Narcissism for Beginners

by Martine McDonagh

  ‘Robin wasn’t the only child who stopped at the school over the holidays, there were a few others, but he was the only local boy. Every week I told him to ask his housemaster if he could invite a friend to come the following Sunday, but he always turned up alone. I didn’t read too much into it. I was all he had, so it was only natural he would want to keep me to himself.

  ‘He was definitely more of a thinker than a talker. Every now and again, though, he’d come out with something that made me chuckle. One Sunday – he must only have been about seven – we were sitting at the tea table, listening to the hit parade on the radio while we ate our scones, when he announced that he was an “abecedarian”. At first I thought it was something to do with school, like being milk monitor or cloakroom monitor, neither of which I could picture him sticking at, if I was honest, but I congratulated him anyway. He said I didn’t understand what he meant and explained. His mother was Mrs A-B, so I was Mrs C, and when he got married his wife would be Mrs D. I told him he was clever to have come up with it. He always had an unusual imagination and I used to tell Frank I thought he would become a writer or a painter when he grew up. Maybe even a poet, he was such a quiet boy. I never told him about the alphabet thing, though; I thought he would be insulted that the boy didn’t want to call me Mrs H for Henry and I didn’t want to give him any more reason not to like the poor child.’

  See? He was even weird as a kid.

  ‘One year, Robin was about seven or eight, it happened that my birthday fell on a Sunday. All my presents – I make it sound as if there were hundreds but there were probably only five or six and none of them large – were piled up on the table when he arrived. From the look on his face you’d think a spaceship had landed slap bang in the middle of our dining room. I’m forty-three years old today, I told him, or whatever age I was. He just stood there, gawping, and it dawned on me then that he’d thought they were for him and that if he’d ever had any memorable birthday experiences of his own, he would have known to wish me a happy birthday, or make me a card. I suppose I’d always assumed his parents would at least have come up with the goods on his birthday and arranged for him to have a little party at the school. He’d never mentioned it, but then he never talked about anything that happened over there. I felt so guilty. Naturally when his birthday fell on a Sunday I would bake him a special cake, but we were too poor again after he started school to stretch to presents, and I was mindful that Frank already thought we did too much for the poor boy. As he stood there, his dark little eyes darting from the presents to me and back to the presents, obviously willing me to let him open one, I decided to let him in on a secret that not even Frank knew about. I told him to go and wash his hands in the kitchen because I had something to show him that was to be our special secret, just his and mine.’

  I guess my own dark little eyes must have been darting back and forth between Mrs C’s face and the cookies because she says, without missing a beat, ‘If you want another biscuit, dear, just help yourself.’ And goes right on with her story.

  ‘I gave Robin the two smallest presents to carry and I took the rest and we went through the back hallway to go upstairs. That side of the house faced north and was always dark and chilly, even on a summer’s day, not like this place – always light here except when it’s stormy. We’d tried to cheer it up by putting Frank’s tropical fish tank out there and I’d expected Robin to be fascinated by the angel fish and their long feathery tails and the neons with their luminous colours, but he had no interest in fish, living or dead, thank you very much. No interest in nature. I’d tried to teach him the names of the flowers in our garden because I thought it might please Frank, but he refused to take in the information, as if he knew what I was up to, and insisted on calling them all daisy whether they were roses or wallflowers. “Daisy rhymes with lazy,” I used to say, and tap him on the nose with my finger. I’m getting off the point again.’

  ‘No, this is all good,’ I say. And by good, I mean revealing.

  ‘Robin had never been, or even seen, inside the spare bedroom before. The door was always kept shut. Of course he’d been upstairs to use the toilet and to wash his hands before and after meals, although sometimes I let him wash at the kitchen sink if he promised not to tell the master, who could suspend his Sunday visits if he found out; they had some strange rules at that school. It was only a boxroom really but it was special to me because it would have been Sharon’s room if she’d lived. Some of the breastfeeding money went into doing it up so we wouldn’t be thrown into chaos by the arrival of an unexpected overnight visitor, not that that ever happened. I furnished it with a lovely walnut-framed bed with a matching wardrobe and bedside table and lamp. All very modern. We’d made a special trip to Exeter one Saturday to choose it all: lampshades, curtains and a quilted bedspread. Orange, to give the room a warm glow even in winter. I picked it out while Frank trailed round the shop behind me, God bless him.’

  Mrs C pauses and smiles to herself. I wait.

  ‘In the room, under the window where you’d put a radiator now but we had no central heating then, was the wooden trunk my father made me as a wedding present. I still have it up in the attic, one of the few things I kept when I moved here. The style of it didn’t really fit with the new furniture but it was a beautiful piece of work so rather than get rid of it I found a special use for it. It has a high curved lid like a treasure chest and a lock, which even then I’d long since lost the key to. I suppose it’s all covered in cobwebs now. Frank assumed it was full of baby clothes so he never ventured to look inside it.

  ‘Anyway, I knelt down on the floor and set the presents down beside me and gestured to Robin to come and do the same. I said he reminded me of one of the Three Wise Men visiting the newborn Baby Jesus. His little face was a picture. “Solemn as a salmon,” I said. He liked tongue-twisters even if he didn’t like fish. As I lifted the lid his eyes grew big as saucers. The chest was full of even more presents, some wrapped in Christmas paper printed with baubles or robins or Santas, others in bright birthday paper. A few were still in their brown paper with my name and address written in big black letters, as if the postman had only brought them that morning. Not that the postman delivered on a Sunday, but you know what I mean – untouched. Robin watched me put the new presents one by one into the trunk. “Go on, then,” I said to him, “pop them in.” And reluctantly, he put his two in. Then I shut the lid and told him the story.

  ‘After I lost Sharon… come to think of it I probably didn’t mention Sharon. I don’t think I ever told him about her; I didn’t want him to think of himself as second-best. Anyway – after that I noticed that people stopped giving me useful presents, just more boxes of hankies and bubble bath and talcum powder sets, things I already had too many of, things to help me feel better I suppose, but it was as if people didn’t know who I was any more. Even so, I appreciated that they had thought about me for long enough to choose something they thought I might like, and wrap it up and bring it over or go to the trouble of taking it to the post office to send it, and that was enough. Every gift I received from that day on went straight in the trunk without being opened and if I ever felt lonely or unhappy I would go upstairs and remind myself of all the people who thought about me from time to time and cared enough to send me a present on my birthday. Eventually I didn’t even need to go upstairs; I could just think about the trunk, no matter where I was and it would have the same effect.

  ‘Robin sat very still and listened. Then he said, “How do you know who sent you what?”

  ‘ “That’s not what’s important,” I told him. “Over the years some of the people who’ve sent me presents have died and their boxed-up best wishes are particularly special to me, but if you were to ask me which ones are theirs I’d never be able to single them out.”

  ‘I offered to wrap a little something up from my house for him to take back to school and keep in his locker to look at when he felt lonely, and he said, “I’m never lonely, because of God.” Wel
l, I admit I was a bit taken aback by that because he’d never mentioned God before, and I’m not sure he ever did again. I shrugged it off as another of his funny little ideas.

  ‘Every Sunday after that, he insisted on abiding by school rules and refused to wash his hands anywhere but upstairs in the bathroom. The water would stop gurgling in the pipes and I’d hear him tiptoeing – at that age you believe you can make yourself invisible and inaudible – across the upstairs landing and into the spare bedroom to sneak a look inside the trunk.

  ‘Then he developed a habit of feeling unwell of a Sunday evening as the time drew close for him to leave. The first time he did it, I begged Frank to run over to the school with a message for the housemaster that Robin Agelaste-Bim was going down with something and would stay with us until morning so I could keep an eye on him. I promised to send for the school doctor if he took a turn for the worse, but of course that was never necessary. He didn’t try it every week, but those special Sundays when he could wangle a night in the spare room definitely became more frequent. And his symptoms would come on earlier each time so that he would be already in bed before the time he would normally leave. On those nights, he would be too unwell to say his prayers, but could always be relied upon to raise the energy to creep over for one last peep into the trunk before settling into bed.’

  Mrs C giggles. I think she’s even forgotten I’m here now.

  ‘Your father was generally an even-tempered boy, but he could resort to tyranny as well as the next child and he was as unattractive and ungrateful as any other when he did. I loved him all the more then; his tantrums made him more human somehow. He seemed so disconnected a lot of the time.

  ‘I don’t know if he was an especially bright child, but he had charm enough to persuade anyone, except perhaps Frank, around to his way of thinking, which helped him get on at school. As a rule only the much older boys were entitled to a study bedroom of their own, but he managed to wangle one for himself at eleven.

  ‘Just after his eighteenth birthday, so not long before he left school, a funny thing happened. Not funny ha-ha, funny strange. A letter came, addressed to me, from his parents’ solicitor in London, informing me that Robin Agelaste-Bim’s allowance would increase on his eighteenth birthday to three thousand pounds per month!’ She shrieks and bangs the arm of her chair, waking the frickin’ dog up again. ‘Per MONTH, mind you! That’s still a small fortune even these days! It said the increase was made on the understanding that the boy would be living independently. Reading between the lines, I took this to mean they didn’t want him to think he could go and live with his parents, wherever they were. Why they were writing to me, I had no idea. I didn’t even know he had an allowance, never mind an increase. And I don’t know what he did with it all because he certainly never needed to buy anything except maybe sweets from the school tuck shop. I was sure he’d never set foot inside any other kind of shop in his life. I supposed it was all just piling up in a bank account somewhere.

  ‘There was a catch to it, though. If he didn’t manage to spend the full amount one month, the following month’s allowance would be reduced to whatever he had spent the month before and could only be increased again after due application to the solicitor. I was supposed to keep that last bit of information to myself, but I told Robin because I thought he’d been badly treated and it wasn’t fair for him not to know what he was up against.

  ‘When I told Frank he said, “That’s the last you’ll see of him.” He was wrong about that. But it was the last Frank saw of him. I still have the letter somewhere if you want it.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Well, give me your address and I’ll send it to you.’

  ‘No, really, it’s okay,’ I am forced to say. ‘I have envelophobia.’

  She looks at me like I’m mentally defective and starts talking again, but I miss the first couple minutes because someone walks past the house and sets Binky barking. At first I think Mrs C hasn’t noticed, but then she turns and says, ‘It won’t be anyone for me, dear, but maybe we should stop there because I’m running out of steam. Can you come back tomorrow, or are you leaving today?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘I can wait until tomorrow. I’m still tired from jet-lag and could do with a nap.’

  ‘I suppose that’s a modern thing, a man taking a nap during the day,’ she says.

  Binky gets all excited when we get up and move around. I fantasise about grabbing the stupid creature out of Mrs C’s arms, running out with it to the middle of the park, setting it down like a ball on the penalty spot, and kicking it way up into the air and over the edge of the cliff. Fish food.

  I don’t take a nap. I check out the coastal trail on my phone and hike the few miles to a spot on the map called Hope’s Nose. There’s nothing there, but what optimist wouldn’t want to check it out? And if I’m giving you the impression that I’m an outdoorsy kind of guy, it’s not that so much as I like to keep moving.

  Disclosure. I get these weird pre-sleep movies that run in my head. They’re not dreams, I’m still awake when they happen, but it’s like I’m watching them on a screen. The Germans have a name for it: Kopfkino (head cinema). I can turn them off by just opening my eyes, but I don’t get to control when they start. They’re not in colour or monochrome, they’re always in red and black and always of people having accidents and dying. They are completely random and have nothing to do with my life and they don’t happen every night or even every week. I’ve had them since I was a kid so they are not a result of my adventures in methland. They aren’t fantasies, I’m not even in them, I’m just a passive observer. The people in them are tiny like I’m passive-observing from thousands of miles away in outer space. One time it might be a guy falling off a horse and getting trampled, another it might be a kid falling out of a tree. Occasionally I get a close-up on a face that zooms in and out like a psycho, leering at me. Its mouth might be moving like it’s trying to tell me something, but there’s no audio so the effort is wasted. Tonight’s is nothing special, far away and kind of dull, a guy lying on his couch watching TV. He slips from being alive to dead without anything in the scene actually changing, but somehow I know that he’s just passed. Weird, right?

  Awake at five. Run. Shower. Breakfast. Back to Mrs C’s. We chitchat a little while she makes tea. Nothing interesting. We sit down, I line her up with where she finished yesterday and she sets right in.

  ‘Robin came over as usual the last Sunday before he left for university. I could tell he was hoping I would give him the trunk to take with him, but I told him it would be his when I die. As he died before me, perhaps I can persuade you to take it away with you? It really is a lovely piece of craftsmanship.’

  I shake my head and point at my phone, meaning let’s discuss it when we’re not recording. Hopefully she’ll forget.

  ‘I was surprised he had signed up to study religion, but I found out later from Mr Todd, the Head at Applesham, that the reason he’d been given the study room when he was eleven was because he’d put in a special request for a quiet place to practise meditation and prayer.

  ‘He went to Sussex University, in Brighton. I saw less of him then but he still visited the first Sunday of each month. He’d come down on the train in time for lunch and leave after tea. And every month he brought a parcel, two thousand five hundred pounds in twenty-pound notes, brightly wrapped like a present, money drawn from his parental allowance to dodge the rule I told you about. Of course, he never told me what was in the parcels, he pretended they were gifts for me, and I never let on that I knew, but I’m not as green as I look. Instead I said, “Thank you, dear, just take it up and pop it in the trunk, would you?” Exactly as he expected me to.

  ‘He took lodgings in his second year with a divorcee by the name of Marsha Ray, whom he took to calling Mrs F. A nurse. I assumed that D and E had been girlfriends in his first year. I mean I hoped they were, because Frank used to say Robin would turn out to be one of those – you know, batting for the
other team. Said it was very common among men from his background.’

  Mrs C picks up her tea and blows into the cup. She takes a few long slurpy sips and kind of chews on each one while she sits petting Binky and staring at the photograph of her husband on the wall. I turn to look too so I don’t have to watch her. It would be rude to put my fingers in my ears so I can’t do anything about the noises except promise myself I can edit them out of the recording later.

  ‘Frank passed away on the 14th of June 1991. He was only fifty-eight. His heart gave out while he was pruning the roses around Mr Todd’s window and he was gone. It was so sudden. The doctor said he wouldn’t have known anything about it. I hope I go that quickly. Sometimes I think I’m going to be here forever, pushing that bloody bike around. Mr Todd saw to all the arrangements, booked the funeral for a Wednesday and all the children and staff came from the school, even the governors. The school choir sang the hymns so beautifully. Frank wouldn’t have appreciated it, though, he could be a right miserable so and so, but funerals aren’t really for the dead, are they? “Just plant me in one of the flower beds when I go,” he used to say, “reckon I’ll make a decent compost thanks to all the good food you’ve put inside me over the years.” Obviously they wouldn’t let me do that, so I had him cremated and put his ashes on the roses. That would have cheered him up.

  ‘Robin was in the middle of his exams, so naturally he couldn’t come, but he sent me a beautiful card. I still have it, upstairs in the trunk. Are you sure you don’t want to go up and bring it down?’

  Yep, still sure.

  ‘He said he had two recollections of Frank. One of his silhouette in the distance, hunched over a wheelbarrow or a lawnmower, and the other a close-up of the hairs that protruded from his nostrils in thick wet strands, like the untrimmed tobacco that poked from the end of his roll-up cigarettes. That’s exactly how he described it; he had a way with words when he could be bothered.