Blame

By L S Haris

Set in a cruel world in a parallel universe to our own.

When a son commits suicide, it is his father who has to not only re-evaluate his own life, but take time to look again at the world at large and discover how one so young, with so much promise, could have bought so much into the lie as his precious son Joel did, and believe there was no other way out but to take his own life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: L S Haris
• Release date: Feb 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386295839

Book preview

Photograph. noun. A picture formed by the chemical action of light or other radiation on a sensitive surface.

THAT’S REALLY ALL I have left. Photographs, and precious few of those. A photograph can’t lie? I know that even a photograph can be manipulated and distorted, but you can twist anything to your own ends if you are ruthless enough. This is why I am trying to write it all down without any spin, as honestly as I can. A personal account of my son Joel’s suicide and the subsequent events as they have been presented to me and as I understand them. No, I lie already. I will never truly understand why Joel isn’t here with me today, why he took his own life. And I don’t think I ever will.

I wanted to find a different photograph of Joel. One that the newspapers hadn’t defiled. Not the one of Joel on his graduation day. One that wasn’t used on the front covers to sell newspapers or flashed up on as a backdrop to the news headlines on TV. I just wanted to put a different photograph up on the table. As I try to remember my Joel. The real Joel.

I have boxes of Joel. After he died I realised I had so few mementos of him and his life. So I started to collect any small fragment he had left behind. The everyday became precious,. I started to hold every tiny piece of his life in reverence. As if  holding on to everything he left behind somehow kept him alive. It is in one of these boxes I find a rare treasure, a photograph of Joel and B together. I remember so well the evening the photograph was taken.

It was the first time I met Bernice, or B as she preferred to be called. Joel drove back from University with B. It was the end of his first term in his first year and he had only just started with B but he was so keen to introduce her to me. I remember telling him not to end up like me and his mother, not to get tied down too early and to live a little. I told Joel when his mother and I were getting our divorce that if we had met later in life it might have worked out, we wouldn’t have built up the resentment for the lost youth that marriage and children had stolen. University was going to give Joel so many opportunities he would meet so many new people. It was an opportunity I never had. I always dreamt of going to university. The English language has always fascinated me. The meanings of words, I remember whole English lessons dedicated to teaching how to use a dictionary and thesaurus all now relegated by the use of shirt+F7. I know the complexities of the English language are no longer taught in school, but in my day that was my favourite subject. I have always been fascinated by it and would have loved the chance to learn more that just a splattering, now — to my shame — long forgotten. I wish I could have taken my interest further but it wasn't to be. Joel’s mother was pregnant with him and David before I knew what hit me. We got married and I got a job to pay for the twins and their mother and that was that. That is how it was back then. We just made do. I always felt I had missed out on so much, so I told Joel he shouldn’t settle for the first pretty face. I can see now I got that wrong too. But he didn’t listen to me. And there is so much more to B than just a pretty face. I was a bit apprehensive myself at meeting B. I was worried that his university friend would be smarter than me and I would look a fool. I feared more than anything else looking small before my son. But I liked B from the start. She had a rare quality — honesty. B would always tell it to you straight. In all the years with all the stuff that has happened, B always held true to that notion. She sometimes dilutes it but it is always there. I think that as she gets older she realises it is not an easy path to tread. But B is always honest to herself and speaks her mind. When we first met, I was so awkward in my divorcee bachelor flat I lived in back then. I recall I struggled to find enough plates and none of the matched, no sooner had Joel and B arrived than all my worries over the trivia didn't matter any more. B had a strong mind she wasn't super smart, she wasn't condescending, she still had an earnest way of discussing things that only the young have. They truly believe that they are the first people to have invented reasoned debate. But with her honesty I didn't feel belittled just honoured she could speak so freely as she continues to do to this day.

Hindsight. noun. Wisdom after the event.

THERE WERE A MILLION warning signs but we just never saw them. B, with her honest look on life, wonders if she just wasn’t looking. We were all so busy playing the leading role in our own life’s we didn’t always register the personal anguish of the supporting cast. B is hardest on herself for this neglect because it was her sheets Joel had slipped from that morning he took his own life, without a word, not even a goodbye. She shared her toothpaste with Joel; she shared her bed with Joel. B shared her life with Joel but by 6.30 a.m. on a November morning Joel ensured there would be little left of him to share. B liked to think that when Joel had left their bed on his last morning, perhaps there had been a long lingering look from him as he silently said his goodbyes. But Joel wasn’t like B, the passion no longer ran through his veins. There was no screaming at the wall. No scratching, no tearing, no broken nails, no bloody hands ripping at the brick wall. None of this, no rage, not now. They had taken that from him too. No passion for life remained where once there had been. So how had he become this jellyfish, spineless, just a mound, just an entity, mostly not thinking, just the same repetitive movement after repetitive movement, over and, over and over, again. Yes, that’s it, that’s what it must have felt like to be Joel. I have been advised not to project my feelings on to him. He was going through something I just can’t understand. So I allow myself to think about what I knew. I think about the morning of his death. I walk through it in my mind with him. At least then, in my version, he is not alone. So he did not die while I was still wrapped up in my bed like some lazy cat.

Four twenty-five a.m. on that cold November morning Joel picks up another box of breakfast cereal, stacks the shelf, pulling the soon to be out-of-date boxes in front. Date rotation.

In the supermarket at which Joel held down one of his many part-time jobs, the few shoppers who would have been around at this time wheeling their trolleys around do not see the broken man. This isn’t the future the university promised him. The prospectus told him "The quality of the education and training offered by this university ensures that graduates are equipped with a range of skills and knowledge which are constantly in high demand amongst employers. Our research shows that a very high proportion of our graduates are either in the kind of job that they want or in post-graduate studies training by the end of the graduating year." Joel had never had the kind of job he had wanted. In his own mind Joel belonged to the low proportion of graduates who had failed, with his 2/2 he had had 11 jobs in three years. He only got this one because he had left out the BA Hons after his name, and had put down a false employment history to cover the three years he spent at university to get his degree. He would have been over-qualified and his employer would have been obliged to pay him more than someone without a degree, if he was as honest as B he wouldn’t even have got the job. So he edited three years out of his life to get a night-shift job stacking supermarket shelves. I couldn’t remember that being in any part of the prospectus he had read to me, and he had read the prospectus cover to cover. The leaves were well worn, the spine broken like a well-loved favourite book — his passport to a shiny new world full of promises to a better future. That was all a lifetime ago to him now. Somewhere he lost the joy of living.

Five twenty-six a.m. Joel’s future is what he has chosen to make it and he has chosen to make it short.

Six o’clock, shift end. Joel would have made the usual journey to the next job. I imagine his trip as he goes from CCTV camera to CCTV camera around the city centre and the underground system. On CCTV he would look like a bad computer graphic as the digital imagery jolts him across the screen, but in reality Joel had a slow, evenly-paced walking style. The soles of his shoes well-worn, paper-thin, letting in any water around. I still have those shoes in the unopened police bag. On his last day when he wore those shoes, they had walked the walk of a lifetime, a prematurely stunted lifetime. He graduated in those very shoes. He even polished them. In those shoes he had stood proud for the photographs, arm wrapped around B. In the university everyone knew who they were and the future was full of promise. The workforce would welcome them with open arms. What they had learnt was cutting edge. They were Generation Now.

The summer after his graduation had been like a summer in a song, the summer of his youth, and it hadn’t had an unnatural ending forced on it by the new university year, but it had eventually died out. It wasn’t the weather that had put a damper on it. One by one the partygoers had somehow drifted away. Some had found work, some had just returned to their family roots. Joel's mother and I separated after the boys left school, David into the world of work and Joel to the local college to re-sit his A-Levels. I was divorced as soon as could be arranged. After he had graduated Joel had no real family home to go back to. The childhood home was sold and split 50-50 in the divorce settlement. There would have always been a room for him but he was now 22, a man, keen to make his own way in the world. Twenty-two? I was married and the boys were three years old by the time I was his age, but in these vicious, ruthless days. Twenty-two seems so much younger than in my day. I should have seen he was too young for this callous society. But David, had followed in my footsteps. He was now married and would soon be starting a family of his own. I just figured Joel would follow the same path with B. She was his family back then. I had always said I was there for him but perhaps I never said it loud enough or with conviction. I too had a new lady in my life. I just let B and Joel get on with living their own life’s.

After the summer was over I think it was only when Joel and B were left alone together that the panic had set in for Joel. B had been offered a job before she had graduated and although she had deferred it to give herself some time out she had now become a wage slave. Joel loved B and revelled in her newfound confidence in her new job and new life but there was still no job offer for Joel. It wasn’t as if Joel had been lazy or job-shy, far from it. In the months before graduation he had filled out all the graduate placement application forms he could find. As the graduation loomed a hint of desperation seeped in. Joel and B had spent hours folding letters, sticking stamps, informing companies what a great candidate was about to come into the job market, and advising them to make their offers before he was snapped up. But by October, the summer well and truly over, and there had been no offers and only a handful of letters even acknowledged his existence. Joel was not thin-skinned. He had suffered setbacks before.  Joel drew on this inner strength. He truly believed that it was just a question of finding the right company for him. He was now applying for specific jobs, rewriting his CV to highlight any area of his course and life that he felt would make him the ideal candidate for the job. He was sending out 10 or 20 applications a week. He was getting the newspapers, going to the job centre daily, searching for new jobs on the new arrivals board. And after a little pressure from B he was signing on. He was originally not happy to do this but as B was paying the rent and his graduate loan was all but gone, he did sign on.

He had put on those shoes the first day he went to the job centre to sign on. He had polished them specially. He wore a suit fresh shirt and even a tie. The freshly ironed collar pressed into his neck. His clean-shaven face was that of a hopeful man not afraid to face a new challenge. Or was he just another naive graduate going to another character-building lesson at the University of Life? I remember Joel telling me later how he carried a little folder with a copy of his CV and a list of companies he had recently applied to for work. From the moment he opened the door to the job centre he had felt uneasy that he was over-dressed and the shoes were to shiny. He was ten minutes early and his appointment was running 10 minutes late. By the time his name was called he had read all the situations vacant boards and there was nothing there he had studied for. When he took his seat he gave a good interview and even managed to explain why he hadn’t signed on sooner, without sounding as if he thought he was better than that, that this was a mistake, that he had been promised more. He was the first in our family to go to university; he was also the first to sign on. His life plan was just a little off course. In the box where his interviewer had to fill in what jobs he would be applying for he had told them again about his qualifications — which had overflowed the relevant box. There was an awkward pause where the interviewer had to stop to think how to word it. He was downgraded to meet government legislation. He knew now that what he was being politely told was he should be applying for jobs he might actually get. Even this was no body blow, and it did not shake his confidence. He merely thought Yes, this is where I have been going wrong. I should start at the bottom and work my way up. I think of him two years on. If he had got any of those downgraded jobs listed in that box he would have considered himself a success. But at 6.15 on this November morning almost exactly two years on, I can only think he felt he was now nowhere near success. In his mind he must have felt beneath failure. He was something screwed up, thrown away, to be kicked about in the street, he was nothing. That’s why he did it. That’s why he jumped.

The first year after he graduated must have seemed bleak, so barren, so desolate, without hope, so unlike how it was meant to be. Joel would always hold on to the positive but by the end of his graduate year even his relationship with B was on the rocks. In a phone conversation Joel and I had towards the end of the first year, he told me. He couldn’t quite remember the exact moment that he knew B was going to leave him. He couldn’t put an exact time or a date to it. If he had asked her outright she probably would have told him to stop being so pathetic. But B was growing, she was achieving her full career potential and with hindsight Joel was stagnating in his own desperation.

At his six-month review at the job centre they were not so understanding. Joel began to realise that having been so long without work he was almost making himself completely unemployable. He said he felt he had to get a job doing anything, just to have something to put on his CV and so he could have a conversation with B again, rather than the silent monologue that seemed to exist between them now. B was so happy and successful, having been promoted in her first year, and Joel was lost in his own world of job application after job application, desperately trying not to lose the plot. He was holding it so tight he could feel it slipping away. I brushed his depressive thoughts to one side; now I wish I could go back and have those conversations again with him — really listen and understand what he was trying to tell me. I had two years warning. If only I had foreseen the future I would have lived the past so differently.

But things did improve for Joel for a while. Joel’s breakthrough did finally come. It wasn’t the job he had wanted — his supervisor was 18, a school-leaver. But it was a foot in the door.

Joel’s first job was in a bank as a cleric. B was still doing so well that in a desperate attempt to salvage their relationship Joel had agreed to buy a flat with B. This boosted his confidence for a while but the resentment he felt towards B had all but consumed their relationship. Joel and B separated. Joel moved out. He could remember the first flat: it was well kept, and his flatmates were all clean, no track marks, no lines on the coffee table to betray them. I remember visiting him once at the flat. Then things just