The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness

by Graham Caveney

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  ‘The mere process of learning is allied to mutiny.’

  Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman

  We’re not in a band, which doesn’t stop us from coming up with names for our band. Quite the opposite; thinking of band names is the music that our non-band makes. The Tranquilised Pilots, The Footnotes, Semolina Ping Pong, ACAS, The Delinquent Gymnasts, Trotsky’s Dumb-bells, The Fag Ends, all were formed on the school bus to Blackburn, only to break up on the walk up the hill, usually due to ideological differences. ‘There’s no way The Air Hostesses would release a single called “Adolescent Breakdown”,’ John would insist, ‘especially if we go on tour supporting The Raincoats.’ Thus were The Air Hostesses dissolved, their non-single un-released, a mere two minutes after their debut non-appearance. ‘How about Penguin Genocide, or The Ra Ra Shirts . . . our debut single to be called “My Donkey Jacket’s at the Cleaners”?’

  The second time he comes round to my house he brings with him an armful of albums and the instruction to replace my 10cc records with, ‘These. They are important.’ The cover of the first record has a photograph of what looks like a skiffle band, except that the guitarist is wearing a Hawaiian shirt and the singer a white V-necked kaftan. He stands in front of his band, crazed and curly hair balancing on top of a bemused expression and a what-the-hell-do-I-know shrug. I’d heard Jonathan Richman without knowing who it was. His ‘Egyptian Reggae’ had provided the pretext for Pan’s People to dress like Cleopatra and do a shuffle dance routine on TOTP complete with Liz Taylor-ish costumes and camel motifs. There were, of course, no vocals and so I hadn’t realized that Richman was also, what? A Dadaist pretending to be a seven-year-old boy? Walt Whitman writing nursery songs? This was not what was meant by post-punk or new wave, was it? It had DIY iconoclasm, the sound of having being improvised in his dad’s garage. There was mischief without the mayhem. Where was the spit, the urban sneer? This boy-man was singing about leprechauns and the ice-cream man, for God’s sake. John-call-me-Conrad Mullen plays me ‘Afternoon’ for the third time and now I’m starting to hear it: Existentialist Doo-Wop. It’s funny without being ironic, goofily gentle.

  We work through the record, delighted, replaying key tracks. John tells me it’s like Blake, the whole thing about childhood and innocence and experience, the one about flying into the mystery. I say that The Modern Lovers are like hippies, but hippies that sound like they’ve gone back to the fifties when music still sounded as though someone had just thought of it.

  He plays me Fairport Convention – ‘Time Will Show the Wiser’ – and does his version of a pogo dance, a scary performance that resembles someone in a straitjacket having a seizure. Next up The Chieftains, followed by Simon and Garfunkel. Then The Raincoats singing ‘No Side to Fall In’, scratchy violins, percussions and three-part harmonies. I suspect he secretly fancies one of the women (Gina Birch?) but that he thinks it’d be somehow wrong to admit it. He tells me that it isn’t a secret actually, and that there’s nothing wrong with it and anyway it’s complicated. It’s like the song itself, trying to find somewhere you can fall into, and do I know about Lola? I don’t know about Lola and so he tells me. I’m fascinated. I make him tell me again. So, she walks like a woman and talks like a man? Which might explain why . . . fuck! And when he gets down on his knees, they look at each other, and he wants things to stay that way. Double fuck! Suddenly 10cc’s Eric Stewart pretending that he’s Not In Love doesn’t seem so appealingly nuanced. And Coca-Cola not trans-sexuality was the censor’s problem? It’s a mixed up muddled up shook up world . . .

  A few weeks later John tells me something even more shocking. We’re talking about the sheer genius of Tom Robinson Band’s ‘Power in the Darkness’ – a not unusual topic of conversation. We agree that it’s a pity that he seems to be better known for the anthemic ‘2-4-6-8 Motorway’ than for his agit-pop. We agree that it’s the keyboards that make all the difference, the way that Mark Ambler’s organ plays off Danny Kustow’s guitar. I tell him about the sleeve notes, the ones that say politics isn’t about politicians, but about being on the dole, or your mate getting Paki-bashed. Yet I’m a bit baffled. The bit after that says it’s also about your kid sister not being able to get an abortion. What is that bit doing there with all these other noble causes, the other righteous victims? Surely politics shouldn’t be about the kid sister (that I don’t have) not having to have an abortion?

  And so he tells me. He tells me about a woman’s right to choose, the position I hold now but had never even heard about in the years I was growing up. Until that moment – halfway up Shear Brow in Blackburn, satchel in hand – it had never once occurred to me that abortion was anything other than a mother killing her baby. So deeply ingrained in me was this belief that I didn’t consider it a belief. It was the natural order of things, like the blood in my veins. I didn’t consider myself anti-abortion in the same way I didn’t consider myself anti-murder. To define myself in these ways would be to imply that there was a debate to be had. And as the act was so self-evidently wrong, how could there be a rationale in its favour? Of course I was against abortion; how could anyone be otherwise?

  In the lobby of our school there was a cabinet with pictures of foetuses in jars. I recognize them now as the propaganda tools of the so-called pro-Life movement. At the time they were just part of the furniture, like the names of past pupils carved into wooden plaques. I once told Father O’Neill that I was having trouble sleeping, couldn’t get off or kept waking up. He told me that this meant I’d been uncomfortable in the womb. He told me this with all the authority of a doctor diagnosing eczema; no hesitation, absolute certainty. I was, according to him, already alive as me in the womb – a pre-social soul awaiting its corporeal body.

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  ‘Until I learn to accept my reward . . .’

  The Teardrop Explodes, ‘Reward’

  I’m fighting a running battle with my mum. About my hair, although it feels like something much bigger than that. She wants it cut, cut ‘nicely’. She says, It makes you look ill, it’s bad for your skin, your acne. I say, It’s my hair, and, Other people have long hair. She says, We’re not other people. It’s one of my mum’s recurring motifs, ‘we’re not other people’, meaning, I guess, that we are exactly like other people, just not like the other people who we don’t want to be like. Respectability, it is her guiding principle. She has internalized respectability from her hair (in headscarf) to her toes (in BHS slippers). It runs through her like the writing in Blackpool rock. The Accrington Observer carries stories about who appeared in court and why. ‘Drunk and Disorderly’, ‘Shoplifting’, ‘Non-Payment of TV Licence’. She reads and sighs, sighs and reads. The shame. Have they none? She wouldn’t be able to hold her head up. She’d rather die. Those are the people who we are not like.

  I decide I am a communist – a catholic-communist with a double small ‘c’. I want a militant version of Christ’s kindness, a sort of socialist sermon on the mount. I tell Mum that I’m a communist but not to be cross because I’m still a catholic. I tell her that if she thinks about it, Jesus was a communist too and she says she supposes that he was. She overhears me and John Mullen referring to our teachers by their first name or nicknames, us thrilling at our transgressive familiarity: ‘Tosh’ Tom Kennedy, Father Simo, Jock Roland. Her chin goes up, her eyes flare and she says in a voice that can stop a double-decker bus: ‘You will not refer to those men in that way, not in this house. You’ll show them the respect they deserve.’

  I show the Rev Kev my poem, the one that starts ‘Red is the color / The colour / Of life / No matter which way you spell it’, and he says that poetry is about using words like musical instruments. We sit in his office and sip sherry. We are, I decide, meeting as equals. Or as equal as it’s possible for two poets to be. I mean Byron and Shelley weren’t exactly equal; nor Wordsworth and Coleridge. Yet he is listening to me with rapt attention. He takes books down from his shelves, a well-thumbed copy of Eliot. He reads to
me. ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. He says, Listen to the gaps.

  I spend the morning sorting his books, firstly by genre, then period, then alphabetically. Amongst a pile of papers on his desk I come across one of his undergraduate essays called something like ‘Transcendent Love or Self-Deception? A Study of Antony and Cleopatra’. I flick through it feeling voyeuristic and intrusive, as though I am rifling through his bank-book or underwear drawer. I don’t know the play (and still don’t), which doesn’t stop me from being engrossed in the essay. I don’t understand it, which engrosses me all the more. So my teacher had himself been taught, had read and written and essayed just like his students. It was a thrilling discovery. He’d existed before I knew him. Before I was born.

  I talk to him about it over lunch – a lunch he buys me in a fairly posh restaurant, the first time I’ve set foot in one. The place has deep carpets, the menu is pretending that it was written with a quill. I confess that I found his essay; read it, loved it, didn’t understand it.

  He tells me about the book that he should write but knows he never will. It will – won’t, would – be about self-deception, the stories people tell themselves to hide from their fundamental vulnerability. As a priest he knows that it is precisely this vulnerability – our lack, our loss – that binds us together. If he’s feeling mischievous he calls it original sin. Literature’s power is to take this essential flaw and dramatize it. At its best, literature acknowledges what God knows: that we are our imperfections.

  When the waiter asks if everything’s all right, Rev Kev says, un-sniffily, that his steak was a bit fatty, but apart from that fine. I had never realized that the waiter’s question – everything all right? – could have any other answer except the one given by my parents: ‘Yes, smashing / lovely / beautiful.’ Not so much an answer as an apology, a response to an accusation. This wasn’t that. This was something else. A lesson in politeness and power: ‘A bit fatty, but apart from that fine.’ This: this is how I will be.

  He is wearing civvies, jeans and a purple button-down shirt.

  He tells me about his job and I thrill at hearing him describe it as a job. He tells me about his work for the Samaritans, about the man who had been held captive for years by his wife; about the heavy breathers and the perverts who demand that you listen to their fantasies.

  He tells me that after the film version of The Exorcist came out, there was a huge upsurge in cases of possession – it became quite the thing, highly fashionable. He tells me about having to attend to a young woman who wanted him to exorcise her, and him having to read Peter Blatty’s book to get himself in character. She tried to do the swearing but wasn’t very good at it. She wanted the whole Latin and holy water thing. He gave her tea and digestive biscuits.

  I tell him that I’ve asked my parents about Crete and that they’re delighted, of course I can go. Actually they’re worried about the cost, but they’ll find the money somehow. Talking of which, he pays me for the morning’s work. There’s a few other jobs if I’m interested – a PTA night coming up. He could pull a few strings – get me work behind the bar. Money shouldn’t be an issue. If I want to go to Crete then I – we – should go.

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  ‘. . . he knew that henceforth the entire devotion of his religion, the whole ecstatic fervour of his prayers, would be connected with, nay, inspired by, one object alone. With the same reverence and humility as he would have felt in touching the consecrated elements he laid his hands on the curl-crowned head, he touched the small pale face, and raising it slightly, he bent forward and gently touched the smooth white brow with his lips.’

  John Francis Bloxam, The Priest and the Acolyte (from The Chameleon, 1894)

  I loved being groomed. If I had my adolescence to do all over again, not only would I want to be groomed by Kevin O’Neill I would want to be groomed by others too (collective noun for groomers? A nest, a smarm, a spoil?). I would want a spoil of groomers lending me books, talking to me about mankind’s insufficiency and gently making it known that the steak was too fatty in restaurants. Maybe I didn’t have enough groomers. Maybe if my science teachers had been paedophiles I’d have done better at chemistry. Or maybe they were paedophiles but I simply wasn’t to their taste. Is this sick? Not all of my past needs to be arranged along those lines, abusers and cynical groomers, the groomed and the cynically abused.

  Not all of it. But some of it.

  As I’ve said, I’ve got a stupid name. Before I even finish pronouncing my surname I automatically begin spelling it, swallowing the irritation that wants to say: ‘It’s not that bloody difficult . . . C. A. V. E. N. E. Y.’ It is a name that seems irreducible to a nickname, that wants to resist any linguistic back-slapping or semantic matiness. The ‘ney’ means that I can’t follow the rest of my peer group down the road to a democratic elongation. I can’t become a Caveney-y, and so a Caveney I remain.

  The ‘Graham’ hasn’t helped much either. How different would my life have been if I’d have joined the ranks of the Gaz-es and the Baz-es, the Tels, the Doms, the Matts and the Cols? Or an abbreviation that can become its own rightful name, a Tony or an Andy say. I could have gone for Fred or Ben and even Jeremy can live in hope of becoming Jez. But Graham remains Graham, no matter what. My parents didn’t want a name that would become something – someone – else. It is a name chosen for its self-containment, for its refusal to resurface anywhere else. It is a name of social aspiration, of gentle upward mobility. You either say (t)his name in full, or you don’t say it at all. Thus announced Jack and Kathleen Caveney in choosing ‘Graham’.

  Is this why it sticks in my throat now? When I say my name I can feel the syllables protest in my trachea; they emerge reluctantly, cringing slightly as though embarrassed at having to arrange themselves in such a non-euphonic order. ‘Graham Caveney’ – too many long vowels, those whiney ‘a’s’ getting all tumbled up in themselves in their rush to get the fuck out of my mouth. I aspire to a bubbling stream of speech – an uninterrupted meander from throat to tongue to air. Yet what emerges is strangled and malnourished, as though the words have been deprived of oxygen and emerge pale and apologetic into the enemy territory that is just outside my mouth – the place that is no longer me but not quite you.

  In my voice can be heard all the conflicts of ‘boy-made-good’ – hidden resentment, pre-emptive apologies, pretensions and uncertainties. Except that it is not just boy-made-good. It is boy-made-good-made-very-bad-trying-to-make-good-again. Say ‘aaaaaah’: open wide.

  I tell the Rev Kev that my mum is always repeating herself, and that it gets on my nerves. He’s kind. He tells me that one of the reasons my mum may feel the need to repeat herself is that, historically, she has never been listened to. He makes me re-love my mum, and I love him for it.

  He says an odd thing. He says that he’s not got a talent for poetry – a cloth ear when it comes to his own attempts – but that he does have a feel for the aphorism. He tells me that he came up with one recently. He tells me that it goes: ‘If you get a friend and he’s wise and true / Then fuck him before he fucks you.’ I remember being shocked, not by the language but by the cynicism. I think about it for a long time and decide that it’s a mini-parable about not idealizing your friends, about remembering that they are humans also, flawed fleshy humans, and that we are fucked if we forget it. I think about it for a long time. I am still thinking about it.

  I tell him that I wish I could tell jokes, that they’re a thing I just can’t do. He laughs and says, ‘Oh, but you can.’

  Each morning I go to mass. It is often only me and him. We don’t acknowledge anything other than prayer and the Eucharist.

  I show off. I tell him that I’d realized that Beckett’s novels rely heavily on the letter ‘M’ – the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, unlucky for some, and also the date of Beckett’s birthday. He nods as though he knew this (did he know this?) and says, ‘Like Kafka’s K, the eleventh. Prime numbers. Like us. We’re both prime numbers.’<
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  The morning assembly, the prayers, the announcements. I think, What will we talk about later?

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  ‘Logical advice gets you in a whirl’

  Joe Jackson, ‘It’s Different For Girls’

  Quite why I didn’t tell my parents that I was working behind the bar for a Parent–Teacher night, I still don’t know. Maybe something to do with bars, and with Parent– Teacher nights.

  I know that Kathleen would both approve and disapprove of bar-work. She would be proud that I had been asked, was contributing to the Crete fund. She’d be pleased that: I’m making an effort, earning a few quid, taking some responsibility. She’d be worried that: I’m too young to be pouring drinks, that we aren’t that bloody hard up, that it is too much responsibility. And: Do you need special clothes? Do they need our permission? What about your tea?

  I know that Jack both approves and disapproves of Parent–Teacher nights. He liked that they talked to each other, the teachers and the parents; it was what was wrong with his schooling, the fact that they never talked to each other. They might pick up on something that the other had missed: you’d never get a full picture otherwise. And he was suspicious that they were always bloody talking to each other. ‘Hob-nobbing’ is what it was, trying to get their foot in the door, their feet beneath the table. No wonder you never got a full picture.