Story read by David McGrath (final story in podcast, at 1h 27 min, here)
I once manned the helpline for tourists disenchanted by Paris not being the Paris they expected.
My documentary crew says that’s so interesting.
Better than working for Facebook.
What did you do for Facebook?
I screened reported photographs. Before the software could do it.
You must’ve seen a lot of dick pics.
The dick pics I could handle. It was the war photographs that gave everyone in the office nervous breakdowns. The in-house therapist told us that everything was going to be OK. That’s how I got the experience for the helpline.
My documentary crew is fascinated. You’re an interesting guy. We don’t want some run-of-the-mill, kitchen-sink documentary. We want sensational. Like you.
My documentary crew and I move in together.
What else?
Why don’t we talk about you?
What else about you? We want to know everything.
You want to hear about my father stood on the sidelines of my football games for years, shouting into his phone about deals and mergers and million-pound investments?
Yes.
This was when nobody had mobile phones. Back in the nineties. But my Dad shows up to my football games with this big phone, shouting into it like a big shot making millions of pounds at any given moment. And during one of our games, another Dad falls to the ground having a heart attack. The entire field looks to my Dad and tells him to call an ambulance. He’s the man with the big phone, after all. And my Dad stands there, watched by everybody, and has to admit the phone is a fake or pretend to call an ambulance. My Dad pretends. The other Dad dies.
That’s so fucked up.
That’s my Dad.
What else?
And because my documentary crew is so interested in me at all times I fall in love with my documentary crew. I fall in love with my documentary crew’s interest in me like some second-rate narcissist. Like my goddamn Dad.
My documentary crew’s sound guy never tires. The camerawoman’s lens is never out of focus and the questions are incessant. Have I ever used a prostitute? Have I ever cheated on a girlfriend? Have I ever hit a woman? Have I ever called someone a cunt? Have I ever stolen money? Have I ever been with a man? Do I have homosexual thoughts?
*
My brother visits with his girlfriend. My documentary crew does not like them and calls my brother’s girlfriend the princess. They leave for a day of sightseeing, and my documentary crew comes into the sitting room. There is silence.
You cannot tell anyone we did this.
What did you do?
The princess is cheating on your brother.
What?
She’s cheating on him.
How do you know that?
We’ve just gone into their room and read her diary.
What? I can’t believe you did that.
What?
Before I can tell my documentary crew that this documentary is not working out and that I’m not interested in finishing the documentary, my father dies.
My documentary crew complains about my sisters not being fully open at the funeral. My documentary crew does not think they’re very sisterly.
Ease up. They’ve just buried their father. Your behaviour is atrocious at the moment.
This starts a big argument. My documentary crew does not like being documented. We’re screaming at each other and my documentary crew is punching the roof of the car, threatening to jump out if I don’t stop on the motorway.
Swear to fucking God, stop this fucking car!
This documentary is fucking done! I’m shouting back. We’re going to get this pregnancy test, see that it’s negative and then we’re fucking done!
In the next town my documentary crew hops out of the car. They return with the pregnancy test held high in the air, crying.
It’s positive! It’s positive!
My documentary crew is pregnant.
That night I propose.
*
Money adds a whole new dimension to my documentary. My documentary is far more expensive now than originally planned and it really focuses on me not being a good provider, me being a leech, me being a loser, me being a dependent, me not doing anything with my life, me not paying enough for our lives.
My documentary crew plays me back to myself. Shows me to myself saying to the camera that I should get a better-paid job. My documentary crew then replays it and replays it and replays it. Shows me to myself wasting time with writing, never going to make it, me being delusional, me being unrealistic.
Fine, I say. I’ll get a security guard job where I sit at a desk and write my book and get paid for it. I’ll be a building concierge or something like that.
My documentary crew explodes.
How is that interesting? How can that make a good documentary?
*
The nurse asks us questions. We answer them like we’re at a job interview. There’s an exhale in the room, and those who can see behind the curtain are looking at something. We see our baby in the smiles on their faces. He’s shining. We can feel him shining in their smiles. And our baby is lifted over the caesarean curtain into view and he’s purple and crying not too much, not as much as I expected a baby to be crying, and there are hot drops of blood dripping from him, and he’s so tough, such a little man, brave in the face of this new world he has arrived into, so wise, smarter than his Dad already, and right there, right then, I know he’s a natural.
I know he’s so talented, that his possibilities are endless and his future is vast. I suddenly just know all of this. I know it more certainly that I’ve ever known anything in my whole life.
His name is Wyatt. It means little warrior, born eleven pounds on the eleventh, born into a world where three grandparents met him on their way out of it saying Rather you than me, kid—whose last remaining granddad drank himself to death in a bedsit, born into arson, car wrecks, divorces, addiction and barricaded doors, his Mum an entire documentary crew and his Dad struggling quietly with alcoholism, trying to finish a novel because it’s the only way he thinks the kid will be proud of him, and all the while in the womb, he sat there listening to the turbulent, co-dependent and toxic production of his Dad’s documentary, its documentary crew terrified they wouldn’t look like the baby, waking up panicked in the dead of night, crying with the thoughts of the baby not loving them.
But I know he can take it all in his stride. He’s been forged in the fight and all the things that stand against him are formidable, and yet here he is, inimitable, standing strong and brave, bettering himself by the second, alert and learning, living in spite of the life that’s stacked against him from the very beginning, a life that he won’t get out of alive, and my heart is burst dead from the pain of my love for the strength inside him.
Good boy, I say. Keep going. Good boy. Keep being alive. Keep doing it. Great things will happen for you, I promise.
*
Bad week? the relationship counsellor asks as we sit down, Wyatt sleeping in his pram beside us.
It’s all about me, I say. It’s always about working on me.
You appear stressed.
I am.
My documentary crew chimes in and replays footage to the relationship counsellor, telling her what I said, and then what I said when I backtracked on what I said.
I’m becoming unwell with being told what I say by my documentary crew.
And you were slamming doors this morning.
No I fucking wasn’t.
My documentary crew becomes offended by my swearing and by my tone.
The way you speak to us!
Because I said fuck? I wasn’t slamming any doors—that’s why I said I wasn’t slamming any fucking doors.
You slammed it.
Let’s move on, the relationship counsellor says, horrified, and we’re just warming up. This is nothing. Twice in the past week, my documentary crew and I have fought ourselves into an exhausted coma over how my documentary should be shot.
But I’m not moving on until my documentary crew admits I didn’t slam any door and that this documentary should be scrapped. Nothing’s real. It’s a work of fiction.
The way you speak to us!
The story here is that I closed a door. And I want you to admit that. There was no slam.
Fine. You closed a door loudly.
I’m not accepting that. I closed a door. The resulting sound of that door closing was a perfectly acceptable noise befitting a door closing in any part of the world. There was no slam. The slam was in your head because you take the closing of doors as abandonment.
How dare you try and fathom what’s going on in our head?
Say I didn’t slam a door.
No.
We’re done, I say. This documentary is over.
As I walk out I stop at the door and shout, By the way, this is how you slam a fucking door!
I slam the door so hard that I nearly take it off its hinges. I’m a self-righteous, falsely accused door-slammer, a self-fulfilled prophecy high off my own indignation, victorious, bounding through the hallway like a fire alarm, off to work like a caveman, fuck this and fuck that, the baby screaming, camera rolling and police on their way.
*
The staircases in the Family Courts are diagonally shaped and caged to deter suicides. They suicide-proofed the stairs because so many documentary subjects were going headfirst down seven floors after losing contact with their children. Splattering dead on the marble and the credits roll.
I’m reading my documentary script. It has finally been made and it’s ninety-six pages long. It details coercive control, emotional and sexual abuse, financial abuse, intimidating behaviour, harassment and stalking, punishing silences, alcohol abuse. It details a use of a prostitute in 2007 when my documentary was not even in production. It details use of cocaine around the same time. It details an incident in which I attacked my documentary crew and our relationship counsellor with verbal abuse and then used violent, aggressive and extremely concerning door-slamming to further intimidate.
It thanks children’s social services for its help with postproduction.
It says I’m traumatised by long-term exposure to gore and graphic images and have a morbid obsession with death and murder. It says I come from a broken home and have never sought help for the torment suffered. My documentary strongly recommends that I not be part of my son’s life. It recommends a lifetime injunction. My documentary concludes by reminding the court of the non-molestation order and asks for a partition at the hearing so that my documentary crew is no longer exposed to my toxicity and vicious terrorisation.
An announcement goes out over the public address system.
Hammersmith and Fulham versus Smith, Court Fourteen, please.
Forced adoption, says my lawyer Vincent.
How do you know that?
If a borough is involved they’re taking the child. The parent normally doesn’t even show.
Is there hope of seeing the child afterwards?
No, says Vincent. That’s the end of the line.
Jesus Christ.
Haunted houses got nothing on the ghosts in this fuckin’ place.
Court Seven explodes. Gangs of tracksuits and trainers spill out in uproar. Everybody is shouting at the court—that it’s a baby-snatching cunt. The Dad goes hard against his own sisters for trying to calm him down. He goes hard against his whole family for not going hard enough. The family rally and go hard against the court. Everybody is a cunt, including me in my little shirt and tie, Vincent in his three-piece suit, the security guards and the social workers, the barristers against them and the free legal aid trying to represent them. It all moves down the lobby and out of sight.
There was a woman once, Vincent says. She had thirteen children taken from her. She just kept having children and the state was waiting at the end of the birthing bed to take them. Couldn’t stop drinking and drugging.
That’s harrowing.
Common enough. Maybe not to the extent of thirteen. But thirteen happens.
The Court Officer comes and tells us the magistrates are ready for us.
Before we go in, Vincent says. There’s one thing here. Vincent reads:
Father sells bogus holiday packages for Paris and other European destinations to vulnerable Asian tourists.
It’s when I manned the helpline for tourists disenchanted by Paris not being the Paris they expected.
Vincent laughs. You have to hand it to these documentary crews sometimes. So what did you tell the disenchanted tourists?
I told them everything was going to be OK. That the worst experiences in our lives turn out to be the best things to ever happen to us. That no matter what happens to us, or where we find ourselves, we can see how our experience can be useful to help others.
Vincent smiles because he’s had a documentary made about him, too.
Good man, he says. Now let’s go in here and get your son back so you can bring him to the park and see the squirrels.
(c) David McGrath, 2024
David McGrath is winner of the Bryan MacMahon Short Story Competition 2023, the Bare Fiction Prize, & was shortlisted for The Manchester Fiction Prize in 2023. He's been published in the All New Writers edition of The Stinging Fly 2023 & Open Pen, as well as several anthologies, & won the Cill Rialaig Residency with The Irish Writers’ Centre in November 2023 to finish his novel entitled The Crack.
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