I am a target from here on in, my moves monitored. The senior boys are unforgiving, the memories of their humiliating haircuts fresh. The local yokel who should have been grateful, has shown his ill-bred colours. In some ways, of course, they are right. Academically I am flying. The exam board more interesting, the teachers more engaged. I am taking ‘O’ levels a year early. I am on track for Oxbridge, one of the brightest kids at school (the other was Mohican boy and he is now history). There are plans to join my uncle’s law firm. My middle-class metamorphosis is complete.
I see Christopher in the school holiday. It isn’t easy. Our lives are growing ever further apart. After a difficult start in the army he has begun to settle. He had been put in a boxing ring at camp, where he had battered the other lad. The officers have taken an interest. It was part of a summer tournament, which he won to everyone’s surprise. The kid can fight. This is something he can excel at, something the army can understand. He will soon box for his regiment, and later for the army. He has found his place, they appreciate him, he will be off for winter camp, relieved of cleaning duties.
Even when Christopher fought as a child, the other boy (often me) was simply an obstacle in his way. He was relentless when he came at you. He wouldn’t, or couldn’t, stop. From the early days in the children’s home he had learnt how to be a boy. Now he has mastered all the manly virtues. He was always more comfortable in the company of males. We are putting on adult personalities and the matching identities no longer work. He is proud of his army uniform, polishes his shoes to a mirror shine before heading down the pub, toecaps clicking, his beret set just so. He looks a little like Dudley.
When I was 10, he gave me a masterclass in cursing. Now his language is harsher, his certainties stronger. The army has given him a new lexicon of hate. ‘Queers, coons, Catholics’: anything different to be feared and loathed. The Northern Ireland Troubles aren’t about civil rights or equality; they are about us and them, the enemy. We can’t talk about it without fear of a punch in the face, and Mum and Dad are on his side. ‘We don’t get their like down here,’ says Dudley darkly. We will never meet at Mum and Dad’s again. Our links are severed, our lives from now would barely touch.
1968. Time for girls, a teen obsession with sex. Some of the Battisborough boys coming back from London have met a gaggle of convent girls on the train. There has been kissing and fumbling, an exciting exchange of address. They are boarding near Newton Abbott, not far away. The delicious seeds of destruction are sown.
That term is about ‘O’ levels and letters. I am writing to my sister Lesley and to a girl at the school, twin passports into an alien world, written on pale blue paper, a Basildon bond.
It is resolved we will visit the girls’ school, our notes ever more urgent. We are the same small group, now three plus one: a ginger-haired Canadian boy who will pay for booze and cabs. Our cash kept in the school office is watched closely now, so we borrow in bits. An alibi is constructed. Plans made, taxis booked, we finally rendezvous under a bridge by a lake in the convent grounds. We kiss. We drink vodka. Boarding-school boys and girls learning to be together. It is almost innocent. Our sticky-fingered reverie is broken by an anxious friend. Their beds have been found empty. The whole convent had known we were coming. A few more kisses then we flee like in a Sixties film with an anxious soundtrack.
After an uncomfortable night outside Newton Abbott, hungover from excitement and lack of sleep, we return to Battisborough. Our letters have been found at the convent. They call our school. The same bad boys named in the notes are all out of bounds. Summoned into Mr Byatt’s study, we simply deny it, express our innocence. They know it is us, they’ve read our letters, but we may have given them, too, a chance at an alibi. No one wants the nuclear option, the fallout for both schools could be catastrophic. Our crime and punishment are too awful to contemplate.
Re-enter our flame-haired friend. The next day we are back in the study, our offence laid bare. The Canadian boy has wrestled with his guilt, we are told; the terrible truth is out. The head says he is proud of him.
Names go up on the noticeboard. We are suspended (the girls all immediately expelled). Taxis come to take us away, we say goodbye, pledge lifetime loyalty. I am never to see them again. Finally, it is just me. I anxiously wait for Dad, the put-put sound of his air-cooled engine. He doesn’t come. In the end, a groovy social worker picks me up, coloured shirt, long hair, loud tie. I am too much trouble, they are too old, it is too painful, too hard for my mum and dad, he says. I must understand. They didn’t sign up for problems, puberty, illicit sex. They have handed me back into the city’s care. Ten years. I am on my own. My Peter Drabble dream is over. I start to shed my name on the short drive to Plymouth.
AUGUST 16. I bump into Howard and Nancy on the bus. I am on the way to the plot. They are buying Nancy her first phone. She is 11 now and only a couple of weeks away from secondary school. She would have been four when we started working on the allotments, digging holes and eating sorrel with her younger sister, Rose. She will be too adult for the allotment soon.
The plot looks overgrown, there have been weeks of sun and showers. I have been proud of its production, its high summer growth, but it is matted, like a long-haired dog that’s been rolling in mud. It needs work with secateurs, a careful clearing.
I am away next weekend. Then it will be August 31, the last day of summer. Autumn is only days away, ‘fall’ in old English, for fall of the year and leaves. The steps to the shed are littered with conkers, signalling the start of school winter term. Jeffrey’s dahlias are like dinner plates. There’s a cluster of fat blackberries by the compost. The signs are everywhere. I guess I have been distracted. Mary’s runner beans are running to seed. I hope she gets to eat them. I pick ours, of course, and lettuce leaves for Sunday lunch, nasturtiums for the kitchen table. As I prepare to leave, Howard and Nancy arrive, so we share berries, pod a few peas. It is good to have them back.
AUGUST 17, SUNDAY AFTERNOON. Howard is at the allotment when I arrive, ham and cheese sandwich in hand. We sit for a few minutes. It has been a month or more since we have worked together at the plot. Summer has almost gone. We never talk much about what to do on the day, each gravitating to the area where we feel we need to start. Howard begins with weeding. I want to free space to replant courgettes. It is late but I have an idea to let one or two sprawl across the path, to run free if there is enough summer energy left in the sun. I had planned to lift all the potatoes but we soon have too many to eat over the next few weeks. A rethink is necessary. I start wheelbarrowing away weed and overblown salad. Howard is in the groove, holster on his hip, secateurs in hand. Plants are pulled and thrown aside like a puppy after a bone. Everything seeding is lifted except wild rocket and amaranth, too magnificent to mess with: more than a metre tall, episcopal red leaves like cloth wrapping a sacrament. The flowering has started, shaped like baby elephant trunks, coloured like a papal robe. A quick three hours later and we come to a stop. There is new room for air to pass through the plants, for sun to warm the soil. With luck and a few weeks of half-decent weather, we will have a late surge. Too tired to sow, we resolve to return in the week with autumn seed. Our last job is one we have avoided all summer. Two barrels of comfrey tea have been fermenting for too long. It takes courage to open them, not to reel away from the roadkill stink. The first is thick and nasty, looks and smells like slurry. We rinse the sludge at the bottom of the barrel and I spray it over the transplanted courgettes. The second is clean and clear like a healing miso soup. This goes on the beans. I pull an armful of comfrey leaves to refill a barrel. It will be ready by the equinox, a boost of energy for autumn. We leave laden.
1970. Christopher loves Ray from when he first followed me to Basildon. His relationship with Lesley is more conflicted, though this is mutual. It is as though he’s waited for Ray all his life. He’s held tight to his Jenkins name like a foundling keepsake. He’d never felt like a Drabble and maybe it was mutual. Ray had been a chief
petty officer in the Royal Navy, Christopher is a sergeant in the army. They have the NCO value system born from a hermetic life. As the years pass, they share the same prejudices, the same receding hair. We talk about it, sharing our parents out like sweets. One for you and one for me.
He’s my dad, not yours, said Christopher from the start, and it was easy to believe. They have grown to look alike. Think alike. They fear the same things. Christopher has cleaved to him. Then, in ’87, I discover the birth certificates that seem to show Ray isn’t, after all, our father.
You have to go to see him, I say. He adopted us after he married our mum. Whatever it says, he is still my dad, Christopher says. Unlike me, they have always stayed in touch. They have been close from the beginning, for many years. Christopher has been loyal. A Jenkins, he believes and belongs in the church of Ray and his Pentecostal certainties.
He goes to see him and asks about the adoptions. Ray says he’s always thought of us as his sons. But he had put us in a children’s home, taken Lesley, named for Leslie Ray, and left. When Christopher and I were teenagers, he wouldn’t tell us why he wasn’t around. You must never ask me again, he said, and we don’t until that night. Now the stunted truth squints in the light. Christopher never forgives him for not being his father. They never speak again.
1992. I never knew Christopher to have a girlfriend. He wasn’t interested in girls as a boy, or much in women as a man. They aren’t interested in him. It is just how it is. He finds a solace in the company of men that is denied to me. While I chase softness and sex, he yearns for Spartan certainties, a pre-Seventies purity. His first wife was a conductor on the bus he drove. His second, Sue, too. He is solicitous and thoughtful. Their words and their sitting together are childlike. Cooing like kids.
Christopher and Sue have invited us over. It’s a first. They always come to us for lunch, tea and cake, a walk on the heath, her high heels sinking into the soft earth. He lives on Thamesmead, around the corner from his kids. It is a huge estate, mostly white, like Basildon. He feels at home. He answers the door holding back a giant Doberman, a thick chain around its neck like something securing a motorbike. It follows us as we sit on the low sofa, knees around our ears, heads lower than the dog’s. It stands guard, growls, curls its canine lip. Christopher laughs. He got the dog from a neighbour, he says. They had bought it to protect them, then realised they were all afraid. Christopher had put it in a fight with a champion pit bull in a field out the back. The Doberman won, ripped the other’s ear off. Christopher is proud. He is happy. The dog feels my fear. I try to stand, hard with its huge head pressed into my groin. It follows me closely into the kitchen, snarling all the time. We don’t stay long. We don’t go back.
2000. I am talking to Christopher on the phone. He has been paid off from his job as a bus inspector. The work had suited him. He was organised, officious, it came with a cap which he’d customised so the peak came flat to his face. He sports a sergeant’s military moustache.
His bosses had offered a lot of money, he says. Our conversation is going well. He is happy. He has bought a new car and two video players, one for downstairs, one for upstairs so he can watch films in bed. Then I wreck it.
Christopher has three children who live on the same estate. Two boys, a girl with a heart condition. He is very bad at birthdays. He had recently sent his eldest son a card a few weeks late. Chris, I say slowly, you should spoil your kids while you can. Take them into town, buy them toys and clothes in Regent Street. You’ll never have this much money again. You and I know how much it means. And you know no one needs a second VHR.
I have gone too far. It has been a long time. I recognise the loudness of the silence. She has a boyfriend, he says of his first wife, finally. They are living well on benefits. His voice is tight with anger now. Sue is indignant in the background. Don’t ever dare tell me what to do with my own money, he says. He shuts the phone line down.
The next day I buy and send a card. As ever, the conciliator. I am sorry, Chris, I write, mending fences. Making peace is what I do. Then inexplicably I add a fatal final line. This time, I write, you are wrong. And I lose him. Of course, it seems so stupid now. He stops talking to me. He disappears. It’s as though he thinks we’re after his cash. Like a fairy-tale miser, now he becomes a hermit.
I let him go. We all get on with our lives.
2008. In the end, of course I can’t stand it. I fear something could happen to him and I may never know. I ask someone to trace him, a specialist in people who don’t want to be found. It doesn’t take long. He is close to where he was, around another corner. I send him a card with my love and phone number, same as it ever was. I ask him to call me, say I need to know he’s OK. He doesn’t phone but sends a note with his number on.
I ring and catch him cleaning his car. He’s a bit busy to talk, he says. I tell him it’s too many years since we spoke. He says it has only been two. He says he’s happy with Sylvia, who came on the scene when Sue finally left. (She used to drain the bank account, phone him when she was with other men. Sometimes she’d have them make the call. She would return when the money ran out. He always took her back. The abandoned boy.)
Women hot-wired him to unhappiness, this strong man with huge hands (mine looked like a kid’s beside his: the only thing I envied). He’d cling on. To Sue and to Sylvia, hold hands all the time. Fingers like bananas clutching hers in his.
Anyway, he says, he has to go. Things to do. He’ll call me soon. He’ll keep in touch. Of course, he never does.
2011. A cold late-January morning. The phone call comes to my office. I am looking for Allan Jenkins, the voice says, I am from the Metropolitan Police intelligence unit. It is about your brother Christopher.
I breathe in. Slowly. I know I am losing him.
He is in hospital, in Devon, he says. He is very unwell. He thought you lived in Southampton Row [it is Southampton Road], but you are unknown at that address. Normally, the cop continues, we may have left it but my father died from cancer at Christmas so I was determined to find you. He said you were a journalist with the Guardian and here you are. Christopher is in Torbay hospital. You need to go and see him very soon.
I take a train the next morning, fated Paddington as always. He is in the stroke ward with other shrivelled, sickly men. Sylvia is there and her sister. Christopher is lying on the bed. He is being eaten alive, there isn’t much of him left. He looks like his ghost.
He had been feeling a bit ill for a year, he says slowly. He’d been to the doctor a few times for his cough. They gave him some linctus and sent him away. He didn’t think much of it but his legs had swollen on the Christmas drive to Devon. Sylvia’s sister had insisted on the hospital. They scanned him with an MRI, found thrombosis and clots in his chest. Also lung cancer, like Dudley. It is too late to operate.
I hold his hand like we did as kids. They are the only part of him that hasn’t shrunk. I try not to cry. At least you are back home in Devon, I say. Tears release and roll down his face. Come on, cheer up, says Sylvia. I say I think it is OK to cry. If not then, when?
I don’t think Christopher fully recovered from his early childhood hurt. The big man with baby talk. It is as though he has always been slowly dying. From being unloved, unhappy. Now it has fully incubated and finally come for him. His life and ill luck have run out.
When Sylvia and her sister leave, I ask the nurses if I can stay. We need more time to talk. To be together, alone. We don’t speak much. We sit in silence, two broken boys 50 years on. We talk a little about Devon, about the river, the farm, our near-mum and dad, about being foster kids, a family.
He drifts in and out. Nods off. He is quiet. The morphine drip grips. I hold my breath and hold vigil. I watch as he fades. He struggles to his feet when it is time for me to leave for the last train. For the last time. I hold him up so we can hug. He barely comes to my shoulder now, my brave six-foot soldier, boxer brother. I hold tight. I whisper how I love him. You are my brother, the last thing he says.
Christopher has a stroke during radiotherapy a few days later. He fights for two days before sliding away. Lesley asks if she can come to the service but Sylvia says no. He wouldn’t have wanted her there, or any of them, only you, she insists. She asks if I can pay for the funeral. I ask for a couple of days to see what I can get together. When I call over the weekend, concerned by the quiet, she tells me she ‘burnt him yesterday’.
I wonder where his ashes are.
I think most of my life I have struggled with survivor guilt, since I cared for Christopher in the children’s home, my nervy, older baby brother, broken in a way it seemed only I could see. I could feel his fragility, knew he needed me. Though on this he was mute.
I regret when we drifted. When we fought. When I thrived and he barely survived. When I was wanted more than him. When hurt slipped off me more easily. When I shut him down, exhausted by the rage, the weight around my neck.
I cut him loose because I was unsure we would make it safe to shore together. I wonder why I didn’t try harder. It was just love and care he wanted. Why was it so hard? I was intent on escaping who I was, reinventing myself, but Christopher stuck fast with stubborn integrity.
When he wouldn’t let go, I let him go. To drift. To drown. To die. Now there is no way to make it right. So I grow nasturtiums and marigolds, like when we arrived at Herons Reach. When I was five and a half and he was six and a half. In orange-tinted memory to show we were there.
AUGUST 22, FRIDAY. A quick 5.30am pop to the plot to tell it I am going away for the weekend and to check on the transplanted courgettes. They have started to spread, the rehomed chicories too. I have sorted autumn and winter seed and boxed them for Howard but I am mostly here to put in an appearance. For the first time in months there are bare patches of earth and growth is slowing. Time is short. I strip a few peas in time to see the fox sneak up the bank at the end of the plot, like a teenager creeping in at first light. I cut a few leaves for the house while I am away. I see Mary has taken the onions. It feels like a good sign. I hope she is enjoying her runner beans. A last look, a quick goodbye and I am home by 7am. There is work to do and a plane to catch before noon.
Plot 29 Page 6
