That seems a hard thing to say, but one of the things you learn is to look facts straight in the eye. Not necessarily without flinching.

For example… I’m a sad old man. You try it, at the age of fifty-five. Your only child hates you, your wife hates you, your colleagues – ex-colleagues – despise you. All for good reasons. Everything you worked for is gone and there you are. It doesn’t feel like standing at the threshold of a new dawn, I can tell you. I don’t feel sorry for myself… well, that’s not true, of course I feel bloody sorry for myself. I mean to say, I know that it’s my fault.

Jane and I, that was a love story. We fell in love when we were young – deeply, deeply in love. It went wrong later on. You can say all sorts of things about why – she wasn’t who I thought she was, I don’t suppose I was what she thought I was. In the end though there’s only one answer – booze, booze and booze. I like a drink, I used to say. Not any more. Bit late in the day. The funny thing about it is that we both ended up on the bottle. Isn’t that odd? Neither of us was at it to start with, it just seemed to happen. Makes you wonder.

When David came back to Minely, I was scared silly. But I hoped. My son, after all. It was hard because he saw through me a long time before I saw through myself. Your son, your little boy who thinks you’re the whole world and you have to stand in front of him and say, ‘Here I am, I ballsed it up for you. Will you have a relationship with me? I don’t blame you if you don’t…’

‘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 the table. Then watching me rise, just in order to show everyone the great wet patch spreading over the front of my trousers. I can’t even remember what they were, but I have been known to pray that they weren’t the pale moleskins. Please God!

I’ll think of it on my deathbed, I know I will. Maybe it’ll be my last thought on earth.

The news spreading round the staffroom. Mr Lawson wet his pants at a staff meeting.

David Hollins, the Head, was very nice about it. I’d been at the school twenty years. ‘We can’t go on like this, Charles.’ Phrases like that. ‘I’m putting you on indefinite leave.’ And, ‘Not fair on the kids…’

Wife, son, job, bang. And what’s left, you ask? Ah. A corny answer to that one, but the truth. God’s left.

Sorry. I’m not one of your evangelical types. I’m not out to convert anyone. I was always a believer, I don’t want anyone to think that God is a replacement for the bottle. I always prayed. I pray more these days. I go to church. I think to myself, At least I have my faith. Now, David, he really has nothing. Not that he ever had a job to lose. But he’s lost his wife, or the equivalent, and his daughter. At nineteen that’s a slightly different proposition. He has his daughter to gain. Maybe I have my son to gain.

I did try to convert him. I said, ‘What else is there that’s outside yourself and big enough and strong enough to help you with addiction if it isn’t God?’

‘Faith, hope and charity,’ he said with a smirk. I think he was being sarcastic.

The thing about me and David is, we have so much in common. There’s so much we could talk about. But he isn’t really interested. I think he’d despise any insights I could give him. All he really wants to talk about is me being a bastard… hitting her, hitting him. I suppose he’s outraged that I should even try. The thing is, I have a point of view. Murderers, psychopaths, angels – everyone has a point of view. You don’t have to agree with it but if you’re going to have some sort of a relationship with them, you have to understand it. But perhaps he doesn’t want a relationship with me.

We saw quite a bit of each other when he first came back. I was living in a bedsit down the road, a reformed character, so he must have thought he ought to give me a chance. He used to come round and let me hold my granddaughter. I was very grateful. I still see her… Gemma comes round from time to time. I take her for walks in the park and feed the ducks and push her on the swing…

‘Hello, clouds!’ I shout.

‘Hewo, cwouds,’ she yodels.

‘Hello, sky!’

‘… skwy…’

‘Hello, birds!’

‘Hewo…’

‘Hello, God!’

I wonder if her father would approve?

He didn’t talk to me very much about his own private life, only mine, so I had to piece together what happened later on. Basically, it didn’t work. He came out of prison and she didn’t want to know. That’s why I say it wasn’t a love story. Jane and I met each other and fell in love without the aid of any artificial stimulants… and we stayed in love. I think we still are despite the anger and the failures and the violence and the booze. It’s not possible for us to live together, of course, that’s the tragedy of it. But we loved… we love. I do anyway. But David and Gemma were on drugs the day they met. The beach crowd. Not heroin, I daresay. But drugs are drugs, aren’t they?

I accused him of that and he rolled his eyes and said, ‘Just a bit of smoke – that’s nothing.’

‘Is it?’

‘It’s better for you than fags,’ he said, and we said it together:

‘I couldn’t do without my smokes…’ I say that often enough. We had a laugh about it.

Anyway, it didn’t work, that’s the point. He wanted it, she didn’t. I don’t like Gemma very much. I blame her. I blame myself – but I blame her too. Apparently, it went on for months. She asked him to go; he wouldn’t go… it was his child too, why should he go, that sort of thing. In the end she moved back into her parents’ house and told him she wasn’t coming back. He hung on for a week, then he gave in and moved out of the flat so she could come back. Obviously he couldn’t sit there leaving her and the child stranded with those awful parents.

I offered to put him up. He could have stayed with his mother, there was enough space there. But no, he went and stayed with friends. And apparently – I never heard about this for ages afterwards – apparently he got very angry about it all, very bitter. He started going round there late at night and shouting outside the door until she let him in. Shouting. Drunk. Disturbing the child. Making a nuisance of himself.

How very familiar.

And one day, to cut a long story short, he went round there pissed up, and he did the dirty. Oh yes. He knocked her down and kicked her around the room. She wasn’t that hurt, not black eyes or fat lips. But that’s not the point. The point is, he hit her.

He didn’t tell me about that, of course. Gemma came round after he’d left Minely and I got most of it off her then. I’d hardly seen anything of him for ages; I didn’t even know he’d gone.

I waited a long time for him to get in touch with me. I wanted to talk to him about it; I mean, I wanted him to talk to me. I thought, O-ho, what have you got to say for yourself now, mister? I hoped he might turn to me then, at last. Not for advice as such. But I thought by that time our similarities would have been too strong for him to ignore. It would have been nice to share a common weakness. Actually, I did gloat. He’d spent so much time telling me what a bastard I was and now… ho ho ho.

Well, I know I’m not being fair. It’s different, it was just once. He went round and apologised the next day. Maybe I make too much of it – anyone can lose their temper, especially after all he’d been through. I bet it gave him a fright. I bet he thought he was turning into the old man – the bogeyman!

But we’ve both lost our relationships, we’ve both lost our children. We’ve both been addicted to something or other. I know the shapes of our lives were different. I was a respectable teacher with a mortgage and a family living inside the law and he was a junkie living in a squat outside the law. But still, you’d have thought – certainly hoped – that there was something in me he might relate to. But he went away and never got in touch. There was a postcard from Hereford some time later. Apparently he had friends there; he was going to do his A-levels at college. Had a girlfriend. Sounded happy enough. Gemma says so. They’re friends these days. More than me and Jane are.

‘He’s really well, he’s got a lovely girlfriend. No, he’s great, he’s clean, we get on really well,’ she says. He comes to see her and Oona from time to time. He takes Oona away on holiday so Gemma has some time off. It sounds all very worked out. He never comes to see me even though he’s in Minely from time to time. I’m patient. One day I hope there’ll be a phone call or a knock at the door. He’s a good boy, a good person. It’s his instinct to help. I believe he’s capable of great love and affection. I know I’ll never receive these things from him but I like to think I was instrumental – when he was little, before things went wrong – in nurturing them in him.

One day, my boy, all this will be yours. As they say. All my goods and shackles, such as they are. There’s no one else. The other thing you leave your children is your life – the example of it. One day, my boy…

And so, in your absence, David, I raise my glass to you – a cup of tea, actually – and I say, Here’s to you. Good luck! Make the most of it.

And don’t end up like me.