‘You’d better not be burning that infernal oil stove, Juny! Because don’t say I haven’t warned you! I can smell it from here!’
He bites at the mouthpiece and shakes it between his teeth like a bone.
‘I’m coming straight down there and putting the whole lot of you out on the street! Do you hear me? That’s my fucking oil you’re burning down there, Juny! My fucking oil!’
He bounces the receiver in its cradle, he pulls the whole thing out by the wire and dangles it from the wall. He imposes his rule from afar: geography holds no boundaries. He exercises his will for the sheer hell of watching us jump!
We sit blowing on our hands. I take one of the chestnuts; my brother clobbers me.
‘Fuck off, that’s mine!’
He undoes my fingers one by one, then gives me a Chinese burn. I let out a cry, a little whimper.
‘For God’s sake stop your whining!’
That’s my mother speaking. She sips at her Guinness and quakes gently in the gloom . . . Then the door goes and the old man marches in. That’s our signal, we drop everything and jump to attention. We hear footsteps echoing down the driveway, a car door slams. He announces himself, brisk, stinking of the bottle. He wrinkles his nose . . .
‘Can I smell dog, Juny? Juny, I smell dog!’
That’s when everything turned sour: the smell of that oil stove was one thing, but me bringing home a harmless little stray was another . . . The old girl did her nut, she made me promise to take it over the back and lose it in the woods, somewhere desolate, the back of beyond . . .
‘Your father won’t hear of it! And besides, the cat . . . the cat won’t like it!’
12. HEARBOY
I dressed hearboy up in my anorak and hid him in the garage. I patted him. I threw him a stick, my new-found friend, black and white, a stray from the council estate, and not at all snobbish. He looks at me in that special kind of way, his tongue hanging. He wants to play, to make friends, with these funny eyes, blue, mottled, but not blind. And he knew how to beg all by himself, he didn’t take any kind of training. He just mucked right in with us kids, as if to say, ‘we all want to have some fun, so let’s go to it!’ We all run hell for leather over the back woods and have a good romp.
That’s when the old man shows up: he makes his threats over the phone, he promises repercussions. He tells the old girl that he’s just leaving, he’s on his way at this very moment, his arrival is imminent. We’ve heard it all before, it’s for the birds, ramblings of a wino, then, lo and behold, the old coot really does show up. We clamp our jaws and hold onto our hats. It’s bound to bring out the worst in him, the stench of that stove and me with my new mutt.
Right away he orders the dog out. He banishes him from the house for forever and a day. And the stove, we have to shut that down for a start, on account of the fumes, great plumes of burning oil . . .
Then he has to go picking on Hearboy. Not only a dog, but a stray! That was pushing things too far! No breeding! Neither fish nor fowl! He waves his hands about like a bush. ‘Out! Out! Out!’ He barks like a mongrel, he sends out signals, he bosses the dog, and the dog does just like he tells him. The old man turns and marches away, then he stops and scratches his bean, he sits on it like an egg. Then slowly he turns around and calls the dog back over. Hearboy wags his tail, runs right up, sits and licks at the old man’s mitt. The old man lifts his hand to his face, he studies his palm and dips his fingers in it, puzzled, then he regains his composure. He reaches down and pats Hearboy’s head gingerly, just a stroke at first, then more playfully, he tussles his ears. Hearboy smiles back up at him. They cock their heads at each other. The dog’s ears go like that!
‘Woof,’ he says. ‘Woof woof!’
‘Sit!’
‘Woof woof!’
‘Roll over!’
‘Woof!’
‘Beg!’
‘Woof woof woof!’
‘Stay!’
‘Woof!’
‘Lie boy, lie!’
The old man’s pleased as punch, he looks around grinning, trying to find an audience . . .
‘Did you see that, Juny? Look, watch . . .’
He directs it, a whole new toy, he’s warming to the mutt. ‘Hearboy!’
And over he comes, running at full tilt, funny coloured eyes, a pink tongue hanging out. That knocks the wind out of him, the old fake. He troops off to the other side of the garden, he finds a toffee wrapper, he stoops, he pockets it, and not even a reprimand! Then — ‘Hearboy! Hearboy!’
And Hearboy does it again, the dog I mean, he bombs over, tongue lolling, little trails of drool, good as gold. The old man’s mask pinches at the side, it almost cracks his mug.
‘Hearboy!’ That was the command. ‘Hearboy!’ That’s what we got to call him, my stray. ‘Hearboy!’ And here he comes. Style! The style of the dog. ‘Hearboy!’ No bashfulness, no snobbery, just friendly and true. Enthusiastic, out for some fun, whipped.
‘Collect his lead, Steven, we’re going over the woods to test Hearboy’s obedience in the open country!’
He talks to me! He’s talking about Hearboy, my mutt, my little stray. I stare up at him open mouthed.
‘Come along, chop chop!’
I jump to it, I have to be quick before he changes his mind. I call the mutt over, I get Hearboy’s lead on . . . I take off my belt and loop it through his collar. That sends him wacky — you have to yank on it and holler blue murder.
‘Can I show you the big beech tree, dad? Can I show you how to climb it, the big beech tree?’
He pulls at his whiskers, stares thoughtfully at the dog and says nothing. First of all he has to climb into his wellingtons, and then wax his Rolls Royce. It’s half six before we actually set off. I even offer to show the old man the big beech tree, to show him how to climb it. He sort of saunters along, recalcitrant. When we get past the old scout hut, I figure it’ll be alright to let Hearboy off his lead. I unloop his lead and buckle it back round my shorts. He goes super-wacky again; he yelps and butts me, puppyish . . . He gets his lipstick out, cocks his leg then darts off double quick, on all fours, sideways, crab-like, looking for rabbits. He sniffs and takes another piss, he looks back over his shoulder, wonky eyes, he wants encouragement.
‘Go on boy, go on!’ I shout it, I grin and stamp my foot at him. Then he makes a dash and disappears into a bush, he runs back out at ten different angles, he circles us. The joy on his doggy face, his tongue flying like a banner, pinkish, dripping . . .
The old man bites his lip and takes command . . .
‘Hearboy! Hearboy, heel!’
The old man barks it out. He slaps his thighs. He fills his voice with hate. He booms it out. He opens his lungs and yells. But Hearboy’s lost to the world, everything’s a game to him. The old man’s opinions? Bollocks!
I pick a blackberry, sneek up behind my father and slap it on the back of his neck. I pick two or three, I eat one, then I toy with the other. I run and jump and get him right in the back of the neck, just above the collar. Then I run on and turn, but he doesn’t chase after me. He just stands there rigid, then lifts his hand, wipes the back of his neck and stares at the pulp. He peers into the little seeds, in amongst the juice, then lowers his jowls, a countenance of doom. I just wanted him to join in that’s all, to feel part of the fun . . .
I run up behind him and Slap! with a ripe blackberry. He wipes it off, looks at it, then turns on his heels and marches off back towards the house. I trail along behind him, following in his wellingtons, trying to tell him, trying to get him to speak to me. You see, it was only a prank, some harmless fun. Me and the mutt scamper along between his strides, his face turns black. I start to blubber but he keeps marching, mask set, face to the front. I was only going to show him the big beech tree, that’s all. How to climb it, the way there, the special way, a short-cut, a secret short-cut. I drag at his shirt tails, I beg him to stop, to come back, to see the big beech tree with me and Hearboy. But I may as well cut my throa
t.
‘I promise that I’m sorry, truly, truly sorry, cross my heart and hope to die!’
But he won’t even look at me, not a second glance, not even for Hearboy. Me and the mutt slow down, he’s got us beat. We watch him ’til his tail disappears, the blackberry stain on his collar, red, kind of blue-ish, purpley, running down the back of his neck . . . He disappears out of sight, crosses the little clearing, then he’s gone . . . past the old scout hut at full gallop . . . disused wells . . . the brambles . . . heading towards the driveway. Golden locks flouncing in the breeze, and his neck, blue-black, erect, dignified, unforgiving: my father.
13. THE FACTS OF LIFE
Easter time we went down to the old shack on the beach. A-roads, the trees ringed with white, instead of street lamps. They had to pull over five or six times to let me out so’s that I could puke. And I remember the sky was always blue and there was this church with a little field and a donkey; my mother would ask the old man to pull over, so’s I could stroke it. And the donkey would walk painfully over to us, his back like an old carpet and his ears twitching. And there was a big dark tree, a blue sky, and his sad eyes blinking away the flies. I stroked his velvety ears and fed him a handful of dandelions, and the old man revving the motor, telling us it was time to go.
That was some place, a little line of shingle marking the end of the estuary . . . A road, a general store, two dikes and no main drainage, and there was always the wind. We used to sit ’n’ watch the old girl empty the septic tank into the sea every morning.
Walking across those pebbles made you wince — my brother forced me to put my whole weight on those razor shells . . .
And the old bat with curlers who owned that shack, shrills out across those hot stones, ‘My God, isn’t he horrific!’
And my brother pipes back, ‘Oh yes, rather!’
It seems I’ve got a lot of evening-up to do, a lot of scores to settle. I stick my tongue in my jaw. The beach stank, the sun stung, and I sweltered under the weight of my betters, my elders, my superiors.
Ah, just to speak with my pen and breathe, to lay this ghost to rest. I shan’t bathe my brow until all the humiliations I’ve suffered have been spoken in full.
The old man blew us out; he packed us off down to Seasalter, then absconded. We couldn’t afford the rent on a shack by ourselves so we chipped in with a friend of the family, Norman, and his daughter Sue. Nick kipped on the couch, Sue slept with my mum, and I have to sleep in the big bed with Norman.
And that’s when he got it out. All night he keeps asking if I can keep a secret, he rubs my tummy and repeats it.
‘Fred, can you keep a secret?’
Of course I can keep secrets. I tell him loads of times. Then he groans and gets his willy out, he slaps it in my palm, like a sausage, brown and hot, and all these crinkly grey hairs. That’s odd, all those hairs, I haven’t got any of those. Then he tugs my knickers down and plays with my little pecker. He sucks on it ’til it goes hard, then he starts grunting and kneels over me and wags his thick one in my face. I can feel the heat coming off it — he slaps my arse with it, hot, denuded, growing . . .
It went up and out like a stick. I look at it; that makes me go cross-eyed, he plunks it into my hand and I remember something my brother told me about, ‘wanking’. . . about rubbing your willy until this stuff comes out of it. So I do it. I kind of move it a bit and he starts dribbling. This must be what they call ‘wanking’. This must be ‘the facts of life’ that my mother keeps going on about.. . ‘It’s about time you learned some facts of life!’ Must be that my father can’t tell me the facts of life because he’s too busy at the office. My mother must have asked Norman to tell me. I wondered if that’s what it was, if me mum hadn’t asked old Norm to show me ‘the facts of life’.
He slaps it into my palm, then starts having some kind of fit; he jiggles about all over the shop, his eyes popping. That’s something I couldn’t get used to, his eyes without his specks on, like some kind of hideous dwarf, snorting through his nose. I had to look away out of pity for him. And that thing sticking out of all those grey hairs, that sausage between his legs, hot and steaming. I let it go, I drop it double quick, just as soon as he starts moaning and dribbling. I thought that I’d hurt him. That maybe I’d done the ‘wanking’ wrong — it seemed that way. He was a school teacher — you go messing with them and they’re just as likely to put you on a detention, or hit you or something. And that’s when he does it, he flips me over onto my belly and puts his thing between my legs, he noses it in there, he sweats on me, he gurgles, he trembles at the knees. And the sound of the shingle, that’s the waves . . .
I used to have to go to the bedroom in the afternoons, I didn’t breathe a word to no one, I was guilty as sin, I kept schtum . . . I was implicated just by virtue of being born. That’s sad.
So now I talk, I dare him to come back, old Norman, I dare him to come back here and try to shut me up! I’ll give him juice! We can talk about his dick and the crummier aspects of his intricate personality. I know his address, I have contacts. And his daughter, sweet Sue, in the nut-house by all accounts. Well, I remember and I won’t forget. The sun slanting in through the drawn curtains, pale blue sea horses and cockle shells. Afternoons, you could hear the kids playing outside, the beach, the seagulls . . .
14. DIDICOIS AND GYPSIES
Norman gives me this little crucifix, he hands it me through his car window. I see the crinkly hairs on the back of his hand, then he winks at me and calls me Fred.
‘I’ll be round to see you, Fred!’ Then the wink through his specs.
I admit that I was oversensitive as a child, that I pissed the bed and that I cried ’til I was sick, but I had certain jolts. I had to have the light on, I couldn’t sleep without the light on. I had to stare into it, to concentrate on it, holding my crucifix . . . trying to breathe through the covers, hiding my neck.
The ant’s making clicking noises with his antennae, right alongside my bed, horse-sized, signalling to his brother ants on the other side. That’s what the throbbing noise must be, the bass notes, they agitate the air, shaking it up, up into a billion dots, dragonflies with four foot wing-spans and teeth. I suck at the roof of my mouth, dry, itching . . .
I can hear breathing, more like retching . . . a man leaning over my bed wearing a gas mask. His nose goes on for ever and ever, it goes out through the window and into the garden. I want to get up, to tell my mother, to stop the night. I crawl onto the floor, pull on my plimsolls and follow his nose, out into the garden, right round the house, three times. I count the laps. Moonlit, I run naked and trembling, with a little hard-on; I slip in a cat’s shit. Then somebody sees me from the road, a man and a woman, arms linked, staring right through me. I freeze, stock-still, statue-like. They walk on and I slip back indoors . . . I make a breathing tunnel, my head way down beneath the covers, sweating in fear. I have to keep the air hole as small as possible to stop the spiders crawling down it and laying eggs in my mouth.
I ask my brother to hold my hand. I whisper hard . . . He pretends to be asleep, then he grabs my hand and rubs it around the hairs on his dick . . .
Next day, I nick a tube of glue from the garage, shave off my eyebrow, and paste the hairs round my little dick. I too will be a man.
I try to be true to my little heart. I try, but everything comes out back to front, I stammer and piss the bed . . . I read everything backwards: no matter how hard I flex my eyes I can’t distinguish my ‘p’s from my ‘q’s. It ties my mind into knots . . . My mother tried with me, she really did, she read me bedtime stories right up until my teens, even when it hurt her throat to carry on. I wet the bed to repay her.
I tried to conceal it, I tried pissing down the side of the mattress where no one would notice. I started walking backwards, heaping more and more shame upon myself.
When my father came to hear of this new development he threw an epileptic fit — he was absolutely one hundred per cent up in arms.
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��So now he’s a bed wetter! Urinating all over the floor wasn’t enough! Now at last you see what this toad is made of! It’s your own fault, Juny. Don’t tell me that I didn’t warn you! You spoil him! It’s the company he keeps! Christ he should never have been allowed to set a single foot on that council estate! My words or somebody else’s? They’re all didicois and gypsies, Juny, every goddamned one of those Irishmen is on social security!’
As far as my father saw it, I was crawling around in a cesspool of my own making, raking through the shit with the lowest of the low. Every last one of his fears and predictions had been fulfilled, four times over!
‘So that’s how you repay your mother is it? In piss! The little pig pisses his bed does he? Exactly how old are you, Steven? One? Two? Three and a half, maybe? A baby, and I thought you were a young man! Look at him, Juny, he’s swimming in it, it must be those biscuits he eats! Well, how many buckets of urine do you want exactly? Full to the brim! Ten! Fifteen or twenty maybe? When we’re swimming in piss, then will you be satisfied?’
It was agreed that I was pasty, had legs like matchsticks with the wood scraped off, and that I smelled. I probably had a criminal nature and was heading for a good pasting. It was unanimous. And my father left. And no matter how hard I laugh, it is only to shed this wounded self, and how bitter it tastes.
My mother, my brother, and my nan too; none of them asked about my life nor thought to protect me. And I cried and I told them I wished I was dead . . . And no matter how hard I sobbed, they laughed at me. And I ran to the toilet and smashed my head against the wall, cracking the tiles . . . ’til I fell sobbing to my knees, the door locked.
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