I think what distressed me most after Hilda moved into number twenty-seven was seeing my mother’s clothes being worn by a prostitute. It was not only the idea of trespass and violation, there was the daily spectacle of what happened to the clothes when Hilda put them on. My mother was a slender woman, she had a slim, delicate figure, boyish almost, whereas Hilda was all curves, she was fleshy. So my mother’s clothes were tight on her, and became as a result provocative; what had been demure on my mother was tarty on Hilda, but then that was the nature of the woman, everything she touched in some way became tarty.
I began, I remember, to watch her, for she provoked in me a sort of appalled fascination. It’s difficult to talk about this, but to see the dresses, the aprons, the cardigans that still, for me, carried the aura of my mother, to see them transfigured, charged with the sort of physical invitation that was stamped on all Hilda’s gestures, all her speech, the way she walked, the way she swung her bottom—this affected me strongly. Often I followed her when she went shopping, or in the evening when she would slip on that mangy fur and go clicking down the alley in her heels, my mother’s lipstick on her mouth, my mother’s underwear next to her skin, my mother’s husband on her arm—I’d slip down the alley behind them, move (like an African boy) from shadow to shadow, silent, invisible, a phantom, a ghost. When they drank in the Earl of Rochester I watched them through the windows, I was outside in the cold and darkness, and I peeped in at them as they basked and drank in the bright, sociable warmth of the bar. I found a way into the yard at the back of the pub and this gave me access to the windows of the lavatories; standing on a barrel I would look down on Hilda when she came out to the Ladies, I’d see her with her underpants at her ankles and her dress hitched up, her bottom not touching the toilet seat; then, having wiped herself, it was out with the compact and a quick go with my mother’s powder and lipstick. She never saw me, though once, I remember, as I craned on tiptoe to see what she was doing, the barrel wobbled beneath my feet and she looked up—but not before I’d ducked my head and regained my balance. As I say, I experienced a sort of appalled fascination at the sheer brazenness of the creature, I watched her as you might some exotic wild animal, with a mixture of awe and fear, and a sense of wonder that such a form of life could exist. She was a force of nature, this is how I thought of her at the time.
As for my father, for him my contempt knew no bounds. He was no exotic, no force of nature; in a barbaric and cowardly rage he had murdered my mother and now he was enjoying the tainted rewards of that act. He would sit there in the Rochester grinning and simpering as he sipped his mild, a furtive, grinning man, a weasel with blood on his twitchy paws, secretive, crafty, lascivious, cruel, and malignant. I had reason to hate him, had I not? He murdered my mother and turned me bad in the process; he infected me with his filth, and the hatred I bore him was intense.
For a time I made a pretence of going off to school in the morning, though after a week or two I didn’t even bother with this anymore. I no longer slept at night, and it was too much effort to leave the house at half past eight and then wander about down the canal all day, or go down the river and mess about in the boats. No, I’d just stay in my room and work on my insect collection and keep an eye on the back yard, see who was coming and going.
Hilda often had her friends over during the day, tarts for the most part. Harold Smith and Gladys were the most frequent visitors. I would come down to the kitchen and sit in a chair with my knees pulled up to my chin and my arms wrapped around my shins, and say nothing, just listen, they didn’t seem to mind, they chattered on, gossiped away about the various petty dramas that lent spice and tint to their seedy lives. Hilda was never slow to produce the sweet port. “Now not a word to your father,” she’d say to me as she poured us all a tot in a teacup (I’d developed a taste for port myself, since Hilda moved in). Gladys always seemed to have a problem. “If it’s not one thing it’s another, eh Glad?” Hilda would murmur as she scrubbed the stove or peeled the potatoes and Glad sat at the table smoking Woodbines and patting at her black-dyed hair in a worried manner as she described some fresh calamity involving her landlord or her “gentleman” of the moment, while Harold Smith grinned his cynical dead grin and cleaned his fingernails and said nothing. But it was Hilda I was really watching, and as she went about her scrubbing and peeling I noted with secret fascination how her arms and thighs and breasts swelled and shifted beneath the skirts and aprons that had once graced the slender figure of my mother.
One incident stands out vividly from this period. In January it would be dark by five o’clock in the afternoon, so that by the time my father came home the streetlamps would be lit. I’d see him from my bedroom window as he wheeled his bicycle in from the alley and leaned it against the outhouse wall. His toolbag was slung over his shoulder, and he had a black scarf wrapped about his neck. He knelt down to undo the strings he’d tied round his ankles, and tucked them into his trouser pocket. Then, briskly rubbing his hands together, he stamped down the yard and in through the back door. Hilda was making dinner, I could hear the clatter of saucepans and the rumbling that came from the pipes when water was running in the sink. A murmur of voices, the scrape of chair legs—he’d have hung his jacket and scarf on the hook on the kitchen door and sat down at the table. Hilda would put a bottle of beer in front of him, then out with his papers and tobacco tin while she laid the table. How smoothly, you notice, Hilda had assumed my mother’s role in the everyday domestic routines, she played the woman of the house to perfection; but notice also with what contemptible complacency my father accepted this!
I could tell something odd was going on as soon as I entered the kitchen. There was a way (I’d been aware of this before) that Hilda and my father would sometimes watch me from the corners of their eyes, and I could sense them doing it tonight. What used to drive me mad was that as soon as I became conscious of it they’d be looking elsewhere and behaving perfectly normally—too normally—and it was true of that night, there was a strange artificiality to everything they did. There was also a funny smell in the room, though I couldn’t identify what it was. Not the food, I’m sure, for we were having kippers and I know what a kipper smells like. Without a word I took my place at the table; without a word I started on my kipper. I could still feel them glancing at me, and then at each other, though I was never able actually to see them doing it. Then I cut into my potato, and dead in the middle of the halved potato there was a dark stain.
I stared at it with some unease. Then a syrupy fluid began to ooze out of the potato, the thick, slow discharge of what after a moment or two I recognized as blood. I looked up, startled, to see my father and Hilda, their knives and forks poised aloft over their plates, openly grinning at me. The light bulb suddenly crackled overhead and for a moment I thought it was laughter. Again my eyes fell upon the oozing potato, and now the blood appeared to be congealing in a viscous puddle under my kipper.
What did they expect me to do? Something odd was happening to the light in the room; there was only the one bulb, unshaded, dangling from a braided brown cord, and the light it shed was harsh and yellowy. It seemed now to be fluctuating—for some moments to be growing steadily dimmer, until we were all engulfed in shadow, and all I could see of Hilda and my father were the whites of their teeth and eyes, and the glitter of their eyes—and then it slowly grew brighter again, and they appeared to be behaving perfectly normally. Then with sickening inexorability the light again thickened, and this time the crackling of the bulb grew suddenly very loud, it rose almost to a screech, and as I sat there barely daring to breathe it was impossible not to hear in its crackle voices of derision, and ridicule, and when I looked down at my plate—I was unable to watch Hilda and my father anymore, for they terrified me now, they were transformed, they were like animals of some kind, there was nothing in their faces that I could read as human, and this set the hair on my neck prickling—when I looked down at my plate the blood was faintly glowing, there was a pale incande
scence to it, and I stared at it in a state now of frozen shock even as the light slowly came up again and returned the kitchen to that strangely unstable state of false normalcy in which knives and forks clattered on plates and Horace and Hilda ponderously chewed their food and drank their tea and the crackle of the light bulb was once more muted and intermittent, and the tap dripped steadily into the sink. On my plate the halved potato sat in a pool of congealed dripping stained brown by the juices of the kipper.
I would not get up from the table, I would not give them the satisfaction. “I thought you liked kippers,” murmured Hilda, glancing up at me as she brought a freighted forkful to her own mouth, and I saw how my father’s eyes slid toward her at this, and how his lips produced that fleeting twisty twitch of amused contempt, no sooner detected than it disappeared. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction; wordlessly I sliced into my kipper and began noisily to chew, my eyes now fixed on Hilda’s face. “Whatever are you doing?” she said, picking up her teacup. “There—you’ve swallowed a bone!” I began coughing, for the kipper has a bony skeleton and I had been careless. I brought up onto my plate a damp gob of half-chewed fish with many tiny needle-thin bones embedded in it and sticking out; my father said, “Oh for God’s sake, Dennis.”
Oh for God’s sake, Dennis—can you begin to imagine the fury this aroused in me? Was this not execrable treatment, this vile provocation? But I would not give him the satisfaction, and I held in my feelings, I bottled up my rage and my hatred, for my time would come, this I had known since Christmas, my time would come and then he’d be sorry.
Later they went out to the pub and I went back to my insects. When I heard them returning down the alley I turned off the light and watched them from my window as they came through the gate and into the yard. My father was unsteady, and Hilda was angry with him, this was clear from her unsmiling expression and the way she hurried across the yard and through the back door, while he clumsily closed the gate then made a visit to the outhouse. Footsteps on the stairs—Hilda on her way up to bed. But when, a few moments later, my father came into the house, I did not hear him come up after her, and as the minutes ticked by I realized he had settled himself in the kitchen, even though the light had not been switched on. After a while I tiptoed along the landing and watched Hilda as she slept; her clothes and underwear were draped over a chair, and one stocking had slipped off onto the floor. Then quickly downstairs, and as I’d suspected my father had stayed in the dark kitchen to drink more beer, then passed out. Silently I drew close to him. With his head back and his mouth open, and still in his cap and scarf, he was snoring gently in the chair by the stove, a quart bottle of beer and a half-empty glass on the floor beside him. By the pale gleam of moonlight that came sifting in through the window over the sink I examined him carefully; I still had all my rage bottled up inside me, and I realized I could do to him whatever I wanted; and with the thought came an enormously sweet sense of power, of control.
I opened the bread tin and took out the bread knife. I made a few feints and thrusts with it, imagining how it would be to stick it in my father’s neck. Soundlessly I waved it in front of his face, dancing around like an African boy; he didn’t wake up. The moonlight flashed on the blade of the knife as round and round the kitchen I danced, lifting my knees high and wildly shaking my head, still without making a sound. Tiring of this I put the knife back in the bread tin and filled my palm with stale crumbs. These I then slowly dribbled onto my father’s upturned face, and though he twitched and snorted, and brushed at the crumbs with a jerky hand, still he did not awaken, such was the depth of his stupor.
After the kipper and potato incident Hilda became far less sanguine about me. She decided, I think, that she could no longer tolerate the risk I posed to her newfound security—she had come too far to see it all snatched from her through the wild talk of a boy. For I’d seen the look in her eyes at the table that night, I’d seen the alarm when I’d coughed up a mouthful of bony fish; and with that alarm had come a new, worried watchfulness, I caught it often in the days that followed, she became alert to me in a way she’d never been before. And of course it wasn’t simply the safe berth in number twenty-seven that she stood to lose; if they ever dug up my father’s potato patch, and established that Hilda had been with him that night—then she’d lose a lot more than a safe berth. She’d swing.
And so the atmosphere of number twenty-seven became even more fraught with tension, there was a new edginess, a shortness of temper in both of them that I was quick to exploit. Hilda no longer dispensed teacups of port to Harold and Glad with the same air of merry complicity—no more “just a drop to warm you up, Glad, you’ve had a long night.” No, Hilda was feeling the strain, she was snappy and preoccupied as she went about her tasks in the kitchen. I tried to make things worse. I stole her bucket and took it down the canal, where I filled it with stones and sank it. She was furious about losing her bucket, she searched high and low for it, for of course she couldn’t scrub the floor or the yard or the front doorstep without a bucket. I can see her sitting at the kitchen table when my father came home from work that day (I was listening on the stairs); with a headscarf tied around her hair (all up in curlers) she sipped her tea and said: “I’ve searched high and low—buckets don’t just disappear.” Grunts from my father, and it was hard to interpret them. Was he indifferent to her lost bucket? Or was he knitting his brows, exposing his bottom teeth in that familiar grimace of angry perplexity, and perhaps, at the same time, casting his eyes at the ceiling, up at my room, laying responsibility for the lost bucket at my door? I suspect he was. When I came downstairs for supper Hilda came right out and asked me what I knew about her bucket. I sat in my chair, shrugged my shoulders, gazed at the ceiling and said nothing. “Dennis!” snapped my father. “Answer your mother when she asks you a question.”
This was rich. “Mother?” I said, sitting forward in my chair, laying my hands flat on the table and staring straight at her through slitted eyes. “You’re not my mother.”
“Oh not this again!” said Hilda, turning toward my father. He frowned, took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes. “Let’s have our supper,” he said wearily. I exulted inwardly at the strained silence in which the meal was eaten.
Later that night I again heard them talking in the kitchen, so out I crept to the top of the stairs to listen. The door was only slightly ajar, and their voices were low, so I had to strain to catch what they said. But after a minute or two I made some sense of it. They were talking about me. They were talking about sending me to Canada.
I crept back into my room and closed the door. I turned off the light and settled by the window, my elbows on the sill, my chin in my palms. There was a moon that night, and beyond the alley it gleamed on row upon row of damp slate roofs. My father sent my mother to Canada, and she was down among the potatoes now. Then I thought of him passed out and slack-jawed in his chair in the kitchen below, and an idea started to take shape in my mind, and it had to do with gas.
❖
In the days that followed I did nothing to make the situation worse than it already was. I couldn’t get my mother’s bucket back, it was gone for good, but at least I didn’t steal anything else. I was quiet and normal at mealtimes, and there was no repetition of that distortion and crackling of the light. Nothing was said, but we were deeply suspicious of each other, and this increased the tension already stifling the house; none of us was eager to exacerbate it. A trying period, then, the only incident of any significance being my father’s one clumsy attempt to throw dust in my eyes.
I was often down the allotments during this time—this would be late January, when there was little for gardeners to do. I liked it best at dusk, about half past four in the afternoon, particularly those ten or twenty minutes before darkness proper descended, when the sky was gray-blue but on the ground the shadows had thickened and objects were rapidly losing definition. Then that feeling I’ve always had for fogs and rainfall was aroused, and I happily roamed fro
m garden to garden and felt only barely visible. But there was one afternoon—the allotments were deserted, except for me— when to my surprise I saw my father cycling down the path along the front fence, parallel to the railway embankment; I was in Jack Bagshaw’s allotment, so I slipped behind his shed and, as I’d often done before, peered from round the side to see what he was up to.
He pushed open the gate to his allotment and wheeled his bicycle up the path, and leaned it against the shed. Then he came round to the compost heap and stared straight at me; I immediately pulled back. “Dennis,” he called.
I said nothing; I barely moved, I barely breathed.
“Come on, son, I just want to talk to you.”
I sank down on my hams and covered my ears. A few moments later I felt his hand on my elbow. “Come on, son, come over to the shed.”
I allowed him to lead me back to his shed. He unlocked the door, ushered me in, sat me down in the armchair while he lit a few candles. Then he settled himself on a wooden box, elbows on his knees, head bent forward, took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. “What’s the matter with you, son? What are you so angry with us for?” He glanced over at me, looking weary and perplexed. “Eh?”
I was curled up in the armchair and gazing at the cobwebs. My heart was beating very fast; with some relief I felt the Spider begin to withdraw, I felt him crawl quietly away, leaving only a dusty empty cell behind: that was Dennis.
“Why did you say what you said to your mother?”
“She’s not my mother,” I said, though I hadn’t meant to say anything at all.
A snort of surprise. “Then who is she?”
But he would not trap me again.
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