The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness

by Graham Caveney

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  ‘Cheap holiday in other people’s misery . . .’

  The Sex Pistols, ‘Holidays in the Sun’

  And so I don’t go to Blackpool that year, and neither do my parents. We go instead to Fleetwood, to a caravan that is wondrous just to sit in and listen to the rain. Aunty Mary and her family are in one they bought a few years back, an investment that was daringly aspirational at the time. She’s done quite well for herself, my Aunty Mary. Her husband – my Uncle Jack – is a painter and decorator, a job that was a real trade before we all became convinced that we could do it ourselves. She no longer ‘has to work’ – a phrase always used with an equal mix of awe and resentment – although she cooks Jack’s meals, does his book-keeping, orders his supplies, raises my two cousins and helps to raise me.

  During primary school I would go there for my lunch – ‘dippy eggs and toast’, her speciality. Now at secondary school I still go for the occasional Friday night sleepover. I don’t want Mary to be my mum, but I do want John to be my brother, just as I want Helen and her tartan-stitched Oxford bags to be my sister (with a Girlfriend option, once I figure out what girlfriends are for).

  On Fridays we gorge on crisps and pop, take turns playing records, except that I never seem to get a turn. Helen plays George McCrae’s ‘Rock Your Baby’, Hot Chocolate and Showaddywaddy. There’s an insane thing by Darts – ‘Daddy Cool’ – and the middle bit has almost a separate song built into it. When this bit happens – the Girl Can’t Help It bit – I do my impression of a demonic Den Hegarty, the one with the pantomime quiff, and roll around on the rug that is my stage holding the hairbrush that is my microphone. John plays ‘Denis’ by his new favourite band even though Helen says he only likes the song because he luuurrrves the singer. John says that she – Helen – luuurrrrrves the lead singer in Showaddywaddy even though he looks like someone from The Planet of the Apes.

  There’s a song called ‘Baby Stop Crying’ – Bob Dylan (I don’t yet think of him as one-word-only-needed Dylan). When it comes to the chorus, we all start to shout at Dylan’s imaginary ‘baby’, singing along in the manner of the harassed mums we hear in Accy Market: ‘Stop crying . . . Shut it! I’ll give you something to cry about!!’ (Dylan pleading his heart out . . . ‘Baby, please stop crying . . .’). ‘Will you stop that bloody racket, I’ve had it up to here . . .’ (chorus again: ‘stop crying’) . . . ‘Straighten your face you miserable cow . . .’ (we’re becoming hysterical now . . . upping each other’s ante) ‘I’ll give you such a pasting when we get home . . .’ (do de do de do . . . ‘stop crying / stop crying / stop crying’ sung in that iconic whine) ‘Stop! Bloody! Crying! Stop it! For God’s sake . . . Will you give it a rest? . . . Stop it! Stop that crying . . . I hate you!’ (helpless with laughter now, the earnestness of Dylan’s plea seems to be blending with our own crass parodies.) . . . StoooOOOOP Blooooody Cryyyying.

  Aunty Mary comes through and tells us to stop shouting. John tells her that it’s not us she should be telling to stop, it’s Bob Dylan’s bloody girlfriend and her stupid bloody crying.

  I can’t remember when I knew that Aunt Mary was an alcoholic, perhaps only when I became one myself. The line was that ‘she liked a drink’ – a phrase that was elastic enough to cover a multitude of sins whilst hinting at redemptive pleasures. Aunt Mary fell down the stairs? Well, she does like a drink. But she seems all right and is having a laugh about it? She’s a bugger is that one, she likes a drink. Occasionally she ‘liked her drink’, a slightly harsher judgement, the implication being that she was more possessive of her drink, or that the drink was more possessive of her.

  I remember her sitting at the Formica table in her kitchen, fixing what she called a pick-me-up. Years later she would fix them for me, although by then we no longer called them pick-me-ups. Add one large brandy to an equally large Benedictine, mix with hot water and sip as though it is communion wine itself. There was a belief that Benedictine was medicinal. You would hear it all the time in the pubs and clubs: ‘a benny and hot’ to settle your stomach/ warm you through/ ward off a chill. It has the sickly-sweet taste of cough syrup, the warmth of the hot water colluding in the myth that what you are really drinking is a slightly more social version of Lemsip, not really drinking at all. More of an unprescribed tonic, in fact. Like the Guinness when pregnant, the Mackeson’s to build your strength up, the barley wine to sharpen the appetite, the couple of pints to relax you and the drop of whisky to help you to sleep.

  It never occurs to me to ask, when my mum tells me to go and run a few errands for Aunty Mary, why she can’t do them herself. Just as it never occurs to me that the pills she takes for her headache are anything more than pills she takes for her headache. And it doesn’t seem peculiar that before she leaves the house to go to her caravan in Fleetwood, she has to have a few of her pick-me-ups, any more than it seems peculiar that the only time she does leave the house is to go to her caravan in Fleetwood.

  I remember Jack mumbling a few things about her, about how she would test the patience of a bloody saint, or he’d sigh his exasperated sigh when Kath came back after one of her visits, teary and troubled. Still no one used the term alcoholic, let alone the word ‘agoraphobic’. The wisdom was that Aunty Mary ‘took after her father’, a diagnosis which suggested that nothing more needed to be said. (Occasionally there would be expansions on this: ‘a bad ’un’, ‘a wrong ’un’ and, intriguingly, ‘an eye for the women’, as though his drinking was a symptom of the more serious charge of promiscuity.)

  In Fleetwood there are bottles scattered throughout the caravan. Not ours, of course: me and Jack and Kath are in the next one over. But Aunty Mary’s is awash with homebrew. She began brewing her own a few months before, part of a new fad whereby she could make her addiction respectable by making it her hobby. It became ‘something to keep her busy’, something to occupy her mind. She spoke of it as though it were some wholesome rustic pursuit, like fell-walking or hang-gliding. ‘All my own work,’ she proudly announces, forcing on visitors a bottle of her homemade mild, which probably kicks in at around a not-so-mild 12 or 13%: ‘It’s all good stuff. I made it mi’self.’ Thus did Aunty Mary rid herself of the stigma of drinking at home.

  The caravan is part of a site – there are hundreds of them, row upon uniform row, each white and seeming to perch on its allotted patch. There is an amusement arcade which consists of a pinball machine, a telly bingo and one of those machines that threaten to send its whole load of 2p coins cascading over the edge if you could just get your own 2p to drop at the back and give them a nudge. There is a clubhouse, its promise that there will be entertainment every night of the week, something for everyone. We plan our week: one day in Blackpool (for old times’ sake); a day in Fleetwood itself (Kath wants to buy some fish); a round of pitch and putt; the rest of the time our own.

  At night we go to the clubhouse. If I say there was a Beauty Contest – an actual ‘c’mon girls it’s all a bit of fun who’s gonna be the first to volunteer?’ beauty contest – it will sound the stuff of cliché. But there was a beauty contest. To follow this up by saying that there was also a ‘knobbly knees contest’ feels like I’m mistaking some godawful sixties kitchen-sink realism for my actual life. But there was a knobbly knees contest. Music: Middle of the Road hearing their mama singing some chirpy chirpy cheep cheep song and then finding said mama gone. Repeat ad infinitum. Drinks: halves of lager and black, or lager and lime, or port and lemon; all ‘fizzy women’s drinks’, for women who want to be drunk, but who don’t like the taste of their drink. For the men, mild or bitter, punctuated by the occasional virile rum.

  And jokes: lots and lots of jokes: Pakis and mothers-in-law and husbands who can’t get it up and women who are begging for it and poofs and Paddies being stupid and the black fella who lives next door with the funny accent and the chinks and then yet another Paki along with some bird with big knockers-tits-melons-baps-gazungas-mammaries-anything-in-fact-except-breasts and the Germans (said
with another funny voice) and still more Paddies and Murphies who seem to be simultaneously forever on building sites but also perpetually on the dole (how does that work?) except that is when they’re not blowing themselves up with their home-made bombs and here’s an impression of an Indian-Paki which is much the same if not exactly the same as a Paki-Paki because they’re both the bloody same in that they’re not us and we’re not them and that’s the way it is and that’s the way it should be and that’s the way we like it and don’t worry about it cos it’s all a-bit-of-fun-can’t-take-a-joke-just-having-a-laugh-what’s-the-matter-with-you?

  I drink lemonade and eat crisps and I hate these people: these people who are no longer my own people. It is the kind of hate that is flat and heavy and weighed down with shame; a resentment that pushes my chin into my chest and keeps my shoulders stooped.

  I hate their parochiality, their lack of imagination posing as virtue, their fear of others posing as pride in themselves. I am a sulky teenager who takes his sulking seriously. I didn’t have an epiphany, no ‘I saw the Pistols/The Clash and knew that life would never be the same’ grand awakening. What I had was seven nights on a caravan site, a week of corrosive disenchantment.

  I have a friend who is convinced that when she heard Patti Smith sing ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine’, the words irrevocably altered the structure of her DNA. I envy her her certainty, her precision. I don’t remember that, but I do remember hearing her interpretation of Springsteen’s ‘Because the Night’. It was on that caravan site – the amusement arcade next to the clubhouse.

  I would escape there to play pinball and for some reason (a jukebox? a radio?) the song seemed to be permanently playing. I remember getting not quite an erection but a warm caress around my balls listening to that opening piano, the way it manages to be both teasing and ominous, the kind of minuet you might hear just before the scary bit in a black-and-white movie. And then she wailed, wailed from a place deep inside herself. ‘Take me now baby here as I am . . .’ It is a place whose contours are those of wilful and aggressive surrender, a place where we are both tyrannized and liberated by . . . what? Bodies? Ours? Other people’s? Something that’s in between them? Soon after I saw Patti Smith on The Old Grey Whistle Test. She was reciting poetry and singing about horses, singing as though she was in a séance, possessed. She was dressed in a man’s jacket, pantaloons and a wide-brimmed hat which she wore pulled down over heavy-eye-shadowed eyes. I loved the fact that she spelled her name with an ‘i’. It seemed to explain why she sounded a bit like a boy. And also why she looked like one. I’d seen androgynous men before – seventies glam rock consisted of nothing but. But androgynous women? Patti Smith looked like a cross between Joan of Arc and Charlie Chaplin. I stare at the TV screen, at this woman who is like no woman I’ve ever seen. And life gets bigger.

  It was the same summer I read Kafka, a Rev Kev Recommends that is my shelter from the world of the clubhouse. I sit in the caravan and read about a man who wakes up to discover that he has been transformed into a giant insect. When he tells his boss that he can’t come into work (or – wonderful touch – that he might be late) because of the whole insect thing, his boss doesn’t get it. He gets that he’s an insect: he does, after all, come round to Gregor’s house to look at him. What he doesn’t get is Gregor’s explanation of how this state of affairs – this Metamorphosis – is going to impact on his career prospects. And the reason he doesn’t get Gregor’s explanation is that Gregor’s words are no longer words. They are, as befits a giant insect, the noises of a giant insect. I am enraptured.

  Next

  ‘My condition is not unhappiness, but it is also not happiness, not indifference, not weakness, not fatigue, not another interest – so what is it then?’

  Franz Kafka, Diaries

  I sit in his office and I pour out the whole sorry bitter saga. About stupid bloody Fleetwood and the bloody stupid people. About how I hate the small-souled petty-minded white working class and how I hate myself for hating them. I am possessed of an adolescent’s outrage, terminally in despair at the world’s ignorance and lack of ambition. Possessed also by a Catholic sense of fallibility, that what is wrong with the world is what is wrong in us. People are lacking, are simply not good enough: it’s why we need the story of Christ. He nods his head, crosses his legs, a wise and patient man-priest.

  I had stopped going to confession a few years before, the ‘forgive me Father for I have sinned’ recitation of my weekly transgressions managing to be both inadequate and overly dramatic. Yet this is what this was, a therapeutic face-to-face with someone who understood the enormity of what it meant to want to be good. He didn’t give me a penance or offer me absolution. He sat and he listened and together we tried to make sense of my world. He called Jack ‘a man of the soil’, a phrase which elevated him from being a groundsman into a Lawrentian hero.

  It wasn’t just my dad who was changed by redescription; it was Kevin as well. He was showing me that the way in which we name someone transforms the way we see them. Is this the reason I stopped calling him ‘Father’, because I didn’t want to put him in competition with my actual father, or because you don’t call your friends ‘father’? Yet ‘Kevin’ never seemed quite right either – way too informal, like calling the Queen ‘Liz’. ‘The Rev Kev’ worked as description but not as a form of address. In private it was ‘you’, in public ‘Father’. I still haven’t worked out what to call you.

  We agreed that Kafka could well have been writing about adolescence (as well as about old age/ illness/ the human condition) and that – hahaha – my acne had given me a unique insight into Gregor’s condition. We kind of quite liked the sister, Grete, and the way she fussed over him and his food. He used the word ‘arthropodic’. It’s the first time I’d heard the word and I vowed to use it in the future. And yes, it was like a parable but also not at all like a parable.

  What made it so perplexing was that Kafka played it straight, didn’t go for allegory. It was like he wrote this most unnatural of stories in the most natural way possible, and that everything about the metamorphosis made perfect sense within its own terms, was a . . . yes, a closed circuit. So it wasn’t really that I hated my mum and dad; it was more that they were part of a closed circuit – this total bloody thing – which meant that they weren’t able to talk my language any more than Gregor’s parents could talk insect. Which was sort of funny, if you thought about it. As well as all the other things – sad, infuriating, boring. And these things can – do – co-exist. More than we think. That’s it: our emotional responses conflict more than we think about more things than we think and books can help us to hold these conflicts in some kind of balance.

  Perhaps, he suggests, Fleetwood had been invaluable in showing me how different worlds co-exist in me as well as the one we live in. I’m to remember how many other worlds there are. Next year I should maybe come with him to Crete. Every year he took two or three boys to Crete and next year it would be great if I could be one of them. I would be slightly younger than the other two – they were already in the sixth form – but I was old beyond my years and would get so much from it. Of course he would ask my parents. He was the headmaster.

  And so my question to you, now that I am no longer in danger of having to ask it, and you are incapable – what with the being dead and everything – of having to answer, is this: when did you decide to fuck me?

  Is that too coarse? Doesn’t take into account the various mixed motives and conflicting emotions of our lit-crit conversations? I apologize. Try again: was there a point at which you thought that this precocious adolescent boy, with the bad skin and bookish pretensions, might be someone who could ease your loneliness, perhaps even share your bed? After all, he/me awakened something in you, didn’t I/he? Was I a younger you? A reminder of the kind of curiosity and intensity that had once fuelled your own boyhood, maybe even made you want to be a priest? Had there been someone who understood you in the same way you understood me? A
priest of your own, perhaps? Who listened intently to your ambitions and dissatisfactions? Did he lend you books? Did you ease his pain in a way that brought its own not unproblematic rewards, a way that made you think, this is the way pain ought to be eased? And passed on?

  Next

  ‘You are at once both the quiet and confusion of my heart; imagine my heartbeat when you are in this state.’

  Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

  I buy a copy of Patti Smith’s Easter – it has That song on it and I skip all the other tracks in my haste to hear her tell me to take me now baby here as she is. Ask me what else is on the album (people did, people do) and I draw a complete blank. There’s a swear-y one, a hymn-y one and a punk rock-y one with a bad word in it. And then there is track three, side one.

  She is the reason I buy Mink DeVille – ‘Spanish Stroll’ – slick and camp, the backing vocals suggesting that all these strange figures – Mr Jim, Brother Johnny – had much more complex relationships with the singer than he was letting on.

  She’s the reason I get into Springsteen. Who would have thought that That song was written by a man, and not any man but the man who everyone said only wrote about cars and being born to run?

  Patti Smith is the reason I buy an album called New Wave – a compilation with a red cover and a photograph of a punk spitting beer into the camera. Her track was called ‘Piss Factory’, a four-and-a-half-minute jive-poem about a job she’d had ‘inspecting pipe’ (what?). I remember thinking that crappy jobs in America sound like cool-crappy jobs, whereas crappy jobs in Accrington were just crappy.