Box Hill

by Adam Mars-Jones

  I was building up a low-key grievance against Ray for letting Kevin get away with things, which is bound to poison any relationship unless it’s dealt with promptly. It doesn’t do to let things fester. But he handled it in the most magnificent way, without a word said, at least to me. He left just the right amount of time. He waited until the fourth poker night, when Kevin was settling in and could expect a little attention from him.

  Ray folded his poker hand, went over to Kevin and unzipped. Kevin looked up at him with a great grin, and my heart sank. Kevin was ready, Kevin was better than ready. Kevin was pretty much wagging his tail. This was what he had been waiting for. And yet Ray never got involved. It wasn’t the way Kevin must have hoped. It wasn’t a case of the beautiful biker man feeding his hard-on to the pretty new boy whose ribs you can actually see. It was dutiful, somehow. It was like a club formality. It wasn’t intense. It was like Prince Philip opening a hospital annexe.

  While Kevin was worshipping his cock, Ray kept his hips from moving, and I noticed he even folded his hands together behind his back. Just like Prince Philip. If he’d been a smoker I swear he’d have lit up a cigarette. Then he politely pulled out, without the pat on the back that Kevin might have thought he’d earned. And came over to me.

  He gave me my chance to shine. By now the other members were ready for another deal of poker, but he kept on going, pumping his cock into my mouth. He closed his eyes. He was telling them that tonight he didn’t care about the cards. For once the cards could wait. The poker club could wait until he was good and ready, even though the album side I’d come to recognise as Deep Purple had finished. Then when the members were getting restless, he did a sort of double-take. He didn’t come, that would have been too obvious. But he opened his eyes.

  Every time I saw him again, Ray’s eyes were bluer than I remembered them, even if I had seen him the day before and spent the night with him. I wondered if his eyes weren’t actually luminous, so that blue built up behind the lids when he was asleep. And I’d try to be awake before him, so that I could catch the moment when the pent-up blue spilled out.

  Ray suddenly stopped and opened his eyes, and he said, almost dreamily, ‘I’m sorry, am I keeping people waiting? I must have lost track of time.’ Then he made the gesture that would have been ruffling my hair, if I’d had more hair, and zipped himself up. Then he murmured, ‘I was thinking about something else,’ and calmly went back to the poker table.

  So I was left sweaty and dribbling, also deeply happy and vindicated. Ray had really shown Kevin what was what. He’d really put him in his place by fucking my face.

  And in point of fact Kevin was a sweetheart. I really warmed to him once we got used to each other. Technically, as neither of us actually belonged to the club, and each of us could only speak if addressed by a member, conversation between us was impossible, but Kevin found his way round that little difficulty. Even though I, I’m ashamed to say, would have been content to keep everything chilly and correct. Some way short of cordial, looking over from my thermos of tea and my history book at his bottle of Coke and New Musical Express. Diet Coke hadn’t been invented then.

  Kevin stuck his tongue out. At first I was scandalised and offended, thinking he was simply being rude. Paul had just finished with him to go back to the poker game, and I thought this was just rivalry and defiance. His way of saying, I’m being taken care of. I’m being looked after just as well as you. To stop me getting above myself.

  But it wasn’t that at all. He had nerve, that one. I noticed he was doing something funny with his eyes. He was crossing them, making out that he was looking down on that extended tongue. Then he made an exaggerated pounce with a pair of pinching fingers down onto his tongue. All this while Paul was hardly back in the game, and could look over at him at any moment. Paul who had quite a temper on him. And Kevin was miming finding one of Paul’s ginger hairs glinting on his tongue with a grimace to show how little he appreciated it being left there. It was his way of making peace. Making things all right between us, and letting me know he wanted us to be friends.

  He didn’t have to do that, but I was glad that he did. We were careful not to be noticed by the membership, but there was a little flicker of communication going between Kevin and me the whole time. Saturday nights had a whole new dimension, suddenly. We would mime having our fingers crossed that Alan’s poker hand would be good or his bluffing inspired. If he folded his hand and came towards us, we’d look away, me at the Roman Empire or the First World War, him at the reviews of Clash concerts, each despite our new connection hoping that he would choose the other. Then afterwards the lucky one would send rueful looks to the unlucky one, or if we were feeling really daring mime being sick. Alan wasn’t clean. He was the only one who wasn’t. Alan’s cock tasted of stale piss and neither of us wanted it, ever.

  Then one night Alan tried to fuck my arse, and Ray threw him downstairs. I wasn’t supposed to leave my post unless it was to run an errand for a member, which was why I had a thermos for my tea, but Alan sent me to fetch some beer from the kitchen, and then he cornered me there. After the earlier embarrassment, I wasn’t even sure he hadn’t the right to fuck me — I thought I knew he didn’t, but it had never been said, and I didn’t dare to cry out, but I managed to knock the dustbin over, sending some bottles rolling, and that came to the same thing. Ray came flying in, no words just action. I think he’d have thrown Alan downstairs even it was Alan who was playing host that night and they were his stairs, which thank God they weren’t or the repercussions for the club would have been much nastier. We were at Big Steve’s place in West Byfleet.

  We never saw Alan again. For all I know he was the best poker player on God’s earth, but Kevin and I never missed him. Afterwards Ray stroked my head to comfort me, and asked me the same question he always asked and always answered in the same way. Not ‘What am I going to do with you?’, which he’d pretty much demonstrated month by month, but ‘Why did I take you on?’ He always supplied an answer of his own to that question. The answer he gave was always, ‘No-one else would have you.’

  It’s true there’s never been a queue. But Ray always seemed to be getting at something else, with that question and that answer, as if there was something he needed me to understand. Looking at it sensibly, if no-one else would have me, if I wasn’t any sort of prize, then that should be a reason for Ray to stay away too. He could have anyone he wanted, with his looks and his personality. So: how did it come about that it was a good thing and not a bad one that I had no other options? I tried not to think about it too much. It might not be a good idea for me to know Ray’s reasons. I was a bit superstitious about that. I didn’t want to jinx things.

  This is how I worked it out. My value to him was my loyalty. I belonged to him. Loyalty wasn’t just one virtue among others, it was the only virtue in the world as far as he was concerned. It made me worth having, which meant that before me, someone in the past must have let him down. There must have been someone who hadn’t been told ‘No-one else would have you’, or who’d found someone else who would, and who’d just moved on after all Ray’s devotion, after the effort he had put in.

  It made a sort of sense. Maybe Ray had learned a horrible lesson, and that’s why he had drawn such a clear line, I mean by not letting me have a key to where he lived. Maybe a boy before me who nobody talked about, a silly lad who broke his heart, if that’s what happened, had taken advantage and just expected to be looked after. Not to lift a finger. So Ray was going to make sure it didn’t happen again. It was funny to think that Ray, who lived in the present like no-one I’ve known, might have been shaped by the past in a small way.

  It wouldn’t be right to say that Ray held me back. It would be ungrateful and wrong. But it’s a fact that I wouldn’t have been able to work shifts, the way I do now, if I was still with Ray. Fifteen years I’ve been on the road now. I wasn’t cut out to be a gardener, and I knew that even then. But I c
ouldn’t have been on early turn or late turn at work and still fitted in with Ray’s schedule. Ray’s life.

  Six years I had with Ray. We’d celebrated my twenty-fourth birthday, which meant he was certainly thirty, but not yet thirty-five. Then like a fool I went on holiday with Mum and Dad. Worst decision I ever made. But they asked me to go. Joyce was supposed to go with them, but then she was suddenly pregnant after years of trying, and it would be a mistake to travel in that condition. And it was beginning to become clear that Mum and Dad really needed someone to go with them. They even let me choose the details of the trip.

  Mum was soon on her feet after her hospital stay in 1975. The polyps meant her no harm, just like we’d been told, though they needed to be checked every now and then. Everything seemed to be back to normal, and it took all of us a good long time to understand that nothing would ever be the same again.

  The difference was all in my little Dad. It wasn’t just his hair going white, his whole outlook changed. He and Mum were still inseparable, but it wasn’t the same kind of inseparable. The balance went out of it. Balance went, and fear came in. It wasn’t any more that they dealt with life instinctively as a couple, although they were always together. It was simply that he couldn’t bear to let her out of his sight, which seemed the same at first but was almost the opposite.

  Soon we noticed, Joyce and me, that Dad was becoming absent-minded, but in a way that was anxious rather than vague. He would fret if Mum so much as left the room, as if he didn’t know where she was unless he could actually see her. He’d ask, ‘Where’s your Mum?’, trying to sound unconcerned, and if we said, ‘Don’t you know? Do you really not know?’, he’d say, ‘In the kitchen,’ or ‘In the bathroom,’ with an uncertain edge to his voice that we weren’t meant to notice if he guessed right. Usually he guessed right. Then everything was supposed to be back to normal. He’d manage to stay calm as long as she came back into the room before too long. The funny thing was that he never actually went looking for her, he wanted to stay where he was, he just wanted her to be there too. So his behaviour had two things in it, the needing her to be there and the not wanting to go anywhere.

  Another funny thing was that if he knew she was there, he stopped paying attention to her. If she was drying her hair with her old-fashioned pink plastic hair-drier — I don’t know why she didn’t pick up something more up-to-date from the shop — then he knew that as long as the whirring noise went on she was still there, and he’d close his eyes and seem to doze until the noise stopped.

  I don’t know whose idea it was that Dad should retire a couple of years early. Perhaps he wasn’t up to doing the job any more. Maybe he couldn’t concentrate properly on filling prescriptions, even though Mum was in the shop with him. Of course Dad made out that nothing was wrong, and Mum wouldn’t say anything about how it was that might sound like criticism, even to me. But maybe he kept looking at her, and when he brought his attention back to the prescription form, which someone was waiting for, it was as if he’d never seen the piece of paper in his hand before.

  At first retirement seemed to suit Dad fine. He was quite happy at home, as long as Mum left a note saying she was working in the shop. First of all she would put it in his jacket pocket, but then she learned to pin it to the outside of the jacket instead. If she left it loose, it might end up on the floor, and then he’d be very agitated by the time she came back for lunch, or after work. He’d say, ‘Where have you been all day?’, but if she said, ‘Where do you think I’ve been?’, he’d say, ‘At work, of course. In the shop.’ It was strange. When Mum started taking Dad to doctors, they agreed that Dad wasn’t becoming demented. That wasn’t the problem.

  The crumbling of Dad’s behaviour was all to do with Mum and her whereabouts. Apart from that, his mental powers were no different. He knew what day it was, who was Prime Minister — in fact, he could reel them off in reverse order, with dates, all the way back to Pitt. He even kept up with new drugs and brand names though he didn’t work more than the occasional Sunday shift in the shop, as the pharmacy rota prompted. If the new pharmacist took ill or had time off, Dad could hold the fort, just as long as Mum stood near him, and didn’t serve a customer while he was filling a prescription. Sundays weren’t usually that busy. Dad was all there mentally, as long as Mum was right there beside him.

  Mum wouldn’t let on how all this got her down, but you didn’t need ESP to realise that she really needed to get away. So I fell in with this idea of a holiday in France, nipping across on the hovercraft early in the summer season. Even Dad liked the idea of the hovercraft, a British invention and stylish and fun. I’d also been reading Geoffrey of Monmouth, and I took it into my head to visit some of the places he mentions in France. Geoffrey — or Galfridus as he called himself, writing in Latin, Galfridus Monemutensis — isn’t most people’s idea of a historian, but some things that seem fanciful in his writings turn out to be true. True-ish, at any rate. So he talks about how Merlin brought Stonehenge to Salisbury Plain from Mount Killaraus in Ireland, which isn’t so different from where archaeologists these days reckon the stones came from. And he talks about how the Venedoti decapitated an entire Roman legion in London and threw their heads into a stream. And what was found in the bed of the Walbrook in the 1860s but a large number of skulls? With practically no other bones to keep them company.

  So I was excited despite myself to read Geoffrey of Monmouth on Arthur’s last battle, about Kay the Seneschal being carried dying to Chinon, the town he himself had built. About Bedivere the Cup-bearer, borne with loud lamentation to Bayeux, the city his grandfather had founded, where he was laid to rest ‘beside a wall in a certain cemetery in the Southern quarter of the city’. I didn’t expect to trip over the bones of a Grail Knight, the way I’d tripped over Ray’s foot at Box Hill, but I really wanted to visit those towns, and to snuffle up the distant whiff of events from long ago.

  Of course it wasn’t like that. We made a sort of visit to Bayeux, but for most of the holiday Dad stayed in the hotel. He didn’t want to go anywhere. It turned out that he felt unsteady coming downstairs, and so he sat down on the top step and wouldn’t come down any further. That’s where he stayed, and he wanted Mum to stay there too. I led Dad back to the room and persuaded Mum to come out with me, that first day. Dad was afraid that someone would try to talk French to him while Mum wasn’t there, even though all the staff spoke excellent English, so we left the phrase-book behind just to pacify him. Somehow it wasn’t there when we got back — God knows what he’d done with it — so next day the pressure on Mum to stay was more intense.

  Mum arranged a swap of rooms, so that she and Dad were on the ground floor, but then it turned out he felt just as unsteady on the three steps that led down from the hotel lobby into the street.

  I was only away with Mum and Dad for ten days, but that was enough to finish six years. Not just to put an end to them, but to make them disappear. When I got back it was a Wednesday. In the evening I phoned the Hampton flat. Mum and Dad finally had a phone by then, but there were no answering machines in 1981. I mean they existed, but nobody had one. Nobody in Isleworth or Hampton anyway. When I got no answer, I started worrying immediately. Ray was nothing if not reliable. I rang every hour that evening, and before nine the next morning. I kept up that pattern every day, even though I knew after the Wednesday that I’d have to wait until Sunday to find anything out. Sunday at Box Hill, where the bikers go.

  It was a terrible week for Mum as well as for me. Of course it was. She couldn’t pretend after France that life with Dad was ever going to be again what it had been. A partnership. She’d been abroad for ten days, and more than a week of that had been spent in a hotel room keeping her husband calm. Reassuring him that she wasn’t going to leave him alone — that she went on existing quite reliably even if a door happened to close between them.

  But Mum knew what I was going through, too, and she asked Joyce to come round and sit with
Dad for an hour on the Sunday, pregnancy or no pregnancy, so that she could give me a lift to Box Hill. Box Hill, where the bikers go to show themselves off.

  In my memory, there was a huge thundercloud hanging over Box Hill, like the doom cloud after a nuclear explosion, but my diary tells me the sky was clear. The doom cloud arrived later, with Big Steve and Little Steve. Disaster rode pillion with them.

  Mum let me off by the café at the bottom. That was where most people looked in. Before she left she told me to have a cup of coffee — I wouldn’t miss my friends, they’d be looking for me just as surely as I was looking for them. Which was true, but I couldn’t have kept down even a cup of coffee. And I worried that if the club arrived as a group they’d go straight up the hill and not stop by the café. Even though I knew the club would not be arriving in full force. The club’s force was spent. There was a signboard covered with advertisements for bikes and bike gear, pillions wanting rides, hard-to-find spare parts for the British bikes that you saw on the roads less and less. If I’d closed my eyes I might have been able to tell a difference in the general engine noise from the first time I’d gone there — the contribution made by the trail bikes that were coming into fashion, with their angry chainsaw revving. The aggressive names that were going to be fashionable, Dominator, Virago, Intruder. None of the quiet authority of Commando.

  I knew that if no-one came I’d end up climbing the hill on foot, though there would really be no point. If Ray arrived, leading the pack, carrying the spare helmet for me, he’d pull in by the café. I’d see him, and he’d see me. He’d be quite capable of driving past me as if I was invisible, until he was good and ready to acknowledge me, but he’d see me all right.