by Stuart Evers
His days have been the same since arriving. A routine. Picks up cash, walks the streets to the bar, has a beer, scores and heads back to the small plain room. An hour maximum. Perhaps not even forty minutes some days. How long, he forgets. It is not important.
Until the Christmas term he had been teaching at a primary school. Kids without English. Unable to read. Kids who looked blankly when you asked them a simple question. He liked to work with them. Their eventual comprehension. The slow, slow grasp of what was required. He tries now to stay away from those speaking English. Tries to be without understanding. Pointing, miming, shaking his head. He wants words to become useless, like his dead brother’s limbs. Pointing, miming, shaking his head. Even the dealer says nothing now. Just palms the cash and passes the baggie. Simon orders his beer from the owner who doesn’t speak a word of English. A routine.
At the primary school he’d met Anya. Underarm hair, dark crew-cut. Younger, somehow drawn to him. She invited him to her bare-boarded apartment, rag rugs, books and candles, and they talked all night. The next night they were naked together. He smoked some of her draw, did not tell her why he shouldn’t. Smoked her draw and listened as she explained the way the world really worked. They did this many times, many nights. They lay in her narrow bed and he put his hand on her flat stomach as she raged.
‘All the establishment needs is someone who doesn’t realize the incredible hatred he inspires when on television. All the establishment needs is a stooge like that on the television and there’s no unrest or upheaval. It’s why game-show hosts move channels so often. They’re making sure the hate never goes cold! They’re making sure that just when you think you’ve got rid of one fucking prick, another one crops up in his place. One even more vacuous, even more slick, even more talentless than the one before.’
Simon had laughed then, and again now, remembering. How I love you for this, how I love your overthinking mind. And how I love how you hate. You are talking about my father. You probably have him in your mind now. He wanted to say this. He wanted her to know. But he just laughed.
‘You might find it funny,’ Anya said and turned from him, picked up the joint. ‘But give it a decade, give it two, and the only assassinations will be of television stars. The so-called personalities will be terrified. Politicians will be safe. They will be able to do as they wish.’
Two decades and just the one assassination. A female presenter shot on her doorstep, a loner, stalker, caught: not what Anya had in mind. It changed the shape of his fantasies. He no longer imagined punching his father, shooting him, but dreamt instead of elaborate assassination. A snowplough accident. A dog attack in the middle of Hyde Park. A bomb placed in the annexe, timed to go off at the end of a playback of one of his game shows. Simon’s preferred method was a piano pushed off the top of a tall building, crushing Bob below. Bob loves those old slapstick routines: let him die the way he has lived.
Anya has been on his mind since arriving in Thailand. Ghosts of her carrying a backpack, ghosts of her drinking beer in bars, ghosts of her rolling joints, scribbling in notebooks. She’d stayed at this same guest house. Cheap but fine. Cheap and close to everything. A higgle-piggle – when he thinks of her, he thinks of her saying those words – place with dank rooms and additions, enlargements and extensions leading into a garden courtyard where the chalets are. The chalets he’d looked at. They were not what he wanted. He liked the clatter of the next-door cafeteria, the low honk of voices, the pouring of liquid; the flames and fire.
‘We’ll go,’ she’d said once, after a long description of Bangkok. ‘You and I, we’ll go together. Take the whole summer. Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia. The grand tour. Temples. Meditation. Fresh seafood. The best hash in the world. A cabin by the beach.’
Anya, long limbed, naked, kissed him and he saw this would not happen. It did not. Years later, now perhaps, she would mention him in passing, at a dinner table, at work. With a father like that, she’d say – because now she knew, now she knew who he was – you can almost excuse it.
There is a photograph taken of the family. Not quite of the family. A photocall for the press. Father playing a miniature trumpet, mother with an admonishing, amused look that says stop larking about. Simon looking off with distracted eyes. His hair will not be tamed flat and his solemn look is directed at his off-camera brother. The handsome spastic is behind the photographer, no make-up applied, perhaps asleep, perhaps not.
‘But why can’t Gary be in the photo?’ Simon asked. His father shot him a look and Simon said nothing more. He imagined killing Gary. Stabbing him with a kitchen knife, slitting his throat. Their father coming into the dining room to find Simon over the corpse of his brother, blood-drenched and smiling. Nine years old and thinking such thoughts. No wonder, when you think about it. No wonder.
He was a slight boy, but he managed to tip the chair just enough. Enough for Gary to fall, to dump the body onto the parquet floor. The noise was loud, like glass-shatter, and he paused over his brother waiting for footsteps on the stairs. There were none. He prodded his brother with the miniature trumpet. He pulled down his brother’s trousers. He kicked his brother in the arse. He called his brother a spastic, a stupid bloody spastic. And his father and mother arrived then.
He wore his best clothes, the very best ones, the bow tie and shirt, the same he wore when important people came to the house. The nanny took him. A car drove them to a row of Georgian townhouses, brass plaques outside, steps up to shellac-dark doors, silver knockers and mother-of-pearl doorbells. He remembers the streets and the cars, the nanny waiting with him to be admitted. But his memory of the sessions, even of the psychiatrist, is hazy: a book-lined room, a woolly headed man in tweed, horn-rimmed spectacles and a couch he assumed he was not allowed to sit on. Did he even ask to sit on it? This was a punishment, was it not? A punishment would not allow such comfort as sitting on its brown leather; he would not have asked, no.
And the questions. Have you ever wished to harm your brother? Have you ever harmed your brother? Have you ever wished to harm yourself? Have you ever tried to harm yourself? Give me three words to describe your father? What do you see in this picture? Can you tell me the first thing that comes into your head when I say these words: spastic, home, kiss, fear, anger . . .
They have the quality of a televised memory, shaped by dramas, documentaries he’s seen. Did the doctor really ask whether he had hurt himself? Would a real doctor really ask about his father in such a way? Simon no longer knows. He cannot be certain. There were sessions; he’s sure of that; and he remembers coming home to the quiet house, slipping in through the kitchen, hoping no one had noticed his absence.
For two months he didn’t hear from or see his father. Not uncommon. But. Bob was touring, or writing for someone, or filming. Simon went to his psychiatrist appointments; did not call his brother a spastic. He did not kick his brother in the arse. He did his schoolwork and kept quiet, concentrated on his breathing as his counsellor had taught him. He ate his dinner, every last mouthful, and said please and thank you. He played well with others and he talked to Gary. He did not cry when the lights went out.
He was washing his hands, soap and water, water, soap and water, water. Washing his hands and his father was at the door. His father’s face in the mirror, tired and lined. Simon dried his hands and his father stood with his arms outstretched.
‘Come give me a hug, Simon,’ he said. ‘I’ve missed you my boy. Missed you so much.’
His father smelled of whisky and hair oil, his arms strong around him.
‘You’ve been such a good boy,’ Bob said. ‘You’ve been such a good boy, Simon. That’s what I’ve been told. I’ve been told you’ve been a good boy and every good boy deserves a treat. Come, come, Simon, I’ve a surprise for you.’
His father carried him to the study. In his arms and in the fervour of imagination, Simon seeing the surprises unfold, the sheer size of them, their frantic colours, their unknown, untold excitements. His father put hi
m in the wing-backed chair. His father was smiling the way he did on the television when someone wins the big prize. His father handed him the brochure. A castle, something like a castle, green grass and turrets, but no moat or flags. In that moment, he is caught. This he thinks now amid the next-door voices and clanking. Caught in the moment of incomprehension. He is still there. Bob’s face looking at him, the wrong face though; the eyebrows too arched, what looks like dried make-up on his chin and cheek. The smile dropped for an instant, then turned back on. The explanation. What he has won. A place at a boarding school. A permanent holiday from the family. Bob mentioned the sporting facilities many times, the cinema club every third Friday of the month. Your new school: didn’t you do well?
The clank and voices. Tak tak tak. He picks up a bottle of lukewarm water. He is hotcold and sweating. The sheets are damp in places, wet elsewhere. He pissed the bed the first night of the boarding school. Pissed it so much the dormitory staff had to flip the mattress in full view of the others. Nine others laughing and calling him pisspants. Calling him pisspants though six of them had themselves been called pisspants before. He pissed the bed the second night too. The same routine.
‘You need to sort yourself out, laddie,’ the old woman said. ‘Or else you’ll be sleeping in your wet all term.’
The boys called him pisspants all through the third day. He did not piss the bed the third night. He broke one of the boys’ noses. His blows were incredible. He heard one of the boys say, ‘He’s going to kill him! He’s actually going to kill him!’
The dormitory staff wrested Simon from the boy, Simon still trying to land blows, blood on his knuckles, blood all over the boy’s face. They locked Simon in a store cupboard for that. The teachers, not the boys. He was dry as a bone the next morning.
This room is bigger than the store cupboard, are there rats here too? The rats in the store cupboard. Yellow fangs, clutching cheese, their tails making Fu Manchu moustaches over his lip. What he told the boys. He preferred the store cupboard. To be told something is a punishment does not make it so.
Anya is next to him in the bed. Slender Anya, the coal of her joint burning red.
‘We’ll go,’ she says, ‘you and I, we’ll go together. The grand tour. Temples. Meditation. Fresh seafood. The best hash in the world. A cabin by the beach.’
She smiles sadly and she has her hand out. Keys he puts there. Keys so briefly his, for the mortise and the latch. A key ring she bought for him that he had not thought to remove before giving them up. Cross my palm with silver. A door slams and the night is cold and he gets a bus home. He cries on the bus and no one offers him a handkerchief.
His father. His father Bob. Bob now in the corner of the room, standing in evening wear, dabbing a pocket square at the top of his brow.
‘It’s hot in here, isn’t it?’ Bob says. ‘Good God it’s hot. My wife’d hate it here. My wife can’t stand the heat, you see. Can’t stand the heat. I have to say though, it’s a blessing: it keeps her out of the kitchen.’
Simon watches Bob wait for the laughter. Simon watches Bob wait for the applause. Simon turns over in the bed and closes his eyes.
3
Bob puts The Flip Side back unwatched and drags his fingers across the spines of the other tapes. Archivists’ handwriting, not his own; the kind you see in libraries, in lawyers’ offices. Were he to start now, Bob would not live long enough to watch them all. Tapes are stacked alongside the desk, last week’s new recordings.
Behind an oil portrait of Jaq, the safe. He opens its combination lock. The numbers are not significant; there is no need for significance when you recall so much. Only important things. Only recall the significant things. A combination lock presents no challenge. But those things he considers not important slip through his fingers. Memory as value judgement. Memory as protectorate. He remembers as a child being fat. He remembers the Coronation Day parade, a Romany family passing, their caravan loudly painted, loudly hanging with Union Jack bunting, shouting something as he waved his flag, shouting Fatty Arbuckle at him, laughing and pointing. But he does not remember his mother pushing her fingers into his stomach. He does not recall her saying, ‘You’re a disgrace, Robert. Like a pig, always with your snout in the trough.’ He does not recall his father laughing at him running in the park. He does not recall their comments to friends when all the kids were together. Mother and Father. Both dead now. No one now to say it ever happened.
The notebooks are the same shape and size: maroon boards, stitched. They have a fair weight, a solid heft. He takes them from the safe and arranges them side by side on the desktop. He sits on the leather-covered chair. He touches their covers, opens one and flicks through the pages, the cartoons and the jokes, the sketches and gags. At random: People think I’m from Kent, I hear them say it as I walk past. He looks at the line. Prestatyn, 1971, a motorway service station. Clumsy. He has used it many times, but it isn’t quite there. Gets a laugh, yes, but clumsy. The forty-seventh page has five jokes about funerals. They are wretched. Written at this desk. Written after Gary’s death and still in his black suit and tie, a bottle of Scotch and Jaq asleep.
He had not considered it an estrangement. Estrangement is for the upper classes, something they have been perfecting for centuries. The middle classes are made for reconciliation: even he and his mother made their peace in the end. At Jaq’s prompting, a letter sent, a letter of admonishment and explanation, a list of questions he wanted answering. A letter came back, laced with cautious conciliation and ignoring the charges levelled at her. The summer of 1967. The summer of love. Three visits to her in Goring-by-Sea. Her in the rocking chair, the large gins and the cigarettes at her well-painted lip. Three visits and any mention of his wife, his marriage, its breakdown, waved away like trails of smoke. They talked a long time, but not of the cancer in her colon. They talked a long time, and he left for the last time. A coma. Reconciled and so now ready to die. Inevitable, the reconciliation. There could never be absolute defiance.
Absolute defiance. Yes. That was the look on his face, on Simon’s face, walking up the driveway in his uniform, back from his first term. Bob had thought the boarding school would be the making of Simon. Something that would loosen his anger, strafe his resentment. A period of time away from Gary, some time for the boy to find his own voice, his own character. At the door, Bob welcomed him as the prodigal. Simon looked at him with the same look Bob had once tried to master towards his mother: hardened and uncaring, nonchalant about her disregard.
The intercom runs between kitchen and annexe, a speaker grille and push button screwed into the walls. Jaq calls him in for supper; she calls him in for sleep. She would rather not make the walk between the two buildings, rather not poke her head around the door. Though he does not say it, she understands she is intruding, even after twenty years. Having the space changed him. Jaq saw it straight away. Noticed it in his performances. Less polish, a slight easing of the worked-at patter. It looked like he cared less, like there was something perhaps more important than making those people laugh.
‘You’re more yourself now,’ she said after a show in Bournemouth. ‘You are more believable. More real.’
‘Was I not before?’ Bob said.
He looks up at her portrait, a good job. Captures her warmth and care, her smile. Lines had been smoothed, ridges of chin subtly excised. The woman the girl had promised. The girl in the office, one of the secretarial pool, typing and filing, making tea, booking tours. The office catered for well-to-do ex-servicemen, now turned comedy writers for hire. Young men, men in suits with cigarettes and constant back-and-forth, prising lines from one another, riffing, writing scraps down on fag-packets and bus tickets, the backs of menus, beer-mats. Their scrawl passed to Jaq and the girls for typing, the typed lines worked at with a pencil, then passed back to Jaq and the girls for retyping. A radio always on, the blast of the road beneath. The boys heading for the pubs, the boys heading for the restaurants, the girls never joining them, the girls p
referring the singers and musicians from the offices downstairs. The songwriters and drummers, the singers and the promoters. Those men were distinct, aloof; hailing taxis, heading for cocktails, for all-night coffee bars. There were Negroes and Hispanics, Frenchmen and Americans. Next to them, the office boys were like the boys from school: sniggering, ill-informed, interchangeable. Jaq and the girls found their humour wearying; their bravado boring.
Jaq and the girls were young and slim; they breezed through rooms unaware these were the moments that would haunt them long into their lives: taking a glass of champagne from a silver salver, allowing their cigarettes to be kissed by offered lighters, spending their own hard-earned, heading home to their house-share in the Angel. Unmarried and with lovers, unmarried yet not untouched. Later, looking back at photographs, their ghost selves alongside famous men who no one today would recognize, alongside nobodies who later were somebodies. Those dresses and hairstyles now back in fashion. Wondering what happened to the others, wondering what became of them all. All save Jaq.
Bob’s memory elides the romantic and the documentary. He can recall the name and face of every woman he has ever slept with – Diane, Elizabeth, Suzanne, Angela, Kathryn, Emily, Susan, Mary, Liz, Linda, Pat, Deborah, Barbara, Karen, Suzy, Nancy, Anita, Donna, Cynthia, Sandra, Pamela, Sharon, Kathleen, Carol, Jenny, Cheryl, Janet, Kathy, Anna, Janice, Louisa, Yvonne, Victoria, Carolyn, Kathy, Jackie, Molly, Denise, Gill, Judy, Helen, Jean, Brenda, Linda, Tina, Margaret, Lorraine, Ann, Patsy, Tina, Rebecca, Bethany, Joyce, Helen, Tracy, Teresa, Wendy, Lizzie, Debra, Christine, Catherine, Amy, Sue, Linda, Leann, Shirley, Judith, Louise, Trudy, Holly, Mary, Lisa, Jeanne, Laura, Dawn, Gillian, Dorothy, Michelle, Sally, Victoria, Anne, Jayne, Phyllis, Elaine, Lois, Connie, Vicky, Sheila, Beth, Ann, Pat, Julie, Amelia, Gloria, Gail, Joan, Paula, Beth, Angie, Peggy, Cindy, Jennifer, Becky, Hope, Mary, Tina, Lisa, Pru, Kimberly, Martha, Jane, Cathy, Jo, Joanne, Debbie, Diana, Frances, Alice, Valerie, Marilyn, Ellen, Kim, Lori, Jean, Vicki, Rhonda, Rita, Virginia, Katherine, Rose, Mary, Lynn, Jo, Ruth, Maria, Jacqueline – yet they are static memories. He can recall the couplings but not the feelings, not the reasons why some became affairs and others remained casual flings. An interviewer – no, more than one interviewer – observed that Bob wanted to please everyone. From street-sweeper to crown prince. He does not know what to make of that. A psychologist said it was all about his mother. There’s a line in the sixth notebook, not his own: That’s the problem with shrinks, if it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.
