It’s Susan; she’s come down here to say goodnight, and tuck Joanne in, and give her her kissing practice. ‘French kissing’, it’s called. They hold each other, run their fingers through each other’s hair and rub noses. The secret is, is to wriggle your tongue, you both do it, inside each other’s mouths. You stroke them together, snake-like. Sue shows me with Joanne, then gets me to do it with her. She bites at my lips, giggles and pulls away, her hands on my shoulders. She leans in again, she sticks out her girl’s tongue, I suck on it. She holds me with her eyes, dark. Thirteen years old, a real woman! I watch her tutoring Joanne, deep, long . . . They giggle and call me over, Susan pats the bed by her side.
‘Come and sit with us, Steven.’
I blush and hold back.
‘Come on, Joanne wants you to, don’t you Joanne?’
Joanne nods and hides her face in the pillow. I grin and pad over . . . Sue holds out her hand, pulls me close and kisses me.
‘Don’t you think my bum’s too big? Do you think it sticks out too much?’
She bends over and asks me to look at it, she twists her neck and inspects it in the mirror.
‘Isn’t it too muscley?’
It’s true, it does stick out, and with a big split.
‘Joanne’s daddy makes me play with his willy when I stay round there. He sends Joanne to bed and I have to sit on his lap. He plays with my tits, then he puts his tongue in my mouth. It’s horrible, like a slug! I don’t like it. He sucks on my tits and makes me play with his willy, he gets it out and I have to rub it . . .’
Joanne looks down, waif-like, a pony-tail, just a kid. She looks down at my legs, my bruised shins.
‘You’ll get bone cancer.’
I put my hands between my thighs and hide my legs under the bunk. I cover them with my hands.
She tries a little smile, and toys with the anchor.
‘When Susan isn’t there I have to do it. I don’t like it. He makes me feel his thing and I’m not allowed to tell my mummy.’
‘I’m glad my daddy isn’t like that!’
I look to Susan, I see her little woman’s mouth speak, and my hand goes up to my fucked-up teeth. I feel my lips, I want to be able to speak as well, to tell the truth, to explode this world. But I can’t, I just sit there dumb, staring at Joanne’s bitten nails. Her fingers playing with the end of a rope, plaits, that’s what they were like, lots of intricate coils, bits of cotton, frayed and dipped in tar.
‘He puts it in your mouth and then it squirts, it tastes yuck!’
So Joanne’s father had his monkey stick out, too? I listened with bated breath . . . praying that I too could spill the beans on Norman . . . that I too could speak bravely . . . But the cabin turned to silence.
I keep my trap shut. I don’t breathe a word, not even to Susan and Joanne. I lack all belief. We touch, we hold hands, we walk by the river bank, the occasional windmill; just kids really, kids at heart. . . But somehow broken. They could share with me, but not me with them.
20. BIG BROTHER
One thing that you’re never short of as a kid, is other people’s big opinions: the world’s full of them. The looming faces of the grown-ups — and they’re all at great pains to point out the sacrifices they’ve made on your behalf, and all the suffering that you’ve caused, in particular. Parents aren’t quite happy with their sprogs until they’ve twisted them into the same miserable, guilt-ridden victims that they are. And even then they’re not quite sure that you’re apologetic enough, that you quite know how to say sorry with the right amount of humility. That you understand the inherent vileness of your character and the terrible inconvenience you’ve caused everyone by just being born. They say it twice, they repeat themselves, pausing for maximum effect. They look away in disgust, staring out the window, fiddling with themselves and sucking their teeth.
Everyone kept telling me that I’d be alright once I’d grown out of my obnoxious adolescent ways, in ten years or so, once I’d had a few rough corners knocked off.
‘He’ll soon quieten down and start toeing the line, you mark my words! Or he’d better, because this world certainly isn’t going to put up with him the way he is! If he thinks for one moment that it will, then he’s got another think coming!’
She talks about me as if I’m not there, as if I knocked over my egg and chips on purpose.
‘Shut up your whinging! Jesus Christ, that voice!’ She screams and slings the saucepan at me. ‘You’re in for a rude awakening! Just you wait ’til your father gets home!’ She holds onto the door frame and starts to sob. ‘Just bloody get out! Go on, get out!’
My brother and mother never tired of forecasting violent and merciless beatings ahead of me for the foreseeable future, and a great big one, beyond.
The old girl was more than suspicious of my involvement with the criminal element from over on the council estate. There were mysterious break-ins and disappearances. But no matter what threats were levelled at me, no matter how many times I was cross-questioned, I kept mum. I didn’t breathe a word, suffering silently under a blanket of guilt. I moped about, studying the paint work.
‘He’ll have chronic acne when he grows up!’ That’s my brother’s big opinion. He sidles over and stares down at me, curls his upper lip and parts his hair. ‘He’s just the type, and he’ll scar as well, I can already see it!’
One of his many pronouncements — a blow from every direction, that was my childhood . . . And always that big lug sounding off! Arrogant. Studious. And the size of the head on him, phew! It gave my mother stitches, no kidding, real ones. They had to lace her up again like an old boot! You’ve heard the story before? Me too, only I know it backwards, it’s my history, my little thread of existence.
‘He’s lucky he wasn’t born a thalidomide! I said you’re lucky you weren’t born a thalidomide, Steven! You’re the exact right age!’
I looked at him. ‘A what?’
‘A thlid! Those kids with no arms, just little flippers — you’re lucky you weren’t born a flipper!’
I stared down at the deck. This was obviously some kind of a threat, something else I had to be grateful for. He saunters out the kitchen and goes for a wank. He gets one of the old man’s tit books, stuffs it down his jeans and locks himself in the toilet. He’s in there for two solid hours. Then he calls me over to look at it. He slaps his dick from side to side. He makes it thwack on his thighs.
He buttons up and marches into the hallway; he makes demands, swearing at the old girl. He wants to be like all the other kids at school. They have fathers who come home, who play with them and share their hobbies, fathers who don’t disappear for months on end, so why can’t he? He makes an extensive list of his grievances . . .
He throws bigger and better tantrums: twice the beatings and twice the violence. Directed at me personally, you understand. I have to suffer by the law of succession. He instates himself as my acting father in the old man’s absence. By God, he’ll install some discipline into my snivelling, worthless existence! He’s got all the attributes, a proper little tin Hitler. He rubs himself, he boils like a turnip . . . He shows me what for! vicious blows! twice my size! absolutely nothing I can do about it.
Plastic elephants are out for a start! No more day-dreaming about squirrels and dinosaurs, certainly not! I’m in for a rude awakening! the beating of a life-time! He draws graphic illustrations. He paints the sky, the big lug. He can’t abide ignorance -a real chip off the old block.
‘You can’t even read or write yet? Pathetic! I could read and write when I was four, couldn’t I, mother?’
He looks to her to back him up . . . She wrings the dishcloth in her hands.
‘I’ve done all I can, I’ve tried teaching him . . .’ She chews it over . . . ‘He’s not worth it! He’s stubborn and argumentative! Just like his soddin’ father!’
My mother stands there up to her elbows in pond water, she froths about in there fishing for potato eyes . . . She turns on the cold tap and knocks a
tea cup onto the deck.
‘Shit! Bugger! Christ almighty! Now look what you’ve made me do! Just shut up the pair of you!’
I cross my eyes and toy with my gun; I cock it . . . My brother takes a kick at me. I see it coming, I dodge, he misses. I fall to the ground and scream . . .
‘For crying out loud, stop whinging!’
She comes at me, brandishing her saucepan . . . I roll in the shit of the floor; I play dead.
My brother’s tempers? His kicking me? And twice my size? Not very fair . . . and I don’t forget! Like my plastic elephant, that’s me — memory! I pride myself on it.
Where is our saviour? The hours have ticked by and none of us have been chosen. I check my timepiece, a quarter past freckle -it is time to spit, to disentangle my damaged heart.
21. IN WHICH NANA LEWIS GETS KITTENISH
Next up, Nana Lewis pops her clogs . . . We should have seen that one coming. As far as my mother was concerned, it was nothing short of cold blooded murder: she always swore that that’s exactly what it was.
‘He drove her to it, as sure as I’m standing here now! And then he has the nerve to not even turn up at the funeral! Can you believe it?’
It’s true that Nana Lewis took all of our tragedies on the chin — she was right in the thick of it, right in the firing line. And the old man kept heaping on new miseries; there was even rumours that he owed her money, and not two or three pounds either but substantial amounts! It seems he’d been touching her on the quiet, rifling her nest egg, and he was determined not to pay her back a single farthing, on principle!
Smoking forty Guards a day, and the old man rummaging with her heart, tugging at her purse strings like that — that’s when people start dropping. A stranger feeling their wallets? — There’s a snake in the grass! Money kills!
What with all the bickering and open hostilities, it was bound to affect the old bird’s health, it worried away at her. Even when she was laid up, the old man was always insinuating, pouring lie on top of lie, layer upon layer; it really was worse than cement. He invented even thicker and thicker crusts. In the end she took to her bed and never got up again, only that once, to go to the loo. She lifts her head from the pillow, puts her feet over the edge of the bed and then flops back. Grandad Lewis thought she was just play-acting, getting a little kittenish.
She didn’t want us kids to see her when she was laid up, she was always hoping for a recovery. ‘Let my angels remember me as I was, Juny.’ That’s how she spoke. All her brown hair turned grey, and she flopped back on the bed, onto my grandad’s lap.
‘Let my angels remember me as I was.’ Her last request. She’d of really liked to have seen us kids, you see, but she didn’t want us to see her, to see the effect, what life had sucked out of her. The mask of life slipped — cheerio! And she flops back onto the bed, onto grandad’s lap. And he thought she was only play-acting, only she wasn’t, she was dead.
That morning there was a starling trapped in the chimney, just above the boiler. It was fluttering around in there, slowly dying . . . It kept it up the whole afternoon, ’til my mother took Hearboy out for walkies and when she got back it was dead. ‘That was a sure sign!’ according to my mother . . . An omen!
And I got out of school late because they put me in detention for crossing the school field again. Walking on the grass -you weren’t allowed to walk on the grass! And I jumped the fence and that took the biscuit! First they hit me, then I had to write lines. They ask me which hand I write with, then cane the other one so’s I can still write . . . And if it isn’t the cane, it’s the slipper. Six of the best! On your arse! We hobbled around that school blowing on our hands like a bunch of cripples.
I take my school bag off and kick it. I chuck it as high as it’ll go, swing it by its strap and smack it into the wire fence. Then I see Norman revving up his old banger outside the school gate, sat there behind the hot glass. He leers at me through the windscreen, like I’m his woman or something. He opens the door and tells me to get in.
‘Your mother asked me to pick you up . . . It’s about your grandmother . . . Do you want to go for a little drive first?’
He pushes the bulge in his trousers down. He takes off his specs and ‘hahs’ on them. He looks up at me and pats the seat next to him. ‘Come on Fred, we can go up the woods for a little walk.’
‘I want to go home! My mum says I’ve got to be home for tea!’
I tell him straight, he’s got to take me home right away, on my mother’s orders, and no scenic routes, she’s expecting me. I impress it upon him, it is as simple as that, or I won’t get in his poxy car! I talk through the window, he takes his little tin out, and fiddles about with the strands . . . He rolls one, lights up and blows out the smoke. ‘OK, in you get, I’ll take you home, your mother’s got some bad news for you.’
I climb in beside him; he looks over his shoulder and pulls away. As soon as he makes the gear change his hand goes for my dick, he spins the wheel and swerves across the road . . . He tries to get it out, there and then, the car cranking away in second . . .
I get hold of the door handle and cross my legs. He slams on the anchors. He’s got something jammed in his zip — he lets out a howl. I grab my bag, jump out and head straight up the road, I make a bee-line for the house. His zip goes down and I jump out the car! I don’t dilly-dally: I’ve smelt the colour of his shit stick before and I’ve no wish to smell it again . . . Whoops! And I’m out the car, running into the bosom of my family, so to speak. Up the garden path, under the little arcade of trees. I go straight in without looking back.
‘Nana is dead . . .’ she gasps. She pulls at her face . . . ‘He killed her! Sure as I’m standing here now! As sure as if he struck her down with his own hand!’
Norman comes hobbling in behind me, limping on account of his dick.
‘I’ve already told him, Juny . . . I explained it all to him in the car, he’s in shock . . . He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, ignore him!’
He blushes and adjusts himself. All of a sudden my little cock is the last thing on his mind. He’s found a new role to play. He reads his part and steps straight in, no rehearsals. One minute he wants to suck me off, the next he’s choking back a tear, dabbing at his oysters, the concerned family friend. Just like that! The truth of the matter is, he didn’t dare start feeling me up, not in front of the old girl, with Nana Lewis not yet in her grave. Heavens no, there’s a time and place for everything.
He puts his arm round my mother’s shoulders and walks her to her seat. . . He even tries consoling me. I eye the bastard. In fact I wasn’t at all surprised, the big turn-coat! He’s shitting himself in case I spill the beans about the seamier side of his personality. He’s hamming it up, waving his arms about, embracing and emphasising, hogging the whole fucking stage. He looks at my mother sideways, to see what kind of effect he’s having — he looks away double quick and pulls a different mask. He quits undressing me and gets on with the task in hand — the family friend of the bereaved. He makes explosions with his mouth, spraying fountains of platitudes.
‘I know, Juny, I know, he drove her to it . . . Such a wonderful wonderful woman . . . Yes, there’s no doubt about it, death lies at his door! The martyr’s death! Your sweet mother, God rest her soul!’
He bends over backwards to agree, balding, grey, the dick showing between his legs. He even invents himself a little dance, right there on the spot, a kind of jig. His cock must have gone limp. He rotates and prances, the arms go up and a little arabesque, he spins and sits down; he’s fagged . . . He rolls himself another one, opens his gob, picks the tobacco from between his plate and lights up. A little lighter, embossed with a packet of Chesterfields, real charming, enamelled, intricate. He tells us the whole story about how he found it under his floorboards when he was looking for the stop cock. He tries to side-track us . . . He hands it to me to look at — OK, so it’s some lighter, but that shindig? It was enough to make you puke! Really, to see that old queen
play-acting like that, then fiddling with himself under the table! I look at the HP sauce bottle.
The bird died in the chimney and Nana Lewis conked out . . . and the old girl went grey . . .
‘I’m going to have a nervous breakdown!’ she assured me.
She held onto herself, her lungs hurt. . . The old man called up but he couldn’t make the funeral. ‘Business commitments’, he called it. The truth is he couldn’t face up to the corpse, on account that he still owed it money.
22. ANALYSIS OF A SOUL RANCID
It was at the end of the road, a barracks, low, derelict and wind-swept. You were on the scrap heap, aged eleven and a half. Dockyard-fodder, signed, stamped and sealed, and no back chat! A special mixture of emotions: Walderslade Secondary School. Northern blasts, pinning us to the hillside. Every window in that dump shook like billy-oh, rattling in their sockets. And then the rain comes in, cascading down the walls in rivulets, whole tidal waves . . . the place was awash!
You think I’m joking? It just goes to show your ignorance. You can’t overstate an experience like that, it would be impossible. That special stench of doom, echoing corridors and chalk dust -this thick!
It had a reputation, alright — you couldn’t just walk in there, you had to have sunk to a certain depth, to have achieved something with your life. Retards mostly, no-hopers, and even then you needed a proposer and a seconder, and not just anybody, somebody who fitted the bill. Someone with all the right attributes: vicious, villainous and petty, with just the right amount of vindictiveness. The type of character who could limbo under a dog turd without dirtying their nose.
Crowsfeet fitted the bill. One minute I’m walking up from the bus stop with the old girl, the next thing this mush runs up to us and hands me an Easter egg. I look into his dismal eyes, grey and whipped, and down at the chocolate egg, nicked more than likely. He wants to be friends . . . He wipes his gob on his sleeve.
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