He would not be back in a minute. He was no longer able to help. And I had no replacement answer by heart.
When Tom and I were young, and life was hard in the parish of Sewerby cum Merton and Grindale, Dad would occasionally come home an empty shell, his niceness all caked and desiccated. Mum would cope by stapling his hair to the mattress, before hammering his head to the bed-frame with six-inch nails.
Metaphorically.
Mum had a temper, and a tendency to crack. Dad was falling apart more quietly. He was melting. He tried to keep himself together with prayer and faith, and learning from the lives of the saints, as if every day were just another jump from a plane.
But Mum seldom let up. In a language Dad might one day understand, she’d underboil his eggs, or iron a hole in the shape of an iron in the front of his clerical shirt. She emptied the Hoover-bag into his Repeat Offenders box-file. For nights on end, whatever his prayers, she’d keep him awake, her standard complaint that he was an able and attractive man who ought to be making money. For the sake of the children, for the security and settling-down, or just to know before next Christmas where we’d be living next Christmas, without enough money for Christmas.
I’d hide in cupboards with my fingers in my ears, and pretend it wasn’t happening. Each individual argument was a personal assault, because if on another night, thirty-four years and nine months previously, it had been like this, then where and who would I be now?
The next morning, or when I was back at school, I had time to rationalise. Mum and Dad sometimes overreacted to each other. And that, I reasoned, was an acceptable definition of love.
Mum never calmed down. At that time, she couldn’t see anything through. During her days as a temp she was encouraged to enrol in courses supposed to advance her career by broadening her experience. She tried circus skills, psychology for beginners, creative writing and amateur dramatics. But she’d quickly give them up, resentful of anything connected to work while her boys were stepping out in other people’s shoes, from the charity shops.
Basically, money was the problem. I don’t know what happened at home when I was away at school, a poor posh person living a double life, but I’d definitely stopped thinking that everyone was born equal. My revised opinion, encouraged by Mum, was that there were people like Dad, and then there were special and gifted people, like me. I used to fantasise, denying my clerical heritage, that Tom was always Tom but I was my Mum’s secret love-child, my secret father someone famously blessed with talent. We often talked about it, but Mum couldn’t say exactly who it was: it was a secret.
I was trying to find my way, and, like the most mundane fellows everywhere, I didn’t want to be like my dad. I wanted to be a star.
During the holidays, Dad would sometimes catch hold of me and pull me in and wrap his arms around me, squeezing me tightly until I could hardly breathe. Or he’d ask, out of nowhere, if anyone fancied staying in and playing a game of chess.
Yes right, Dad. I went out and had my left ear pierced, seven times. Mum gave me the money. I was determined to fill every Mason vicarage with my own sense of the hopelessness of the human condition, whose true and drastically corrupted nature only adolescents of my age and inclination were fully qualified to recognise.
I told Dad I was trying to find myself.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘That’s good.’
Better, I thought, siding with Mum, than choosing an optional poverty so prolonged (compared to everyone else who was sane and able-bodied) it was almost pretentious. It was Dad’s only pretension, which I found intensely annoying. To make up for it, I cultivated all the pretensions.
I read philosophy and French novels. I noted full moons, and at sixteen made mad dashes on a step-through Honda across the flats and downs of Salisbury Plain, stopping off at Stonehenge to wassail the Apple Tree and bow to the Elder, worshipping at the pagan wonder of old Albion. Mum would follow me down in the car.
‘How embarrassing is that?’ Tom used to ask. ‘Going to festivals with your mum, trying to be someone you’re not?’
But in fact it wasn’t embarrassing at all. We were peas from the same pod, and, waiting for solstice dawns on the Hergest Ridge, I agreed with Mum and like-minded fellow travellers that organised religion was over. In its place, and in the place of all fear, there would be science, creativity, imagination and sex. But then later, in the shadow of some ancient long-barrow, in the dark scary hours before dawn, I’d secretly make the sign of the cross.
It was a sensible precaution: it kept Satan at a distance.
The next day I’d be wretchedly sick on cider and dope, before biking home in daylight to tell Dad how fantastic it all was.
I was trying very hard to be unlike him, which was fairly standard behaviour. Dad had always wanted so little for us that we’d end up, not ordinary exactly, but Christian and caring and kind. I gave him one last chance. During a long summer holiday, I volunteered to act as sidesperson in his church, along with a girl from the parish called Alice.
Mum refused outright to wash my socks. She said she sometimes wished I’d never been born. She thought I was turning into Dad, but she was wrong. It was exactly the opposite, because for our generation church was seriously weird. It was the most shocking rebellion I could think of, because nothing could be more deviant than giving up a Sunday morning in bed to stand in a white cape holding a precious-metal goblet heavy with the viscous blood of Christ. For Alice, it was like becoming a lesbian. It opened up the world. She suddenly didn’t have to be the prettiest girl in the party dress, with the pink-ribbon Alice band. Nor did she have to smoke cigarettes she hated or put the wind up the school bully by asking him in public if he fancied a blow-job.
Standing at the front of the church, either side of Mason Senior the geeky vicar, we put ourselves beyond saving, lost in our religious streaks, praying over and over again that sex, when it happened, would be special. And when it did, between the two of us, it was. Alice said. We were seventeen years old. Not long after, she stopped coming to church.
She became a Goth, and said I was too tame for her. If only I’d been more rebellious, less like Dad, bought a long dark coat and some matt-black hair-paint. I did try. I stopped serving in church, and developed an astounding openness to the credible, the incredible, to anything. The family bucket of religion, passed down in a fire-chain from Mason to Mason, I spilt carelessly some distance from any actual fire. Clothes in alternative fashion became my sacred ju-jus and fetishes. Choosing the right music re-enacted ancient patterns of belonging, and an extra earring assuaged the gods by complying with this month’s tribal fad. I was trying to set myself free, fashioning a new personality, applauding my friends’ nose-rings and tongue-studs as talismans against the devil, who was always plotting to enter the body at any available orifice. Is that right? Fine, I could believe that. It felt like an essential part of the James Mason Minor I was at the time.
‘You’re just like Mum,’ Tom said, as yet again in my double life I took out all the earrings for another half of term at choir-school. ‘But you can’t see it, can you?’
Tom was now away at University studying Economics, and on one of his rare visits home he asked Dad why he always wore his collar as often and visibly as possible. In fact, Dad used to buy a new set each year to maintain their astonishing whiteness.
‘It concentrates the mind,’ Dad said. ‘And keeps the problem before the eyes of the people.’
‘What problem is that then, Dad?’ Tom asked. Within two months of leaving College he had his own car, and his own flat, and everything else that people were generally thought to want. ‘What exactly is the problem?’
‘The problem. Life, death, how are we supposed to live? That problem.’
‘Actually, I don’t have a problem with that.’
Tom was immune. For some time now he’d stopped even pretending to be good. Every evening he drove home from the City in his roadster with electric everything to a kitchen with a glass kettle, and by his
second year in London, eating Japanese noodles on expenses, he earned five times as much as a vicar after twenty years on apologetics and paste sandwiches. Mason Senior wrestled with the divine secrets of existence. Tom Mason Major bought from the bottom and sold at the top. Thine is the glory, Tom. Our dad still had his uses: an Anglican vicar in the family could be good value, especially at dinner parties with Bachelors of Arts and Sciences, where not one highly paid graduate under the age of forty had progressed much further than not believing in God.
That was Tom. We’d drifted apart, even though we looked very similar and still had our special handshake, which we pushed and pulled before embracing each other. When we met, Tom paid for everything, and if Tom could do all that, so unlike Mum and Dad, then what could I do?
It was a long time since Tom had finished with our plot against Dad. For Mum, it was never finished. It was war; it was always war, and I must have inherited the same failing, never knowing when to stop. I often asked Dad how he got to be a priest.
‘Stubbornness.’
‘Didn’t you ever want to be anything else?’
‘Of course I did. Lots of things.’
I advised him to let himself go, and stop being so hard on himself. With my multiple earrings and a leather pouch greasy with the resin of soft drugs, impressionable, a lounger-about and a scrounger, I encouraged my father the vicar, the source of aid and comfort to all in need, to regret every pound per square inch of his English uprightness.
‘Be yourself,’ I said.
I’d failed to notice that for Mason Senior uptight meant tightened up, like a nut or a bolt, like a machine. That was how he kept on going, week after week, coping with me and Mum while conforming to European norms of health and safety. That’s how he didn’t fall apart, or malfunction, or fly off the handle.
‘Lighten up,’ I’d say, flicking a lit match into the washing up water, tilting my chair back and blowing a couple of smoke-rings. ‘Stop pressing down. See what comes to the surface.’
One yellow summer Sunday, with the local colour washed pale as August, I came home from not working on my A-levels to the news that Mum had packed and gone. I was eighteen, and she should have waited, for the sake of the children.
‘This is so unlike her,’ people said.
The parishioners blamed it on the weather, and BBC drama, and the time of her life. They acted out their different versions of crisis counselling. Some of them even blamed it on me, as if I and my mother were one and the same. ‘This isn’t like her at all. But there again, she hasn’t been herself recently.’
‘Face it,’ Tom said, home for the weekend to help with the fall-out, ‘she’s a fucking schizo. Always was. Always will be.’
I stayed at home and sulked. A month or so after Mum left, a letter arrived from the French Pyrenees, in which she tried very hard to explain herself. She blamed the length of the long haul, the constant moving, the diocesan indifference, and the hurtful ignorance of the people. The spiritual rewards, she wrote, remained stubbornly spiritual. And in any reasonable analysis, at the end of the day, when you added it all up, her husband the vicar of thine good parish had only himself to blame.
Being helpful, I typed up the letter for the parish magazine. It was the least I could do, sitting at the computer in the middle of the night, and at the last moment pasting it in over a regular feature called ‘The Things Children Say’. Mum wrote that Mason Senior was more committed to the Church than he’d ever been to her, or his boys. He’d often been away or unreachable, and had consistently refused to earn anything even close to a decent wage. Ever.
And he was sleeping with another woman. Yours sincerely, Mrs Mason.
Dad had stopped pressing down. He’d untightened, and lightened up, and with his eyes open he’d kissed a recently arrived divorcee. In her front room, standing up. So that the principled neighbours and everyone else could see. He never explained himself, or apologised. He let people dismiss it as a moment of weakness, but even then he never openly asked for strength, only forgiveness.
After Mum’s letter, Dad stopped seeing the other woman. He went back almost to normal, and, though the effort was clearly great, he responded to every jibe and sly remark with restraint and tolerance, except during Lent.
That’s when we all had to be careful, when he showed us another side of himself. For Lent, every year from then on, Mason Senior gave up the consolation of religion. And as he grew older, every year was more horrifying than the last. It was only during Lent, outside the shelter of divine justice, that he saw the true extent to which evil prospered. He was appalled at the addled mind of the mother country, losing her memory, stumbling, forgetful that unlike most other nations she had her very own God to pull her through. If that’s what she wanted. He’d been preaching it for years, but it looked increasingly unlikely that this was what the nation wanted, in thrall as it was to a freshly invented England of devil’s-head tattoos, and by-passes, and sharp business practice made pretty much perfect.
During Lent, Dad became a drinker, four weeks wall-eyed every spring-time, working his way through the bottles of dry sherry he was given every Christmas by parishioners. About half-way down the bottle, he’d vow to found a militant wing of the Anglican Church, deciding that God and England deserved better than unpuncturable niceness. His Bishops were constantly asking him if he was strong enough to dismiss the pretence of strength in favour of a constant, honest, perhaps even weakening admission of weakness.
No. Not any more, not always. Not during Lent.
Mason Senior, an ex-military man with a strategic vision of a radical new Church, said no. It was time for good Christians to stop feeling guilty and alienated and feeble for being tolerant and persuadable and understanding. He’d had enough of the platitudes, the declining numbers, the constant bickering and petty disputes: the Anglo-Catholics said candles, the Evangelicals said guitars, and for any public occasion, especially when televised, an archdeacon could be trusted to select with care whichever was the less appropriate.
At the end of the violence of Lent, his face cut to bits by his shaky safety-razor, Dad breathed a sigh of relief and recorked any surviving bottles. Out of the closet came his scarlet chasuble, his seasonal favourite, and he wore it humbly all through Holy Week until, on Easter day itself, he changed in triumph to the white and the gold. He lifted up his hands. He received the consolation of religion. He stood there at the front, and he lifted up his hands, and he tried to make something understood which one day would be universally understood, if it was the truth.
People, he said, you must be good and gentle to each other.
Mum had a bolder approach.
And I was somewhere in the middle, with Helena arriving tomorrow, and an outstanding offer to dig up the dead. To be honest, I was so nervous that I didn’t know what to do. I lacked self-confidence in a situation like this. Frankly, I was in a panic – in several minds at once.
If I disappointed Moholy, and he reclaimed the flat, then where else could I go to hide?
But then there was Helena, and how could I possibly be the father of children? One day they’d turn into someone like me, inevitably, and I didn’t wish that on anyone.
And if we did have a child, Helena and I, I knew from Mum the horror of bringing up children with not enough money. Moholy was offering a fortune for Joyce. I couldn’t remember from the catalogue exactly how much, but a lot. And Rifka had suggested, once I’d proved I could dig discreetly, that Joyce was only the beginning.
Mum was urging me on, hollering from afar in an accent just too distant to identify. Go on, my son. I lifted my hand to my ear. The earrings were long gone, the holes almost closed, but I could still hear Mum’s voice and it was getting closer, easier to hear, more insistent. ‘Relics mean heroes,’ she said, in a professor’s voice, a brilliant and enthused professor, pushing pretend half-moon glasses past the delicate kink in her nose. ‘They’re reminders of human possibility. Dear boy. The burial and disappearance of the great i
s almost perverse. Dig the old blighters up. Let’s have a little look at them. After all, they were the mighty.’
Dad would never have done it, not in a million years.
‘You’re right. He’d never have risked it, never have braved it. But you’re not your dad, are you, Jay? Are you?’
God no. This was it, at last, an opportunity to demonstrate clearly to myself that I was escaping Dad’s fate, objective evidence of the off-the-scale distance between me and those hapless vicarages. Until now, however far it may have seemed, the distance had never been far enough.
Dad had lived too long surrounded by religious notions of good and evil, endurance and suffering, life after death, heaven. These notions, once common currency, were now an oddity, and he hadn’t worked out even the basics of how modern life was best to be lived.
Mum was nearly sixty and somewhere on the sunny Spanish coast in a sarong, where not even her children could pile their troubles on her head. She was the winner. That was the way to live.
The weather held, overcast but dry. It was very dark and late on a Sunday night, and I’d just driven two and a half hours along an empty motorway to the upbeat soundtrack of Mum’s many voices. In my black zip-up jacket, Rifka’s tools wrapped in my dad’s army kit-bag, I stepped out of Moholy’s Peugeot van at Fluntern cemetery in Zurich. It was 1 a.m. I turned my shoulder to the sweep of headlights from a solitary car, then squeezed shut the driver’s door. A thin haze of cloud was blurring the moon and stars, but in my opinion, and considering Zurich was a major European city, it felt unnaturally quiet and dark.
The Swiss Germans were all in bed, lights off. I could be anybody, do anything. They were letting me do what I liked.
Dry Bones Page 9