I left her presence. In the kitchen, Victor was sitting in the corner, curling up an edge of liver-coloured lip. I wondered if something had provoked him. A ghost come out early? Perhaps, I thought, it’s George.
Connie was next door as usual, going about her tasks in her own kitchen. You could hear her through the thin wall; the metal colander knocking against the enamel sink, the squeak of chair legs across the linoleum. In the days following she showed no sign of hysterical grief, or even nostalgia. My mother watched her closely. ‘They never should have told her,’ my mother said. ‘A shock such as that could do lasting harm.’ For some reason, she looked disappointed.
I didn’t know what it was about, and I don’t now, and I doubt if I want to: it was just some tactic one person was trying on another person and it was the reason I didn’t like to play cat’s cradle, patience, cutting out with scissors or any indoor games at all. Winter or not, I played outside with Victor and Mike.
It was spring when P.G. Pig was born. I went out into the field at the back, to get away from the screaming and puking and baby talk. Victor sat quivering at my heel. Mike raced in insane circles among the daisies. I pushed back my non-existent cowboy hat. I scratched my head like an old-timer and said, ‘Loco.’
My brother was still a toddler when Victor’s character took a turn for the worse. Always timid, he now became morose, and took to snapping. One day when I came to put on his lead he sprang into the air and nipped me on the cheek. Believing myself an incipient beauty and afraid of facial scarring, I washed the bite then rubbed raw Dettol on it. What resulted was worse than the bite and I rehearsed to the air the sentence ‘Hurts like hell.’ I tried not to tell my mother but she smelled the Dettol.
Later, he chased P.G. Pig, trying to get him on the calf. PG marched to the German goosestep. So, he escaped by inches, or even less. I plucked a ravelled thread of his towelling suit from between Victor’s teeth.
Victor didn’t attack grown people. He backed off from them. ‘It’s just the children he goes for,’ my mother said. ‘I find it very perplexing.’
So did I. I wondered why he included me with the children. If he could see into my heart, I thought, he would know I don’t qualify.
By this time we had a new baby in the house. Victor was not to be trusted and my mother said a sorting-out was overdue. He went away under my stepfather’s overcoat, wrapped tight, struggling. We said goodbye to him. He was pinioned while we patted his head. He growled at us, and the growl turned to a snarl, and he was hurried out of the front door, and away down the street.
My mother said that she and my father had found a new home for him, with an elderly couple without children. How sad! I pictured them, their homely grieving faces softening at the sight of the white dog with his useful brown saddle. He would be a substitute child for them. Would they dip their old fingers into the ruff at his neck, and hold on tight?
It was strange, what I chose to believe in those days. P.G. Pig knew better. Sitting in the corner, he took a sideways swipe at his tower of blue bricks. ‘Destroyed,’ he said.
About a year after that, we moved to a new town. My surname was changed officially. Pig and the younger baby had the new name already, there was no need for them to change. My mother said that generally, the gossip and malice had got out of hand, and there were always those who were ready to do you a bad turn if they could contrive it. Connie and the other aunts and cousins came to visit. But not too often. My mother said, we don’t want that circus starting up again.
So the years began in which I pretended to be someone else’s daughter. The word ‘daughter’ is long, pale, mournful; its hand is to its cheek. The word ‘rueful’ goes with ‘daughter’. Sometimes I thought of Victor and I was rueful. I sat in my room with compass and square-ruled book and bisected angles, while outside the children shrieked, frolicking with Mike. In truth I blamed Mike for alienating Victor’s affections, but there is a limit to how much you can blame a dog.
With the move to the new house, a change had overtaken Mike, similar in magnitude though not in style to the one that had overtaken his brother X years before. I call it X years because I was beginning to lose track of that part of my life, and in the case of numbers it is allowable to make a substitution. I remembered the facts of things pretty well, but I had forgotten certain feelings, like how I felt on the day Victor arrived from Godber’s Farm, and how I felt on the day he was taken away to his new home. I remembered his straitjacketed snarling, which hardly diminished as he was carried out of the door. If he could have bitten me that day, he would have drawn blood.
The trouble with Mike was this: we had become middle class, but our dog had not. We had long ago ceased trying to take him for walks on a lead. Now he exercised himself, running away at all hours of the day and night. He could leap gates and makes holes through hedges. He was seen in the vicinity of butchers’ shops. Sometimes he went to the high street and stole parcels and packets from baskets on wheels. He ate a white loaf, secretly, in the shadow of the privet. I saw that he looked dedicated and innocent as he chewed it, slice after slice, holding the dough carefully in paws that he turned inwards, as if praying.
When my mother saw the neighbours leaning over the larch-lap, imparting gardening tips, she thought they were talking about Mike. Her face would become pinched. She believed he was letting the family down, betraying mongrel origins. I knew the meaning of the word now. I did not get involved in any controversy about Mike. I crouched in my room and traced the continent of South America. I stuck into my geography book a picture of Brasilia, the white shining city in the jungle. I placed my hands together and prayed, take me there. I did not believe in God so I prayed provisionally, to genies and ghosts, to dripping Clara and old dead George.
Mike was less than five years old when he began to show his age. He had lived hard, after all. One year, he could catch and snap in his jaws the windfalls our apple tree shook down. Those he did not catch as they fell, the babies would bowl for him, and he would hurtle after, tearing skidmarks in the turf as he cornered; then with a backward jerk of his neck he would toss the fruit up into the blue air, to give himself a challenge.
But a year later, he was on the blink. He couldn’t catch the windfalls if they rained down on his head, and when old tennis balls were thrown for him he would trot vaguely, dutifully, away from the hue and cry, and then turn and plod back, his jaws empty. I said to my mother, I think Mike’s eyes are failing. She said, I hadn’t noticed.
The defect didn’t seem to make him downhearted. He continued to lead his independent life; smelling his way, I supposed, through gaps in wire netting and through the open doors of vendors of fine foods and High Class Family Butchers. I thought, he could do with a guide person really. Perhaps I could train up P.G. Pig? I tried the experiment we hadn’t tried in years, clipping lead to collar. The dog lay down at my feet and whimpered. I noticed that the foxy patches of his coat had bleached out, as if he’d been in the sun and the rain too long. I unfastened the lead and wrapped it around my hand. Then I threw it at the back of the hall cupboard. I stood in the hall and practised swearing under my breath. I didn’t know why.
On New Year’s Day, a fortnight before my twelfth birthday, Mike went out in the morning and didn’t come back. My stepfather said, ‘Mike’s not come in for his tea.’ I said, ‘Mike’s bloody blind.’
They all pretended not to have heard me. There was an edict against quarrelling anywhere near Christmas, and it was still near enough; we were lodged in the strange-menu days leading to the Feast of the Epiphany, when babies daub jelly in their hair and The Prisoner of Zenda is on TV and no one notices what time it is. That’s why we were less alarmed than we would usually have been, yawning off to bed.
But I woke up very early, and stood shivering by the window, the curtain wrapped around me, looking out over land that was imagined because there was no light: leafless, wet, warm for the time of year. If Mike were home I would feel it, I thought. He would whine and buffe
t the back door, and someone would hear if not me. But I didn’t know. I couldn’t trust that. I ran my hand through my hair and made it stand up in tufts. I crept back to bed.
I had no dreams. When I woke up it was nine o’clock. I was astonished at the leniency. My mother needs little sleep, and thinks it a moral failing in others, so usually she would have been bawling in my ear by eight, inventing tasks for me; the Christmas truce did not apply in the earlier hours of the morning. I went downstairs in my spotted pyjamas, the legs rolled up above the knee, in a jeu d’esprit.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ my mother said. ‘And what have you done with your hair?’
I said, “Where’s my dad?’
She said, ‘He’s gone to the police station, about Mike.’
‘No,’ I said. I shook my head. I rolled down my pyjama trousers to the ankle. Fuckit, I wanted to say, I mean my dad, I don’t mean the substitute. Answer the question I put to you.
The next day I went out calling, through the small woods that belted open fields, and along the banks of the canal. It rained part of the day, a benign and half-hearted precipitation. Everything seemed unseasonable, forward: the rotting wood of fences shimmered green. I took my redoubtable brother with me, and I kept my eye on the yellow bobble of his bobble hat. The minute he went out of sight, in undergrowth or copse, I called him, Peegee Pig! I felt him before I saw him, loping to my side.
I had penny chews in my pocket and I fed them to him to keep him going. ‘Mike, Mike!’ we called. It was Sunday, the end of an extended holiday which had added to the dislocation of Advent. We met no one on our quest. Peegee’s nose began to run. After a time, when the dog didn’t answer, he began to cry. He’d thought we were going to meet Mike, you see. At some place pre-arranged.
I just tugged Peegee along. It was all I could do. The word ‘interloper’ was rolling around my mind, and I thought what a beautiful word it was, and how well it described the dog Mike who loped and flapped his pink tongue in the open air, while Victor squatted in the house, incubating fear; and I could not help him, because I shared it and it was the only thing I could give him to eat.
On the banks of the canal at last we met a man, not old, his jacket flapping and insufficient even for the mildness of the day; his hair cropped, his torn pocket drooping from his checked shirt, and his gym shoes caked in mud. Who was Mike, he wanted to know?
I told him my mother’s theory, that Mike had been mowed down by a Drunken Driver. Peegee sawed his hand back and forth under his snuffling nose. The man promised he would call out for Mike, and take him if recovered to the police or the RSPCA. Beware of the police pounds, he said, for the dogs there are destroyed in twelve days.
I said that within twelve days we would be sure to hear from them. I said, my step my step my father has been to the police: I managed the word in the end. I swear by Almighty God, the man said, that I will be calling for young Michael day and night. I felt alarmed for him. I felt sorry for his torn pocket, as if I should have been carrying needle and thread.
I walked away, and I had not gone a hundred yards before I felt there were misunderstandings that needed to be corrected. Mike is only my stepdog. Supposing I had misinformed this stranger? But if I went back to put the facts to him again, perhaps he would only forget them. He looked like a man who had forgotten almost everything. I had gone another hundred yards before it came to me that this was the very kind of stranger to whom you were warned not to speak.
I looked down at Peegee in second-hand alarm. I should have protected him. Peegee was learning to whistle that week, and now he was whistling and crying at the same time. He was whistling the tune from Laurel and Hardy, which I can’t stand. I knew full well – ‘full well’ is one of my mother’s expressions – that Mike was dead in a ditch, where he had limped or crawled away from the vehicle that had smashed him up before he saw it. All day I’d been searching, in defiance of this fact.
Oh, I’m tired, Peegee wailed. Carry me. Carry me. I looked down and knew I could not, and he knew it too, for he was such a big boy already that it could almost have been the other way around. I offered him a penny chew, and he smacked my hand away.
We came to a wall, and I hoisted him on to it. He could have hoisted me. We sat there, while the air darkened. It was four o’clock, and we had been walking and calling since early morning. I thought, I could drown Peegee Pig, and blame it on the man with the torn pocket. I could haul him across the towpath by the hood of his coat, and push him under the bright green weed; and keep pushing, a hand on his face, till the weight of his clothes pulled him under; and I saw myself, careless beau, other life, lily pad and floating hat. As far as I knew, no one had been hanged for Clara. ‘What’s for my tea?’ Peegee said. Some words came to me, from the Shakespeare we were doing: When the exigent should come – which now is come indeed…The damp was making me ache, as if I were my own grandmother. I thought, nobody listens, nobody sees, nobody does any bloody fuckit thing. You go blind and savage and they carry on making Christmas trifles and frying eggs. Fuckit, I said to Peegee, experimentally. Fuckit, he repeated after me. Mike, Mike, we called, as we trod the towpath, and early night closed in on us. Peegee Pig slipped his hand into mind. We walked into the dark together, and our fused hands were cold. I said, to myself, I cannot kill him, he is fidelity itself; though it did occur to me that if he drowned, someone would be named after him. ‘Come on, Peegee,’ I said to him. ‘But cut out the whistling.’ I stood behind him, put my cold hands into the hood of his duffel coat, and began to steer him home.
There was a lot of blame flying in the air, about where had we been, up by the canal where vagrants live and anybody. My mother had already washed Mike’s dishes out, and put them to drain. As she was not much of a housewife, we knew by this sign that he was not coming back, not through our door anyway. I cried a bit then, not out of the exhaustion of the day, but sudden scorching tears that leapt out of my eyes and scoured the pattern off the wallpaper. I saw Peegee gaping at me, open-mouthed, so I was sorry I’d bothered crying at all. I just wiped my fist across my face, and got on with the next thing.
Curved Is The Line
Of Beauty
When I was in my middle childhood my contemporaries started to disappear. They vanished from the mill-town conurbations and the Manchester backstreets, and their bodies – some of them, anyway – were found buried on the moors. I was born on the edge of this burial ground, and had been instructed in its ways. Moorland punished those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It killed those who were stupid and those who were unprepared. Ramblers from the city, feckless boys with bobble hats, would walk for days in circles, till they died of exposure. The rescue parties would be baffled by dank fogs, which crept over the landscape like sheets drawn over corpses. Moorland was featureless except for its own swell and eddy, its slow waves of landscape rising and falling, its knolls, streams and bridle paths which ran between nowhere and nowhere; its wetness underfoot, its scaly patches of late snow, and the tossing inland squall that was its typical climate. Even in mild weather its air was wandering, miasmic, like memories that no one owns. When raw drizzle and fog invaded the streets of the peripheral settlements, it was easy to feel that if you stepped out of your family house, your street, your village, you were making a risky move; one mistake, and you would be lost.
The other way of being lost, when I was a child, was by being damned. Damned to hell that is, for all eternity. This could happen very easily if you were a Catholic child in the 1950s. If the speeding driver caught you at the wrong moment – let us say, at the midpoint between monthly confessions – then your dried-up soul could snap from your body like a dead twig. Our school was situated handily, so as to increase the risk, between two bends in the road. Last-moment repentance is possible, and stress was placed on it. You might be saved if, in your final welter of mashed bones and gore, you remembered the correct formula. So it was really all a matter of timing. I didn’t think it might be a matter of mercy. M
ercy was a theory that I had not seen in operation. I had only seen how those who wielded power extracted maximum advantage from every situation. The politics of the playground and classroom are as instructive as those of the parade ground and the Senate. I understood that, as Thucydides would later tell me, ‘the strong exact what they can, and the weak yield what they must’.
Accordingly, if the strong said, ‘We are going to Birmingham,’ to Birmingham you must go. We were going to make a visit, my mother said. To whom, I asked; because we had never done this before. To a family we had not met, she said, a family we did not yet know. In the days after the announcement I said the word ‘family’ many times to myself, its crumbly soft sound like a rusk in milk, and I carried its scent with me, the human warmth of chequered blankets and the yeast smell of babies’ heads.
In the week before the visit, I went over in my mind the circumstances that surrounded it. I challenged myself with a few contradictions and puzzles which these circumstances threw up. I analysed who we might be, we who were going to make the visit: because that was not a constant or a simple matter.
The night before the visit I was sent to bed at eight – even though it was the holidays and Saturday next day. I opened the sash window and leaned out into the dusk, waiting till a lonely string of street lights blossomed, far over the fields, under the upland shadow. There was a sweet grassy fragrance, a haze in the twilight; Dr Kildare’s Friday-night theme tune floated out from a hundred TV sets, from a hundred open windows, up the hill, across the reservoir, over the moors; and as I fell asleep I saw the medics in their frozen poses, fixed, solemn and glazed, like heroes on the curve of an antique jar.
I once read of a jar on which this verse was engraved:
Learning to Talk Page 3
