by A. N. Wilson
Trevor said how boring the books were which he had to teach: stories of children supposedly like his pupils – of mixed race, or with single or gay or divorced parents.
She calmly replied that she was the single parent of a mixed-race child. Instead of insincere apologies, he’d said, ‘But he – it is a boy? – he wouldn’t necessarily want to read about himself in a book. A book should release him into a world of fantasy, of other realities! As soon as we get through these boring books on the syllabus, I tell the kids about King Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot. We also do tales from Greek mythology, and Hindu and Norse legends. These are stories which nourish a child.’
Later at the party, they’d danced, smooched, kissed a little, but it was several months before they had become lovers. In the light of all that had happened since, it pained Mercy to remember their first dates, when he would come to her flat for a meal, and tell Peter, who was aged five, stories.
‘They’re so good you should write them down,’ she had urged him – and he had confessed that he was trying to get something on paper, a version of Homer’s Odyssey for young children.
Mercy could still see Trevor in her mind’s eye, with Peter on his knee. That was an alert Trevor, with dark hair, and a clean-shaven, clever face, his bright eyes shining as with the hypnotic knack of a good story-teller he spoke to the boy as if imparting a special secret known only to the two of them.
‘Tell again,’ was something Peter often said to Trevor.
‘Tell what again, son?’
‘Tell again about the Old Man of the Seals.’
‘The Old Man of the Sea and his Seals? He is a very special sea-god, and he lives in a deep, dark cave down under the sea, with seals for pets. And when he is sure no one is looking, he and the seals come up and sit on the rocks, and he counts the seals, like a shepherd counting—’
‘Tell again, tell how he changes,’ Peter would insist.
‘Now the old man hates anyone to see him. And if anyone does catch him, or tries to catch him, he hates them asking him questions. So what does he do?’
Peter, entranced, wide-eyed, would stare at Trevor.
‘You say,’ the child prompted.
‘No – you say first.’
‘He changes shape – he’s one person and lots of different people!’ said the boy with glee.
‘That’s right, because he is a water-spirit – and water runs through your hands, you can’t hold on to it. So every time someone tries to get a hold of Proteus, he’ll be someone completely different.’
Peter had always been a presence in their lives, Mercy’s and Trevor’s. Of course, Lily was a mother in a million, and she had often had the little boy to stay with her overnight, to give the pair time to be alone. It had felt quite strange, their first night in her flat, without the presence of Peter. They’d become a little tipsy on red wine, laughed a lot, made gentle, tender love to one another.
‘She offered her honour, he honoured her offer, and he was on and off ‘er all night long,’ she had murmured. He’d never heard that one, and it made him shake with laughter. Oh Trevor – your laughter! She missed that so much now.
As time went by, Trevor and Peter seemed like perfect companions. Like Saint Joseph, Trevor was a just man and he asked no questions about Mercy’s earlier life, nor about Peter’s father. Peter sometimes called Trevor ‘Dad’, though he had never been asked to do so.
Mercy and Trevor married. Their own sons, first Bradley, then Lucius, were born. Peter changed from being a delightfully cheerful toddler into a gifted but highly disturbed and disturbing child, given to extreme swings of mood, to naughtiness and rages. Sometimes, he was violent towards Lucius or Bradley, and on these occasions, rows flared between Mercy and Trevor. He said she always sided with her mysterious first-born against the younger children, that she was always making excuses for Peter, even when, as quite a tall eight-year-old he did dangerous things such as holding his two-year-old half-brother upside down. The deep bond between Peter and Mercy was something Trevor resented, and their two sons breathed this resentment from their earliest years. They grew up with it, learnt it, absorbed it, shared it. Mercy greatly feared that she had contributed to Trevor’s mental breakdown. After all, her husband’s worst fears were based on a reality. She did love Peter with an all-consuming passion which was quite unlike her fondness (deep and sincere as this was) for Bradley, Lucius and Trevor. They had cause to be jealous. She did her best to conceal her emotions, and she tried not to be too open about loving Peter more than she loved them. It was simply a fact, however, that she adored her first-born in a way that she had never loved another human being, and a part of the reason for this lay in his very Protean character which Trevor had so presciently noticed very early: his ability to be first one person, and then another person, to be a whole variety of characters, depending on his mood or his company.
As she returned to the flat, Mercy felt real anger against the whole pack of them – Kevin Currey and his bloody theories of how to get real with the real Peter; the teachers who were, most of them, wimps who could not see the point of an original clever boy like Peter; Brad, Lucius and Trevor for having driven him away, driven her son from home.
The Toplings’ maisonette occupied the first and second floors of an Edwardian house down a leafy side street in south London. They had lived there since their son Bradley was two – that is, seven years. (Lucius was actually born there in the flat.) It was home. Mercy had made it as cosy as she could, though ‘the boys’, a phrase she used to indicate not only the younger children but also their father, did their best to mess it up.
Since giving up smoking herself some years before, she was especially conscious of the smell of stale cigarettes, which hit her as soon as she’d come through the door of the house, and before she had as much as opened the front door of the flat. The door opened grudgingly against the boys’ anoraks, which had fallen to the carpet. She hung them up again and in the little glass beside the hooks she checked her appearance, and gently shook the braided hair, which was moist with raindrops.
‘It’s still bucketing down out there …’ she told her own face, not sure that there would be an answer.
From the sitting room came the sound of television. She had hoped the boys would have been in bed by now.
‘Still up?’ she asked with a weary smile.
The sitting-room door opened on to more floor-strewn detritus – Lego, a variety of other toys, some books, three Action Men, one in combat gear, one with its right leg snapped off. The two boys were lolling on the sofa. A box containing the remains of a pizza was on the carpet.
Trevor was sitting in the armchair. His posture and expression were unchanged from three hours before, when she had left him in charge of the children. Presumably it was Trevor, and not Brad, who had extravagantly ordered a pizza to be delivered.
Anger at the scene – the boys so unwelcoming, their dad so stiff and still, the mess all over the floor – flared in her head, then died. It was all so pitiable.
‘Hey!’ she said with a smile. ‘You guys’ve got school tomorrow. Come and help me clear this lot up, then into bed with you.’
‘Oh, Mum!’
But the boys did help her make the place neater. The toys were stowed in a green wooden box painted not unlike a canal barge with floral patterns. The telly, to cries of protest, was switched off.
‘Okay?’ She heard her voice becoming the cooing noise appropriate for addressing the very young, or the very sick. ‘I’ll see the boys into bed, then make a cup of tea. Eh?’
He was forty-five years old, but he could have been twenty years older from his appearance. He was thin, bespectacled, prematurely grey, not only in the hair of his head and the stubble which was always sketched over badly shaven cheeks, but in his very complexion. As well as being sunken, his stubbly grey cheeks, heavy smoker that he was, were scored with wrinkles. There was something wraith-like about him, and many of the pat phrases from the common parlance which Mercy’
s friends used about him were quite true. He really did seem like a shadow of his former self. Nor was he ‘all there’.
‘Read the paper?’
She waved The Daily Legion in front of him to see if she could at least make his open eyes show some recognition or response.
‘He came round,’ he said quietly. ‘Came round here.’
‘Peter came here? But he was meant to be with us, seeing Kevin Currey. Had he forgotten?’
‘He bought the boys a pizza.’
‘When?’
Trevor shrugged, indifferent: perhaps frightened.
‘He was gentle,’ he said in a quiet, dull voice.
This could not be relied on. Mercy sighed, thinking of the wars which had taken place in that flat. When Peter was ten, he had mutilated some of the exercise books brought home by Trevor to mark. They had contained a whole term’s project on the Odyssey. Most of the children’s work was poor, but some of them had taken real trouble with colourful illustrations of triremes, helmets, spears, goddesses or the Cyclops. Peter had spared the dullards, and ripped the books of the best children. Trevor had become wildly angry, chasing Peter around the flat, shouting. Mercy had come in from work to find Trevor pummelling the boy with his fists. She had screamed and dragged her husband off him.
She dated the first real onset of Trevor’s depression from that day. When he got to school next morning and opened his briefcase, he found, nestling among his books and pens and the unmutilated exercise books, a dog turd which had been neatly collected from the pavement.
Thereafter, he developed something very like persecution mania. If kids at school misbehaved, he believed that they had been put up to it by Peter. Some of the girls in his class – egged on, Trevor believed, by Peter – had taken to calling him ‘Perv Topling’. The parents of one of these girls came to see the headmaster with a bundle of anonymous letters, pasted together from newspaper and magazine cuttings. These alarming productions accused their daughter, aged twelve, of being ‘the nigger’s tart’ and alleged that she performed disgusting ‘services’ for Trevor. Of course no one believed the letters, but they upset all concerned. No sooner had the memory of that incident faded, than another outburst of bad behaviour was capable of plunging Trevor back into depression. Racist abuse, or blatant sexual filth was written on his blackboard. Sometimes the perpetrators were caught, sometimes not. No one ever traced this back to Peter’s influence, but such was Trevor’s certainty that his stepson was behind the persecutions that he all but persuaded Mercy that some, at least, of the outrages were the fault of her eldest son.
There was something, therefore, all the more touching about Trevor’s quiet surprise this evening.
‘He was …’
‘What was he, sweetheart?’
‘He was … nice.’
‘Come on, you guys!’ Mercy said to the boys. ‘Upstairs with you!’
She clapped her hands at them as if they were pigeons whom she wanted to scare into the air.
She wanted to make Trevor fly. He was quite visibly sunk in his gloom, slumped in it. Mercy had known many days of grief, fear and sadness in her life. Peter and his troubles were a constant, gnawing worry. She’d never, however, suffered from depression. In spite of reading books about it and talking about it to doctors, and living under the cloud of Trevor’s depression for seven years, she still did not understand it or even, really, know what it was.
‘Listen to your tapes,’ she suggested to his languid, drooping body. ‘Here – you like these, it’s that actor who makes you laugh.’
It was the actor who made Trevor laugh in the happy days; they’d loved his renditions of P.G. Wodehouse. Now – was this person she lived with Trevor? She’d bought the stereo, and the tapes, for him, hoping to raise the flicker of a smile on his ashen features.
‘Put on the headphones – go on.’
She did it for him, fitting the phones over his grey hair. He sat quite still while she did so. Then she switched on.
He leaned forward with a sudden spasm of agony and burst into tears.
‘Oh, oh …’ he moaned.
‘What? What, for God’s sake?’
Her sympathy had given out. He wrested the phones from his ears and leaned forward clutching his knees. She pulled the headphone connection from the socket in the player. Instead of their favourite comic actor reading about Jeeves, a loud violent voice:
It’s no use, bitch, dat you scream an’ cried
Cause jour nigga’s gonna Juck you an’ he’s comin inside
The music and the accompanying voices to the rap were harsh and violent. It felt as if the room had been invaded by a gang of young demons intent upon inflicting spiritual pain.
SIXTEEN
Tall, in his hooded cagoule, Peter kept moving, easiest way. The drizzle had turned to driving rain, so nothing was clear; all London was a smudge of car headlights reflected in raindrops, of orange street lighting glistening on wet pavements, of lighted windows and of spaces which were impenetrable, pure darkness. Cars, bikes, buses, pedestrians kept moving, beneath improvised head-covers made from folded newspapers, wind-blown small umbrellas whose spokes were askew, hoods and hats. In such a night identity and identities were swallowed in the glare and the blackness. Keep moving, keep walking. Keep calm.
Peter had been on buses, off buses, down the underground, up again. He’d paced the High Road, and caught an overland train to Clapham, then changed trains and came back.
In the train he’d played his Walkman and quietly repeated its phrases to himself. ‘London in August rather tends to give me the pip …’ ‘Having a corking time …’ ‘What ho, Jeeves! What ho!’
Out in a high street somewhere, a parade of shops, he turned up the volume.
‘Relief was surging through me in great chunks … I prowled about the neighbourhood all afternoon and evening, then I had a bit of dinner in a quiet restaurant in town and trickled back to the …’
Bally good show. One of the others, the characters inside him, had picked up the words, read by the actor on the tape. Even though he had turned up the tape to full blast, he could not blot them out.
He paused in a shop doorway, leaned back against the plate glass of a window selling electrical goods, and breathed deeply.
She’d been his slave, right?
I made Martina clean that kitchen floor with her tongue and she loved it – this from the Guards officer in a drawly voice.
Then she lick my dick, then she lick – this was the moron, the violent one who liked knives.
Then, drawled the major in the Coldstreams, I want you to hoover the drawing room.
Gee, the old woman – those scars! The kid was nearly wetting hisself with fear. Pity they had to drag the kid round with them all the while. The kid just wanted a kiss and a cuddle, wanted Martina to hold him, tell him everythin’s gonna be fine.
She knew without being told. She knew – he wept when he thought of it – why he couldn’t meet Mr Currey in the presence of his mum and his granny. The others all talked big, but you didn’t want to believe all they said. They hadn’t had no sex. It was him who’d had to.
‘If it crosses your mind to tell anyone …’ said Mr Currey.
‘Oh no, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t tell no one,’ whispered the kid.
‘Only I can get you sectioned – know what that is? Taken away. Locked up with other nutters. And they wouldn’t be gentle like I am.’
They all believed his threat – Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, the Coldstream major, the murderous moron, the kid and any of the others who had tagged along. Whenever Mr Currey had said it – and he’d said it each time he had Peter alone with him – they’d known it was true. Mr Currey could tell the school authorities, the police, the doctors that they had started the fire in the laboratory. He’d say that Peter was schizophrenic.
Murderous Moron talked big, said what he’d do to a brown-pipe engineer like Currey, cut that four inch of nuffin’ off him for starters, cut his face too. B
ut even MM feared Currey, feared his powers. And the others, besides, were aware that MM was a liability. Take all that stuff when they was all on their way to Redgauntlet Road to meet Martina.
He’d said how he’d burst into a flat the previous week. Just for practice. Knew the slag was alone. Saw her bloke go to work, then strolled over, nice ‘n’ slow and rang her bell jus’ as she was washing up the breakfast ‘n’ that. Said he was come to read the meter. She opened the door, no problems. No questions. She’d peed herself when she’d seen the Stanley knife. Literally wet herself as she simpered and emptied out the contents of her handbag.
No bally class, old boy, said Bertie.
Well then he’d tried an older bitch, in them flats down Wigan Road? She’d whimpered ‘n’ all – while he ripped up her pension book, made her empty out the contents of that bleeding teapot. Lots of pound coins and a few dirty fivers. Twenty-seven quid. He’d smirked. He could see the headline in The Daily Legion: MURDERED FOR JUST TWENTY-SEVEN POUNDS.
Not that he had murdered her.
Or had he?
Pressing his wet forehead against the cold plate glass of the shop window, and looking at the row upon row of refrigerators, Peter did not know. He tried deep breathing. He tried to be calm.
