I buckled down to my office job, made new friends, moved flats, went out.2 I wrote copy for adverts. Kenning Car Hire had taken an ad in a charity sailing brochure: ‘YACHTS OF LUCK FROM KENNING!’ Potterton Boilers had brought out a model with a new flue: ‘DON’T GET STEAMED UP ABOUT YOUR BOILER!’ A rather dim monkey could have produced work with more originality.
One day towards the end of the summer, when the corners out of sunlight were growing noticeably colder and scarves had started reappearing on the streets, my mother called me to explain that Bill was having some tests in Canterbury Hospital, and it might be a good idea to look in on him. So I borrowed a friend’s car and went to visit my father.
Illness had knocked some of the fight from him. Propped up in an enormous white bed, he seemed smaller and more jaundiced. The lines on his cheeks were deeper than ever, and his hair had thinned into wisps of grey. I thought, This isn’t a few tests, there’s something very wrong with him. Naturally, he pretended that everything was fine, as usual. We discussed the new lane system on the M2 motorway, digital watches and Potterton central-heating systems.
I had parked the car underneath the hospital, in a vast low-ceilinged concrete cavern with faulty, buzzing neon panels. I stayed for an hour in the hospital ward, but when I returned to the car and tried to leave I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, for although the exit arrows continued to point around to the left, I kept spiralling downwards instead of driving back up towards the surface.
As I went deeper, keeping the wheel at a steady angle, the surrounding cars grew dustier and older; some of them looked as if they had not been moved in years. I realized that I had not been concentrating because I had been worrying about my dad and whether he might be dying, and suddenly I was lost. I had simply ventured into the long-term parking area, but it felt like a descent into hell.
I tried to find a place to turn around, but was now in a series of tunnels too narrow to manoeuvre my car. I passed a sign reading ‘Car park closes at 8 p.m.’ and realized that it would shut in less than five minutes. When I scraped the nearside rear bumper against the wall, my oldest fears surfaced and I began to panic. Forced to travel on in one direction, my sense of claustrophobia grew. My breathing became laboured. I had suffered several serious bouts of pneumonia and pleurisy as a child, and had been left with damaged lungs. I opened a window and was sure I could smell leaking petrol.
It was getting more difficult to catch my breath. I imagined the car becoming wedged in the ever-narrowing tunnels, imprisoning me inside it as petrol dripped and pooled underneath the wheels, the fumes rising to fill the dark interior.
I finally found a place to turn, of course, and corrected the simple mistake I had made, returning easily to the surface. I was crying and felt ridiculous, ashamed of not dealing well with something my father would not have thought twice about. Bill had once burst a tyre on a motorway one night during a terrible storm, and had hopped out with his jack to fix it in a jiffy. He had replaced the tyre in howling rain and darkness while facing three lanes of oncoming traffic, and the idea of being nervous about doing so had not even crossed his mind.
When I returned to my room, I climbed on the bed and heaved the Selectric from its hiding place. Threading in a new sheet of paper, I began to type up the story of my panic attack, expanding and exaggerating it, colouring it with heightened emotions. I created a protagonist who had come to the building above the car park in order to serve a writ. The man was cocky and confident, but as the peculiarity of the car park’s layout made itself known he found himself trapped, his arrogance stripped away by something as simple as a ‘Keep Left’ sign.
It took me less than three hours to finish the first draft of the story. I didn’t just put down the memory of being stuck in the car park. Everything I had forgotten about writing came thundering back.
After that, each time something happened, whether it was sad or frightening or a cause for small happiness, I placed the feelings into the framework of another story. Gradually the pages mounted up in the corner of my room. At the end of the year I collated the stack of paper, and realized that I had finished ten stories.
I never sold a single one. Instead, almost by accident, I managed to sell the entire collection. The tales were fantasies, fables, adventures in lands I had never visited, but inside each one was a grain of unpalatable truth, something that I believed to my core.
The acceptance letter from the editor at Sphere Books was a pleasant and slightly distant single page, but it meant more to me than all the pages I had read in my life. The editor had not mentioned money, when the book would be published or how many would be printed, but it didn’t matter. I wanted to run all the way across London to tell my mother that it had all been worthwhile, but she had always told me that bragging was common.
It appeared that I had done it without the help of swinging London, without the sexual revolution, without the hip young things who invented the first era of what later became cringingly known as Cool Britannia, without any of the much-publicized creative efflorescence of the period. Instead, I had been shepherded by a self-effacing middle-aged mother, a genteel, disappointed librarian and a couple of dry English teachers who I can now only faintly remember. Perhaps I did not want to run across London after all. Achievement, it turned out, was a quiet thing. I wanted to clutch some books to my chest and walk them back through the rain to the little library that lived under the Blackheath flyover. I wanted to see Ethel Clarke sitting behind the counter, and show her the letter. I wanted to see the slow warm smile of satisfaction spread across her face.
The book was published as a (to me, at least) handsome paperback, and I even managed to find it on a shelf in an Oxford Street bookstore, albeit at the very back of the shop, near the stockroom. At the last minute I had remembered to put a dedication to my mother.
Out of politeness, I added my father’s name.
Short stories are one thing, a novel is another, and the first of these took a lot longer to gestate. The narratives I developed split up into thrillers, supernatural tales, social comedies, satire, science fiction, horror, humour, crime and mystery.
I did not attempt the Great British Novel. I was not fêted as the Hot New Talent. I did not become a Smash Bestselling Author. Despite hitting a few top-ten sales lists and garnering generally kind and thoughtful reviews, I joined the brigade of British mid-list writers, that groundswell of solid, reliable and often surprising authors who keep bookshops afloat once the public has sated itself with the latest overnight sensation.
It was more than I had ever dared to dream of.
One day, I hoped to add myself to the ever-expanding list of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers I had so long admired, which now also included:
Alan Garner
Peter Van Greenaway
Edmund Crispin
Peter Barnes
Joyce Carol Oates
David Pownall
Michael Frayn
Hilary Mantel
Paul Bowles
Brian Moore
Christopher Priest
and a hundred other authors who deserved to be more famous and read more widely than any TV presenter or glamour model who had been paid a fortune to grace the cover of the latest ghost-written stocking-filler to provide, at best, an alternative to buying someone socks at Christmas.
It was something to aim for, at the very least. And now the door was ajar, letting in a thin sliver of sunlight and opportunity. Unlike the brother’s cousin of the man who painted Shirley Bassey’s bathroom, there was a chance that I might one day become known for something more than going to the same school as Daniel Day-Lewis.3
1 Fast and efficient, but also incredibly noisy. An entire office of them was louder than a busy shipyard.
2 E. M. Forster once said he would have written more if he hadn’t gone out so much. Samuel Beckett, asked what he had given up for his art, replied: ‘I have fairly often not gone to parties.’
3 Three years
below me so I didn’t know him, sadly. How cool could that have been?
33
A Brush with History
BILL EMERGED FROM hospital subtly altered, like one of the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, only in reverse, so that he was suddenly warmer and more human. On subsequent visits home, I found him becoming tentatively friendly, like an old holiday companion carefully renewing an acquaintance. On the rare occasions when Bill returned the visit, he would always enter my room in the middle of a complaint about the journey.
‘You wouldn’t believe the traffic on the A2. The last two junctions were coned off and we had to cut up through Kidbrooke, which meant we couldn’t take the turn-off at the Blackheath roundabout.’
He had always been more comfortable discussing traffic systems than almost any other subject, probably because he was more familiar with the workings of the internal combustion engine than the human heart. We had reached a point where we could talk easily about boats and cars and sliproads and bridge construction, and I was careful never to mention anything as tricky as love, death or relationships. Bill came from the wrong generation for that sort of soft talk.
I could see that my father was ageing fast. Lines of regret had etched themselves deeply into his face, until he looked as old as his father before him. He had taken early retirement, but with nothing to do and no friends to see, he had simply remained at his post before the lounge window, watching the world bustle by.
When I discovered that Bill was dying of lung cancer, the result of a lifetime spent smoking unfiltered Woodbines, just as his father had smoked Capstan Full Strength all his life and died from them in similar circumstances, I went home and sat beside him in a spot where we could both face the view, such as it was.
My parents had moved from Cyril Villa to a neat, faintly nautical bungalow by the sea in Whitstable, but there was nothing much to see from the lounge. Typically, Bill had chosen a house set one road back from the water, facing the rear brick wall of the house that actually had the view of the sea. Apart from a single green thread of crimson roses on an orange brick wall, the garden had been denuded and manicured until its most noticeable feature was its barrenness. It was as though some retired people had punished their garden for being too small and leaving them with too much time on their hands.
‘I think we need to get some air,’ I said, passing my father an overcoat. Bill was still wearing his smart grey suit and tie, even though it was years since he had been to an office. The collar of his crisp white shirt had always been too tight, but now it looked two sizes too big.
We still struggled with conversation. I had never once discussed my success as a writer with him, and now it no longer seemed an appropriate subject.
‘That’s better. A bit of a breeze through the head.’ We
rounded the crest of the road and stared down at the grey, wind-pocked channel below.
I sat down on a bench beside my father. He looked blankly out at the sparkling sea, the walkers, sunbathers, children, yachts, water-skiers, the rest of the world, as if trying to make sense of so much activity. It was as though he was spending his final days observing distant action from an obstructed seat at the back of a cinema. Whatever he did now, he would not be able to interact with what was happening before him. Somewhere a radio was playing Acker Bilk’s mournful ‘Stranger On The Shore’, his favourite song. I tried to think of something nice to say.
‘What was it like when you were a scientist?’ I asked, remembering the monochrome photograph I had seen of him in a white coat, standing outside the laboratory that looked like a garden shed. I had been trying to write about a scientist recently, but a real one this time. Why on earth had it not occurred to me to ask my father before now?
‘Those were exciting days,’ he said, brightening up a little. ‘The best days of my life. We were all so young and untested. It seemed as if anything was possible back then.’
‘Why did it feel so different? Because you were young?’
‘Not just that. The government put a lot of faith in us, even though we were all in our early twenties. They wouldn’t do that now. Nobody trusts the young now. But there was a war on, and people like us were in short supply. We worked incredibly long hours, and the pay was terrible. We weren’t sure what they were expecting from us. We were trying to understand the structure of strengthened glass, trying to make it and then find a way of applying it to some use. The brief was very broad.’
‘Did you succeed?’
‘Oh yes, we used it to seal wiring inside, you know, to hold the wires in place. Valves and wiring, they were all so clumsy, and took experts to connect. The idea was to seal the bare wires, or a conductor in molten form, inside glass tablets and lock them together. You could make the connections much smaller that way. We knew that some other boffins were trying to build the first computer. I kept thinking how much better it would be if we could pour conductive metal straight into channels cut in silica.’
‘You mean like a silicon chip?’
‘Yes, but of course it was impossible to do back then. Our tools weren’t fine enough to cut the channels. As soon as they invented the laser, I realized it would become a reality.’
I remembered a moment of rare enthusiasm; my father coming into the garden to read aloud an article about the development of the industrial laser. I had paid him little attention.
I felt disgusted with myself. All this time, my father had been silently harbouring his own enthusiasm, and had brushed against one of the greatest scientific revolutions in history. In a slightly different time frame, under slightly different circumstances, he could have achieved something quite extraordinary. He could have helped to take Alan Turing’s work on into the modern computer age. He might have been successful, even famous. He would certainly have been happier.
Who would you have been, I wondered, what might you have done, without your mother to contain you? Two mothers, working in opposite directions – no wonder they never got on.
‘But there’s no use complaining about what might have been,’ said Bill, sinking back and looking out at the darkening sea. ‘Come on, let’s go home.’
‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ I said.
‘What for?’ Bill seemed mystified. As we walked back in silence, it struck me that it was perhaps the first time we had ever been truly comfortable in one another’s presence.
‘Look at you, you need a haircut,’ I told Bill, noting the straggling white hair that curled behind his huge ears.
‘I can’t get there any more,’ he admitted. ‘My legs aren’t working properly. Remember Morris’s in the Old Dover Road, where I always took you for your haircuts?’
How could I have forgotten? The barber was about ninety and blind as a bat. Every time I went there I got my neck nicked with a cut-throat razor, so that I ended up dreading haircuts more than trips to the dentist. By way of compensation the barber would give me a red rubber mould of Robin Hood and a bag of plaster. He nicked me so often that I ended up with all of the Merrie Men and half of Sherwood Forest.
‘Is he still there, old Morris?’ my father asked.
‘Oh, I imagine so,’ I said, knowing that not only was Morris gone, but so was the Old Dover Road, along with an entire way of life. ‘Let me cut it for you.’
‘No, you don’t have to do that. That’s not your job.’
‘I want to.’
When we got home, Bill sat very still with his back to me, rigid and upright on his stool, a towel tied around his scrawny neck, and remained very quiet while I trimmed his thin hair with the kitchen scissors. It seemed wrong to watch him behaving so compliantly.
My fingertips could feel the warmth of his neck. His creased, bloodless skin was much softer than I had expected it to be. It had always looked like roughly hewn granite. As I finished snipping the last pale strand, I lowered my hand so that my fingers brushed his bare wrist. It was the only time in my life that I ever remember touching my father.
Two days later, Bill
Fowler died.
34
The Last Star in the Sky
‘IT’S NOT A very nice job for you, dear, but I just don’t feel up to it,’ said my mother, pointing to the wardrobes. ‘A few old grey suits, it’s hardly worth calling the Salvation Army. Even they must have standards.’ She had delayed clearing out Bill’s clothes until I could get down to Kent and do it for her.
I looked at the cupboards. After years of being hard up and filling their little house in Westerdale Road with utility furniture, I was surprised to find that she still bought cheap, wobbly wood-veneered wardrobes. Material things had never meant much to Kath. She treasured books more than household items. She wasn’t one for nostalgia. Finally left alone, she seemed quite content now, although there must have been regrets.
‘Maybe we’ll find something exciting tucked away. Evidence of a double life,’ I teased her.
‘Oh no, dear, we were far too ordinary for anything like that. Your father didn’t bother to tell anyone we were moving from Cyril Villa, and not one person even tried to get in touch with us. Nobody really knew we were ever there. Sometimes I wonder whether we existed at all. The English can be such chimerical creatures when they choose to be.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘Nice use of “chimerical”, by the way.’ My mother laughed.
After Steven and I had both left home, our parents had sold the rambling old house where no repair had ever been completed, and the building had become an old people’s home. The oddest thing was that they decided not to take anything with them to the new bungalow except my mother’s ‘best company’ crockery – not a single stick of furniture, no clothes other than the ones they wore, hardly any mementoes or family photographs, most of which they left behind in boxes in one of the empty rooms. They simply stepped out of one life and into another. I admired that, even though I did not quite understand it. Across the years, my father had been governed by a set of obscure, unworkable principles, like a kitchen appliance for which the instruction booklet had been lost.
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