Grief dragged his face. ‘I am,’ he said in a hoarse, emotional voice that surprised me. I had thought the only person Neil loved was himself. That he probably shouted his own name when he was coming.
‘Did she drink?’
‘No.’
‘Not with your father?’
‘No, it wasn’t like that. She tried to stop him.’
A deep hush had fallen on the room.
‘And what happened when she tried to stop him?’
There was a horrible, tense silence.
‘What happened?’ Josephine asked again.
‘He hit her,’ he said thickly, tears in his voice.
How does she know? I wondered, amazed. How did Josephine know to ask such questions?
‘Did this happen often?’
There was a tortuous absence of sound until Neil blurted ‘Yes, it happened always.’
I got the same sick feeling I’d had the day before when I found out about Neil beating Emer.
‘You’re the eldest child in the family,’ Josephine said to Neil. ‘Did you try to protect your mother?’
Neil’s eyes were faraway, in a frightening place in the past. ‘I tried, but I was too small to do any good. You’d hear it downstairs… you know? The thumps. The slaps, the cracks…’ He paused and opened his mouth as if he was going to puke.
He placed the palm of his hand across his open mouth and we all stared at him, bug-eyed with horror.
‘And she’d try not to scream, you know?’ he managed, with a twisted half-smile. ‘So that it wouldn’t upset us, upstairs.’
I shuddered.
‘And I’d try and distract the others, so that they wouldn’t know what was happening, but it made no difference. Even if you couldn’t hear anything, you could feel the fear.’
My forehead was sweaty.
‘It always happened on a Friday night, so as each day in the week passed we got more and more scared. And I swore that when I was big enough I’d kill the bastard, I’d make him beg for mercy the way he made her.’
‘And did you?’
‘No,’ Neil struggled to say. ‘The fucker had a stroke. And now he sits in a chair all day long, with my mother dancing attendance on him. And I keep telling her to leave and she won’t and it drives me mad.’
‘How do you feel about your father now?’ Josephine asked.
‘I still hate him.’
‘And how does it make you feel that you’ve turned out exactly like him?’ Josephine asked, the mildness of her manner not hiding the apocalyptic nature of the question.
Neil stared, then gave a shaky smile. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, Neil,’ Josephine said with emphasis, ‘that you are exactly like your father.’
‘Not at all,’ Neil stammered. ‘I’m nothing like him. I always swore I’d be completely different from him.’
I was stunned at Neil’s complete indifference to the truth.
‘But you’re just like him,’ Josephine pointed out. ‘You behave exactly like him. You drink too much, you terrorize your wife and children and you’re creating a future generation of alcoholics in your own children.’
‘NO,’ Neil howled. ‘I don’t! I am the opposite kind of man from my father.’
‘You beat your wife the way your father beat your mother.’ Josephine was relentless. ‘And Gemma – she’s your eldest? – probably tries to shield Courtney’s ears from the sounds of it, the way you did with your brothers and sisters.’
Neil was nearly hysterical. He pressed himself back into his chair, terror on his face as if he was up against a wall, surrounded by savage, barking, baying pitbulls.
‘No!’ he wailed. ‘It’s not true!’
His eyes were horrified. And as I watched him, I had the shocking realization that Neil really did believe it wasn’t true.
There and then, for the first time in my life, I truly understood that fashionable, bandied-about, over-used word – denial. It made my intestines cold with fear. Neil couldn’t see it, he honestly, really couldn’t, and it wasn’t his fault.
A glimmer of compassion sparked to life in me. We sat in silence, the only sound Neil’s sobs.
Eventually Josephine spoke again.
‘Neil,’ she said matter-of-factly, ‘I appreciate that you’re in tremendous pain at the moment. Stay with those feelings. And I’d ask you to bear in mind some things. We learn behaviour patterns from our parents. Even if we hate those parents and their way of behaving. From your father, you learnt how a man is supposed to behave, even if on one level you abhorred it.’
‘I’m different!’ Neil howled. ‘It’s not the same for me.’
‘You were a damaged child,’ Josephine continued. ‘And in some ways, still are. It doesn’t excuse what you’ve done to Emer and your children and Mandy, but it does explain it. You can learn from this, you can heal the damage in your marriage and in your children, and most importantly of all, in yourself. This is a lot to take on board, especially considering the extent of your denial, but luckily you’re here for another six weeks.
‘And the rest of you.’ She threw a glance round the room. ‘Not all of you are from alcoholic homes but I’d advise you not to use that as an excuse to deny your alcoholism or addiction.’
30
We limped back to the dining-room, drained after all the emotion of the session.
Every afternoon, after group, two of the more senior inmates went to the sweetshop in the village and brought back lorryloads of cigarettes and chocolate. The placing of the orders was a lively affair.
‘I want chocolate, so I do,’ said Eddie, to Frederick who was writing down orders on an A4 pad of paper. Frederick had the biggest, reddest nose I’d ever seen. ‘Name me out something nice.’
‘Turkish Delight,’ he suggested.
‘No, too small, gone in one bite.’
‘Aero?’
‘No, I’m not paying good money to eat holes.’
At this there was a shout of ‘Ah, ye tight-fishted bollix,’ from Mike, Stalin and Peter, who were passionately discussing the merits of ice-cream Mars bars over ordinary Mars bars. (‘The ice-cream ones are three times the price.’ ‘But they’re miles nicer.’ ‘Three times nicer?’ ‘Well, I don’t know about that.’)