LITMIR.BIZ

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      Dad keeps his eye on the fight. ‘Who’s this, boy?’

      ‘Didn’t catch a name. Sorry. He said that you used to be the most fun for drinking, fighting and fucking women. I suppose that would be around the time you were married to Mum.’

      I feel the blood in every vein. His attention darts from the TV to my face. His body doesn’t tense. Even if it did, it would be hard to tell – his body is already a rusting corkscrew of guilt and anxiety. But, like all tough guys – or once-tough guys – he has an acute sense of another man coming to a simmer. He checks my expression. Yes, Robert is thinking about having a go. The boy doesn’t quite know it, but he’s about ready to kick off. Just like his brothers. Good old boy: typical Webb.

      ‘No, no, no, mate,’ he says, slowly uncrossing his leg, stubbing his fag out, ‘I don’t know about that.’ He’s embarrassed. Or he has the grace to look embarrassed. Or he has the sense to look embarrassed because he intuits correctly that if he shows the first sign of pride in this description, in his ‘reputation’, I’m going to climb across the table and try to kill him. I wait, looking at him still. I’ve never been in a fight in my life, but if I’m going to have one, it’ll be this one. The Freudian Counterfuck, the Return of the Jedi, the Attack of the Implacable Hiccupping Teenager. It’s a stupid idea but I’m hammered.

      He turns back to the boxing. After a moment he says, ‘Y’mum and me had some hard times, son . . .’ I break my stare and follow his gaze to the boxing now. The pissed-up rage drains away in an instant. ‘Hard times’ is not just a blanket phrase; I know he’s using it as a euphemism for something very particular. In fact, for a particular person. ‘But we had some bloody good times too.’ His eyes redden; I won’t say that they ‘well up’ because he won’t allow them to get that far. He sniffs his snot up and passes the back of a hand – the one with the sewn-on thumb – across his nose and briefly across his eyes. I see the heavy pulse in his throat, the throat that I just imagined being able to strangle. And I notice that I love him. And that Mum once loved him. I could reach across the table and touch his arm. I could say, ‘Dad, I’m sorry about Martin.’ But I don’t. I don’t mention Martin.

      Darth on the deck, his mask off for a second, and neither of us can really bear it. I watch the boxing with him for what I think is a decent interval and then I say, ‘Night, Dad’ and he replies ‘Night, boy’ and that’s that.

      You see, the childhood drawing of Slieve Moyne, the one with the two grown-ups and the three boys, the one we started with – that picture is incomplete. It’s the house that I remember, but if I showed that drawing to Mum, Dad, Mark or Andrew, they would look at it for a long time. They would see that someone is missing.

      In Auntie Trudy’s bedroom, at one end of the gramophone, is a picture box. It’s a Perspex cube holding six photographs. The one that she keeps facing upwards, so that she can always see it, is of a cherubic boy with light brown hair, wearing his St Andrew’s School uniform. This is Martin John Webb, my eldest brother, who died of meningitis when he was six years old.

      One way of imagining life is that it’s a competition between love and death. Death always wins, of course, but love is there to make its victory a hollow one. That’s what love is for. When the worst came for Mum and Dad in 1971, there was nothing they could do to soften the blow. But they had enough remaining love to make a reply. I can’t help liking their reply.

      My brother died and I was born ten months later.

      *

      If something terrible happens to you, and you’re lucky enough to have supportive friends, there will be a period when you hear a version of this several times a week: ‘And if you need to talk, I’m right here. I mean, just talk. Because I’m here. For a talk. And if you don’t want to talk, maybe think about talking. Talk.’

      There are times when we’re all grateful to hear this, and other times when we experience it as pressure. And although I’ve no doubt that there are many women and girls who have that second reaction, I think it’s men and boys in particular who get into trouble here. We feel grateful for the kindness, but helpless and frustrated. ‘Talk about what? What’s to talk about? Talking won’t change anything, will it?’ Suddenly we’re surrounded by well-meaning people encouraging us to talk about our feelings. The problem is, talking about our feelings is something we’ve been specifically trained not to do.

      What are we saying to a boy when we tell him to ‘man up’ or to ‘act like a man’?

      At its most benign, we might just be saying: do the thing that needs doing even if you don’t want to do it.

      But more often, when we tell a boy to ‘act like a man’, we’re effectively saying, ‘Stop expressing those feelings.’ And if the boy hears that often enough, it actually starts to sound uncannily like, ‘Stop feeling those feelings.’

      It sounds like this: ‘Pain, guilt, grief, fear, anxiety: these are not appropriate emotions for a boy because they will be unacceptable emotions for a man. The skills you need to be your own emotional detective – being able to name a feeling and work out why you’re feeling it – you don’t need to develop those skills. You won’t need them.’

      It sounds like a good deal. The great thing about refusing to feel feelings is that, once you’ve denied them, you don’t have to take responsibility for them. Your feelings will be someone else’s problem – your mother’s problem, your girlfriend’s problem, your wife’s problem. If it has to come out at all, let it come out as anger. You’re allowed to be angry. It’s boyish and man-like to be angry.

      I do it. I notice it more often these days, but I still do it. I express anger when what I’m actually feeling is shame. Or I get angry when I’m afraid; angry when I’m feeling uncertain or anxious; angry when I’m in grief. I bet you can think of men who even get angry when they fall in love. And probably have angry sex.

      And yes, women do it too – of course they do. The difference is that they haven’t been encouraged since childhood to wear a total lack of self-awareness as a badge of pride. On the contrary, the message they’ve been getting is that they are ‘intuitive’. They are ‘nurturers’ and ‘good listeners’. They’re there to intuitively tell men to go to the doctor and to nurturingly sort out the laundry. Luckily, they can also ‘multi-task’, so they can do both at the same time, as well as booking their kids’ dental appointments and making a lasagne. Sadly, men can’t ‘multi-task’ apparently, which must be the reason we tend to take a step back from all that.

      And yet, when people saw Dad walking down the street in Woodhall Spa, they did not think: ‘Ah, there goes Paul Webb, a walking powder-keg of repressed grief.’ Paul’s public face was beloved by more or less the entire village. Generous with his time, charismatic, cheeky, cajoling and straightforwardly kind, he didn’t so much live in that village as host it. He would walk into a pub and I would watch the whole room subtly adjust itself in his direction and settle itself in for a treat. They adored him. But then, they didn’t have to live with him.

      Mum did. She had been through the same loss and put up with Dad’s domestic reaction until she couldn’t put up with it any longer. Her name, by the way, was Pat (she hated ‘Patricia’) and if kicking Dad out of the house was brave, what she did next was heroic.

      2

      Boys Aren’t Shy

      ‘Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?’

      Alan Bennett, Forty Years On

      ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman of thirty with three sons and no income must be in want of a husband.’ I’m pretty sure that’s how Pride and Prejudice begins. Something like that.

      But it’s fair to say that, had one of Jane Austen’s penniless heroines, in Derbyshire say, in the early 1800s, found themselves in Pat’s situation in Lincolnshire in 1977, they would probably come to a similar conclusion. Austen’s women can be shockingly dry-eyed

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