Sixteen, Sixty-One

by Sixteen, Sixty-One- A Memoir (epub)

  At school, I began to feel I was play-acting in my unreality. It made it easier to deal with the popular girls who told me to pluck my eyebrows, but I found my reality a little lonely. I felt like Matthew was the only person who understood it, so I began visiting him more often. If school and home and youth club and the Post Office were all unreal, Matthew’s kitchen and the pack of cards between us were real.

  Annabelle often busied herself in her bedroom, but always asked if I wanted to stay for dinner. The three of us gossiped about the neighbours over shepherd’s pie and sometimes climbed the stairs to watch Friends in their living room. I shared the second sofa with the cat.

  One evening, after I’d brushed my teeth and was climbing into bed, my mum knocked on my door.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I just wanted to say goodnight.’

  She looked uncomfortable.

  ‘Sweetie, I know you’re spending a lot of time with Matthew and that you’re fond of him. I just want you to be a little careful with him.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ She didn’t reply and I looked at her in astonishment. ‘That’s ridiculous!’

  ‘I know, he’s a lovely man and I’m sure he wouldn’t do anything, but I’m a mother and I have to worry. So just promise me you’ll look after yourself.’

  I made the promise and muttered angrily to myself as she left about just wanting a father figure because she’d picked such a rotten one in the first place.

  When I told Matthew of the conversation the following day, he looked concerned.

  ‘Your mother’s a nice woman, but she’s steeped in the unreality. She’ll never be an Uncle and she’ll never understand. You may have to be more careful from now on.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Instead of answering me, he sent me away with a collection of Oscar Wilde plays, one of which, The Importance of Being Earnest, was indicated with a bookmark.

  On page 259 I found a word had been circled in pencil.

  ALGERNON: … What you really are is a . I was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist. You are one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know.

  JACK: What on earth do you mean?

  ALGERNON: You have invented a very useful younger brother called Ernest, in order that you may be able to come up to town as often as you like. I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose. Bunbury is perfectly invaluable. If it wasn’t for Bunbury’s extraordinary bad health, for instance, I wouldn’t be able to dine with you at Willis’s tonight, for I have been really engaged to Aunt Augusta for more than a week.

  ‘You think I should create my own Mr Bunbury?’ I asked the next time I saw Matthew.

  ‘Sure,’ he smiled, leading me to his study. ‘Bunburying is an essential part of life.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to lie, though.’ I perched instinctively on the navy chaise longue.

  ‘I know you don’t, because you’re honest and true.’ Matthew sighed and sat heavily beside me. ‘But sadly you’ll have to if you want to live freely. It’s the dreadful irony of life that all Uncles really want is to live pure, innocent lives, but society forces them to play its sordid little games.’

  ‘So, do you have a Bunbury?’ I turned to face him.

  ‘I have many Bunburys my dear,’ he answered with a wink. ‘I’ve even had to assume whole other identities.’

  After making me promise not to tell anyone, he unlocked a drawer in his desk and showed me the credit cards he had in other names.

  Albert Sumac.

  Leonard Bloom.

  Charles Cain.

  ‘I mainly just use the first one. It’s been necessary for me to hide certain parts of my life from other parts of my life,’ he paused as he relocked the drawer. ‘For, um, financial reasons as well as personal ones.’

  ‘You’ve stolen money?’ I hiccupped.

  ‘You’re very blunt.’ His lips curled into that lazy smile I liked.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll be shocked.’ I sat up straight, feeling suddenly adult. ‘I’m just curious.’

  Matthew returned to the chaise and spoke quietly to the bookcase on his left. ‘I took what I needed from my last employer when I left, yes. My son helped me hide it in the Channel Islands, and later I invested it in property in Kew. It was a one-off thing; now I just do a little tinkering of the books with my racing clients and the housing association where one of my flats is. They pay me – well, Albert – to manage the building and I skim a little off the top. It’s no worse than the banks do every day.’

  ‘And the personal reasons?’ I whispered excitedly.

  ‘Ah.’ He turned his wrinkled eyes to me. ‘Well, I’m afraid you might be shocked by those.’

  ‘I’m not a child!’ I blurted.

  ‘You’re right, you’re not a child. Okay, well I suppose you’ll find out sometime.’ He glanced quickly towards the closed door before whispering that he and Annabelle had an ‘arrangement’. I listened to his words with wide-eyes, neither daring to ask for details about this ‘arrangement’ nor questioning for one moment whether this might be the sort of line all adulterous men use to justify their actions.

  ‘You mean you see other women?’ My voice hit an embarrassingly-high note.

  ‘Shhh!’ He sat back with a grin. ‘I think you’re trying to make me blush today. Yes, I have other women. It’s a necessity of being an Uncle … and a man.’

  I mulled over this for a moment, and then asked, ‘How many?’

  ‘Excuse me?’ He raised one caterpillar eyebrow.

  ‘Sorry, you don’t have to tell me,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m just curious how many women you’ve “needed”?’

  ‘In my whole life?’ he chuckled. ‘Annabelle asked me that once and made me count. I think it was sixty-three.’

  ‘You’re lying!’ I choked. ‘That’s ridiculous. It’s probably impossible.’

  ‘I wish it was,’ he sighed. ‘Sadly, there have only been a few I really cared about. For some, I can’t even remember their names.’

  Over the coming weeks, in between philosophical discussions about art and Uncles and gossipy chats about next-door’s decision to cut down the oak tree, Matthew told me about the women in his life.

  ‘I used to have to sneak girls past the witch I lodged with. We tried every trick in the book. As far as she knew, I had seven sisters who would each visit me on a different night of the week. Stupid old bag!’

  I knew it was weird being told these stories, but I enjoyed them. I imagined them as scenes from black-and-white movies flickering through my mind and tried to work out what my silver-haired friend must have been like as a young man.

  ‘Sometimes, if I liked a girl, I’d treat her to a hotel room. But in those days they wouldn’t let just anyone into hotels, so you had to pretend to have just got married or, if the manager had a heart, you could make up some sob story about her dad being out to get you but you just being a nice lad after all.’

  ‘My friend Thomas had this plan to put a mattress in the back of his van, but I think it got him more slaps than shags.’

  ‘I once kissed three generations of the same family. I was in love with Mrs Shelby when I was six and she gave me a kiss after the school play, then later I dated her daughter Jenny, and when she got too old and grey, I took out her daughter Rose.’

  ‘Jocelyn was an actress. She never had a penny, but her breasts were magnificent.’

  ‘Linda was a secretary and used to steal office supplies for me, so I could work from my flat. I hated going into Fleet Street; drinking was the only thing that made it bearable.’

  ‘Amy was fun; she didn’t mind doing it outside or in the car.’

  ‘Julie almost killed me. She came to pick me up from work so we could go to the pictures, but what I didn’t know was that she’d found out I was going with her flatmate too. Everything seemed normal and she stayed quiet as I chatt
ed about my day, until she turned onto the motorway and just kept accelerating until we were going 120mph and I was clutching the door handle for dear life.’

  ‘Kate was beautiful, but she peed herself when she had an orgasm. I could never get into that.’

  ‘Elizabeth and I used to eat at the best restaurants, and then run out without paying. It put us on such a high. But she always fancied my friend more than me.’

  ‘Lucy wanted to marry me.’

  ‘Irene did marry me: trapped me into it by getting pregnant. I was still in Norfolk in those days and you couldn’t run out on a girl in farm country. It was different in the city. I liked the city.’

  ‘Marie – Annabelle’s friend whom I was seeing before her – was utterly neurotic. The stupid cow used to cry after sex and then insist on cooking me bacon and eggs, even in the middle of the night.’

  After hearing these tales, when the teapot was cold or empty and Annabelle was making quiet fumbling noises in the hall – indicating she wanted some attention now – I would stumble onto the street and stare bewilderedly at the pavement I had plodded so many times before. I imagined the seven-year-old me, clad in a gingham dress and kicking stones with sensible shoes, and I wondered how she and I were still in the same place, how I could know so much now, yet still have to pretend to be the same little girl living the same little life in the same little town.

  One day Matthew played me a Leonard Cohen album and began speaking in a much more serious tone.

  ‘Of course, what I was looking for yet was afraid to find all those years was what I had right at the beginning. When I went to university, my family made a big deal about it because I was the first one of us not to work on the farm. I wanted to go to Oxford, of course, but I failed my Latin, so Exeter it was. I was reading English Literature and rushed to join the department paper, to set up a John Donne society and to establish the best way to sneak books past the librarians. I was so innocent then, hardly thinking about girls.

  ‘Suzanne was in one of my lectures. She was from Paris and wore only black. All the boys were in love with her, but for some reason she came over to speak to me. I bought her a hot chocolate at a café and she took me back to meet her flatmate Marie-Anne.’

  I noticed with something approaching panic that a tear had dribbled from Matthew’s eyeball.

  ‘We had from November to June together and it was perfect. The three of us lived in harmony: Marie-Anne and I both totally in love with Suzanne and loving each other for our mutual predicament. I would watch Suzanne spread out on the bed on spring afternoons, reading poetry aloud as Marie-Anne ran a razor ever so gently over her pubic bone, then softly kissed the raw skin.

  ‘But that upstart Mickey Robinson decided to publish something in the campus paper about our ménage à trois as he called it. It was the biggest scandal of the term and I was hauled into the Dean’s office. He was so embarrassed he couldn’t even look me in the face when he told me I was being sent down. Suzanne’s parents were informed and she was summoned back to France before any of us could say goodbye. But it was Marie-Anne who took it the worst.’

  He was crying fully now and, borrowing a gesture learnt from films rather than life, I walked over to his chair and wrapped my skinny arms over his shoulders.

  ‘What happened to Marie-Anne?’ I asked softly.

  ‘She hanged herself in our flat. The landlady found her. I wasn’t even allowed to go to the funeral.’

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I learnt about Suzanne and the others, before I’d committed too fully to my second life, Matthew and I had to organise my Bunbury.

  ‘It’s regrettable, but I think it would be safest if we offered your mother a reason for you to come here so often.’

  ‘What sort of reason?’

  ‘Well, perhaps you could work for me. I’ll employ you to sort my books and maybe put my horseracing accounts on the computer. How about that?’

  I’d never thought about what Matthew ‘did’. I knew he’d once been a journalist and was vaguely aware he now made money offering betting tips to a mysterious collection of ‘clients’, but generally I imagined he spent his days reading poetry and waiting for my visits. In contrast to my workaholic parents, Matthew’s life was so theoretical and luxurious that the concept of him sat in front of a computer concentrating on paid employment was almost laughable.

  ‘I really could do with sorting through my books – both the horsing ones, and these,’ he said, brushing his hand over an old edition of To the Lighthouse. ‘I’d like them in order throughout the house. We could do it together and drink cups of tea and discuss the dead poets as we go. As far as your mother’s concerned, you’d just be earning a bit of pocket money helping out a scatterbrained old gambler.’

  Thus I began ‘working’ for Matthew. The legitimacy of this work was never clear; sometimes he would thrust a small amount of money into my hand as a kind of payment ‘to show Mummy’, but most of the time I just spent my Saturday and Sunday afternoons reclining on his chaise longue reading scraps of verse from the anthologies we were meant to be alphabetising.

  Sometimes I felt a pang of guilt when I returned home and my mum asked me how the afternoon had gone, if we’d got much done. But mostly I rationalised that it wasn’t a lie as such and, anyway, such measures were only necessary because she and everyone else who thought it odd for a teenager to spend so much time with a sexagenarian were so steeped in the dismal unreality of the world they couldn’t see the true beauty of friendship. Besides, Matthew was adept at sensing my angst and, whenever I began to slip too far into the vicinity of guilt and shame, I would find an email waiting in my inbox, pulling me back to the beautiful world of literature and poetry:

  From: Matthew Wright

  To: Natalie Lucas

  Sent: 12 July 2000, 08:27:31

  Subject: Your worries

  I know you struggle with the lies, but never forget what is real. You feel guilty about your Ma, who herself feels guilty about you and her Ma and all of the world, simply because she’s trying too hard. She can’t see the beauty.

  But you, my angel (my Uncle), can. And that is a gift (for me as well as you).

  Edmond Rostand said: ‘The dream alone is of interest.’

  So, my darling, let us dream.

  MW

  *

  About halfway through the summer, just after my sixteenth birthday, we began discussing love. We read the Romantics, then moved on to Whitman and finally picked up some collections by Leonard Cohen. I liked the singsong neatness of Blake and the hallmark sentiments of Burns, but Matthew would always reach for Leaves of Grass or mumble the lyrics to ‘Death of a Ladies’ Man’.

  We discussed unrequited, inexpressible and forbidden love; we talked about communities running people out of town, countries stoning women for infidelity and religions turning their backs on faithful worshippers. We watched The Wicker Man and flicked through the writings of the Marquis de Sade. We reread extracts from Brave New World and talked about the concept of everyone ‘belonging’ to one another. He told me monogamy was just as abstract an idea as polygamy and we discussed his relationship with Annabelle once more. We talked about the line between friendship and love, about why the world has to be so blind to the possibilities of their overlap. Sometime in late August, Matthew told me he loved me and I wrote in my diary that he was not being improper.

  A lingering hug became our ritual goodbye. Back in my bedroom I would miss his arms and want the safe feeling of being enveloped by a true friend. We swapped ‘I love you’s in emails and notes through the letterbox. We knew the others wouldn’t understand, but we also knew that it was true and innocent.

  My Bunbury evolved so that once I returned to school to begin the sixth form I had permanent employment archiving Matthew’s racing tips at the weekends. I never went near his computer, but sometimes he’d tell me about reading the form and calculating probabilities so I cou
ld blag my way through knowing about gambling. Through a slow accumulation of half-truths and almost-lies, Matthew and I constructed a wall around our friendship that allowed us to spend intense afternoons discussing Uncles, love and poetry. The neighbours, my parents and his in-laws ceased raising their eyebrows and gradually came to expect us to sit together at parties, to dawdle behind or step out ahead on Sunday afternoon walks and to be found together when we were nowhere else.

  My diary during that time was a scruffy composition book I’d covered with an angsty painting on squared graph paper. I’d bought it as I walked through the town one Thursday in Year 11 after Josephine Cuthbert had taunted me about my crush on Adam Hound and my brother had poked me in the arm for the duration of our bus ride.

  Arriving home, I’d slammed the front door and ran up to my room at the top of my house. I’d spread my paints and brushes over the floor and began making crude, angry marks. After a while, my mum had knocked tentatively at the door. She asked what was wrong and listened sympathetically for a while as I sobbed and tried to describe the hideous impossibility of school and life and myself.

  When I paused to hiccup my breath, she glanced towards the window, sighed, and said, ‘Well, I’m sure it will get better. It could be a lot worse – at least you have food on your plate. Dinner will be at seven.’

  She left and I grabbed a pen. My first entry looked like this:

  21/03/2000

  ‘Maybe it’s not the school,’ she said. ‘It’s happened before.’ Does she think I don’t know that? Does she think that every day I don’t wish I could fit in, just lazily walk into school and be greeted by a few proper friends instead of worrying who I’m going to burden myself with next?! I hate it. I hate school. I know I’ve never really been able to settle down with good friends, not at primary school either, but I just think that if I reinvent myself one more time then maybe someone will like me. And sixth form is different. If I could just switch schools one more time I shouldn’t get so much of the ‘keen bean’ stuff. It’s only a week until the end of term, thank God. Maybe I’ll make it.

  Why the hell am I writing this crap? I hate diaries. They’re pointless and I always write in them for a month or two and then stop. It’ll probably be the way of this one. I just don’t get the point of writing something no one is ever going to read. But then it scares me to rely on memories. I don’t want to forget things, especially not the bad stuff, because that’s what reminds you not to live in the past but the present.