‘Well, he only hit me a couple of times,’ said Kath finally. ‘You’re talking about that evening you saw us through the banisters. He came at me again and I fell backwards.’
‘But—’
‘Then he hit himself. Over and over again. I sat there watching him while he did it. You can’t imagine how I felt. I wanted to reach out and hold him, but he just wouldn’t let me. He wanted to hurt himself. Well, you’re the only other person who knows about it. It has to be our secret.’
‘But I still don’t understand. Were you ever in love with him?’
‘No. Nor with anyone else, before you ask. It would have been nice, and I thought it might happen, but that wasn’t the way things turned out. There are different kinds of love; I had you and Steven.’
‘Then why have you stayed with him all this time?’
‘Oh, there are things you don’t know about your father. He grew up in that tiny dark house listening to his mother destroy the reputations of everyone around her. I try not to believe that there are bad people, but she really tested my patience. I suppose she was a product of her time, and the time before that, when a strong woman could rule the street she had been born in. He finally got away from her by taking a job in the city. But he’d picked up her habit of saying terrible, untruthful things about people behind their backs, and one day it got him fired from his job.’
I remembered the whispered mystery of my father’s lost job.
‘He was out of work, but stayed up at his mother’s house so often that you probably thought he was still going to the office. After a long time he eventually landed a new job and his career finally took off. He started doing well – he’s smarter than he seems, your father – and he rose quickly through the ranks. He worked very hard and was heading for the top of his profession, but the company decided to relocate to Toronto, and it broke his heart not to go with them.’
‘Why didn’t he go?’ I asked. ‘Why would he choose to end up in a horrible run-down gas showroom in the Elephant and Castle instead?’
‘Why didn’t he go?’ She stopped and studied me, as if amazed that I could be so stupid. ‘You know the answer to that, Christopher. He stayed because of you. He could see that you were clever. He didn’t want to take you out of your school. You were so happy there. He gave it all up for you.’
I felt deeply ashamed. In my heart I had always known the answer, but I had given my father nothing back. Secret emotions, hidden feelings, pretending everything was fine: this was what we were best at. Why did adults have to bury everything? Our family problems, Bill had always told us, were a private thing. And he was determined to keep them that way, even if it sent us all mad in the process.
1Playboy ran cutting-edge fiction in its pages and was a good friend to upcoming authors. It recently published an article on pubic hair-styling, so obviously the tradition continues.
28
Rebel Rebel
THE POPULAR MUSIC of my mid to late teenage years was truly terrible: Marc Bolan1 whining about golden-haired fairies and stardust, Groundhogs and Iron Butterfly sounding like someone panicking in a roomful of dustbin lids, Jethro Tull playing the flute while hopping about on one leg like Worzel Gummidge. The only bands I could bear to listen to were Mott the Hoople and Led Zeppelin, although, if truth be told, I preferred Die Fledermaus. ‘Whole Lotta Love’ received some major suburban-bedroom turntable time, and was an antidote to the local disco, where everyone sat in the corners of the room, nodding their heads and grooving along with little spastic hand gestures. The girls wore maroon floor-length crushed-velour dresses and had long kinked hair tied back with ribbons, Pre-Raphaelite virgins on cider and joints. Their idea of a good time was getting smashed while listening to the screaming bit from Pink Floyd’s ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’.
For the weaker members of the school pack, it’s always a strange, cocooned existence on the sidelines of the action. I enviously watched the other kids as they honed their social skills, getting their hands into drunk girls’ shirts while they danced to ‘Ride A White Swan’. The other geeks and I were still making Aurora model kits of mummies and werewolves. None of us were rebels.
The school had a good name. The head and his staff, stiff and imperious in their chalk-stained black gowns, flapped through the corridors like adrenalin-charged vampires. They were grudgingly respected because they did not try to be our friends, but kept their distance and occasionally maimed us when we went too far. We saw the movie If, in which Malcolm McDowell machine-gunned his teachers, and it simply wasn’t us.
That was before our relief art teacher Mike Branch arrived. He was about thirty years younger than any other member of staff, and came for the summer term. Everyone fell in love with him. He was handsome and funny and a bit mad. He let you smoke in the kiln room, his long blond hair hung over his collar, and he wore jeans. To boys who were actually expected to wear school regulation underpants, this was amazing. He asked us to call him Mike, and explained that his classes would be very different from what we were used to.
The first time I saw him, he was lounging with his brown suede boots on the desktop, reaching an arm up to the blackboard to wipe away the masters of the Florentine renaissance. ‘Forget the heavy stuff,’ he told us. ‘We’ll be studying the Dadaist2 movement, OK?’ Then he wrote REBELLION IN ART in red and threw the chalk out of the window.
Suddenly art became the hot class to take.
Mike’s lessons were unpredictable, and actually interesting. We created anti-meat art and self-destructing art and death-to-the-ruling-class art. The other teachers tolerated our displays because technically speaking they weren’t very good, which made them less of a threat. Besides, as pupils we were Showing An Interest, thus achieving a prime educational directive. The fact that we would have donated our kidneys for transplant if Mike had asked us hadn’t escaped their notice, either. The more ignored and hopeless teachers realized they could learn something from watching the art class.
One day Mike placed a single on the turntable of his record player. I was fist-deep in a gore-sprayed papiermâché duck when ‘Paint It Black’ by the Rolling Stones came on. I had never liked the dirge-like song, but it transpired that Mike had a purpose for playing it.
‘For the climax to our season of anti-art,’ he said, strolling between my paint-spattered classmates, ‘we are going to paint it black.’
‘Paint what black, sir?’
‘Everything. It will be a day of artistic anarchy. We’ll take all the work you have produced this summer and paint it all black. Then we’re going to glue it all together with the record player at the centre, along with anything else that you feel belongs in the sculpture, and stand it in the middle of the school quadrangle as a statement about ourselves.’
It seemed a bit stupid, but nobody argued.
‘What if somebody tells us to take it down, sir?’ said Doggart, a pudding-basin-haircutted weed who was born to say ‘sir’ a lot in his life.
‘You don’t take it down. You don’t obey anyone’s orders until the stroke of noon. Then I’ll appear and we’ll play “Paint It Black” from the centre of the sculpture. The art will last for the duration of the song, and then we’ll destroy it.
‘How, sir?’
‘We’ll set fire to it.’
‘But this is a smokeless zone, sir.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll forewarn the other masters.’
So, preparations were made, the date was set for the last day of term, and we painted everything we could lay our hands on before adding it to the pile. Clocks. Chairs. Tyres. Lampshades. Toys. Tailors’ dummies. Car exhausts. A washing machine. And all the time, the damned record played on and on until it wore out and had to be replaced with a new copy.
Mike Branch strolled around the art room, shifting from table to table, stopping to watch as Ashley Turpin, a fat kid with almost geological facial acne, attempted to get black paint to stick to a brass candelabra.
‘Extremely groovy, Turpi
n,’ he pronounced, running his thumb across his chin. Turpin, who had previously shown no promise in any area of scholastic endeavour beyond O-level Body Odour, was pitifully grateful.
Identified to other classes by our laminated badges (black, circular, blank – oh, the nihilism), we suddenly found ourselves treated as a creative élite. I and the other despised and shunned creeps had finally found our cause.
We began to be bad – bad as in modern bad, good bad. Soon we were discovering the non-artistic applications of Paint It Black. Minor-league anarchy: having pizzas with disgusting toppings delivered to the masters, cash on delivery; gluing their wipers to their car windscreens. Brian ‘Third Degree’ Burns upped the stakes by removing the back wheel from the French teacher’s moped, painting it black and adding it to the sculpture. We made crank calls to masters’ wives from the caretaker’s phone. We started wearing black shirts to go with our black ties, and became threatening towards weaker classmates. Anyone who whined that it was wrong was ditched from the group and had his badge revoked. If we had paid attention during History, we might have learned something about Mussolini.
By now there was an all-or-nothing atmosphere among members of the group. On the last day of term, Mike had arranged a double art period for his band of angry young rebels. All of the black-painted sections of the sculpture were arranged around the room. The Rolling Stones record played at top volume. The art room was rechristened the Rock Shop, so you could say, ‘Hey, if anyone wants me during the study period, I’m at the Rock Shop.’
We began to assemble the sculpture. Forming a chain, we passed the sections out into the school quadrangle. Table legs, television sets and dolls’ arms poked out from the twisted black heap, which grew and grew. The record player was wired up but we were going to be late for our noon deadline, mainly because we were so strung out by now that we were repeating each other’s tasks.
The big moment arrived and we were still building the sculpture. Most of the school had turned out to watch. The record player was started and the song began to play. Everyone knew that something special was about to happen. All kinds of rumours were flying around, most of them far more imaginative than what was actually planned. The headmaster appeared to see what all the fuss was about. He stood at the front of the crowd with his bony arms folded behind his back, like the Duke of Edinburgh watching native dancing, a look of attenuated tolerance upon his face.
All eyes were on us. We were the rebels and we had something to say.
Except that we didn’t.
We looked around for Mike. Our Mike, the leader of the black. But there was no sign of him anywhere.
‘If you’re looking for Mr Branch,’ said the headmaster in a clear Scottish Presbyterian voice that rang across the quadrangle, ‘you will not find him here. He left the school premises last night with no intention whatsoever of returning today.’ He carefully pronounced the ‘H’ in ‘whatsoever’.
Our headmaster turned on his heel and led the other teachers back to the common room. And the record stuck. It stuck on the word ‘black’. The repeated syllable taunted, and the derision began. Everyone drifted away, snorting to each other, too bored to even come and beat us up. The natural order had been restored, and we were back at the bottom.
I wondered if Mike Branch had ever intended to stay for the final act of rebellion, and what he might have done. Some years later, a friend told me that he had been spotted working as an estate agent in Kensington. I found myself wondering if he realized the effect he had had on all of us. He had given us pride and faith in ourselves, but also arrogance and ill-will. Then he snatched it all away.
It was incredible that we had put all our trust in someone who wore a purple turtleneck sweater and yellow beads beneath a brown patch-suede jacket. But I owned a mauve two-tone shirt with a huge round collar and canary hipster bell-bottoms, so what did I know?
1 The perfect parody of a tie-dyed art student. He hit a tree on Barnes Common and went off to live in Fairyland.
2 We loved the Dadaist movement because you could look like a rebel just by nailing a Brussels sprout to a tree.
29
The Safety of Scientists
KNOWING THAT MY father had sacrificed his career for me should have been the turning point you reach in films and novels, when bridges are mended amid welling tears, and a profound and lasting sense of respect is established between the protagonists as the son views his father with fresh eyes.
Unfortunately, this revelation came just when I had become an art rebel, so I carried on ignoring him. I was too busy dyeing all my clothes black and being moody. I had discovered Hamlet and studied it obsessively, searching for parallels with my own life. My father was not an adulterous murderer, but I was quite convinced that I shared qualities with the Dane, including prevarication, incoherent anger, impoliteness, a tendency to mope and an attraction to shoulder-pads. The phase was short-lived, though, and vanished with the non-appearance of the cowardly class warrior Mike Branch on our last day of term. I was quite relieved to be able to return to normal; being a rebel didn’t suit someone who preferred Offenbach to Iron Maiden.
Things were a little easier after that, but being with my father was rarely a picnic. As Bill coped with the loss of his mother and re-discovered the existence of his wife, he came to depend more on Kath than he ever had done on Mrs Fowler, following her from room to room, hardly ever letting her out of his sight. He would sit beside the sink smoking as she washed the dishes, and would traipse from room to room behind her as she vacuumed the carpets. He curtailed her freedom in a thousand unthinking ways, but whenever she turned to talk to him he could find nothing to say. Perhaps too many years of silence had passed between them to allow conversation to return.
It seemed impossible, but the family circle had shrunk still smaller. Without ‘Aunt’ Mary or Mrs Fowler around to drive us mad, a torpor descended upon the house, slowing our days and flattening all emotions. It was as if we had all been tranquillized. Elsewhere in the world there were wonderful adventures to be had and great loves to be celebrated, but life in South London had flat-lined. When Kath had first laid eyes upon my father, I wondered if it had it been like Cressida’s sighting of Troilus as he passed beneath her window in gleaming armour, then decided that as Bill looked more like Arthur Askey1 than a Trojan prince, the answer was probably not.
Within a month my father and I were constantly arguing once more, so Bill refocused his affections on Steven, who shared his love of everything mechanical.
The time of waiting seemed to last for ever. I crept off to horror films as though paying furtive visits to a forbidden lover. It was a way of experiencing all the things I could not yet feel, or be allowed to feel. If it wasn’t exactly improving my mind, it was better than digging out bottles of rum from the sideboard and getting pissed in the middle of the afternoon, or hanging around in bus shelters, casting weaselly glances at adults while planning gang wars over disputed territories. There wasn’t a wide range of activities to choose from in Abbey Wood if you had no money.
I returned to writing longhand. The Remington had tangled its keys once too often. I had tried to straighten them with a pair of needle-nosed pliers, but now they defied any attempt at realignment. After each visit to the Odeon I headed home to fill up more exercise books with stories, notes, and ideas filched from everything I saw, but sometimes the sheer effort of being so self-absorbed got to me. By now my secondhand writing was suffering from the law of diminishing returns.
Girls take an interest, but boys become obsessed. In the past I had been obsessed with Thunderbirds, Mad magazine, Hammer films, The Avengers (Diana Rigg series only), Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Prisoner, Hancock’s Half-Hour (radio series only), Superman, Playboy and Dracula.
Oh, to see a film in which Superman fought Dracula for Diana Rigg on a space station. Sadly, there was as yet no internet to provide solace for one’s more exacting obsessions. I looked back at the dismally predictable list and felt very
ordinary indeed. I re-read the short stories written out in my diary and the feeling of ordinariness grew. I was the same as every other child in the neighbourhood, probably the whole of London, England, the Earth, the Universe. I probably even had the same fantasies, which included:
Being the last teenager left alive on Earth and having the keys to every building in London.
Running my own television station, Fowlervision.
Owning a cinema and being the manager, so I could put on whatever I liked, as many times as I wanted.
Something vaguely to do with naked ladies, or possibly naked men, which was very different to being interfered with.
Owning every single issue of Superman, especially the one in which he dies: not a hoax, not a dream, But REAL!
I slammed my notebook shut when I realized that Kath was reading over my shoulder. ‘I think we need to have a little talk,’ she said, indicating the diary. ‘Bring that with you.’
We usually headed into the overgrown garden filled with rusting motorbike parts whenever we wanted to be alone, so as to keep our conversations hidden from my father. Bill had lately taken to chopping chunks out of trees in the adjacent woods, spreading his knack for destruction into the natural world, so Kath made herself comfortable on a sawn log and took the book from me. She read in silence for what felt like ages, then closed it gently and looked at me.
‘Well, they’re not terribly good, are they?’ It hurt me that she could be so honest. Her green eyes gazed steadily into mine, demanding that I reply with equal frankness.
‘No,’ I admitted. ‘They’re rubbish.’
‘No, not exactly rubbish. But they’re not really yours. They’re someone else’s ideas, re-worked, which is fine if you want to get a job in advertising. Instead of writing about mad scientists, can’t you write about people you know?’
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