So, no. Best not.
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‘His entire existence as a priest was one long humble bow that wearied his soul . . . As a priest, he spent his days praising, adoring and sending up incense to God, and now he too was the God of that creature who feared him and who punctually offered her devotions to him.’
Eça de Queiroz, The Crime of Father Amaro
So I’m not working behind the bar for a PTA do. I’m going round to another lad’s house. No, they don’t know him. A lad my own age.
There are the wonderfully named optics, a word I decide to work into as many conversations as I can. There are brandy glasses and wine glasses, chilled white wine but not chilled – definitely not chilled – red wine. There’s gin and vodka which are easy to mix up but actually easy to tell apart – smell ’em if in doubt. There’s what we call mixers – tonics and lemon and cordials – that some people like to pour themselves and others like to have poured for them. There’s ladies’ glasses, the ones with the handles. Don’t – whatever you do – give a fella a drink in a ladies’ glass. That’d be – haha – more than your life’s worth. There’s pint-pot mugs and half-pint mugs, beer, obviously, barrelled and bottled. Mild and bitter, and a drink called mixed, which is half-mild half-bitter, and even though it doesn’t really matter which you pour first you should always pour mild first. Then there’s Guinness and bitter (a Black and Tan), but don’t worry about that and just ask if you need anything. Divide your time, a spell behind the bar, walk round with the wine. Top ’em up, keep it flowing.
I’d tried and been around strong drink before. One didn’t go to my aunt Mary’s on a Friday night – on any night – and not try strong drink. It tasted vile. Thick and heavy, it astonished me that she was able to drink so much of it.
The parents (and some teachers) are knocking it back here as well. This isn’t homebrew and crisps. This is PTA drinking, drinking that wants to get drunk without it being acknowledged. These people are drinking because they like it, and they like it a lot. They are drinking ‘stiffeners’ and ‘liveners’ and ‘scoops’. Jack’s right, they are on the make: there’s talk of sports days and prizes, school trips to the Vatican, little Offspring/Saint Name’s chances of A levels and beyond.
The priests are launching a charm offensive (as we didn’t say in 1980): collars and gowns and bonhomie. It’s an impressive tableau, a sight for the sore eyes of the socially climbing Catholic. Kevin is not quite selling pardons but it’s as near as damn it. He seems to have developed a handshake for the occasion, a two-handed clasp that seems to seal the deal on mortal souls and Northern brass. It’s a new side of him. I watch from behind the bar.
I still haven’t decided what drink will be my drink. Beer looks promising but people seem to drink so very very much of it. Not just one pint – itself a massive measure – but pint after pint (how do they not want to pee all the time?). Imagine if it was milk. I pour some Vimto-looking red wine and manage not to spit it out. It’s like dandelion and burdock mixed with malt vinegar and cheese. It makes the back of my teeth feel weird, like I’ve drunk too much strong tea. I try the white.
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‘My passion for iced drinks punished.’
Franz Kafka, Diaries
In Scorsese’s film Mean Streets, there is a wonderful scene of Harvey Keitel getting shitfaced. The camera seems to be placed in front of him at chest height, and follows him round as though they were both strapped in to a fairground ride. The song being played – ‘Rubber Biscuit’ by The Chips – is being played both on the screen and as a soundtrack to the action on the screen. It has the Looking-Glass clarity of a drunkard’s logic, its nonsense lyrics (‘cold water sandwich’ ‘go to the meeting bun’) battering their head against a saxophone. It is drinking as nursery rhyme and it is wonderful.
This – this night behind a PTA bar – is nothing like that.
Later, when I saw the film, I would try to rearrange my memories so that it tallied with those of this scene. I tried to re-cast my life, substituting the cool that is Keitel for the pathetic slobbering and giggling fifteen-year-old boy that is myself.
I drink the white wine, which seems to taste better the more I drink of it. I go and talk to people – these grown-up PTA people with their ties and frocks. Someone tells a joke and it is the funniest joke in the world. It’s me! Me, the boy who can’t tell jokes has told a joke. Well, not so much a joke, but kind of a joke. People are laughing. And I’m laughing. I say it again, I say I’d rather have a full bottle in front of me than a . . . I say, wait, I’d rather have a full frontal lobotomy. No. I’d rather have a bottle in front than a frontal lobotomy. Get it? A bottle in front of me. Frontal lobotomy. Listen? Shhhhh.
Julie, my therapist, wants to know: How could I have not gotten drunk that night? In what possible world could anyone – least of all a fifteen-year-old boy – sidestep the sheer ubiquity of drink or be immune to its all-pervasive charms? She leans forward in her chair: you were serving them drinks, and they were drinking those drinks for a reason. You were curious. There’s a reason that you needed to be over eighteen to work in a bar. There’s a reason you needed to be over eighteen to drink.
I don’t feel well. I want to go home. Take me home. I can’t go home. I’m drunk.
She says: He spiked your drink. I know he didn’t actually spike your drink. But he spiked your drink. The drink was spiked. The whole evening was spiked.
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‘. . . in a sense, my Lo was even more scared of the law than I.’
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
A car. A car I’ve been in a lot recently. He’s taking me home, but not to my home, to his home. We’ll sit in his room and carry on talking. It’s where we talk sometimes. His room with its Stevie Wonder records and the house cat and I still don’t feel well. It’s a big detached house – the priests’ house: all of them live there, each has their own room. His is on the ground floor, on the right as you go in. It smells of furniture polish and incense, candles and cooking. They have a cleaner but I’ve never seen ’er . . . hahaha . . . Cleaner. Seen her. Geddit? It’s like a bottle in front of me and frontal lobotomy. Still drunk. Shhh . . . My mum and dad. What about my mum and dad?
She says: Things can be pre-planned without being preplanned.
I want to lie down. I need to lie down. Let me lie down.
I think: Tongues are weird. They look like they’re supposed to be soft but they’re really quite hard. It’s their wetness that makes them deceptive. They’re like olives. Except they’re nothing like olives. Tongues are like . . . tongues. They’re like nothing else. Are they a muscle? They kind of move around on their own, only half attached to our bodies, the root somewhere in the back of the mouth. I’m not sure where it starts. Or where it ends? Flicking a lot, searching for something, as though there’s something in my mouth that it needs. Needs a lot. His not mine. Mine recoils, it doesn’t want to give his anything to work with, or against. I’d heard that people can actually swallow their tongues. Epileptics. Imagine, swallowing your tongue. Is this necking, this thing he’s doing and if so why is it called necking and not tonguing? If his tongue is in my mouth then where’s mine supposed to go? And how do I know it’s mine, and not his? It’s not licking or even slurping – it’s jabbing, like in boxing.
I want to be sick. I hope I’m not sick. I feel sick.
I don’t say ‘Stop’. Not that I could say stop with his tongue in my mouth. His tongue colonizing my gums, my spittle being annexed by its insistence. I think ‘Stop’. I think your breath is sour.
I don’t kiss back. I think if I can make my tongue go limp and unresponsive, then this alien tongue, this other combative tongue, will get the message. It will know that this is not a two-tongue situation and it will somehow become embarrassed and leave. It will read the lack of resistance as resistance.
Now I see why it’s called ‘necking’. His neck has got some kind of rhythm going now. A kind of in-for-the-mouth/back-for-a-breath beat. He’
s making funny noises, like a cross between a whimper and gasp, as though he’s opening a present that is so surprising that it is making him want to cry. I keep my eyes closed.
I think that if we didn’t have lips, our mouths would simply fray. There would be flaps of skin flapping around the hole in our mouths, like threads of cotton on a badly sewn pair of jeans. I think that lips are dry because they are on the outside, but tongues are wet because they are on the inside. Except that his tongue isn’t in his inside. It’s in my inside. Which makes it his outside. And yet it’s still wet. Horribly wet.
I think what a weird word ‘kiss’ is. It’s one of those verbs that can be both active and passive. Like ‘throw’ or ‘hit’. He kisses me – active voice. The kisser is the subject, the kissing is the doing, the kissed the object. ‘Want’, ‘eat’, ‘write’: are they called transitive verbs? ‘I was kissed by him’ would make me the subject and him the object and change kiss from active to passive. But I’m not the subject. I am most definitely the object. Then there’s ‘cost’, ‘read’, ‘make’, ‘pay’ and ‘teach’.
There’s the one doing and the one having it done to, Active/Passive Subject/Object, a verb determining the outcome. ‘Confess’ and ‘bless’, ‘own’, ‘fear’ and ‘love’: there are so many verbs. His tongue and lips are the things doing the Doing and they seem to want to do more. Which would make it both past continuous as well as present perfect continuous.
Words have their own rules, their own slippery principles. He taught me that.
How come I’m naked and in bed when I don’t remember getting naked? Or getting into bed? And why am I watching this whole thing from the ceiling?
His stubbled face is a thousand tacks scouring my yet-to-start-shaving face. His moustache black and oily. It’s like one of those industrial cleaning brushes that we use to clean the school corridors. It is the kind of face you could strike a match on and it seems intent on taking the skin off my own.
‘My private parts’: that’s how my parents always referred to my genitals. The phrase used to annoy me. It seemed to speak of shameful reticence, the mixture of propriety and embarrassment that characterized their attitude to sexuality generally. Now I think that it is a good phrase – my private parts. Except they’re not private any more.
He is astride me, a knee over each of my hips, masturbating. I have my eyes half-closed. His hand is keeping up a steady rhythm. He’s pacing himself. His other hand is rubbing my chest, my stomach. I can feel the palm of his hand. He fondles my cock and the fucking thing betrays me by getting hard. I lie there and think, my cock is giving him the wrong message. My cock seems to be staying hard, but my mind is willing it to stay soft, even shrivel. If it stays hard he might want to make it come. And if he makes it come then my orgasm will be his. Which wouldn’t be my orgasm at all. ‘Don’t come’ ‘don’t let him make you come’ ‘you mustn’t come’: these phrases become mantras. I recite them to myself to the tempo of his masturbating hands.
He comes. The warm splodge of his semen drops on my stomach and sits there, like the stringy albumen of an egg white, like cheap shampoo. He passes me a face towel hung next to the washbasin. I wipe off and hand him back the towel. And then he says the strangest thing, a thing that will drive a thousand future therapeutic encounters, a thing that will remain in my head even as I try to drown it in vodka. He says: ‘Thank you.’
‘The whole thing is over in ten minutes top.’ Discuss this statement with reference to the theme of dramatic irony.
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‘What are we gonna tell your mama? / What are we gonna tell your pa?’
The Everly Brothers, ‘Wake Up Little Susie’
The drive from Blackburn back to Accrington is the longest journey that anyone has ever taken. Or will ever take. It’s late at night, possibly the early hours of the morning, and I’ve got to face my parents. They have no phone.
Back at the house he gives me paracetamol. I throw up and he gives me some more paracetamol. He tells me to chew them, get them more quickly into my system. I wash them down with water from the washbasin, water that has a metallic tang.
He says that he’ll come in with me, explain what happened. Except of course that he won’t explain what happened. He’ll explain what he thinks could have happened. Why a couple of pupils of his had been asked to help out and how they’d probably helped themselves to a couple of drinks not knowing how strong drinks were. And how he’d let them sober up at the priests’ house. And how he knows he should have found a way of letting them know but there was no way of letting them know. But at least they would know I was safe. And relieved to have me home. They would be so relieved to have me home. It would be fine. Trust me.
Whilst he’s talking, talking and driving, I wonder if what really happened really happened. The man next to me, the one who is now wearing his collar, joking that it helps if he gets stopped by the police, that man is now . . . what? And what does whatever he is, and whatever it is that he did, what does that make me?
Was that sex? Was that what that was? If it was sex then that would make me gay, and if I was gay that would explain a lot. I could be gay. Gay’s all right. Gay’s cool in fact. Gay is David Bowie (wasn’t it?) and Oscar Wilde. But that wasn’t Gay.
We seem to hit every red light, and every red light means that Jack and Kath will be worrying that little bit more. They will be frantic, they will have talked about calling the police because that’s what they always say when I come in late. But they haven’t got a phone. They would have to go to Aunty Mary’s to use her phone. To call the police. ‘We were getting ready to call the police.’ Which, thirty-five years later, suddenly strikes me as ironic.
Quentin Crisp was another. Now he was definitely gay. I had watched that film about him with my mum (Jack had gone for a pint, having looked in the TV Times and decided that it was not ‘his thing’). So I had sat with Kath and we had watched The Naked Civil Servant. Kath had felt sorry for him – a progressive form of patronization by the standards of the day. She’d said something about ‘a waste’ and
‘how it couldn’t be helped, you were who you were, and that was that’. Of course Kath hadn’t bought the Tom Robinson EP containing ‘Glad to be Gay’, nor did she have a TRB clenched freedom fist printed on her T-shirt. I had and did. Maybe this was all that Sean boy-crush stuff catching up with me.
Except I wasn’t gay. I wasn’t gay, because I had just had sex with a man (or he’d had sex with me? on me?) and I hadn’t liked it. Hadn’t liked it one bit. It had made me puke up bile into a hand basin and look down at things from the ceiling. It had made my tongue feel disgusting and my cock feel sore. What time is it? Another red light. Mum and Dad will be cross. They will be so, so cross.
I hadn’t heard the word ‘pederasty’ when I was molested by a pederast, or paedophilia as I fell victim to a paedophile. I had heard of ‘kiddie-fiddlers’. I had been told not to get into cars with ‘strange men’.
Now I was in a car with a non-strange strange man, far stranger now than he was when the night began. And I needed him to save my stay-out-late-still-drunk skin.
I put my Yale key in my Yale lock and nervously squeeze open the front door. Kevin is behind me, his confidence trying to compensate for my dread. A part of me thinks that they will have gone to bed, that I’ll be able to slip unnoticed into my tightly tucked sheets.
They haven’t gone to bed.
Jack is sat in his chair, the chair that he always sits in, the chair that is yer dad’s chair. His ashtray is overflowing more than usual, it is being kept company by an undrunk cup of coffee. Kath is in the kitchen. It’s where she goes when she’s upset. She can’t ‘just sit around’, ‘sit around doing nothing’; she’s ‘got to do something’. I’m in the doorway of the living room, Kevin still in the hallway, when the cry goes up. It is a duet: ‘Where the bloody hell have you been?’ ‘What in heaven’s name time do you call this?’ There is a pause. All recriminations and accusations suddenly. Stop.
/> ‘Hello, Father.’
He is wonderful, my molester. He listens attentively to Jack and Kath. Years later my various counsellors and therapists will listen to me the same way. He listens to their worry and in it he hears their deeper fears – their fears for their only child and his precocious adolescence. He purrs the most plausible explanation for the state I’m in, both tonight and generally. It’s a tough time. Lord knows he’s been teaching long enough, has seen how difficult it can be for lads, bright lads especially. Often the brighter they are, the tougher it can be. And of course they’re curious. It’s part of growing up. Like with the drink. So when he/me and his/my friend turned up at the school tonight because his/my friend’s parents were attending this boring PTA do, it was only natural that they’d want to try some of what these parents were having. It was his own fault. Should have kept an eye on me/us. Maybe it was for the best. Get it out of his system. Had to happen sooner or later. No harm done, not really. Part of growing up. And anyway, here he is. Lesson learnt, delivered safely home.
I’m sitting next to the Father who is not my father as he talks to the father who is. What do they see when they look at each other? Jack sees a man with whom he can talk man-talk, yet one who poses no threat. Which makes it a different type of man-talk. I remember the kind of men who were friends of my dad. They were avuncular types, warm and big-hearted. Yet talkers they were not. The bonds that held their friendship together were forged on the terraces and the cricket pavilion and the factory floors. He would no more have told them his anxieties for his son than he would have talked dirty about his wife.
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness Page 9