A faintly irritating smirk had settled on Watson’s face. He turned to Peter and muttered with camp confidentiality, ‘I’ve always thought that Gregory was doing more social and literary good these days than the rest of us put together. Teaching would-be scribblers and compiling books about writers’ tricks and habits that save the rest of us having to read all those endless biographies that appear on the market.’
I had heard enough. ‘So how’s the old novel coming on?’ I asked amiably. ‘We’re dying to read that, after all those reports from the front line.’
Watson looked away with a sort of twitch of pain. ‘I’ve temporarily put it aside. Lot of essays. Had to earn a living. I think about it every day.’
‘They say words on the page are the thing,’ I said, turning the knife. ‘Are you still stuck in Chapter Three?’
Watson seemed to have spotted an acquaintance in the room below us. With an exaggerated wave and a muttered ‘Excuse me’, he moved purposefully down the stairs. Ahead of him, as if by magic, a way cleared through the partygoers, revealing that he was walking, too briskly to change direction, towards nothing more welcoming than the fiction shelves. He reached them, stood, frozen in a moment of unavoidable social shame, facing away from the other guests like a child who had been told to stand in a corner. Slowly, he turned. At the end of that convenient path between guests, I smiled and raised my glass to him. Blushing, he plunged into the nearest group of partygoers.
‘Poor Tony,’ I said. ‘He’ll be trapped in Chapter Three until the end of his days.’
Peter Gibson sipped at his wine. ‘Shame about FatherLand,’ he said. ‘I would have liked to read about your son.’
* * *
Top Five Fastest Novelists
1. Jack Kerouac wrote The Subterraneans in three days.
2. Georges Simenon allowed himself six days to write a Maigret novel.
3. Walter Scott finished two Waverley novels in three weeks.
4. Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence and Evelyn Waugh each completed a novel in six weeks.
5. Anthony Burgess wrote five novels in a year.
* * *
9
Doug was out. Doug was on the binge. The day after the bookshop party, I had been working on Literary Lists when, late in the morning, the telephone rang. Unusually, it was for my son. Even more unusually, the voice that asked for him was that of an adult – brisk, businesslike, on the move, the sort of voice that could be closing a drugs deal, selling a car or transferring stock options. I went downstairs, banged on his door. There was no reply. I pushed it open. A brief, stomach-heaving glance into the room revealed that Doug was not there. Taking my time, I returned to my office.
‘He appears not to be at home.’ I cranked up my accent to indicate a generalized disapproval. ‘Can I say who –?’
‘Nah. Chiz.’ The oaf hung up.
I stared for a moment at a list on which I had been working revealing the surprising number of great writers whose parents had died during their childhood, but found myself unable to concentrate. I realized that, of late, the normal throb of life from Doug’s room had been less evident. It had been several days since I had actually seen my son. I rang Marigold’s number.
‘Doug appears not to be at home.’
‘Doug?’ For a moment, she seemed to have forgotten her son.
‘Someone rang for him but he’s not here.’
‘Oh sugar.’ My wife sighed, as if a disappearing son reported by an inadequate spouse was all she needed on this busy morning.
‘I wouldn’t have bothered you, only the man on the telephone sounded a bit dodgy. Did you see him last night?’
‘No, I was … caught up in a meeting. You?’
‘Launch party.’
‘Of course.’
There was a moment of brief, embarrassed silence. ‘He probably met up with some friends,’ I said eventually. ‘You know, teenagers.’
‘Teenagers are doing things – taking exams, getting part-time jobs, going round the world. The nearest thing Doug gets to action is going to the corner shop for a packet of cigarettes.’ She sighed. ‘I have something this evening which I just can’t cancel. Can’t you deal with this for a change?’
‘He’s our son, Marigold.’
There was another pause and I imagined her glancing at her Vogue diary, reprioritizing as we spoke. ‘I’ll try to get home early.’
‘If it doesn’t disrupt your plans.’
‘What does that mean, exactly?’
‘Just that I can manage if you’re too busy.’
‘If only you had talked to him,’ she muttered, almost to herself, before hanging up.
I gazed at the notes about death and authorhood but somehow the fussy statistics recording real pain and loss made my own life seem dreary and pointless. Instead, I found myself thinking about Peter Gibson, his ambition, the clear-eyed way he saw the literary scene, the mysterious hold he exerted on those who met him. How much older was he than my own son? Three years, maybe four? Had he spent his adolescence locked away in a room? Had he been allergic to the outside world? Had his parents let him down? Had he too been sucked into a whirlpool of impotent domestic blame? I compared the way he focused upon his work, ignoring the very distractions of the youth culture which invariably snagged Doug, kept him locked away in his room, paralysed by computer games, sexual fantasy and music that seemed to have been recorded in a torture chamber.
My son was not exactly a recluse but he had, undeniably, during the eleven months since leaving school, developed a powerful attraction to staying within the four walls of his own small room. The first indication that he was withdrawing from conventional family life had been when he took to piling his plate with food at meal-times and withdrawing wordlessly to eat it upstairs. We had never been a family for solemn, communal eating – the everyday bonding over food which other families manage so effortlessly had always been beyond us – and, by the time we recognized that a pattern was developing, it was too late to change it. Weakly, with only the merest hint of adult sarcasm, we would ask him now and then whether he would be gracing us with his presence at dinner. His response was a silent, cold-eyed, neo-psychopathic stare which invited all sorts of interpretations, most of them negative, fearful and, above all, guilt-ridden.
These days he emerged only rarely, with rat-like scuttles to the fridge or the lavatory which were timed with precision for moments when neither parent was likely to be around. At dead of night, we could sometimes hear his door open, the clink of plates being left on the floor, a sloppy, bare-footed trudge to the laundry basket where he would occasionally leave congealing T-shirts or undergarments stiff with dirt. Only Donovan, to whose scratches at the carpet outside his door Doug was preternaturally alert, was allowed regular access to his tiny, scummy world.
We had enrolled him at a ruinously expensive cramming establishment but, after he had failed to appear for any lessons during the final month of term, we had shelved any thoughts of his acquiring further academic qualifications. Doug was sorting himself out, regrouping. It was, if not normal, the sort of thing which parents of teenagers became used to. In the early days of his decline, I used to enter his room to find him lying, blank-eyed on his bed. He told me that he was thinking, that he was all right, that the best thing his mum and dad could do was leave him alone. So we did.
Occasionally, Marigold and I would discuss whether such behaviour qualified as a genuine and serious breakdown, whether we should call in some kind of roving shrink, but these exchanges invariably degenerated into bickering over which of us was responsible (personally, behaviourally, genetically) for our son’s behaviour. In the end, we had tried to put his way of life down to teenage blues, to a phase from which some time soon he would emerge, smiling sheepishly, Douglas once more.
At moments of rare openness between us, we would talk about the way he used to be, before the world in which he moved was reduced to a tiny room of noise, smell and wank mags, before even his name had beco
me contracted. For the first three years of his life, the odd formality of Douglas – a favourite among the Camerons down the centuries and distinguished in that thin-lipped, disapproving way which is the special province of the Scottish upper-middle-class – had suited him. A solemn, watchful baby, he had seemed to sense that his parents were successful people whose lives had been disrupted enough by the very fact of his birth, that they had time to make up, careers to pursue.
Even when Marigold weaned him onto the bottle rather too early in my view (claiming discomfort but I wasn’t taken in; she has always been vain about her figure), Douglas was accommodating.
At the age of four or five, the hopeful years, Douglas became Dougie. Smiling Dougie. Running Dougie. Dougie, the very apple of his parents’ eyes. Then, quite early, at eleven or twelve, the openness and optimism faded. The laughter died or, rather, grew conditional and guarded. His face became closed, watchful. His sweet and natural accent, neither posh nor proletarian, gave way to a lazy, street grunt. He told us that he wasn’t Dougie any more, refused even to answer to the name. He was Doug. As in thug, or drug; as in glug-glug-glug.
He left school, enrolled at the crammer, then went into his decline. By that stage, the diminished, lethargic creature which we had brought into the world was hardly recognizable to us as Douglas, Dougie, or even Doug. It seemed only a matter of time before he became Dg, D-, or simply nothing at all – a blank where there had once been communication.
It occurred to me now that perhaps it was a good sign that he had spent the night out, that he had been on the binge. Maybe that’s what you did at seventeen. One minute you were hanging out on street corners, chewing gum, skimming the curb with skateboards, communicating in monosyllables, returning later than promised, dirty, sweaty, wiping your nose with your forearm, swigging at a coke, in training to be a grown-up.
Then, quite suddenly, you understood: you were no longer part of this sad, suburban, little scene, with its kickabouts in the playground, its shandy-and-grope youngster-parties at the tennis-club, its mums with baby-seats in the back of their saloon cars, its worried, nagging fathers. You had rejected it; it had rejected you. A couple of years ago, you had been popular, a kid with a future, controllable, cute. You had an open smile. Adults talked to you. Then, almost overnight, you had become invisible, neither truly child nor truly adult. Words left you. The smile left you. Girls suddenly seemed to belong to a different universe – one of chat and friendship and laughter where only older boys had a place. You entered a twilight zone where no one, not even your parents – especially your parents – liked you, where no one, except the other guys, understood you. Your looks went. You became gawky, uncoordinated, your body looked like it was put together late on a Friday afternoon shift on the human being production line, when the raw materials of muscle, hair and decent skin were running short and you were thrown together just to get you out of the childhood factory before the weekend. You spent hours in front of the mirror trying to make sense of what was happening to you. Deserted by language, you developed a strange system of grunts, squawks and facial tics. Girls mocked you for this, parents raged at it; your secret language became more obscure. Purr, you’d say. Egg. Ractic. Odded. Grout.
Shit, man, where did you go from there? You went to the pub. You hung out with the lads. You got it down you. You chatted. Owi, then? Yeah, owi, chiz. You changed your style. No more baggies now. Certainly no more baseball caps turned the wrong way round. Something was beginning to happen.
Now, suddenly, people were aware of you. They paid attention but it was not your cuteness, your kiddiness, that drew their eyes to you. It was something much better. It was almost like fear. Soon you found that the world was on its guard against you and your new male danger. Policemen stopped you on the street. Shopkeepers watched your every move. Kids, adults, stepped aside as they saw you approaching. Curtains twitched when you stopped to chat with your mates (‘Those boys are out there again, dear’). But the girls started to notice you, too. It was time to find your own world, a place where you could be yourself without a secret language, without the approval or disapproval of other generations. You go out. You don’t go home. You binge. Maybe it was all natural.
Downstairs, the front door slammed. I closed my eyes, relieved. Talk to him. That’s what I should do. Talk to him, caring yet authoritative, a father.
By the time I had reached the kitchen, Doug was at the sink, gulping back a full glass of water. I stood at the door for a moment. ‘Well?’
He refilled the glass from the tap and drank it down. Chucking the glass in the sink, he walked to a sideboard, took out a chocolate biscuit, crammed it in his mouth, wiped his face with the back of his hand.
‘And?’ I tried again. ‘Would it be too much to ask where you’ve been since yesterday – all night and all today?’
‘Would it be miew miew miew miew?’ My son’s face contorted in a grimace, his head wobbling wildly as he imitated, with crazed exaggeration, my precise, concerned-parent tones.
Although I was angry enough to ignore the signs, it occurred to me that this behaviour was unusual for Doug. He had never been a slammer, a strider, a mocker; stealth and evasion were more his style. It was not that he was afraid of confrontation with his parents, more that he was wearily dismissive of them, of the entire lame adult world.
‘Don’t be rude,’ I said. ‘We were worried.’
‘Oh yeah, right.’ His voice was loud as if he was having to shout down some argument in his head. ‘Worried, yeah, great, right. Thanks, Daddy.’
‘Both of us were worried. Unfortunately, your mother had an urgent meeting.’
He exhaled, a noise of profound, knowing disgust. I noticed for the first time that his face was pale and gaunt, apart from a flash of red where someone or something had grazed his cheekbone, breaking the skin. A smut of dirt on his chin reminded me, with a faint stab of pain, of the child he had been not so long ago. There was something odd about his eyes; his pupils were dark and dilated as if he had been staring for too long into a bright light.
‘There was a call for you this morning,’ I said calmly.
‘Big wow.’
‘It was a man. He sounded –’ I sensed from the way that Doug was staring at me that I was venturing into dangerous territory. ‘Well, to tell the truth, he sounded a bit sinister.’
‘To tell the twoooth.’ Doug parodied my prissiness with another grimace, the muscles in his neck extruding with contempt. ‘You mean, he didn’t sound like a designer or a nice little writer.’
‘Who was he, Doug?’
‘Mind you own fuckin’ business.’ The shoulders hunched and he seemed to shiver and I knew, with the certainty of a parent, that he was afraid. He looked up suddenly and, seeing the concern on my face, recovered his anger. ‘Just back the fuck off, right? Leave me alone.’
‘Don’t shout at me.’
‘Shout?’ he shouted. ‘What you talking, what you fucking talking about, do what, shout?’
‘Calm down. Douglas.’
‘Want to go to my room, owi.’ There was a crack in the voice, as if tears were not far away.
‘In a moment. You owe me an explanation about what’s going on.’
‘Owe? You what? What exactly do I owe you for, Daddy?’
I laughed uneasily.
‘No, go on then,’ he said. ‘Tell me what I fuckin’ owe you for?’
‘Your education, your food.’ I faltered. Put like that, it didn’t seem much. How to sum up the years of worry, of occasional pride and more frequent disappointment, the general sense of displacement and loss of equilibrium that, effortlessly, guiltlessly, he had introduced into our lives from the moment he was born until now? ‘General life,’ I said feebly.
‘Yeah, right, thanks for nothing. Life. Just what I fuckin’ needed. Life. Like I really asked to be born, didn’t I? You think you’re God or something –’
‘We try to help you.’
‘Then get out of my fuckin’ face.’ His
dark, staring eyes filled with tears. ‘Leave me alone. You don’t own me. You don’t understand anything about me. All you care about is your lame careers. I leave you alone, you leave me alone, right.’
I hesitated, lost for words.
‘Here comes the big daddy sigh,’ he sneered. ‘Big tragic fuckin’ daddy sigh. Let’s all feel sorry for him and his sad little loser life.’
Rage welled up inside me. For years, I had been able to dismiss these moments of childish contempt as nothing more than a tantrum. But the snotty nose, the tiny red, enraged face, the screams of rage, the flailing little hands and hopeless kicking feet had gone. Now he had words – not many words, it was true, but enough words to hurt. So why should I hold back? I was a parent, not some kind of punchbag for a spoilt adolescent. He was old enough to understand that I hurt, too. I had feelings. Or at least, if he didn’t understand, he should be made to. It was part of growing up, part of the education for which I was responsible.
I stepped forward, grabbed my son by the chest of his T-shirt, pulled him towards me so that, for a second or two his dark, unfocused eyes were inches from mine, then pushed him back, my fist striking his bony chest. He sprawled on the kitchen floor where he lay, looking up at me, openly afraid. We stared at each other idiotically for several long seconds before Doug’s customary sullen expression returned. ‘What you going to do now, Daddy? Give me a good kicking? Would that make you feel better?’
‘I’m not a loser.’ Suddenly I was aware that I had behaved precisely as my son had hoped, that he, lying there on the kitchen floor, was the victor of this round. ‘I’ –’ Somehow the word ‘sorry’ froze in my throat. ‘I’m really disappointed by the way you’ve behaved.’
He stood up, rubbed his chest. ‘You tore my fuckin’ T-shirt,’ he said. Then, muttering ‘Thanks for the chat, Dad,’ he brushed past me and made his way, with long, angry strides, back to his bedroom.
I waited for the beat, the sound of Doug defiantly in residence, but there was just silence.
Kill Your Darlings Page 7