by Tim Parks
Which is why we’ve never had a party before, I suppose. I remember Shirley was very eager to have a housewarming do years ago when we moved into the Hendon place. ‘Parties are for fun,’ she said. ‘You’re the one who’s always saying he wants to have a good time.’
And it’s true. Parties are for fun. But the only people who really seem to have any are the ones who break through all inhibitions and get into snogging and petting and even bonking people they’ve never met before. Those are the kind who have fun. And the fact is that much as I envy them, I would never be so much of a beast as to do stuff like that with my wife around, or even amongst people who know her. Often, I’m afraid, one must come to the conclusion that one’s inhibitions are the best part about one.
Other people are different of course. Some are quite shameless and have always done exactly what they want when they want. So it is that towards midnight, my chosen hour for the sale of my soul, I will slip discreetly out into the hall away from the guests in lounge and breakfast room, down the passage, through the cloakroom to the study, a lighted cigarette between the fingers of one hand, a big tumbler of whisky in the other, only to find Gregory and Peggy sprawled across two armchairs, more or less humping each other.
Why didn’t I lock the door, for Christ’s sake?
It’s an odd party because we’ve invited such a mix of guests, many of whom we haven’t seen for so long we can barely remember what they look like. We sent out sixty odd invitations but have no idea how many people are actually going to come. Twenty? A hundred? The invitations said eight thirty, but by nine only Shirley’s friends from the choir have arrived, well-behaved, carefully-dressed people happy to drink a glass of white wine, eat snacks and speculate about their dictatorial organist/choirmaster’s private life. The women take it in turns to hold Hilary in their arms and say how well she is looking. One, in a strapless black velvet outfit, looks just the kind decked out for pleasure she won’t have. I can’t help noticing her thin knees and calves and thinking of Marilyn.
Peggy phones to say she’ll be late and can we put Frederick to bed or he’ll become a monster. ‘Grandma’ll read you a story,’ I tell him, thinking to kill two birds with one stone, have both of them out of the way. For Mother, after barely a glass of Soave, can be heard fervently praising the Lord in conversation with a plain weasily little man with his arm in a sling.
‘I don’t want Grandma to read a story. I want to stay downstairs. Five minutes, Uncle George.’
‘Your mummy said bed.’
‘Then you read, Uncle, I want you to read.’
He says this because he thinks I’ll refuse. He’s a sharp little lad with whom I feel a certain affinity. But as it happens I’m quite glad to be out of the fray for a while.
I take him upstairs, make him clean his teeth and sort through the kiddies’ books people have occasionally given us, not realising Hilary will never be able to understand them. What would he like? Tom Thumb? He says the giant scares him. Eating the children. But it’s only stalling. Nothing would scare Frederick. I tell him it’s only pretend, there are no giants, nobody eats children. But I agree to dig out the Ugly Duckling instead. Where unfortunately, I reflect as I read, it is the welcome transformation that doesn’t convince.
I kiss my nephew goodnight. Having got the door closed, I take the opportunity to change my soiled trousers and, before going downstairs again, size myself up in our wardrobe mirror. Five-ten. Blond. Pale-skinned, straight-nosed, clear eyes. Perhaps a little serious-looking, but certainly nothing loony about me. In the end, if I have to insist before a court of law on any one thing, it will be my complete normality, my modernity. Show me, I’ll say to the jury, just one, just one part of my overall vision which is out of line with the dominant social philosophy in England today. I bet you can’t. I just bet. But watching myself in the mirror I can see the tension about teeth and jaws. I have big jaw muscles.
Hearing noises at the top of the stairs I walk down the long landing to the other bathroom where Mother is struggling to change a particularly dirty nappy before putting Hilary to bed. I take over, for the girl’s heavy and helpless and needs washing. I work quickly and efficiently and, though I say it myself, gently. Hilary always rouses a quite terrible gentleness in me. I wipe carefully inside the folds of skin around the pale warm split bun of her crotch. And talc generously.
At a certain point, my mother touches my shoulder and smiles at me with a bright winsome look. ‘I think you’re magnificent with the girl.’ For some reason she says it in a whisper. Then in her normal voice. ‘I’ll put her to bed now. You go down and talk to your guests. It’s your party.’
This is a little annoying because I had meant to give Hilary a very heavy dose of Calpol to make sure she won’t wake and attract attention during the evening. As Mother walks off with the girl along the landing, she is already humming mournful hymn tunes which she presumably imagines are soporific. And indeed they are.
Downstairs I pin a little notice to the first column of the bannister. ‘Use downstairs loo: don’t want to wake kids.’ I hesitate, then decide to accept one last call to the bathroom.
Finally towards ten, everybody arrives more or less at once. Squash partners from my Hammersmith club, a few blokes from karate classes, couples we met on the maternity course and perhaps went out with once, or used to meet for a drink sometimes, at least until Hilary was born. Mark and Sylvia, our old neighbours from Finchley. People from work. People from school where Shirley taught – her ex amongst them? Stout Ian Perkins has a lecherous look to him, trailing a petite wife with pink rabbitty little mouth and pursed lips. And now there’s a faint aroma of dope in the air? Who? Can I allow that? If the police should come before I start the fire? Calm down please. It would be madness to make a fuss. Probably I’m just imagining it.
Mrs Harcourt arrives, bringing a sprightly older man with middle European accent who seems determined to make a fool of himself telling jokes and drinking heavily. He is tall, but lean, over-dressed in a dinner jacket that doesn’t quite fit. Obviously out for a good time. Mrs Harcourt introduces him, with no comment, as her dear friend Jack. She is looking younger and happier than the last time I saw her, in an elaborate taffeta dress with sparkling butterfly brooch and pearl necklace. I’m surprised to notice she hasn’t brought her camera. Our tenth anniversary will pass unrecorded.
Gregory turns up with a girl I’ve never seen before, a thin-lipped, depressed looking lass with a sudden false smile of greeting that heaves up the downturned corners of the mouth. Tight jeans and ample curves up top tell all though. She moves with a soft predatory pad in expensive running shoes.
‘Divorced, old man,’ he explains. It’s at least two years since I saw him. The girl is leaning over the table for food and he is watching her arse. So am I for that matter. He chuckles: ‘Just got too much. And boring into the bargain. You know, marriage, always the same. We both wanted out.’
As I open the door for someone else, Charles and Peggy can be heard arguing quite violently as they approach down our lovely, tree-waving street. They are calling each other names. Sometimes I wonder if Shirley and I aren’t the only couple in the world guarding the romantic fort of first marriage.
Lobster Claws
‘Hi, what you up to? How come we never get to see each other?’ Greeting guests in the porch I’m putting on an extraordinary show of bonhomie: I sound positively American. Meanwhile Shirley is marshalling drinks and food in the breakfast room. In the lounge somebody’s put on ‘Street-Fighting Man’ of all things. I check my watch. Ten fifteen.
‘Congratulations,’ I tell a very pregnant Susan Wyndham; she is leaning on the arm of the bearded man whose photo I used to see in her bedroom. ‘What do you want, boy or a girl?’
‘Just as long as it’s healthy,’ he says solemnly.
The evening gathers momentum. Much as planned. People finally begin to mingle, to get drunk. And to dance. The volume of the music is creeping up, and with the noise comes b
ustle, confusion. I’ve spotted several cigarette butts on carpet and parquet and a glass of red wine has gone over the bottom of the heavy green velvet curtains in the lounge. Pretty expensive enjoyment frankly. What I can’t understand, though, is how Shirley, who has committed so much time and energy in recent years to cleaning everything up far more often than is necessary (’because Hilary spends most of her life on the carpet’), is now being so blasé about it all. ‘Oh that doesn’t matter, I’m sure the stain’ll come out. We’re not that finicky. I mean, you can’t live in a museum, can you?’ She lifts her hand to cover her laughter, embraces someone, whirls off in a dance.
Still, the louder and rowdier the party, the better it suits my purpose. And I break open a couple of fresh packs of Rothmans and spill the cigarettes into a cut-glass bowl on the sideboard. The lounge is already a smog. When they’re always telling you on the news that everybody’s giving up.
Where’s Mother? I expected she’d have gone by now. Got one of the ‘church folk’ to drive her home. But she hasn’t said goodbye. I don’t want her around when it all happens. There are two rather handsome people kissing deeply at the bottom of the stairs. Which reminds me. I walk briskly to the back of the hall and slip into the cubby under the stairs, crouching down under the slanting ceiling. Amongst dusty boxes, there’s a heavy half-full drum of varnish from when they did the floors. I shift it over to the wall on the study side (barely a yard from the armchair) and prise the lid open a little with the car keys in my pocket to release some fumes. Ideally, I would like the stairwell to go up before people realise what’s going on. Though that seems a little ambitious.
Then up to check the children one last time. Fortunately the guest room is at the opposite side of the house from Hilary’s. For obvious reasons. The important thing is that everybody be where they should be when it begins.
I ease open the door. Frederick has his arms flung out above his head in red pyjamas. His face is so smooth in sleep, despite the thumping rhythm from downstairs, so smooth, so calm. But then he doesn’t have dreams like I have, like last night’s for example. I watch him. Although they don’t actually move you can sense, beneath the calm features, an intense, fluttering, delicate life. Not for the first time I reflect that I too might have had a lovely child like this.
Where the hell is Mother? I don’t want her holed up in a bedroom somewhere praying. That would be typical. And I quickly move along the two passageways that meet at right angles at the top of the stairs, opening doors, checking the bedrooms, the linen cupboard, the bathroom, even the tiny laundry room. Which paranoid activity inevitably reminds me of last night’s dream again, and I pause a moment at the top of the stairs as it all comes back.
I knew it had been a bad one. Of course, essentially, it’s just the same old mutilation fare. The new twist being that this time I was looking for my face. All over the house opening doors, looking under furniture, searching for my face. Unusually, though, as anxiety mounted, as I desperately hunted for and equally desperately hoped I wouldn’t find my nose, my eyes, my mouth, and worse still the expression those features must form, I came across Shirley brushing her hair in the bathroom the way she does, tossing it this way and that with a lovely sensuous motion. Instinctively I lifted my hands to cover myself, but she says calmly, ‘Nothing wrong with your face, love,’ and immediately I’m calm too. At least no one has noticed, I think, so perhaps it doesn’t matter. One can perfectly well go through life without a face if nobody notices. But now she frowns: ‘You really should get your arms looked at though, George.’ As though changing slides on a projector, attention switches in a flash to my right arm where strange pink rubbery outcroppings of flesh are forming just beneath the shoulder. I run a finger across them. ‘Age,’ I say, in the way one might of the dry fatty skin one tends to get above the elbow. But these jelly-like protrusions are gross. And then I see my forearms. They are bristling, bristling, with long, maybe four-inch lobster claws, blackish, as if burnt, unutterably ugly as they wave and grope of their own accord. I open my mouth to scream. To find I haven’t a mouth, for there is no face of course. At which point one wakes up to find that all is perfectly okay.
Downstairs I check out the lounge. Maybe fifteen people. Almost everybody is busy dancing or at least deep in conversation. Gregory’s girlfriend is writhing particularly wildly, though always stony-faced. Very suggestive contortions, and not near Gregory either. No sign of Shirley, or Mother. Where is she? In the breakfast room Charles is at the buffet table with a leg of chicken in his mouth, defending Liverpool local council against the robust good sense of Susan’s man, Eric. One of the karate guys splits his trousers showing how important it is to assume a low centre of gravity.
There is something very stable about the hum now, as if this buzz of alcohol-fuelled voices will go on for many hours. And checking my watch it is indeed time. I planned to do it now, when in the general tipsy hubbub Hilary will be forgotten. Sensing that if I stop to think, the cold sweat which is already coating face and hands will turn into violent shivering, I move to the sideboard where the spirits are. A well-dressed, clean-shaven boy who doesn’t know who I am, offers to do me the honours. ‘Fill it up,’ I tell him. He grins as if at a fellow freeloader. I take a gulp, light myself a cigarette, and armed, as it were, to the teeth, push through people down the hall, down the passage by the stairs, round through the cloakroom, past the bathroom and the door to the cubby and into the secluded study room.
To find Peggy and Gregory.
Why, after my silly, automatic, ‘Oops, sorry,’ closing the door on them, do I have such an overwhelming sense of frustration, and more precisely of déjà vu? My childhood. Hearing, finding, knowing of Peggy with her lovers, feeling excluded, feeling somehow that my bubbly sister has a monopoly on life, on gaiety, that I am always to be in outer darkness gnashing my teeth. It’s only a couple of months since she had her abortion for heaven’s sake.
I hesitate in the cloakroom where hooks are overloaded with rain-scented jackets, duffles, macs, mohair. In the bathroom someone coughs. An explosion of laughter comes from just round the corner in the hall. My cigarette is more than half burned. I take a good gulp of the whisky, knock brusquely on the study again and push back in.
‘George, really!’
‘Sorry, I don’t want to bother you guys, but Charles is looking all over for you, Peg. Could walk in any moment.’
They’re still at the stage of fumbling in each other’s clothes. They only met at most a couple of hours back. They both came with other partners. Gregory half sits, flustered, a glint of saliva on his beard.
‘Why don’t you, er, adjourn a moment and nip upstairs. Go to our room at the end of the passageway to the right. There’s a key in the door.’
But our room is next to Hilary’s room. Why on earth did I suggest this? Do I want them to burn? Or do I want them to save Hilary? In which case, what’s the point? Or was it the only thing I could think of? In any event I’m screwing up. I’m losing control. I draw the last puffs on the cigarette with my black lobster claws and tip another gulp of whisky into the place where my mouth must be. Only half the glass left.
‘Good on you, bruv,’ Peg says chuckling. The two of them are getting up, rearranging their clothes. ‘We’ll run the gauntlet of the hall then.’ And crouching down, like a commando about to storm a beach she grabs gangly Gregory by the hand and begins to hurry out through the cloakroom.
I look around. They’ve turned on the angle lamp on the desk, pointing it down at the floor near the wall. And in this would-be romantic, shadowy light, I quickly toss my whisky onto a dusty green armchair, then dislodge the dying coal of my cigarette so that it falls at the edge of the little pool of yellow spirit seeping into the cushion. Immediately it goes out. Without hesitating I pull a lighter from my pocket and try to light the material directly. An almost invisible paraffin flame appears, but seems not to touch the material itself, seems to dance, detached and ghostlike. It surely can’t be enough. But
I must get out now. I can’t wait to see. I haven’t even closed the door properly. I turn to grab the ashtray I left on the desk and spill it over the flame. But it isn’t there. Why? Why not? Has some creepy person like my mother already gone round gathering and emptying ashtrays? For heaven’s sake!
The flames are biting into the material now, the metamorphosis of fire is taking place, flaring yellow and smoky. I should put the thing out at once. Any forensic idiot will be able to see it was started on purpose. But in a trance I move to the door. And at last I realise, with the sudden lucidity of revelation that I am only acting here and now so that some action in my life at last there may be. So that I won’t keep plaguing myself trying to decide what to do. The outcome is almost irrelevant. I am acting because I can’t bear myself. I find my mental processes intolerable. I am horrible. And I may very well just go upstairs and sit out the horror with Hilary, burn away my lobster claws, my jelly flesh. My mother is right. I have been damned from earliest infancy.
The light of the flames is now brighter and fiercer than that of the lamp. I must have been here five minutes. There’s the fierce crackle of a bonfire. Suddenly frightened by the common-sense fear that somebody will hear, will smell, I hurry out of the room and close the door carefully behind me. The heavy wood clicks softly on good do-it-yourself insulating foam. And in an unplanned brainwave I go and pick up the low table at the bottom of the hall, bring it back, set it down across the study door and, unburdening the hooks one by one, place a huge pile of damp coats on top. Now back to the party. My face, I feel, like Moses returning from Sinai, is glowing with heat.
