A cause of celebration it should have been, but Ralph had taken one look and decided fatherhood wasn’t for him. His wife had taken a look as well and felt maternal love for what she had produced. For the sake of the child, active and healthy with a fine pair of lungs as he went through teething, the reluctant parents had tried their best, even ensuring that their son was well looked after. By the time of his fifth birthday, the young Michael was sent off to school. With him out of the way for most of the day, Ralph reverted to type and started to stay out longer, Yolanda also finding herself another lover.
Ralph had known that his wife was easy, the reason he had been attracted to her in the first place. He had never wanted the perennial wallflower, the stay-at-home wife, the meal on the table at dinnertime sort of woman. He had wanted someone wild and free, the same as him.
Both Ralph and Yolanda looked across the table one night, as the young Michael sat in his chair eating his meal.
‘We’re not cut out for this,’ Ralph said. It was the first time in several months that he had said something that his wife could agree with, the arguments, the separate beds, having become the norm.
‘He’s still our son,’ Yolanda said.
‘What do you suggest?’
‘When he reaches seven we can send him to a boarding school. In his holidays, he can come and stay with either of us.’
And that was that, so much so that in the years from his seventh birthday up until he was eighteen, father and son had not seen each other more than a handful of times. And even then it had always been for short periods, and neither felt comfortable in each other’s presence. Not that Yolanda, the mother, had been any better: always off here and there with one wealthy lover or another. Very soon the periods away from boarding school became a succession of brief contacts for the young Lawrence with his parents, intersected with activities such as hiking in Scotland or learning to surf in Hawaii, or whatever else the wealthy did with their children until they grew up.
The drugs came about after a weekend with the son of a banker at his house in the north of England. Two friends who had boarded together for the last five years, each looking out for the other. Michael Lawrence, extrovert and charming, his friend Billy, shy and introvert. It was the former who secured the two women, both eighteen and attractive, working class. With an empty house, the two friends seduced the women, not difficult given the amount of alcohol in the house, and it was them who introduced Michael and Billy to heroin.
Neither had been able to resist the descent into hell. Billy had died at the age of twenty-three, alone and destitute, after his father, desperate to protect his reputation, had thrown him and Michael out of the house after coming home early and finding the two of them cavorting with the women in the indoor swimming pool.
And now Ralph Lawrence found himself in the same room as his son. Each looked at the other, and then out of the window at the rehabilitation centre. Outside the weather was frosty and overcast, reflective of the mood in the room.
‘It has been a long time,’ Ralph said.
‘Time moves on,’ Michael said. He stood calmly, sedated or whatever the centre did to a person; Ralph didn’t know, didn’t want to either. He had spent a lifetime drinking, never once succumbing to anything more harmful than cocaine, the occasional joint of marijuana, and as for injecting into a vein, that wasn’t for him. He had seen it, who hadn’t in the circles he had moved in, but a fear of needles and an aversion to the sight of blood had served him well.
‘You’re looking well,’ Ralph said.
Both men struggled to come to terms with the current situation, and neither was enamoured of the other. Even when Michael had been growing up, and on the rare occasions that they had met, it had been difficult. A few hours away from the school at the weekend, a meal at a restaurant, a brief chat about school and what the other was up to, and then back to the school, both of them breathing a sigh of relief.
And now the two of them together, one older and supposedly wiser, the other in his thirties. It was the only time in nearly twenty years that both had been sober or detoxed. An uneasy stillness filled the room. Eventually, Michael took the initiative and approached his father, his right hand held out. Both men shook before Ralph put his arms around his son and embraced him. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘We’ve both stuffed up, but now’s our chance to put it right.’
The two men left the room and walked down the corridor outside. Both of them felt a little embarrassed about their momentary show of emotion. Ralph had to admit to feeling good for the embrace, Michael was not so sure. To him, this was the man who had deserted him, had thrown his mother away. Whatever Yolanda Lawrence may have been, Michael, through the years at boarding school, had maintained a vision of his mother as someone of loveliness, someone who would come and rescue him. But she had never come, and Michael could only blame the man at his side.
