by Adam Thorpe
‘Bloody cat,’ said my father, ‘bloody damn cat.’
‘Oh dear,’ said my mother, ‘oh dear.’
She sounded as though she was about to cry. We had all knocked our heads, and were all dripping blood from our noses. My father had cut his lip on the steering wheel, my mother had struck some knobs on the dashboard. We got out of the car and saw the troughs made in the road by the tyres, their rubber smeared white where it had gripped. The car was facing the opposite verge, but there was nothing else coming. I’m afraid I was crying, though my nose didn’t hurt that much. Perhaps it was the cat, which lay perfectly intact further up the road, as if it was sleeping off the shock.
My mother hugged me. Her dress smelt of the hotel room’s mothballed cupboard. My father picked the cat up by the tail and laid it on the verge, slapping his hands afterwards as he always did when he’d carried out a difficult task. Then he dabbed his mouth again, and I looked up at the sky and dabbed my nose, and my mother dabbed hers and mine. My mother was giggling: it was apparently funny, the three of us dabbing our faces with hankies, even though we only had trees and hedges to watch us.
Then she said, ‘Poor cat. It might have been adored by someone.’
I was careful to keep my mother’s hankie, saying I still needed it. As soon as we got back to my uncle’s, and the privacy of my own room, I cut out the bloody part and put its red circle, folded tightly, into my fetish packet.
‘Give me the heart of a lion,’ I murmured, ‘and the cunning of a snake, and the astonishing pluck of Captain E.R.G.R. Evans.’
I was holding the packet against my chest. It seemed to move in my hands, like the brown monkey’s paw jerking in the hand of its owner in a story I’d found in the hotel’s bookshelves, and which had not left my head. Quiri had once told me that fetishes were not for wishing upon, unless you were a sorcerer. I also remembered that, unless the blood was replenished, the borfima turned against its owner, like the monkey’s paw in the tale. I felt I had taken a wrong step, on which there was no going back.
I sat on the bed and put the fetish packet under the pillow. I felt more like Captain Scott than Captain Evans, and thought of that half face in the puzzle. Because the tablecloth underneath was red, it had looked as if Scott had been horribly injured. There was a soft knock at the door. I grunted, chin in my hands. My mother stepped in, with a clean set of pyjamas and a glass of milk.
‘Sand between my toes, I’ve got sand between my toes,’ she said, in a sing-song voice.
I decided to wait till tomorrow before pleading with my parents. The knock on my nose had given me a headache, and I was feeling suddenly weak and tired, as if the whole of the rest of my life from now would be a great burden, to be hauled over broken ice and around dark chasms of crevasses.
The next morning I asked my mother to cut my hair. It was thick with salt and took three washes to clear it. I was always worried when it came to having my hair cut, but no grown-up ever thought my mark was anything but dirt, or a bruise, or something inherited at birth. Mr Hassingham, the oily-haired barber in the village with a missing finger, thought it was dirt. He pointed it out to Aunt Joy, but my mother must have talked to her because she didn’t say anything to me afterwards. The school barber, a bald man called Jardine who claimed to be related to the England cricketer, thought it was a ‘birth defect’. He’d arrive on a silver bicycle with his scissors and things in an old Red Cross case on his back. I recall him very clearly because he was full of tales of the England side; I both liked him and feared him as his razor scraped at my nape.
On my first holiday back from Flytings, my aunt herself cut my hair. She used her sewing scissors in the kitchen, leaving the back just long enough, but sharpening it to a tail. Through the year, she’d collect the fallen curls in a paper bag; as soon as the first rosebud showed, she hung the curls in bunches from the stems, or threw them wildly over some of the bushes, to keep off the deer. It was my smell, she said. I helped her, rubbing my hair between my fingers so that it came alive, then scattering it over the budding shrub.
‘Not that one, Hugh!’ she’d shout. ‘That’s for display in the Hortics! They won’t give me a prize if it’s full of your off-cuts!’
These special shrubs she covered with a fine netting. My hair mostly worked, which was a shame; I wanted to see deer wandering through our garden at night, taking the blooms one by one in their mouths, leaving only a shivering stem. It excited me, to think of deer living nearby. I only saw them a couple of times, from my window very early in the morning – their tawny shadows leaping across the field’s ploughed lines and up over the crest which just hid the Atlantic Ocean, not more and more of England.
It was as my mother was cutting my hair, after our return from Bexhill, that my uncle found what he was looking for.
The ditches he’d dug were quite large and long and deep by now: at the bottom and along the sides there were large chunks of chalk, a bit like rough-hewn Lotts Bricks, a set for giants. There were three of these ditches, curving round the tumulus like a bone necklace; they were, in fact, following the old ditch, which my uncle said had been filled in over the millennia. I was very proud of the little wooden sign at the head of each ditch, because I had painted the names on them, red on white: Segment A, Segment B, Segment C.
At first it was quite hard to see the skeletons, but my uncle pointed them out to us, in Segment B. My mother and my father stood either side of me on the edge. My scalp glowed and tingled from the wash and the cut, the feel of my mother’s strong hands. My uncle was standing on a plank in the ditch, his sunburned face split into a wide grin.
‘There’s the pig,’ he said, pointing, ‘and here’s the ram.’
I saw what I knew were ribs, mixed up together – and the twirly horn of a ram.
‘Tell us more,’ said my father.
‘It’s Suovetaurilia said my uncle, with his hands on his hips and his legs wide apart, sounding as if he was greeting somebody with that name whom he hadn’t seen for a long time.
I thought that Suovetaurilia (which was obviously Latin) must be very well known, whatever it was. My father said, ‘Something to do with a bull, Edward.’
My uncle said, ‘What a fine classic you are, James! Never knew you had it in you! A sacrifice, my dear chaps! A pig, a ram, and an ox! The classic sacrifice of the classic world! Only here we’re talking about pre-classic Britain!’
Every time my uncle said classic, it sounded like a pistol shot.
‘Where’s the ox?’ my mother asked.
My uncle blinked a bit. ‘You always have to have everything at once, don’t you, Charlie?’
My mother laughed.
‘Um, how many years before Rome, exactly?’ asked my father.
My uncle waved his hand about. ‘This is a primary level,’ he said, ‘so we’re in the Neolithic – early Neolithic, what’s more. A good two thousand years before all those awful bloody straight roads.’
‘How on earth did you know it was there?’ asked my mother, not telling him off for swearing.
‘I didn’t know, Charlotte, I intuited.’
‘Oh, come on, Edward!’
‘I did!’
He was bouncing his pendulum in his hand. It was like a large teardrop, and was made of crystal. I’d seen it go round and round, as fast as a carousel, under his stiff hand.
‘Oh that!’ snorted my mother, ‘then they must be two-a-penny.’
I wanted to ask what ‘intuited’ meant, but there seemed to be an argument going on between my uncle and my mother, and my uncle was just opening his mouth again.
‘But hang on,’ my mother interrupted, ‘you’ve found an awful lot of bones, you know. You were probably bound to find a sheep and a pig chucked in. Not counting the non-appearance of the ox.’
‘In the same ditch? Buried whole? Just as in Suovet –’
‘They probably roasted them on a spit, Edward.’
My uncle flung up his arms and made an angry sound, almost a roar: ‘
Sometimes, Charlotte my dear, I want to do to you what I used to do to you!’
My father turned to my mother, with a faint smile on his lips: ‘What did he used to do to you, darling?’
My mother frowned. ‘I can’t think, James. He was such a sweet, kind, thoughtful brother to me.’
Then she smiled, as if she’d won. In the stories she’d told me of her childhood, Uncle Edward always seemed to be bashing her up, or teasing her, or playing practical jokes. I frowned, a bit puzzled. The sun came out and we had to shield our eyes from the glare off the chalk.
My uncle joined us up on the edge; I had wanted to go in, but for the moment nobody else was allowed to – not even my aunt. He was wiping his hands on a cloth. ‘I’ve always wanted to find a sacrifice,’ he said. ‘A real one.’
‘There are false ones, are there?’ enquired my father.
My uncle stopped wiping his hands and looked at my father with a twisted-up face, which might have been because of the sun in his eyes. ‘You know damn bloody well there are, James,’ said my uncle. ‘You and I were in the biggest one of the lot.’
He threw the cloth down and walked off, as if he was very annoyed. I looked up at my mother. Because I’d just had my hair cut, my neck and back were itching. She’d carried out the scissors by mistake: they were in her hand like a knife.
‘The war,’ she said, but so quietly I had to read her lips, as I had to do when she asked me for something across the tea table while my uncle or aunt were talking.
The following evening, I knocked on my parents’ door while they were dressing for dinner. It was a special dinner, because it was the last one before their return home. I was in my pyjamas, and had already kissed them goodnight. My father was pulling on his new white trousers; he was very proud of them. We had gone together to Walters of Oxford at the beginning of his leave, where he had bought the trousers, a white dress coat, two spine pads, mosquito boots, and two hurricane lamps.
‘Look at this,’ he said to me.
Instead of buttons, the trousers had a ‘zip’, like I had seen on bags. He pulled the zip up to his waist button.
‘Very American,’ said my mother, making her eyebrows darker and thinner at the dressing-table mirror. ‘I never thought I’d live to see the day, James.’
She turned to me, with only one eyebrow painted, like clowns had. ‘Your father’s a fuddy-duddy, you know, Hugh.’
‘What’s a fuddy-duddy?’
‘Someone,’ said my father, ‘who doesn’t like to throw out the best of the old for the worst of the new.’
I dropped on to my knees, as I had always planned to do. My mother was looking at my father’s reflection in the mirror, and didn’t notice.
‘That’s much too pat,’ said my mother. ‘New things scare you. You’re scared of things like jazz, you’re scared of the wireless, you’re scared of talking films –’
‘Nonsense,’ said my father, buttoning his dress shirt, ‘it’s a question of taste. Talking films are vulgar. I do not want to hear a fairy or an Emperor talk with an American accent or any other accent, for that matter. People talk too much, anyway, and mostly nonsense.’
He was taking his collar out of the drawer, breathing as if he’d just been running. ‘Nothing scares me,’ he went on, ‘except the little man in round glasses on the Clapham omnibus, with his packet of weedkiller. And the smell of garlic.’
I opened my mouth, lifting my hands into the right position, flat together in front of my face.
‘Why garlic?’ laughed my mother.
My father, his shirt dangling over his trousers, leaned on my mother’s chair and gazed at her in the mirror. Because I wanted to know why he was scared of garlic, I closed my mouth.
‘Mustard gas,’ he said, quietly. ‘It blew over us while I was having my little stint in Flanders, before the blessings of Africa. The damn stuff smelt of garlic, and vice-versa.’
‘Of course,’ sighed my mother, ‘you don’t need to tell me.’
He kissed her on the cheek and stood up straight again.
‘Hugh,’ he said, in a different sort of voice, ‘I expect you to be a good boy at school, and to write us once a week.’
He was looking up almost at the ceiling, attaching his collar stud. My mother was pressing a lipstick against her mouth. The room was puddled in light and full of a sweet, grown-up smell that normally started when I was in bed. I swallowed. I realised my hands had dropped and that I was sitting back on my heels.
‘I’m not going,’ I said, in a thin voice that was not really mine.
I was looking down at the nearest foot of their bed, poking out from under the green-and-orange coverlet. The foot was shaped like a claw, as if waiting to rip apart a passer-by.
‘I always used to say that,’ chuckled my father, unexpectedly. He was tying his tie, still looking up at the ceiling. ‘Always used to say that, before the off.’
I could see him in the mirror, where his face looked skew-whiff beyond the back of my mother’s head. This was swapped by her face with a bright-red mouth, and I looked away, surprised.
‘Hugh,’ said my mother, ‘we’ve had a lovely time together. It won’t be long –’
‘Nine months,’ I said.
‘It goes very quickly, Hugh. For some children, it’s two years or even more –’
‘I want to go back –’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ snorted my father.
My mother said ‘Ssssh!’, then: ‘You’re not unhappy at Flytings, are you?’
She looked both anxious and annoyed. I heard my father sigh, impatiently – perhaps because he had been told to shush. Or perhaps because of me. I wanted to leave the room, because my parents were not quite my parents. Perhaps a sorcerer had called their names from the side of the path. I stood up. Now I had a very strong desire to throw myself upon their bed, but their bed was spread with their clothes, wrapped in cellophane. My mother had bought a roll of cellophane in Oxford, to my great excitement. The man in Walters of Oxford had then told her that cellophane and Africa did not go well together, but she’d said that that was true of everything.
My mother stretched out her arm, so that her fingers rested on my elbow. The nails were very shiny, as if they were under cellophane as well.
‘Hugh, you remember that little white girl called Primrose, whose parents ran the Mission Station on the road to Duala?’ I nodded. (She had spent much of the party at the Allinsons’ pulling my hair.) ‘Well, she died of a fever at Christmas. Africa and white children do not go well together.’
‘Like cellophane,’ I murmured.
‘What? Speak up,’ said my father. ‘I won’t have things said under your breath.’
My father was not usually so short-tempered with me here, but perhaps that was because I had spent the holidays striving with all my might to be a very good boy.
‘Like cellophane,’ I said, louder.
‘What?’ my father snapped. His nose was still red and peeling, from our seaside holiday. His nose had never been burned like that in Africa, though when he’d had too much gin and was cross with everybody and everything, it looked as if it had been.
I found myself back in my bedroom, where I lay on the bed and tried to weep. I forced tears to come, as if I was squeezing my face like a lemon. The end of my visit to their bedroom was unclear in my head, as if I was seeing it all with my good eye shut. I had walked out and slammed the door, but between my father’s ‘What?’ and my walking out there had been some other things said. Both my parents had talked at the same time, about school and duty and selfishness and fever, but my ears had gone deaf, filling with a kind of brown water.
It was better to keep things secret, I thought. It was better not to breathe a word of what you felt, because then it was always before and not after it, when it was already too late and Long John Silver and Israel Hands and George Merry and the rest were aboard, waiting to cut you down like pork.
Very bad news is broken in stages, however abruptly. I once
heard a friend of my uncle’s liken it to evolution, making a sort of nihilist joke. I was about fifteen when he said this: perhaps precociously, I ignored his nihilism and referred him to the beaten-up messenger in Antony and Cleopatra.
‘It’s partly selfish, this tact,’ I said.
We were in deckchairs on the lawn: the man was very thin with a straggly moustache under a pointed nose. He had dirty fingernails and was some sort of priest in a hessian ballgown, eating nothing but a gruel of knotweed, dock leaves and nettles at teatime.
‘Hugh’s a scholar already,’ my uncle said.
The friend made a face. ‘Scholars can’t see their noses for their fat bottoms.’
‘I have no desire to see my nose,’ I replied, ‘were it long enough in the first place.’
I wasn’t normally so spirited; something seized me that afternoon and I rode on a fiery chariot, witty perhaps for the first time in my life, fencing an adult with an assured arm. My uncle was amused, and maybe proud: at least, he made no apology for me.
The very bad news about my mother certainly evolved, rather than broke.
Sometimes I think it began as early as when she first disappeared up the lane and I tripped over by the orchard. There were three more leaves (she couldn’t come in the year I was ten) and each one repeated this disappearing act. I didn’t chase her any more, of course; I would stand by the gate and pretend to wave cheerily, or on the station platform if she was leaving for London. But the night I was given the bad news, it wasn’t those moments I dreamt of, or even the bush; instead I saw her being swallowed up again by Pottinger’s Mill, knowing in my dream that its big doors opened on to a bottomless and lightless cliff.
The real thing happened during her third leave in 1931. I was nine. One morning she said she wanted to go for a ‘stretch’. This meant a decent walk. Often she would go on a walk by herself because she needed to read poetry, and she would take a thin book out of my uncle’s library. If I asked her afterwards if she’d liked the poetry, she looked shy, or even cross, and said I musn’t ‘examine’ her. My uncle reckoned she didn’t even open the book; I heard him say this when he was putting one of them back. This was probably because my mother didn’t like Miss Edith Sitwell, and my uncle did.
