Flesh and Blood Page 17

  *

  I arrived at Cardinal Allen Grammar School for boys in a uniform my father had struggled to afford. My brother Paul was already a pupil and had shown a keen talent in sport – his school athletics records were listed proudly on the notice board in the corridor as we filed in. The games master singled me out and told me he was expecting great things. I took a nervous breath and felt the rattle of the wheeze in my chest. Ah.

  Thankfully there were other subjects I could shine in. Most of my new classmates were from lower-middle-class suburban families. They had semi-detached gardens and company cars and inhaled the prejudices of their parents with barely a pause for breath. Yet I wasn’t intimidated. We sounded equally terrible in orchestra rehearsals. My early school results were encouraging and my parents were delighted.

  There wasn’t a lot that delighted them at this time. My parents’ marriage – never the smoothest surface on which the children could stand – was now showing wide cracks. Mum had enjoyed the child development aspect of motherhood so much that once her kids were at school she’d resolved to take it further. She trained as a nursery nurse while I wheezed my way through St Anne’s, and was now employed at an inner-city nursery school. Dad hated it. He regarded his wife working as a mark of personal shame. He’d mock her low wages, and accuse her of neglecting her children. It was vindictive and cruel, a neurotic insecurity turned into a sulking meanness, designed to wear her down in the same way as his relentlessness had done in their early marriage. But this time my mother stood her ground. It was now the seventies. Women of her generation had begun to inject their own desires into the closed world of men’s expectations. Clare McGann had done her marital and maternal duty beyond reproach, and now she was going to pursue her modest dreams in spite of her husband’s obstructions. It was a battle she’d ultimately win, but at a cost to her marriage and her children’s peace of mind.

  By my second year in Cardinal Allen the shouts and arguments were terrible. My parents had embarked on a war of attrition that tore away any veneer of peace in our home. Meals were spent in sullen silence. Dad would embark on long periods of hunger strike, while Mum would take us away in summer without him. My oldest brother Joe abandoned our home and moved away. Paul cultivated a self-protective confidence that revealed little of his feelings. Mark, wrestling with adolescence, struggled to be heard in all the shouting. My sister Clare became a high-achieving scholar – each glowing school report a desperate peace offering to parents too distracted by their own unhappiness to see her quiet despair.

  And me? Perversely, my asthma began to ease. For all the tension at home, my developing lungs could take a deeper breath. Yet there were more things I needed from that environment than a lungful of oxygen. My body was changing. I was now growing hairs in interesting places and feeling the first confusion of pubescent sexual awakening. There was a new knot of tension in my stomach. A mounting panic that distracted me. The little house in Birstall Road had provided me with a protective womb from which to comprehend the world. Now it had ruptured. My schoolwork nosedived, and my teachers were baffled by my uncharacteristic passivity towards it. I looked lazy and uncommitted. I wasn’t. I was crying for help.

  I drifted on through the early years of adolescence as my parents’ marriage crumbled. Nights were an escape. I dreamed about those pretty girls I’d spied at the bus stop or watched gliding piously down the aisle at Mass, storing up enough pneumatic sins to keep the priest occupied in the confessional for a month.

  By day those same young women would stare back at me like something unpleasant discovered on the sole of their elegant shoes. I was hardly love’s young dream. Just as my asthma had lifted, acne had arrived to take its place. My limbs and other appendages grew rapidly, and in all the wrong directions. I was shy and clumsy and hopeless at the kind of flirtatious confidence required to turn breathless dreams into reality.

  Then one day at school I did something uncharacteristic. I walked into an audition for the new school play and offered my services. I was painfully gauche, yet I’d seen the previous school play starring my brother Paul, and had been inspired by his wonderful performance. Paul had shown things in public that he’d never shown at home. Strength and sensitivity – courage under the glare of strong lights. I wanted to find that. What’s more, girls loved him for it. The fact that he possessed preternatural good looks and flawless skin doubtless helped. But hell, it was worth a try …

  The part I auditioned for was small and manageable. The teacher who directed the plays was an English master called Joseph Hartley – as crucial to the brothers’ later careers as anybody who came after. He liked what I did and offered me the part. The rehearsals were wonderful. I was part of something I’d never felt before. A collective endeavour. A gang that didn’t beat me up. When the performance finally came I grew terrified. I only had a few lines, but ran them ceaselessly in my head for fear I’d clam up in the spotlight. When my entrance arrived I could hear my footsteps on the floorboards and the thump of my heart banging in my chest. I stood, frozen, as my first line approached. The moment of truth. Run or fight.

  I opened my mouth. My diaphragm descended and air flooded deep into my lungs. My chest muscles tightened to funnel the exhaled air towards the larynx. My vocal chords resonated. My throat and lips, tongue and jaw worked in harmony to articulate projected words to the back of the school hall. I heard my first line. My voice was painfully thin and untrained. But I heard it. I hadn’t run. I’d stood my ground.

  The English master was encouraging. He gave me confidence in myself at a time when my life was full of doubts. He suggested that I had a talent for drama, just like my brother Paul. Mr Hartley had encouraged Paul to become an actor, but Paul didn’t know how. He’d left school soon afterwards and started to drift. Mum decided to take him in hand. She dialled directory enquiries and asked for the number of the only drama school whose name she knew. It was called the ‘Royal Academy of Dramatic Art’. The rest of us had never heard of it. She rang the number and requested an application form. Paul needed a bit of persuading to fill it in. The school agreed to help him with a Shakespeare piece and a speech from My Fair Lady. The audition day duly arrived, and Paul went off to London on the train. That night he returned. The outcome seemed inconclusive, so Paul shuffled back into his provincial life.

  After that, the main drama switched back to home. Mum had reached the end of the line in her marriage. Dad had rejected every suggestion of counselling. When she asked for a separation, he refused to leave. Mum sought the parish priest’s help, but my father wouldn’t budge. Mum and Dad, despite their troubles, were devout Catholics. Marriage to them was an indissoluble thing. It was therefore with the utmost pain that Mum finally went to a solicitor and filed for divorce. Still my dad refused to go, and so Mum was forced to take out an injunction on him. The pain and guilt of it still stings her. In the end, the priest came round to help Dad pack. Dad, shattered by the results of his own inflexibility, moved back in with his brother and sister.

  My sister and I were caught in the crossfire. We were now required to perform that sad dance of fractured families everywhere. The children of separated parents – hasty experts in fixed-smile diplomacy and the negotiation of divided loyalties. Clare, with extraordinary courage and discipline, buried herself in her schoolwork – her academic performance excelling even as her home life dissolved around her. I drifted on, the knot in my stomach being the only consistent application of my energies. To escape the suffocating effects of home, my brother Mark had discovered a wonderful new creative outlet at the Everyman Youth Theatre. This was a young people’s drama group run in warehouse space at the back of Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre. The kids who attended were tough, smart, brilliant, blunt and utterly compelling. I’d never seen anything like them. Pugnacious young poets, beautiful, brittle punkettes, ascerbic young gays and smirking sink-estate scallywags. I quickly followed my brother into regular weekly attendance. It would have a lasting influence on our lives.

/>   Soon after I joined the Everyman, a letter dropped onto our doormat from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Paul had passed his audition – one of about twenty people in over a thousand applicants. Paul was dumbstruck. We were astonished. A working-class Liverpool factory worker’s son with just a couple of school plays’ experience had been accepted into one of the world’s leading drama schools. Up until that moment drama had been something my family had encountered by accident and indulged in without ambition. It had been an alternative means of escape – a source of creative oxygen and structure. We’d never been to the theatre as a family. There were no actors we knew, and we had no knowledgeable acquaintances we could confer with. Yet, thanks to an English teacher’s encouragement and my mum’s tenacity, one of our family was now to be trained for a career in drama. Paul was the first McGann male in history to follow a profession – a job free of coaldust, bullets, factory grease or soil-grimed fingernails.

  But what was I to do with my life? My O-levels were fast approaching and I was spending every spare moment either in school plays or at the Everyman Youth Theatre. I started underage drinking in the few pubs that would serve me, my pockets laden with guilt money procured from my divorcing parents. I remember my first cigarette. The tightness in young lungs barely clear of asthma. The stab of nicotine in my undeveloped brain. The naive vandalism of elective self-harm. A gesture of defiance to a future I couldn’t yet believe in.

  My drifting was just one symptom of the wider forces shaping my family at that time. The McGanns had reached an interesting crossroads in their history. Education had delivered us from the brutal simplicity of our labouring past, but it hadn’t provided us with the means to negotiate the more complex world we’d reached. It was as if we’d been dropped off at the gates of our parents’ post-war promised land without a key. We had to pick the lock ourselves. Who were we exactly? We weren’t like our mum and dad any more – or like theirs. But we also weren’t those people who taught us, or auditioned us, or shared our classrooms. We were something else. Something Owen and Susan might have recognised. Immigrants, scrambling for a foothold in a strange new place. Our education was the boat that brought us. Now we had to get ourselves off the dockside.

  *

  My O-level results arrived and I was astonished to have scraped seven of them. Lacking any clear plan, I decided to stay on for sixth form. I signed up to study music, while devoting all of my spare hours to the brilliant, brash world of the Everyman Youth Theatre. It was the beginning of the eighties. Liverpool arts culture was thriving, even as the city’s economy plummeted: Liverpool bands filled the music charts and Liverpool theatre brimmed with a vibrant joy and anger. Our youth shows were the backdrop to our coming-of-age in a city that was determined to go down fighting. It was breathless and exhilarating.

  I fell in love for the first time. She was an art student. She was beautiful and funny and worldly and kind, and I was still shy and scared and a virgin. When I finally found the guts to kiss her, I didn’t want to stop. We’d spend our nights at wild parties in the derelict merchants’ mansions that bordered Toxteth’s Sefton Park. The ostentatious palaces of Liverpool’s Victorian mercantile classes were now the crumbling playgrounds of its penniless punk students. Owen might have enjoyed the irony. We made love for the first time in a room full of people too stoned to notice or care. We held our breaths when the climax came, suspending the joy for as long as possible. Holding off the future.

  My future crept towards me regardless. In order to study A-level music I was required to be proficient in a musical instrument. My music teacher suggested I should undergo crash-course training as a tenor singer. To help my sight-singing, he also suggested I should apply to join the Liverpool Philharmonic Choir – an excellent amateur chorus attached to Liverpool’s world-renowned city orchestra. So I found myself a local singing tutor and I auditioned for the Liverpool Phil. To my great surprise I was successful.

  The singing lessons were tough. Really tough. I’d collected a legion of bad breathing habits in my short life. Shallow, strangled gasps and tight-throated top notes. Now I had to undo it all and learn to breathe properly. For most of our lives, breathing is just an automatic process. But directed breathing – breathing with artistic purpose – isn’t. Without adequate breath, it’s impossible to sustain a note or project a full voice. Without control over the things that connect us to others, we can never be in possession of our intent. We can never project the best of ourselves into the wider world.

  For weeks and weeks I barely sang a verse of anything. It was all breathing. Hour after hour of deep-lunged breathing until my head span with the excess of oxygen. Gradually I was able to harness the power of my diaphragm and the huge column of air it controlled. I finally produced notes that could resonate and sustain, rather than thin out and die towards the end of a phrase. I could now make myself heard in a way that didn’t shame me.

  I needed to. My early time with the Philharmonic Choir was a white-knuckle ride. The expert choir needed little rehearsal, effortlessly wading through vast screeds of complicated sheet music with barely a glance. I was reduced to aping their fast-turning pages and miming their confident vibrato. But the music they made was magnificent – Beethoven, Bach, Vaughan Williams, Elgar – and we had great conductors like Sir Simon Rattle to direct us, and venues such as the Royal Albert Hall and Royal Festival Hall to sing in. The tenors performed in bow tie and dinner suit, which wasn’t exactly my standard wardrobe. Mum dug deep on limited income to purchase the best she could. I really looked the part, although I didn’t feel it. The other choristers were older – elegant, affluent, and totally unlike me – yet also warm, kind and funny. A different world, but not a hostile one.

  My life was now increasingly full of jarring notes – irresolvable themes that didn’t fit together in any kind of harmony. I’d go straight from genteel choir performances to the bawdy anarchy of a youth theatre party, or from the breath-sustained discipline of music lessons to drunken cigarette-tainted kisses in parks. I was still drifting, still standing outside of myself, miming life’s confident vibrato while the pages turned without me. I could feel a creeping acceleration in the speed at which the separate pieces of me pulled apart. The edge of the waterfall was drawing closer.

  The two oldest McGann brothers were now settled in London. Joe had gone into the music business as a singer and songwriter, while Paul was confidently ensconced as an actor in RADA. Mark and I were spending all our waking hours at the Everyman. Entirely without forethought or planning, the performance arts had injected themselves into the centre of my family’s collective story. It remains a mystery to us why it should have been the arts – rather than, say, business, or science, or a million other things. It seemed to be a common means by which we tested and defined ourselves. A lonely melody that we each attempted, and to which each sibling added a specific harmony. A way to understand our lives in the absence of a key. A way to pick the lock and leave the dockside. But it would still require good fortune: a moment of serendipity for each of us that would break the chain and propel us forward.

  Mark’s fortunes suddenly found their moment. He’d been singing John Lennon songs for a band that was accompanying the Everyman’s main house production of Ken Campbell’s The Warp. Mark’s incredible characterisation of Lennon in those songs brought him to the attention of the theatre’s artistic staff. The next show they mounted was to be a musical biography of John Lennon. They selected my brother Mark to star in it. The show was a huge success, later going on to enjoy a successful West End run. Mark was simply phenomenal as Lennon – full of fire and passion and heart. Overnight, my brother went from an amateur youth theatre actor to a career professional. His chain was broken, and forward he leapt.

  My A-levels arrived, and I failed them spectacularly. I was finally ejected into the adult world. Still unprepared. Still running, not fighting. At least for now there was still the choir. There was still my girlfriend’s warmth and wit. Still the social magnet of th
e youth theatre. But the city I lived in was in the midst of a deep depression. There was no work – not even the most casual job. I was unemployed, collecting my benefits with the rest. The streets of Toxteth were rioting. I drank my dole away. I screwed and smoked and drifted and ran and waited for some magical leap of fortune to make sense of the discordant music in my head.

  I’d reached the edge of the waterfall.

  I travelled to London with the choir to sing a piece of Elgar in the Royal Albert Hall. The choir stalls in that auditorium are curved, high, and very steeply raked. As I made my way back to the tenor section after the interval, I looked down at the concertgoers in the audience. Suddenly my breathing became rapid and shallow in my chest. I was overwhelmed by a terrifying dread. The sound of the chattering in the auditorium became distorted in my ears – the voices of the choristers next to me were loud and jarring. I felt dizzy. I started to panic. My exit to left and right was blocked. I couldn’t escape. The ceiling of the Albert Hall was pressing down on me. I was totally exposed. What if I collapsed and fell? What if I fainted during the performance?

  After what felt like minutes of agonising petrifaction, my breathing slowly calmed. The music started. The choir sang. Yet I could only mime and turn the pages, unable to sing a note, still shocked and confused by what had happened.