So he trotted off and I got out of the van for a smoke in the fresh air. There were no streetlights or houses nearby and it was a beautiful clear night, so I stood there blowing smoke rings up at the stars and didn’t really register the shouting. And then I heard him come running down the road behind me. ‘Get in the fucking van,’ he screamed, ‘they’re calling the fucking police.’ I’d never heard him swear before or seen him run and, what with that and the dope, I started giggling. He completely lost it then, started kicking the tyres and screaming at me to unlock his door when it wasn’t even locked. A right tantrum. I told him to calm down or I’d leave him behind.
Back on the road he explained that he was upset because your mother had refused to let you see him and he suspected she was planning to renege on a deal they’d made when she was pregnant, which was, apparently, that from the age of five you would go and live with him. I found out later that was a lie. I tried to reason with him that he couldn’t exactly blame her for changing her mind about giving her child up to a convicted criminal, but he stonewalled me by closing his eyes, the meditative equivalent of putting his fingers in his ears and la-la-la-ing. So I shut up and drove us to Keswick and not another word was spoken on the subject for a couple of weeks, until one day he told me that he’d somehow received a message from your mother and, as expected, she’d rescinded on their agreement. He had a back-up plan. This entailed me driving to Glasgow to get a copy of your birth certificate, which he then used to have you added to his passport. It was pretty easy in those days – he didn’t even need a photograph. I was too away with the fairies to twig what the overall plan was.
Marsha Ray – or Mrs F as he called her – arrived around the same time. I didn’t really understand why she’d come until we were on our way to Brazil. Until then I presumed she was there to keep house. I also assumed they were sleeping together. He’d always gone on about how meditation increased your sexual energy and it made sense to my addled brain that she might be his outlet for that. To be honest I didn’t really care as long as her presence helped to keep him off my case. As much as your father liked to pretend he was incapable of executing even the most mundane task himself, he somehow managed to book the trip to Brazil without my or Mrs F’s involvement and seemingly without once leaving his room.
The spiritual retreat in Keswick plan was all nonsense, of course – a ruse. No one in their right mind would have paid to stay in that dump of a house with a bunch of oddballs like us, but naturally I went along with it without questioning anything. What the Norwegians say about prison is true, you know. The removal of a man’s liberty is punishment enough. I was so happy just to be able to walk out of the front door any time I liked that I would have bought anything he sold me as long as I had access to drugs and a roof over my head. Mine was a shameless life in those days, Sonny, shamelessly lived.
Which brings me to Confession Number Two. It was me who kidnapped you. Me who took you away from Andrew and your mother. Me who lured you into a camper van on the promise of meeting your sperm father – as you called him. Me who shot Andrew in the leg. And when I was driving you to Keswick it was me who stopped you screaming by blowing heroin smoke into your mouth and giving you Temazepam to knock you out. All the ills in your life have been caused by me. I am a monster and this is my pathetic attempt at making amends for everything I’ve done to you. That I was doing your father’s bidding only makes it worse. Sonny, what can I say except that I am unimaginably sorry. Sometimes we look back at the life we’ve rolled out and see that it amounts to little more than a sequence of things we can’t undo.
That’s the end of my wrongdoing, but please keep reading; there is more you need to know.
Seriously. What the fuck?
Andrew’s Limp #2
I have a question I need to ask Andrew, but the words are all coagulated at the back of my throat and stuck there like a solid lump of phlegm. We’re in the village pub waiting for our order of Sunday roast. Between us on the table sit two glasses of sparkling water.
People are looking at us. At me. Not directly – in quick turns of the head. The word missing is repeating over and over like a billion lawn sprinklers starting up. As in, ‘Is that the wee boy who went missssssssing?’
‘How far is Keswick from here?’ I say to block out the noise. That’s not the important question, just an opener. I pronounce it Kez-wick.
‘You mean Kezzick,’ says Andrew, ‘in the Lake District? It’s a good few hours away on the train, or I could take you if you like, it’s a gorgeous drive. You aren’t thinking about leaving today, are you?’
‘No, not today, but I might go there next. It’s where Thomas and my dad were staying when they kidnapped me.’
‘Oh, right. Just your average sightseeing trip, then.’
Our food arrives. It looks and smells delicious but I have no appetite. To be honest, if I were home in RB now I’d be in my room, lying on my bed, with the door shut tight. Andrew’s looking at me with a worried expression on his face and I put some energy into cutting up the chicken on my plate.
‘How do you feel about going to look at the school today?’
‘Um, I think I’d rather wait, if that’s okay. It kind of feels like a next-visit thing.’
‘Sonny, that’s fine. It’s great just having you here. Looks like the sun’s coming out. How about a walk after lunch?’
But after lunch we’re too stuffed full of food to walk, so we go back to the house and sit in the room with the racetrack, groaning and holding our stomachs.
‘We could watch the video of your fifth birthday party.’
What can I say? My resistance is low and I say yes, forgetting that it’s not the hard things in life that get to you; the hard things bring out the fight. It’s the soft things that dig their way in: birds, kittens, moving images of your own five-year-old self.
He turns it on and within seconds I get to see your face full-frontal for the first time. I ask Andrew to go back and freeze it a few seconds.
I always had this secret worry that without realising it I might be attracted to women who look like you. It’s none of your business to know if that’s true or not. I will say that you were beautiful, just like Ruth said. In fact if I had to pick you out in a police line-up I wouldn’t have said you were my mother. Not that I don’t look like you in some ways, I probably do, but because I don’t feel any connection to you at all. But that’s not what gets to me. What gets to me is watching that happy little kid with the squeaky voice, whose words I cannot understand even though it’s my mouth they’re coming out of, playing with his little friends, hitting a kiddie drum with a plastic stick, smiling up at the camera. Actually smiling up higher than that, at the person holding the camera, Andrew. That happy little kid, who had no idea what he had coming. And I start blubbing like that five-year-old would have if only he knew. I can’t stop myself. I can’t stop. The snot and the tears and the Sunday roast that feels like it’s going to vomit right up. I’m lying foetal on the floor in the middle of the racetrack and I can’t stop any of it. I even blame Andrew. ‘Why didn’t you come get me? Why didn’t you even look?’ I wail. And Andrew is sobbing too hard to answer.
Later, he tells me he didn’t know where to go or what to do, so in the end he thought the best thing was to stay home, and wait, and hope that one day either the police would bring me back or I’d find him. He had no claim on me, you were my legal parent, and so far as he knew you were out there with your new husband, looking for me, so what could he do?
‘But once you knew where I was, why didn’t you come then? It might have helped me, didn’t you think of that?’
‘Yes, of course. It might have helped, but equally it could have tipped you over the edge. You were already on suicide watch. We couldn’t risk upsetting a balance that was already precarious.’
‘We? You and Thomas? It didn’t concern you that I was living with a murdering kidnapping junkie? You didn’t think that would tip me over the edge?’ I know I’m ven
ting my anger at the wrong person here, but when this shit starts coming there’s no holding it back.
‘Sonny, Thomas turned his whole life around to take care of you. He knew what he’d done and he was dead set on making it better. If I’d shown up, you wouldn’t have known me from Adam. I thought, given the six thousand miles between us, that the best thing I could do would be to support Thomas and keep him strong so he could help you.’
‘What do you mean by support – money? You gave Thomas money?’
‘Yes, some money, but mainly just moral support. We talked on the phone. He had nobody, Sonny, just you.’
He gets up then to go to make us a beverage and when he comes back we sit there in silence drinking our tea.
‘We could still take that walk if you fancy it,’ says Andrew. ‘The moon is almost full and we’re not long past midsummer so it won’t be getting dark tonight.’
Little Man and the Zombies
There’s no railroad station at Keswick, so the final stage of my journey into the town is a bus ride. Sometimes in RB I ride the bus, if I’ve cycled a long way and don’t have the energy to cycle home. Our buses have these neat racks in front for carrying bikes, so it’s a breeze. There’s no rack on this bus so I guess people don’t use bikes so much. It’s kind of hilly. There’s one other person on board, a woman who’s been somewhere else to do her shopping so I guess Keswick is small.
It’s a pretty ride. The grey sky and the low cloud hanging over the mountains remind me of standing on the cliff edge at Big Sur when the fog rolls in off the Pacific Ocean and the cloud is below you and the sound of the waves below that.
The woman gets off the bus somewhere I don’t notice, so by the time we hit Keswick it’s just me and the driver, who has maybe forgotten I’m here because he’s singing some kind of hymn real loud.
First impressions? This is England but it looks more like Scotland than London or Torquay. And nobody here wears normal everyday apparel; everyone is dressed for hiking, and for rain. That’s the best I can do when I’m starving and tired.
GPS gets me from the bus stop to the Hedgehog Bed & Breakfast, which I chose mainly for its cool name. I forgot this when I was with Andrew but my first memory of living with my dad is crying for my Sonic the Hedgehog video and my Sonic the Hedgehog PJs. I wonder if I even knew hedgehogs were real creatures, and if I had would I have thought they were blue? In SoCal we have possums, skunks, raccoons, squirrels, bears, coyotes, snakes and mountain lions and all kinds of creepy critturs. Driving through Manhattan Beach at night the whole place stinks of skunk, and not always because of the animal. No hedgehogs though. Once, a possum died under our house and man, the stink was so strong you could taste it. You wouldn’t want to be the poor guy who has to earn a buck taking those things away. That guy should be the multi-milly-anna, not me.
I have a hard time understanding the woman who shows me to my room. I don’t want to appear ill-mannered by asking her to repeat everything twenty gazillion times, so after the second time of not understanding I switch to listening out for key words in hopes of piecing them together. I make out the word breakfast so I smile and nod and she smiles right back so I guess we’re okay and that somehow some way I’ll get something to eat the next morning. Which reminds me how hungry I am right now. I throw my backpack on to my bed, stuff T’s next letter into my pocket and follow my nose to the nearest fish and chip shop. Chippie. It’s eight-thirty at night and it should be dark, but it isn’t, the sun’s only just come out. This perpetual daylight is screwing with my jet-lag.
Keswick is located close to a lake, Derwentwater. I check out the distance from the town then go sit on a bench by the water to eat my fish and chips and try to figure out which of the houses at the top of the lake is the one Thomas occupied with my father. There aren’t so many and they all look like regular rich people’s homes. I guess it’s the same here as in SoCal: rich people don’t like to live too close to poor people, just close enough to have them come cut the grass and deal with the sprinklers. The lake is still and glassy and I take a photo of it on my phone then scroll back through my photo album. I stop at an old sneaky over-the-wall picture of Ike and Milly-Anna dancing in their yard. Milly-Anna’s up on the deck and Ike’s on the grass looking up at her. It’s easy to see which song they’re dancing to because Milly-Anna’s lips are all puckered up doing the oo-hoo-hoos. In any case I have never known them to dance to anything else. Milly-Anna’s watched Grease more times than I’ve seen SOTD, but then she has decades of viewing time on me.
I’m just thinking how far away they all seem and how peaceful it is here when these two kids, a girl and a boy, probably about my age, possibly younger, come stomping along. At least, the girl is stomping. She has her arms folded across her chest and is wearing a really tight short skirt that shows off her fat white thighs, and those thighs are marching a few feet ahead of the guy as if she’s making a show of walking away but slow enough to notice if he doesn’t follow. Looks to me as if he’s in two minds about catching her up. Looks to me like he wants to drink his whole six-pack of beer in peace. He mumbles something that I assume she’s expected to hear, then changes direction to come sit at the other end of my bench. The thighs keep on marching. I wonder if she thinks she looks like Beyonce in that skirt, because she sure as hell doesn’t. Bitch, those legs ain’t never seen the sun.
The guy looks at me and lifts his chin so I say hey and my next chip falls off of my tiny wooden fork. I put it down and start eating with my fingers like you’re supposed to. The guy cracks open a can. I look away but the only way to escape the smell of his beer would be to stand up and walk, which would be ill-mannered, right? Beyonce’s realised he’s not following any more and has slowed down, but she doesn’t look back to see where he is. In fact she doesn’t look anywhere other than down at her own elbows and I wonder if she’s always so fixated by them. The sound of the guy sucking and swallowing his beer triggers my misophonia, makes me twitch. I should go but I’m scared he’s the kind of guy to take offence and express it verbally or even physically. I sit it out, try to focus my attention on other sounds. The lapping of the water. Lakes sound different from oceans. Oceans sound different from streams. I think about wading across the icy stream at Andrew Molera State Park when the bridge is out. That kills your feet. The water’s so cold you don’t feel the pain of the stones under them, that’s for sure. A stream sounds different from a dripping tap. That’s another of my trigger sounds. Man, I’m tense.
The guy mumbles something that I realise is directed at me and I look at him and say, ‘I’m sorry, dude, I’m finding it hard to tune in to the accent here – would you mind saying that again?’
He shrugs and instead of trying to make me understand with more words he lifts up the five remaining cans in his six-pack and jiggles them in the air.
‘No, thanks, dude,’ I say. ‘Good of you to offer.’
He shrugs again and we both sit and stare at a lone black bird floating on the water. It has a big red splodge on the front of its face as if its been shot in the head. He crushes his can in one hand, drops it on the ground and cracks open another.
Girlfriend is leaning against a wall about fifty feet away, facing the water but not looking at it or us, still inspecting those elbows; worse, she’s picking at the skin on them, and, now I’ve seen that, I can hear it. Her pale thighs are luminous in the weird summer night. Man, this place is not relaxing. I need to get out of the electrical force-field that’s crackling between Justin Timberlake and Cameron Diaz here. I scrunch up my fish and chip wrappers and at the same time there’s a sudden burst of activity from them. Cameron has stomped back our way and directed a sulky question at the ground behind our bench. Loverboy sighs and gets to his feet like a reluctant ninety-year-old man and enunciates, ‘See. Ya. Mate. Enjoy. Your. Holidays.’ The accent is still thick as oil, but I appreciate that he’s made an effort to be understood and it actually feels good to make contact. I guess you can’t judge a man by the way his
woman treats him.
‘Thanks, skip,’ I say. ‘Good to meet you. See you around.’ Skip? Where the fuck did that come from? I have never called anyone skip in my life before, and if anyone ever dared call me that I’d spit in his face.
They slouch off to wherever it is they’re headed, her up front, him behind, as if they never stopped. As if they never even met yet, and I wonder if they’ll still be working the same routine in twenty years’ time.
I stay a few minutes more, long enough to toss my chip paper into the trash can (three attempts; I’m better at kicking than throwing), long enough to let the air settle. I toss his discarded can into the trash too and head back townwards.
I wake up too late for breakfast. Turns out that yesterday the woman was telling me breakfast finishes at nine. Somehow this morning I understand every word she says. My ears must have adjusted their tuning overnight. She asks me if I’m planning to go to the pencil museum and when I say no, that I want to get across to the other side of the lake, she’s a little surprised – what right-thinking twenty-one-year-old male wouldn’t want to gen up on the history of the pencil, right? – but tells me I can take a ferry on a tour of the lake which will drop me wherever I want to go. The sky is actually blue this morning, which makes the town look prettier, the grey and the green and the blue with wispy white clouds being blown around like the feathers of a giant bird that’s been ripped apart by an airplane. When I get to the pier though it’s kind of crowded with people eating ice-creams and potato chips, so on account of the inevitable chorus of mouth noises I decide to walk the trail around the edge of the lake instead.
Narcissism for Beginners Page 18
