‘Right.’ It must have been obvious from my tone that I was being a sneery Southerner, but I also had a point. ‘And the difference is …?’
‘“Visitor” sounds more welcoming, apparently. We started off as an informayshun centre, then it went to tourist informayshun and now it’s visitor.’
‘You sure they didn’t change the name because Wolverhampton has never had … any real tourists as such?’
‘No, no, we have lowuds of tourists … because of the university.’
‘The university?’ I resisted the urge to point out that, strictly speaking, the term for these visitors was ‘students’.
‘So how many … how many “visitors” do you get?’
She chose to answer a different question. ‘We can only log the ones that speak to us.’
‘Right.’
‘So yow live local?’
‘No, I’m from London.’ It felt good to say it, so I said it again. So much for being a member of the boomerang generation.
‘Y’am gunna be a national then?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Yow live in this country?’
‘Yes.’ It was like being in the back of a cab. ‘London is … the … capital city of Great Britain.’
‘So, y’am a national?’
‘Yes.’ It dawned on me that she was planning to register me as a tourist.
‘I’m being recorded as an official visitor?’
‘’Cos yow spoke to us.’
‘God.’ I was still struggling to get my head around the concept of a ‘Wolverhampton tourist’ and now I was one. I replaced the ‘Black Country Days Out’ leaflet. ‘What kind of things do people ask for when they come in?’
‘Souvenirs.’
‘Souvenirs?’
‘Ar.’
‘What do you sell?’
‘Have a look behind yow.’
I had no idea what to expect. What could possibly symbolize my home town, a place that The Idler Book of Crap Towns: The 50 Worst Places to Live in the UK, had described as a city ‘so divided along class and racial lines that it is hardly a city at all but a collection of tribal groupings’.* A pork sandwich? A curry? A knife recently used in a racially aggravated assault? Nothing would have surprised me.
As it happened, the glass cabinet behind me turned out to contain: sticks of Wolverhampton rock; Wolverhampton thimbles; Wolverhampton fridge magnets; Wolverhampton hairbrushes and Wolverhampton ponchos. The thing that made these objects specifically ‘Wolverhampton’ was that they all had ‘City of Wolverhampton’ emblazoned across them. The slogan alerted me to a fact I’d forgotten: in my absence Wolverhampton had become a city. When I lived there, it was a town – according to one of my primary school teachers ‘the biggest town in Europe’, a fact I’d never managed to corroborate – but it had been appointed city status in 2001. I bought some Wolverhampton rock – which turned out to have been manufactured in Harrogate, according to the label – and some postcards I thought I’d use as ironic thank-you cards. The attendant put the items into a carrier bag with the prayer ‘Wolverhampton – our city – bright future’ emblazoned across it and I walked out and sat down on a bench outside, to take it all in.
In the middle of the square, in front of me, stood Wolverhampton’s most famous landmark, a statue of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort, referred to by locals as the ‘Man on the Horse’, the ‘Mon on the ’Oss’, and the ‘MOTH’. Looking at it – someone had, as usual, put a road cone on Prince Albert’s head – it struck me that apart from a few churches, it was probably the only thing that had remained unchanged in the city centre for the past century. It was there when Wolverhampton was a great industrial town, at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. It survived the sanctioned vandalism of the post-war years, when many of the town’s greatest buildings were destroyed in the name of progress. It was there during the brief period in the seventies when Wolverhampton was cool, with local band Slade riding high in the pop charts, and Wolves were doing well in the league. And it was still here now in Wolverhampton’s oddest and most unexpected phase as a tourist attraction.
And then I was struck by a sudden need to talk to Alison. We had spent recent weeks half killing each other, and the Friday evening had been horrible, bloodier than the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, but she was still the person I wanted to call if I saw something funny, and she used to listen to my stories of Wolverhampton with such suspended disbelief – the fascination of someone who had never travelled further north than Oxford. Actually, that’s unfair – it was probably the fascination of someone who had never been allowed to see the home or meet the family of their partner. After extensive negotiations with myself, and realizing I had several postcards on my person, I compromised and decided to write instead. I picked one – a picture of the man on the horse – and began.
Dearest Alison, I know you said you didn’t want me to contact you, in person, by phone, email, or letter. But you didn’t mention postcard! So I’m writing to you on the back of this picture of the man on the horse – remember? Anyway, you’ll be glad to know I’m not writing to ask you to change your mind. I agree it probably wasn’t going to work out between us, we wind each other up too much, but … (cont. on card 2)
… (and here we have another picture of the man on the horse!) … I just wanted to take you up on a few things you said on Friday. First, my family aren’t ‘racist’ in not wanting me to go out with someone who isn’t Sikh. My dilemma is more subtle than that. And it’s depressing that after so much time you still don’t understand that. Second, I am not, as you say, ‘trapped in a dysfunctional pattern’ with my relationships – you’ve been reading too many women’s (cont. on next card)
… magazines (and here we have another picture of the man on the horse!) … I don’t think my relationship history is untypical of a man of my age. Furthermore, I am not, as you say, ‘running scared of confronting my mother’. I’m just waiting for the right person and the right time, and then I will do it, on my own terms. There’s no point in sparking a family drama when I haven’t got someone to commit to anyway. And I realize now that someone isn’t you. I’m sorry we both wasted each other’s time. Good luck. S
And here you have another thing about the end of relationships: yes, you go through phases of coping and not coping, but you don’t necessarily go through them progressively or sequentially. Sometimes you can go from thinking you want to be friends with your former lover, to wanting to mutilate them slowly, in the time it takes to open a very necessary bottle of whisky. I had begun the postcard with warm intentions, but somehow, during the course of writing, had become furious and bitter. And by the time I got up with the intention of buying some stamps, for a set of postcards that would never get sent, I was in a stage of post-relationship torment I had not experienced before: horror. For it was while walking down Lichfield Street that it occurred to me that Alison was actually right.
Over the three or so years since my break-up with Laura, I had excused my hit-and-run approach to relationships with a variety of explanations. I was a romantic waiting for The One. I was, like lots of men, nervy about commitment. I was just doing what everyone else was doing: serial monogamy was the norm now. But looking back at the relationships, there was a dysfunctional pattern. They would all begin intensely: I would feel powerfully in love, suggest I was up for something long-term. But then, after a month or so, I would start finding faults, become more critical, and after a period of around three to four months, end things. And whoever said breaking up is hard to do didn’t know what they were talking about. It was always easy. At least, always easier than confronting my mother. The relief I felt afterwards, at having got away without being discovered, always outweighed the stress of the break-up.
By the time I had trudged back home, things were clear: if I didn’t confront my family about the arranged marriage thing, tell them I wanted to live my own life on my own terms, I was never going to be happy. My mother was the person I
should be writing to, not Alison.
The realization wasn’t a cheerful one. I felt as if I’d lost the use of several vital organs all at once. But unable to tell Mum why I felt awful, I claimed I was unwell, which, of course, sent her into a frenzy of nursing and cooking and brewing and praying – she has absolutely no sense of perspective when it comes to illness in her children – which made me feel even worse. I can’t remember how long I spent in that crippled state, my thoughts muddled and disconnected, my mother offering handfuls of paracetamol. But, not being able to stand the strength of my own feelings, I do remember developing an acute aversion to any film or TV programme that featured any kind of competition or conflict, which in practice meant I couldn’t even watch Bargain Hunt any more, and could for the first time share Dad’s enthusiasm for BBC Parliament.
You may wonder why I didn’t at this point get back into that canary yellow Porsche and deal with things by driving back to my secret and dysfunctional London life. After all, denial had got me through things before. But something had changed. After so many years of living a lie, and so many failed relationships, I had had enough. I’d got to the point when the idea of not doing something about my situation made me feel more ill than doing something about it. Desperation can lend you a kind of courage. And over the following days, the determination to write Mum a letter solidified: I would put down my frank and honest thoughts on paper, come clean, get it translated into Punjabi and hand it to her.
However, I realized there were precautions I had to take before putting pen to paper. I had to make sure I was sure, and to be sure, I had to make sense of how and why I had ended up in this position. I also had to find out about my parents’ story. For if there was one thing I knew Mum would say, in the firestorm that followed a confrontation, it was: ‘If you knew what your father and I had been through, you wouldn’t do this.’ They say it normally takes a death or a birth for someone to want to know about their family history. In my case it was six failed relationships and the prospect of an arranged marriage.
And so, some five years after discovering that note about my father’s schizophrenia, I finally began to confront the fact of my father’s illness. Though I make myself sound more dynamic and resolute than I was. I began timidly and awkwardly, almost by accident, by simply, for the first time in my life, looking at my father, closely, while I was lying across the sofa in the living room. And once I started looking, without moving my head, out of the corner of my eye, I couldn’t stop. Rajah’s mouth. Bindi’s chin. Puli’s eyes. My chubby cheeks. Skin browned by a summer’s worth of walking to the gurdwara and back. A patch of red on his forehead. Ears that seemed to get larger, as the rest of him shrank. A growth of stubble even though he had shaved that morning. Handsome? Yes. Though he has one of those odd faces that varies in attractiveness. Sleep put a decade on him. A shave took a decade off. His clothes – green trousers tailored in India, a tight pullover hugging his pregnant belly – added a year or two. But if you stuck him in a suit and tie, got him to smile, he’d surely pass for a bank manager, a GP, or any other middle-aged Asian professional.
His pose was a familiar one. He was sitting in his armchair in the middle of the room, leaning over the table, poring over a copy of the Daily Mail my brother had left while popping over on the way back from the gym the day before. I realize the sight of my illiterate father reading a newspaper should have struck me as strange before this point. But as I’ve said, I took so many things about my parents for granted, and families can absorb infinite amounts of dysfunction. If I thought about it at all, I just accepted reading as one of Dad’s odd habits, like adjusting his hair – he stands in front of the bathroom mirror, combing it for hours though there isn’t much hair to speak of – wolfing down tea as soon as it has come to a boil, waking up at 6.30 a.m. even though he rarely has anything to do, refusing to go to bed during the day, even if ill or exhausted, watching BBC Parliament, even though he doesn’t know the name of the Prime Minister and is instructed by Mum where to put his cross at election time.
Besides, like air and gravity, the reading thing had always been there. When we were kids, once a month, at Mum’s insistence – she has always had a powerful belief in the importance of education – Dad would walk us two miles to the local library, and, as Bindi flicked through Gobbolino the Witch’s Cat for the eighty-seventh time, as Rajah hunched over books about cowboys and horses, as I prepared for my future as a public schoolboy by immersing myself in Wodehouse and Jennings, and as Puli flicked precociously through the adult fiction section, and regressively through the Enid Blyton books she thought were actually written by ‘Grid Blyton’ until a teacher pointed out that she’d misread the signature on the front, Dad would sit in the corner, reading the newspapers. He wouldn’t flick through them, or glance at the pictures and graphics, but would find some text, stare at it for a while, his eyes moving neither left to right nor right to left, and then turn the page.
When I was older he did the same with school textbooks I left lying around and, when I started having The Times delivered, for my A-Level politics course, I would often find him staring at it at breakfast. It annoyed me – sometimes I would hide the newspaper as soon as it arrived – but I never asked myself what might be going through his mind. It was just one of Dad’s things.
But lying there watching him for the first time – because we never look at our parents closely, do we, just as we don’t see them as people – I wondered whether the reading might be a symptom of his illness. And for the first time I asked him about it. Though again, I shouldn’t make this sound too conscious or courageous an act. I was staring at him when he looked up, so suddenly that I couldn’t pretend I was doing anything else. And to break the moment of awkwardness, and the habit of a lifetime, I asked: ‘What you reading about, Dad?’ There was an interval before the reply.
‘I’m reading about America.’ He pointed at the page. ‘It’s talking about the Prime Minister of America, isn’t it?’
There were two stories on the page – neither of them about America.
He continued: ‘There are two governments run by the white people and they both work closely, don’t they?’
My turn to hesitate. ‘You mean the American and British governments?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re right there, Dad.’ A pause. ‘Can you read, Dad? Do you understand the words and letters?’
‘A little bit. We have lessons at the day centre.’ Ah, the day centre. The Asian men’s mental health group, every Monday and Wednesday morning. I had heard him talking about it, and once even received an email from Gurbax Kaur, the woman who set the group up – an overwhelming email that had me shutting my office blinds* – but I still hadn’t tried to find out more about what he got up to there.
‘That’s great, Dad. I wish Mum would learn a bit of English.’
He folded the newspaper away neatly. Dad has always handled printed matter with care. And then, because the conversation had made me feel uncomfortable, I reached for the TV remote control. I was about to turn up the volume when he added: ‘I want to tell you something.’
A missed heartbeat. ‘Oh. Okay, Dad.’
‘Your Mum tells me not to talk about this with you …’
‘Okay.’ He’d moved forward and was sitting on the lip of his armchair now. He raised a hand in the air, like a lecturer wanting to emphasize an important point.
‘When the sun rises it’s all okay.’
‘Ki?’
‘When the sun rises on the farmland there is so much shakti that everything is okay.’
I couldn’t tell whether Dad was trying to convey a simple concept, that the sun had great power, whether I’d misheard what he said (Dad’s speech is a little slurred sometimes), whether my Punjabi was once again proving deficient, or whether he was, terrifyingly, claiming he’d power over the sun.
‘I’m not sure what you mean, Dad.’
‘I mean, in the morning, when the sun rises it is because of shakti.�
��
‘Is that something you learnt in the day centre?’
‘No, I worked it out myself.’ He lifted a finger and rubbed an area of inflamed skin on his forehead.
‘Okay, Dad.’ The implications raced through my mind and I fell back to the comfort platitudes. ‘Are you going to the temple later?’
‘Yes.’
‘Nice day for a walk, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
The next day I was up and about, or at least had returned to staring at the wall-mounted gas heater in my bedroom, an improvement of sorts, thinking about possibly heading back to London, when there was a soft knock on my bedroom door. It was Dad, who had just come back from his morning walk, one of the fixed elements of his daily routine. There’s a question I always ask the people I interview for newspaper profiles: can you run me through a typical day of your life? I always ask it because it’s an inoffensive opener and because it amuses me that the answer is always the same: ‘Actually, there’s no such thing as a typical day in my life,’ they say. But Dad is different: he really does have a typical day. He wakes up at 6.30 a.m., drinks his hot tea straight from the stove, watches BBC Parliament for an hour or two, goes for a walk to the day centre or the temple, comes back, has a sausage sandwich, goes for a walk to the temple, walks from there to a shop to fetch some apples for himself or a few groceries for Mum, walks back home, watches a few more hours of BBC Parliament, has supper, watches a little more BBC Parliament and then goes to bed.
He sloped towards me with a folded piece of paper between his fingers. It was apparent from his body language – those hunched shoulders, that stealthy glance – what he was going to ask. He had a hospital appointment approaching and wanted me to read out the details from the appointment card. Often, when there’s a meeting with a medical professional coming up – I assumed the three-monthly appointments were to do with his diabetes – he will show the card to several of his offspring in turn, trying, like an investigative journalist, to corroborate the time and date through multiple sources, or perhaps just trying to commit the time and place to memory through sheer repetition. If you’re illiterate and have no way of keeping a diary, or keeping a note, repetition can be a way of remembering things.
The Boy with the Topknot Page 7
