Page 90 of How Good It Was (Excess All Areas 3)

“I’m glad you decided to make an appointment. Obviously, our phone call to see if I could be of assistance was informative, and I really believe I can help you navigate your current confusion.”

“My head’s all over the place. I just had to tell my best mate I’m sorry for stopping him hooking up with my sister thanks to a prehistoric pact we made.”

“Tell me more about that?”

“I thought we were here to talk about my past.”

Neil smiled. “Isn’t this your past ... if it’s prehistoric?”

Luke shrugged. “I suppose so. When my dad died, I guess I wanted to step into his shoes. Take care of my mum and sister, yeah. So, I told my mates to keep their hands off Iz because I knew what they were all like. Horny teens ready to bang anything that bounced.”

“Why did you think you were the gatekeeper of your sister’s sexual expression?”

Luke did a double take. “That wasn’t it. They were man whores. You don’t want that shit for the women in your lives, right?”

“There’s absolutely zero judgement from me about this, but from what you told me on the phone, you’ve led a very promiscuous existence. Do you think you don’t deserve the woman you are in a relationship with, either?”

“Willow?”

“Yes, Willow.”

“Of course I don’t deserve her.”

“I like to think it’s much simpler and altogether more complex than that. The notion of saint versus sinner runs much deeper. What I would say is it’s very positive that you recognise it wasn’t healthy and made peace with your friend, if not yourself, about it. But we’ll come back to this in another session.” Neil made a note in his book. “I had a thought after we spoke on the phone about your dad. I want you to tell me about your dad, but I want you to pretend he’s sitting right next to you. What kind of man was he?”

Luke looked to his right, trying to visualise him sitting right there in the matching black leather chair. When he captured the spirit of him in his mind, he smiled. “He was a good man. A protector and provider. He took looking after the three of us seriously. As a firefighter, he’d work all these different shifts. Days on and days off. Nights. Whatever. But I don’t ever recall there being a day when he wasn’t there for me.”

Neil smiled. “You respected him?”

“I did. Although, he was a strict disciplinarian. I remember getting bounced into next week by him when I tried to alter my school report one year. I thought he was going to have a coronary in the kitchen. He grounded me for two weeks. Took away my video games. Then, at the end of the two weeks, he sat me down, told me he wouldn’t have been pissed at my original grades, but would have wanted to know what he could do to get my grades up again.”

“Would you say his discipline was fair?”

Luke thought about how it had felt to be stuck in his room while Matt and Ben were hanging out with friends in Piccadilly Gardens. “Back then, no. But now, in hindsight, as an adult, yeah. He was. I should have done the same for Izabel.”

Neil took a sip of his mug of tea. “It’s interesting that you say that. You drew a line in your answer which made me think about the concept of time. There’s back then and now. Where back then means you were still a child experiencing the negative effects of discipline. And now, as an adult, you understand the lesson he was trying to teach.”

Luke studied the therapist. “That’s fair.”

“I’ll come back to that in a moment. Tell me more about your dad. Did you admire him?”

“Easiest yes. How could you not? He was a firefighter, put his life on the line every day. He loved us, not in that obligatory way, but on a deep-down level that you could feel. And he had our backs. I remember my French teacher giving me a hard time, and at parents’ evening, when the teacher started to tell Dad about it, he asked the teacher what he’d done to actually help me. Like, had he tried to figure out why I was being disruptive? Was I bored? Was something worrying me? The teacher was gobsmacked.”

“Did he believe it was the teacher’s job to keep you in line?”

Luke laughed as he shook his head. “God, no. He kicked my arse when we got home. But he then sat me down to get to the bottom of it. And the truth was the teacher always made me feel stupid as shit for not being able to conjugate verbs. Made fun of me every time I tried. So, I switched off. Stopped trying.”

“What happened?”

“Dad got me a French tutor we couldn’t afford, I worked hard because I thought it would help when I became a pilot—being able to speak foreign languages—and I was moved up a set, so he was no longer my teacher.”

Neil paused, and Luke fought back the urge to keep rambling about his dad. The silence felt questioning. Oppressive, even. “Tell me about one of your dad’s flaws.”

“Why would I speak ill of the dead? Bit fucking weird, isn’t it?”

“You’d be surprised the number of things I’ve heard in this room about dead people. This is about you and your feelings and memories. They are real and valid and meaningful, regardless of whether the person is dead or not.”

Luke filtered through memories of his dad. At the sideline of his football tournament, driving him and Matt to school one rainy day, blasting Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8er Boi” because Luke loved the drum track. They’d banged on the back of the front seat and air drummed. The day he’d surprised him with the Von Dutch trucker hat he’d wanted for getting his first Saturday job at Debenhams. Going to pick their mum up after a night out with friends because he didn’t want her getting in a taxi alone.

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