Junk - Melvin Burgess [105]
‘You shouldn’t have left her,’ he told me.
‘David, I couldn’t even look after myself, let alone your bloody mother.’
It all fell to bits pretty quickly after he left. I thought I was holding the whole thing together. Apparently he thought it was him. People hang on to situations. You think you are the situation. Then when the whole bloody thing falls apart… you are still there.
But there wasn’t any reason to hold it together after he left us. No matter how hard things got I always thought, I have to stay here for the boy, I have to keep going for his sake, I can’t leave David here at the mercy of his mother. He didn’t make it any easier, though. Interfering all the time. Trying to take care of her. Doing the housework for her. Taking away her self-respect – taking away the only things she had to keep her going. It’s the worst thing you can do for an alcoholic. Your self-respect is low enough to start off with. How she must have felt about herself, having her son doing her job for her! I tried to tell him: ‘Your mother has a problem, David, we have to help her get on top of it…’ But he just carried on, trying to run her life for her.
I suppose what I should have done was to say, ‘Your father has a problem, I need help.’ But the need for self-deception in a situation of dependency is quite staggering. I never even knew I was an alcoholic until everything had already gone.
For example. I’d come back and the whole house would stink of gin and perfume. ‘You stink of alcohol,’ I’d yell.
‘YOU stink of alcohol!’ she’d shriek back. But I knew she was lying. Funny, isn’t it? There was no way she could smell me because I was too clever for her… ha ha ha! I drank vodka and wore aftershave. She was only saying that to get off the fact that she’d been on the gin all day.
I must have stunk like a skunk.
I used to hit them. I expect you knew. No hiding place, eh? I wish he could forgive me but it’s asking a lot. No, I haven’t and never will ask for forgiveness from my son. But if he offered it, that’d be different. I’d accept in all humility.
Jane lives in the old place; I don’t see her very often but when I do, there’s this smell long-term alcoholics have. A sort of warm urinous smell, tinged with a bit of spirit. And they don’t know it. You splash on the Tasker aftershave or the perfume and you think, Aren’t I clever, ha ha ha.
I lost my job about a year after David left home. I wonder how I got away with it for so long. The smell, apart from anything. That humiliates me to this day – the thought that I smelt. My final humiliation came about during a meeting of Heads of Department. I fell asleep in my chair, dozed off. Not a unique experience. I woke up with someone shaking my arm – it was Tamla Williams. ‘Wake up, Mr Lawson… I think you’ve had a bit of an accident…’
It took a moment to dawn. The smell. Then the warmth on my lap turning cold.
I said, ‘Excuse me,’ and I got up and walked out. I picked up a copy of the school magazine from the table and held it in front of me and I walked as fast as I could to the car, saying to myself, ‘This is a dream. This is a dream. This is a dream.’
The bastards. They could have just tiptoed out of the room and left me to wake up on my own and clean up and sneak away. At least then I might have been able to fool myself it hadn’t happened in public. Come to think about it, I wonder how often they did do that? There was this time… no. No. It doesn’t bear thinking about.
I just tried to shut off about it, but you can’t help imagining it all… them sitting around thinking, The poor old sod’s dozed off again, sad, isn’t it? Then the smell, the looking around, the realisation as someone sees the drips coming off the edge of the chair on to the carpet. The embarrassment rushing round