Everybody Died, So I Got a Dog

by Emily Dean

  Even the sources of the Simpsons’ infrequent conflicts seemed refreshingly uncomplicated. They disagreed about whose turn it was to be the top hat in Monopoly and whether to play Phil Collins in the car. Instead of, ‘How long is that fucking Chilean concert pianist sleeping on the sofa for?’ (Answer? Indefinitely.)

  The Simpsons had a country cottage in Suffolk and sometimes I was invited up to experience dog-family weekends. We would pile into their dad’s car, a tin of travel sweets nestling by the gearstick, and play I-Spy while Ralph slept obediently behind his dog guard. ‘Who wants to go and pick samphire for tea?’ asked their mum, Sally, when we arrived, discreetly swapping my patent shoes for a pair of borrowed wellies. And off we would race through the salt marshes, Ralph running ahead of us, his tail wagging excitedly. We’d play board games and go for ‘drives’, stopping off at country pubs to order scampi, before baths and tea and ‘just one chapter of your books!’ before lights out.

  It seemed on those weekends with the Simpsons that I had been given a pass to an entirely different way of life, where there was a clear division between adults and children. A place where people settled disputes without soliloquies and quotes from Phillip Larkin.

  Did everyone else experience these pangs of confusion when they went to stay with other families? As bags were packed for our return to London, I felt a sense of disloyalty, as if I were returning to people who were utterly blind to my emotional betrayal. Lucy and her sister Jessica would fall asleep in the car and I would stare out at the disappearing tranquillity of the countryside, stuck between fascination for this other life and the relief of returning to the familiarity of my warmly eccentric family realm.

  Looking in through the Gothic-arched window at our peculiar world as Treacle rushed across the lawn to greet me, his jewelled collar glinting decadently, I felt a glow of belonging. I envied the Simpsons’ life, but those people in that strange Gothic house? They were my gang. And gangs stuck together.

  Chapter Four

  One night, Rach and I were woken up by the sound of my mother shouting. Drama wasn’t unprecedented in Holly Village but there was something about this particular altercation that felt off-brand. We rushed to position ourselves at the top of the stairs to eavesdrop. My father yelled back a bit and then a door slammed, putting an end to our stakeout as we scampered back into our bedroom for a post-mortem through the Gaza Strip.

  My parents had never really indulged in epic marital rows. My mother would dismantle my father’s occasional bursts of irritation with the soothing tones of the hostage negotiator. Veiled hostility and closed doors were a foreign country to us as we played out our disputes noisily en masse. But silence was becoming a new weapon in my mother’s arsenal, the most deadly strike of all when introduced into an atmosphere of constant noise.

  Something was definitely up in Holly Village.

  My father had started spending all his time closeted away, speaking softly on the phone to Anita, Mum’s heel-clacking return from the theatre woke us up later than usual, and was often followed by my father descending the stairs forcefully. On the rare nights they were in together, the curious concept of something called ‘bedtime’ was enforced.

  One Saturday afternoon Rach decided to investigate by raiding their bedroom drawers as my father snoozed in front of a Bing Crosby film. My mother had gone off for lunch with her gay theatre friends at a members’ club called Zanzibar.

  As Rach performed a hurried Watergate sweep of the drawers, I kept lookout, like the slightly dozy member of the gang who can’t be trusted with anything more technical.

  ‘Look, I found his diary!’ she hissed triumphantly. ‘It’s mostly stuff about books,’ she continued with disappointment, flicking through the pages. ‘What’s “conjugal rights”?’

  I shrugged, imagining my father performing some ritual involving animal sacrifices around a bonfire.

  This kind of sly investigation was one we hadn’t been reduced to before in our egalitarian troupe. We knew everything about their relationship – the letter Mum had found from another woman in the early days of their courtship. The married man my mum had a secret crush on. The reason my dad’s first marriage to a woman called Shirley had failed. (‘I got swept up in the expectations of others.’) And now this weird line was being drawn between us and adult matters. The idea of my parents having an interior life that didn’t include us seemed preposterous.

  My mother started shipping us off to our grandmother’s flat every weekend. She insisted this was so that we could have ‘quality time with your grandmother’, but there was a non-negotiable sense of urgency about the trips. It felt as if a vital page had been ripped out from our story.

  ‘Why do we have to spend every weekend with Nan?’ Rach moaned one day as we transferred our duvets and pillows into the car. ‘She’s always drunk!’

  ‘And she takes us to a pub where Rastafarian men offer us RUM,’ I added self-righteously.

  And so, one Friday, weighed down wearily like Atlas with our duvets, we rang the intercom of the Brixton flat. Ready to spend the long weekend with our fabulously entertaining but alcohol-fond grandmother. We ascended the staircase that smelt of ammonia and said hello to Lou – a homeless prostitute my grandmother had effectively sublet the stairwell to, who smiled hazily at us through her toothless grin.

  My grandmother’s cats were scuttling about inside the flat. Lucky was black with white tuxedo markings and greeted visitors like a rural pub regular discovering a tourist in his seat. My grandmother cited ‘shyness’ to excuse his basic lack of people skills. Simon was his panicked sidekick, a tortoiseshell with a blotchy ochre coat who had obvious co-dependency issues. They were less domestic pets, more two pairs of terrified glassy eyes and eight scuttling legs, who spent their days glowering behind sofas. They emerged only to attack a bowl of Whiskas or pee on a coat before returning to the shadows.

  ‘What is the POINT in having bloody cats if they’re going to behave like these ones?’ my mother always said when she dropped us off, appalled by their stage fright.

  Rach and I usually ended up abandoning our attempts to draw Lucky and Simon out from a corner. My grandmother would imply that once we had all left, liberated from our judgmental presence, they would transform into clever, charismatic extroverts. Simon, she claimed, had even mastered the art of saying ‘mama’. It was like someone telling you their dour, standoffish friend is ‘just hilarious!’ when you get to know them.

  Perhaps Lucky and Simon were suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder. They’d been sold life with a pensioner and ended up with a woman who saw off a burglar by pulling down his trousers, sending him fleeing as he screamed, ‘BITCH!’

  If my parents were the ringmasters at the circus of our childhood, my grandmother was the bearded lady – exotic, extraordinary, almost the stuff of legend. She wasn’t much like my school friends’ grandmothers, who had Murray Mints and tissues stored in their cardigan pockets. They hadn’t made their way through five husbands, had a secret child with an American colonel and dated a Turkish man who called himself ‘the king’s messenger’. Those nanas tended not to go by several different names, either. Josie, Ivy-May and Lingy-Loo were three that Rach and I used for her, depending on the situation.

  Even now I hardly know what to say when people ask about her life. Which one? Cabaret dancer in Wales or governess in Turkey for the American colonel who’d secretly fathered her son? The woman who illegally started a school in Nigeria or the one who helped the southern rebels during the Sudanese civil war? Her romantic encounters took her around the globe, followed by my bewildered mother, who escaped to London at fifteen to go to drama school. Plane tickets would arrive occasionally for her to join my grandmother on the latest leg of her world tour.

  Nan was now settled in a crumbling Victorian mansion flat behind Brixton tube station, back when the area was a locale entered with trepidation by reporters covering the 1981 riots. This unfortunate detail wasn’t about to let my parents
keep us from our suddenly vital ‘quality time’ with our grandmother, though. If the news bulletins reflected an especially bad night of rioting, my father would take charge of driving duties, dodging hurled bottles and police lines, to ensure our safe delivery.

  My grandmother was one of those women whose name was always mentioned with the supporting caveat of ‘a great beauty in her day’. There was an antique dressing table where she sat every morning, layering her face in creamy powder, feathery eyelashes and magenta lipstick. She sipped tea from her chipped china cup, cigarette burning out in the matching saucer, while Eighties breakfast shows blasted from her portable TV. She had grown up in an era when personal traumas were dealt with by adopting the maxim ‘Pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick and pull yourself together.’ Especially, in her case, the ‘pour yourself a drink’ part.

  ‘Christine, tell us about your bizarre mother!’ my mum’s friends would cry, intrigued by this strange female who had abandoned all the beats of convention.

  My mother dutifully trotted out the wild stories about my grandmother – how she’d used beauty and charisma as currency to escape her almost feral childhood in Wales and become a jet-setting femme fatale. How her men were like expendable members of a relay team: the starter husband in Wales relinquishing the baton to the painter who took her to Africa, who passed it to a colonial type, who handed it to a handsome Nigerian, over to a man simply known as Joe. Before it was restored to the starter husband once again. And all of them seemed happy to ignore the endless pit stops on the way for her endless lovers.

  The hordes of men my grandmother got through were part of her story but she was the one driving the narrative. That shift that women entering middle age are expected to make, from centre-stage coquette to hazy backdrop, was one she refused to acknowledge. Her sense of entitlement was never slung out along with her youthful beauty. If anything it became an even more ferocious blaze.

  As we entered Nan’s flat the cats scuttled away on cue. Her lodger sat on the sofa, eating beans and chips. He was a quiet, timid man from Hull who most of the time would pad unobtrusively around her flat, blushing at her bawdy manner. But she had spent the last few months giving him a makeover. He had a new name – ‘Johnny da Silver’ – and a new career. As a stripper. ‘I’ve given him SUCH confidence, girls!’ she would cry, kissing her fingertips like an Italian chef camping it up on daytime TV.

  But the reviews weren’t needed – we had seen Johnny da Silver in full flow ourselves. Rather considerately he abridged his strip for us. Perhaps he felt that a ten- and twelve-year-old might not be the right demographic for his final reveal.

  ‘Lovely little mover!’ my grandmother cried, clapping, as the bottle of Gordon’s was slowly depleted.

  I would wonder at these moments how the Simpsons were spending their weekends. Watching Flash Gordon at the cinema? Playing Ludo as they drank orange squash?

  Tonight we were spared the free show. At around midnight, woozy from the sips of Babycham Nan gave us as a ‘little treat’ to go with our illicit cigarettes, Rach and I headed into my grandmother’s bedroom to try to get some sleep. Before it all kicked off.

  The Lambeth town-hall clock was striking 2.00am when my grandmother banged on the light switch and burst into the bedroom. She wore a silk turban, silent-movie-star make-up and the ominous stare of the combative drinker. She was carrying a plastic portable cassette recorder that was blasting out Turkish folk music. ‘Where is LOVE?’ she bellowed belligerently.

  ‘Nan! Piss off, you’re drunk!’ Rach shouted, disappearing under the duvet.

  ‘Listen you me well!’ she continued, deploying the Nigerian pidgin she favoured whenever she was drinking. ‘Where is LOVE? Where is LOVE in this 1981?’

  It was quite a question to have to answer at 2.00am. But luckily she was on hand to do that for us.

  ‘Let me tell YOU. Let me TELL YOU. BABY.’

  The ‘baby’ was spat out contemptuously. She paused and exhaled with theatrical exhaustion, as if she were anticipating applause.

  ‘There IS no LOVE in this 1981. How’s about THAT. BABY!’ Then, her eyes glittering dangerously, she slammed the door and Simon and Lucky scuttled off like terrified witch’s familiars.

  Rach and I dissolved into exhausted giggling fits. We were, as ever, slightly high on the thrill of witnessing an adult lose their composure so comprehensively.

  She returned for an encore, thrusting black and white photographs at us, roaring, ‘I remember when my daddy was shot DEAD! They shot him DEAD, BABY!’ It was an unusual way of revealing distressing information about a deceased relative. Not the way I’ve seen it done on Who Do You Think You Are?

  Some nights she would get out photos of our five grandfathers. Bayo, our Nigerian grandfather (number four or was it five? It was hard to keep track), had been around during our early childhood. He spoke in curious English, influenced by old newsreels. ‘I like the gracious Queen, TOO much,’ he would say. My parents often told dinner-party stories about Bayo to make their friends laugh, recalling the time he had marched my grandmother up to the police station to report her for ‘wifely disobedience’.

  One day we had heard them use a curious word to describe him.

  ‘What does bigamist mean, Dad?’ Rach asked.

  That marked the end of that particular grandfather.

  Nan had decided to live out her old age alone, although the Welsh starter husband (our actual grandfather) came to visit occasionally. My mum referred to him as ‘my mother’s first husband’, perhaps preferring not to access any sense of paternal abandonment she felt.

  In public my mother laughed about my grandmother’s chaotic life but when she spoke of her in private, Mum’s voice always took on a slightly different tone. She would sigh and say things about us not ‘knowing the half of it’. But when I watched my mother in her incarnation as Nighttime Mum, I was reminded sometimes of that wild spirit and refusal to conform.

  My grandmother had a daytime persona, too. Nighttime Nan was unpredictable but Daytime Nan blanketed Rach and me in bottomless devotion, massaging our feet, serving grapes in a carved African wooden bowl and sending us postcards listing our superlatives (‘You are the best of the best!!’). She liked extremes. Her heart was ‘ripped into a thousand pieces!’ if we snapped at her, the newsagent who shortchanged her was a ‘wicked, wicked soul.’ It felt at times as if the weekly immersion in her life were some sort of odd joke. ‘You think you’re not like the others? Hold my beer.’ But her utter bizarreness began to make our own lifestyle seem almost suburban by comparison.

  Sometimes my grandmother found herself thrust into one of my parents’ literary evenings. The guests would listen to her stories about Africa: the time she’d hidden Sudanese children in wardrobes during the civil war and plied soldiers with alcohol and charm, like a deviant Sound of Music Abbess.

  At the time I worried we were betraying her by wheeling her out as the freakish turn. It wasn’t until my own adulthood that I considered what it must have been like for my mother, growing up in that endless turmoil. There was so much she hadn’t told us. Details would emerge of things she had witnessed, things that couldn’t be incorporated into the construct we all fashioned, of my grandmother as an ebullient, vivacious character. I suspect that some of it my mother couldn’t face, and some of it she had simply filed away with all the other crazy shit.

  Sometimes she would drop tasters in casually, as if she were reminiscing about family trips to the seaside. I remember us watching the movie Airplane. When the pilot character delivered the comically surreal line, ‘Joey, have you ever been inside a Turkish prison?’ to a child onboard, my mother whispered, ‘Well, I have, as a matter of fact.’ Years later, as teenagers, we were flicking through old photo albums and came across a picture of her holding up a Sudanese baby. ‘Oh, that was Abdullatief, darling. Nan adopted him from a brothel. They took him during the war. So she sort of … lost touch.’

  They? Who were they? And how did my grandmo
ther manage to ‘lose touch’ with a baby? Expecting the baby to send updates seemed to me a big ask.

  Mum laughed at our stunned reactions to her exotic history. Her detachment perhaps only possible once she could breathe, at a safe distance from my grandmother’s vast presence.

  I was almost in awe of the breezy tone she used for these thunderbolts. I realised that she had happily survived an itinerant chaos that made our lives seem pastoral. But the unpredictability that she had vowed to escape had still found a way into our life. It turns out the past can be annoying like that, emerging when you least expect it to claim its rights to the story.

  Returning from our weekly dips into my grandmother’s tornado made me feel safe in Holly Village, where people used alcohol to ease the social flow rather than to bury trauma. Where we didn’t get woken up at 2.00am to answer questions like ‘where is love?’ and hear about people being shot. (The Chilean concert pianist tended to avoid discussions about Pinochet.)

  I might have raged against the unconventional details of our life but the captains of our ship hadn’t abandoned the controls entirely.

  Well, not yet.

  Chapter Five

  My mother had started reading the kinds of books you wouldn’t find on the Simpsons’ shelves. One was called A Woman in Your Own Right – Assertiveness and You. It joined a growing collection of similar books piled up on her bedside table. They had titles like The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, The Women’s Room and When I Say No, I Feel Guilty, which posed the question ‘Are YOU letting people walk all over you?’ on its cover.

  The books seemed to have coincided with a new dynamic in our family. My mother had acquired a distinct air of rebellion. She cultivated single friends and spent hours drinking white wine in the kitchen with a frizzy-haired divorced woman who always sighed, ‘Well, that’s MEN for you!’ She began to respond to my dad in a different tone, saying things like, ‘Actually, I enjoyed that book!’ and ‘I happen to like Elton John. I’ll play what I want!’ And sometimes she dropped in mentions of his friend Anita that didn’t sound altogether friendly.