by Paul Sayer
What I really wanted was mastery, complete control over my fate, though I hadn’t the vaguest idea of how I was to achieve it. For the moment it became just a heavy notion, a silent willfulness spreading, drying me out, looking for a reason to take me over.
FIFTEEN
One day my mother disappeared, simply took herself off without telling anyone. Father sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands saying, ‘What’s got into her? What have I done?’ Alison took some coins from the pocket of the coat hanging on the back of his chair and went to a telephone somewhere. She returned about an hour later saying, ‘Our mother, your wife, has gone home to her sister’s, and to see the doctor and I don’t blame her. He says she’s got to go into hospital for a good rest. What do you say to that?’
‘Is that so?’ said Father, suddenly brightening. ‘I wonder what those places are really like.’
The air of summer turned thin and sharp. Father did not seem inclined to make my sister and me go to school, saying at one point that he would educate us himself, though nothing ever came of that. However, following Mother’s departure from our midst Alison became more serious, more central in her young self, and she insisted that Father enrolled her in a school she had found out about in some nearby village. ‘Peter should go too,’ she said. ‘I have other plans for Peter,’ said Father, vaguely trying to restate his position as head of the household. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘why should he go? He doesn’t want to. If he could say I’ll bet he would tell us he doesn’t want to go to any school.’ Alison sniffed and frowned.
Under the big winter skies Father became oddly rejuvenated, announcing his plan to adopt the squatters’ rights he had used in procuring the cottage to take over one of the empty shops. His idea was to turn it into a sea-food restaurant to which, he said, the whole county would flock. My sister was briefly caught up in his euphoria and she clambered over him, egging him on, trailing him for more details. ‘Peter’, said my father, ‘will wear a frilly-fronted shirt and wait on the tables.’ ‘What good will he be?’ said Alison. ‘He’ll be our dumb waiter,’ said Father, his stomach rutting unusually, the way it always did when he found himself amusing. Alison cooled immediately and took me outside to play.
Father did indeed break into one of the shops, one day when Alison was out at school. ‘You could come down and help,’ he said to me, but I wasn’t inclined to bother and he did nothing to make me. I often noted that he seemed uneasy when he was alone with me, almost respectful in a funny sort of way. By mistake I did wander down there one morning. He was inside mopping rainwater from behind a door. I peered through the window, and he began making a show of wiping down a counter, taking a handkerchief from his pocket and patting his brow, pretending it was hard work. I moved on down the wind-whipped ghostly street.
At weekends Alison took to going back to our old estate, staying with an old school friend, I think. Father too would vanish, often for days at a time. The restaurant idea was, of course, quickly abandoned. He would go to some resort up the coast to collect his money from the post office. On these trips he would drink himself into some kind of oblivion, though he was usually sober by the time he got back, arms full of groceries, much of it stuff that we never ate, since we had no fridge. Occasionally he was remorseful for something or other and I would listen to him ranting through the night while I tried to sleep in my little room, looking at the wallpaper rainbowed with damp. Sometimes I fancied that he wanted me to forgive him for something, though I never knew what.
With so much time available it would have been normal, I suppose, for a boy of my age to go exploring the empty beaches and the coves Alison said existed somewhere, but I rarely went beyond the confines of the cottage and its garden which was slipping into the sea. Sometimes I would wander on to the beach to collect wood, the way Alison had shown me, for the fire, but I was not strong and could only carry pitifully small amounts at a time. If I could stir myself to make a fire I would sit in the room that served as our lounge, staring into the grate, hypnotized by the flames, keeping perfectly still, careless of the hours, forgetting to eat. At other times I might stand in a shaded corner of the kitchen watching out of the window as yet another removal van came to empty a bungalow along the cliff. I would stand and wait until the occupants turned out the lights and locked the door. Then I might have to move round a little, to see the van as it rocked away along the pot-holed road into the darkening afternoon, leaving no trace as it rolled behind the horizon. Gone. Gone where? I might have asked myself. Gone nowhere. Displaced, that was all. I should have broken into the empty houses; it seemed the thing to do. But I didn’t.
One day Alison came back, saying she’d been to visit Mother in the hospital. She sat on the settee, her leg tucked underneath her, idly toying with the stuffing oozing out of one of the cushions. She examined the nails of her hands, then broke into tears, a fearful wailing that seemed to possess her and shape her larger than her years. Father looked at her blankly. ‘For God’s sake,’ she said. ‘Can’t you ask me what the matter is?’ ‘All right then,’ he said, ‘what’s the matter with you?’ Alison wiped her nose and said, ‘Mother’s cut her wrists.’ Father stood and put his hands in his pockets. ‘Is she dead, then?’ he asked. ‘No. No, she’s all right.’ ‘How’, he asked, ‘could they let her do such a thing?’ There was a genuine plaintiveness in his voice and he actually had some moisture in his eyes. ‘Anyway,’ he said after a silence, ‘if she really wanted to do herself in that’s not the way to do it. Hardly ever works. She can’t have been serious otherwise she would have gone for the throat, here where the arteries are prominent. Or here at the back of the neck.’ He tapped the place with two closed fingers. ‘Or the liver, that’s a great blood-filled organ. If she went deep enough, that is.’ Alison wept horribly.
Late into that evening, when Father had gone out to wherever he went, Alison emerged at the door of the lounge with one of Mother’s suitcases packed with her own things. She kissed me, said none of it was my fault, and handed me a note which I was to give to Father. When he read it the next day he screwed it up and threw it in the fire without a word.
As winter deepened the storms became very rough, the sea being driven right up under the cliff. The cottages at the edge began to suffer as the water took the earth away with it. Whole rooms fell away at stroke, decorated walls and fireplaces left looking out to sea. Some fell completely, slithering to the sands in the night. Men would come from somewhere to examine the ruin, make notes and then go away again to be replaced by other men who would set fire to the debris where it lay on the beach. If it was dark I would watch the fire, impossibly drawn by it and its reflection in the now-calm sea. Each time one of the cottages fell, anybody who might still be living in any of the other cottages would walk to the scene in the airy post-storm breezes to contemplatively measure with their eyes the distance between the new cliff edge and their properties. Father had a fresh obsession: erosion.
He began to spend whole days shoring up the bit of cliff in front of our cottage with rocks and timbers which he bedded in the clay, making them stick out like lances against the tide. And of course the high water laid all his silly work to waste in a single hour.
He grew fearful of the sea and its pernicious ways, pacing the cottage, cursing softly, clenching his fists at each boom of the storm outside. He took to bringing drink back from the town, hitching a lift or carrying the stuff however many miles it was along the cliff-top path. I became accustomed to watching him sleeping all hours of the day and night. I might hear him mumbling, coughing, calling to someone who wasn’t there. Then at other times he might prepare an elaborate breakfast for the two of us, singing happily, enthusing over his plans for the day, brimming with nostalgia for things I did not believe had ever happened. I had learned enough about his moods, though I might savour them for their welcome lightness. He, like myself, grew thin and ghostly. Though it seemed we had weathered the worst of the winter, his exertions of both mind and body, his solit
ude, my liability to him, all seemed to have taken part of his health away and even his daft dreams were failing to sustain him the way they had before.
In the back garden of the cottage I was mooching around one day when I caught and dislodged a stone with my foot. Underneath was a toad. It was biggish, old-looking, the ochre of the ground. Its presence surprised me. I thought it must be dead. I nudged it with my foot and it turned to face me. I debated over whether or not I should kill it. I ought to, I seem to remember thinking. The act of destroying a living creature might have done me good in some way, have transmuted something, imparted some kind of power, reinforced me. But I had never committed such an act and my will was now in decline. Carefully, my head spinning with just the small effort of bending down, I replaced the stone over the toad.
I began taking more and more to my bed, lying there still as the depths of the sea, slowing my breath until my ribs ached. The process at work within me was slowly gaining the upper hand. Somehow I was beginning to see my withdrawal from life as a way of lifting myself above time, transcending the conflict around me, holding at bay the demon that had come for my father and might soon come for me. I would doze in some twilight state that was neither sleep nor waking. I felt no hunger. Then sometimes I would find myself half-dressed in a corner of the cottage, alarmed at the fact that I could not recall getting out of bed and could not understand why I had gone there. Now and again I might venture out into the air and light to pick up bits of firewood or I might lift the stone in the garden to look at the toad, that unmoving, unblinking, ugly thing that drew me to it with an eerie, silent insistence. The thought of destroying it had long left my mind; indeed, I dared not touch it, not even with my foot. Then, after a while, I could no longer bring myself even to lift the stone.
On a windy wet day my father and I were roused from our sleep by a polite knock at the door. At first neither of us could quite believe there might really be someone there. Then the knock became hard, and I could hear footsteps crunching through the undergrowth beneath my window. A helmeted head appeared. A gloved hand wiped the sandy film from the glass and the man’s face peered down at me. I was so shocked I stood immediately and, clutching a sheet around me, went to fetch Father.
He greeted the man at the back door, complimenting him on what he said was a fine motorcycle. Apparently my father knew this man, someone from the place where we had lived before.
The man came into the kitchen and put his helmet on the kitchen table, his riding clothes smelling odd, his presence in our midst at once unsettling and intriguing. He was bringing news. It was his sad duty, he said. Mother was dead.
SIXTEEN
The man’s few words danced on the air between us, an earthly, factual statement that threatened to wake us from our dream, invite us to coalesce. Father became excitable, pressing the man for detail. ‘Are you sure the boy should be listening to this?’ said the man. ‘I mean, will he be able to understand?’ ‘Yes,’ said my father. ‘Yes of course. He’ll be all right. Come on, tell me what’s happened.’ The man would no doubt have preferred his reticence, letting us find out from someone more qualified to speak, another member of the family perhaps, but it seemed he was familiar with us and knew how alienated and odd we were.
Naturally I was never told the full story; people, including this man, were either being kind or simply did not think to tell me. My mother, apparently, had formed some kind of a relationship with a patient at the hospital where she was staying. He was a temperamental type; not in the way that Father was, for despite his unpredictability and waywardness Father was a mostly harmless man. This other man, however, was actively strange. One morning both he and my mother had declared themselves fit to leave the hospital and had jointly demanded their discharges. (How well I came to know this type of man, how I ache when I think of him, his febrility, his plausibility, the tantrums; and I never did meet him).
They were given a room in a hostel somewhere and within a day or two arguments and fights began. I could picture my mother and her poor efforts at tidiness and cleanliness in this room, this place she could never have seen as her home. The man, unusually perhaps for his type, became psychotically jealous and began trailing Mother wherever she went, accusing her of being a whore, a thief, a man-hater out to cheat him of an inheritance that did not exist. He took offence at trivial things. He began to find evidence of my mother’s supposed infidelity and dishonesty in the most curious of ways: the way milk bottles were arranged on a doorstep, in hairs on the landing carpet, the order in which she put on her clothes in the morning. She must have seen something in him, though. I fancied she saw it as some last chance in her life, compensation of sorts for what was obviously - even I could see it - a failed marriage and inept motherhood. Pride maybe, or resignation, must have stopped her leaving this madman, for she must have realized what he was like, or rather what he was not like. She herself wasn’t mad, not in the proper sense of the word. She just gave in, I think. I could picture her wearied at last and for always, her jaded hopes wresting what strength remained in her thin muscles as she lay back wherever it was and the man vented his terrific, incongruous fury on her, his hands around her neck, shaking, squeezing, and she offering not the slightest resistance, even smiling a little. Perhaps.
The man on the motorbike, having given only the most miserly of intimations about the detail surrounding the affair, made some conciliatory gesture of condolence and left. My father sat opposite me in silence, unable to summon up the caricature of himself that passed for his personality. Then he stood and in an astonishing moment raised his hand to hit me across my head. He rocked with his own incredulity, the hard fist wavering above his temple as if it held something very heavy. Eventually he let it fall and ran from the kitchen to the outside, turning over his chair and slamming the door hard as he went. I did not see him then for several days.
When he did return it was a wet and humid day. He cheerfully found some reasonable clothes for me, including an overcoat which I had long ago outgrown. He seemed more his usual self as he led me by the hand out of the cottage and along the cliff-top to a cafe where we waited for a bus. We were going to my mother’s funeral, he said.
A few people were at the church, relatives I assumed, but my father and I did not go inside. Something to do with not being a party to hypocrisy, I seem to remember him saying. We went on to the crematorium and I saw Alison looking distressed, trying vainly to hide her tears. I watched the coffin disappear through some swing doors and wondered what I was meant to feel. Afterwards we went to a little tea given by my mother’s sister whom I did know, she having been to our old house lots of times when I was younger. Alison, looking composed and refreshed, sought me out as soon as she could. ‘You look awful,’ she said. ‘Are you eating properly? I bet you’re not. I bet he hardly bothers with you. And I don’t believe what he’s telling everyone, about the school and all. You’re not really going to school, are you, Peter?’ ‘Of course he is,’ said Father, hurriedly interrupting. ‘He’s top of the class in most things. Isn’t that right, Peter?’ Alison sighed and held my hand. Soon Father became drunk and started insulting everyone, dragging up old arguments and grievances, and we had to leave. Alison said she would try and fix something up for me to come and live with her, she would come and visit me as soon as she possibly could. But she never did and I do not recall ever having seen her in the years that were to follow.
We tramped through the wet night hitching lifts since my father had been unsuccessful in trying to beg money for our bus fares back to the cottage. He seemed very tired and he kept stumbling and found it difficult to get to his feet again. When we did get back he went straight to his bedroom. I heard the bed creak and then nothing. I lay on the sofa in my tight overcoat and looked at the cracks and swirls in the ceiling.
After a day or so, when he had not stirred from his room, I took it on myself to go and see if he was all right. I opened the door and approached his sleeping figure with my customary hesitancy and s
tealth. Only his head and bare shoulders were visible above the sweat-damp old blanket. His forehead, and beyond the hairline, was puffed in a series of bumps and ridges latticed with a spidery network of surfaced capillaries. The skin about his temples and cheekbones was similarly bloated, making his eyes small, like a pig’s, or a small child’s. He grimaced in his sleep, horribly so, his dry white lips parting to reveal sepia, scummy teeth. I crept round to the window side of his bed and saw his shoulders and the top of his back. The flesh was wet and convoluted like a brain, red sores running in lines between the contours. I couldn’t help myself, I don’t know why, and I was already reaching out to touch, to feel the texture and depth of his soft masses when he turned around, staring at me with his pinpoint black eyes. I snatched back my hand. With great difficulty he spoke: ‘I’m sick. It’s real this time. You have to help me, Peter. Try to understand.’
I could not understand. In my hopeless confusion I ran into the kitchen and returned with a large knife. I held it over him. Already he had fallen asleep again. My hand was tight around the handle, grasping, sweaty. What was I meant to do? Then the knife was gone, falling away from me, slowly tumbling, spinning, flashing, cutting my father’s shallow breath and slipping harmlessly to the floor. I could no longer bear to look at him. I left the room closing the door behind me.