At every meal we ate together, my kindly aunt and uncle cross-questioned me about my belief and my knowledge of the Bible, as I knew they would. With my cousins listening nervously, my half-formed answers seemed shabby things. While I might have been able to defend a position about the impact of laissez-faire economics, or the degree to which the Great Depression contributed to the rise of fascism, my new rhetorical skills and facts counted for nothing here.
I wasn’t at all sure what I did think about most of the things my aunt and uncle asked about. None of my school friends were interested in God or the Bible, or the nature of sin or grace or redemption, so while I often thought about those things, I hadn’t talked to anyone else about them. I had wanted to, though. They still mattered to me. But now that I was actually being cross-questioned, I couldn’t produce the certainties and opinions my aunt and uncle wanted from me. My head swam. I began to change the subject every time I saw it veer back towards the Lord and to me.
I managed only one small, rather inept, act of insurrection that week. When my uncle asked whether my science teachers had managed to persuade me that I’d once been a monkey, I told him I thought he was quite wrong about all of that, and that what Darwin thought was a lot more complicated. Of course my aunt and uncle had a set of polished counter-arguments about the age of the earth and the seven days of creation. I did not know enough to be able to refute them, but my history teacher, I told myself as I retreated from the table, would have called it a good start. Though I had better things to do with my time than defend Darwin’s ideas against creationists, and though I had no intention of returning to the subject with my aunt and uncle, I knew I would have to read more books if I was going to understand how natural selection worked. I wasn’t going to let myself flounder about like that again.
The elderly Renton Brethren assembly that my uncle and aunt’s family attended in west London was very small. The men talked in just the same way I remembered, standing to speak in spasmodic flurries as the Spirit moved in and around the room and in and out of them, unfolding the nuances of the current truth. The women were still silent, sitting in rows at the back in their bows and hats, hands folded on their laps; the Spirit did not speak through Renton Brethren women either, and that still enraged me. The hymn-singing sounded the same. But I was no longer anxious to follow the angels-on-a-pinhead exegesis, and although I was struck by the fervour of their devotion, their absolutism and hard lines frightened me.
Something shifted inside my head in that west London Meeting Room. If the Apostle Paul thought that women should be completely subject to the rules of men, if he thought the Spirit was too good for them, then Paul was wrong. Hadn’t he been just a man after all? A particular man in a particular place at a particular time? Hadn’t he had flaws and prejudices, like all human beings?
What would I have been like, I wondered now, if my parents had joined the Renton Brethren? Or if they’d stayed in the Jims? How would I have swallowed my rage and sense of injustice, avoided looking at all those contradictions? And what future would there have been for me as a Brethren woman? My two teenage cousins were not supposed to marry outside the Brethren. If they did, they’d drive a wedge between themselves and their parents. But, they told me, there were no boys in their Meeting young enough for either of them to marry. They were going to become old maids, they wailed, eyes wide. Did I know, they said again, how lucky I was?
14
I had a responsibility to do something with this freedom of mine, I told myself on my return home. I needed to do something reckless and brave. When my younger brother, then thirteen, told me he’d been inside the squatters’ house on the other side of the road while I was away, and that there were drug dealers living there who had the most amazing record collection, I told him he had to take me there too.
Whenever we passed the squatters’ house, my mother tutted at the unkempt garden, at the peeling paint and the tattered curtains hanging at the windows. I heard neighbours say it was a disgrace. The police should break in, they said, throw those dreadful people out and board the place up with those metal grilles they used. No one in the neighbouring Sackville Gardens, they said, would stand for that sort of thing on their street.
So my brother and I hung about on the pavement outside trying to look inconspicuous for at least thirty minutes before we slipped down the side passage into the overgrown garden at the back of the squat. By the time we pushed through the long grass and shrubs to the door, we were covered in cuckoo spit, pollen and cobwebs. My brother knocked three times before a man in his mid-thirties with a moustache and shiny eyes appeared at a hatch in the boarded-up kitchen window. He looked like a picture of a leprechaun I’d seen once in a collection of Irish fairy tales.
‘That’s Chris,’ my brother whispered. ‘The other one’s Alan.’
‘Who’ve you brought with you today, little man?’ Chris said as he shoved the door open with his shoulder. It was a joke, of course. My brother at the age of thirteen was six foot one. He was a handsome blond giant of a boy.
‘This is my sister,’ my brother said.
‘Hello, sister,’ said Chris. ‘Do you have a name?’
There was something slow about the way Chris moved that made me think of the caterpillar on the toadstool from Alice in Wonderland. Alan, who we met later, was tall and mercurial. He had grown his straight hair long on one side to cover half of his face entirely. On the other side it was shaved. I’d seen the punks with their red, blue and green Mohican spikes all over Brighton. It was always hard not to stare at them. I tried not to stare at Alan.
My mother’s house was pristine, threadbare and brightly coloured; theirs had broken sofas, marijuana plants and chessboards. Books and records were scattered on the floor and piled high against the walls. Through cracks in doors I glimpsed mattresses pushed up into the corners of rooms, under more bookshelves and plants. Dust hung in the air where the sun slanted in. Soon my brother and I were visiting every few days, to return a book or pick up a new music tape they’d made for us. We’d slip down the side passage and into the garden, push through the overgrown shrubs and knock on the boarded-up back window.
Once we were inside, time moved differently. Chris and Alan’s friends came and went to and from the house: artists, musicians and film-makers. They picked up work when they needed to, in a music shop or a bar or café for a few hours a week. My mother would have called them dropouts. The Brethren would have called them Satan’s footsoldiers. They sold cannabis resin in small cellophane parcels – which meant, someone told me, they were definitely drug dealers. But they kept their promises. And they were kind.
I used the money I earned from my Saturday job at the newsagent’s to buy charity-shop long silk floral dresses like those worn by the women I saw at the squat. I wore them with oversized sweaters and strings of beads. I lost weight. In the summer I wore Indian leather sandals, or sometimes went barefoot. In the winter I wore Doc Martens boots. I bought joss sticks for my room.
At school I’d made friends with a beautiful Malaysian new girl. She noticed the henna I’d started using to colour my hair, and told me that in her country they made henna patterns on their hands. She was Hindu, and when I asked what that meant, she said no one had asked her that question since she’d come to Britain. She explained what her family practised and why, and told me why it was good to be a Hindu. She didn’t know any Hindus in Britain. She and her brother and mother were living with their grandmother, who was Christian.
Why was she living with her grandmother? I asked. Her father had died, she said. Before they left Malaysia her little brother had lit the fire for the funeral pyre they burned him on. Why had it been her brother who had done that? I wanted to ask. Why hadn’t they let her do it? Did Hindus consider her ‘just a girl’ too? But when she’d talked about the funeral pyre her eyes were full of tears, so I changed the subject.
In the last weeks of the summer of 1979, when I had just turned fifteen, when my mother was out at her new jo
b working as an accountant in a neighbouring town, and the twins were busy or playing with friends, my brother and I would slip across to Chris and Alan’s smoky living room. Over there in the half-light I didn’t worry about blushing or stammering. No one noticed. We’d perch up against beanbags or cushions and play chess or backgammon, but mostly we were there, like everyone else, to listen to music. Alan played Kraftwerk and Roxy Music and Joy Division. Chris played Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. I liked the music Chris played best. We drank tea, took occasional nervous drags from the joints people passed round, and listened to Chris and Alan argue about the new albums they brought home and played loud on their huge speakers.
‘Did you feel anything this time?’ my brother would ask as we crossed the road back to our house for dinner. And I’d shake my head. Neither of us dared inhale, so although I sometimes felt light-headed and heavy-limbed, I knew that, like him, I was never really stoned. It was LSD I wanted to take. I’d been asking Chris about the things he’d seen when he was tripping, but he said LSD wasn’t good for people who had bad dreams. It was meditation I needed, he said, not acid. At fifteen, I was much too young to take LSD.
‘When I’m sixteen then?’ I asked. But he just laughed and shook his head.
He gave me a leaflet for a meditation course. I walked to the old Salvation Army Hall one Saturday afternoon after work, found the administrator for the adult education section, and signed up for twelve weeks of Sunday-afternoon classes, paying for them with my savings. When that course came to an end, I signed up for a communication class run by the same teachers. I sat cross-legged in a darkened room opposite my cross-legged partner while we repeated the phrase All cows eat grass. All language was inherently empty, the instructor explained, but we could learn to communicate deep and complex thoughts and feelings through apparently meaningless phrases.
For thirty minutes my partner would repeat the words All cows eat grass to me. Then for thirty minutes I’d say it to him. In between our weekly sessions we were supposed to practise this technique – locking eyes with strangers at bus stops, in queues and cafés – It’s cold today, I’d say intensely. Is the bus delayed? What I was really saying in my mind was Isn’t life fascinating? Or I understand your pain.
Now I practised making eye contact with every customer who bought sweets or a paper at the newsagent’s I worked in on Saturdays, particularly the ones who were shy or in a rush. That’s twenty-seven pence change, I’d say, smiling, projecting love, thinking of those cows eating grass. Every encounter, my meditation teachers reminded me, was sacred. Every man and woman on the other side of my counter had a deep secret place I was supposed to reach.
It was embarrassing at first, but I stopped blushing when I saw the powerful effects my newly fierce attention had on people. The most misanthropic customers found excuses to linger at the counter and talk. I began to extend the range of my questions. That shirt’s a good colour on you – is blue your favourite colour? Why do you buy that particular newspaper rather than that one? Are you reading anything interesting? Have you ever memorised any poetry?
At the squat, Chris had begun to ask questions about my father.
‘Why roulette?’ he asked as he showed me how to roll the joint that everyone especially admired, the one that forked in the middle and was made of six long Rizla papers. ‘I mean, is there something about a roulette wheel that’s different from slot machines?’
I’d been so spellbound by the question that I missed seeing the way he made the fork in the middle of the joint.
‘Was there a connection,’ he asked, ‘between your father losing his belief in God and starting to gamble?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, thinking about the tallies of black and red numbers I’d seen scattered on scraps of paper around the car. How could anyone know?
‘He has a number system,’ I said, crumbling the resin down the middle of the long trough of tobacco cradled in Chris’s hand.
‘If he really thinks he can predict what number is going to come up next,’ Chris said, ‘that’s amazing. I mean, if he does – and your father is smart, right? – then he believes humans can predict the future. Does he think he still has a hotline to God?’
‘I don’t know what he thinks,’ I said. ‘I haven’t asked him about that.’ I hadn’t really asked him about anything.
‘Would he mind you asking?’ Chris said, as he showed me how to make the little twist of paper at the end to keep the tobacco and the weed in. ‘I mean, could you ask him questions like that?’
15
They’d put Macbeth onto the O-Level syllabus, I told my father on the phone the next time he called. Could he take me to see a performance? The teachers had said we were supposed to see at least one production if we could.
He’d seen Anthony Hopkins play Macbeth in 1972, and Helen Mirren play Lady Macbeth in 1975, but the very best performance of the play ever staged, he said, with his usual maddening hyperbole, was the Ian McKellen–Judi Dench RSC production, which he’d now seen four times. It was on again at the Young Vic. Good thing I’d mentioned it. He’d get us tickets.
I’d once dreamed of railing at my father for his broken promises, for the fact that he’d made life so hard for my mother, but now I wanted more than anything to know if he thought the future was knowable. As soon as I got into the car he put on a tape of the Hollies’ ‘The Air That I Breathe’, and I had to bite my lip so that I wouldn’t cry. Chris and Alan would have said that the Hollies were trite, but I didn’t care. I was sure he’d put on that song just for me.
In my mind I was up on the armrest again, my body through the sunroof, my arms outstretched like a bird, the wind whipping my plaits against my face.
Before, I’d always been in the back seat with the twins. Now I had the front passenger seat all to myself, and had the run of the glove compartment where my father kept his precious tapes. ‘Have you still got “Kodachrome”?’ I asked coolly as I rummaged through it. ‘“Mother and Child Reunion”?’
We’d set off late, so soon he was driving at ninety miles an hour up a crowded A23 towards London. Even as the rain began, he was overtaking all the other cars, his foot pressed down hard on the accelerator.
For the first twenty minutes or so I put on all the old songs my father had played repeatedly in the upside-down days after we left the Brethren: ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, ‘Morningtown Ride’, ‘Sinner Man’: Sinner Man, where you gonna run to? I told myself he must be remembering all the same things I did from those days, but Chris’s voice was in my head: None of us really know what’s going on inside other people, right? Perhaps Chris was right. We were all dreamers; life was a dream.
I was relieved when, somewhere north of Crawley, my father slowed down a little and began to lecture me about the play. How much did I know about Macbeth? he began, but he wasn’t really interested in my answer. He wanted to tell me about everything he had in the Macbeth drawer in the filing cabinet in his brain: every interpretation Wilson Knight had ever made of the play, the connection to the Scottish witchcraft trials, what hubris meant, what the tragic flaw meant in relation to the play, Shakespeare’s obsession with sin and blood and stains, and the relationship between the stains and puritanism.
‘If Macbeth had refused the call of the witches,’ I asked him, desperate to stop the flood of his talk, ‘if he’d not actually killed Duncan, would Birnam Wood still have come to Dunsinane?’
My father stopped talking. He smiled.
‘Interesting question,’ he said. He was thinking.
Then he turned the music down and began to recite Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’ slowly, assuming I was keeping up, getting his inference, understanding how the complex poem answered the question I’d asked.
As he reached A shudder in the loins engenders there, his voice began to break. The rain was now hammering the windscreen in great lashing strokes. The broken wall, the burning roof and tower …
The wipers screeched across the glass, because the r
ubber had perished and he hadn’t bothered to replace it. We were swerving towards the side of the road, and he was still beating out the rhythm on the steering wheel …
And-Ag-a-mem-non-dead.
Suddenly we were in a ditch, white fog lights and red hazard lights refracting and splitting through the rainwater, the long rising and falling of truck horns as they swerved around us.
While we sat waiting for the towtruck, the rain running like a dark river over the car, he’d started up a monologue about Yeats’s gyres, by way of explaining how the poem answered my question. His words spiralled out and spiralled back, just as his preaching once had. You just had to keep up, concentrate.
I might have been furious with him for nearly getting us killed, for making us miss the play, for lecturing me, but I wasn’t. I had my father to myself, and I wanted to understand about the gyres, and the patterns the rain made on the windows in the dark were so beautiful.
‘Yeats believed,’ he said, ‘that time was like a necklace of intersecting spirals.’
He tried to draw the shape in the air with his huge hands, but he couldn’t make it work, so he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and sketched the pattern on the back of a betting slip:
‘The spirals of the new gyre start to spool outwards here,’ he said, adding arrows to his diagram, circling the axis points with his red pen, ‘just as the last gyre is coming down into its end. See? Each new gyre of history starts with a kind of violent annunciation at an axis point: Zeus turned into a swan; he seduced Leda. That’s there at the axis, here. And then the gyres open out: Leda gave birth to Helen; then Helen’s beauty brought the Trojan wars into being. It spirals out and out – see? – until everyone’s caught up in it. Then a new axis point opens inside the gyre here – see? The angel Gabriel visited Mary. That’s another collision between man and god, of course. Mary gave birth to Jesus, and Jesus ended up crucified, and before you know it, two millennia of Christianity have come into being. It spins out and out, and this time the burning walls are monasteries and abbeys and country churches …’
In the Days of Rain Page 26
