by Kevin Brooks
And she knew it too. She knew that her performance was embarrassingly bad, and she knew that when the film was released the critics would tear her apart, and she knew that her acting career was over before it had even begun.
And if that wasn’t enough, she also knew that Rafael didn’t love her any more … if, indeed, he ever had. Three months after leaving for Los Angeles to edit the film, he’d come back to see her just the once – and that was only a two-day visit to get her to sign some legal contracts. She pleaded with him to stay, even going so far as to get down on her knees at one point and beg him not to leave.
‘I need you here, Rafa,’ she sobbed. ‘It’s so lonely in this house –’
‘I’m sorry, Mari, but I have to work.’
‘But I’m going to have our baby. What if something goes wrong –?’
‘Nothing’s going to go wrong.’
‘It did before.’
‘You’ll be fine, trust me. I’ll make sure you have all the best people –’
‘I don’t want fucking people!’ she screamed at him. ‘I want you! You’re supposed to be with me, for God’s sake. You’re my fucking husband.’
He didn’t stay. He flew back to Los Angeles the following day, and – as far as I know – he never went back to Hampstead again. By the time I was born, in June 1959, Rafael had filed for divorce, and was publicly dating another young actress who would later become his second wife. When the divorce was finally settled, my mother was awarded an initial lump sum of $3,000,000, with further payments of $500,000 per year for the remainder of her life. She also kept the house in Hampstead.
And gradually lost her mind.
Of course, I didn’t realize that there was anything wrong with my mother until I was about nine or ten. I simply accepted, as all children do, that my life – my home, my mother – was normal. I didn’t know anything else. I didn’t know that mothers aren’t supposed to lock themselves in their bedroom for weeks on end, leaving you in the hands of a series of uncaring nannies. I didn’t know that most mothers aren’t wildly unpredictable – one minute loving you to death, the next minute screaming at you with hatred burning deep in their eyes.
I didn’t know that my mother was a broken woman.
To me, she was just my mother.
It wasn’t until I began making friends at school, and they’d talk to me about things, about their families, and they’d invite me round to their houses for tea or a birthday party … it wasn’t until then that I realized that my life wasn’t quite so normal after all. Most of my friends had fathers, for a start. And even if their parents were divorced, they still got to see their fathers now and then. I’d never even laid eyes on mine. And, as far as I knew, most of my friends’ mothers weren’t constantly struggling with some form of addiction, or obsession, and their day-to-day lives weren’t ravaged by depression and mania.
The older I got, the more aware I became of my mother’s suffering. It wasn’t always obvious, and there were long periods when everything seemed perfectly normal. Weeks would go by, even months sometimes, when she wouldn’t sleep all day, or get drunk all the time, or be out of her head on prescription drugs. She wouldn’t slop around the house in dirty old clothes, she wouldn’t wash her hands every five minutes, she wouldn’t go out every night and come home with a different man. She would, for a while, do normal things. She’d cook, go shopping, read books, watch TV. She’d talk to me, tell me stories. She’d tell me about her life. But then, often quite suddenly, something would just snap, and the mania or depression – or whatever it was – would take over again, and she’d develop a new addiction, or a new obsession, and all I could do was hope that it wasn’t going to be too bad.
One final thing about my mother, and it’s a question that you’ve probably been asking yourself. If she hated the house in Hampstead so much, why did she stay there? Why not just sell it and move somewhere else?
I asked her once. She was in the grip of a cleaning obsession at the time – maniacally scrubbing the walls, washing the windows, polishing the furniture … going at it like crazy, not bothering to eat or sleep or even stop for a moment’s rest – and I’d just made her some soup and was trying to persuade her to drink it, when all of sudden she burst into tears and slumped down to the floor.
‘This fucking house,’ she moaned. ‘I fucking hate it.’
‘So why don’t we move, Mum?’ I said. ‘With the money you get for this place we could get somewhere really nice, a little flat in the middle of London or something.’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t leave here.’
‘Why not? I mean, if you hate it so much …?’
She looked at me, her eyes slightly unfocused. ‘I have to be here for Rafa,’ she said distantly. ‘He’ll be back soon … I have to be here for him.’
And that, for now, is all you need to know about my mother.
Curtis didn’t want to go home after the gig at the Conway Arms that night, and we had to drive back to the squat in Seven Sisters anyway to drop off Jake and unload some of the gear, so Curtis suggested that we stay the night there. Someone had just moved out, apparently, and their room was still empty. We’d stayed the night at the squat a couple of times before, and although I didn’t really like it there, I didn’t really want to go home either. My mother was going through one of her sexually promiscuous phases at the time, and she was also hooked on some new slimming pills that she’d got from her doctor which kept her awake for days on end, so I knew that if I went home she’d probably be with some moron she’d dragged back from the pub, and if she hadn’t managed to find anyone – which was highly unlikely – she’d want to sit up all night talking to me. And I wasn’t really in the mood for either of those things. So I told Curtis I’d stay the night, and while he got on with unpacking the van, I went over to a phone box across the road and called my mother.
I knew that it was little more than a gesture, and that in her state of mind she probably wouldn’t have noticed – or cared – if I’d come home or not anyway. And, besides, she’d told me before that I didn’t need her permission to stay out all night.
‘You’re sixteen now,’ she’d told me. ‘Almost seventeen … you’re not a child any more.’
Which, at the time, I’d kind of appreciated. But recently I’d begun to realize that there was a part of me that secretly yearned for her to be a bit less liberated, a bit more protective … a bit more caring, I suppose.
‘Hey, Mum,’ I said when she answered the phone. ‘It’s only me –’
‘Just a minute,’ she muttered. ‘Hold on …’ I heard her cover the mouthpiece and speak to someone. I heard laughter, a cough, the chink of glasses. Music was playing in the background – ‘Tumbling Dice’ by the Rolling Stones. ‘Lili …?’ Mum said. ‘Is that you?’
‘Yeah, Mum … listen, is it OK if I stay over with some friends tonight?’
‘Course,’ she mumbled. ‘Course you can, love …’
Her words were slurred. She sounded drunk.
‘I’ll be back in the morning,’ I told her.
‘Mmmm …’
‘Are you all right, Mum?’
‘All right …? What … yeah, I’m all right. I’m fine … how did it go?’
‘Sorry?’
‘The gig – how did it go?’
‘Yeah, it was great. Really good.’
‘Good … good …’ She covered the mouthpiece again, whispered loudly at someone, then came back to me. ‘So, how did it go tonight? The gig … was it good?’
‘Yeah … look, Mum, I have to go now, OK?’
‘Right …’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘Yeah … see you later, darling. Have a good time.’
I put the phone down.
It was dark outside, the High Road quiet in the night. Lights blazed from the windows of the squat across the street, and when I opened the door a
nd stepped out of the phone box, I could hear the deep thudding bass of reggae music blaring out of the house.
I paused for a moment, gazing up at the infinite black sky …
Wondering so many things.
Then a car sped past, and an empty beer can came flying out of the window, clattering to the pavement at my feet. The driver honked his horn, laughter cackled from the open windows, and as the car disappeared down the High Road, I crossed the road and went back to the squat.
8
The squat was a four-storey Victorian townhouse in a dead-end street that ran parallel to the High Road. I didn’t really know anything about it – who actually owned it, how long it had been used as a squat – all I knew was that it was a big sprawling house with dozens of rooms, and that all kinds of people were continuously moving in and moving out, which meant that you never really knew who was actually living there at any given time. The house itself was in fairly good condition. It had electricity, gas, running water. It wasn’t overly dirty. Everything worked. All in all, it was just a slightly shabby, slightly rundown, slightly messy old house.
But it wasn’t the house that I didn’t like – it was the people who lived there.
Some of them were OK, I suppose, but most of them were a bit like Jake – that is, they spent a lot of time taking drugs, and they were kind of creepy. A lot of them were in bands, so there was always music playing somewhere in the house, and it was inevitably played really loudly no matter what time of day or night it was.
Which was why I didn’t get any sleep that night.
The room Curtis and I were sleeping in – or were supposed to be sleeping in – was on the top floor of the house. There was no furniture or anything, no curtains, no bed, nowhere to sit. It was basically just an empty room with some cushions and a couple of blankets thrown on the floor. I didn’t feel all that comfortable about sleeping in blankets that had recently been slept in by someone else, but by then I was simply too tired to care. It was late, around two o’clock, and I was exhausted. I just wanted to sleep. But Curtis was still hyper, and he couldn’t keep his hands off me …
At three o’clock in the morning, we were both still wide awake. Curtis was sitting cross-legged on the floor, smoking a cigarette and scribbling furiously in a notebook, and I was lying face down on the blankets with a cushion clamped over my head, trying to keep out the booming thud of the reggae music that was still blaring out from somewhere downstairs.
‘Curtis?’ I said.
He didn’t answer.
I removed the cushion from my head. ‘Curtis?’
‘What?’
‘I can’t get to sleep.’
‘Why not?’
‘Why do you think?’ I turned over and sat up. ‘Are they going to be playing music all night?’
‘Probably.’
‘Why do they have to play it so loud?’
Curtis smiled. ‘It’s reggae … it’s supposed to be loud.’
‘Couldn’t you just go down and ask them to turn it down a bit?’
He laughed. ‘Yeah, right … that’d be a really cool thing to do, wouldn’t it?’ He put on a simpering voice. ‘Would you mind awfully turning it down a bit?’ He laughed again, and went back to writing in his notebook.
I sighed. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Lyrics to a new song,’ he said.
‘What’s it called?’
‘Don’t know yet.’
I sighed again, resigned now to not getting any sleep, and I just sat there for a while, not saying anything, just watching Curtis, looking around the room, gazing out through the curtainless window at the empty starless night …
‘Did you speak to Jake?’ I asked Curtis.
‘Uh?’
‘Did you speak to Jake?’
‘About what?’
‘The Conway Arms … he said something about a residency –’
‘Oh, yeah, didn’t I tell you? We’ve got it. Every Friday night, ten o’clock. We can either take a straight fifty quid or a cut of the door money. Jake’s still trying to work out which is best. We’ve arranged to meet Arthur on Monday morning to sort out all the details.’
‘Who’s Arthur?’
‘The guy who owns the Conway.’
‘Right.’ I looked at him. ‘You know we’re back at school on Monday, don’t you?’
‘I’m not going.’
‘What?’
‘I’m not going back.’
‘What do you mean?’
He stopped writing and looked up at me. ‘I’m not going back to school, Lili. This is what I want to do – the band, the music, you know … this is my life. It’s all I want.’
‘Yeah, but what about your A levels –?’
‘Fuck ’em,’ he said, laughing. ‘I don’t need A levels, do I? Not for this …’ He tapped his notebook. ‘If I’m going to write songs I need a life, not a fucking A-level certificate.’
‘Yeah, but –’
‘Naked are going to make it, Lili,’ he said, his voice suddenly intense. ‘Believe me, we’re going to be big.’ He shook his head. ‘I haven’t got time for school any more.’
‘Have you told your parents?’
‘Not yet.’
‘They’re not going to like it.’
He sniffed. ‘Yeah, well …’
He was staring down at his notebook now, not writing anything, just staring down at the page. And I could tell that he was thinking about his parents, about what they’d say when he told them he was leaving school … I could see the confused mixture of resentment and fear in his eyes. He never liked talking about his parents, and I think, in a way, he despised them simply for what they were – conservative, middle-class, comfortably wealthy. It was almost as if he resented the fact that he hadn’t been born poor, so he didn’t really have anything to rage against. He knew, deep down, that his rebelliousness had no cause, and he blamed his parents for that. Yet, at the same time as despising them, he couldn’t get away from the simple fact that they were his parents. His mother, his father. They’d brought him into this world, nurtured him, cared for him, looked after him. He was their son. And I don’t think he ever worked out how to deal with that.
I looked at him.
He was still staring blindly at his notebook.
‘Curtis?’ I said.
No answer.
‘Curtis?’
He looked up. ‘Yeah …?’
‘It’ll be all right,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m sure … it’ll be OK.’
He grinned. ‘Fucking right.’
9
I didn’t hear from Curtis again until the following Wednesday. I was due to take my mock A levels that year, and because of all the stuff with the band and everything I hadn’t done any revision, and I was quite a long way behind in my course work too, so I’d been making an effort to stay at home and try to catch up a bit. I’d called Curtis on the Monday to find out what had happened at the meeting with Arthur, but when his mother answered the phone she told me that Curtis wasn’t there.
‘Do you know where he is?’ I asked her.
‘No,’ she said bluntly.
‘Oh, OK … well, when he comes home, could you tell him that Lili called, please?’
She didn’t really say anything, she just made an odd little sniffing noise, a contemptuous kind of snort, and put the phone down.
I tried ringing him again the next night, but this time nobody answered. I let it ring for quite a long time, then eventually I hung up and called Kenny. But all he could tell me was that Curtis hadn’t been at school for the last two days.
‘What about Stan?’ I asked him.
‘What about him?’
‘Do you know if he’s heard from Curtis at all?’
‘No idea.’
‘He hasn’t said anything to you?’
‘About what?’
I sighed. ‘About Curtis.’
‘No, he hasn’t said anything. What’s this all about anyway?’
‘Nothing … I’m just trying to get in touch with Curtis, that’s all.’
‘Yeah, well … you know what he’s like.’
‘Yeah …’
It was around six o’clock on Wednesday evening when Curtis finally called me. He was ringing from a phone box. I heard the pips going, then Curtis muttering and swearing as he tried to put the coins in …
‘Fuck … shit, hold on –’
Beep, beep, beep …
‘Curtis? Is that you?’
‘Lili?’
‘Yeah –’
‘Can you hear me?’
‘Yeah, where are you?’
‘The phone box opposite the squat … God, it stinks in here –’
‘What’s going on, Curtis? Where’ve you been? I’ve been trying –’
‘They threw me out, didn’t they?’
‘What?’
‘My fucking parents, they threw me out of the house.’
‘Why?’
‘Fuck knows …’
He sounded really wired, like he was totally wrecked on something.
‘What happened?’ I said softly, trying to calm him down. ‘Just tell me what happened.’
It took a while to get the full story out of him, mainly because he kept changing it all the time, but in the end I managed to piece it all together. Basically what happened was that he’d stayed at the squat until Sunday evening, and then around eight o’clock he’d finally gone back home. He was planning on telling his parents about his decision to leave school that night, but as soon as he got back, as soon as he walked through the front door, his father came storming up to him, grabbed him by the shoulders, and dragged him into the kitchen. Sitting at the table, crying her eyes out, was his mother. And on the table in front of her was a small lump of cannabis resin wrapped in clingfilm.