‘You all right, Big Yin?’ he asked.
I didn’t know. I was aware of having heard noises – people running, somebody shouting, something like a scream – but it was quiet now. I looked away and saw some guy walking across the square, trying to hold his face together with his hands, blood dribbling through his fingers, but in that moment, I didn’t connect him with what had just happened. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked Tam.
Tam didn’t take his eyes off me. ‘There’s a wee bit cut on your head there,’ he said. ‘I’d get that seen to, if I were you.’ I raised my hand and found the wet, sticky jag of something in my eyebrow. ‘But first, I’d get out of here,’ Tam said. ‘The polis will be along in a minute. If they can be bothered.’
He straightened up. Somewhere behind him somebody was calling out, shouting the same thing over and over, but it sounded like somebody who wasn’t serious, somebody just pretending. I couldn’t make out what it was, or where the voice was coming from. The boy with the gash in his face was sitting on the flagstones at the far end of the walk. Tam didn’t wait to see what I would do, he just patted me on the shoulder and turned away. I stood up. I felt light-headed, excited, but I didn’t really think I was there. All that had happened had happened to somebody else, and I had just come across it by accident, a moment ago. I turned and walked off, suddenly aware of how bright it was under the street lamps. It was half a mile to home along Gainsborough Road. As soon as the thought came to me, I started running, a trickle of blood meandering down my face, my head buzzing. I felt quick and alive; at the same time, I knew I had been granted a unique favour, a singular piece of luck. The police wouldn’t see me, nobody would see me, because I was invisible. I had no mass, no volume; I was nothing but movement. If I were to stop running now, I thought, I would disappear altogether. But even while I was running, I was invisible. It made no sense, or it did in a kind of Zeno’s Paradox way, but I wasn’t thinking about sense, or paradox, or anything else, I was just running. I felt amazing. I felt free; I felt lucky; and I knew I would never, ever go out with the stores boys again.
I went in to work the next day expecting some kind of post-mortem, but the boys just acted as if nothing had happened. Wee John asked me, in front of a group of women in the canteen, how I’d hurt my head – his little joke. Nobody said anything about the night before until later, in the middle of the afternoon, when we were all down in stores. It was a tea break. We’d been talking about nothing much and I was feeling one of the gang, a little pleased with myself, glad to have got away with whatever it was I had got away with. At the back of my mind, I’d had a dim, superstitious fear that they would know how relieved I felt, as I ran home in my cloak of invisibility. The boys seemed more powerful to me than ever, now – and not just physically.
It was Tam who got things started. ‘Remind me not to get into anything with this one again,’ he said to Wee John, tipping his head towards me.
‘Aye,’ John said. ‘He’s scary though, isn’t he?’
Tam laughed. ‘I’ve never seen anybody go down that quick,’ he said. ‘It really was a sight to behold.’
‘Maybe he’s got vertigo,’ Wee John said.
‘Maybe so,’ Tam agreed. He looked at me and grinned. ‘Anyway, he didnae run, I suppose,’ he said. ‘He stood his ground – ’
‘Almost,’ said Big John.
I’d been offended to begin with, though I didn’t know why. The boys were right. On the night, I’d been a liability. Now, though, I saw the funny side of it. They didn’t expect me to be some big hard man. They thought I was smart. They knew they were bampots. I did what I did; they did what they did. Maybe I was their witness – though if I was, I hadn’t made a very good one. ‘I didn’t have time to run,’ I said, ‘that boy hit me before I even saw him.’
Tam nodded. ‘Dinnae worry, Big Yin,’ he said. ‘Next time, we’ll pack you off to the infirmary before the fireworks start.’
CHAPTER 7
In 1971, I dropped my first tab of lysergic acid diethylamide. It would be a gross understatement to say that this was a revelation – and would be a mistake to talk about LSD in the same terms as other drugs. LSD-25 is a sacrament; by which I mean, something that allows the celebrant to win back some participation in his environment. All my life, my environment had been controlled by fathers of every persuasion, by corrupt authority, by The System: when I asked for bread from any one of these fathers, he gave me a stone; when I asked for fish, he gave me a serpent. Then, from nowhere, there was this pill, this tiny microdot on a roll of cellophane, and all of a sudden I was a participant, the celebrant of one small corner of the world, a corner where the standards are so much higher than they are elsewhere. And I said: This is it. I take this little pill and new rules apply. Nothing can touch me. Too late to stop now. Love Is Gonna Bring Us Back Alive. Acid was a sacrament and nobody could control it. Nobody could give it to you and nobody could take it away. It was a sacrament.
When I was growing up, a promise had been implicit in the communion host, the promise of a sacramental moment which, in turn, promised revelation, a new awareness, grace. I remember the excitement I felt on my first communion day, when I stepped forward, knelt at the altar rail and waited my turn – and I remember the disappointment afterwards, when nothing happened. For me, the host was only a wafer of unleavened bread melting on my tongue, a wafer of bread and another empty ceremony. I didn’t need to study theology to know that something was missing from that experience, and I didn’t need to know the etymology to know that what I needed from religion was exactly what the word promised. That etymology – religere, to retie, to reconnect – said explicitly what I had always implicitly known: it said that, when I went to Mass, when I prayed, when I received the host, when I walked through the snow on a Christmas morning to sing carols in a cold church, surrounded by flickering candles, I was supposed to be renewing my place in the world, reconnecting with everything around me, remembering my place in the whole. Only, it wasn’t happening.
Acid did what the host failed to do. Acid was the only real sacrament to which I had access. It connected me back to the world, it re-attuned me to the subtler, deeper frequencies of the material. It made me see the possibility of wholeness, of what the alchemists called pleroma. Here I was, the boy who had seriously thought about a vocation. Now, though the source wasn’t quite what I’d expected, I had one. I knew, of course, that it was a synthetic experience; but I also knew that what was synthetic about it was only the starting point, the first step on a long walk through the chambers of my imagery. One person could drop a tab of sunshine, or black microdot, and go to heaven, another could do the same and go to hell – there were so many variables. Later, when I became interested in meditation, I remember meeting a guy – the husband of a friend – who was so in love with himself meditating, he thought he’d achieved satori after a couple of years of sitting. Thing was, he was trying to talk about it, so I guess it wasn’t quite satori, but it was instructive to listen, interesting to hear what he wanted enlightenment to be. I don’t want to sound superior – it’s not as if I’ve never been guilty of a little Blue Peter mysticism myself – but at the time I couldn’t help thinking that it all sounded like the pretty UFO-type acid trip they show in movies, all lights and bliss and inexplicable warmth. Acid could be like that, too, but it usually wasn’t. Usually, it was something you couldn’t describe, even if you wanted to. Sure, if you drop a tab or two of pink microdot, or Strawberry Fields, your body will be charged all the time, like the Northern Lights, always moving, always changing. But that’s not all. Nowhere near. Problem is, anything you say about acid is purely theoretical, just as it is with any sacrament. All I can say is that my experiences with LSD had nothing to do with drugs, and everything to do with the order a child needs, as it grows. It wasn’t about having fun, or living some alternative lifestyle, it was about a whole system that didn’t work, a system that lacked any real authority.
According to the exemplary story I was told
as a child, George Washington, president and father of his nation, ‘could not tell a lie’. Yet all the time I was growing up, his successors lied every night of the week on prime-time television, not just on the news but via advertising, infotainment, feature films, game shows, late-night educational programmes. A web of untruths about how we lived and what we consumed and what was considered useful knowledge constituted the very fabric of my world. I would sit in front of the TV, watching some politician or company CEO look straight to camera and tell a barefaced, deliberate untruth, and the thought that almost always struck me was that these men had children of their own, that they were lying to them, as well as to the rest of us. It wasn’t just my father who was lying, it was everybody’s father. No surprise, then, that my generation’s heroes – our ghost brothers – were moral orphans who were determined to invent themselves anew in another world, not by choice but because their fathers had betrayed them. They were the crazies, the yippies, the Weathermen, the people who said ‘never trust anybody over thirty’. For me, most of all, they were the eco-lunatics who talked to plants, the crazed boys who swept along the margins of golf courses looking for magic mushrooms, the wild-eyed latter-day berserkers who crushed Amanita muscaria for its psychotropic juices, the seekers after truth and alternative scientists who threw away the possibility of acceptance and good careers for a religion that included meaningful sacraments. For them, as for me, fatherhood had been discredited; the Father, as archetype, was a liar. For boys like us, all that remained was our own minds, and what we could do with them.
What I did was to withdraw into the virtual equivalent of solitary confinement. By the time I was sixteen, I was making any excuse to sit out Sunday lunches, wandering off at the last minute, just as my mother was about to call us in – it didn’t matter if there was hell to pay afterwards, I just couldn’t bring myself to sit down at the same table as my father. This upset my mother: she wanted, more than anything, for us all to keep up an acceptable pretence, to go through the motions. There would even be times when my father would make an effort, bringing home a bottle of Liebfraumilch or Blue Nun from the off-licence and opening it himself while my mother set out her best tumblers. Still nothing could shift me. On the single Christmas Day my father decided to spend at home, I disappeared halfway through the morning, and spent the rest of the day walking along the disused railway line, hiking through cuttings and along embankments in the new snow, alone, happy, growing up. My mother was furious, but my father didn’t say anything about it. At the time, I didn’t think he cared.
My relations with my mother, by now more détente than lived affection, were breaking down. Not long before that fateful Christmas, she had found a packet of Durex and a copy of The Communist Manifesto crammed into the sweet, dusty gap behind the more acceptable books on my shelf. A week or so later, she came downstairs in the small hours when my father was on night shift, and found me in the living room with a girl she didn’t know. A Protestant. Not much was going on, but she had stood behind the half-open door, in her nightdress, and said, in a hurt, firm voice, ‘I think you’d better get that girl a taxi home. Her parents will be worried.’ After she found the subversive book – lent to me by a history teacher at my all-Catholic school, as it happened – and the prophylactics, she called the priest in. Had it been Father Duane, he would probably have made her see that things weren’t anywhere near as bad as she imagined; instead, the new priest, a peely-wally Englishman with sandy hair and yellowish freckles, came and sat in the front room, ignored the plate of home-baked buns and chocolate digestives my mother had put out, and talked about obedience and chastity, while I sat in my father’s ‘big seat’, next to the dead television set, and stared out of the window at the rain, nodding from time to time, while the town darkened.
It was a stupid idea – perverse, I suppose – but at the time it seemed promising. Proposition: what would it be like to drop half a tab of microdot, then sit down to one of our Sunday lunches? The whole thing: chicken, mashed potatoes, soggy sprouts, trifle, my father’s bad wine. I flirted with the idea for months before I actually got round to doing it, but it was up there on the list of stupid (perverse) things to do. I’d gone to Mass, once, tripping; later, I would take acid on the night shift at the steelworks. I dropped acid in muddy fields, on the bus to Kettering, in the pub, in bed with lovers and strangers, but nothing compared to that Sunday afternoon, when I sat with the entire family, not even trying to hide the fact that I was out of it. The odd thing was, not trying turned out to be the best policy. Things only went wrong when I tried to appear normal; when I was just sitting, eating, letting what little conversation there was drift by, I was entirely functional, a perfect mask for all that was going on at the back of my mind, in the place where stories unfold. At the same time, I was watching, listening, finding tiny details to latch on to that would move me along from one moment to the next, more or less at the same pace as everybody else around the table. That was always the difficult part when you were trying to pretend you weren’t tripping: time. It passes at different speeds, tripping and straight; on a trip, it’s not so uniform, not so homogenous. You can get caught up in a glint of sunlight on the tine of a fork, or a glance out of the window at the incredible green of the tree by the back wall, and you lose track of what’s happening in the clock-governed realm of others. Or you remember a line from a song and you suddenly understand all the things it might have meant. I knew that the way through this ridiculous test I had set myself was to concentrate on the everyday details: to find the magic in them, yes, but also to keep moving, to get to a point where, if it wasn’t working any more, there would be a way out. So I listened: to the almost imperceptible creaks and tears in their voices, to the silences, to the sudden, dark, hurt-sounding noise my father made in his nose from time to time, to the sounds people make when they are eating. Normally, at those family lunches, my unattuned ear heard only the crude noise of mastication. Now, it could distinguish even the finest nuances: bright, wet sounds, like a small party of explorers making its way through sodden rainforest; little crunches and snaps in the cheekbones; the several sounds of swallowing, not just one gulp, but a series of operations in the back of the mouth and the throat, delicate, expert, casual. That was how I got through: by listening. Now and then, my mother asked me a question, or tried to start a conversation, but nobody expected much from those Sunday lunches. Getting through was all that mattered, and we were all intent on getting through, one way or another. Then, as I would have done anyhow, I disappeared up to my room to listen to music through my new headphones, quite sure I had pulled off yet another pointless exercise in perversity.
The terrible, yet strangely poignant, tradition of families like ours was that the excesses of Sunday lunch be followed, at around seven in the evening, by a light supper of salmon sandwiches or, when money was short, of a cold, glassy-looking meat paste called potted hough. That day, we were having the best: soft white bread spread thick with butter, and filled with tinned salmon that had been strategically mixed with enough vinegar to remove any fish taste altogether. I wasn’t quite straight by the time I was called to this feast, but I went downstairs feeling confident, easy, ready for anything. It didn’t take long for me to realise that something was wrong. Margaret looked worried, and my mother was withdrawn and quiet, setting things out on the table, her thin-lipped mouth even tighter and more wounded than usual. Still, nobody said anything. I wondered if maybe my mother and father had had an argument while I’d been upstairs – about me, perhaps – but I didn’t think any more about it. I ate my salmon sandwiches, helped clear the table, hung around waiting for the mood to lighten, then lingered a while longer trying to get Margaret on her own, so I could ask her what had happened. She wasn’t playing, though, so I went back upstairs. I didn’t emerge till the next morning, after my father had gone on day shift. Nobody said anything out of the ordinary. Whatever had happened, it seemed to have been forgotten. I knew it would have had something to do with me, but
I wasn’t that bothered. Détente – that was as much as I was hoping for. Anything for a quiet life: the basic philosophy of the male. The dark cloud lingered, however. It wasn’t there all the time, but it kept coming back, and I knew something would come out, eventually. All I had to do was wait.
Things came to a head in the most unlikely circumstances. After all the risks I had taken and got away with, it was a friend from school – a former friend, really, a boy from whom I had become estranged for no particular reason, other than the usual vagaries of teenage life – who blew my cover. It was about three weeks after the Chicken and Acid Sunday Lunch, on a week night, when my father was at home. My mother had gone to bed early – she often did, climbing the stairs painfully, clutching her Mills & Boon – and my father was watching television. When he had day shift, he often stayed home, stayed sober, got to bed early. It made for a certain tension, but we all had our hiding places for such occasions: my mother taking her book to bed early, me in my room, smoking, or reading subversive literature, Margaret watching the little television set my father had brought home one day as an early Christmas present. My father was a world leader in early presents; things didn’t always fall off the back of a lorry at exactly the moment he needed them.
A Lie About My Father Page 16
