Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash
Our pretend-family had visited once before, a month before the first lockdown banged the shutters closed. Corona was just a beer, and 19 just some prime number, and we were carefree. I don’t remember why my friend’s wife couldn’t come, or my husband, but the four of us were near enough blood. Our ease with one another made us either more like family, or less. Anyway, people assumed our kinship as we wandered the beaches and high streets of Devon, telling our respective daughters to finish up the lunches they’d said they were hungry for, or to come away from the water’s edge before they soaked their trainers in mid-February Celtic-Sea ice water. And if anyone was near-enough blood, it was those two girls, who’d seemed to recognise rather than meet one another on first sight, wobbling towards one another on their ice skates. Apart, they were two only children. Together, they were fraternal twins, some invisible communication channel stretching taut between their brains.
The friends are his, or at least they were. As they embraced me on that first visit, they became mine too. But it wasn’t I that they’d known for a lifetime, in the way that Cockneys know each other and one another’s families, the way they are a family, near enough. Way back now, they moved out of earshot of Bow Bells. The old man ceased selling shoes in the market on the Roman Road a long time ago. But their accents and memories are still there. The couple often talk of their neighbours, and not the Devon ones. Listening, I can see and hear the London of that time as though I’d lived it myself.
The couple are desperately in love, in a way not often seen in the ninth decade of life. I haven’t had my kiss yet today. Ah, that’s lovely. You’re beautiful. The resentment of his first wife and her first husband may have driven them from the East End, but it could not penetrate their Devon paradise enough to poison it, couldn’t taint the fat blackberries now bursting with sweetness amongst the thorns in the garden, or the harvest fall from their apple tree on this, our second visit. Our hosts understand the arrangement now. On our first meeting, they’d asked, in whispers, if the nature of our flight from London was the same as theirs had once been. Oh no, it’s not like that, we’d said, a truth that has always remained true, although I suppose we both wondered, sometimes.
It’s a funny thing, closeness without intimacy. The countless hours huddled by the ice rink’s edge, waiting for the girls. The innumerable visits to the pub, laughing. The years of messages, scrolling down my phone. Fondness, loyalty, fun, mutual practical support: all beyond question. Given these features of our friendship, the lacunae felt peculiar. We never delved into the murkier realms of complex emotions, for example, or any emotions, really. I thought we didn’t go there because his English-male comfort zone constrained him. It never occurred to me that it might be impossible, that perhaps I held some kind of passport to these territories that he did not possess. Whatever the reasons, at the merest whiff of negativity or someone else’s emotional need, my gregarious, generous, big-hearted friend is like a genie being sucked back into his bottle, drawing the stopper in behind him as he goes.
This summertime trip to Devon would be really welcome, my friend said. He needed a break from the house. He and his wife hadn’t spoken in six weeks. To every question I asked, he gave the same answers. I’ve had it. I’m done. Had some critical incident happened? Had the years just ground them down? Was their daughter all right, did she know, had he talked about it with her? Was someone moving out? Where would the little girl live? Was she okay? Was he?
He was fine, he said. Their daughter was fine. He didn’t care if his wife was fine.
I’ve had it. I’m done. Want another drink?
The lovely days were infused with wood smoke from the garden fireplace, and with the breath of the sea. We drove through undulating landscapes to visit a verdant forest, a river running high with sweet water again after a too-long drought. That was Act I. One evening, as my friend stoked the fire in the garden and the girls sorted berries with me in the kitchen, Act II began.
Their car drew into the drive bearing a ghost to the feast. Our hosts, ignorant, had believed her when she said it would be a lovely surprise.
Surprise, she said. Her daughter went pale, looking suddenly younger than 12. Wordlessly she fled the house, my daughter in pursuit. My friend acknowledged his wife’s arrival by neither glance nor word. Our hosts writhed in confusion, embarrassment, guilt. Stupefied I stood, feeling like the piggy in the middle.
Within the hour, four things became clear. First, their relationship was indisputably over, beyond reconciliation. Second, she had come purely for vengeance, to disrupt her husband’s pleasure. Third, she erroneously believed me to be his lover. And fourth, within her swollen belly lay another man’s child.
The reception she received did not deter her, and she decided to stay on for the duration.
The atmosphere was more than strained: it was full of silent violence, unspoken vitriol, creeping dread. For me, it was more than awkward: it was agony. My two professions, psychotherapy and writing, rely on my ability to recognise pain and my willingness to be open to it. And now the very walls and windows of this cottage were covered and running with pain like a condensation. Words and kindness and empathy were desperately needed, but none came, and their absence felt like a breathtaking cruelty, casually worn. Whether that cruelty was born of ignorance, incapacity or calculation, I couldn’t tell. If I could not comprehend the passive viciousness, if I could not understand the apparent callousness with which it was committed, nor could I absorb the fact that this psychological warfare was being conducted by people I called friends.
Although he had warned me so many times not to speak of it, I told him I was upset. I told him I was worried for the little girl, who kept herself shut away, who would now not speak to either of her parents.
It’s nothing to do with you, he said, astonished and laughing. You don’t need to be dramatic. He shook his head at how silly I was, how unreasonable. It’s amazing, he said, how shrinks like you always make such a big deal out of things.
In the kitchen the next morning, our host was weeping. I blame myself. I didn’t know. We said it was fine for her to come. We hugged for a long time, crying, and the pain of an entire household swirled in my blood and crowded my brain.
On the last night at the table she sniped at him in front of our daughters, with every syllable encased in ice. Bon appetit, darling.
My dam broke.
‘Are you happy with yourself?’ I asked her. ‘Did you accomplish what you came here to accomplish?’
Everyone else left the room. I shook like a leaf, feeling everything. The two of them were utterly composed, betraying nothing. He sat on one corner of our triangle and never looked up from the football. She sat in her corner, delivering a running monologue in monotone, gracefully waving her hand in his direction, mine, his again, like a magician’s lovely assistant. See, this is your friend. He has brought you to this state. Look at you crying, crying so much. He has brought you to this low place. This, your friend. The master manipulator. You see? You see?
Except when someone scored a goal, he never moved; his expression never flickered. She got up and towered over me, impassive as a Greek statue, tall and elegant. What are you doing? she said. Stop it. There is no tragedy here. This has nothing to do with you.
I called them both psychopaths, and in that moment, with horror, I realised it was probably true.
Mirror neurons in our brains enable us feel the pain of other people. Whether we’re going through something ourselves or seeing someone else go through it, mirror neurons are supposed to fire in both situations. What they give us is more than just insight into other people’s actions and emotions - we can experience it ourselves, feel things are they are feeling them, put ourselves in their shoes. This is the neurological substrate of empathy, the saving grace of us all, without which our world would be irredeemable.
In the brains of psychopaths, the mirrors are broken. Researchers put over 100 psychopathic people in a functional MRI machine, asked them to imagine the suffering of another, and they watched the screen. The ‘social hub’ areas of the brain, structures filled with mirror neurons, are meant to ‘light up’ with empathy. But the psychopaths’ brains stayed dark.
He’d always called himself a psychopath, laughing. Nothing bothered him, he’d said. I’d laughed too, because I thought he was joking. He was such a smiling, joy-giving presence in my life. How could he be a psychopath? But psychology is my day job, and when I’m off the clock, I’m really off the clock. It’s funny, what I manage to miss.
In the fairy tale about the Snow Queen, a little boy and little girl are the best of friends, like siblings. But some mischievous imps have built a distorting mirror that makes everything in its reflection ugly, and when it’s dropped, it shatters. A fragment of the mirror flies into the little boy’s eye. He no longer responds to his friend with love or even recognition. She falls upon his neck and weeps in grief and consternation, but he is unmoved. When the Snow Queen comes to kidnap him, he doesn’t even care, and he goes.
I don’t know what to call him anymore. In due course, following the original plan, this man dropped us off at the music festival where my daughter and I were to meet my husband and spend a few days with friends. To external appearances, perhaps in his mind too, nothing notable had happened. There was nothing to see here, and it was nothing to do with me. The girls huddled in the back seat, whispering. In the front seats, he and I made conversation. I hate music festivals, he said. Don’t do anything for me. This didn’t surprise me. Music doesn't affect him - he just turns any old thing on the radio and lets it run.
As we said goodbye and he hugged me, I didn’t say - and he might not yet know - that these things were happening for the last time.
Waiting for the set to start, I shifted miserably from foot to foot, lost in thought. Three days had passed since leaving Devon, and I remained troubled. Perhaps I had been foolish. Maybe they were right - it didn’t have anything to do with me. Why didn't I ignore the situation? Why couldn’t I let it lie?
I’d not caught the lyrics on the radio, just heard the sound. Who is that? I’d asked, my urgency matching something in the music. TV Priest, my husband said. I didn’t investigate them further then, but it proved reason enough to go to the gig that day.
Salvation comes from unexpected places, and I needed saving. I want to tell you about it, but the transformative, transfigurative experience eludes easy capture. I don’t want to give up, though. I want to believe I can convey it somehow. I refuse to reduce it to guess you had to be there.
He was grey-suited and bespectacled, like he’d come from the office, arriving on stage with such a minimum of fanfare or posturing it took a moment to realise that yes, he was the frontman of TV Priest. They began, and with the greatest respect to their musicianship, without which I would not have had the experience I had, I could not tell you what any of the other band members looked like. I could not pick them out of a lineup if my life depended on it.
In none of the official videos or TV Priest’s other live performances on YouTube can I find an example like it, anything to help me understand why it hit me the way it did. I’ve been through the lyrics for the whole setlist again and again now, combing them for a deeper understanding of what affected me, but the answer isn’t in there. I think instead it’s in the fact that, with great willingness and generosity and perhaps even courage, Charlie Drinkwater allowed himself to be contorted, spasmed, wracked with the emotion of the music as he sang it. Some say it was planful when Ian Curtis of Joy Division convulsed on stage, that he was deliberately approximating the seizures he had when his epilepsy was uncontrolled. I don’t believe that. To me, it looks like the intensity was in him, and that he couldn’t stop it running through and from his body and leaping out into the crowd, and that he didn’t want to. With Charlie’s performance that day, it was the same.
He didn’t say much between songs, but about halfway through, just before ‘The Breakers,’ he spoke up. Even though we sound angry, he said, we’re hopeful people. Last year my mental health wasn’t very good. I wasn’t doing very well. But I have good friends. I don’t know why they put up with me. I’ve known these guys since I was five years old. This song is about my good friends. He went to the right and left of the stage and enveloped his guitarist and his bassist in his embrace. He went behind the drum kit to hug his drummer.
Sometimes, during the set, he retreated to the side of the stage, wiping his eyes. I couldn’t tell whether I should be worried, whether anyone should. I don’t know him, I don’t know any of them. Is the hypothetical and unnamed beauty and pain of strangers on a stage anything to do with me? You tell me.
I asked my husband to watch my things and moved up. Parched, I was compelled to draw nearer to this wellspring after a too-long drought. Close up - or perhaps just because the arc of the set and his emotion were both building, it was more intense still. Although I did not know what it was or why it was there, I felt all of it: the beauty, the gratitude, the suffering, the hope, and the willingness to be there for all of it, to show it to us. And I felt what I craved - some channel of communication, an intuitive understanding, stretched invisibly between two human brains.
In the fairy tale, the little girl goes to the ends of the earth to find her friend. In the frozen kingdom of the Snow Queen, he is there, his expression like cold carved alabaster. She rushes to him, holds him, cries and cries. Then something magical happens - her tears, falling on his face, wash the splinter of evil mirror from his eye. Recognising her and not understanding how or why he came to be there, he throws his arms around her with joy and love. It is a beautiful ending. I know it is not the ending that my friend and I will get to have.
His fingers pressed to his eyes, his suit coat slung over his shoulder, Charlie walked swiftly from the stage, followed by his bandmates. In the middle of the emptying tent, I stood in front of the stage and sobbed. Two fellow humans approached me, and I saw the man was red-eyed. Are you okay? he said.
I was okay, I said, only profoundly moved by all this beauty.
We did not know one another. We knew no one in the band. We were not personally close to any emotions and events underlying this stranger’s music, his lyrics. In theory, it was nothing to do with us.
So strange that bond of love
For the people you don't meet
Sometimes the weight gets heavy
And it rolls up on your back
We told one another our names. James, Caroline, Elaine. We three hugged, and we wept.
I know, I know, we said to one another. I feel the same.