‘Absolutely not, Steven, it’s a family meal!’
That’s tough. My brother backs the old man up. ‘No way kid!’ That’s how everybody speaks to me. I look resigned, I kick at stones.
‘What’s the matter with that child of yours, Juny? He’s totally unappreciative.’
I toe the ground and I look at him, then I don’t, that’s the way it’s always been. Bored, moseying around, waiting for that old git to show up, then the phone goes . . .
‘Oh shit bugger arseholes! Oh, for heaven’s sakes stop it the pair of you, I’m trying to listen! Shut up or I’ll bang your soddin’ heads together! Oh, hello darling . . . yes . . . yes . . . the 8.15 . . . yes . . .’
And then the tidying up . . . Getting our knees clean for a start, and not going over the back . . . Then that bozo would show, clasping a toffee wrapper. His nose in the air, he walks in, and deposits it in the bin . . . Bravo!
‘Come along, Juny, chop chop! I haven’t eaten since luncheon. Nichollas! Steven! Look at your knees! For Christ’s sake, chop-chop! Really, Juny, there’s no food in the house, and now you want to keep me hanging around all evening. I expressly rang you in advance, why can’t you be ready? Come along you boys, get in the car now! And for God’s sake mind the upholstery! Christ, Juny, you’re prepared to use my facilities but do I get any respect!’
Me and my brother traipse out, and head for the car, it’s still warm and stinking of leather . . .
My father starts it up and then we have to sit there in silence for fifteen minutes whilst my mother runs back indoors. She checks that the cooker’s turned off, that the cat has been put out, makes sure that she’s left a light on and checks that she locked the back door. We watch her coming and going inflow motion. She slams the front door and pulls it violently almost wrenching her arm from its socket, just to be sure. To be certain. Is it locked? My father drums on the steering wheel with his root-like fingers.
‘Good God, woman, for Christ sake’s get in the bloody car! I hope that child is not going to puke in the car again! You’re not going to do a Technicolor yawn, are you, Steven?’
‘Wot?’
‘Not “wot”, “pardon”!’
It’s my opinion that he swerved all those corners on purpose. He chucked the engine into fourth and never bothered to come back down again, his hands flailing at the wheel like a juggler. I feel my collar and suck at the inside of my mouth. It’s the special combination of the leather and the old girl’s lipstick, the car reeks of it, and her swathed in that stinking fur coat of her mothers. She turns in her seat and smoothes my hair back, a cat lick, and then the smell hits me, it clings to the roof of my mouth, I gag. She feels my forehead, and rattles her cheap jewellery at me. The gold of her ring, it glitters in my eye socket. I gag, I vomit and re-swallow, I grit my teeth . . . I need air, I want the woods, I want to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex or a squirrel. The old man hits the brakes and swerves the roundabout at full throttle. My stomach heaves, it trickles through my nose, sour, some bean sauce — I have to let it go. I open up and let it pour, in hot jets, six different types of tomatoes.
‘My God, Juny, stop him! I don’t believe it! He’s done it again! The little stinker!’ My father grapples with the wheel, yelling over his shoulder. ‘Why didn’t you tell us! You did that on purpose, didn’t you? Well, he can clear it up! He’s your child, Juny! Shit and damnation! You stinking little bastard!’
He slams on the anchors and I smack my nose on the handle on the back of his seat, a little dinner tray. I swallow another mouthful . . .
‘It’s the way you drive, he can’t help it . . . can you, Steven?’
My mother dabs at my nose with a handkerchief, starched at the edges. I fumble with the door-catch, fall to my knees and crawl onto the verge. My father’s hands grip the steering wheel. He stares out through the windscreen in disgust. . . I breathe the grass, the hedge. I feel the dirt and dig in my fingernails. I don’t want to go out to dinner. I don’t want to eat, I don’t like eating, it’s a trap, just another torture set up to destroy me . . . I gurgle in the dust. Please let me stay here, please leave me to die, I can’t face the leather. My mother, a giant lipstick . . . I let go, bitter, two or three mouthfuls, sweet and clinging . . .
‘Dad, Steven’s being sick again.’ My brother sings it out triumphantly.
I lick at my snot, eyes stinging. My legs are thin and white, I don’t know what I am doing here or why I came, but these people have control of my life. I am their property to do with as they wish, I am under their spell, the spell of the tongue and fist. . . I crawl onto the back seat . . . The trouble is that I got some dirt on the upholstery.
We drive on through the silence and the smell. A topic for conversation, but for later, and my bad teeth, my boils. We drive on in silence, waiting . . .
‘Young gentlemen . . .’ That’s how my father spoke to us after his brandy, his face glistening.
I breathe through my mouth, avoiding the stench, I stick my mug up against the glass.
‘Can you hear anything?’ He turns to face us over the back of his seat. ‘You can’t? Well, that’s it! That’s what you pay for! Listen, Prrrrrr . . . That’s all . . .’ He minces his moustaches together and purrs like a cat. ‘Prrrrrrr, that’s what you pay for, engineering! Mister Rolls and Mister Royce, the finest engine in the world! Is the engine turned off? No! I assure you, the engine is running, listen!’ He puckers his lips. ‘Prrrrrrr . . . There you have it, the Rolls Royce engine! Quality my young gentlemen! That’s right, gentlemen, young . . . You’re both fine young gentlemen!’
We sit there in the car park, the car cranking away beneath our feet.
‘You’re both fine young gentlemen . . . and when you grow up, you’re both going to be good-looking chaps!’
My brother’s face swells like a football, scowling with pride.
‘Fine, handsome young gentlemen!’
I sit there, my teeth sticking out in eight different directions, still chewing on bits of carrot.
‘Fine handsome young men, aren’t they Juny?’
My brother gives me a horse bite on the leg and I have to squeal.
‘Now shush the pair of you before I bang your bloody heads together! If you can’t behave like adults, you won’t be treated like adults!’
My brother smirks down at me. I use my hand to cover my teeth, fucked up . . . I wanted to believe, but I can’t. I honestly can’t . . .
6. A CAT’S ARSE IN HIS HEAD
Me and Jeffrey caught bumblebees in our bare hands, and I fell and grazed my knees every day that summer. Then the girls in the white house left and went to live in Australia and I fell off the bed and cracked my head open and my mother told me to shut up blubbering or she’d call an ambulance. ‘Did I want to get taken away?’ And the sun came in hot through the front window and the green out front of the council estate looked sad and yellow and she just kept on ironing.
She didn’t want to carry me, so at the shopping arcade I get lost on purpose. I talk to myself, I play with a lolly stick, she tells me to drop it, it’s dirty . . . Then she just walks off, she lets go of my reins and I stand by this oak tree . . . Then she storms back, snatches hold of my hand and drags me along behind her.
‘Do you want me to have to pull your trousers down and smack your bare bottom in public?’
I walk on, quite fragile really, crying.
It seemed that they’d been mapping out my future in private and my feelings don’t even enter into the calculations . . . I watch their mouths . . . My father walks around naked with his big willy out . . . Nobody else in the world has bum cracks but my family; everybody else’s are filled in . . .
My father takes me down town and they make me sit on a plank and have my head shaved. My mother buys me new socks, shoes and a tie, my little bow on an elastic has to go . . . Actually, my brother flicks it into the fireplace and I have to watch it burn. Apparently, I cry too much.
I try to follow the whispered conversations, but
everyone quits gassing as soon as I cock an ear.
Next morning my mother comes in, clicks the light on, pulls the covers off me, and forces me into the new clothing . . . I rub my eyes, I whimper . . . That stuff’s harsh, freshly starched . . . It’s still dark outside, I start to blubber.
‘Don’t be a baby, Steven! You’re not a baby are you? You’re a big boy now, you’re going to school.’
‘I don’t want to go to school . . .’
‘Of course you do, you’ll meet lots of new friends.’
‘Is Jeffrey going?’
‘No, you’ll make new friends.’
‘I want to stay here with you . . .’
‘You can’t, you have to go, it’s the law, you don’t want mummy to be arrested, do you?’
‘My stomach hurts . . .’
She yanks my shorts up and buttons them, stern faced, a regular Judas, nothing but a turn-coat. I’m dressed, my face wiped, a cat-lick, then I’m taken outside. I fight all the way, tooth and nail, right up to the front steps of the school. I kick at her and shriek like a whistle . . . The bush, I want the bush! She unclasps my fingers one by one, knuckles whitening and I sob from the bottom of my heart. I’m losing my life, I have to wave goodbye; she pulls me by my arm up those steps . . . I stagger and trip, I plead . . .
‘For God’s sake stop dragging your feet, Steven! Now stop your crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!’
That’s tough, I trusted her and she dealt me a dud. I suck my snot, I try and let her know my feelings, deep down, heart-felt...
‘You have to go to school, you’ve got to learn to read and write!’
I bite at my tears, stinging, blinding . . . ‘I don’t want to read and write.’
‘If you don’t go to school, you’ll be taken into care and I’ll be arrested!’
‘I don’t want to go.’
‘It’s the law!’
‘Why?
‘For Christ’s sake shut up!’
And so I let them destroy my specialness.
She left me in that place, echoing corridors, banging doors. Everything in hideous miniature and a smell that goes straight to your bowels, the smell of beatings and betrayals. There’s scarcely any love in those classrooms, just hapless kids: row upon row of us, gummy and diseased, just waiting to be lied to. And the teachers banging it out day in, day out, year after year: ‘2 + 2 = 4’, ‘animals don’t really talk’ and ‘gentle Jesus’ . . . All those sad stumbling lies that have as little to do with the spirit of man and the love of God as can be humanely imaginable.
My hatred of school was absolute, a rare and beautiful hatred, almost perfect. They murdered us behind closed doors, sat at evil little desks: kid-sized.
At eleven o’clock they hand round the little milk bottles and one drinking straw each, all apart from the kiddie at the end, the one with the busted specs held together with dirty pink sticky plaster. Old four-eyes got no drinking straw; he got a kick and a pinch if he was lucky! Then he gets dragged out front and has his legs slapped for losing his drinking straw. Good! We’re all in agreement, us, the teacher and the world, we nod, we understand the mentality of the class-room. We finish our milk, we suck it right down to the bottom, then follow it round with our straws, we blow bubbles to see who can make the loudest racket, then we get told to shut it.
Mrs Lamb claps her hands, and orders us up off our seats. We go single file up to the front and drop our bottles into the crate, we clank them, we throw them in there ’til they bust. Then we go sit down again and play with the toys ’til dinner time. You go to the shelf and choose for yourself, little plastic soldiers, some metal fish in a cardboard tank with little fishing rods with magnets on the end . . . Some busted jigsaws in numbered boxes . . . I get the lid, with a number that doesn’t exist. I have to stare at it, to try and find its friend . . . Fifteen minutes go past, an hour . . . An upside-down five, a two that isn’t a two or a three. There is no such number . . . The window, a dirty patch of tarmac, a few trees in the distance battling in the mud.
Then the dinner bell, Mrs Lamb waves it above her head. That means that we have to go out and stand about out there in the fresh air. We get up and file out like little soldiers, then we run, we scream ’til it hurts, competing with the birds. I walk up the little path to the toilets, past the school gate . . . I stare out into that other world, a police car goes past and a man with a tree under his arm. I find the toilets and there’s this kid in there with one of his ears missing, just a rim of gristle and a hole like a cat’s arse in his head. I sneek looks at it whilst I pee . . . Some of it goes on my sandals.
In class we do God, make dinosaurs and sing baa-baa black sheep. Then it’s home time and my mother meets me at the gate, and the peanut man’s there on his bike, and she buys me a toffee apple. And I begged her not to make me go back to that place, I dropped my toffee apple and I cried.
It seems that it was imperative that I learned to read and write, that I forget my life up until that moment. I stared into the books, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of it: their letters and numbers were meaningless to me. I was singled out and shamed for my ignorance and general stupidity . . . I just couldn’t understand why I should change, why I had to learn this foreign language.
My mother sat with me going through the lists.
‘Cat! Sat! Mat! Your brother could read and write at your age. Just look at it, at its shape . . . C-A-T, CAT!’
We sit cross-legged in a neat little semi-circle and Mrs Lamb plays the piano. ‘Nick-knack-paddy-whack, give the dog a bone, this old man came rolling home.’ And we sing along, we have to, we’re orchestrated. We have no choice in the matter, everything’s been decided in our absence, no democracy, just liberal hell. In the end, it seems that you have to do everything that you don’t want to do in this world, and then you have to pretend that you actually enjoy doing it, that you’ve at last grown up, that it’s exactly what you’ve always wanted all along. That’s the type of people we are.
7. THE LANGUAGE OF ALL THE ARSEHOLES OF THE WORLD
Juny! Honk, honk! Juny!’ His morning reveille, a double blast, both nostrils . . . ‘Have you starched my handkerchiefs?’ He walks downstairs.
‘. . . Garage,’ he says to me. ‘Garage!’
I look up at him.
‘Garage, repeat it after me, garage! Are you listening, Steven? Not ‘garige’. Garage! Garage, garage! For heaven’s sake if you’ve got something to say, then say it correctly: garage! Bought, not ‘brawt’!’ He pulls at his whiskers and coughs slightly. ‘Have you been playing with those council estate hooligans again? Has he, Juny? I thought I said that he wasn’t allowed over there! That’s where you get this filthy talk from, isn’t it? Well, you might think it sounds clever, but it doesn’t, it’s vulgar! Now look at me.’ He puckers his lips and crosses his eyes. ‘Garage! Bought! Ga-rah-je . . . Ga-rah-je! Got it? Really, Juny, what’s the point? Can he spell yet? Not really? A little? Now and then? Well, say it then damn you! Re-mem-ber, not ‘renember’, remember! Remember, remember, remember! Garage, garage, garage! Bought, bought, bought! Jesus Christ! What are they teaching this child? It’s that school, I warned you! Nothing but riff-raff! They can’t even teach him to speak properly! Remember! Not ‘renember’! Not ‘brawt’! Not ‘garige’! Garage, ga-rah-je! ‘Garige’? Oh, you don’t mean the ga-rah-je, per chance do you? You ‘brawt’ it, what’s ‘brawt’ mean? You couldn’t possibly mean that you bought it? Bought, bought, bought! Got it? Bought, bought, bought! Satisfied? ‘Renember’, do you? ‘Re-nem-ber’? Remember, remember, remember! Steven, are you listening to me? Come along, say it after me, ga-rah-je! What’s wrong with this child of yours, Juny? He looks unhappy.’
I’ll tell you something for free, you needn’t bother trying to talk with anybody in this world, especially when you’re just a little kid. You’re still shitting your pants, and nobody’s the least bit interested. All this talk about communication and understanding? It’s all hokum. Your opinions are
not required, the only thing grown-ups are enchanted by is the sound of their own voices, they go gooey-eyed, they’ve got three fingers jammed up their own arses.
You want to talk to my father? Have you got your cheque book? You’ll need it! You wish to have a voice in this land, to keep on the right side of law and order? Well, cough up kid! If it’s preferential treatment you require then put your money where your mouth is cock-sucker! On your knees! Bow down to the democratic voice of money! Cheque books at the ready, credit cards cocked! The only real language? Money! — The language of all the arseholes of the world! And forget your loose change, tosser, spondulicks, and nothing less!
You write and paint and you can’t hold down a real job? It doesn’t look too rosy down at the local nick. Your credit rating? Your National Identity Card? The murdering computer, that’s where we’ll all wind up! Dialled and filed, down on their super-tech memory bank. The rich, the poor, the damned and the dead, nothing but ciphers. Did I say the rich? Pardon me! Of course the pompous and the opinionated will never die, they fuck around as if they’ll live forever, immortality guaranteed, and never a moment’s doubt!
I really did try talking to him, my father, but when it came down to it, he had a very limited style, Edwardian and bombastic. He had a way of looking in the mirror, re-fixing his whiskers, checking his time piece and trying another flounce in his bow-tie. The whole lot of righteousness was so thick and clinging that you couldn’t knock it from between his ears with a hammer and chisel (that’s a joke). It would take his own death to pull him up and start him reasoning . . . People can become pretty lucid when they’re staring over the edge of eternity, it knocks the bullshit right out of them double quick! All of a sudden they start making pretty good sense. Then they quit blubbering and they’re dead.
8. CRABS AND BUTTERFLIES
You’ve got it coming to you!’ That was levelled at me pretty regularly, that and, ‘You’ll be for the high jump!’
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