by Carol Morley
‘Where does a whale get weighed? At a whaleway station!’
*
‘Well I am glad that’s all over,’ Mum said as she settled herself down into the coach seat before she fell asleep, her chin doubled and rested on her chest. I looked the other way, out of the window, and saw Dreamland, where we’d always gone to, year after year, and realised that even though I couldn’t remember, surely Dad had some fun there – it was a funfair after all.
It was our last day, and I felt annoyed that I hadn’t done much clue searching at Grandma’s house and that I hadn’t even found out which of the three bedrooms Dad had slept in. I was leaving behind evidence that could have helped me understand. There was one thing I had discovered from Mum’s garbled talking the night before: Dad’s father had left him when he was five years old, and I knew that meant something. I vowed that on the next visit I would comb every inch of space as though I was a magnifying glass.
*
But I never did go back to the house, or see Grandma again, though she kept in touch after we left. She sent us money-off coupons neatly clipped out from magazines and newspapers. Fifty pence postal orders arrived on birthdays and at Christmas, and she wrote occasional letters, written neatly in navy blue fountain pen. She mostly wrote about the price of cabbage and other vegetables, and her church duties. In the last letter Grandma Westbourne sent, four years after our final visit, she said the horses in the field nearby were behaving strangely and it must be a sign of something. She died a few days after writing that. She cut Mum out of her will and left my brother, my sister and me a letter each, to be opened and read on the day that we were married.
I’d always known her as Grandma and my mum had always called her Mum. I’d never known her first name. It’s not nice, I suppose, but I didn’t much care that she was dead. I was only bothered about the things that she knew about Dad that were now impossible for me to ever find out.
brynn
She remembers how he became flushed, reading the letter he got that day, and how he was shirty with her afterwards. He wouldn’t tell her what was in the letter, but she found it later in the dustbin, the thin paper screwed into a ball inside the mismatched envelope. She’d smoothed it out and looked at the faint handwriting, and realised it was from Ronald’s father, who he hadn’t seen or heard from since he was a child.
He never did respond to the letter, and when they found out from a distant uncle that his father had died a few days later, Ronald had his first blackout, and his first breakdown came not long after that. She’s always linked the death of his father and his breakdown.
She tries to imagine the letter, and at the front of her mind she maps it out, and she can almost see it, as it was; the creases in the paper, the inky words on the page, the underlined date.
Kilburn, London.
14th October 1969
Dear Ronald,
I won’t go into how I got your address but I hope this letter finds you well. It is a hard letter to write but believe me when I say I have wanted to write for a long time.
I have thought about you and your sister often and I suppose you are both married with children and I am probably a grandfather.
I know that relations between me and your mother were not the best and I am sorry but please understand. It has been many years, and a lot of water under the bridge.
I am not getting any younger. I am writing to ask if I could see you. I was lately working as a Handyman, that I enjoyed, but illness has forced me to retire. My health means I am not able to travel, but I would be glad if you could visit me. I hope that you will find it in you to see me after all this time.
Yours,
Dad
under the shadow
Rob was singing into an imaginary microphone, pretending to be onstage, and his constant singing had driven my sister Susan to her boyfriend’s bedsit. Mum was slumped on the settee as though she didn’t want to be there at all. We had been back from Margate for two days and she hadn’t even mentioned the Sex Pistols poster that had replaced the horse picture hanging over the mantelpiece.
Other things had passed Mum by as well. Rob had cut his long, fine hair into short soaped-up spikes and the back room had become the rehearsal room to Demobbed, a group my brother wasn’t even in, though he had helped them get a gig once, and had been offered the job of managing them. It was odd how they had all made their way into our house during the week we were away, especially as Alby, the lead singer, hated my brother and Rob hated him. They’d apparently had some major disagreement over the music of Paul Weller and The Jam. Though I never spoke to Alby out of loyalty to Rob, who could do no wrong in my eyes, I spent the rest of the school holidays hanging out with the band.
It was Kit, the drummer, who I paid most attention to. She rimmed her eyes with kohl, had blond spiky hair and wore black, ripped T-shirts, fishnet tights and mini skirts that showed off her long thin legs that I wished were mine. Kit had run away from home and was now living with us, sleeping on a double mattress jammed in with the band’s equipment in the back room, the room I imagined would be a dining room if some other family lived in the house.
Mum only realised that Kit was living with us when a vicar called at our door to persuade her to return home. I followed them into the kitchen, where Kit sat opposite the vicar and tapped out a beat on the lino with her foot. She refused to listen to his pleas for her to return to her parents and the church marching band. Mum made tea and I was pleased she appeared quite normal, seeing as she hadn’t really moved from the settee for days. Our cat Tiger had been part of the family since I was tiny, and as he curled hungrily around Mum’s ankles I wondered if Tiger ever thought of Dad, if he missed him, if cats could do that.
The vicar raised his shy eyes to Mum. ‘We’re lost without Kit, we really are,’ he said. ‘We worry about her.’
Mum seemed to have come out of what I had come to secretly call her widow’s daze and looked like she was relishing the challenge of keeping Kit in the house, even though she hadn’t noticed she was with us in the first place.
‘She’s as safe as one of my daughters, living here,’ Mum reassured him.
He fumbled his fingers around the edge of his dog collar and gave one of those half-smiles people give when they don’t really mean it. After he left, with a sad backward glance at Kit, Mum laughed. It was the first time I had heard her laugh for a long time.
So Kit continued to live with us, but, despite my full attention, which I was hoping Kit would be grateful for, she remained wrapped up in herself and she ignored me. I turned to Etta, the bass guitarist, who seemed more grateful of my company. She had chunky thighs, which she emphasised with torn-up, pale tights, wore deep-red lipstick and dyed her hair black. Etta sometimes stayed the night, but not always, though I’m not sure where she went to when she wasn’t at ours – she had grown up on a farm, so it can’t have been there, as there were no farms around our way as far as I knew. I think Etta liked looking for clues, like me, as she was always poking about our house, and one day I caught her coming out of the cellar.
‘There’s a rabbit down there,’ she said. ‘He looks half-starved.’
‘It’s Bugsy,’ I said. ‘I sort of forgot about him.’
She assumed he was named after Bugs Bunny. I told her he was named after the film Bugsy Malone but I didn’t tell her it was the first and last film I’d ever gone to see with Dad, and that we’d got Bugsy soon after.
Etta said she was deeply concerned about Bugsy and took him out the front to get some air. She found a shop in the Yellow Pages that sold straw for his hutch and we both went to buy it. I loved being out on the streets with Etta. Passers-by stared at her stiletto shoes, safety-pinned tartan dress and the black cones of her hair. I wanted to parade the streets with her for as long as I could but Etta was anxious to get back to the cellar.
She held Bugsy and expertly petted his long, white ears and I pictured her on her farm, milking a cow. She offered him to me, but I was a bit scare
d of holding him, so she put Bugsy down to ‘have a scamper’ on the damp ground and set to work methodically cleaning the hutch and laying the straw. When she was finished she put Bugsy gently back inside his cage and we both bent down and peered at him through the wire grill.
‘I bet he gets really pissed off in there,’ I said.
It was the first time I’d sworn in front of someone that old. Etta grinned at me and I knew that a special connection had opened up between us. I made sure I got fuck into my next sentence.
*
My eyes adjusted as I stepped into the back room. There was enough daylight spilling around the satin-edged pink blanket hung over the window to make out the pale sheen of tangled flesh on the bed. A nipple, a thigh, something hairy, something smooth, writhing, connected. One, two, three bodies, like a human sandwich, groping and moaning: Alby, Etta and Kit. A rush of bodies rose up and re-arranged, a slash of leather whip and a muffled voice cried out. I wondered if the whip that sliced into the bodies was from Etta’s farm.
Up to that point I had only thought about sex in terms of a husband and wife, a shared double bed and then a baby. I hadn’t got much further than that. I was confused, but I realised that this must be sex, of a kind. Unnoticed, I stood and stared. Eventually, the writhing started to slow down and Etta detangled herself, sat up and lit a cigarette. Kit and Alby carried on pressing against each other. I was sorry for poor unwanted Etta and her thick thighs, and felt bad that she couldn’t get a boyfriend of her own.
Etta inhaled on her cigarette and turned her head and saw me. She flinched for a moment before calmly exhaling a thin strand of smoke in my direction. I felt giddy and alive. An urge gripped me and I ran from the room, grabbed a pair of nail scissors from the kitchen and raced up the stairs to my bedroom, where I cut my T-shirt, making a ragged hole that exposed my stomach and belly button. A rush of pleasure that I was a punk hit me, but was quickly exchanged for guilt. What was happening in our house would not be happening if Dad had been around.
*
The holidays were nearly over and I was about to start my new school. It had been rumoured for a long time that on the first day an older pupil would force your head down a dirty toilet and flush the chain. This was one more reason that I never wanted to attend school again, but I knew that there was nothing I could do to stop it. Even when someone dies, it can only be put off for so long. Mum made further signs of emerging from her widow’s daze and said she would take me shopping for a new coat and uniform. As we stepped out of the front door, I glimpsed her attempt to disguise an expression of terror and it occurred to me that she hadn’t been outside for weeks.
At the market stall, I chose a red cagoule, roomy enough to last me for years. When I tried it on, Mum didn’t quibble with my choice and her eyes filled with tears.
‘Your daddy is looking down at you right now and he’s very proud,’ she said.
Why on earth would Dad be proud that I was wearing a baggy cagoule? It seemed ridiculous. Why had she gone and mentioned Dad? Why had she done that? I thought about the woman next door who screamed a lot to try and get rid of her cancer. I wanted to scream, but instead I stood there, with my head down so I didn’t have to look at Mum. I stared at my shoes, thinking, let this moment be over, let all this be past.
*
School began and I joined the hundreds of other eleven-year-olds that lined the tennis courts, waiting to be put into tutor groups. Everybody was wearing dark colours and I stuck out in my red cagoule. I began to regret my choice, wondering if I would be the first new pupil to get my head put down the toilet.
Considering my cagoule, it was not a surprise when Jilly picked me out from the crowd and sauntered towards me with her feathered hair floating in the breeze, but she airily walked on by as though I no longer existed. I felt a growing sense of relief and the possibility of change. Things were going to be different.
Rushing home from school I pulled on my holey T-shirt and rejoined the revolution that was going on in our house. Susan tried hard to make things normal, and to help Mum, but she could only do so much, and spent more and more time at Greg’s place, revising for her A-levels. I wished that I could have done something to make Mum feel better. Mum’s regular act, to hide her constant red-rimmed eyes, was to give a weak smile and disappear into the kitchen to make tuna fish pie. Tinned tuna with a packet of Smash on top, my favourite.
*
Rob and his music had taken over our house and it felt like the whole world was on the verge of change. Not only did we have Demobbed holed up in the back room, but another band had come to stay the night on their North West Tour. Mum was in the bath and I was alone in the lounge watching TV when the lead singer came in. He wore black drainpipes and a white T-shirt under his navy blue jacket that looked like a school blazer, with an old-fashioned prefect badge pinned to it. His hair was dark and combed forward, making a short, uneven fringe for his flat, pale face. His unblinking eyes stared at me as he came and sat next to me. We watched Are You Being Served? together while he held my hand and stroked my hair. I didn’t really enjoy any of this, but it seemed rude to stop him. He asked my age and told me that he was eighteen.
‘So what’s it like being eleven?’
I shrugged. I didn’t have a clue what to say.
‘What’s your favourite thing to eat?’ he asked.
‘Tuna pie,’ I said.
He seemed to find this very funny, but I wasn’t sure why.
*
Next morning I stayed in bed until I heard the band leave, and then I got up. Downstairs, Mum was stretched out on the settee dozing, her funeral dress riding up her tights. I tugged her dress down and looked up and saw that the lead singer had scrawled my name and his inside a heart on the Sex Pistols poster. I grabbed the pen from the mantelpiece and I scribbled over the heart to disguise it. Thinking that I might be questioned over what it was covering, I drew similar blotches over other parts of the poster as well.
‘You’ve gone and ruined it now,’ Rob said when he saw it. I didn’t say he was being unfair. I couldn’t explain.
*
I stood outside Mum and Dad’s bedroom door. I hadn’t been in the room since Dad died and as far as I knew neither had Mum. Nowadays she slept in the lounge with the radiogram tuned in all night. I pushed the door open slightly, not wanting to let much air out in case something of Dad slipped away. I stepped inside.
The room was airless and dank and full of shadows. If a room could have a mood it was as sulky and glum as anything. When I opened the wardrobe door, I expected to see a tie or a shirt or a suit hanging there, or perhaps Dad’s old table tennis trophy that was always displayed, but there was nothing of his left. It was empty.
It was the last room Dad had ever slept in, the last room he ever had dreams in, probably nightmares. I lay down on the mattress and put my face into the pillow. I inhaled, but there was not a trace of Dad.
I got under the bed and looked up at the spirals of springs. Dust and fluff drifted down into my mouth and eyes. I watched the mattress poking through from above, hoping to suddenly see the shape of a body, the shape of him. I touched a rusty spring and held my breath for as long as I could.
Perhaps none of this was real.
Maybe Dad was still alive.
I waited.
*
Marc Bolan died in a car crash, leaving a two-year-old son behind. It was his girlfriend in the driver’s seat of the Mini, and even though Marc sang about driving a Rolls Royce because it was good for his voice, my brother told me that Marc couldn’t actually drive. I bought a scrapbook and covered it in black sticky-back plastic and collected newspaper cuttings about Marc’s accident, which Rob thought was morbid.
*
Within a few months of Dad dying, everything changed. Rob moved to London. Susan moved into a one bedroom flat with Greg. Mum got a job in the head office of a wine company. Kit, Etta and Alby’s band split up and moved away. Without Etta to remind me, I kept forgetting to vi
sit Bugsy. When I finally did go down to the cellar to see him he was dead and I took it as a sign that I was useless at looking after anything. We left that house, the last house Dad ever lived in. Later, I discovered that the man who moved in after us went mad. He took an axe to the house and chopped it up, door by door, banister by banister, bit by bit.
brynn
She still puts on lipstick but she doesn’t know why. Everything’s an effort. Even eating. She’s lost weight – down to a size fourteen. She’s working in an office with lots of common women who never stop talking about foreign holidays. She thinks about doing a degree. She’s already got the forms. She has no qualifications, but if her son, who has a way with words, wrote the admissions essay, she would get in as a mature student. Rob and Susan – they’re grown up really, but the youngest one… if it wasn’t for Ann. No, shouldn’t say it. But, go on, it’s only a thought. If it wasn’t for Ann she could just up sticks and leave. One bag packed – all you need.
She opens the handbag that she bought for his funeral and takes out the old birthday card she keeps inside. Yellow and red roses on the front, and the printed words: A Birthday Greeting, Dear Wife, and when she opens it a paper cut-out bouquet of roses pops up with a poem that begins: Flowers can express so well/The things that words can’t say. She turns it over, looks at the blue ink sloping forward, the tight loops of his writing – To My Wife, For a Very Happy Birthday, Darling, from your Loving Husband. Underneath he has put a mountain-heap of kisses.
She should have helped him more.
They were going to grow old together. She remembers when he first touched her and how everything came after that. His mother waited three months after Rob was born to send that card and matinée jacket. Just so she didn’t have to face up to the fact that she was twelve weeks pregnant when they got married.
After the funeral, at first, she couldn’t leave the house for weeks – didn’t want to go outside – couldn’t stop gulping and thought she would suffocate. Then one night she found herself running outside. Rob and Ann chasing her along the streets and she was screaming ‘Shit’ and other words, on and on, and didn’t care who heard. She didn’t know a four-letter word till she married him. He didn’t believe it but it was true. It wasn’t meant to be like this. And nobody had any idea of what she was going through. Not a clue. Piss. Fuck. Shit. The children caught her at the end of that cul-de-sac, gripped her by her arms and pulled her back to that damn house. Nowhere else to go.