Pagan and her parents

by Michael Arditti

  ‘You must know what Oprah Winfrey says about child abuse. Or don’t you watch your women rivals?’

  ‘I can’t bear to. I get too depressed by the thought of her salary.’ Her sour face seems to take me at my word.

  ‘That if you’re asked whether you were abused as a child, there are only two possible answers: either “yes” or “I don’t remember”.’

  ‘Come on. I’m the last person to underestimate the problem; but nothing is served by such wild exaggeration.’

  ‘It’s in your interest to say that; you’re a man.’

  My mistake was to think that she might feel some sympathy towards me by virtue of our linked sexuality when, in fact, she regards all men as equally poisonous. She told me quite openly that she became a vegetarian, not out of concern for animals, but because the meat that she ate might be male.

  A general gloom appears to have pervaded the house. As we enter the bedroom, we find Shona lying on her bed, her body heaving, her face buried in the counterpane. Pagan runs up to her and lovingly rubs her forehead on her shoulder; I am moved by this gesture of compassion, which contrasts sharply with her apathy downstairs. I sit down next to them but jump up fast when I sense the dual disapproval of Oprah and Jess. Like a radio actor, I am forced to convey all my emotion in my voice. I ask what the problem is; Shona does not reply. Pagan speaks for her. ‘It’s her face.’

  I am startled by the baldness of the statement, which appears to confuse the general with the specific. Shona’s face is, self-evidently, a problem: a patchwork of burnt skin and plastic reconstruction, as angular as a cubist painting with its distinct and highly coloured planes. The moral of her story is so stark that, if I had heard it anywhere but here, I would suspect poetic licence. She is the sole survivor of a family of five who had their electricity cut off after failing to pay the bill. They were forced to use candles. One fell and started a fire which consumed her mother, father and two younger brothers. Her face bears the scars.

  ‘Why? Does it hurt?’ I ask. I have assumed that the dead flesh lacks sensation. Now I fear that it creeps with the crackling of flames.

  ‘It did in the night,’ she says, ‘with the bell.’ The association harrows me. ‘Then, at lunch, Julie-Anne called me bacon-face.’ She cries again. I dare not take her in my arms. ‘Everyone hates me because I’m ugly.’

  ‘I love you,’ Pagan says, with a hug. ‘Next to Leo, I love you best in the world.’

  ‘But you’ll go soon. You’ll go home and live in the park.’

  ‘You can come and see me. There’s lots of rooms. You can play with all my toys and my friends.’

  ‘No,’ Shona says, ‘I don’t want to go. I’m going to stay here for ever. And then I’m going to live in a house for the blind people, so that no one will be nasty to me ever again.’

  I can offer no comfort. My thoughts are drowned by the sound of Danny Kaye, as Hans Christian Andersen, singing ‘There once was an ugly duckling’ to a boy with no hair. I have never felt so conscious of the inadequacy of fairy tales.

  As we drive to Arundel on a visit that is overdue by over a year, Pagan tells me that Shona has already run away from two foster homes. She then asks tentatively if she might come to live with us. I scotch the idea before there is time for it to become an issue. ‘They wouldn’t let me unless I were married; and I couldn’t find a wife that soon. Besides, you’ll be more than enough of a handful on your own.’

  ‘No, I won’t. I won’t even be a fingerful … a thumbful.’

  ‘Don’t contradict; it’s rude.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  I cannot help laughing. I am glad that she has made a friend and glad too that she has widened her social circle; although I regret that it has been accompanied by a coarsening of her speech. When she tells me that the home is ‘fulking awful’, I am as shocked as if I were wearing mutton-chop whiskers and a morning coat. And yet I refuse to tell her that it is a bad word; in my book, bad language is ill-used not immoral. I say, instead, that it is the wrong word, adding that fucking is a way in which grown-ups show that they love one another and that it is a good thing; it only becomes bad when it is done crudely or cruelly … or to a child.

  Later, as we sit taking tea in the castle café, she extends her vocabulary further. ‘What’s a poof?’ she asks. ‘Are you a poof?’ The questions are less distressing than the timing. I have always known that one day I would have to answer them. And yet I feel bitter that, thanks to your parents, she must face the truth so soon.

  ‘Who told you that? Was it someone in the home?’ I recall Ronald’s insult.

  ‘No, it was … it was …’ The pause leaves no room for doubt.

  ‘Was it Grandpa?’

  ‘He’s not my grandpa. My mummy didn’t have a daddy. She was adopted.’ Resisting the temptation to take the escape-route of adoption, I return to the subject of grown-up love. I attempt a simple illustration of the connections and differences between the sexes, using her Kit-Kats and my scones. She watches rapt; and yet I wonder how much she retains. I go on to say that the reason that people have tried to take her away from me is ‘because I liked other Kit-Kats’. She laughs and bites my head off … metaphorically.

  ‘Do you mind about that?’

  ‘Of course not. I think all bottoms are horrid.’

  ‘That’s because you’re a little girl. You won’t when you’re older. But you’re already too old to call everything bottoms. There’s a difference. A boy has a penis and a girl a vagina.’

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Yes.’ I lower my voice in response to suspicious looks from the neighbouring table. ‘You’ll find that people call them all sorts of names … silly names, naughty names, nasty names. But there’s no need. Use the proper names so that they sound no different from any other part of the body … your elbow, your shoulder or your knee. Does what I’m saying make sense?’

  ‘I think so. Can I have another Kit-Kat?’

  ‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough?’

  We buy a Mary Queen of Scots doll and a tin of traditional butterscotch for Shona and then head back to Brighton. In the car, Pagan frets that she will never be allowed home; and I dispense promises like Monopoly money. We return to find the house in chaos. After his fight with Ronald, Eugene has slit his wrist with a Swiss mountain knife, succeeding, for the first time, in hitting an artery. He has been patched up in hospital and will be sent straight from there to a secure unit. Meanwhile, the recreation room is off-limits, until the staff have had time to scrub down the walls.

  I am sickened by the thought of such self-destruction at the age of twelve. I blame his parents for stigmatising his skin as vilely as yours did your blood. I picture a scenario in which their hunger for a family blinded them to their prejudice. They convinced themselves of their ability to love a child from any background and yet, as the years went by, increasingly resented being stuck with what they saw as second-best. So they gave him back as though he had been sent on approval … Well, God may not have cursed them, but I do. I fill with fury at a fatherless universe. And, while assuring Pagan that I will be here to take her out again on Tuesday, I have never felt a more pressing need to take her away for good.

  The opportunity occurs five weeks later, when my application is finally heard in the family court. It is not contested … not by the Welfare Officer, who makes a forceful plea that Pagan be returned to me, regretting her previous misjudgement and supplying a full account of my acquittal … not by the Manager of the Children’s Home, who praises my devotion and the effect of my visits on Pagan’s morale … not by your parents who, in a letter from their solicitor to Max, admit that they are no longer able to look after a child, citing ill-health (your mother is suffering from glaucoma) and the stress of your father’s forthcoming trial … not even by the Judge (His Honour Judge Curtis), who, after reading the affidavits and my transcription of Mrs Justice Campbell’s summing up, dispenses with my appearance in the witness box.

 
He grants me residence, albeit with reluctance, repeatedly emphasising that his sole concern is with the best interests of the child. He is determined that she should be removed from the home as a matter of urgency and can see no more suitable placement. Adoption is a possibility (I blanch); and yet, in view of the family history, it is not one which he intends to pursue. Even as he makes the ruling, he cannot resist chiding me for my breach of the Contact Order … as though my prime responsibility were not to protect Pagan but to observe the letter of the law. He ends by recommending that she be given some form of counselling; which I agree to arrange.

  As we leave court, I decline Max’s offer of lunch; I have arranged to spend the time until Pagan’s return from school with William. I drive to Worthing and then follow his directions to the old-fashioned Watch and Clock Repairers where he works. I negotiate the complex insecurity system (so named by William, who claims that it is worth more than the entire stock) and enter the shop to which he has devoted the best part of fifteen years.

  ‘My finest worker,’ his boss says as we are introduced.

  ‘Your only worker, Mr Hill,’ William corrects.

  ‘Now yes; but in the old days … I wouldn’t know what to do if he went.’ The edge to his voice betrays further insecurity.

  ‘No danger of that,’ William says with a shrug. ‘What else could I do? “Doesn’t he have delicate hands?” a customer said last week, as though it was compensation, like a blind piano-tuner or fat men who are light on their feet.’

  ‘People trust you. They come from miles around.’

  ‘A dinosaur in a digital world.’

  ‘There’ll always be a call for a craftsman.’

  ‘That’s not how my parents saw it. I think they equated working with my hands with manual labour. Whenever my mother spoke of it, she made it sound like a hobby that they were indulging … that I was earning pocket money to supplement an allowance.’

  ‘My finest worker,’ Mr Hill repeats; ‘I don’t run a charity.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it looks much,’ William declares defensively, ‘but I know nothing more beautiful than the insides of a clock. Such grace and precision, such history. When I’m at my bench, I feel in control … and not just of the clock but what it signifies. In my own small way, I feel I’m the master of time.’

  ‘William’s the chairman of the South East committee of the British Horological Institute.’

  ‘It used to be the standing committee till I joined.’ I am not sure whether I am expected to laugh. ‘Still, political correctness has even reached our antiquated world. So, I’m known, to everyone’s embarrassment, as the chair.’

  With that, he takes his leave of Mr Hill and leads me to the car. I am glad to see him again, although I find his mordant humour disconcerting. And yet, if you roll through life at ‘armpit level’, as he puts it, it may be the only way to survive.

  ‘If you’re ever on the run again, Leo, get yourself a wheelchair,’ he says, as he drives me to the restaurant; ‘it’s the perfect hiding place. No one ever thinks of looking inside. Two things happened to me last week that brought it home. The first was when I was waiting outside a shop with narrow aisles and a woman tossed 50p into my lap. She immediately assumed that I was begging. She didn’t say a word; she just dropped the coin as if I were a collection box.’

  ‘She must have been trying to assuage her guilt.’

  ‘That makes me feel much better! The other was when I went to a party given by a collector I’ve done a lot of work for. “It’s so good of you to come,” she said, shaking my hand as limply as if she were the Queen. “There’s someone else here in a wheelchair I’m longing for you to meet.”’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘What makes it worse is that she’s a genuinely well-meaning woman. You’d think that, after thirty-six years, I’d be immune … but no.’ He pulls up. ‘Still, here we are. Door to door service.’ He pats his permit. ‘Lose your legs; and all your parking problems will be solved for life.’

  We enter the restaurant, which William declares to be his favourite, although he warns that his criterion is as much ease of access as quality of food. We order and chatter. He is heartened by my account of the morning’s proceedings and intrigued by your parents’ submission. It is only when I am halfway through a piece of underripe melon that I am struck by a discrepancy.

  ‘You said thirty-six years.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I thought that you were thirty-nine.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I also thought – forgive me if I’m wrong – that you’d been … that you’d never been able to walk.’

  ‘So did I. That’s the story of my life, at least the authorised version … that my birth mother rejected me when she found I was crippled but I was rescued by my new parents. They took me in out of compassion, as though I were the runt of the litter who would otherwise be put down. However hard I tried – if I fetched them their newspapers and slippers for the next forty years – there was no way I could repay the debt. But it was an illusion.’

  ‘How … when did you find out? Candida never said.’

  ‘Candida never knew. I didn’t share her lifelong obsession with discovering her parents … if I had, I might have learnt sooner; although it was her attitude, more than anything, which put me off. As a kid, I was deeply offended by the way that she talked about our parents. She portrayed them as thieves – no, racketeers – who’d profited from other women’s mistakes. I couldn’t bear the ingratitude. For their part, they made it clear that they would regard any search for our birth parents as a betrayal … now I understand why. So I told myself that there was nothing to be gained from knowing; it would simply cause everyone pain. Ironically, it was Candida’s death that prompted my change of heart. Even though we’d lost touch, I’d believed that we’d always be there for each other; I suddenly felt so alone. I became curious … less about my mother than about any brothers or sisters. So I applied for my birth certificate and finally tracked my mother down. It’s a gruelling process.’

  ‘I know; I lived through it with Candida.’

  ‘My first surprise was that my mother welcomed me. Ever since the change in the law, she’d longed for me to make the application. I wrote to her and she rang me the following day. We agreed to exchange photographs. I sent her a close-up of my head and shoulders; I didn’t want to remind her of my chair. I didn’t even mention it; it seemed like rubbing her rejection in her face. We arranged to meet. I saw at first glance that she had no idea. She tried to disguise her reaction; but I didn’t want her to. And I learnt that the reason she’d had me adopted was simply that she wasn’t married. I was a perfectly healthy baby. She could never have given me up if I’d had any sort of disability. It would have made the guilt a hundred times worse.’

  ‘So when … how did it happen?’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to know. I went to see my doctor … my new doctor. The old one was a friend of my father’s. Rotary … the nineteenth hole. I explained that I needed to consult my medical history for a talk I was giving to a local youth group on surviving an accident. It was a shot in the dark … it was a bull’s eye. He detailed the treatments I’d undergone, not for a birth defect but for breaking my spine in a fall at the age of three. And I suddenly remembered – no, relived – what had happened; it was happening again, as if the clock had stopped … only, this time, I wasn’t in control. I was three years old. I could see my father hurting my sister. She was crying, but he wasn’t smacking her. I tried to pull him off, and he grabbed me and lifted me onto the top of a wardrobe. Then he took her away into another room. I could hear her scream. I put my hands to my ears to shut out the noise and crashed down onto the floor.’

  His memory permeates my vision. I see him lying lifeless on the ground, while you are assaulted by your father. But there is one face missing. ‘Where was your mother?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Most likely out on her St John’s work or one of the other good causes wh
ich she always found so “satisfying”.’

  ‘So how did he explain what’d happened?’

  ‘How do I know? I was three years old. I’ve protected myself from the truth for thirty years. I don’t know what she knows about him. I suspect … I suspect she suspects; but I don’t know. But, whatever else, she lied about my always being like this. She lied about their compassion. She lied about my mother’s rejection.’

  ‘So she may have lied about Candida?’

  ‘She may. I think that Candida tried to tell her; but she refused to listen. Which is why she came to hate her even more than she did my father. She seemed to assume that what he’d done to her was what men did; after all, my mother repeatedly told us that men were animals. I thought that she meant “the rats and snails and puppy dogs’ tails” left over from childhood … how could I have been so naive? While Candida felt that the one person who should have protected her hadn’t. Whether it was blindness or complicity, I leave to you.’

  ‘God knows, I’ve little love for your mother; but I can’t believe that she would connive at the abuse of her own daughter.’

  ‘Not just her daughter.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not just her daughter.’ The waiter interrupts. I wave him away, but William appears to welcome the respite and asks him to return first with black pepper and then with more wine. The delay does not make the revelations any easier to absorb.

  ‘You too?’

  ‘Oh yes. It must have been several years later; although I can’t say when exactly … memory’s not as precise as time. He turned his attention to me. And he carried on for years. Years! I couldn’t run like Candida. And I didn’t scream. Why didn’t I scream? Because boys don’t, I suppose. And why did I never tell anyone? Like I said: because I was a boy. And such things didn’t happen to boys; they couldn’t happen to boys; they destroyed everything that I believed boys were. And, day after day, night after night, he raped me. He’d say to me, “This can’t hurt you; you can’t feel anything; they’ve told us, you have no feeling.” But I had feelings. Didn’t I have feelings? And I knew that he was inside me … pounding me, polluting me.’ He thrusts his plate away. I reach across the table, smearing my sleeve, to place a hand on his arm. ‘Don’t do that!’ He flinches. ‘Sorry. Force of habit. I can never bear to be touched by a man.’