by Kit de Waal
20:50 We will soon be an hour into dinner and I haven’t said anything yet. I will start to look like a weirdo soon. Upstairs on the landing, the loft hatch is open, and on the floor is Dad’s box of birds’ eggs, safely stored for the last twenty years. Each egg is nestled in its own little space. One – Dad’s favourite, and now mine – is pale blue. He would handle it so delicately, would never allow it to be broken. Downstairs, where he is now, the TV is smashed from when he got in a fight, and so are some of the bottles. He is smashed. I am too, in a different, invisible way.
20:59 Someone is announcing they have a book deal to write about their sailing trips. She grew up spending weekends at the marina on their boat, working hard under the sun. Setting out up the coast, lunch in inlets, camping on islands. I’ll admit, these scenes are just like those in a book. I don’t have places like this. So what would I write about, then? If I ever dare. Suddenly it goes dark on the landing. The meter must have run out. I feel my way downstairs and find Mum in the hallway, looking through her purse for coins. Her hands are not soft but are gentle. She left home at fifteen and went to the south coast to find work in the hotels there, where she met my dad. He made her laugh. She was still young when she had me. Now she goes into the cupboard under the stairs to give the meter what she has. We have put so many coins into that slot, heard them fall all the way down. Are they sitting below the house in a gleaming reservoir, waiting to come back to us? That stash of coins must be somewhere, but we don’t have it. We have the fact we spent it, and had nothing left after. We spent it on heat and light, which cooled and faded, was always about to run out. Mum pauses in the dark cubby, waiting for more energy. She watches the dials turn. She has no control over which numbers are up. Then, yellow light floods the little room, a hum starts up again and the little wheel continues turning. Specks of food get warm, leap up and hit a ceiling.
Mum had a boyfriend who wanted to marry her. But he was not good, and he made her sad in a new way. He had a bit more money, though – he worked in computers and wore a tie to work. I didn’t think this was a good trade-off, but Mum said he was someone we could count on.
Anything could make him hit the roof. Swearing, something on the telly, foolishness, childhood (specifically girlhood), energy, inexperience, and then experience. Mum did leave him in the end, but for three years, in the smallest bedroom, there was the possibility of a dead girl. Smoke curled slowly out of him, and at any moment she might do something to make his rage catch fire. And then they would both go to hell.
21:15 I open the bathroom door and there I am in the bath, age fifteen, a flannel over my face. Repeating that life is precious. You shouldn’t waste it. But the thought of living might be more choking than the thought of death. Especially since you won’t be going to heaven now – you’ll only have seventy or eighty years max, so you’d really better make them count. You’d better achieve things to make up for what you wished you’d had, and what your parents don’t, and what you’ve given up in the next life to feel free in this one. But being cautious, needing to make sure you do things right, checking around you for danger, taking care of yourself – this will look like weakness and immaturity here. Hurry up.
21:23 A little funny thing comes out of my mouth before I have time to screen it, and the others laugh. A big laugh, both because it was funny and kind of clever, and because my saying it surprised them. So now I have a little credit banked, at least.
I cross to the bedroom that Granny (Mum’s mum) never leaves. All of the journeys she takes are in her mind. Her chosen menu is the same every day. Only two kinds of food – tinned mandarins and soft processed cheese. And these are paired with pills, two kinds. These pills have gone through everything. Through the 1980s, 70s, 60s, 50s – pills, all the way down. When she is awake, she sings to herself – songs from the 1940s. The walls in here are papered with pink and yellow flowers – she is surrounded by meadows. I leave her there, nightgown fluttering in the breeze as she waits for her sweetheart, and continue on.
21:34 I skip dessert. They are seven quid each. I walk into the kitchen and find a dead person. She’s kneeling at the oven. She’s the next generation up, the furthest point I know to go. She’d had enough. Or she didn’t have enough. We don’t know quite why she did it. She didn’t talk about what she was feeling. None of us ever talk about what we are feeling.
21:49 Then, an opportunity! I actually have something to say. I could bring in the perfect reference here. But – I don’t know how to say it. Do you pronounce the g or not? I try to find a memory of someone saying it aloud, but I don’t have one.
I lie on the table, half in, half out of my shell. They prod me with their little forks, inspecting, coaxing. My body is whole, but from the outside I look grotesque, still emerging, and from the inside I seem to be trying to get away.
I had thought that if I could just get the degree, life would get incrementally easier, and all kinds of things would come into view. I had thought that then the possibilities would be as wide and bold as my desires. But it wasn’t so, and now my desires are losing their nerve. Perhaps I should not have expected more than this shift, which is not inconsiderable, after all.
22:16 The bill comes, and of course we just split it equally amongst everyone, regardless of what you had, because that is the sophisticated way it is done. Granted, this is the easiest, breezy, carefree way.
I look out from the restaurant over to my house. Through the windows I can see them all turning in for the night.
I see my uncle, coming up the hill to home, a pirate ship laden with denim, a spacecraft protected by its payload shroud. A little person underneath proliferating layers piloting a big person. The view from the flight deck is vast, and full of nothing.
In the front room, I notice some of the bottles have rolled-up bits of paper inside them, with messages written on. Dad must have lost them in there along the way, and I didn’t even think to look inside.
Gran and Granddad are playing dominoes. Her ruby wedding ring moves up and down in the space between them, a strong, skipping heart.
In the kitchen stands a young woman, who knows the war has been won now but fears she may be losing something inside of her, and that in this, she is without allies.
Mum is sitting quietly on the back step, sipping her favourite drink. I cannot tell you what she is thinking about, because I don’t know. Perhaps she is looking back, perhaps she is looking forward; perhaps I will find a way to ask her.
The lights go out in each room. Except for Granny’s. She keeps her light on all night. She is a crackling wireless, old now, ever in song.
Out the back, the whole family’s clothes are on the line, rippling gently with the wind. Sometimes they puff up, swollen with energy from the atmosphere. Then, one breaks away, lifts upwards, but is caught moments later in the claw of the neighbour’s tree. From there, that piece of moon-soaked, starlit cotton waves hesitantly at the sky.
This is just one of many little houses, but together we warm it, light it, stuff it full. We may be small, but we are budding all our lives, until we die. Things could change. Something new and surprising is always possible, right up until the very end.
Steve
Daljit Nagra
When I think of my schooling, which was a stone’s throw away from Heathrow Airport, I’m reminded of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’: I too saw the brightest minds of my age destroyed. Ginsberg’s dramatic words draw me close to so many of the pale faces of the kids from the council estate next to our school. They were able, bright, some even gifted, and they all succumbed to mediocrity by either leaving school at fifteen, which was permitted back in the 1980s, or – those who were more compliant – leaving after Year 11 with a clutch of CSE grades, to end up in uninspiring jobs. In this sense, I think the minds of my friends were not so much destroyed as intellectually deprived. I’m sure a few of these friends fought their ways into positions of employment that stretched their minds, or they went on to advanced studies at a later sta
ge, but these would have been the exceptions.
When I think of my schooling, the best instance of neglected minds for me is my fair-haired friend, Steve. He grew up in a household with several siblings, his mum was a nurse and his dad was a school caretaker. They’d already instilled in Steve a strong work ethic, so in his teens he’d go on to hold down a part-time job in the DIY store FADS. I met Steve in our early teens by chance; we’d take the same route to school and it wasn’t long before we started walking together past the scary council blocks. What drew me to Steve were his abnormalities! He wasn’t into football, or sports in general. He couldn’t tell a Kevin Keegan from a Martina Navratilova. He wasn’t into watching the idiot box, so no talk about last night’s episode, say, of The Sweeney or Starsky and Hutch. Perhaps even more abnormal, he was a reader. What self-respecting male reads books? His ground-floor bedroom even had a bookshelf. It had books such as a tea-stained copy of Kes, jokes by Spike Milligan and the lyrics of Lennon and McCartney, all paraded proudly in alphabetical order. Weirder still, Steve had a compendious hardback of common laws. He’d walk to school muttering laws from his red tome about the rights appertaining to a citizen’s arrest and so on. He was a rarity – an exotic breed around the breeze blocks – weaponised with the strictures. Don’t mess, or be citizenly arrested by Steve and his lawful book.
I assumed he’d grow up to one day become a lawyer; being gently chubby, he might have taken shape as a Rumpole of the Bailey, or perhaps he’d be a keen-eyed sleuth, a Columbo. Yet when we reached our final years of schooling, when the stakes should have risen, when we should have felt an academic urgency, a grander ambition stirring our hormones to some noble purpose, Steve was struck by a disarming level of academic under-expectation. Not only did school hold us back by patronising us with meaningless qualifications, Steve’s parents and our general social circle had all pinned their hopes on jobs at a local office or factory. This would have been fine, except that Steve was academically gifted. His general knowledge would have impressed Bamber Gascoigne (quizmaster on University Challenge at the time), he could weave narratives with a Dickensian flourish, and he could ascend the invisible steps of abstract thought and return to earth without a bump.
Surely he should have set his sights higher. We’d all known some students who’d gone on to sixth form, but this was often to retake exams. None of us knew anyone who’d been to university or who knew the consequences of such a preoccupation. I watched Steve’s alarming detachment from academia with a migrant’s beady perspective. I was born in England, in our town, Yiewsley, but my parents were from India. They’d expected me to become a doctor or a lawyer. I was driven by a migrant psychology to succeed to a status higher than that of my parents. I didn’t know how to become a doctor or a lawyer. I hadn’t enjoyed my careers interview where I was told – like all my friends, like Steve – to quit school at sixteen and get a job. I remained determined to suffer the edifying white of the classroom chalk for as long as I could, unlike Steve, who neglected revision and exams with impunity. He just stopped caring about his studies, and no one cared to stop him from not-caring.
I watched on, saddened, as he slowed his academic mind to accelerate his music ambitions. I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t want to keep both education and music equally on the burner. While still at school, he joined a band as a rhythm and lead guitarist, and rehearsed in a garage, performing for friends and family in a disused shop, and onwards to reach the popular heights of our school assembly, where his band strummed with aplomb ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, and ‘Red Red Wine’, along with other popular songs of the era. I watched, proud to be his friend. The assembly was a final confirmation that he’d traded in the schoolbook for the songbook, the mighty Bic had fallen and the Grattan-catalogue Hondo guitar was now God.
It was no surprise when Steve left school at sixteen. He gave up his various part-time jobs and took up a full-time position with a furniture company while performing in pubs around west London with his band, Standard Issue. Would he be showered by limelight? Become a starman? Steve as the next Mick… Ronson. Steve playing with Paul… Weller. Steve… ‘With or Without You’. I don’t think he burned with ambition: perhaps he wasn’t messed up enough; perhaps the tragic lack of guidance, of mentoring, of social connections held back the band from developing their own voice. Too many humble, gentle types in the same room don’t make the ego blaze! Though I suspect he just enjoyed the camaraderie of playing in a band. He enjoyed the experience that nourished his need to enable others to smile, to put a smile on his own face. Happiness without the burden of fame and its spiralling expectations. Life in the band introduced him to the song of his life, his devoted wife, Lisa, and the music of love has played for them ever since.
He’s now fifty-one and for the past decades he’s worked for several businesses, at best in a lower management role. He hit the ceiling many moons ago, and he’s watched countless youngsters with solid degrees from respectable universities float past him. Not that Steve ever saw himself bossing a large workforce; it’s more that his ability to move around jobs that suit his skills has always been limited. Despite all this, he has been hugely successful and has always been valued at work. My main concern is that he would have found satisfying the academic fruits that I grabbed for myself. I went on to mess up my own life for a while, before studying A levels at evening classes then, at the age of twenty-one, I headed for university. Over time I built up enough self-belief to write poems with a serious purpose. I’m now a poet and an academic at a university. Why didn’t Steve want what I wanted? The intellectually thrilling platform from which to spring? He had as much right as I had to seek platform, then spring! Perhaps he was held back by the narratives of entitlement for blue-collar workers constructed by the powers that be and by his family. Perhaps he was too strongly expected to toil, to seek economic gratification, to leave the nest and make immediate wingspan.
The white working classes are often cornered into a pejorative type, but Steve is also a kind of type and one that rarely takes the stage. Throughout the decades, I’ve never heard him express a bitter attitude towards those who’ve bypassed him in the workplace. An honest man who’ll rarely blurt an expletive and has never been physically aggressive, who is politically correct and a moderate drinker, though I wish he’d have an extra pint when we’re out! He accepts himself and lives with a beam of self-effacing delight, is replete with witty one-liners, and remains as curious as ever about broadsheet issues of the day. A soft-spoken and dignified man who starts the car for the hour-and-a-half journey to work, who is committed to his duties as parent and husband, who never rants politics and who quietly voted against Brexit.
I was never close to my family and I didn’t expect them to visit me at university, Royal Holloway in Egham, Surrey. But even though I lived many miles from Steve, he’d visit me almost every week over the three years of my English degree. When we were younger, he’d knock for me on the way to school each morning, and now at university, he’d arrive straight from work in his shirt and tie, and drive us off to a country pub, or we’d go for a curry. He’d almost always insist on paying for the drink, the meal. However far we’d venture, however difficult my years at university, he was a mainstay who’d always drive me back to my room. I’d wave him off surprised and gratified to exist in this unusual friendship, this paternal attraction that came naturally and against the odds, a bond that neither of us felt inclined to cut from its cord and leave behind.
No Lay, No Pay
Paul Allen
‘You fanny-tested it, boy?’
Sharker Harlock’s face bore his usual arrogant smirk, mixed perhaps with just a dash of superciliousness and a smattering of outright bastardness.
A test involving fannies? On a barrow full of muck?
I should point out that in the building trade ‘muck’ is a mixture of sand, cement, water and plasticiser, used for laying bricks. And in September 1972, at twelve years old and having been working on-site with
my dad all summer, it was me that had put this very barrowload that Sharker seemed to be questioning through the mixer.
I should also point out that at that age and time of my life, though completely in the dark about girls and sex (voluntarily as it happens; I was far more interested in motorbikes and roaming the fields with my dog), I did have at least two versions of what a ‘fanny’ might be bouncing around in my head, gleaned from overheard conversations:
1. A useless tradesman, i.e. one that ‘farted and fannied about’.
2. Something to do with a lady’s front bottom.
It sounds ridiculous in this day and age that that was the sum of my knowledge in this particular field of expertise, but they were far more innocent times, and I was very, very shy, to the point of being regarded by the girls at school as vaguely retarded. Also, there was no internet.
‘Well… have you?’
God, I hated Sharker at times. He was my dad’s best mate and, inexplicably, every now and then would be sporting a shiner my old man gave him the night before down the pub. They never seemed to fall out over it, and from what Mum said, Sharker would sometimes get a little too much when he had the drink in him, ‘So your dad, being his mate, knocks him out before he upsets anybody.’
Yup, them were the days. We all looked out for each other on council estates.
‘OY! GORMLESS!!’
Back then, I often wished I had been carrying more age and muscle so I could do him Dad’s matey favour and knock him out myself. This was such a moment. I shook my head, miserably.
