The Children's Writer

by Gary Crew

  Chanteleer indicated that we should move to the centre of the room, his mother included, although I couldn’t imagine what novelty the place might hold for her.

  I noticed a single window in the opposite wall and stepped aside to look out. The view overlooked the camellias in the front, the tapestry cushion of pansies still smouldering though it was dark, and the great wrought-iron gates open on to the street. I thought of our tiny garden and sighed.

  I began to imagine myself in this garden, to realise myself, and a ladder appeared, which I climbed until my own head sprang up, peering over the window sill into the study. But this was not my head exactly, not Charlie Bloome, but my head as Monkey Boy, making a goofy face as I looked in.

  I stepped back, shocked, especially since I now saw myself through the eyes of the ape. And there was Adrian, the stuttering brother, the dill (something of a Monkey Boy himself), dusting Sebastian’s medals on the trophy table.

  And I imagined the study door thrown open, and Sebastian entering, and coming up close behind his brother (who was oblivious, dusting), and the writer poking him in the back, whispering close and nasty, ‘Here. And here. Clean it right, you stupid prick.’ Then Adrian turning to face him, his face florid, loathing, murderous, and his hand, as mine had once (or so I imagined), gripping a pen raised as a weapon to plunge into the neck of his brother. And Monkey Boy at the window (my eyes like saucers) knew that I was witnessing what I should not, and slipping down the ladder, I skirted the velvet pansies to run through that gate home.

  When I returned to my senses (shaken, I admit) and saw that Lootie and Constance were still in the study (as was I, miraculously), Chanteleer had assumed the role of tour guide. ‘Around the walls,’ he said, ‘are the covers of my books. In time I will light them better, with gallery lighting, mounted above, but we can’t do everything at once, can we, Mother?’

  ‘There’s the money to consider,’ the old dear muttered, too honest, as usual, causing her son to grimace.

  ‘Are these the originals?’ I asked. I regretted this immediately. I guess my resolve had been weakened as a result of my recent murderous experience, there at the window. Yet it was not me who had gripped the pen, surely not me who had stabbed and killed, but that other dill, that other drip, that other Monkey Boy, the brother. Surely?

  But murderer or no, Monkey Boy or no, my question still hung in the air and too late, I knew that I had opened myself to Chanteleer’s scorn.

  ‘I would hardly frame photocopies,’ he shot back, which was rude, yet enlightening nevertheless, leading me to a clearer understanding (which was, after all, my purpose in the visit): that this room was for show, not a real study, not a genuine writer’s workroom, but a monument to the author’s literary achievements, hence the tour.

  I shut my mouth, still more determined to observe in silence.

  The mounted covers were old fashioned as I had noted when I first encountered them from the comfort of our sofa—all fiery-mouthed dragons and leaf-green elves and horses rearing and tin-plate knights with lances—and I wondered that the publishers of a man so famous couldn’t find better illustrators. Even the designs were ordinary, the lettering and the titles. The thought occurred to me that none of this might be the publisher’s fault; maybe these covers were what Chanteleer wanted, even demanded. Maybe his taste was twee. (The bow tie, the socks.) Or maybe, as his mother had said, he knew nothing about kids.

  I realised that we were expected to say ‘Ooh!’ and ‘Aah! but refused. I also refused to examine the trophy table—fearing that I might collide with my other, that pen-wielding ape, Adrian, perhaps?—although Lootie let me down there, gasping at every item held up to her view.

  But it was the desk that really took her fancy. ‘How beautiful,’ she gushed. ‘Is that where you write? Really?’

  ‘My mother gave me that,’ Chanteleer said, preening. ‘Didn’t you, Mother?’

  ‘I did,’ she acknowledged, smiling.

  ‘Tell our guest when,’ he said, encouraging.

  ‘Back in…’ She couldn’t seem to remember, so her son obliged.

  ‘On the occasion of my first publication, entitled…’

  It was evident that the old lady had forgotten the script, or the champagne had muddled her thinking. So she improvised. ‘Oh…’ she began, one hand to her forehead, ‘Um…If I remember rightly, the desk is red cedar. But I didn’t buy it. It was purchased by the Duke and Duchess of Hartley and bequeathed to my mother. And then to me, of course. As was so much of our stuff. Indeed a great deal of our furnishings were left to me by the Hartleys. Ever so influential, they were. And generous, thank the Lord. And I have given so much to Sebastian…’

  And to Adrian? I wondered.

  ‘Come now, Mother,’ Chanteleer interrupted, leading Lootie away. ‘They don’t want the family history. I call this my trophy table, though they aren’t trophies exactly, I am hardly a footballer…’

  Determined not to respond, I looked away, but for whatever reason (deliberate provocation?) I said, ‘Where is your computer?’ It was after all, a reasonable question. This was a writer’s study, wasn’t it?

  ‘What computer?’ he replied.

  ‘Don’t you have a laptop tucked away somewhere?’

  ‘I write by hand,’ he said. ‘Serious writers write by hand.’ And he tapped the black pen, tucked ever so neatly into his coat pocket.

  Lootie was impressed. ‘And then you type up what you’ve written?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I send it out. I’ve yet to find a suitable typiste here. I had to leave Patty in the Old Country. I’ll miss her.’

  ‘So, where’s your current novel?’ Lootie wanted to know. ‘Or should I say “manuscript”?’

  Chanteleer turned, looking down on her, ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘if you’re going to be close to a writer, you must learn never to ask about a work in progress. You understand?’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, in an aw-shucks kind of way, ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Do you sit here to read?’ I asked, coming to the rescue. I nodded towards the black leather chairs.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, stepping away from Lootie to perch on the leather. ‘Every day.’

  I found this interesting. ‘Is it kosher to ask a writer what he reads?’

  ‘The paper,’ he said.

  ‘No favourite novelists that we should know about?’ I asked, thinking (hoping?) that perhaps there was some inside trading, some hint about writing, that a student might glean.

  ‘Not any more,’ he said, staring around the room, ‘I have so much to attend to. So much business…Time, my boy. Where does it go?’

  A prolonged silence followed, so I said, ‘Speaking of which, we really should be going ourselves. Are you okay with that Lootie?’

  Oddly enough, she was.

  13

  We called our second bedroom ‘the study’. As opposed to our main bedroom, the window of this room overlooked our pocket-handkerchief back garden. We put two tables in this room, both secondhand. On one was our computer, facing the window; we wrote at the other, or read. Along one wall ran bookshelves (our ‘library’) made from chipboard and breeze blocks. I had the top shelves (being taller), Lootie the bottom.

  In happier times, when we were both committed to our studies, we shared this space, one working on the computer, the other at the reading desk. But following her contact with Chanteleer, as Lootie sank deeper into the doldrums, she had begun to clear out her shelves, stacking the unwanted books on the desk where I still liked to read.

  ‘What am I supposed to do with these books?’ I said.

  ‘Keep them if you want,’ she said, ‘or sell them.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Aren’t you ever going back?’

  ‘Not to teaching kids,’ she said. ‘It’s over.’

  ‘But you were enjoying it,’ I said. ‘The lessons we prepared.’

  She laughed in my face. ‘There’s more to teaching
than glue and cellophane.’

  I looked at the books. Aries’ Centuries of Childhood, Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood. They interested me, and from time to time, when I was by myself (which was more and more often), or when I grew tired of my own work, I’d dip into them.

  My childhood had been very ordinary. Sometimes, after school, I might go over to Rory’s place to play. He had better toys than me. He had Lego and Star Wars stuff that my mother couldn’t afford. He even had a light sabre. When he played with that I was given a broom handle to protect myself while he flashed its lurid beam, invariably killing me. Sometimes he would take out his electric train and I was allowed to watch. He let the train run around its oval track for a while, then he’d put a toy railway worker in its path. Immobile on the metal track as the worker was, Rory enjoyed the death.

  I have often thought about that.

  In my first year at uni I read a story by Saki, the Victorian writer. The parents in this story were worried about their son’s violence when he played with his toy soldiers. He was always leading a charge, or killing someone. So they gave him a new toy: a set of nurses and doctors, hoping that he might learn to show compassion, to play a game where the toys were healed. Their ruse failed. The child had the doctors kill the nurses.

  I sometimes think about that too.

  I mean, why did those English boys kill that little Bulger kid? Why did they lure him away from his mother, and bash his head in on a railway line? The books on childhood never answered this, which set me wondering, How would I?

  I had gone to school, as children do, attended morning prayers, then sat in class and did what I was asked, never questioning adult authority or the value of what I was taught. Maths and grammar were all the same to me. They had rules to be obeyed and if you multiplied incorrectly, you got the wrong answer; a singular subject took a singular verb, and so it went.

  But some lessons made me think.

  Most of all I loved hearing about saints and martyrs. The thrill of hell fire, the celestial glory of the angels. I would listen and dream, not about being good (that was never an issue) but about the pictures these stories made in my head. The visions. ‘Are you listening Charlie Bloome?’ the priest would say, and I would answer, ‘Yes, Father,’ because I was.

  At lunchtime, when the bell rang and we filed out, I’d take the soggy jam sandwiches that my mother had wrapped in waxed paper and sit under the camphor laurel tree in the schoolyard. I liked this tree. It had roots that stuck out like buttresses. I could wedge myself between them and feel safe. Sometimes I would read my books, sometimes I would gather the shiny green leaves that were caught there and crush them between my fingers. They smelled of camphor, a wonderful lingering smell I knew from my mother’s workroom.

  One of her ladies brought a little wooden box, carved all over with Chinese figures and a willow tree. When the woman opened the box to show my mother (I was allowed to look, standing on tiptoe), I saw that it was filled with pearls. The lady had broken her necklace and, having gathered the pearls up (they poured from her breast ‘in a torrent’, she said, ‘in a rush’), she wanted some sewn onto a hat. When I put my nose over the edge of that box, I smelled the camphor that stayed with me and helped me to feel secure when I sat between the roots of that camphor laurel tree at lunchtime. Especially if I had my book of saints and martyrs with me.

  Sometimes I would not hide away to read, but play a game called bedlam. I didn’t know then that this game was named after the infamous mental institution. There were two teams (boys only) running around like crazy, each trying to tag the other. If you were caught you were put in a rope circle laid out on the grass. You couldn’t escape unless a boy ran through the circle crying, ‘Bedlam!’ I was big for my age and I could run fast. I wasn’t caught that often.

  Being big also meant that I was left alone and not bullied. I could do what I wanted. Sometimes I wouldn’t play. I’d throw my lunch in the bin and sit under the camphor laurel having a great time, all by myself.

  I especially loved the book, Heroic Boys and Girls: Stories of Youthful Saints. There were no pictures but I could see what happened all the same. How St Cyril was dragged before a blazing fire, but did not shrink from suffering and St Agnes, who could not be destroyed by fire and so was given over to the executioner’s axe.

  I was never in trouble, except once.

  I remember that my mother made a steak-and-kidney pie for our tea (dinner) at five o’clock. ‘The meat was cheap,’ she said. From the leftovers she made me a special pie for my lunch. She made it in a little china dish and gave it to me in a brownpaper bag as I left for school. ‘Now don’t go squashing this,’ she said. ‘And bring the dish home.’

  As the morning passed, I thought about that pie, singing to me in my school bag. I imagined the crusty pastry, the chewy kidneys, the juices, like gravy, thick on my lips. At lunchtime I took the pie and headed for my tree, for that place between the exposed roots where I could eat in peace. But I needed to pee first. ‘Pee’ was a home word, ‘piss’ a school word that I would not say. ‘Poo’ was a home word too, ‘bog’ and ‘shit’ bad school words that I would never say.

  The lavatories at St Finbar’s were cold, the cubicles without doors, the pedestals streaked yellow from the constant dripping of half-pulled chains. Swear words like ‘fuck’ were written on the walls. The place stunk of pee and those blue blocks of antiseptic left to fester in the urinals, clogging the drain.

  There was a rule that no boy could take food into the lavatory. The brothers had put a special rack outside, made of timber dowelling, where lunches were to be left if you had to go. Certain boys used this rack as a kind of free food bar. If they’d left their lunch at home, or forgotten it, or didn’t like what they’d been given, they would walk by these racks, checking if something nicer was on offer while a boy had a pee inside.

  I didn’t want to leave my pie on this rack. It would be stolen for sure, and my mother had made it especially for me. Besides, if someone stole it, the china dish would be gone too, and I would get into trouble. So I put the pie under my arm, safe in its brownpaper bag, perfectly hygienic, and I stood at the trough to pee.

  Father Florian came in. He was the principal, on lavatory duty. He saw me. He was a tall man, thin and bald, his face mean, with a big nose and hollow cheeks and black-framed glasses. He slapped his hand on my shoulder and I jumped, my pee squirting sideways. He said, ‘Wait for me at my office.’

  I went to the office, my knees knocking. I hadn’t been there before. Father Florian came up in a few minutes. ‘Go in,’ he said. I did as I was told, the pie still under my arm. ‘I’ll take that,’ he said, snatching the pie and throwing it in his wastepaper bin. I heard the dish break. ‘You disgust me,’ he said. I wanted to tell him that my mother had made the pie for me, that she wanted the plate back, that she made the pie for me because she loved me, but no words came.

  Florian reached above his desk and took a cane from a rack there. ‘Hold your hand out,’ he said, and I did. He lifted the cane high, and flicked it, testing, then brought it down on my open hand. I winced and pulled away. ‘The other hand,’ he said and when I held it out he did the same again, only this time he lifted the cane so high that he hit the light bulb and shattered it, the glass falling to the floor. ‘Again,’ he said, ‘This time for breaking my bulb.’ When he was done, he said, ‘Get out, you filthy boy.’

  I took the punishment without crying, though I seethed with the unfairness of it all: that because of my love for my mother, and my commitment to obeying her, this adult saw fit to punish me.

  I often thought of my mother, especially when I was reading Lootie’s books and reflecting on my own childhood. Mum rarely spoke about her past, other than in the didactic terms of the value of suffering or the oxymoronic worth of poverty, but from time to time she would forget herself and say, ‘We did that in Dunolly’, or ‘It was like that in Dunolly’. Most often, when she complained about our rented house, she would compare
it to the ‘big house in Dunolly, with the cherry tree out the front’ and once she showed me a photograph of the place, though I don’t remember what became of that.

  So a yearning to go back to Mum’s roots began to develop. To find out where she had come from, with me in her.

  Not owning a car, I finally gathered the courage to ask Rory. ‘Don’t laugh,’ I said, ‘but things aren’t going so great with Lootie and me, and I was wondering if you would get me away for a while. For a drive.’

  ‘Sure, Monkey Boy,’ he said. ‘Happens to the best of us.’ He gave me a wink. ‘Where would you like to go?’

  ‘Dunolly,’ I said, ‘where my mum came from. A sort of sentimental journey.’

  ‘The old gold-mining town?’ he asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I admitted. ‘It’s where my mum came from. She didn’t talk about it much.’

  ‘Yeah, okay,’ he said, non-committal. ‘It’s not far, eh?’

  I’d checked a map and assured him that it wasn’t. ‘We could do it in a day, easy,’ I said. ‘I’ll pay for the petrol.’

  Rory thought about this, then suggested, ‘How about we make a weekend of it? We could stop over in a pub. We could have a steak and get pissed.’

  I wasn’t all that keen on Rory’s terms, but since I wanted to go, I agreed.

  Lootie didn’t seem to care that I was going. ‘Good idea,’ she said (the implied meaning of which eluded me). So when Rory picked me up on the Saturday morning, I left with a clear conscience.

  I wanted to see where Mum had lived, the landscape, the farms, the pubs and churches, the town itself. I wasn’t going as a tourist. I thought that maybe I might see her school, even her house. That in seeing where she lived, I might find my own roots.

  As we drove around, it was easy to tell that the town had changed in the years since Mum had lived there (supermarkets, housing estates), but there was a still a country character about Dunolly, and Rory was nice enough to indulge me so that I could take it in. Deep down, I think he knew that he was a loser himself, so what harm could come of condescending to another?