I first knew something was horribly wrong the morning of Tuesday, September 30, 2014.
“Ben, I think I’m in really big trouble…” mum’s voice trembled at the end of the phone line. In the past she had told me she only had months to live only for me to discover it wasn’t true. She’d spoken of evenings she’d caroused with ambassadors, senior heads of the CIA, the owner of Steinway pianos, all figments of her imagination.
But this time things felt more real. This time, minutes before, a camera and an allegation had been thrust in her face as she walked down the street in the sleepy little village of Burton Overy, England - population 370. Soon to be 369.
“Sorry to bother you, Mrs. Leyland. Martin Brunt, Sky News.”
I’d later watch the footage. The camera dawdles as she comes into view with a glimmer of excitement at the prospect of fleeting fame on her face.
Why me? What an opportunity? Think of the stories we’ll have about this, her face said.
“Can we talk to you about your Twitter account?”
But now her face changes. Tightens. Her lips purse. That same pickled mouth of secret suffering I had seen a thousand times before.
She pivots.
“No. Look, I’m going out with a friend. Ok!” A slight rebuke, a defiant glower at the impertinence of their interruption. I knew that hair’s breadth change in temperament only too well, almost like you took a child’s toy away from them.
In these moments, her silence would betray a million anxious cogs whirring because of the latest person, place or thing that had activated the legacy of shadow she had never been able to talk about, let alone face.
“Why are you using your Twitter account to attack the McCanns? Did you know you’ve been reported to the police, to Scotland Yard. They’re considering a whole file of Twitter accounts and what supporters say is a campaign of abuse.”
“Look, I’m going out with a friend. Ok!” She gets into the passenger seat and slams the car door.
“What’s that all about?” Says Lorraine, one of the few people she had ever really gotten close to in her 63 years.
But it’s clear she should just drive away.
Five thousand miles away, a crusted layer of cocaine inside my nostrils, the whisky tobacco breath minutes old even at 10am, I had my own unconfronted problems.
There was nothing I could do to help her but listen. There really wasn’t much left to say. Working for a law firm at the time with an office in London, I tried to scramble to have them prevent any news story from naming her or using her face, but they were all out that day on other matters. Things move quickly when the press has a story.
The following day the story broke in the Daily Mail and within minutes had been picked up by all major news outlets. Her name and face were everywhere - on newspapers, televisions, and websites.
Cars and cameramen were parked outside her house as she typed her last email to me and then she asked her neighbor to look after her cat, made a dash for her car, and drove away.
Two days later she was found dead in a hotel room.
The Beach
It was a mixture of sympathetic magic and dissociated numbness that drew me to Zuma Beach that Saturday, October 4th. Nestled in the northernmost tip of Malibu, a year or so before, on her birthday, we had come here with my then wife, Eloise. I had buried a gift-wrapped digital camera underneath the sand and led her there in a treasure-hunt, while dolphins swam like prehistoric bullets through the barreling waves.
Gripped for years in the teeth of OCD’s insistence of ritual and symbolism, I think some part of me was trying to use this memory-laden location to coerce some kind of sign from the universe that she was OK. A phone call, an email, anything. I wanted this to be over as much for her sake as for my own addiction- entwined self-centeredness.
Not that I hadn’t indulged myself more than enough in the pity party . Behind wound down shades of my place in the Hollywood Hills there was a dilapidated scene: a plate of cocaine on the dining room table, flies rubbing their hands on beer bottle mouths.
And the strange thing is, she did call. Or at least I thought she did.
My phone lit up while I was sat overlooking the bay sipping on what must have been my third or fourth glass of wine just before midday. I answered and the line dropped. I called back. Nothing.
Almost immediately, three days of waiting, morbidly theorizing, was over.
Although I didn’t actually hear her voice, she had called. I assumed she couldn’t muster a conversation and instead settled for sending up the flare. And so I ordered another glass of wine, repaired to the bathroom to do a celebratory bump of blow, and made my way down to the beach to enjoy the sun, the relief and the return to my double-edged focus on myself.
I was lying on the sand, mere feet away from the rock where I had buried her present, when my phone rang again. This time it was dad.
“Well hellooo, how’re you? Mum called. Well, I mean, she called but hung up.
Either way, I think she’s OK.”
The heaviness of silence trembled with deafening clarity.
“Ben, I don’t…I don’t…know what to say,” his voice caught on something, unusually inarticulate for a man never at a loss for words, “your…your mum’s dead”
Anxiety clogged my ear canals, numbed my senses and quietened the world.
“Ben…she killed herself…I’m so sorry. I wish I could be there. I wish…you weren’t so far away.”
The sound of the ocean just out of reach.
“Ben, are you there?” He repeated quietly and kindly. I could hear the tears collecting in his nose and his mouth as he tried to steady himself and be there for me. Even though they’d been divorced for years, the pain and sadness was palpable. Despite the distance that had grown between us, I could hear him wanting to be there with me, his words drifting listlessly across four time zones.
“But that doesn’t make sense, she just called me a couple of hours ago.” I was flapping like a fish fighting the catch. Confused. Shocked. In denial.
Am I going crazy?
“I don’t know son. I don’t know what to say. I just spoke with the police. He said they found her at a hotel.”
It would later turn occur to me that the police most likely dialed me when reviewing her phone. The most awful butt-dial in history.
More silence. He gathered himself. I could hear him struggling to stand, that slight arch in his stoic spine, the restlessness of his switching hands holding the telephone. Three decades of a story which put him there and me here, estranged. Brought us back together for this, the most terrible of moments.
“Ben? Son? Are you still there?”
The phone fell out of my hand as a heat and a fear surged deep inside my chest cavity, rising up my throat and exploding into a scream interrupted by hiccuping phlegm.
“No. Noo. Noooo.”
I ran into the ocean. Far enough to submerge my entire body. I needed to drown out the noise. I wanted to drown myself. Everyone on the beach looked towards me, worried and confused.
Those initial moments of reality rejecting torpor, those full bodied sobs like a car engine being pushed to capacity. When all the regrets and the taking for granted, the anger, the arguments and the impregnable distance coalesce into a sky-snapping thunder and it finally hits you.
They’re gone. Present and future become past tense. Fatalistic conjugation of heavy verbs. Burial. Cremation. Last Will and Testament. Come home.
A handsome black man, silhouetted against the sky, towered over me.
“What’s wrong? Are you OK?”
“My mum killed herself.” All I could muster was the abrasively succinct truth. He grabbed me and pulled me close. My body was limp and my arms fell down to my sides.
“I’m so, so sorry. I know you don’t know it now but you are going to be OK.”
He whispered, only for me. A stranger, but the closest to anyone I think I had ever felt. Today I wouldn’t recognize him in the street. But I’ll never ever forget him.
A primitive force pulled me towards the rock. That ragged altar in the distance. I staggered like a lost soul in the desert, collapsed underneath its shade and tore at the wet sand with my hands. A broken man become a child, all I could do was sob “mummy” until I ran out of air.
To read the next installment in this series, Part 2, click here.