The Late Hector Kipling

by David Thewlis

  I clear away the plates and carry them through to the kitchen. I hear Mum and Eleni start up again and I think Mum’s asking her whether or not she thinks Madonna is a slag. She doesn’t say slag of course, but that’s what she’s getting at. I can hear Eleni smiling and shifting position, getting comfortable, ‘Well...’ she begins, ‘well...’ I love Eleni. She seems immune to those parts of my mum that drive me off my nut. Good luck to her. I’m off to take a bath.

  ‘Is the immersion heater on, Dad?’

  He shouts ‘What?’ and I repeat myself and he says that it is, but to turn it off cos it’s burning money, and I climb the stairs, wishing I could smoke a cigarette.

  Above the bath, pride of place, is a small drawing of a budgerigar on old yellowed paper. It sits in an ornate gilded frame behind well-dusted glass. It’s lying on its back, dead. But it doesn’t look dead cos it’s been hung the wrong way, so it looks like it’s all right. I did it when I was eight. It used to hang on my Aunty Pat’s parlour wall until Pat went mad and died five years back. By then I hadn’t seen Pat for twelve years and Mum didn’t think to tell me until after she was buried. I’d liked to have attended her funeral. I’ve never been to a funeral. Oh yes, little dead Bob used to hang on big dead Aunty Pat’s parlour wall. I say hang, but in those days it was just tacked to the lilac wallpaper with a couple of drawing pins, curling up at the edges. It was the wrong way up then as well. It means everything. As I lie back in the glittering suds, I look at it for the fifty thousandth time. It’s still good. It really is. I was only eight and it was done with one of those fat multicoloured biros, but somehow, somewhere in that aching eight-year-old brain, I’d managed to look at Pat’s budgie, little Bob, and somehow comprehend a way of scratching him onto the paper so that you could tell that it was Bob, and not just any old dead budgie. It was this drawing that set me off. The attendant awe that it evoked amongst my elders galvanized my confidence, and supplied the necessary fillip to propel me towards a life of art. ‘A life of art’. That’s what I have. And all these visits home seem like some sort of gentle archaeological dig. And there is my Troy, behind that well-dusted glass, in that ornate gilded frame. Little Bob. Who’d have thought.

  Aunty Pat used to do up her hair in a tall yellow beehive. It looked like ice cream. One dull day when I was six we were all on the beach having a picnic and she got a bee in it, a fat black bee in her tall yellow beehive, burrowing towards her scalp, smashed on lacquer, and Aunty Pat shrieking and shaking, standing up and falling over, Mum pinning her down and Dad going in there with a lolly stick. I was sucking on a Mivvy, not sure what to think, cos it was exciting and funny, but at the same time, awful and frightening, and she might get stung on the head, and what will that do? Will it kill her? Will it make her hair fall off? Will she turn into a bee? She’s screaming like she’s having unanaesthetized surgery as Dad coaxes it out on the end of the stick, the bee lapping up the vanilla.

  All that happened right here, in the shadow of the Gaiety Bar, and I ask Mum if she remembers and she smiles and says she does and we tell Eleni the story. Eleni smiles and holds onto my hand. Her hand feels warm and I can feel her pulse on the pad of her thumb. In my other hand I’m carrying the video camera, just in case. Just in case something happens. Just in case the Tower topples over, or a clown goes mental and runs amok amongst the seaweed and seagull feathers. For there are seagulls. And, let me say it now, I remain passionate about the seagulls. I love the sound and the white, and the whole seagull thing. There are kids swinging from a musty rope beneath the pier. Folk out, walking their dogs. Old men with metal detectors looking for Atlantis and old threepenny bits. Drunken screams from the Pleasure Beach. It’s dusk and the sun’s going down. Mid-September. We talk a little about the sea and Mum asks Eleni if it’s as nice as the sea in Crete. Eleni says that it is, and she means it. If Mum had asked me, I would have said that it is, and I would have meant it, cos I love Eleni and we agree about these things. And we mean it. Mum starts telling more stories about when I was little: falling off donkeys, swallowing sand, poking at dead seagulls. Mum looks out towards Central Pier, feasting on her cardboard dish of whelks, seeing ghosts. The tide’s going out, the sun’s going down and Blackpool’s lighting up. I love Blackpool when it’s lighting up. I love it when it’s lit up and I love it when it’s dark. All the times in between. I love Blackpool. I love the way it makes an effort.

  ‘Ooh, when you were little, Hector,’ says Mum, ‘when you were little.’

  We walk along in silence. Mum gazing down at her feet in the sand. Me and Eleni watching a passing tram, done out in bright multicoloured bulbs to look like a Mississippi showboat.

  And then . . . ‘So when are you two going to have some kids?’ says Mum, right out of the evening blue, as though it’s monumental, like we’re really getting it all out in the open now, like it’s time to get down to things. Real things. Eleni squeezes my hand.

  ‘One day, Mum,’ I say, ‘I suppose,’ cos it’s not monumental. In fact it’s the opposite of monumental: it’s routine. Mum asks, ‘So when are you two going to have some kids?’ about twice a week, sometimes more, and I always say the same thing: ‘One day, Mum,’ I always say, and always add, ‘I suppose,’ and that’s usually the end of it. Sometimes Mum loses herself in a reverie about how bonny these kids will be and how much she’ll cosset them and feed them and buy them Jaffa Cakes and bears and tiny shoes. ‘Oh, go on,’ she’ll say, ‘have some,’ and that’s usually the end of it. But today, this Sunday evening, it’s not. It’s just the start of it. Eleni squeezes my hand.

  ‘Well, I’m late, Connie,’ she says.

  ‘Late?’ says Mum.

  ‘Four days late.’ I let go of her hand. ‘With my period.’

  I love Eleni. I love my Mum. My Mum loves Eleni. Eleni loves my Mum, and both of them love me, so that’s all fine, but Eleni’s eagerness to please has just put on its gloves and I feel like saying ’Calm down’ or ’Give it a rest’ but I don’t say anything cos Mum gets in the way of all that by stopping in her tracks and bellowing ‘ARE YOU!?’ in capital letters. With exclamation and question marks. Me and Eleni also stop in our tracks and we’re all facing each other.

  ‘Four days?’ says Mum. ‘Are you, pet?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Eleni. She looks at Mum and smiles. Mum looks at Eleni and smiles. And then both of them look at me and suddenly I’m aware that I’m not smiling. So I do, cos anything less would be wrong. Mum looks down at Eleni’s buttoned-up coat, at her belly somewhere beneath her buttoned-up coat, through the cloth into her belly, right through into her womb, and so on. And when she’s done with this penetration, this tunnelling through space and matter, she starts tunnelling through time and suddenly I can see her holding this thing, this nothing really, feeding this nothing really, buying it Jaffa Cakes and bears and tiny shoes, like it’s something, a real thing, a soul, a poppet, a living breathing miniature of her and Dad and all that went before. Eleni looks down at it too. At this lateness, at this four days late, nothing for certain, nothing really, nothing-at-all kind of thing and she smiles and nods. For some reason I find myself turning on the camera. For want of anything else to do I aim it at Mum.

  ‘Ooh, give over,’ says Mum, blushing and smoothing down her hair. She hates it when I turn on the camera, and that’s why I do it: to stop her. To diffuse this giddiness at Eleni’s late period.

  ‘What do you think, Mum?’ I say, willing her to move on and hide. But she doesn’t move on, she doesn’t hide, oh no, in fact, quite the opposite, she looks me in the eye, straight down the lens.

  ‘What do you think, Connie?’ says Eleni, and Mum smoothes her hair, gathers her thoughts and tells her, tells us, tells the camera . . .

  But first let me tell you what I think. Is Eleni pregnant? I doubt it. Do I want Eleni to be pregnant? I don’t know. I really don’t know. Do I want a child, children? Ask me something else. Ask me an easier question. Ask me why Théodore Géricault shaved his head to complete The Raft of
the Medusa. Ask me why a day on Venus lasts longer than a year on Venus. But a child? A baby, a toddler, an adolescent, an adult, half me, half Eleni? You see, artists aren’t very good at all that. Artists are a little perturbed by all that kind of thing. Biological creation. They’re suspicious. They imagine that it might hinder all their small plastic creations. They’re afraid that biological creation won’t be creative. They’re afraid of the banal and the mundane. They live in fear of the shit and the puke, of the fatigue, the duty and the loss of control, the immensity of failure and the clash of wills. That’s what artists are afraid of. I know – I am an artist. I’m Hector Kipling.

  Mum takes a deep breath. ‘I think it’s lovely’ She’s off. ‘I think if you and Eleni had a baby . . .’ She pauses. ‘Is this all right?’ she says. ’Is this what you want?’ like suddenly she’s an actress. The hair gets smoother and the eyes look out to sea.

  ‘My father was an alcoholic cocky illiterate philanderer who left my mother when I was eight.’ (That’s news to me, but I must say I quite like it.) ‘And then, on my eleventh birthday, my mother started complaining about pains in her feet.’

  I know about this bit, but she’s always told me that she never knew her father. I feel a painting coming on.

  ‘By Christmas she was in the ground. I was an orphan.’ She pauses to drag a tear across her cheek with her thick crimson knuckle. I shall never forget it. ‘And so on, and so on. And then, to jump ahead a few years, I met your dad at a dance. Well, I’ll tell you what, Hector . . . Eleni, darling: I didn’t know much about love, I honestly didn’t. But I knew what I liked – as you say in the art world – I knew he was for me.’

  O Jesus Christ in Heaven Above, I Beseech Thee. No, seriously, I really do.

  Her eyes are looking more and more like the vinegar-sodden whelks that she’s just wolfed down. And so it goes:

  ‘Well, there you go, we were married within a year. He was thirty-two, I was twenty-six.’ Another salty pause. ‘Three years later we had you. I had you. You, Hector,’ and she points right down the lens and pouts, a bit like Posh Spice used to until she was told to pack it in and smile a bit more. ‘And that was all we wanted. All that we could have wished for.’

  You know what I think’s going on here? Mum, the camera, all this? I’ll tell you right now. It’s Tracey fucking Emin, that’s what it is. Somehow that programme last night – Tracey shuffling around King’s Cross talking about her abortion – it’s got into Mum, that style, that approach, the candour, the tone of the confessional. Here she is giving it all up and away, and I’m thinking: ‘We’re on the beach in Blackpool, Eleni’s four days late, I’ve got my camera out and my mum’s coming on like Tracey Emin. Giving it large. She’s gone all White Cube on us. She’s gone all concept. Mum! My mum. Mum as confessional Art Star.’

  Mum continues: ‘And I used to look at you in your pretty little cot and think that one day, one wonderful day, you’ll have kids. It felt like . . . when you have a child . . . you don’t just have that child, you have the children of that child, and the children of those children, and so on and so on ... and it made me so happy that I cried. You in the cot trying to say Mama – although Dada seemed to come easier to you – trying to say all sorts of things. And then one day, out of the sudden blue, you were eight and you drew that budgie.’

  She gazes out to sea and walks ahead a little, rubbing her palms together like she’s on Channel 4 or summat, like she’s a seasoned professional, like she’s been up half the night messing with the draft of all this. I follow her. A seagull lands and starts pecking at a crab. Mum throws it a handful of nut crumbs. ‘We all need something small to look after,’ I expect her to say, but she doesn’t. She’s got her own thoughts, her own ideas, and here they come:

  ‘And I know that me and your dad couldn’t draw the bloody curtains, but you can. You can draw it all and make it look real and strange and lost. And I know that we’re useless. That I’m useless, but I did make you and you can make other things, and if you went on and made a baby then I think that would be lovely’ We’re back where we started with everything being lovely, which is more like Mum and I relax. I turn off the camera and wish she knew that I was smoking again. ‘Was that all right?’ she says and I say, ‘Yes,’ and, ‘Great,’ and, ’Definitely,’ and, Amazing, Mum.’ We set off back for home and talk of other things like candy floss and donkey shit and fuck knows what. Whatever it is it’s got nothing to do with babies from then on. But it has really.

  That night we all went back and congratulated Dad on painting the garage floor green.

  ‘It looks a bit like we’ve got grass in the garage,’ he says.

  ‘You know what, Dad,’ I say, ‘you’re right. It does.’

  We ordered a Chinese takeaway. At half-past eight I took control of the television and made everybody watch a documentary about Edwin Hubble.

  ‘Look at that,’ says Mum, pointing at a nebula cluster, ’it looks like an eye.’

  ‘The eye of God,’ says Dad, though he doesn’t mean it cos he doesn’t believe in God. Neither does Mum. At least I don’t think they do. They’ve never mentioned Him. My whole life, not one mention of Him. Until now.

  Anyway, Mum needn’t have bothered looking through Eleni’s buttoned-up coat into her womb, cos that night, after Mum and Dad had scuttled off to bed, we fucked on the cream settee again, and Eleni’s four-days-late bit all came flooding out. We didn’t stop when the blood started to pour over the cream settee, we persevered and mumbled things like ‘Yes’ and ‘Oh God’ and ‘Fuck!’ Cos sex is like that, and that’s how we like it.

  ‘Mum,’ I say the following morning as she’s struggling to open the milk, ‘there’s blood on the settee.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I said there’s blood on the settee.’

  She stops trying to open the milk and puts it down. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘How do you mean, “How do you mean”?’

  ‘How do you mean there’s blood on the settee?’

  ‘I mean there’s blood on the settee.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I had a nosebleed,’ I hear myself say. I hadn’t meant to say that. I’d been all set to tell the truth. Me and Eleni have talked it over and we’ve agreed that I should just tell the truth. Eleni’s hiding upstairs.

  ‘You had a nosebleed?’

  ‘Last night.’ This is pathetic. There’s too much blood for a nosebleed, too much of it for it to have come from my nose. Who am I? Cyrano de fucking Bergerac?

  ‘A nosebleed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You had a nosebleed?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No, I didn’t have a nosebleed.’

  ‘Hector, what are you talking about?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you sleepwalking again?’

  ‘No, Mum. I’m just saying that I didn’t have a nosebleed.’

  ‘But you just said you did.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You said there was blood on the settee.’

  ‘There is.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘How do you mean, “How do you mean”?’

  Mum turns through three hundred and sixty degrees.

  ‘She’s not late anymore.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Eleni.’

  ‘What do you mean she’s not late? Where is she? What are you talking about?’

  ‘She’s not four days late anymore, Mum.’

  There. I’ve said it. I fucking said it. I got it out. Fuck I’m modern. What a modern little fucker I am. I told her. She gets it. She’s got it. It’s got. It’s done.

  Mum picks up the milk, pushes past me, walks through to the lounge and stands there looking down at the cushions, all sad. I stand in the doorway wondering if she’s thinking what I thought, what Eleni thought: I wonder if she’s thinking the shape of the stain looks a bit like A
frica. I wonder this. And I wonder what to say. And I wonder how she feels. And I wonder where Dad is. And I wonder why she picked up the milk.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, Sparky’s on the scene, jumping up onto the settee and getting to work. Giddy as fuck, lapping it up. Oh, Sparky, you idiot. You idiotic little twat. Most idiotic of all the beasts.

  In conclusion, let me say this: I wish – I really do, I really wish – that he wasn’t doing that right now.

  On the train home there is no great sense of regret. We had never planned to have a baby. In fact, it is important to mention that Eleni hadn’t taken a test, seen a doctor or pissed on a strip of plastic. She was simply late. She’s been late before, and no doubt she’ll be late again. One day, of course, we’ll all be late.

  The late Hector Kipling.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, what am I bid? We start at twelve million.’

  3

  BOX STREET, BOW, LONDON

  We’re back at home and Eleni’s sat at the piano, staring at the TV. She goes through a series of diminished chords interspersed with ninths and sevenths and concludes it all with a C sharp seventh and an F sharp minor. Not that I’d know all this unless she told me what she was doing as she was doing it, which she does, calling out all the letters and numbers as she moves her body from side to side, her fingers flickering across the keyboard, hair in her eyes, fag in her mouth. Sometimes she takes it out and does it all with the fag between two knuckles, like producing glorious music is the easiest trick in the world. She’s making me smile with how much she wants me to understand. I do the same for her with my painting sometimes, calling out the colours and the brushes. At times like these I think we’re perfect. At times like these I think she thinks the same; imagine that.