You know when you’ve hit a good shot. I use a bat that weighs 2 pounds and 9 ounces, and it makes a reassuringly solid sound when I connect properly. The ball pings off the middle. I start to run, but there’s no need. It’s going for four.
The ‘YES’ I scream in response is half roar, half rebel yell. It’s loud enough for someone to hear it in Leeds. I’m still shouting it, and still wearing my helmet, when I lean back, arms outstretched. Then I yank my helmet off, kiss the badge on the front of it and hold my bat aloft. I tilt my head upwards. All I see is the unblemished arch of the sky, clearer and bluer than ever. All I hear is the crowd – the clapping, the cheers, the thunder of voices. What I feel is absolute relief and the profoundest joy. I am experiencing what I can only describe as the sense of complete fulfilment, which is overwhelming me.
I’m so grateful to Ben Stokes. It’s second nature to dash to your partner when he reaches a hundred, sharing the stage with him. Stokesy doesn’t. He stands back, a spectator like everyone else, allowing me a minute alone. He knows. Finally, he throws one of those big, tattooed arms around me and says: ‘Soak it up. Take it all in, mate.’
I do.
And what comes back, of course, crowding into my mind, is the past, which puts everything into context. My dad. My grandpa. My grandma. My mum. My sister. I could weep now. I could let the tears out, but I fight against them instead, closing my eyes to dam them up.
My dad always liked to know where my mum was sitting before he went in to bat. He drew comfort from the fact that she was there and giving her support – even when he couldn’t see her distinctly. At the beginning of his innings he’d search for her from the crease and settled only when he’d fastened on to the approximate location or, better still, actually spotted her in a row, usually because of something she was wearing. I’m exactly the same. I’ll always look in her direction, searching for her face among a thousand others.
My mum is sometimes unable to look when I bat; she might hide in a corridor when I get near a landmark score. I know she’ll have braved this one out, but everyone is standing and applauding so I can’t see her at first. I point with my bat towards where I know for certain she and Becky are sitting, a gesture for them alone.
Eventually the noise of the crowd dies away, and I think of starting my innings again. But first I take one last look at the sky. If heaven has a pub, I hope my dad is in it now. I hope he’s ordering a pint to celebrate.
Then I hope he orders another.
CHAPTER 1
First, the bare, stark fact – the matter of public record.
My dad was only 46 years and 126 days old when he committed suicide. My mum, my sister Becky and I found him when we returned home at 8.30 p.m., which was one of those typically lampblack and cold January nights. He had hanged himself from the staircase.
Now, the speculation – the what ifs, the what-might-have-beens, the guesswork.
The great risk of being alive is always that something can happen to you – or to someone you dearly love – at any moment. I learnt that lesson on a Monday evening so ordinary that otherwise it would be indistinguishable from a thousand-and-one others. Everything seemed normal to me. They say that even the sensibilities of infants can pick up a minute shift of mood at home, alerting them when something is a little odd or off. I’d gone past the stage of infancy – I was a young child – but I’d registered nothing untoward. To me, my dad was just my dad, as ebullient and as energetic as ever. I never saw him down or doubtful, or fretful about either himself or our future. I had no inkling that anything was wrong. He didn’t seem like a man full of distractions to me.
In the morning I said goodbye to him and walked to school with Becky, the Christmas holidays over and a new term beginning. In the early evening my mum took me to football training at Leeds United, bringing Becky too. That our lives changed irrevocably while the three of us were away seemed to me – then as well as now – inconceivable and incomprehensible.
The inquest into my dad’s death, which I didn’t attend, heard evidence about his mental state. That he’d been suffering from depression and stress. That he’d seen both his own doctor and a consultant psychiatrist because of it. That he’d experienced extreme mood swings, veering between the dramatically high and the dramatically low, leaving my mum unsure about ‘which version of him would come through the door’. That he’d been for a drink at one of his favourite pubs a few hours before he died (though the toxicology report revealed no extravagant level of alcohol in his system). That he’d been concerned about my mum’s health and the treatment she was undergoing for breast cancer, diagnosed less than three months before and far more aggressive than even she appreciated at the time. She’d undergone chemotherapy, radiotherapy and then chemotherapy again. She was wearing a wig because her hair had fallen out. I didn’t know – but I learnt later – that the hospital became more concerned about my dad’s emotional state than my mum’s. He was afraid she was going to die. He was also afraid of how he would cope – and what would happen to us – if she did.
Also, my dad had been particularly anxious about an impending court appearance to answer a drink-driving charge, which would certainly have meant the loss of his licence, a potentially grievous blow to his promotional and marketing business – and to our family finances. The incident precipitating it was an accident on a quiet country road the previous October. My dad was bringing me home from training at Leeds in his Volkswagen Scirocco. A car, coming in the opposite direction, dazzled him with its headlights, which were unusually bright. For a split second, my dad lost control of the wheel. We veered off the road, struck a slight bank and the car tipped over. The Scirocco ended up on its right side, leaving me on top of my dad.
Shoeless, and still wearing my football kit, I freed myself and then clambered over him, escaping through the back window. With only the odd cut and bruise, which was miraculous, I stood in the middle of the road and waited. The driver who’d blinded my dad hadn’t stopped; he’d sped away, long gone and unidentifiable. A friend of mine, also on Leeds’ books, was being taken home by his father. I flagged them down, and the police and an ambulance were called. That afternoon my dad had been at the funeral of a golfing buddy. Like everyone else, he’d gone to the wake afterwards. The police routinely brought out the breathalyser, finding him over the limit. I can’t condone my dad’s drink-driving, but the circumstances surrounding the case – the car responsible for it, the driver absconding afterwards without a care for our well-being, the fact that my dad hadn’t been speeding – didn’t seem to interest the police. I, the only other witness, wasn’t even asked to give a statement. I am still livid about that.
The repercussions of the crash rippled out. My dad was mortified that he’d put me in danger, mulling over afterwards how much worse the crash could have been. It left him with a debilitating arm injury. His future in local cricket, and also the enormous pleasure he got from playing golf, were both jeopardised. His right arm and shoulder required an operation, and 16 pins and a plate were put in to support his joints, which brought him considerable pain during his ongoing recovery.
Fraught with worry as the court case loomed and his other problems accumulated, my dad had not only been drinking too much generally – and he accepted as much – but a few weeks earlier he had also swallowed an overdose of painkillers at home: the same painkillers that had been prescribed for his injuries. He described taking them as ‘a cry for help’. My mum had for months urged him to go to a doctor and talk openly about his depression. Either he refused or, after giving in and going to an appointment, he