My father’s hand came down harder still across my forehead. He had forgotten he was wearing a ring. A gash appeared across my eyebrow, releasing a curtain of blood into my right eye. The injury looked worse than it was, but it made me howl loudly enough to bring Kath out from the kitchen, and to be honest, I was prepared to turn it into a full-blown drama.
‘What the hell have you done to him?’ my mother cried furiously.
Bill was never at his best when forced to defend himself. ‘Your son’s a useless little nancy, he needs some sense knocked into him.’
‘He’s not good at doing the things you make him do.’
‘We all have to do things we don’t like doing, even him.’
‘So you thump him? And he’s just my son when he’s done something wrong?’
‘I don’t know who he is. I don’t know what he is. There’s nothing in him I recognize.’
‘I suggest you take a good look at yourself. If he turns out to be like you, he’s in for a bloody miserable life. He knows who he is.’ Sometimes, Kath championed me at her own expense.
‘Leave him alone, for God’s sake. You’re always pulling him about, he’s not a baby.’ Bill ran oily fingers through his thinning hair, frustrated. ‘I just don’t understand. He gets good results at school. He behaves himself. He’s always well turned out. He knows right from wrong. It all looks good on paper, but when you turn it into flesh and blood something’s just not there.’
‘Here, let me see that cut. Goodness, you can stop making such a noise, it’s not that bad.’ I knew my mother would deal with the wound first, then the carpet and finally the walls. Her aim, as always, was to restore everything to how it was. No sign of upheaval would ever be allowed to remain.
This time, coming to my aid was the worst thing Kath could have done. It only served to widen the crevasse that ran through the middle of the family. The sides moved further apart, with both parents using their respective children as aides, and a few cinema trips were no longer enough to create a lasting truce.
Steven had no idea that his loyalty was being manipulated, so he and I were able to remain steadfast allies. But seated in the garden with a book on my knees, away from the house where no normal conversation could be held, I wondered about myself and my father. Perhaps we could never be friends, not because we were too different, but because, in some mysterious way that I had yet to understand, we were too alike.
Overhead the mouldering plane trees were rustling with fresh rain, and in the council flats opposite someone was screaming blue murder. Kath came out to join me with a red plastic first-aid kit in her hand. She sat beside me on a dead stump – all that remained of a once thriving tree my father had over-pruned – and put a quick stitch into my eyebrow. Thanks to her post-Victorian upbringing, she had always been handy with a darning needle.
‘He loves you in his own way,’ she told me sadly. ‘But he’ll always be his mother’s son.’
So will I, I thought.
‘This is going to sting,’ she warned me, wiping the wound with disinfectant. ‘Think of something else. Tell me something. Can you remember the first time you enjoyed reading?’
The memory was always quick to return. My first school, Invicta Mixed Infants, had a cherished square of grass behind its playground, just a small emerald patch of calm that caught the lunchtime sun, and you were allowed to venture on to it only if you were going to read a book; even comics were not allowed. I had taken an American novel from the library, Two Years before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr, and lying on my stomach, began to read.
Soon the dust of the suburban street, the drowsy warmth of the sun on my back, the distant susurration of bumblebees and the faint dampness that could always be felt through English grass all faded away, to be replaced by the snap of ocean spray, the creak and sway of the clipper, the bitter mess of salt beef and hardtack, the coarseness of sail and rope on my hands.
Finally sensing the unnatural quiet surrounding me, I looked up and realized that I had missed the break bell, and the first twenty minutes of my afternoon class.
I wanted to try and explain my feelings to my mother, but found the words drying in my mouth. I could hear them in my head, but was not able to explain aloud.
Kath sat back, detachedly admiring her handiwork, and something broke. Her face refused to maintain its immobility. Her eyes shimmered as she tipped back her head. ‘God, look at us. What a state we’re in. We should all be rejoicing the fact that God has given us life, but instead we waste every single thing we have. And you’re just as bad as he is – you couldn’t be more selfish if you tried. Why can’t you give something back, just for once? At least give him a reason to respect you.’
‘Why? I don’t respect him.’ It was the wrong thing to say, but I could not help myself.
‘Then we’ll just go on the way we are. Not much to look forward to, is it?’ She snapped the lid of the first-aid kit shut and rose, furious with me.
1 During the Crimean War they tried to make a similar thick paste from horses called Chevril. It didn’t catch on.
27
A Private Thing
LONG BEFORE THE sexually permissive sixties boiled down into the shabby, leering seventies, Bill began to notice that he was missing out. He re-read his elderly Playboy1 magazines and sent off for the odd bit of Dutch porn (clinical, scary, overlit and more instructive than arousing – second drawer down in the wardrobe behind the socks), and after seeing Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice fancied trying a bit of wife-swapping. But the only wife apart from his own that he even knew to nod to was his boiler-fitter mate Ron’s missus, and she was a boiler. He’d never bothered to make friends with anyone, and was starting to see how small his world had become.
Sex was in the air, but everything conspired against Bill getting any. Kath had by now undergone a grotesque, painful hysterectomy that had involved a doctor waking her up to announce that her womb ‘and the parts governing your sexual feelings, which you don’t need’ had been removed while she was unconscious, without her consent.
Everything was changing around them. As a concession to modernity Kath finally purchased a cream plastic trimphone, which was so light that it flew up into the air whenever she lifted the receiver. She didn’t have anyone to call, but it had been embarrassing having a telephone table without a telephone on it. Bill solved the problem of the flyaway phone by supergluing it down. Kath would stare at it longingly, half willing it to ring, half fearful of what to do if it did.
And to make matters worse, ‘Aunt’ Mary came to live with us. She’d had a stroke, and reminded me of a scary old tree. Her smile involved a baring of the teeth that frightened even the dog.
It seemed that the old lady could not do anything for herself, except when she thought no one else was watching, when she moved like The Flash and returned to her position in front of the fire before you could register what had happened. Every time she outstretched a clawful of year-old toffees in my brother’s direction, Steven ran screaming from the room. She smelled of old cupboards, damp and death, and the room seemed brighter and more cheery whenever she left it. She was also subject to narcoleptic fits, and after drooling for a couple of minutes with a faraway look in her rheumy eyes, would periodically fall sideways and drop off her chair, once bludgeoning herself into a trance on the fireplace surround. Somehow, these little moments of downtime never seemed to faze her, and she would spring straight back up with a croak of ‘Well, what are you looking at? Don’t you have anything better to do?’
And there she stayed in the middle of the lounge at Cyril Villa, sucking up the light, a silent, yellow-skinned, joy-draining, tartan-covered obelisk who simply would not die, seated between parents and children, stifling any possibility of spontaneity, joy or conversation above a whisper. She was there before we got up and long after we went to bed, and she hardly ever spoke to anyone. I suspected that, having denied herself a life of her own, she now took great pleasure from crushing all communication that might le
ad, no matter how circuitously, to some form of happiness.
First, we made any excuse we could think of to leave the room. Then, when it seemed that she could levitate from one area to the next behind our backs, we made any excuse to leave the house. I took to walking the dog six times a day. Bill went off to dig up some rose bushes that had been doing quite well without his help. Kath took her copy of Bleak House to the bathroom for hours at a time. Steven played happily in the garden, because he was still innocent and adorable.
Finally, something wonderful happened to ‘Aunt’ Mary. She died. During the reading of her will, we discovered that she had left fifteen thousand pounds to a cat shelter, money that Kath insisted she had siphoned away from her mother. But at least we were free. It was only for a few weeks, though, because sadly my grandfather’s lungs, thickly coated with tar from his old job on the roads and a lifetime of chain-smoking Senior Service, gave out and he too died, leaving Mrs Fowler with nowhere to stay.
I found my mother sitting in her partially wallpapered bedroom, crying. ‘What can we do but take her in?’ Kath said. ‘Carrie can’t do it, she’s got her hands full with her nerves, and no one else will even talk to her. Bill wants her to come and live here, with us. She’s not like Aunt Mary. She’s strong. She’s going to live for ever. She’ll outlive all of us. She’s like those tins of fruit that never go off, the ones that are still fresh after years and years.’
It seemed as though our family was cursed. That dark and rainy night, immediately after the funeral, Mrs Fowler appeared at the front door in her wicker hat and navy-blue coat, clutching her ebony stick like a character in a particularly dreadful Victorian children’s novel. But now she also had a battered brown leather suitcase with her.
‘Well,’ she sniffed disapprovingly at the hall wallpaper, ‘it would appear I’m to live here. My son has specifically asked for me. Am I to be invited in or what?’
I knew that once the invitation had been issued and she had crossed over the threshold, nothing would get her out until everyone in the house had been sucked dry of blood.
My mother held the door open and got out of the way as her arch-nemesis trundled forward like a gunboat entering a harbour. Having badgered her husband into a submissive decline, Mrs Fowler now had the little house in Reynold’s Place to herself, but conveniently glossed over the subject when Kath asked her about it, moving swiftly on to the arrangements of the household.
Kath wrung her hands inside her apron, a stress-relieving habit she had developed along with pressing the back of her wrist against her chin. ‘Would you like me to take you upstairs and show you your room?’ she asked.
‘Show me the kitchen,’ said Mrs Fowler. ‘My son needs a decent meal inside him.’
The tiny galley-like kitchen was Kath’s sanctum sanctorum, the only place she could call her own. Now, it seemed, she was to share it.
After a good night’s sleep, Mrs Fowler rose early and began the rehabilitation of her son’s diet by restoring lots of peculiar old products to the kitchen: lard, dripping, treacle, suet, dried prunes, turnips, syrup of figs, castor oil, molasses, pickled eggs, gherkins, some kind of sepia cabbage in a jar. If she could have laid her hands on some whale meat or snoek she would have done so. In clouds of flour she bashed and rolled and thumped pastry about until it was grey. Filled with inchoate vexation, she inched across the workspace so that Kath was slowly driven back against the boiler, before being impatiently asked to move out of the way. My mother retreated to the door, hovering uncertainly while her rival boiled mutton to extinction.
Next, Mrs Fowler started on the lounge, dangling crocheted antimacassars from the backs of the armchairs and placing yellowed doilies under anything in the room that didn’t move. Chalk and china knick-knacks began to appear: poodles, windmills, fishing boats, a giant fly made of brass that held pins. I realized what she was doing: she was turning our house into her house. Already crepuscular, the gloomy rooms sank into senescence. Once she was satisfied, she would march from the room with a mutter of ‘That’s much better.’
There are men who will do anything to avoid an argument with women. Bill meekly ate what was set before him, refusing to be drawn into the complex question of his preferences. I dug out my old notebooks, or retreated to the cinema. My mother chewed her nails, sensing defeat. Even the dog hid in the back room, developing a zoo-cage mentality that would eventually drive it to compulsive pacing, insanity and an early death.
There had to be some way out. Our family had never been close, but now it was quickly falling to bits. Like stress fractures appearing in the sixties concrete motorway that cut through East Greenwich, something had to crack. Eventually it did.
Kath put up with being relegated to an ever-smaller corner of the kitchen for three weeks, then fled to my room, where she sat biting her nails and peering from the window in abject misery.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she confided. ‘Your father hates me more each day. You’re the only one who understands that I’m not the villain in this, and you’re just a child.’
I wasn’t thrilled to be considered a child. I had started thinking of myself as an adult at the age of twelve. ‘You’re always telling me to act on what I feel,’ I told her. ‘Why don’t you do it? Go in to the kitchen and throw her out. Chuck her into the street, and her suitcase after her.’
‘She’s his mother,’ Kath said in awe.
‘She’s not just his mother,’ I told her. ‘She’s a rude word.’
‘You’re right,’ Kath agreed, the truth dawning. ‘She’s a horrible old bitch.’ Shocked, she threw her hand over her mouth. ‘Goodness.’
‘And you have to throw her out.’
‘I can’t do that.’
‘Then she’ll continue to act like she’s Dad’s wife instead of his mother, and turn you into her daughter, and make this family into something really, really strange.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Go on,’ I goaded. ‘Go down there. Put your foot down. Let her know who’s boss.’
But she didn’t. Kath went back to the kitchen and waited patiently while her mother-in-law took over the sink, the draining board, the counter. Finally, when Mrs Fowler realized that Kath was not going to move any further, she snatched a saucepan away from her. ‘For God’s sake,’ she shouted, ‘don’t you know anything about the preparation of decent food?’
There was a small silence, then an explosion of pots, pans and crockery as my mother threw my grandmother out of the kitchen. Mrs Fowler burst forth, her navy-blue coat covered in flour and eggs. ‘That’s it!’ she wailed. ‘I won’t stay in this house for another second, not if you paid me! I’ll not remain in a house where all my goodwill and hard work is ignored and thrown back in my face!’
She stumped upstairs, packed her leather suitcase and returned to stand dramatically in the hall doorway. ‘You can be sure that I’ll let my son know it was you who drove me out on to the street!’ She raised a hand, pointing a forefinger to the sky, preparing to issue a proper Victorian curse. ‘And I swear that if I should die this very night,’ she intoned solemnly, ‘my death will be on your conscience until the day you die. Probably longer.’
And with that, the front door slammed, the wind dropped, the house fell silent and she was gone. After an hour the dog came out from behind the couch.
My mother should have been jubilant, but she wasn’t. She felt she had committed a terrible sin, when all she had done was stand up for herself. She wondered what on earth she could tell Bill when he returned home from work. He would be furious, he would blame her for everything, he would not talk to her for months, years, possibly the rest of his life.
That night, Mrs Fowler went to her sister Carrie’s to stay. After setting down her leather suitcase and asking for a nice cup of hot, strong tea, she sat down on the sofa, closed her eyes and died.
Kath took the phone call and listened with growing numbness. She had only just mastered the art of answering the phone, and now she was about to
be put off it for life. By the time she replaced the receiver, she was distraught.
‘What am I going to do when Bill finds out?’ she asked. ‘This is worse than before. I threw her out, and she cursed me. She willed herself to die, just to spite me. She’s turned me into a cold-blooded killer. He’s going to blame me for murdering his mother.’
But oddly, Bill didn’t. He let himself in quietly and stood at the window, watching the boats make their serene passage down to the wide silver reaches of the Thames. A thin pink mist had settled on the lowlands by the riverbank. The last remaining tatters of cloud disappeared, as if fleeing over the edge of the world. He stood there until the street lights came on and the sky to the North had turned a clear navy blue. Even then he did not move.
Bill remained quiet and thoughtful in the days that led up to the funeral. Mrs Fowler was placed in an urn beside her husband, where she could continue to have a go at him. Quite a few of the neighbours from Reynold’s Place turned up and stayed timidly in the background, like Munchkins making sure the witch was dead.
Neither I nor my mother could understand Bill’s mood. After a while, his taciturn demeanour slowly lifted and he became almost chatty. He seemed strangely free, happy even. And as the old woman’s shadow slowly faded, he finally started to notice his wife. It was as if he had found something that had been there all along, waiting patiently for discovery, only it had been too small and quiet to see.
‘Can I ask you something?’ I said to Kath. My mother and I had taken the dog for a walk. The Alsatian was trying to claw its way ahead, spraying spittle and making strangled retching noises on its lead. ‘When we were in Westerdale Road, I saw him hit you. Why didn’t you just leave?’
‘Oh you did, did you? I wondered if you had.’ She fell silent. We walked on. The dog sounded as if it was choking to death, its pink tongue protruding obscenely from its mouth. She slipped it from its lead and it shot off into the woods to take a dump and chase a rabbit.
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