He was no easier at school. Sullen but volatile, he made few friends, the other children preferring to keep their distance from him. They were frightened of him: frightened of his anger; of what it could do to him, what it could do to them. And because his mood swings were so unpredictable, some of the older, braver boys called him Skitzy. He was twice suspended for smoking on school premises, and very nearly expelled just before O levels for turning the air blue with his language when a teacher caught him drinking in a nearby pub one lunchtime. His parents were summoned, and after they had begged the head to reconsider and an apology had been extracted from Mark, he was given a last chance. He watched them drive away afterwards, his mother holding a handkerchief to her face, his father tight-lipped and ashen.
It pained him now to think how close he had come to destroying his parents. But unleashing his anger had been his only source of comfort, his only means of survival: to reject his parents before they rejected him.
Making his peace with his family had been one of the many humbling experiences he had had to go through to complete the process of cleaning himself up. Bones had said that it was essential for his recovery that he underwent some family-therapy sessions. At first he had resisted the suggestion. Violently. ‘No!’ he had cried, leaping from his seat and nearly knocking it over. ‘No, I’m not ready for that.’ His desperate voice had bounced off the bare walls of the austere room. From nowhere, his body was covered in a sheen of sweat. The white noise of his panic filled his head and his guts dissolved. Then the need for a drink flooded his system. A drink to drown the fear. Going over to the open window, he fought hard to resist his addiction by focusing on his breathing. He looked across the fields to the restored church spire, but his eyes took in none of it. His face was tight with recollection as he visualised the last time he had seen his parents.
He had let himself into their house late one night, using the key he had had for years, but until then had never used. This was no social call: he was there to steal from them. He had been out of work for nearly a year — employers are hard to come by when you’re a full-time alcoholic and living in a squat permanently off your head. He had sold everything he owned, and scrounged from those who had anything worth scrounging.
His parents had discovered him in the dining room, clearing out a Georgian cabinet of silver knick-knacks. He was carelessly tipping them into a large bin-liner when the light was switched on. It was a toss-up as to who looked more shocked, him or them. His mother, standing a few inches behind his father, had gasped and clutched at the neck of her nightdress as if a blast of cold air had just swept in. His father, once he had gathered his wits together and realised what was going on, had said, ‘At least have the decency to leave your mother the photographs.’
Looking down at what was in his hand, Mark had seen that he was about to add to his bag of booty a silver-framed picture of himself as a small boy. A smiling, untroubled face stared back at him; a happy child with a happy future ahead of him. Suddenly the awful reality of what he was doing hit him. With all the force of mainlining straight into his bloodstream, it made him hesitate. Made him wonder if there wasn’t another way.
But it only lasted for a matter of seconds.
‘I need money,’ he said, and tossed the photograph into the bin-liner. He heard the glass break as it banged against another piece of silver. The threat he was making was so clear that he might just as well have been holding a gun to his parents’ heads.
His father tightened the belt on his dressing-gown. ‘How much ... this time?’
‘How much can you spare ... this time?’
‘Put the bag down and come with me.’
His father’s flat voice had its usual effect on him, made him feel as though he was no more significant than one of his employees. Without looking at his mother, Mark followed his father the length of the house to his study, remembering a time when he had played here with his brothers, racing them up and down the long corridor and hallway, skidding to a halt on their knees as they flew across the polished wooden floor, rucking up rugs, bumping into panelled walls, their happy laughter filling the house while their mother gently rebuked them for their recklessness.
He stood in front of the walnut desk, and watched his father write a cheque. ‘I’m giving you this on the understanding that, from now on, you leave us alone. You’ve done your damnedest to destroy yourself, I won’t allow you to do the same to your mother. You’re not to come here again.’
He snatched the cheque from his father’s hand. ‘I can live with that. I’m not too proud to know that I’m being paid off to safeguard your finer feelings.’ He folded the crisp piece of paper in half and slipped it into his pocket, his mind already heading for the door to get out of the house, out of their lives. ‘But satisfy my morbid curiosity, don’t you care about me at all?’
The cool steely gaze — whose blueness matched Mark’s own eyes — stared back at him, never wavering. ‘No. I’ve had enough. I’ve done all that I possibly could for you. My conscience is clear.’
It was the longest conversation he had had with his father in years.
He was as good as his word and kept his side of the bargain by staying away. Until one day, coming round from a drinking binge that had lasted nearly a week — a week of which he had no recollection — he wrote his mother a letter. It was only a few melodramatic, disorientated lines saying that he was sorry for all the trouble he had caused and that he wished that he was dead.
Had it been a cry for help?
Almost certainly.
One instinctively knows when one has had enough. When it’s time. to come quietly.
Within two weeks Theo was helping him into a car and driving him through the night to a rehab clinic.
Bringing him out of his reverie, Bones had said, ‘Mark, please sit down. You really have nothing to fear from such a meeting with your family, and everything to gain.’
Sinking into his chair, desperate now, he had begged, ‘Please, I’m not ready. It’s too soon. Give me more time.’ Refusing to see his parents was the last line in his defence. Remove that and he would be vulnerable and exposed again.
But Bones was having none of his excuses. ‘You have to learn to coexist, Mark. The new man you are becoming has to live alongside the man you once were. There must be no shame involved. There will never be a more perfect time to see your parents. Now, shall we say Monday afternoon for the first meeting?’
They had been through a similar process when Bones had suggested that it might be helpful and appropriate for Mark to see Theo. All the other ‘guests’ at the clinic had a regular time for meeting friends and family from the outside world but he hadn’t wanted to see anyone: he had felt too raw and ashamed. But Bones was a persistent sod and arranged for Theo to come and see him.
‘Is it very bad, this place I have brought you to?’ Theo had asked, as they wandered the grounds in the bright spring sunshine shortly after they had been put through their paces by Bones.
‘Let’s just say it’s growing on me.’
They sat on a wooden bench overlooking a small lake and watched a squadron of ducks swim by. ‘I have known you all this time, Mark, and yet before this day you never told me about your friend drowning. I feel that I have let you down because you didn’t feel able to confide in me. Have I been such a poor friend to you?’
‘Hey, it’s me on the guilt trip, okay? Don’t go trying to steal my thunder.’
‘But I do feel guilty. I’m disappointed with myself that I never saw through your subterfuge. Your act of wanting single-handedly to save the world should have alerted me to what you were really doing.’
‘And what was that?’
‘Trying to make an atonement for a young boy’s death that you blamed yourself for. Oh, how very clever you were, I didn’t ever suspect. Nor did I really understand just how successful you were at alienating yourself from everybody.’
‘I wasn’t entirely successful. I let you get close, didn’t I?’
‘And for that I feel truly honoured. But tell me what this strange little man whom you call Bones has taught you.’
‘Oh, the usual half-baked theory that I have to learn to love myself.’
Looking stern, Theo said, ‘Please, Mark, do not be so flippant. Respecting oneself is crucial. Why can you not do that?’
‘Who knows? By the time Bones has finished with me I might be able to.’
It was when it was time for Theo to leave that Mark felt his emotions slide out of control. Theo had hugged him goodbye, a fierce, heart-filled hug that had taken the breath out of his chest and made him cling to his friend like a frightened child standing with his mother at the school gate for the first time. He had never forgotten the compassion on Theo’s face as he released his hold. Or his words: ‘I will come back for you, Mark,’ he had soothed, his eyes misting over, ‘I won’t let you down.’
Before the first meeting with his parents, he had had all weekend to stew in a ferment of anxiety and fear. How could he face them after everything he had done?
Would they come?
Perhaps his mother might, but his father? Would he feel that this was just one more aspect of his son’s dismally weak character with which he didn’t want to be associated?
Monday afternoon arrived, and in what was initially an excruciating ordeal, the last remaining spectres of his nightmare were finally laid to rest.
Bones started the proceedings by passing round a family-sized box of Maltesers and saying, in a carefully lowered voice that was clearly designed to draw them into a cosy circle of intimacy, ‘Well, everyone, we live in a society that is only too keen to make us feel guilty. We can’t throw away a shampoo bottle without thinking we should recycle it.’
Mark could see that Bones’s unassuming manner was putting his mother at ease, but there wasn’t a trace of a thaw in his father as he sat bolt upright in his chair, his face rigid with tension and disapproval. He was dressed for battle — suit, tie, shoes gleaming, eyes averted, defences bristling.
‘What I thought we’d look at first,’ Bones carried on, ‘is how everyone likes to have a scapegoat. Nowadays we use the term quite lightly, but its true significance is based on the desire to get rid of the thing, or person, whom we consider to be the cause of all our problems. Even in our enlightened age, there’s nothing better than to be able to blame something, or someone, for whatever is going wrong at a particular time. An unhappy husband will leave his wife for another woman because he believes the wife to be the one holding him back or not understanding him, for making him miserable. The truth is, he is holding himself back with his own misunderstanding of the many problems he refuses to acknowledge as his. Scapegoating goes on all the time. We blame the Russians or Michael Fish for bad weather. We blame politicians for the rising — ’
‘Are you saying that ... that all this is our fault?’ The question was barked with ferocious defensiveness.
‘No, Mr St James, I am not blaming you. Far from it. I’m suggesting that you are blaming yourself for not being able to help Mark work through the unresolved anger of a tragic accident. But if I may be allowed to explain further. When Mark really began to get out of control, you soon found yourselves turning him into a scapegoat for your own feelings of inadequacy and failure. In some small measure it lessened the guilt for you, out of sight, out of mind. No, please, don’t look so shocked. It was a position he deliberately forced you into. You had little choice in the matter. He already saw himself as the scapegoat for Niall’s death and wanted to take things further by proving to those closest to him that he should be thoroughly punished for what he had done. So he bullied you into sending him away to school. I’m afraid he manipulated you perfectly by turning himself into the family’s black sheep. Paradoxically he imagined it would make him feel confident and empowered to know that he was in charge of you all. By then there was no stopping him. He began to see himself as the superhuman carrier of collective guilt.’ A smile passed over Bones’s face. ‘And I think you would both agree with me that he is certainly arrogant enough to believe that he was up to the job.’
And so it went on, Bones talking, his parents listening, as he gently guided them through the dark maze in which they had been trapped. He spoke of the need for them all to challenge the past, to look it right in the eye and see it for what it was — something that no longer existed. The atmosphere gradually became less charged. His mother said, ‘What hurt me most was that he wouldn’t let me touch him.’ She looked at Mark, reached out to his hand. ‘I so badly wanted to wrap you in love, to hold you, to make you realise that you were loved. But you pushed me away so many times that I gave up trying.’
Unable to speak, he squeezed her hand. He looked at his father, to see how he was coping, knowing that it wouldn’t be easy for him. His father’s body had gone slack, his head was bowed low, his chin almost touching his chest. With a shock, Mark realised his father was crying. In response he felt his throat constrict and the backs of his eyes prickle. He caught Bones gesturing to him to pass his father the box of tissues on the desk. But he couldn’t. His body wouldn’t move. It was paralysed by too much family history. Resentment. Bitterness. And a mutual fear of each other.
‘Mark, I think your father might like a tissue. Would you pass him one, please?’
As cunning as ever, Bones had forced him to confront yet another ghost. He reached for a triple-strength Kleenex and, like a white flag of surrender, passed it to his father.
The head still bowed, there was an embarrassed murmur of thanks, followed by a loud trumpeting blow. But then the real tears flowed, and seeing his father’s rock-hard exterior crumbling away, Mark lost it as well. For the first time since he had been a small boy he wept openly in front of his parents, the tears streaming down his cheeks. In response, a heavy weight magically rose from his shoulders. The relief was enormous. And, without disturbing them, Bones quietly left them to it.