas to come – both in this utilitarian room and the one that holds my father a few miles away, awaiting his own judgement.

JUDGE:
Good morning, everyone. As you are all aware, we are here not just to hear evidence of two opposing sides, but to decide the future of a young man called Jonah Jewell.

It should also be noted that Mr Georg Jewell, Jonah’s grandfather, is currently in Hampstead Hospice where he is in the late stages of cancer. My sympathy, Mr Jewell.

All these months of work and I just can’t stay awake. My chin keeps falling to my chest. I can blame the tiredness on last night, but something else is dragging my mind away from these proceedings.

Those hidden vodka miniatures and the need for more take me back almost twelve years, pre-Jonah, to a memory of lacerating humiliation.

A hand gripped me hard beneath the armpit and pulled me violently from my swivel chair before my heart or eyes or brain had accepted I was awake. Dissonant violins struck up. The floor was cotton wool. I desperately needed to defecate. I was vaguely aware of people standing open-mouthed – some shocked, some wearing the smiling mask of
schadenfreude
.

DE VRIES, opposing barrister:
It is the LA’s view that it is in Jonah’s interests to transfer with his peers to Maureen Mitchell and for his care package, which is already substantial, to continue.

The LA is opposing the parents’ appeal in relation to Part 4 because it considers the parents’ choice of school represents unreasonable public expenditure.

It is the LA’s view that Maureen Mitchell School can meet Jonah’s needs and the LA does not feel that it should fund a significantly more expensive placement elsewhere.

Unreasonable public expenditure? So it’s really all about money then, nothing to do with what’s best for Jonah. At least, finally, someone’s got the balls to admit what this is really all about.

A second hand hooked my other armpit. I would have run but my legs felt stripped of bone and cartilage and I was dragged, toes scraping the carpet, through parallel lines of suited people in a parody of a wedding party – no confetti or claps, just gasps and sighs.

Then I was in a lift, the doors closed. My escorts remained silent. The sound of my heart caught in my ears, my mind was a washing machine. Ideas, tossed and turned, twisted back on themselves, crazy, insignificant details – I’d left my laptop open, my jacket was over my chair. The lift dropped to the basement, my stomach stayed on the third floor. I felt fingers dig into the soft flesh of my upper arm. My ear began aching again – I had had an ear infection for weeks that wouldn’t shift – I felt it weeping, mingling with the sweat running from my head. I could smell myself. Acrid. Rotten. Different to the sweet sweat of exertion – it was the smell of fear.

The lift ride went on forever. Chris de Burgh piped from the tinny speakers. My mind hummed the funeral march.

The lift juddered to a halt and the doors screeched open. We were in the basement, below ground. I thought I was in Hell.

‘What are you going to do to me? What have I done?’ My voice sounded monotone, lifeless, haunted like the voices of those downed RAF pilots captured by the Iraqis and made to confess on TV like Thunderbird puppets.

There was silence as I was led through a metal door and out into the blazing sunlight. I squinted, my eyes blinded, but when the macabre dance finally stopped and the flashes began to fade, I made out the grubby form of my company Mondeo and the guillotine dropped. Alec stood next to my open driver’s door clutching a roll of black bin bags.

The grip was released as I was thrust forward and dropped to my knees in front of him.

Alec stared down at me and handed me the bin bags.

‘Clean it out, you fucking piss artist.’

The others left as Alec stood over me, his foppish blond hair glistening in the sunshine.

‘Count them in,’ he demanded.

I started counting in my head.

‘No. Out loud.’

I pulled my hands through the piles of bottles festering in the foot wells, scraped the door pockets for miniatures and empty fag packets.

‘Thirty-two, thirty-three … sixty-seven.’

DR KAUR, borough psychologist:
Staff reported that Jonah’s self-help skills have improved. He is now able to dress and undress himself for activities in school, such as swimming.

Jonah is able to indicate that he needs the toilet by standing near the toilet entrance and is developing his ability to exchange a toilet photograph to make this request.

Which child has she been observing? Sure, he can strip off, but he can’t even put his boxer shorts on by himself, and as for the toilet bollocks …

The inside of the car was clear.

‘Now the boot.’ Alec handed me another bin bag and peered over my shoulder as I leant into the boot. It was full to bursting with half- and full-sized bottles.

‘Keep counting. I want to know the exact tally.’

My tears fell heavily, mixing with the discharge from my ear and the vinegary remnants that leaked on to my shirt and trousers as I continued this humiliating ritual.

‘One hundred and twenty, one hundred and twenty-one, one hundred and twenty-two, one hundred and twenty-three, one hundred and twenty-four, one hundred and twenty-five, one hundred and twenty-six.’

I pulled myself up using the bumper for purchase. Six black bin bags sat neatly against the side of my car. Alec tied knots in the top.

‘That’s the lot,’ I wheezed, puffing from the exertion.

‘Now carry them up to the skip. You’ll need to make more than one trip, I reckon.’

It took me three trips to get the six bags the hundred yards to the office’s rubbish skip. The journey took me past banks of windows. In each, voyeuristic colleagues jostled for space, like rubberneckers catching a glimpse of a dead body at a motorway pile-up.

BIRCH, EdPsych:
Jonah was not able to point to objects in response to complex questions, e.g., ‘Which one do we drink?’

Or anything else preceded by which, why, where or when or how. These kind of statements are so obvious, so simple and so devastating. Surely the judge will understand that the LA is talking bullshit?

I smelled my hands, they reeked of stale wine and beer. My face was smeared with dirty tears, my shirt and trousers stained, and all I could think about was Emma’s pitying face and the month’s impending mortgage arrears.

‘O’Brien wants you on the tenth floor soon. You can’t leave the building or attempt to go near your car,’ Alec instructed me.

I was held in the emergency stairwell for twenty minutes as Alec stood silently guarding me. Did he think I was going to run? I smoked frantically.

Alec was just the chaperone, the leg-shagger. O’Brien would do the damage, all six foot five inches of him. But the fear of this brute was nothing to the fear of Emma. I needed to dream up a deception to excuse myself from losing a £30,000-a-year job and everything that went with it.

The twenty minutes felt like an hour. The stairwell was a grey concrete funnel. I looked over the banister, instantly imposing vertigo on my already spinning head. Was I looking to leap? I counted the number of metal balustrades, imagining how many times my head would crack into each before I finally ended it all with a crunch …

PRICE:
It is interesting, when looking at Mr Hatton’s report in 2003 I see he described Jonah’s self-help skills as being very much different between home and school and stated: ‘This seems to vary from home to school, depending on how much he can get away with being lazy. Perhaps for similar reasons, Jonah is not yet toilet trained.’ Eight years later it seems clear that this is not a result of laziness.

Laziness? How stupid does that sound now? That bastard condemned him – and us – in 2003 with his nonsense. He was supposed to be the borough’s leading child psychologist. Maybe if he’d have listened, and yet, at that moment, I so wanted him to be right, Jonah was just lazy, like me …

These words are Chinese water torture – drip, drip, dripping on my head. I begin listing stops on the Piccadilly Line, Cockfosters, Oakwood, Southgate, Arnos Grove; I scrabble for memories of a Mauritian beach – Emma next to me, pert and shining with sweat. But this is not a local-anaesthetic situation, this calls for a general. I want to wake up when it’s over and scream for water and strong painkillers.

‘GET IN HERE NOW,’ O’Brien bellowed.

I hated being shouted at, anything but that. Punch me, knife me, just don’t shout.

But O’Brien was in his element. He had the floor to himself. A horseshoe of desks where he’d browbeat underlings, reduce them to tears. A vast empty space where he paced while on the phone and when angry.

And he was angry then. I prepared to tell him anything, everything. I wanted his sympathy. I needed to live past those next few minutes. I needed, I needed, I needed a drink.

And then it came.

‘I GET CALLED BACK FOR THIS, BEN. I’VE A HUNDRED MILLION THINGS TO DO AND I GET CALLED BACK BY ALEC TO DEAL WITH A FUCKING DRUNKARD.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I muttered, staring at the floor.

I couldn’t help myself any more and my legs gave way. I didn’t mean to kneel at his feet.

‘GET UP. YOU’RE PATHETIC,’ he snorted.

But I couldn’t move, I was frozen and I was pathetic, it was true. And then I begged: ‘O’Brien, please, please don’t fire me. I’ve just been going through a bad time, things are tough at home, my medication’s gone haywire, I’ll go back to the doctor, I promise. It won’t happen again, just please don’t fire me! I need this job.’

He paused. The silence was almost worse than the bawling. People claimed that they aged under pressure, went grey, grew lines on their face. But the opposite was true of me. I regressed, shrank, cowered. I was twenty-six at 8.30 that morning. By then I was no more than eleven.

‘Ben, I like you. Everyone likes you here. I’ll give you one more chance.’ His tone was quieter, almost conciliatory. ‘I want you to stand in front of me now and admit to me that you’re an alcoholic. I want you to say “My name is Ben and I’m an alcoholic.” Say it now, go on, “My name is Ben and I’m an alcoholic.”’

‘My name is Ben and I’m an alcoholic,’ I lied. Maybe that was the end? Maybe that was it? Tell him what he wanted to hear, tell him it would never happen again and I’d escape.

‘Look, these are my terms. I want you to go to Alcoholics Anonymous and I want proof that you’re going.’

‘But how am I supposed to prove it to you when the thing’s supposed to be anonymous?’ It was my final gambit. I couldn’t go to Alcoholics Anonymous even if I had wanted to because I’d have had to explain it to Emma.

‘There’s sponsors or something. Get him to sign a letter, take a photo – I don’t care.’

As if by magic, Alec appeared beside O’Brien, clutching in his hand a bottle of wine, Cloudy Bay – my Cloudy Bay! Alec whispered in O’Brien’s ear and they laughed …

BIRCH:
Dr De Rossi, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, noted in a letter dated 22 October 2009: his behaviour was increasingly difficult to manage, including significant self-harming, biting his hands, causing them to bleed, bruising on his legs, stripping himself naked and frequent mood changes, from laughing for no reason to head banging or biting himself. He also tried to strangle his parents.

God, that was the beginning of the end. Those horrible months when every day we’d wait for the tales from school of Jonah’s metamorphosis into a wild animal. It was heartbreaking watching him bruise and batter himself. All I could do was drink to numb myself. It just got worse and worse – the rage of not being able to help, the horrible decision we had to face. It was time we looked for a residential school.

… And then I had a vision of the two of them, O’Brien and Alec, sharing my thirty-pound bottle of Cloudy Bay, draining it while they laughed at my predicament, and suddenly my fear and humiliation – so complete and genuine moments before – was displaced in an instant by righteous indignation and anger.

And the revelations of that past hour – all the admissions, pledges, shows of regret and apology, and any hint of damned gratitude – passed and it became as clear as day what was going on there, what the charade, the injustice and travesty’s purpose was. O’Brien wanted to subjugate me further, he wanted me as his gimp, to do his bidding, to draw out and display whenever he felt it necessary to boost his own flagging ego. And even worse: that monstrous man, that bully, that hypocrite, wanted to save me! Me! He wanted to save me and use me as an example. Tell people how he, O’Brien, master businessman and paragon of compassion, had taken that poor broken, alcohol-sodden soul and saved him. Saved his life, his job and his family. Well fuck that and fuck him, I thought. He was one of the reasons I needed to drink in the first place. I was incandescent. If anyone was going to save me it was fucking well going to be me!

And so after banging in my resignation, I repeated this mantra all the way home on the bus. I was going to save myself, no other arrogant bastard was going to take the credit, I’d show them all who was in charge and I’d do it my way. I’d stop drinking my way – just not then.

In the time it took me to walk from the bus stop to the off licence I was King of the Fucking Universe again and bought half a bottle of cheap vodka as a big fuck you to both of them. The bottle was already waiting in a bag as I walked through the door.