Losing It

by Ross Gilfillan

  ‘It’s the survival instinct, isn’t it?’ I suggest, though I’m getting out of my depth here.

  ‘That and the fear of the unknown and more besides. But death is no more to be feared than life. I’m sure that if we were to know every trial and discomfort that awaited us at the bright end of the alimentary canal, we would all stay put.’

  Then she says, ‘Come here, let me feel your forehead. You’re not well, are you?’

  I feel the irony. Nana is dying, she’s just told me so and yet here she is, worried about the heavy cold I’m brewing. ‘I’m fine,’ I tell her, though I’m beginning to think in terms of a slow day tomorrow and maybe even throwing a sickie from school on Monday. Nana strokes my brow again.

  ‘You’re worried about something, Brian.’

  ‘I’m worried about you, I say.

  ‘Thank you, dear. But it’s not that. Tell me?’

  And when I’ve told her about Ros and how I want to share the only interest I know that Ros has, which is books, I ask Nana what I should read if I want to impress her. As someone who has taught English in colleges, I think she should be able to rattle off a handful of names for me to check out online without me having to actually read all the books themselves. But I’m not sure I want to do that after she says, ‘Choose for yourself. Find books which mean something to you, personally.’ Always a jump ahead of me, she adds, ‘And read every page, Brian. Enjoy what you read. Understand what you read. Whether reading well is going to help you with the young lady I really couldn’t say, but it’ll help you, Brian.’

  I want to ask how reading books will help me but now she’s reaching for the light switch, saying she’s in need of her beauty sleep. She looks tired too, and I am afraid that I have exhausted her. I bend down and kiss her lightly. ‘Goodnight Brian,’ she says softly, already three parts asleep. ‘Look after your dad.’

  High upon the monolithic edge of millstone grit which you can just about see if you stand on the bed I should be tucked up in now, and thirty feet above the shadowy shapes of giant boulders strewn in the bracken below, GD is about to tell me something important about my dad.

  But I need to rewind twenty minutes or so: it’s three in the morning and I’m being driven out of town, past stumbling drunks and clubbers fighting over taxis, by a long haired, 69-year-old night owl in a psychedelically-painted Volkswagen camper van.

  ‘I thought we might have a bit of a chat,’ GD says, by way of an explanation.

  All I can think about is my bed. We leave the last suburbs and head for the hills.

  GD takes drives like these almost every night. Just when the traffic’s died down and you’re about to drop off, the old camper van will fart, belch and rattle off up the road, taking him no one knew where, up until now. Now I know: it’s Nana’s Rock, where we perch precariously, a crescent moon only faintly marking the edge of the precipice, with a few bright-eyed cars snaking along the road in the valley bottom, and a startling heaven above. It’s cool, I mean in the sense of being cold, but GD doesn’t seem to notice the temperature, as he sits cross-legged on the stone, fiddling with something in his lap.

  On the way here GD has been talking about Garcia, who clearly has hidden talents, over and above his proven ability to shit in a shoe cupboard. However, I find it hard to believe that he fronted a legendary rock band, along with its various offshoots, for nearly thirty years (I didn’t think collies lived that long) and when I hear about the prodigious amounts of acid he is reputed to have taken, I have to wonder if we are talking about the same dog.

  According to GD, Garcia can play a number of instruments and his favoured genres are country, folk, jazz, bluegrass, space rock and whatever can be broken down into a freeform jam lasting anything up to an hour. But well before GD has finished speaking, I’ve worked out that it’s not Garcia the collie we’re talking about, but Jerry Garcia, lead singer of the Grateful Dead, GD’s number one passion – after Nana.

  But now, sitting on this great rock in the cool night air, GD’s got something else on his mind. He fumbles in his lap again and a match flares, his face blossoming from the gloom. After inhaling noisily, he passes me a spliff. It’s an old-school five-skin filled, I discover, with some very excellent old-school dope. I’m blazing with my grandfather, I think – this is so random. But GD isn’t your average grandfather. To hear him speak, it’s like listening to every adman’s ideal grandfather, a kindly, Northern voice with the faintest of lisps. You’d sooner imagine him sucking on a Werther’s Original than a fat old dooby.

  ‘I want to talk to you about your dad,’ he says at last.

  I can’t imagine what he can have to say about my dad that I don’t already know, but when GD says, ‘It’s something important,’ I give him my complete attention.

  ‘When your father, Charlie, was six years old, he was in the back seat of a car that was involved in an accident. A bad one. Some fellow in a lorry had fallen asleep at the wheel and smashed into the car Charlie was riding in. His parents were both killed, instantly.’

  ‘His parents? But you and Nana…’

  ‘Wait and I’ll tell you. The shock of losing both of his parents traumatized the boy and he lost his memory, not only of the event itself but also of the life he had lived, right up to that point. Even now Charlie’s got no memory of his early years, none whatsoever. He certainly has no idea that Ruth and I aren’t his natural parents.’

  This isn’t my dad, it can’t be, I’m thinking, and yet—

  ‘A couple of years before that, Ruth had found out that she couldn’t have children. She got pregnant all right, but then the foetus was stillborn and they said it would be very dangerous to try again. And that was that, for a while. Then some friends of ours adopted a child and it seemed to be working out so well we thought we’d have a crack at it too. It was a right old palaver, I’m telling you, but the worst bit was making a choice. That was heartbreaking. There was this one kid no one ever considered because of his amnesia. It made him an oddity, a bit of a freak. But Ruth and I talked it over and we thought he might be all right with us.’

  I’m making a thousand mental adjustments to my long-held picture of my dad. And then comes the massive aftershock as I realise that GD and Nana, my life’s anchors, aren’t really my grandparents. It must be a mistake, I’m thinking, surely GD has it wrong? I’m starting to panic. I’m feeling like I just got cut loose from everything and if someone doesn’t hold me down I could float away into the cold black night. It’s dreadful – but then I feel GD’s big hand grasping my shoulder, squeezing hard. ‘It’s okay,’ he’s saying, ‘nothing has changed, nothing at all,’ and I’m no longer the smart-arsed teenager old enough to smoke weed and chase girls. I’m just a kid who needs a whole world of reassurance and I throw myself into GD’s open arms and hold him as tightly as I can and hope he doesn’t notice that I’m bawling my eyes out. And now, my face buried in the warm, wet wool, I can’t help wondering if my real grandparents, whoever they were, could ever have been half so good to me as GD and Nana have been.

  When I have got myself together and have pushed him away like it was all a joke or something, GD waits for the right moment to tell me more. ‘We tried to bring him up as we saw fit,’ he says. ‘His name had been Graham when he was with his parents, but we thought a clean break with the past would be best and so I called him Charlie – after Cosmic Charlie, the song.’

  ‘By the Grateful Dead?’ I ask. Already, he has me smiling again.

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘He’s always loathed being called Charlie. He uses Charles.’

  ‘Charlie doesn’t know how lucky he was. My first choice was China Cat Sunflower, but Ruth made her displeasure known, as they say.’

  I’m still smiling. GD is such good medicine.

  GD gets up slowly and dusts himself off. The far side of the valley is edged with light as we start to retrace out steps, down the sandy track to the van.

  ‘We knew raising him wouldn’t be easy, they had told us
that much,’ GD is saying. ‘But we didn’t think it would be quite as hard as it was. There was too much ingrained of his past life. He wasn’t conscious of any of it but it was still there, this life which was at total variance with our own. It confused him, frightened him. He was unable to adjust.’

  ‘I still can’t see anyone having an unhappy childhood with you and Nana,’ I say.

  ‘Not unhappy, as such. There were times when it looked like he was going to fit in and it was all going to turn out fine and these times were like bursts of sunshine on a cloudy day. But Charlie seemed to sense there was something missing, something not right. You don’t grow up with no knowledge of the first six years of your life without doing a lot of thinking and coming to all kinds of wrong conclusions.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you tell him he was adopted?’

  ‘How do you tell a child he’s not yours after spending every day of every year trying to convince him that he is? To have told him that would have robbed him of what security he has. Once he was grown there seemed no point in brewing up another lot of trouble, let sleeping dogs lie, we thought. But now that Ruth is—’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I say, quickly. ‘Nana’s told me all about it.’

  ‘Has she? Well, that’s as well, I think. No more secrets. This just makes it all the more necessary that your father knows the truth. He needs to know that as much as we love him as a son, he’s not ours. He needs to know that he hasn’t failed us by being unable to go along with our ways. And I think he needs to hear it from someone he loves and trusts. Nana and me have talked it over and—’

  I think I know what’s coming.

  ‘—we want you to tell him. Not now. Maybe not even soon. But when the time is right.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better coming from Mum?’ I say, weakly.

  ‘I think that right now, this could be as shocking for her as it will be for him. She’s going to find out that the husband she’s known so long isn’t the man she thought he was.’

  ‘And I have to break the news?’ As if there might be some other way.

  He puts a heavy arm around my shoulder. ‘You’re the man for this job, Brian. You know that there are some ties that are stronger than blood.’

  Nothing has changed, he’s saying. I can at least do this for him and for Nana, of course.

  ‘I’ll help you in any way I can,’ I promise. ‘But how will I know when the time’s right to tell him?’

  ‘You’re a bright lad, Brian. You’ll know.’

  GD opens the door for me and I climb into the camper van, which smells of damp leather and stale smoke. As he starts the car, the new sun is showing golden over the distant crags. GD fumbles beneath his big arse and pulls out a cassette case, which he opens with one hand and slips the tape into the player.

  ‘Attics of My Life,’ he says, sounding tired, but content. ‘Finest thing ever committed to hot wax.’

  I look at the image on the plastic box. It’s the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty but in this light, the hippie lettering spells out Reality as well.

  ‘You like this band a lot, don’t you?’ I say.

  GD chuckles and taps his old fingers on the wheel.

  ‘You think GD stands for Granddad?’

  I do, actually.

  CHAPTER 8

  You Can’t Always Get What You Want

  According to my phone, it’s 2.30 in the afternoon when I wake and I’m not feeling my best. It’s a real effort to go for a pee, change my mind, sit down, take a dump and drag myself back to my foul-smelling room. What did I do in here last night? It smells like the venue for a national farting contest. I collapse back onto the bed and pull up the covers. My head is throbbing like a porn star’s dick and I ache all over.

  Mum has heard me lumbering around and pops in to see if I’m okay. I’m not, obviously, and the two paracetamol she gives me aren’t going to help much. Nor does the news that Roger Dyson has been calling up all morning; I’d know what it was about, he’d said. ‘At least you’ve got dressed,’ Mum says cheerily. Then she opens the windows, ‘to let in some light.’

  I need rest and lots of it, but it appears that I’m still wearing yesterday’s clothes. I pull off a sweat-soaked tee shirt and kick off my jeans. I’m surprised, under the circumstances, to find I have a hard on requiring my urgent attention. I lie on sweaty, damp sheets and think about Ros doing the sort of things Ros probably wouldn’t do outside her regular contracted roles in my fantasies. I’m running on my reserve energy tank, trying to bring our latest shagfest to an eruptive conclusion, when I’m ambushed by a horrible thought, a boorish gatecrasher barging in to announce that Nana is dying. I pause for a moment, but only for a moment – life goes on even in the midst of death, I argue – and Ros, wearing a pair of liquorice and blackcurrant knickers and nothing else, once more bends over my bed, her full lips parting in a perfect “O”.

  But it’s no good. I lie back, exhausted and stare at the picture of Katie Melhua pinned to the ceiling. I wonder if all it’s a waste of time anyway, this fantasising about what I’d do if Ros and I hooked up. I lift the sheet and look down, wondering what she would make of such a pathetic specimen. Admittedly, the only real life cocks I’ve been able to compare it with have been those I’ve seen in the showers at school and that was a while back, when we were all in developmental stages, genitally speaking. And now the shower block has been rebuilt and we all get private shower stalls I have no way of measuring just how far short I fall of the average dimensions. All I have to compare it with are the cocks I see on the internet porn we all watch.

  All the guys in porn have cocks like fire-hoses and clearly get enough action to look thoroughly bored with the proceedings. The girls look bored, too. A big cock is nothing new for them, it’s what they expect. They’d probably think mine was some kind of mutated wart. I’ve no way of knowing whether some of the biggest specimens, the ones which look like a sheep’s heart mounted on a Pringles tube, are freaks of nature or not. It’s going to be a terrible life if what they’ve got turn out to be bog-standard todgers.

  But, the hopefully, non-representative world of porn apart, what other references do I have? The postcards of Michelangelo’s David on Clive’s bedroom wall are reassuring – such a big man, such a small cock – but except for those and photographs of naked tribesmen in Dad’s National Geographics, there hasn’t been much else to go on. The internet will show you very big and extremely small, but who wants to see pictures of Mr Average? There is, of course, Biggleow’s Chart, but how much stock you should accord the graphic scrawls of a schoolboy sex-fiend is highly debatable.

  Biggleow’s Chart is a standard reference for boys at St Saviour’s. This venerable document, the prototype etched on the inside of a box-file lid, has been handed down, copied and improved upon by successive generations since it was first conceived and drawn up, in (carbon-dating suggests) AD 1983. The original, which is treated with similar reverence to the Turin Shroud, is kept under lock and key by whichever boy is nominated to be this year’s Holder of the Chart (actually, I just made that bit up, but it gives an accurate idea of its holiness). But if you aren’t a recent alumni of St Saviour’s, you’ll just be wondering what this thing actually is. Quite simply, Biggleow’s Chart is the graphic representation of every shape and size of cock, if not known to man, then to a one-time student at St Saviour’s, and now the youngish and thrusting, up and coming, Tory MP for Sheffield South Central, Martin Biggleow.

  Before embarking on his master work, Martin had done a lot of useful preparatory work, mostly executed on the back of Trap 3’s door in the boys’ toilets. Here can still be found examples of his finest penmanship, flying cocks that even the most accomplished of flying cock draughtsmen would have to concede the quality of. That this defaced piece of school property has never been repainted is tacit acknowledgement of the sheer excellence of the work, I think. Boldly inked and carefully crosshatched on a series of door panels are fantastically-detailed flying cocks which aren�
��t just cocks with feathery wings in a featureless sky, but fully-armed fighter cocks, shown engaged in aerial conflict. Plucky British cocks, sporting the familiar RAF roundels, fire off streams of globular tracer at swarms of invading German dicks (Fliegendikken, the legend reads), while vast, lumbering flights of heavily-loaded bomber-cocks crowd the skies as they take the war to the Hun. Particularly fetching is a flight of Spitcocks with testicular wheels awaiting their scantily-dressed female pilots, who are scrambling across the field, eager to bestride their purple-nosed aircraft.

  Biggleow’s cocks featured detail on a Leonardo scale, some anatomically correct, much invented, but all superior to the humorous pictures of men wheeling gargantuan examples in wheelbarrows that Uncle Michael had once slipped from his briefcase to show me. With Biggleow’s chart, a cock can be compared with an illustrated example and awarded a proper species name, compared to others in shape and size and given its proper place in, and I think I have the correct word here, the taxonomy of cocks. I’m not sure I remember all the gradations, as you can never find Biggleow’s chart when you need it – some chode is always using it to make scientific measurements and comparisons of his own and “forgets” to return it to its proper place.

  And chode is good a place to kick off, this being a cock which is actually bigger in girth than it is in length. Other featured types included on the list are the Tom’s Thumb, explained as being little larger than the teat of a baby’s dummy, the Asparagus (thin, with a spear-like tip), the Angry Python (long and thick) and the Billy Club (like a baby’s arm with clenched fist). Under this are some impressively realistic depictions of a rather veiny, bulbous member at various angles of erection with each stage properly labelled, from the standard semi up to the full Seig Heil! But much as I appreciate the ingenuity and artistry of Martin Biggleow’s work, I can’t really say that it has helped me to see where my own cock stands in the scheme of things.