The Fragments of my Father

In the playground, I became an observer. The difference in class between me and my classmates had cleaved me from them. The turning-inwards of my energies was becoming habitual; I read books in break-times, or watched the others playing. Most of the games were about love and war – Kiss Chase or some variant on Cowboys and Indians. Or children played at professions, at Doctors and Nurses, or being a spy. Children do not play at being children, they play at being grown-ups; the playground is a dress rehearsal for the future. I watched them with envy. I read James and the Giant Peach, Five Children and It, The Secret Seven and wished the characters might be coaxed from the page into real life friends.

And then, suddenly, my dad was back home again.

It was a plot hole I could not fill. Every time he returned, I was simply glad that he was home, without worrying too much about the whys: why he had gone, why he took pills at night, or why his work suits hung in his wardrobe and gathered dust. I remember going on a family outing by car one day when I was about eight years old. I was sitting in the back with my brothers and I was reading Roald Dahl’s Danny The Champion of the World. My father was driving. I could see his face in the rear-view mirror and he was muttering to himself as though in conversation with a voice; I smiled, recognising that I mirrored his reflection, for I had the voice of Dahl running through my mind, and it was witty, rude, wry, and compassionate. Fiction can sometimes enrich us, leave us feeling full, but just as often a good book can leave us wistful, with a sense of absence. In Danny, the hero does not have a mother but he has an amazing father. His father teaches him how to fish and takes him on secret poaching trips in the middle of the night. At the end of the book, there is a concluding message: ‘A stodgy parent is no fun at all! What a child wants – and DESERVES – is a parent who is SPARKY.’ It was hard not to stare at the picture of Dahl on the back cover, sitting in his Buckinghamshire garden, a tall man with a twinkle in his eye, and imagine that he was the perfect incarnation of paternity.

Back home, I flipped through a tattered dictionary, wishing I could discover a word for my dad’s idiosyncrasies. If I could only find it, I thought, it would be like turning a key in a lock. Despite discovering new words I liked the sound of (peevish, aberration, crasis), nothing enlightened me. The key would not turn.

3

B ang! Bang! Bang!

When I arrived at St Helier hospital, I made my way through the criss-cross of white corridors to the fifth floor. My dad had been brought here in the ambulance yesterday. As I approached the ward, I heard a noise that filled me with dread.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

There were eight beds. The other patients were all elderly men and, though sick, they appeared to be ‘normal’. They were reading the paper, watching TV, or chatting with relatives, who sat in plastic chairs around their beds. My dad looked simultaneously elderly and infantile. He was drumming violently, fists flying up and crashing down on the bed, like an enormous white-haired baby in a cot. When I said hello, a faint smile quivered on his lips – his fists pausing for a few seconds – before he went back to his routine.

A nurse approached me and said that my dad would probably be discharged later that day.

‘But look at him,’ I said, my heart thumping with shock.

‘Isn’t he always like this?’

I tried to explain the man my father normally was: a man who rose every morning and made his own breakfast, did his own daily shop, and cooked himself a poached egg for lunch, one of those simple recipes that involves a certain delicate skill, lest the egg collapse into a wobbly morass. The nurse looked sympathetic but wary, as though she couldn’t quite equate these two versions of my father. If he’d been in with a broken limb, she might have been able to synthesise them. But madness tears a person’s character into two, their sane self and their insane one, and it can be hard to make the join, perceive them as a whole. Here, in hospital, the staff were used to illness being tested, clarified, boxes ticked and clear prognoses made. Dad had had an operation for bowel cancer the previous year and the accompanying leaflet gave a window for recovery of five to seven days and then a prognosis for his health in three months’ and six months’ time. Now he was an enigma, someone suffering from something which might or might not be cured at any time in the future.

Last September, when my dad had been brought in with the same ailment – a mysterious catatonia – they had also been a little suspicious and bewildered at first. I think it was the result of government cuts. With so few beds, perhaps there were fears that we were just dumping him on the system, creating a bed-blocker.

‘You can’t discharge him, we’d have no idea how to look after him,’ I said. ‘And I’m worried about him eating and drinking.’

The nurse softened. She said he’d be assessed by a psychiatrist. She added that she’d try to feed him.

I sat down beside my dad. Unscrewing a bottle of orange juice, I pushed a straw into it and held it to his lips. They looked parched, chapped. He drank in gasping, slurpy bursts. Relief came over his face. But it didn’t cease the relentless Bang! Bang! Bang!s. I unfolded a copy of The Daily Telegraph, his paper of choice, and attempted to read an article to him, lifting the paper high to hide my face as irritated patients and visitors glared over at us.

The hospital cafe was a Costa; I ordered a hot chocolate and sat down by the window. I was taking a break, for I hadn’t been able to soothe my dad’s relentless banging. From my bag, I pulled a copy of Mrs Dalloway.

Virginia Woolf’s novel is set on a single day in June 1923 and captures the psyche of a nation in the aftermath of the First World War; it dives and swoops into the consciousness of various characters, shifting from one to another within a single paragraph. I suppose I was drawn to a reread because of its theme of madness. In the novel’s early conception, the book’s two main characters, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, were one; then Woolf split this imaginative egg into two. Clarissa is a high-society woman planning a dinner party; Septimus is a soldier who fought on the Western front and lost a friend there just before the Armistice. Woolf notes in her diary that she wanted to sketch the ‘world seen by the sane and the insane’, showing how thin the membrane is between the two. Clarissa suffers from neurosis, Septimus from psychosis. She is more manic; he is more depressed. Clarissa represents the governing classes – ‘civilised life’ – who were left largely untouched by the war, whilst soldiers such as Septimus were left in a state of trauma and despair.

I found myself moved by the relationship between Septimus and his wife, Rezia, seeing echoes of my parents’ marriage. They sit in Regent’s Park together, gazing at the trees and sky. Rezia tries to cheer herself by recalling the reassurances of her husband’s doctors, that he has ‘nothing whatever seriously the matter with him but was a little out of sorts’. The narrative jumps to Septimus’s viewpoint and we see just how disturbed he is, for he hears the birds singing in Greek, and imagines he sees his dead friend, Evans, behind the park railings. It is an evocation of the lonely ache of mental illness – lonely for both of them. Septimus’s wife cannot fathom the depths of his despair, musing: ‘To love makes one solitary’; he cannot share the state of his mind with her; they sit as man and wife, but they are strangers. Septimus ends up committing suicide, jumping from a window. His psychiatrist attends Clarissa’s dinner party and there she learns of his patient’s death.

The book pinpoints a time in history when attitudes towards mental health and gender were changing. In the Victorian era, women with mental health issues were often diagnosed with hysteria. Shellshock baffled a society in love with the romantic idea that men returning from the front were war heroes. When soldiers first began to exhibit symptoms of what would now be called PTSD – dizziness, depression, sexual impotence, nightmares, fits of shaking, paralysis – doctors initially reacted with denial. The military saw it as cowardice and veterans were threatened with court martial if they did not ‘drop’ or suppress their symptoms. By 1922, however, over a hundred special treatment centres had been established for veterans seeking help. The illness was first termed ‘male hysteria’, then ‘neurasthenia’ and, eventually, ‘shellshock’. Doctors had to acknowledge that it might be a malady of the mind rather than the body. As a result, psychiatry gained in power and prominence.

A friend of mine once said that she would have loved to have had a husband like Leonard Woolf. He supported Virginia in her writing, rooted her during the wild winds of her illness. Leonard, I supposed, had effectively been her carer.

Carer: that word again. More and more, people were pinning the label on me, and it still felt odd. I associated the word with someone in a blue coat, stripping beds, wearing rubber gloves; a Florence Nightingale figure with endless reserves of patience, energy and love. When I’d googled the verb to care, I’d found it was of Germanic origin, relating to the High German chara, meaning grief, sorrow. To care involved suffering. Over time, its meaning softened as it also came to signify to make provision or look out for someone.

My mum had looked after my dad for years, but I don’t remember her ever being called a carer. Clearly it was a term of the present day, one that was gaining currency. Recently I’d picked up on the white noise of a social care crisis in the press, though I knew little of the details. If I thought about it, however, I did know of friends who were going through something similar. One had a parent who was ill with Alzheimer’s. At midnight she would suddenly be woken by a call from her mother’s neighbour telling her that her mother was wandering about the road without a coat, and she’d have to jump into a car and drive across the night to rescue the situation. Another had a brother with Down’s syndrome: his parents had given him a loving, stable environment, but as they’d grown old they’d become wrung out with tiredness and, after a lifetime of sacrifice, had been forced to give up and put their adult son in a home.

Carer: the term seemed an anomaly in our modern society – one that, since Thatcherism, has become so individualistic, amplified by Twitter and reality TV; one which prizes aspiration, self-reliance, getting ahead. Not one in which wages are down and inflation is high and life is moving so fast, for I was beginning to associate being a carer with losing chunks of time, getting behind, to-do lists forever unticked and multiplying. Perhaps that was why the label has evolved: as a way of defining duty, enclosing it, protecting it from life’s pressures.

I told myself to get up and return to my dad’s bedside, or head home. Reading Woolf felt like such an indulgence. When I wasn’t with my father I fretted that I was neglecting him; when I was with him, I fretted that I was neglecting my other responsibilities. I was a conscientious type. Missing deadlines made me anxious; I hated to feel I was letting people down. I had so many things to do: emails, freelance editing, chapters to write, chapters to edit, research, washing, housework. I imagined my Florence Nightingale alter ego, who would be back at my dad’s bedside by now, saying soothing words, knowing how to calm his banging. I sat and read and felt guilty.

4

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.