by Will Self
Why, oh why, oh whyeeee! Why did Daddy abandon me like that? That's the $64,000 question, that's the Golden Shot. Why didn't he care for me, love me? He must – I am forced to conclude – have been a weakling, an emotional eunuch. That much is certain. He stepped aside and indifferently flicked a wet blanket at the raging bull of paternity. For that I can never forgive him.
When I was at university, The Fat Controller saw fit to supplement that version of my father's history that my mother had retailed when I was a child. It is characteristic of The Fat Controller that he should have extemporised in this fashion, dropping bombshells of feeling as casually as crumbs. We were sitting in a café and I recall that he was dunking a doughnut as he spoke, paying no mind to the tea slopping on his cuff, or the granular snowfall on his jacket lapels.
‘Your father – Harrumph! A contemptible Essene and no mistakin’ – I knew him well, of course.’
‘You've never said so before.’
‘Well, why should I? I've had no cause to. But now you are about to embark on a career it is only fair that you should know a little more about him. I dare say that your mother always spoke of him as a “brilliant man”.’
‘She did.’
‘Quite so, quite so. Did ye believe her?’
‘Well, not entirely, I never saw any evidence of it. While he was at home he never left the sun porch. He sat there all day reading the newspapers. Not even the nationals – he didn't seem to have the gumption to deal with anything much but the local advertiser. ‘
‘And then he went on his pilgrimage, by bus, I believe. He did at least understand this much, that the timetable expresses a set of mutable, quasi-astrological relations, the coming and going of ferrous bodies – ‘
‘Aren't you getting off the point?’
‘What point!’ he exploded – he could never abide interruption. ‘Don't be a booby, sir, you know I will not have a booby for an interlocutor!’
‘I'm sorry.’
‘Sorry isn't good enough – never is.’
We sat in silence for a while. The Fat Controller dunked. I looked on as the customers in an adjacent emporium crammed themselves into unsuitable denims. Eventually The Fat Controller spoke. ‘You knew that he was a businessman, of course?’
‘Yes, Mum told me that. I assumed that it was something insignificant, perhaps wholesale dry goods.’
‘Oh no, you've got it wrong there, boy. You probably can't remember but the furniture your mother had in the bungalow when you were a child came from the old St John's Wood house. It was really quite good, perfectly substantial. It dated from the time when you were very small and your father ran Wharton Marketing.’
‘He had his own company then?’
‘Absolutely. Your father was one of the most successful marketeers in sixties’ London. He had a real flair for it. Knew just how to launch a product, what activities were required, sales promotion or advertising. He had a nice line in statistical interpretation as well.’
‘What happened, why did the business fail?’
‘Well, people at the time said that it was mismanagement. They pointed to several large accounts that your father had either lost or failed to win, but that was a facile explanation. The truth was that he got bored.’
‘Bored?’
‘Oh yes – yes indeed. I knew him, as I say. Naturally, for I knew everyone of consequence. I had even done business with him on a number of occasions. I actually went to see him not long before the final collapse. The receivers were champing at the bit, I passed a man with a writ in the vestibule. Your father told me himself: “I just can't be buggered, Samuel,” that's what he said, “I can't even summon up the energy to sign a cheque. I can't engage any more.” That was the whole explanation, he was subject to a kind of fatal ennui. There was no other reason why the business should have gone down at all.’
So my father had retreated into his apathy and my mother moved the family to Saltdean. That much I had known already, and it was because of this that my conscious life began on a cliff. I say a cliff but really the site was more like a monstrous divot, kicked out from some golf course of the gods. On the divot sat the interleaved environs of the twin resorts of Saltdean and Peacehaven. Behind them was the ridge of the South Downs. Their rounded summits had a humanoid aspect, as if they were the grassed-over skulls of long-buried giants. In the lee of the Downs, between Saltdean and Rottingdean, were two contradictory edifices. One was a sprawling red-brick manse, the girls’ public school, Roedean. The other was a hideous Modernist joke, the prefiguration of ten thousand bypass-bound corporate compounds, the blind people's home, St Dunstan's. Both establishments were to play a part in my upbringing, a pivotal part.
Saltdean and Peacehaven, taken together what did they imply? Well – for the property speculators that built them – that the less well-heeled could, like their posher counterparts in Regency Brighton, be pickled into health. Fish in a fabricated barrel. But their heyday had been short-lived; a fifty-year season, during which the dregs of the English middle classes had been washed against the guttering of the Channel, before finally being sluiced down it, out into the Bay of Biscay and the Med.
Even by the time I was a child, the green-and-white picket fences, the pink-and-pebbledashed bungalows, the tea shops and other colourful amenities, all of them were in distempered decline. Psychic tumbleweeds blew down the cul-de-sacs and skittered around the crescents. It had become a landscape where everything that looked temporary was in fact permanent, and where everything that looked permanent was already scheduled for demolition.
My mother's caravan park capped it all. Besides the bungalow cum B & B there were twenty or so fibreglass sheds for holidaymakers. But their wheels were bound to the turf by weeds and nettles, and their quaint fifties’ aerodynamicism only served to underscore the hard truth that they – and by implication we as well – were going nowhere.
On this not-quite-Beachy head my mother made her stand. My father was grey enough but he had no eminence and my upbringing was left in my mother's more than competent hands.
It's difficult to talk about the woman with any objectivity, especially as she's still alive. Perhaps when she's dead the Mummy smell will disperse, like mustard gas from a trench-scarred battlefield, and I will be able to see her, and smell her, for what she really was. But not now. Now I can only think of her as an assisting adept, a distaff manipulator. It was she who set it up between me and The Fat Controller. I have long suspected that they may have been lovers at some time or other. I admit, it does sound preposterous. The technical problems would be well nigh insurmountable, for a start. The Fat Controller is just too fat to have penetrative sex in the normal way. Either his penis would have to be fantastically long and flexible, or he would need a series of finely calibrated, servo-mechanised clamps. These to be positioned in the deep furrows between his belly and his pubis, so as to lever the flab interfaces apart when the crucial moment came. I digress – but not entirely. This matter of the potential relationship between The Fat Controller and my mother is of some importance in what follows, and were I intent on constructing a defence for myself its actuality might well be at the core.
But I am blocked from further investigations, for The Fat Controller has thrown up some kind of numinous barrier or force field around his nether regions, and I cannot – with the best will in the world – get inside his trousers. So the above is only speculation.
Mother hailed from a Yorkshire family, the Hepplewhites. But although their name sounds authentically white rose, the truth is that they were fringe people. There was more than a dash of Romany blood in the Hepplewhites, Irish too. When my mother was a child the family lived in an extended, clannish sort of ménage which my grandfather, Old Sidney Hepplewhite, had established in a gaggle of dilapidated farm buildings outside Leeds.
The Hepplewhites lived by costermongering, car and caravan trading, scrap-metal dealing and worse. They were reluctant to go to law, preferring to settle their disputes themselves
. They were the sort of family who nowadays would have their children placed automatically on the ‘at risk’ register. Their lifestyle might have been affected on purpose, to inflame the suspicions of social workers. According to my mother, Old Sidney always carried a double-barrelled shot-gun, dangling from the poacher's hook inside his jacket, just in case a dispute should arise.
She wasn't embroidering. When I finally met Old Sidney, some five years ago, he still carried a gun. He threatened me with it when, wandering around Erith Marsh, I came upon his raggle-taggle encampment. I like to think that he had no idea that I was his kin when he drew the bead, but I cannot be sure.
At any rate, the shot-gun wasn't required when Mum married Dad. They met when my father was doing national service, mustering mattocks or somesuch in a depot outside Halifax. My mother must have seen something in Wharton senior, some potential. Clearly he was from a better class and perhaps that was sufficient. Mum is an expert, like so many English people, not only at detecting class origins in others, but also at obscuring her own. The Fat Controller has told me that she took to shopping at Worth and Harrods with a vengeance once my father was earning, and that her natural sense of style was a big contributor to their social success as a young couple on the make. She could mix a gin and ‘it’ or a dry Martini with consummate ease. But by the time I was conscious of such things, she had relapsed into a petit-bourgeois backwater. Her accent swung haphazardly between the broad vowels of the Dales and the clipped intervals of received pronunciation. Her once cultivated taste had collapsed back into itself, becoming notably deadened and bland.
Now, of course, she's gone the other way again. She sits sipping her ‘lap’ while chows and spaniels chew the laces of her Church's walking shoes and waxed rainwear steams on the leathern settle. I wonder if there will be any end to my mother's rollercoaster ride at the English social funfair.
She didn't wean me until I was three. So, what with my capacity for eidetic images, it's no wonder that her breast still has such significance for me. Indeed, I can see it clearly, right down to the precise accumulation of nodes on the surface of her oval brown aureoles. Oh Mummy, Mummy! That was real sex – everything else, everything that has followed, has just been afterplay. I can see you now, still young, with your S-bend figure and dirigible breasts, blood seeping into your complexion like runny jam into rice pudding. You must have been perpetually in a lather; the way you toyed with me, raised me up, so that my first intimations of the fleshly have remained for ever fused to your nylon armature.
At night I would be found by you, crying softly, slumped in the laundry basket, having walked in my sleep the length of the bungalow to find the cottony warmth of the airing cupboard. One of the slick cones of your brassière would be clutched in my chubby paw. It was as if by chafing it – I could somehow chafe you.
I can remember that and I can also remember you giving me my first words, teasing them in to me. It was at a time in childhood when the fictive world was still interleaved with the real world, and like an opium dreamer I moved between them. Mummy took me on her knee. She licked a looped fold of handkerchief and smeared away the chocolate stains from my mouth with an adamant digit. Then, with the same pointer, she thrust me on to the Island of Sodor. I wandered over the green page and marvelled at the way the blue steel slashed it cleanly apart. The engine people zipped this way and that, buffeting the coaches. They were apple-cheeked, their pink-fleshed humanoid faces tore out of the metal of their boilers as if they were some early form of bio-engineering.
‘Now, who's that then?’ said Mummy. ‘You know that engine's name, now don't you?’
‘Gor-on,’ said I, all gum and lip, palate as yet unfused.
‘And the little green engine, what's his name?’
‘Perthy.’
‘And what about that man? The big, fat man, who tells all the engines what to do. What's his name, Ian?’
‘Fa’ Co-ro-ro! Fa’ Co-ro-ro! Fa’ Co-ro-ro!’ I exulted in the syllables. I trilled and screamed them.
Mummy had bought the bungalow along with the caravan park. It was an L-shaped structure that had grown up over the years in a series of extensions. Mummy added the fourth and last. The long length of the bungalow was bounded by the forty-foot sun porch, roofed with green corrugated iron. While Father picked at his provincial free-sheets, Mummy squelched up and down the linoleum drumming up business on the telephone. She had one with an especially long flex. Or else she would stalk between the caravans, hunting the tradesmen who were meant to be toshing the place up, making it lickety-spick for the next load of work-pummelled urbanites who came to Cliff Top for their week or two of ozone and salted air.
Like all children whose parents are employed in the tourist industry, my life was divided into the ‘on’ and the ‘off’ season. The off season belonged to school and rain hammering on the corrugated roof of the sun porch, while the on season to belonged to the holidaymakers and their children. My mother had many regulars who came back year after year, and I was always accepted by them. It was a friendly atmosphere for a young child, with little to disturb it. As an only child I had my mother's undivided attention, the full force of her complacent love. And then there were also the aunts.
Old Sidney had had four daughters, all of whom had married wispy and ineffectual men. The whole bunch, aunts, their men-folk and assorted cousins, descended on Cliff Top every year for their two weeks of holiday. Indeed, in the early seventies during the worst of the slump, when even ordinary working-class families were all bound for the Med, I think it may have been my aunts’ custom that really kept my mother's business afloat. I can remember muttered discussions at night in serious, adult tones:
‘What would you do without us then, Dawn?’
‘Aye, what would y'do? You'd be on your uppers, lass, with Derek all gone to pieces, like – and that tubby brat of yours gobbling owt in sight.’
The aunts were like caricatures of my mother, such was the family resemblance. While Avril may have been thicker in the waist than Dawn, and Yvonne was perhaps prettier than May, all four of them had the same broad, sincere faces, chestnut eyes and mousy hair. They also painted their faces up in the same naive manner, adding cupid bows of lipstick to the powdered flesh above their lips.
It was like having one big four-headed Mummy when the aunts were in residence. They gathered us up in a giggling ball of blood-relatedness. During the off season my mother's smothering affection was often cold-tempered by financial chills – she would snap at me, deny me love and withdraw the physical affection I craved. During the winter I sometimes became the failed husband she had, rather than the demon lover she had always desired.
But each summer it all came right again. She would lie around with her sisters drinking beer, eating scallops, whelks, mussels and cockles. They would all smack their lips – sometimes in unison. Whenever a child got near enough to this recumbent maternal gaggle it would be grabbed and kissed, or raspberries would be blown on kid flesh, sticky with ice-cream and gritty with sand.
When the aunts and cousins were in residence I ran free. Together with my cousins I would plunge down the steep steps to the rocky beach. Then we would make our way along the undercliff walk to Brighton where we would ride on Volks Electric Railway, or play crazy golf, or thud along the warm boards of the West Pier. In the pier arcades, antiquated mechanical Victorian tableaux were still in place. These were cabinets, in which six-inch-high painted figures, animated by a heavy penny, would jerkily reenact the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, or the hanging of Doctor Crippen. The shingled beaches along the front at Brighton rattled and crunched with the exertions of many thousands of rubber souls. There were motor launches, rentable for a shilling's cruising on the oblong lagoons beneath the esplanade at Hove. Further along still, towards the ultima Thule of Shoreham, there were the salt-water baths of the King Alfred Centre. My favourite, situated as if in open defiance of the laws of nature, up a steep, magnolia-tiled stairway.
We would often
stay out until way past dark.
The scents of piss and soap, blown around the concrete floor of the shower block. A thin man – possibly an uncle – braces down his back, shaving in the chipped mirror. The moles on his shoulders are bright pink in the wash of morning sunlight and he accompanies himself with a rhythmic little ditty, ‘Cha, cha, cha! Cha, cha, cha!’ the emphasis always on the last ’cha’, Gulls are squawking overhead. While along the horizon a freighter weeping rust proceeds jerkily, as if it were just a larger version of the plaster ducks in the shooting gallery on the Palace Pier. In this sharpened past I'm always sinking my mouth in my mother's hair, which is frazzled by her accumulated sexual charge. It's sweet, undulant, as sticky as candyfloss. You get the picture. Mine was a childhood that was sufficiently problematic to make me interesting, but not enough to disturb. The on season, that is.
I was about eleven when Mr Broadhurst came to live at Cliff Top. I had passed the eleven-plus and was shortly to become indentured to Varndean Grammar. This would mean an eight-mile round-trip every day to the outskirts of Brighton. To celebrate the result, Mum had bought me a new briefcase of blue canvas and black vinyl, and stocked it with a tin-boxed Oxford Geometry Kit and plastic-backed exercise books. I was carrying this self-importantly around the caravan park, very conscious of the interplay of my feelings: the adoption of the correct professional stance when holding the briefcase and the sense of foreboding I always had, standing on the verge of the off season.
