by Emlyn Rees
For a moment she said nothing and instead simply stared at me agog. Then, slowly but surely, a smile spread across her face. ‘Oh, my God!’ she gasped, looking dizzily about and starting to laugh. ‘I thought you wanted to …’ Her voice pitched upwards. ‘Oh, my God!’ she shrieked, throwing her arms round my neck. She squeezed me so hard that I thought my ribs would crack. ‘Of course I will, Fred.’ She sighed, breathing warm air on to the side of my face. ‘Of course I’ll marry you.’
Opening my eyes now, the first thing they settle on is Eddie’s pack of Marlboro reds on the window box beside his empty chair. A momentary pang of envy cuts deep as, above me, the sun continues to beat down. They’re the same brand that got me started as a teenager and, on this perfect day, I remember other perfect days from my youth, hours wasted chatting and smoking out in the woods near the village I grew up in, careless of the passing of time.
‘OK,’ Eddie tells me, re-emerging. He sits down, picks up the camcorder and points it at me. The lens cover slides silently open. ‘Give me some background and then we can call it a day.’
‘What kind of thing?’ I ask, weary now, hoping we’re nearly done.
‘I don’t know.’ He ponders before deciding, ‘Family. Tell me about them.’
Eddie’s heard all this before, of course, but I repeat it anyway, for the camera’s sake. ‘My father’s dead,’ I say. ‘And my mother lives in Scotland.’
Eddie beckons me with his hand, signalling, I assume, that this is not enough.
‘Mum never remarried,’ I say, ‘but she’s got a boyfriend.’ I picture Alan, the fifty-five-year-old schoolteacher she now lives with. ‘She met him through the church. He’s nice enough in a quiet sort of way, but I’ve never really got to know him. He’s got grown-up kids of his own.’
I think of Mum and how we grew apart in the years following my father’s death, and how, instead of being pushed closer together by our mutual loss, we were driven further apart. And I think about how glad I was when she got it together with Alan, because it meant she was no longer my exclusive responsibility.
‘I don’t see her as much as I should,’ I say. ‘You grow up, you grow apart, you know?’
Eddie says nothing; he knows Mum hardly ever phones me.
‘I think she’s happy,’ I conclude, ‘and that’s what matters ...’
Eddie still seems to be waiting, so – a little reluctantly – I go on: ‘My father died of a heart attack when I was fifteen years old.’
Again, the hand signal from Eddie
I shrug. ‘I try not to think about him,’ I say. ‘It’s easier that way.’
I’m not intending to say any more, but then I suddenly remember how my father used to sit on the edge of my bed and sing me to sleep.
‘I used to wish that he’d come back,’ I admit. ‘I used to hope that’ – I search the sky for words, then lower my eyes – ‘he’d somehow stop being dead. I don’t know … that probably sounds crazy, but I don’t mean it that way … What I mean is, I had so many questions for him, about him, and then, well, then he wasn’t there any more and I suddenly realised I’d never get any answers. It’s the same for everyone, I suppose,’ I say, beginning to wish I hadn’t started getting into this and deciding to bring it all to a close. ‘There are always going to be regrets.’
There’s silence for a second or two, then Eddie switches off the camera and rests it on his thigh. ‘Thanks,’ he says, ‘that’s plenty for me to be getting on with.’ Leaning forward, he peers at me. ‘Are you all right,’ he asks.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
‘Your face,’ he explains. ‘You look flushed. I think you’ve caught a bit too much sun.’
I touch my brow with my fingertips and then stare at them: they’re shiny with sweat. ‘I’m fine,’ I say, managing a smile. ‘Just dehydrated,’ I guess.
In the kitchen, I down a pint of water over the sink, but I still can’t shake the heat that’s built up inside me. Refilling my glass, I head for my bedroom and pull the door closed behind me. I lie down on the bed and stare up at the ceiling, wishing there were a fan in here to cool my skin.
I close my eyes and try to sleep. But I can’t. Instead, memories rise unbidden. Too tired to do otherwise, I succumb to it all, watching as scenes from my childhood and adolescence flicker like a silent movie through my mind. They come as a shuffled chain of facts and scenes to begin with: the games I played with my friends at lunchtimes, the way we used magnifying glasses to write our names on the soles of our shoes in the summers and the cold days we spent pummelling one another with snowballs in the winters. Then come other days, from even further back, days I haven’t thought about in years.
My father’s Christian name was Miles and I don’t remember ever calling him anything else. He was an endless source of mystery to me when I was a child. He was six foot one, the same height as I am now, and his eyes lay narrow and deep in their sockets, like those of a wolf.
Other than that, his appearance was forever changing. Moustaches, beards and sideburns came and went. Trouser widths straightened and flared. One week he was in polka-dots, the next week it was stripes. It seemed to me, growing up, that every time I came close to knowing who he was, he promptly changed into someone else.
Only his absences from home remained a constant. He worked uptown in the West End of London, sometimes for what felt like weeks on end without a break, the same as he had done ever since Mum had given birth to me, his only son.
My mother, Louisa, used to tell me a story about him coming into my room to kiss me goodnight on my seventh birthday. Most of it, though, I remember clearly myself.
He discovered me curled up beneath a pile of jumpers in my wardrobe with a look of abject terror on my face. He was wearing a sky-blue jacket and a bright-pink shirt with sharp-pointed lapels that stretched down past his collarbone. One of his pearly shirt buttons was missing, revealing a knot of belly hair.
When he asked me what I was doing there and why I was pointing a pistol at him – taking my cue from the massive, brass-buckled cowboy belt he was wearing – I shot him clean between the eyes. The black rubber suction dart quivered back and forth on the bridge of his nose, and Miles focused on it in cross-eyed astonishment as I scrambled out between his legs and fled.
It was only ten minutes later, when Mum’s distressed cries elicited a wary response from my new hiding place next to the Hoover and mops in the boiler room, that the source of my fear became apparent. I have a memory of her soft brown eyes filling my world as I spoke.
The Miles who’d come to kiss me goodnight, it seemed (in hushed tones), was not my father. The Miles who’d come to kiss me goodnight couldn’t be my father, because my father – the real Miles – wouldn’t have missed my birthday party.
There was, therefore, it seemed, only one possible explanation: the Miles in the house was a fake who’d done away with the real Miles and was now planning to do the same with me. I advised my mother either to call the police or to join me where I was and close the door quietly behind her.
I finally consented to speak to the fake Miles some half an hour later. I sat down at the round table in the eating area next to the kitchen. Light rain drummed like fingertips at the windows. It was coal black outside and the only light in the room was the glow of the brass lamp with a shade patterned with Chinese dragons on the small table by the door. Mum was leaning against the brown breakfast bar and Miles was sitting opposite me at the table.
‘If you’re the real Miles,’ I – in accordance with my mother’s version of events – asked, ‘how old am I?’
Miles shifted uncomfortably in his swivel bucket chair and it creaked beneath his weight. He slurped at his coffee and peered at me over the rim of his mug with bloodshot eyes. ‘Seven,’ he said.
His voice was gruff, an uneasy mixture of acquired cockney and natural West Country. He put his mug down and his fingers made a noise like ripping Velcro as he scratched at the dark three-day stubble o
n his jaw. ‘Yesterday you were six,’ he continued. ‘Today you’re seven.’
I considered this for a moment, before trying a different tack to expose him for the fake he undoubtedly was. ‘What’s the code word?’ I asked.
His eyes narrowed, his thick eyebrows bunching above his nose. ‘What code word?’ he queried, wiping his hand across his nose with a noisy squelch.
I pointed the pistol directly at the small red blotch on his face where I’d shot him before. ‘If you were the real Miles,’ I said with a note of warning, ‘you’d know.’
‘Ah,’ he said, nodding his head in understanding, ‘that code word.’ He sat back in his chair and rattled his uneven fingernails on the table. Stifling a yawn, he stared at me impassively. Then his eyes flashed. ‘Why do you need me to tell you what it is? Can’t you remember yourself?’
‘Of course I can.’
‘Prove it,’ he challenged, folding his arms.
I opened my mouth to speak, then snapped it shut again. I wasn’t going to be caught out that easily. ‘No,’ I said.
He leant forward and wrinkles appeared on his brow as he frowned. ‘Why not?’
I frowned back. ‘Because it’s secret. Because that’s the point.’
Miles wagged his finger at me. ‘But if you don’t tell me what it is, then how do I know that you’re the real Fred?’
I was outraged. ‘Because I am,’ I spluttered, the pistol wavering in my hand. ‘Who else could I be?’
‘For all I know,’ he pointed out, ‘you could be a fake …’
‘No!’ I gasped. ‘That’s not fair. You’re the fake.’ I cocked the trigger of my pistol and gritted my teeth. ‘And if you don’t tell me the code word, I’ll –’
Quickly, Miles smiled and his smile fitted my memories of the real Miles: bright but lopsided, disarming and dangerous. ‘Sergeant Pepper,’ he said.
My mouth fell open in amazement; he’d got it right.
I lowered my pistol and, fighting a sudden wave of tiredness, stretched my legs down, trailing my toes back and forth across the thick cream carpet that looked like it had been sheared off the back of a giant lamb. Pushing my left foot even further down and scrunching up my toes until they gripped the carpet, I asked, ‘Why weren’t you here for my party?’
Miles glanced at my mother, then back at me. ‘I had to meet up with some important people.’
I looked up. I couldn’t help myself. ‘Government people?’ I mouthed at him.
He glanced at my mother again, before covering his mouth so only I could see, and whispering, ‘Yes.’
Mum muttered something under her breath, walked to the glass shelving unit and took a cigarette from the silver holder she kept there.
‘What did you talk about?’ I hissed, pulling my knees up to my chin.
Miles lowered his head conspiratorially, so that it was only inches from the table’s surface. A snake of smoke danced up from his knuckles. ‘Can I trust you?’ he asked. ‘Only it’s all very hush-hush …’
I nodded my head eagerly. ‘Of course …’
He looked nervously around, as if someone other than my mother might be listening. Then, seemingly satisfied, he raised his forefinger to his lips and told me, ‘Captain Carnage has been sighted in London.’
I spun round in my seat, peering into the darkened corners of the room. Captain Carnage was the world’s most evil man. He was capable of frightening someone to death with a single stare. As an Extra Special Secret Agent for the Government, Miles was his sworn enemy. I was the only non-spy in the world who knew about Captain Carnage’s existence.
Miles blinked heavily as his expression softened. ‘Listen, Fred’ – he reached across the table and took my hand in his – ‘I’m sorry I missed your party.’
I flinched, startled by a tree branch rearing out of the darkness on the other side of the window. ‘What if Captain Carnage followed you here?’ I asked. ‘What if he breaks in while we’re asleep?’
Miles hoisted me up on to his shoulder. ‘It won’t matter, so long as we’re all in bed asleep.’
‘Why not?’ I asked as he carried me towards the stairs.
‘Because,’ he said, starting to climb, ignoring the squeak of my fingers trailing along the wooden banister, ‘when we sleep, we close our eyes and we can’t see anything. And that includes evil people. And evil people can’t frighten us when we can’t see them. The same applies to Captain Carnage. So long as you keep your eyes shut he can’t harm you.’
‘But what if he gets you? What if he gets you and then wakes me up? What then?’
‘Then you’ve got these to protect you,’ Miles said, taking his sunglasses from his shirt pocket. He put them on me and the world grew dark. ‘They’re Government issue,’ he explained. ‘One hundred per cent Carnage-proof. Nothing evil can hurt you when you’re wearing them.’
I hugged Miles tight and closed my eyes. I loved him. I loved him with all my heart and I knew that what he was saying was true.
Miles’s own early years had been less cosseted than my own. He’d dropped out of school in Warminster at the age of fifteen, after running away from his parents’ home (neither of whom I ever met). Miles’s mother had died in childbirth and his father was a grocer, an ex-Navy war veteran who liked to drink and habitually punished Miles with his fists for the crime he’d unknowingly committed on entering the world.
When he was still alive and I’d grown old enough to hear, Miles never shied away from telling me the truth about his youth. He viewed himself as an adventurer, a piratical spirit who’d sailed through life making up his own rules as he went along. He was proud of how he’d got to where he was from where he’d come from. If he’d broken laws along the way, it had been because they were wrong, not him.
When he met my mother at the end of the Sixties, he was living in a ramshackle house in the outskirts of Oxford and had established himself a niche market, supplying top-grade hashish to the local student community.
Mum’s father, Frederick, was a wealthy lawyer who lived near Aberdeen. Along with my grandmother, he was a strict Presbyterian. He died of bowel cancer when I was eleven and was a kind and generous man who couldn’t bear to be in the same room as Miles. My grandmother is still alive, but she suffers from Alzheimer’s. Mum lives in the same Scottish village and takes care of her.
When she first met Miles, Mum was reading history at Oxford University. In the two years she’d been away from home she’d fallen in with more curious spirits than she’d encountered during her sheltered upbringing. She’d swapped her Christianity for spirituality and its accompanying hippy ideals (a transition which she’d dramatically reverse in later life). In Miles, a boy so clearly from the wrong side of the tracks, she saw an antidote to what she then regarded as the stultifying and boring years of her youth. He in turn saw beauty and swept her off her feet.
It didn’t take him long to persuade her to leave Oxford without taking her finals, but it was a decision that would alienate him from her parents for the rest of his life. Armed with his cash, his stash and his set of weighing scales, they headed off across the country, moving ever onwards from squat to campsite to festival. It was a journey of self-discovery that they both hoped would last for the rest of their lives. But then, in February 1969, the same month that Cambridge scientists successfully fertilised a human egg in a test tube, Miles successfully fertilised an egg inside my mother’s womb.
Pregnancy shocked Mum out of her recklessness in one fell swoop. Responsibility reared up inside her. She married Miles in an Aberdeen register office six months later. (Mum’s parents refused to attend, although my mother’s hopes of a reconciliation had been the reason behind the marriage in the first place.) I was born a few months after that at Charing Cross Hospital. I weighed in at seven pounds and eleven ounces, and had blue eyes that would later turn grey. Mum refers now to the moment of my birth as the moment she rediscovered her faith in Jesus.
In preparation for my arrival, she and Miles had rented a
squalid flat in Islington. Mum had also insisted that Miles get a job, and a job he’d got, working as a barman in a trendy Soho bar. Here he continued to subsidise his income with some small-time dealing, and it was here that he fell in with a crowd of similar-minded people, who’d later become his business partners.
My mother, it seems, was never party to this world. Instead, she looked away and, protective of her child, insisted that they move out of London. My father, for whatever reasons of his own, agreed and they bought a house in the village of Rushton, Hertfordshire, and this was where I’d live for the next thirteen years of my life.
Miles, meanwhile, continued to work in Soho, eventually going on to set up a nightclub called Clan in the mid-Seventies. The commute was a long one back then and, as the years rolled by, my mother and I would come to see less and less of him.
Rushton lies in a natural valley within easy driving distance of Woburn Safari Park, Whipsnade Zoo and the Grand Union Canal, and I haven’t been there for well over a decade. It has no high street to speak of, though the main Hemel Hempstead road bisects it neatly, running parallel with the fast-flowing River Elo and bridging it at the north end of the village.
An older boy once told me that a razor-toothed troll lived under the bridge and, for years afterwards, I used to run across it as fast as I could on the way back from Cubs, terrified that I’d be plucked from my feet and dragged down into the dank depths below to be devoured.
There are around seventy houses in the village. The majority of them were built in the Fifties and lie on the hill on the west of the river. The east side is dominated by older houses, cottages and an austere Gothic church. The most ancient gravestone I ever found in the graveyard, obscured by a tangle of winter brambles, was dated 1568. It belonged to a man called David Jeremiah Johnson and he haunted my nightmares for weeks to come.
The church is flanked on one side by the Duck and Swan public house. Mum started out frequenting the latter and then, as I approached my teens and her relationship with Miles began to disintegrate, she transferred her emotions into the former, clinging tighter and tighter to its solid foundations in an effort to distract herself from her own world, which was slowly but surely slipping away.
