Both my parents were very good with strangers.
That may be one of the things I remember most clearly about them.
Either of them could talk to almost anybody.
A shopkeeper.
Someone beside them on a train.
A neighbour they had never met.
A person waiting in a queue.
There would be a question. A joke. Some tiny opening.
And suddenly the other person was talking.
Not polite talking.
Talking.
Telling them something.
My mother and father both had that ability to make another person feel, briefly at least, that what they were saying mattered.
Perhaps I inherited some of it.
It is more or less what I do for a living, when I have a living.
Journalism is largely walking up to strangers and asking:
Hello. What’s going on with you?
Then shutting up for long enough to hear the answer.
There are worse inheritances.
There were other ones too.
Alexandra Palace, probably late 1976.
Saturday afternoon.
Football on the radio.
I remember my father crying.
Not a tear. Not the restrained moistening of the eyes of an Englishman temporarily overcome by something respectable.
He blubbed.
Sat down, head in his hands, and broke.
Nick and I stood beside him.
One on each side.
We were children.
There wasn’t much to say.
So we stayed there.
Shoulders against him. I don’t remember precisely.
I remember the arrangement.
Dad in the middle.
Two boys holding the edges.
A week earlier – or perhaps memory has simply placed the two scenes beside one another – our mother had fallen down the stairs.
I remember her lying there.
I remember Nick finding a cushion and putting it underneath her head.
Again there were the two of us.
Looking down at one of the people who was supposed to be looking after us.
So we looked after her.
That was what you did.
Mum falls down the stairs.
Dad sits down and cries.
Nick finds the cushion.
I stand beside him.
We wait for the adults to become adults again.
We picked them up.
And then, in different ways, they both fucked off.
There is bitterness in that sentence.
I don’t particularly want to remove it.
Nor do I want to turn either of them into villains now because that would be just as false.
My father is eighty-four.
There may never be another conversation between us.
Or there may be one next month.
His mother lived until ninety-seven. He could outlast everyone.
I don’t know.
Life has shown very little interest in organising itself into satisfying endings.
Perhaps that is partly why I found myself watching This Way Up last night.
Áine.
Irish in London.
Funny as fuck.
Constantly moving.
Talking.
Performing.
Making other people laugh.
Taking care of the atmosphere.
Her sister beside her, the two women so perfectly aligned that sometimes they barely appear to require language.
And underneath it something is very obviously not all right.
There is a moment when Áine is alone with a mirror.
She tries to smile.
Dance perhaps.
Make the face work.
For a few seconds she can.
Then something cracks.
The smile goes.
The breathing changes.
What had looked like a face becomes a body trying to get air.
And she ends up on the floor.
I knew that moment immediately.
Not theoretically.
Not what an interesting representation of mental distress.
I knew it in the body.
The peculiar instant when crying stops being crying and becomes something closer to breathing.
The throat narrows.
The great gulp of air doesn’t quite arrive.
The face you were holding in position gives up.
And down you go.
What struck me was not the breakdown.
It was how close it sits to comedy.
A second earlier the person is funny.
Capable.
Performing.
Perhaps taking care of somebody else.
Then the body says no.
The body is very bad at intellectual consistency.
I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about whether crying means something.
Whether grief has to be understood.
Whether there is some final room inside myself that I haven’t opened yet.
Some explanatory door.
Open enough doors and perhaps somebody eventually hands you the architectural plans.
I’m increasingly doubtful.
Maybe sometimes the body just catches up.
The strange thing is that I don’t remember Nick and me crying in those scenes in 1976.
Maybe we did.
What I remember is competence.
The cushion.
Working out what was required.
Picking them up.
Perhaps children are extraordinarily good at this because they have no alternative.
You find the cushion.
You put it underneath her head.
You put an arm around him.
You wait.
Then you go and do whatever children do next.
And perhaps there is an inheritance hidden there too.
Not simply being good at talking to strangers.
Being good at the moment when somebody else starts talking.
Knowing how to stay.
Knowing when to ask another question.
Knowing when not to.
Watching faces.
Listening for the tiny change in somebody’s voice.
Seeing when the performance slips.
Journalism, friendship, teaching, love.
Perhaps even parenting.
All involve some version of this.
Picking people up.
The danger, I suppose, is imagining that because you can do it for other people, somebody will necessarily know when to do it for you.
They won’t.
People have their own lives.
Sometimes they don’t answer the phone.
Sometimes they’re dealing with somebody else’s sick child.
Sometimes they’re tired of hearing the same question.
Sometimes they simply don’t know that you’re on the floor.
And sometimes nobody actually needs picking up.
Sometimes you need to stay there for a moment.
Let the face crack.
Let the lungs work out what they are doing.
Then get up yourself.
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