by Bill Broun
Cuthbert watched the families. Among them were not a few neoteric aristocrats, who looked surprisingly able to cope with a wait. It was a rare sight. He decided to stand in the line himself, just to be closer to them, even though he didn’t have a stroller to return. The self-conscious, bourgeois joie de vivre he imagined them relishing engrossed him.
One lanky father behind Cuthbert lugged a ginger-haired tot on each leg. The girls seemed to be identical twins, and the man doted on them, rubbing their heads like little cats.
The bulbous, greasy-looking gray strollers were shaped like elephants, and seemed quite popular. The gate itself was a long brown-brick and stucco structure with dark Spanish tiles that reminded Cuthbert a bit of the entrance to the old Pentonville prison, but one with hanging baskets of orange and grape-colored auriculas, just like the ones at the Whittington Hospital, Cuthbert’s old drying-out center, at Highgate Hill. There were geraniums on the zoo entrance, too, and polyanthuses, but it was the auriculas that fascinated him—small and exact, and intensely bright, like fairy-light bulbs.
“Allo,” Cuthbert said to the little twins. He reached down for the fallen head of an auricula on the pavement. He smelled it, and he wanted to hold it out toward the girls, but he sensed that could seem creepy. “Yow ’ad some fun?” he asked them.
But the father placed a large hand on each of the twins’ heads, and turned their faces away from Cuthbert. The man turned back at Cuthbert with a strained smile, as if trying to mask his apprehension.
“Girls,” the father said. “Eyes forward.”
Cuthbert was playing with fire, and he knew it. If the Watch saw Indigents bothering citizens, they would arrest them, beat them, or worse.
Shut yowr gaubshite mouth, he silently seethed at himself. Shut it!
becoming the moonchild
AS AN ADOLESCENT, IN THE YEARS AFTER DRYSTAN’S death, Cuthbert would whisper to a ghost-brother at night as he lay in his narrow, creaky bed.
“You’re all the good that’s in our blood, Dryst—what little there is.”
Through Cuthbert’s youth, in the middle 1970s, during a period of some of the worst of the beatings, the late Drystan’s tiny empty bed had sat across from Cuthbert in the bedroom, its dark navy and brown plaid covered in stacks of automotive part boxes from their father and bags of undelivered clothes for Help the Aged. Around this same period, Cuthbert began, slowly and half-secretly, first for minutes and then for hours and days at a time, to conflate his and his dead brother’s identities. He would even call himself “Drystan” in the third person.
Drystan can’t sleep again, he might say.
Dryst just broke his shoelace.
The orange skies of Dudley are the same color as the dirt on Drystan’s hands.
Cuthbert also began to struggle to finish things as a teenager, struggle to get out of bed, struggle to live a single second more, and the idea of a ghost-Drystan somehow helped. Twice, he had given up a series of musical instruments after two or three lessons. At one point, his father had frogmarched him with a reluctantly rented viola back to a music shop and, slapping his head, forced him to admit he was a selfish, lazy child to a large Polish woman shopkeeper, who had seemed terrified by the scene.
“Mister, no,” she’d said. “Ty świnio!”*
Henry Handley showed little tolerance for money spent on the arts and humanities, but to waste money on it openly—that killed him.
“But Drystan will help me, Daddy,” Cuthbert would tell his father. “I promise, promise, promise.”
“Leave off that gaubshite,” his father had said. “You’ll get taken away for being a nutter. Or a faker.”
Neither parent was kind or world-wise enough to steer him toward either psychological counseling, which he so needed, or a good public school, where the bright boy certainly could have won a generous bursary. So Cuthbert (often thinking of himself as Drystan) took his O-and A-levels two years earlier than usual, at the mediocre West Bromwich Grammar, and grew crazier and crazier. He achieved seven straight-A O’s and four A-grade A-levels in the sciences and maths, leading, at age fifteen, to an unconditional place reading biology at University College, London, his first choice. It had been an astounding feat. The Evening Mail published a little profile titled “West Brom Boy Boffin off to Uni.” The attention mortified Cuthbert, but another part of him, deep inside—the Drystanest part—soared.
The fragile boy seemed poised for an almost golden, if quite wounded, flight away from the Black Country, to a happier place. (As an old man, Cuthbert never remembered how clever he actually was before his addictions kicked in; his main memory of grammar school chemistry was burning his finger badly while trying to form copper oxide gas with a Bunsen burner. He and his mates had been passing around and inhaling balloons of the requisite nitrous oxide under their lab tables.)
Drystan, on the other hand, he could be allowed in Cuthbert’s blinkered mind—with its shades of dissociative disorder—to be the cleverer one, and naturally the precocious lad got into a bit of trouble at his primary and secondary schools, too, right?
In his last year of secondary school, the summer of 1977, before entering university, Cuthbert was mildly disciplined twice, by a sympathetic headmaster, Mr. Hawkes, for snogging another very lonely boy, named Ashley—Ashley had very dry, dark hands—in the school’s boiler room. They had both merely wanted to try out kissing, and neither had luck with girls. But the incident attracted special enmity from Cuthbert’s father.
Henry, one hot Saturday morning, used his usual black belt with the dye abraded off, and a favorite heavy-gauge wire coat hanger, to beat him for this. This time, Cuthbert felt he was fighting for his life. He struggled, defenseless as a skinned knee, to hide in the Handleys’ blue eggshell kitchen, with a gray-yellow light glaring through the windows and the sound of Tommy Dorsey’s “Opus No. 1” turned up loud on the phonograph to camouflage the rumpus.
“Yow’ll stop this shite, yow scallywag,” his father raged, raising the belt (which he folded into a rigid loop) again and bringing it down and kicking him, knocking him against the stove, and then against a pine kitchenette. “Yow bloody poof, yow bloody focking poof!”
Mary Handley howled at her husband to stop, but she did nothing else. With Winefride dead, there was nothing to mitigate the brutality.
“You’ll go to hell for this, Harry. You’ll go to hell,” Mary yelled, but she always stayed with him, and he often went to the dirty pub afterward, where it was hellish enough, where he would paint himself as an unappreciated mentor “’oo did wot needed done.”
Cuthbert could still recall the whistle of the coat hanger in the air, the fanging bites of the belt, the squeal after squeal of “Opus No. 1” ’s strangled trumpets.
Cuthbert completely depersonalized in such conditions. He would call for Drystan sometimes; he would unroll the ghost-child inside himself, like a shimmering emerald electric blanket. He would crawl beneath, panting for breath. His head that time took several bad knocks against the refrigerator, and he felt dizzy. He had tried to “defend” himself from the belt, but he only ended up woozy, with his calves whipped so hard that puffy welts rose up on them like secret budding fins. He’d wished he could use them to swim away from West Bromwich forever.
“Yam killin’ Drystan!” Cuthbert once screamed when he was being attacked. “Yam killin’ ’im!”
The mention of that name, in such contexts, always horrified his parents.
“Don’t say that,” cried Mary. “You bloody well stop that!”
“The boy’s ’af-baked,” Henry gasped, standing back from the boy. “He’s focking mad as a box of rabbits.”
Finally, during a similar life-or-death beating, the neighbors called the police, and Cuthbert—mildly concussed—was temporarily put under a protection order by Sandwell council, and he lived with a foster family near Birmingham City University. He made everyone call him “Dryst,” and no one questioned him about it. He was a tall boy for age fifteen, and many
overestimated his age and maturity. After a week, he was sent home. The overwhelmed social worker who’d been assigned his case had failed to transfer many of the details of the abuse discovered by the police to Cuthbert’s case file. There were comments among the council authorities about how “a grown boy” had got “a bit of aggro” from his dad. In the context of Sandwell, it just wasn’t a big deal. Henry, for several weeks, seemed contrite, too. He repeatedly said he was sorry (“Something’s wrong with me ’yud, son. Yer dad’s so sorry, son.”). He even bought Cuthbert a child’s phonograph that came in a sort of red suitcase. There was a David Bowie record, too, and Cuthbert would play a song called “Joe the Lion” over and over and over and over.
In a month, Henry’s attitude (if not his fists and belt) was back to its old deportment. He felt hazily penitent, but the sense of public humiliation had been searing. He wouldn’t risk hitting the boy again, but the emotional abuse became as caustic as ever.
“Yow’m ’aff the boy your dead brother ever was,” he’d begun telling Cuthbert.
“Well, I’m not me—not anymore,” Cuthbert would respond. “I’m something no one knows.”
CUTHBERT’S PLACEMENT AT UCL never impressed Henry Handley, who still felt Cuthbert should get a trade even as he matriculated, collected his grants, and moved into Ramsay Hall.
“Yow’ll give it up like everything else,” his father kept telling his son. And the teenager did flounder badly at UCL, from the start. Mentally, he was completely off the rails. By 1978 or so, with London nearly at the peak of punk, Cuthbert spent most of his time thoroughly convinced he actually was his dead brother. He grew his dark brown hair unfashionably long and straight, parted on one side, and sometimes wore an absurd Native American wampum of yellow, white, and black shells as a hairband.
He skipped lectures, dropped blotter after blotter of LSD, guzzled grant money away at the pub, and found himself exquisitely alienated from every single soul he encountered.
AT UCL, his revisions eventually came to seem pointless, and he began to study noncourse books about esoteric religion and mysticism. He read Magick—Book 4 and Sellotaped poems by Rumi and Ted Hughes to his wall beside the bed. He came to believe that Hughes was covertly trying, through his poetry, to communicate with him. Cuthbert once wrote on the wall, right beside where his head writhed nightly on its pillow, “He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.”*
He also got into kooky altercations with other UCL students.
“You keep your fucking red thoughts off me,” he once screamed at an innocent sociology student as they reached for the same bowl of warm custard in the dining hall queue.
“I don’t know you,” the student answered.
“Arr,” he said. “And I see everything you think.”
Cuthbert/Drystan spent far more time reading about Sufism and obscure Middle Eastern hermeneutics than about organic chemistry. At one point, he started (then quickly abandoned) a summer Beginning Modern Standard Arabic class. He may never have been invited to join the Golden Dawn, but he became an incomprehensible moonchild to himself and to others.
It should have all caught someone’s attention. Something was desperately wrong, something that went beyond the usual new-to-uni breakdown or naff religious conversion. In one letter he penned (imagining himself to be Drystan and “writing” to his brother Cuthbert in Brum) a bizarre account of gazing out a Floor Nineteen window of the Senate House Library. To the west, he wrote, shone the gold dome of London Central Mosque, partly green from the reflections of huge plane trees from Regent’s Park. He described the glow at that moment as “a hostile eye of sunlight,” pouring out from a hole in England. He continued,
I started rocking back and forth, Cuddy, gently bumping my head upon the cold window, repeating the phrase “imagine me imagine you,” quite audibly, I suppose, in my crude effort at a Sufic dhikr—that’s a sort of God-consciousness, right?—I was bumping my head, bumpiebumpiebumpie imaginemeimagineyou, bump rock bump rock bump bump bump imaginemeimagineyou—until a library aide marched over and says to me, “Do you mind, sir?” This really happened, Cuddy, all down to the Eye of God!
Cuthbert carefully avoided his young, ambitious tutor, Mr. Daniels, who seemed only intellectually, and never emotionally, at ease with the boy’s deep Brum accent and up-front manner, as well as suspicious of his exuberance for animals and religious studies. When it came to Cuthbert’s signs of serious disturbance, poor Mr. Daniels, who truly stood the most chance of seeing that something was wrong, was a perfect idiot—the sort of person who liked to champion the working class as long as they did not smell up his little corner of academia a few meters from the corpse of Jeremy Bentham. Seeing in Cuthbert only a bit of sudatory kookiness, Mr. Daniels recommended the boy immerse himself in the salubrious rigors of schoolwork and contemplate his smallness in the scheme of things.
“I believe that you’ll see your pleasure variables rise,” Mr. Daniels said in a joking tone. “That is, if we can trust in the ‘felicific calculus’ of old Jeremy, right? Ha-ha!”
But for Cuthbert, grueling revision on his biology course offered no chance for self-forgetting, least not as Mr. Daniels conceived it. When he did forget himself, he drew into Drystan even more—the ghost beneath the green rushes, the otter-brother in the bosky claw-waters of long, long ago. Otters obsessed him, too; at one point, after reading Ted Hughes’s “An Otter,” he developed the notion that the poet was, like Drystan, a therianthropic being who crossed between the animal and human worlds, and in fact, Hughes had simply been writing about himself in his animal poems—and not metaphorically. In one meeting with Mr. Daniels, just before he abandoned the course, he tried to explain Hughes’s secret to Mr. Daniels in his sour-smelling office.
“I’m stuck on Hughes, and I can’t stop thinking about ’im, no matter how hard I try,” he was saying. “His otter’s the most profound sort of animal. It’s all biology and all of the animal soul, in one little beast. ‘Of neither water nor land. Seeking some world lost when first he dived . . . from water that nourishes and drowns.’ See what I’m getting at?”
Mr. Daniels looked annoyed, tapping the crystal on his cheap watch. It had a black wristband, and he kept playing with it. “This isn’t a literature course, is it?” He looked at Cuthbert solemnly. “Forget ‘animals’ and think ‘cells.’ Forget ‘phenotype’ and think ‘gene.’ It’s liberating, I tell you, if you really think about it. Have you finished The Selfish Gene yet?”
“I day,” answered Cuthbert. “I mean, I did not, sir.”
“Too bad. See, you’re born, you hitch a ride to your alleles, and you fly forward into human evolution. We really have no utter control over anything. Ha-ha.”
“Ar—I mean, yes,” he had answered. “I tried to read it, but it made me feel . . . like life’s pointless.”
“Not for genes it’s not.”
Cuthbert/Drystan survived two terms at UCL. He went straight from Ramsay Hall to a squat in Euston to the park benches. It was a terrific, if not quite classic, debauched decline. And it was during this time that the ghost-brother first went missing from Cuthbert’s ambit of control. He seemed separate from Cuthbert. Indeed, Cuthbert had even begun to think of himself again, ever so slightly, as himself. For whatever reason, Cuthbert’s total replacement of himself with the wiser, more intelligent, more able, more erotic figure of Drystan came to a ragged end that coincided with the failure at uni.
For now, again, Drystan was gone.
FOR A WHILE, Cuthbert “searched” all over London for his missing brother, with no success, and afterward, tried to convince his parents to report him missing to the Metropolitan Police. But this request, as one might imagine, was seen by them as a kind of antagonistic lunacy, an effort to torment them.
Soon afterward, Cuthbert himself was homeless and sleeping rough in the capital.
His parents, from whom Cuthbert concealed his living situation, were by now totally inured to his ramblings about Drystan, and
normally simply repeated, when the name was mentioned, “You saw your poor brother drown in Dowles Brook in 1968, Cuddy, and you blocked it out. And that’s that!”
Cuthbert didn’t believe a word they said, not anymore. No matter what anyone said, he would find Drystan; around this time, in 1980 or so, Cuthbert also started a habit of visiting, unannounced, his cousin Rebekka, who lived in Hemel Hempstead and worked as a school nurse.
Rebekka didn’t know how to coax Cuthbert back from his insanity.
“You look poorly,” she once said to him. “That’s the tragic truth.”
“Hang on. Hang on. What’s that?” Cuthbert once asked Rebekka. “You almost sound like you’re talking about me, Becks. Or do you mean Drystan? He wasn’t taking care of himself, was he?”
“Drystan? Oh, Cuddy, why are you bringing up your sweet brother?”
“Because you’re talking about him!”
“No,” Rebekka said. “Oh, Cuddy. I mean you. You need help, dear one. Couldn’t we find someone. To talk to you?”
“Look,” he said, “I’ll find him!”
Rebekka would sigh despondently, but she felt nothing she said would ever get through.
Meanwhile, Cuthbert himself, while imagining Drystan’s downhill slide, was of course frequently coping with his own drop into penury in central London. He was indeed looking poorly. His fingernails and teeth were gradually blackening. His clothes smelled of urine. He wore shoes with burst soles. For a while, he feared Drystan’s old schoolmates from UCL would recognize him as Drystan’s brother; after a year or two, he knew they wouldn’t.
Cuthbert’s delusions had become an unstable system. He no longer knew whether he was himself, or his brother, or someone else entirely. His flashes of lucidity often served only to confuse and to depress him more deeply, like matches lit in a pitch-black crypt.
“Was I the one at UCL?” he would ask himself. “Did I write letters to myself?”
His last complete grasp of reality in his lifetime, at around age twenty, was far more self-bewildering than what was to become his new normal—a calmer normal where Drystan, the last holder of the Wonderments on earth, was only “missing,” and he, Cuthbert Handley, was leading the search for him. In his life to come, he would take, in the rarest of moments, hold of the real truth, as his gran saw it—that Drystan was dead, and Cuthbert himself was actually the last to carry the Wonderments. But such knowledge, in the infrequent seconds that his mind would allow for it, proved such a crushing burden that he spent his life hiding from it—in Flōt stupors, in shame, in delusions florid and incessant. But Drystan and the Black Country of childhood would not stay away forever.
