Luckily, it turns out that great love can grow from such inauspicious beginnings. I’m assuming that’s what this feeling is, this toxic chemistry of terror, guilt and hypersensitivity to their sadness.

This need to resist lethargy became particularly urgent once we’d had children. Babies can’t be left to fend for themselves. They would die. Not metaphorically, not spiritually: actually. Literally. Dead. Parenting is an enormous responsibility and it requires enormous effort: great barren wastes of sleeplessness, endless tolerance and patience; endless anxiety; vigilance, discipline, housework… For years and years and years.

You weren’t in control of their needs or their rhythms, so you never felt fully prepared. And it wouldn’t stop. You couldn’t knock off at 5. You couldn’t plod on through, clock-watching, until the klaxon went, then collapse on the sofa. Only in brief snatches of sleep was there any respite.

This is a wholesome and a psychologically healthy way to live. It is founded on love and nurturing and ought to be deeply rewarding. I believed (and believe) that, but the images that accompanied the conviction seemed, somehow, unsustainably exhausting. I couldn’t anticipate the sources of nourishment that would keep me going.

The birth of my first child was undoubtedly one of the two most important events of my life (the other being the birth of my second child). It felt as if huge sheets of feeling: terror, elation, agony, were flapping and snapping across the ceiling, above my head, shot through with strands of brisk, professional focus in midwife-uniform blue. If I reached up, their electricity would thrill down my arm for a moment, but they didn’t seem to be mine. Perhaps they were Jo’s. I couldn’t locate the self that was me to channel or place these emotions. I couldn’t even say I was detached, because that implies two very concrete locations: where I was and where they were. I felt as if I’d been injected with morphine and beta-blockers, discorporated, and had my ghost translocated to the surface of Mars in the middle of a sand storm. In other words, I didn’t know what to think. Or what to feel. I could recognise how important and precious was the little bundle of being that had sprung miraculously into existence in my arms, but I didn’t feel clear resonances inside myself. There was just turbid and agitated hubbub where I should have been ringing like a bell with clear, pure emotion.

I know this is a damning assessment of me, rather than parenthood. A few years later, when my most cynical, repressed and hard-nosed friend had his first child, I mentioned this experience, hoping to bond over how different the popular, sentimental vision of child-birth was with the reality, how love grows. He said, “oh? Really? Well, the first time is set eyes on my daughter I was overwhelmed with the most powerful sense of love. It was amazing!”
“Oh, how lovely! What a happy image,” I replied, thinking, “Right. That’s another thing I must never mention to anyone ever again. It can become another of my grubby little secrets.” I had hoped (I still hope) that I just wasn’t in touch with my feelings.

Maybe I’m not fully human. Phillip pointed out, in a recent therapy session, that I’d just said, “The thing about humans is that they…” I hadn’t noticed.

Caring for your children is the prime directive. There is nothing more reviled than a neglectful or abusive parent; there is nothing more saintly than a dedicated, self-sacrificing one. This was my greatest test. The other people I damaged: Lulu, Jo, my parents, my sisters: they were all adults: they could look after themselves, give as good as they got, but my children were wholly vulnerable, wholly dependent on me, and I was pretty certain I wasn’t up to the job. I was too weak and self-indulgent, too nasty.

I had to try, of course. I steeled myself. I moved into parenthood with trepidation, looking around wildly all the time, trying to anticipate fate’s next ambush, which would almost certainly be a trap I’d set for myself.

The struggle was constant, so I needed to make every minute count, be constantly vigilant, constantly maintaining the defences, always driving myself forwards, driving my legs to straighten and lift me out of chairs and beds where I’d temporarily dropped, or I might stay in them for ever; always driving me away from the lip of a complete and catastrophic collapse that would send me sprawling to the ground, all muscles loose, never to rise again.

Because, if you don’t make the effort, if you don’t contribute, you are breaking the social contract. If you aren’t caring for them, why should anyone care for you? or care what happens to you? You are a worthless git, “a tube for turning good food into shite.” If you don’t keep swimming, you drown. “If you don’t work, you die.”

And so will your children.

If only I could find some excuse for giving up, curling up and just enduring…

Yesterday, two young lads walked past me. One was saying, “…They’d all die, bruv: you don’t work, you don’t eat…”

There was one problem with my philosophy of the elevating power of work: I was fundamentally lazy and ineffective, physically and mentally. Perhaps everyone was (There are lots of synonyms for laziness in English: Indolence, slothfulness… It’s a cultural pre-occupation), but most people seemed far better at resisting it.

Was my inertia learned from my parents? They were relatively hard working but disliked it. Maybe it was literally inherited from them – a biological inefficiency at metabolising food, or something. Whatever the reason, I’ve always found it incredibly difficult to muster the energy or the resourcefulness to be useful or pursue a goal dynamically. I’d always rather be drifting off into a dwam than knuckling down, being told what to do than weighing up alternatives and planning a course of action. While you are finding solutions to life’s problems, and putting them into action, I’m almost certainly sitting there with some inane gif playing in my head.

It’s not as if I’m laid back. In fact, I’m pretty stressed about it. Currents of anxious energy play around my body, like those wavering lines of electricity in a Van de Graaf generator, but they’re too weak to break out into action, most of the time.

Writing provides me with the perfect excuse. A writer can justify gazing out the window all day because they’re waiting for inspiration, they’re thinking things through. Left on my own all day with a small amount of housework to do, I’ll come to myself in the evening and realise I haven’t done any of it, because I’ve been “working”, which takes priority. I’ll probably have written half a dozen lines, over 3 or 4 separate, half-baked writing projects, which will never be finished, and stressed myself out.

So I have a Work Ethic I aspire to and attempt, but don’t live by. What activity I manage is driven by a need to guard against my indolence, to constantly push back the warm tide of sleepy inactivity that is always threatening to overwhelm my brain. All my efforts go into just resisting the pull of lethargy, doing something, anything at all, to drive myself away from my natural state of weakness and torpor.

I lack drive and initiative. I dithered over whether to study History or English Literature at university, for example. I eventually chose English because, ironically, it involved less reading, and that reading was more fun. (I’m not very good at reading.)

When I graduated, I had no idea what to do with myself. I was going to be a poet, but I was aware that there was no money in it and I’d have to earn a living somehow. Lulu did a TEFL certificate and got a job in a central European country teaching English. After a year working in an office on minimum wage, I drifted, in her wake, into the same career. The school she worked in wanted another native speaker, so I did the training and then went out to work with her. It was her suggestion, but it was still stalkerish of me to accept so eagerly. I couldn’t think of anything else to do, though.

I was astonished to discover that, while I had stayed grimly true to a fixed and restrictive sense of myself, Lulu had carelessly changed. She had transformed from a languid sybarite into a real work-horse. She was committed to her students and would work very long hours, late into the night, preparing and teaching lessons, creating teaching materials, marking work. She did this with enthusiasm, relishing the chance to make a positive difference to her students’ lives, and the adventure of living in a strange, fascinating new country and meeting interesting new people.

This struck me as no kind of a life at all, but I admired Lulu’s industry. I wished I shared her dedication and her adventurous spirit, and I was still striving to be what she liked and admired, so, cursing inwardly, I claimed to be made of that self mettle. We embarked on a life of hard work, hard drinking and screaming arguments, much to my dismay, not being very good at any of them.

Once she and I had gone our separate ways, and the dust had settled on the ruins of our friendship, I was left with certain habits and proclivities, certain assumptions.
a. I had profound doubts about myself as a cognitive entity. I distrusted my own ideas and opinions, especially those to do with righteousness or legitimacy, having repeatedly tried myself against others and come off worse, (although, admittedly, much of those debates degenerated into the argumentum ad hominem (ad nauseam!)) (See b.)
b. I felt fundamentally subordinate – I lacked initiative and aimed to please; I was irresolute and indecisive, deeply distrusting any conclusion I came to. Who would trust the choices of an idiot? Deciding made me feel vulnerable because I was fearful of the consequences and the fierce, disdainful reaction to my idiocy. I relied on others not only to make decisions, but also to confirm my existence through acknowledgement and appreciation of my supportiveness of their choices. (See a.)
c. Yet I believed you enacted yourself: you came into being by acting, and being recognised for those actions. And all acts were moral. Preceding your self was your self’s responsibility for that self (which makes no sense at all), so successes were due to willpower; failures to weakness: you were giving in to some sort of inexplicable, interior, a priori badness. Thus, my sense of self was feeble (see b.) but I could change myself through tangible, measurable activity; this would somehow set me right: if you paid lip-service to an idea, by repetition you could make it true. You faked it to make it. But this denied the truth of any original self. The character I attempted to adopt was defined by others, making me, down to my very essence, seem false, deceitful, insincere, a pretence (See a.) (Jesus! I sound like Kierkegaard, or Berkeley. Next, I’ll start claiming that my silly mental confusions necessitate the existence of God!)
d. I valorised hard work (see c.) and the serving of others (see b.). I felt it was a person’s duty to add value to their society and environment, to justify their place in it. This would firm you up, solidify you, as an entity. (See a., b. and c.) The people I admired were hard workers, an attitude that’s reinforced by society at large, I think.
e. I hoped work would make up for my sins: I might be forgiven if I could be of service. Hard work made you a better person and you could work at being a better person. (See a.)

No I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be
Am an attendant lord one that will do
To swell a progress start a scene or two
Advise the prince no doubt an easy tool
Deferential glad to be of use
Politic cautious and meticulous
Full of high sentence but a bit obtuse
At times indeed almost ridiculous
Almost at times the fool.

(And, anyway, my Danish is RUBBISH!)

My morale was low. I really, really wished I hadn’t been such an arse, but I had. I couldn’t take it back, so I needed to atone and I needed to earn Lulu’s regard. I thought, “I’ll make myself indispensable: her most dependable friend and ally. Then she’ll grow to love me, and, what’s more, I’ll be a better person.” I thought I could get there by graft. I aimed to please. What a fucking genius!

We already shared a lot of interests and attitudes, but now I tried very hard to think and act in a way she’d approved of; I tried to really mean it when I apologised; to see it from her point of view; to match her drink for drink. It was an aspirational project! You can imagine how successful it was: apart from anything else, Lulu could really hold her booze.

In one sense, then, I capitulated. I acknowledged this was her stage, her scene; I wasn’t the centre, the main attraction; I was an aggravating nuisance, a distraction, a walk-on part. I was marginal.

It could’ve been an elevating moral lesson, but I wasn’t gracefully admitting defeat and yielding the field. I was hanging grimly on. I think I was probably trying to punish her, subconsciously. I’d probably registered that, coming from a strict Christian background, she would want to act in a virtuous way, and I exploited that. She didn’t want to be unreasonable, uncharitable, unforgiving, so she never just told me to FUCK OFF, which would’ve probably been the best thing for both of us. She was just as stubborn as I was, and I think I was so obviously messed up that she felt concerned for my welfare. We got on very well, some of the time. We genuinely liked each other.

Poor Lulu! I refused to leave the long-suffering girl alone. Being her attendant became my occupation. I was so impressed with, and so absorbed by, her that I assumed she held the same centrality in the lives of other people that she did in mine. I thought she was holding court when she was just hanging out with friends, so I danced attendance in a simplistic fantasy of my own devising: a cruel fairy queen in a royal court of two. I barely recognised the existence of other, shadowy figures.

I imposed this ludicrous chimera on a real, complex young woman, and yet I thought of her as the tyrant! Everywhere she went she was accompanied by a retinue of one: a malignant, capering jester, a reproachful fool, who carried on his back the props and sets of a fiction, a travelling theatre.

It was sordid and claustrophobic. So much so that even I, who was compelled to pursue her, felt a sense of relief, of easing, when we weren’t together. Looking back, my behaviour seems obsessive, although it didn’t seem that way at the time. I thought I was dependable and loyal. I’ve always regarded myself as too weak and flaky and easily distracted to be obsessive. Surely obsessives have great powers of concentration.

I’m surprised Lulu didn’t murder me. It was embarrassing.I was monstrous and monstrously passive-aggressive. I hung around for years trying to ingratiate myself. For YEARS. She must have been so exasperated. I damaged both our lives. And, as the years passed, I grew more and more into the mind-set of the servant. I started to think of myself as The Subordinate, so reliant on the ideas and opinions of others, so sceptical and disdainful of my own, that I became distrustful of the existence of my own self.

But I wasn’t, at that stage, trying to be public-spirited. I grew into that later. I was trying to worm my way into somebody’s affections. It was horribly self-centred and self-serving.

By my second or third year at university I had foundered on the rocks of a woman’s indifference. I adored her; she thought I wasn’t bad company when I wasn’t being annoying. She could take me or leave me.

I was perplexed. This didn’t match any of my casually imagined, solipsistic futures. Fiction’s fastidious structuring had left me ill prepared for life’s inconsequence.

I’d assumed such strength of feeling would be reflected, in some form – if not immediately, then at least after I’d made such an effort to be agreeable. Surely it was a scientific principle, like the law of conservation of energy, or something. Otherwise there would be no balance to anything, no equilibrium; it would all be a shapeless chaos.

But my declarations fell flat: a small, damp thud and an awkward silence. Nothing I said or did seemed to make any difference. Her indifference was visceral, illogical and unchanging. I couldn’t argue her out of it. It was exasperating.

Then, in a huff, I became very ungentlemanly. I was affronted. Since we’d first met, we’d always had terrible rows. We were both stubborn and sensitive youngest siblings. But I was so unfamiliar with rowing between friends, so surprised by it, that I couldn’t really process what was going on. I wasn’t aware how distressing I found it. I just thought there was an encouraging intimacy to it.

Rather than whispering private savageries, or bowing and walking away with my dignity intact, I began experimenting with Heathcliffian melodrama. But my acts of social violence, of sabotage, of public accusation, of deliberate theatre, just made me look like a horrible person. I wasn’t a Romantic hero calling out cruelty, and the nasty intensity and the wrongness of it scared me.

I needed to regard myself as a good person. My fear of being in the wrong now starved my complaints of venom or full-blooded passion. Instead I opted for a sort of pitiful, anaemic fretfulness. I whined; I was wounded; I quietly bad-mouthed her to our mutual friends. I caused a fuss.

Being good also meant acknowledging when I was wrong. I spent a lot of time apologising, always qualified with reproach. I’d say, “Look, I’m sorry that I…, but you…” I hoped that by being an utter arse but admitting it, I could retain the moral high ground!

However, even when insincere, words can retain enough residual meaning, or emotional charge, to influence your thinking, especially if they’re repeated often enough. You get used to the shape of them, of their relational dynamics. The more I apologised, while she did not, (and why should she?), the more I admitted that I was the villain (which I was), the more subordinate I became.

But before the genesis of The Servant, as a teenager, and in my early twenties, I tried to make account of myself in other ways. Having left home for university, I thought I could free myself from my tedious past and personality. I made false, boastful claims about myself. I hoped to construct a character that would impress and entertain my friends. It was an act or a mask, a pretence at having depth. To gain attention, I claimed that I was able to do things that I could not do very well. I claimed I’d had experiences that I had not had, exactly. I claimed to be messed up from the troubles I’d heroically endured, and it turned out I was messed up (who isn’t?) but not from the troubles I professed. In fact, the few small troubles I did have I dealt with extremely badly, as this outbreak of mendacity demonstrates.

It was only, years later, in therapy, that I wondered what was so wrong with my own self that I felt compelled to invent another.

I have still not found an adequate answer to this. When I claimed to have thoughts, feelings and opinions that had only just occurred to me, and that I only said for effect, I was using language as a medium of communication, but not as a receptacle of truth, not as a way of capturing that elusive quality, which is surely language in its highest form. So what was I trying to communicate?

I was being dishonest and thus disloyal to both my friends and to myself. I was communicating nothing. I was making no real connections. I was, in fact, isolating myself. This made worse the sense of hollowness and of worthlessness.

I began to loath myself for being such a twat. Filled with embarrassment, I wanted to stifle my foolish ego-centricity and dedicate myself to being interested in other people. I wanted to make amends.

But it didn’t quite work out like that.

Your own children don’t have to merit or achieve their relationship with you, either, however dysfunctional it is. Parents can be embarrassed by their children, or envious of their achievements, but they don’t tot up the evidence of their social utility and decide how they feel based on that. It’s all far more atavistic. You don’t expect them to be other than whoever and whatever they are.

My children find losing at games a challenge, even party/pub games whose purpose is entirely to formalise, and thus ease, social interaction. We were summoned to a gathering of friends, last weekend. Their dozens of children were playing Mafia, a game where two secretly assigned murderers pick people to kill and the rest of the players have to try and work out who they are and hang them, before they are all murdered. The kids are kind of inexpert, though they play it with enthusiasm. They exhibit a terrifying mob mentality. Somebody will shout “Let’s hang Danny: he looks shifty!” and they’ll all gleefully vote to lynch him.

Meggie, who is now 14 and one of the older ones, was unjustly hanged. I could tell she was finding this very difficult, so much so that I had to take her out of the room so she could rant and cry without disgracing us. (I tend to hover in the background at these gatherings.)

I felt very sorry for her, because I get it: she wants to be able to demonstrate her intelligence by arguing her case convincingly and thus persuading people not to lynch her, and by manipulating the consensus. She’s frustrated by the happy, obstinate senselessness of her friends and feels excluded and picked upon; she wonders if they don’t like her. She also knows she’s being a brat and is worried that now everyone will despise her.

In contrast to me, Jo, usually the more flexible and charitable parent, is shocked by Meggie’s antics. Growing up, her father was far more provoked by sore losing than by any other bad behaviour: lying, cheating, stealing, cruelty: all paled into insignificance beside the sin of being unsporting.

I don’t think it is a co-incidence that my father-in-law’s father, Jo’s grandfather, was a stern and unforgiving missionary in the puritan mould, who expected the highest moral standards from his children, because this attitude, passed from father to daughter, smacks of the old simplistic and dismissive Christian attitude.

Isn’t it just a way of allowing the winners of this world to revel in their dominance without taking responsibility for the effect they have on others? They’re like bullying Regency bucks who can sleep with whoever they like because they know they’re better duellists than any of the husbands they cuckold. The winners make the rules, especially those to do with manners. As the historian Alan Brooke once said to me, “when they say ‘he died well’ they just mean he didn’t give the hangman any trouble”.

Of course, playing and losing games, surviving psychologically, and being able to maintain your relationships with the people who beat you, is an important rehearsal for the trials of life, but it’s a hard-won lesson and it takes time to get it right, and anyway, you learn it for yourself not for the benefit of the beautiful people.

Meggie is trying. she’s struggling with this, but she wants to get it right. She wants to be good. I guess I’ve seen (and caused) so many fuck-ups, that this has become my much compromised and negotiated approximate definition of virtue. The good guys aren’t those who do good; they aren’t even those who try hard to be good and fail; they’re simply those who’d like very much to be good, even though they fail all the time.

At least, I hope so, for my own sake.

Belief is a force for good. Truly religious people strive to do the right thing with optimistic vigour. They trust that their aspirations are both achievable and meaningful, even if they fall short of them. If you require acts of heroic self-sacrifice, they’re your go-to guys. Don’t rely on us Nihilists. We’ll just collapse in feeble, self-loathing heaps at the first sign of trouble, moaning “Humanity is Weak. Even Virtue is Self-Indulgence. Thus Resistance is Useless. Therefore We are Doomed.”

BUT

There’s often a totalising, binary simplicity to religious thought that can still govern how you see the world even after you’ve lost your faith. Even if you avoid the temptation to be disdainful of non-believers, you still run the risk of being disdainful of yourself, because you are either a crusader for the light, or you are one of Satan’s foot-soldiers in the legions of the damned. This goodness or badness is part of someone’s essence and is demonstrated by their words, actions and behaviours, so if you say or do a bad thing, that’s you finished: you’ve revealed yourself to be a bad person. (literally, absolutely and irredeemably, if you are a Calvinist believer in pre-destination and conditional election).

It’s an accumulative process, in practice, though: you can go up and down in Christians’ estimation. “I don’t like you any less,” as Lulu, also brought up in the faith, once said to me, “but I do think less of you”. If you cross the threshold, you can “learn the error of your ways”; you can “redeem yourself”, although these phrases suggest you are wholly lost until you do.

There can be a dismissive thoughtlessness in the way you think about the world. Once you’ve established the goodies and the baddies, once you know who’s to blame, you don’t need to think about them any further, about their inner complexity or their reasons or their reasoning, or their struggle to be a better person. You don’t need to sympathise with their suffering. (For some reason, if it’s “their own fault” it’s not supposed to hurt.)

I was reading an extract from Lem Sissay’s autobiography, My Name is Why. His devout step-parents, having had a child of their own after adopting him, found it useful to label him as a Bad Boy. This was presumably a way of excusing their sense that he was now an inconvenience.

Children, especially, seem to have a strong sense of right and wrong, justice and injustice. This makes it difficult for them to take responsibility for errors and wrong-doings because to be justified and righteous is central to the sense of self, at this age. Admitting they are in the wrong profoundly threatens their identity. This is why children defend themselves so fiercely.

As you get older, you gain more responsibility over your own life and you become much more capable of harming others. Inevitably, at some point, you’ll be backed into a corner, and forced to admit that you’ve been acting like a bastard. This can cause a sort of existential crisis, a dismantling of your identity: you thought you were one of the good guys.

Therapy has helped me, I hope, to grow beyond this simplistic mind-set. I have various idiocies in my past that I keep hidden, assuming everyone will be horrified if they find out, that they’ll renounce me. I keep them in a secret chamber in my chest cavity, near my heart, where they fester and corrupt my whole being. Philip, my therapist, however, is unfazed by my grubby crimes and shabby sinfulness. He’s seems more interested in the tangled thinking that led to them. He appears to think me worthy of an hour of professional scrutiny, at least. This, along with his apparent un-shockability, and my desire to justify the indulgence of therapy by treating it as work, has encouraged me to experiment with honesty. Every now and then I’ll take a deep breath and reveal some awfulness. Phillip will shrug his lack of concern and pursue some other line of argument completely. It is enormously liberating. A weight lifts, slightly, that may have been on my shoulders for years.

Working with children with learning difficulties has also helped. You very quickly learn to ditch any Rain Man-based assumptions that people with limitations in one area of cognition must have a compensatory skill in another area. Many of the conditions that leave students academically challenged also make them unable to perform in other areas, such as Art or Drama or P.E. or Woodwork. They have dyspraxia and are horribly mal-co-ordinated, or can’t follow instructions, or can’t remember the steps in a process. Some have no idea what the purpose of any lesson is, or of the whole subject, or even of going to school at all. School is simply something to be endured. Some are so bewildered that they wander around in an isolated dream, leaving little impression on the people around them, and gaining little from them.

I work with a boy, at the moment, who, if you tell him off, will literally offer to fight you. I’ll say, “Come on, Dom! Just stop turning the computer off! We’ve got to get this typed up!” and he’ll say, “Yeah? Come on, then, sir. You and me.” He’s not joking, either. He senses conflict and these are the only synapses that fire. It’s such a ludicrous response that I tend to laugh through my annoyance and a look of uncertainty enters his face as if he half senses how inappropriate it is.

Most troubling are the students who are simply too intellectually limited to know how or why to be kind or to stay out of trouble. They can’t conceive of the selfhood or others. Others are so emotionally abused that they have been denied the ability, and thus the right, to be likable people. They can be desperately lonely but incapable of forming enduring relationships. Forced to rely on only themselves, they can become solipsistic and nasty. They have been horribly betrayed.

So you cannot value people on their merits. They must be treasured simply for being themselves. Humanity, human consciousness, is precious. Against the black background of mortality, every brief, dying spark is brilliant.

The question now is, can I extend this forgiving attitude to myself? Not in self-indulgent self-love, but to avoid falling into despair; to keep striving to do right.