The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness

by Graham Caveney

  What Kevin’s collar gave him was the right to opt out of conventional masculinity whilst still giving him access to its status. His priestly so-called celibacy didn’t neuter or unman him. Rather it turned him into a comic-book superhero. He was Priest-Man. Priest-Man’s superpower is to be both fully present in his manhood whilst being totally removed from it. It is the power to be two things: a conduit of God and a man like any other. It is the power to do whatever he wants. Jack could no more have suspected the Reverend Father O’Neill of sexual abuse than he could have extracted his own appendix or suddenly stopped believing in God.

  And Kath? Kath saw Teacher-Priest – another superhero, one who manages to be both Priest-Man and Priest-Man’s double. Recalling the scene now I see her shrink into her schoolgirl self, an eager to please thirteen-year-old desperate to learn how to do better on this How To Be A Parent course. Earlier that night she’d become convinced that she had failed that course, failed it badly. She’d had visions of her son getting in with the wrong sort, a bad bunch, wrong ’uns. They’d fed him drugs and drink, got him to play the fool, egged him on. And at midnight when her son still wasn’t home, she knew then that he was dead. They’d left him there, in the house they’d broken into/car they’d stolen/canal he’d fallen into/his own vomit on which he’d choked, and the next knock on the door would be the police. Except it wasn’t the police, it was her son, alive after all if a little bleary-eyed and dazed. And with him not quite Our Saviour Himself, but the next best thing. For not only was Teacher-Priest also Priest-Man, and not only had this dynamic duo rescued her son, but this pair had a third incarnation, a superheroism that would protect them, her, me, for ever: Headmaster-Priest. Thus did I present her with her own Holy Trinity, a steadfast three-in-one enigma that was as close to a Divine blessing as she could ever have dreamt.

  Of the various screen versions of my fifteen-year-old self that play in my fifty-year-old mind, one of them is directed by Alan Clarke. In it a young boy sits listening whilst a priest discusses the boy’s future with the boy’s devout parents. The camera cuts between images of adult conversations: Father talking to father, mother talking to Fathers – and the boy silently brooding. He is maybe biting his nails, chewing the inside of his cheek, looking from grown-up to grown-up as they debate the prospects that lie ahead for this child, if only he could . . . CUT . . . Flashback, the kid is being buggered by this same priest not two hours before. It is the kind of scene that critics will call ‘violent and uncompromising’. The boy will be seen crying, sniffling; the camera lingers on his discarded underpants . . . CUT . . . The boy is in his bedroom. He puts Josef K’s ‘Sorry For Laughing’ on the turntable and starts dancing round the room. His dance is maniacal. The music louder and louder. As Paul Haig sings ‘As we grooved on into town / Charles Atlas stopped to frown’, the boy’s dance-punches turn into punch-punches. He’s hitting the walls again and again, his knuckles becoming bloody . . . ‘’Cause he’s not made like me and you / Just can’t do the things we do’. The scene ends as the record ends, the boy slumped on his bed, his abject body sobbing.

  This isn’t an Alan Clarke film.

  I clean my teeth, put on my pyjamas and get into bed. I wonder if I’m still a virgin, if it counts if you didn’t want it. I start to masturbate. I think that if I masturbate it will mean that sex is something that I can still do: subject/verb/object. My cock is both too tender and not mine. There’s a reason I don’t show my cock to people at the bus stop, or discuss my erections in the checkout queue at Asda. That reason is that they’re private. My private parts. The rage and the despair and the self-disgust are all there, but they are there like photocopies of themselves. Bad photocopies at that, ones that are smudged and that you’ve got to peer at for a long time before realizing that you’re staring at splodges of ink.

  There’s a saying – more of a semantic tic – that I used to hear all over Lancashire when I was growing up: ‘It’ll be reet’ (right), said almost as one word. It was only after I left home and went to university and met middle-class people that I realized that there is a whole lexicon of tragedy, of tragedy for things that are far from tragic, like train journeys or piano lessons. There I had friends for whom things were ‘awful’, ‘dreadful’ and ‘made them want to die’. They ‘simply couldn’t bear it’ because it was, as they said, all too much. It was a new language to me. I had been raised on ‘not to worry’ and ‘worse things happen at sea’, on ‘always someone worse off than you’ and, of course, ‘it’ll be reet’. I loved this phrase, still do. It’s optimism as defiance, an all-embracing affirmation from people whose lives have been anything but ‘right’. You have to scrunch up your face to pronounce the double ee, thus turning the grimace into a grin. You’re skint? ‘It’ll be reet.’ Girlfriend gone? ‘It’ll be reet.’ Reet was the default setting of Lancashire’s working class.

  The feeling I have in bed is that nothing is reet. Things are fundamentally and devastatingly un-reet and there is nothing I can do to make them reet again.

  Next

  ‘My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.’

  Charles Baudelaire, ‘Conversation’ from Les Fleurs du Mal

  Jack and Kath have become KathandJack, a unit of themness. I no longer distinguish between them, they are a solid bloc of incomprehension, like the Soviet Union. There was a time when me and Dad had an unspoken date with BBC 2 re-runs; Laurel and Hardy on a Saturday morning, the one where they’re chimney sweeps and the bricks keep falling on Ollie and he just sits there resigned to, welcoming of, his fate. Or the bemused expression on Bogart’s face when he goes for a haircut in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, like he’s looking in the mirror and wondering how the hell he became Humphrey Bogart. And the bit in Shane where Alan Ladd knocks Jack Palance all the way across the bar with just one punch.

  Now I stand him up, refuse to acknowledge our contract. He flicks through the Radio Times – the delivery of which gave shape to our week – and tells me that they’re showing Mutiny on the Bounty. He does his best Charles Laughton / Captain Bligh impression, ‘another fifty lashes, Mr Christian’, the one that was guaranteed to make me laugh. Except now it doesn’t make me laugh.

  I need to go to confession. And confess what? That I was the cause of impure thoughts? That my dick got hard when it was being jerked by my priest? That I lied, because when his viscous tongue slurped horribly around my unresponsive lips I should have puked my fucking guts right up into his intrusive gaping mouth and drowned him in vomited disgust, and that not doing that was not being true to myself and so is a lie of omission? And to whom do I confess? The other priests, his fellow teachers, the ones for whom he is also Headmaster?

  Everything is covered in cling film, is being recorded through a fisheye lens.

  Next

  ‘When he smiled he used to uncover his big discoloured teeth and let his tongue lie upon his lower lip – a habit which had made me feel uneasy in the beginning of our acquaintance.’

  James Joyce, ‘The Sisters’

  If everyone carries on their lives as normal, then life is normal. If no one says anything, then there’s nothing to be said. In the weeks that followed the first night of sexual abuse I began to wonder if what I knew had happened had happened. Which means that not only do I feel invaded, but I begin to doubt the sense of invasion, to wonder if it is real.

  I don’t remember much about the immediate aftermath. I still go to lessons, me and Johnny Conrad continue our Joyce and Beckett as Abbot and Costello routine (‘we’ll call ourselves “the et ceteras” and just stand there having a staring contest with the audience’). I still go to mass.

  I’m sure he’s avoiding me. It’s difficult to tell because I’m also avoiding him.

  Jump cut: a bit later.

  Things are OK-ish, they’re returning to their grooming-like normality. I can’t remember how this came about, what happened, who said what to whom. But I’m sitting in his office, it is night-time and we are drinking red wine.
r />   Does that sound an odd sentence? It is an odd sentence.

  Having been molested by this man, I am now sat across from him drinking wine – the kind of activity, in fact, that led me to being molested only a few weeks earlier. He tells me that he loves me. Now that really is an odd sentence. If he loves me then why the fuck did he fuck me? Unless the fucking was the loving.

  He promises to take me to the theatre. We are going to see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. The tickets are booked. It will be my birthday treat. Sweet sixteen.

  In Sleepless Nights, Elizabeth Hardwick’s assemblage of memories and reflections, she recalls herself and her friends meeting ‘a very nice looking old man . . . a gentleman in a black suit and white shirt, wearing a kind and courtly smile . . . He waited for us on Saturday afternoons, paid our way into the movie, bought us the whitened, hardened chocolate of summer. In the dark, with a little girl on each side, sitting straight as caryatids, he ran his hand up our thighs, under our dresses. The predator’s first gift, mixed with the bright narrative on the screen and with the chocolate, was to reveal early to us the tangled nature of bribery. This at least was a lasting lesson. Bribery and more bribery – it grows within you like your molars.’ The shock of recognition when I read this passage was physical. I flinched, like someone had stubbed me with a cigarette. Thirty-plus years after the event, this passage explained me to myself. It explains the way in which corruption can not just co-exist with tenderness, but can become part of its fibre: the tangled nature of bribery.

  Kathleen had seen the movie of Who’s Afraid, adored it, Burton and Taylor tearing each other’s souls out over the course of one night. She tells me that Richard and Liz were married at the time and that the film could have been as much about them as about their characters, George and Martha. She hadn’t known it had been a play, but of course I could go. It was a wonderful opportunity. To my mum’s ears, the theatre with my headmaster was a stop short of full canonization. The drunken PTA night (‘the performance’ as it became known) had proved that boys my own age really were the bad influence she had heard so much about. A school trip on the other hand would be just the ticket, couldn’t go wrong. It would put her mind at rest.

  The Duke Theatre Lancaster are putting Albee’s play on in the round. I’d never come across this before. It meant that the audience surrounded the actors, an intimate otherness between our bodies and theirs. They are so close I could reach out and touch the hem of Martha’s slinky slutty nightdress. I’ve seen this actress somewhere before. She has the poutiest mouth I’ve ever seen, as though she’s making up her mind whether to start crying or tell you a dirty joke. I suddenly realize that the last time I saw her she was getting scalding coffee thrown in her face by a psychopathic Lee Marvin in The Big Heat. Tonight it is her that’s dishing it out, snarling and teasing, flaunting and taunting her ‘poor put-upon Georgie’ as she shakes her no-longer-glamorous stuff at an unsuspecting Nick. For three and a half hours I sit transfixed by this play, entranced by the woman at its ruinous centre.

  That night Gloria Grahame speaks to me across the decades, directly to my seat on the second row from the front. It is something about disappointment and how we torment each other to compensate for our own grandiose expectations. She tells me that I’m in love, though she doesn’t say if it’s with Gloria or Martha or even Edward Albee. What I do know from my night in the theatre is that I want to go to university, like the one where George is, where I too will meet an imperious and destructive blonde. Except that she won’t destroy me. I will rescue her, and in so doing rescue myself.

  I’m full of it. In the car on the way home, I’m full of the fervour of the newly converted. I tell him that I want to write a letter to Gloria Grahame. I bet that lots of people write to her and tell her that she was wonderful in old films, but I bet not many people tell her how wonderful she was in that play. Wasn’t it wonderful? The way in which it dawns on you at the same time that it dawns on the guests that George and Martha don’t really have a son. And they really love each other, despite the horror they inflict on each other. And that moment when Martha shouts at him that beating him has tired her arm, the beatings for which he married her. And then the devastating sadness, the emptiness, beneath it all. It was so tender. Didn’t you think so, Father? Are there other plays like this? On I go, drunk on the wonder that is Gloria Grahame. He tells me I’d like Tennessee Williams, that he does a similar thing: secrets, families, fictions. He tells me that I should read a book by Eric Berne called Games People Play, or try John Updike’s novels. He says that I should definitely write a letter to Gloria Grahame but didn’t I think, haha, that she was a bit old for me? She must, he says, be pushing seventy. No spring chicken. But, yes, I should definitely write to her. There’s a silence in the car, an uncomfortable silence like when I’m at home and there’s something on the telly that mum and dad hadn’t expected but couldn’t get up and turn off, because to do so would just draw attention to it. I don’t want to write to Gloria Grahame any more. I think, Yes she is old, an old actress. I bet in real life she’s even older.

  I break the silence, try to redeem myself. But this Tennessee Williams? Which of his should I read? He says that there’s a play called Streetcar all about another (fake US accent) boozy broad and that if I fancied Martha then I would almost certainly fancy Blanche.

  It had been a mistake to mention Gloria, a lapse in judgement, like I’d made a mistake in class. More silence, the car gliding by town after town of nothing more than orange-lit clusters.

  Do I know, sense, what’s coming? It now seems to me so inevitable that he was going to pull into a layby that I don’t know if it seemed as inevitable at the time. What is the opposite of inevitable? Contingent? Unlucky? Evitable? I don’t like the sound of any of these. At least ‘inevitability’ offers me a certain dignity, allows me to think of myself as a version of Aristotelian tragic hero (minus the high birth). Otherwise it is merely grubby and banal. Otherwise I am grubby and banal.

  And so the tongue stuff . . . What is it about the fucking tongue stuff?

  His mouth is bigger than my mouth. And my mouth is a part of my face. I need to get over my mouth. Put it right out of my head.

  Years later I am still obsessed with mouths, others as much as my own. I will write papers for conferences on critical theory discussing ‘The Scandalous Mouth of Shane MacGowan’. I will write about Beckett and Francis Bacon and how the Irish mouth is a site of resistance, how it ‘enacts dramas of counter-modernity’. I will couch my neuroses in smarty pants talk, talk of negotiating subjectivity, and liminal identities. I didn’t think that then – the then that I still think of as now. Now is molestation-mouth-fuck-now, and it has carried on for thirty-five years and it is making me feel ill.

  They’re right though, those Freudian theorists. The mouth is the site where we negotiate our core identity, the orifice through which we learn the differences between inside and out, self and other, body and society. It’s every infant’s question: is this edible? It is through taste that we test the world, come to understand the various flavours and textures on offer.

  And just so you know, Herr Father, my memory of that night is still contaminated with the sense of your sickening gorging tongue, ‘like some thirsty animal lapping greedily at a spring of long-sought fresh water’. Know who wrote those last few words? Kafka. The man you identified as our fellow prime number.

  And the hand on my cock, the rubbing through the jeans to claim a hard-on that rightfully belonged to Gloria Grahame? How does that work? Is my hard-on your achievement or my defiance? It certainly dirties the waters though, don’t it? For the record, I would like to remind you and whatever self-justificatory logistics you pulled for the twenty-odd intervening years, that my climax continued to elude you. Not that the absence of any orgasm deterred you. Was it, in fact, a challenge? Something you became determined to elicit the more reluctant I seemed to give it up?

  He sits, once again, and tells them – my parents, his
allies – about our evening. About some of our evening. He tells them about the play and about how young Graham has got himself a girlfriend, a Hollywood girlfriend, his near-namesake. Kathleen blushes. Not just because the thought of her son having a girlfriend is blushmaking, but because a priest has alluded to, joked about, girlfriendery, and thus about sex.

  Then again, they’re like that now. This new breed of priest: modern, open-minded. Not like when she was a girl and you lived in terror of them. Of them finding out you’d skipped school, or missed mass, or – God forbid – been seen out with a boy. Those days were gone, thank God. She never knew why they called them the good old days. There was nothing good about them. But here, now, this felt like something that was good. Here he sits, a man who is also a priest, a priest who is also a teacher, a teacher who is also a friend.

  He doesn’t mention pulling over onto a layby. Which is fine by me. I decide there and then that the sex stuff is my stuff and that the closer I keep this stuff the better it will be for everyone. I decide that it’s not that big a deal, that it’s a small price to pay for nights at the theatre, for keeping my parents happy. Besides, I know now that there’s a switch. It’s somewhere at the back of my eyeballs and it’s connected, with pieces of twine, down through my chest, straight through the abdomen and down into my scrotum. It’s like the strings on a puppet, except that the strings are on the inside.

  Next

  ‘The problem is insoluble. The body is harnessed to a brain.’

  Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

  Strategy Manual for the Molested-Puppet-Child in Minimizing Molestation.

  Keep arms at side throughout. Ideally try for own hands behind own back. If this proves impossible, aim for the arms to dangle as unresponsively as possible. Aim for a bored nonchalance, a body that is somehow frigid yet indifferent. The thinking behind this pose is that although the Molested-Puppet-Child (MPC) is helpless to prevent molestation, it can, however, send out the message of counter-eroticism to both itself and molester. This may help the MPC later in the day/evening/morning when it comes to address its own sexual desires which, at the age of fifteen, are many and complex.