The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness

by Graham Caveney

  This strategy does, however, run the risk of apparent compliance, the indifference being mistaken for a silent affirmation. In order to minimize this risk, it is imperative that the MPC at no point reaches orgasm. Further complications may arise when MPC realizes that this apparent recalcitrance may also be an aphrodisiac for the molester, a spur to his ambition.

  Ensure that alcoholic drink has been taken and/or is at hand. Wine is preferable due to ease of access, although beer or spirits will work just as well. The purpose of this exercise is obviously to anaesthetize the MPC but, just as importantly, provide it with an excuse (not untrue) for when it vomits into a toilet/sink/Father’s wastepaper basket later in the process. Vomit-mouth can also prove useful as a way of avoiding a second sitting of a single performance. But not always.

  Take any non-being-molested opportunity to remind Father that it is heterosexual. Hope that such reminders will awaken him to the startling revelation that the MPC is not a willing participant in their exchanges (and they are therefore not really exchanges). Recurrent (though unsuccessful) examples of this strategy include: how much you fancy Debbie Harry; the made-up wet dream about friend’s mum; the equally made-up though wished-it-were-true story about snogging a female at the school disco. Although this approach has proved less than successful, it does have the benefit of annoying Father Molester in its implied affront to his own desirability.

  Close eyes. Repeat to self: This doesn’t matter. It’s not important. I’m not even here.

  Next

  ‘Where the you of who you are is.’

  Gordon Lish, Peru

  And so the template is set, although it’s not my template. I have no say in its composition. He gets to decide when he’s the teacher, when the priest. It’s up to him if I’m friend or pupil, altar boy or ‘lover’.

  I become adept at reading the signs, anticipating his moods and what their repercussions will be. Some days Faith is the issue. He tells me how priestly celibacy is supposed to work. It is not the absence of sexuality but the embracing of it, the recognition that sex is between all of us and so can’t be limited to marriage or monogamy. He is married to Our Lady, which means that he takes her levels of loving self-sacrifice as the guide for how to live his life. But Catholics are also pragmatists. We know – don’t we? – that we are destined to fall short of our own standards, and that if being good was a simple matter then we would not need the example of Christ. And celibacy historically was about not having children, about protecting Church property from claims of inheritance. So what we are doing . . . this thing that happens sometimes . . . is not . . . is . . . well . . . it’s complicated. On these occasions – our seminary talks as I think of them – I want to comfort him. I see him then as someone out of Graham Greene, a damaged antihero, torn between his desires and his duty. I think, almost tenderly, this – he – will stop. It has to. His vocation is stronger than whatever the thing is that I have (and I still don’t know what that is).

  Then there is the bribe, the Culture-For-Cock pay-off that is now part of our Saturday night ritual. We go and see Doctor Faustus in Manchester, The Canterbury Tales in Liverpool. I sit in the audience knowing that the journey back will involve a layby, or a visit to his office, or a nightcap back at the priests’ house. I have accepted the deal, except that my acceptance is now tinged with manipulation. If I’m going to be a whore, I want my payment up front. I am no longer the wide-eyed naïf, gobsmacked and grateful for his nights at the theatre. One night we go and see a play called The Prisoner of Zenda. It’s a crappy swashbuckly romp and I pout and sulk about how much I hate it. He makes up for it by showing me The History Man on a new machine that he’s got at school that can record programmes from the TV. He tells me that culture is how we make sense of the world. I’m getting all the culture one cultured man can throw at me. And none of it is making any sense.

  Next

  ‘Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire . . .’

  The Beatles, ‘A Day in the Life’

  Scenes fade and merge, some stand alone, others assembled alongside snapshots of history. Kath wakes me one morning to tell me that John Lennon has been murdered, gunned down outside his apartment in New York. She seems devastated by the news. The Beatles had been her band, or rather the early Beatles had been her band, the love-me-do moptops rather than the acid-ringmasters of Sgt Pepper. She had a theory, did my mum, about this decline of The Beatles, one she shared with me more than once, as though I should take this as a warning. The theory was that these four lads were just ordinary working-class lads, Catholic lads in Paul and John’s case. And that they couldn’t handle it, all that fame, it had taken them away from who they really were. Somehow Yoko Ono was both cause and symptom of all this, for reasons that were clearly related to her ethnicity but never stated as such. ‘Just think, he could have had any woman he wanted, yet he ended up with her.’ Quite who he should have ended up with was never made clear. Maybe it should have been Kathleen Smethurst. More likely that he should never have left Cynthia. Either way, it was an article of faith for her that he could have done better than some Japanese woman. She’d taken it badly and now he lay dead on a pavement outside the Dakota with so much to live for: a bloody waste.

  I write a poem about his death because I feel that’s the sort of thing that real poets do. It’s a mawkish tribute of which I can remember nothing except nicking a line from Adrian Mitchell about sucking the sun like a gobstopper. I go and sit in the school chapel and try to feel sad, but it doesn’t work. I don’t feel sad, I don’t feel anything.

  It’s odd this absence of feeling, because it is itself a feeling. Feelings are like rules. People expect you to have feelings, to follow rules. But the people who are setting the rules don’t seem to know what they are either, even though they’re adamant that you stick to them. It is their number-one rule.

  I have to second-guess my parents, pre-empt their incomprehension. I assume that they assume that I’m doing lots of weird things – things to do with girls, maybe parties, John Lennon-type things. I need to keep this assumption alive. This assumption will protect them from the knowledge of the even weirder things, not-girls, not John Lennon-y things, that are also happening. One set of rampaging adolescent turbulence is a cover story for another.

  Next

  ‘You should build an inner refuge. This too should be thick-lined with dense materials to resist the radiation, and should be built away from the outside walls.’

  Government booklet, May 1980, Advising the Householder on Protection Against Nuclear Attack

  Johnny Goes to Cambridge – not another of our never-to-be-formed bands (Accrington’s precursors to Frankie Goes to Hollywood) – but a statement of fact. King’s College, Cambridge, to be exact, there to read modern languages. He did Oxbridge; not the version where you stay on and do nothing else but Oxbridge, but the one which runs alongside your A levels. He knew it was his way out and was wonderfully unapologetic about taking it. I got the feeling through that last year of our school friendship that he was making sure that I would be all right after he’d gone, that certain things were in place that would help keep me afloat.

  The first of these was CND. He’d told me about a film that was going to be shown at the library, a film about what a nuclear war would be like. We couldn’t not go. My teenage position on the nuclear issue was like Jessica Mitford’s position on death: I was against it. All of it. Nuclear weapons and nuclear power. I hadn’t yet heard of the nuclear family, but when I did I was against that as well. The key word was ‘nuclear’: nothing good could come of it. Just how much nothing good was brought home by Peter Watkins’ film. From what I remember, The War Game imagines the effect of a nuclear bomb dropped on London. There’s stark black-and-white shots of devastation, children instantly blinded, mass hysteria, sirens. It was filmed as a documentary, which meant that all this what-if horror was offset against one of those clipped formal voices that BBC announcers had after the war (was that Watkins’ voice?).
It was terrifying and captivating. It was case closed. The only reason people weren’t against nuclear weapons was that they hadn’t seen The War Game.

  I remember something else from that film, a phrase that stuck with me and Johnny, the grotesque imagery of which we quickly made our own: ‘The melting of the upturned eyeball’. For the next few weeks it becomes impossible for us to say anything else. We try to outdo each other in discovering things deemed to be ‘upturned-eyeball melting’. It quickly describes all and any situations, good or bad, the less appropriate the better. Greggs’ pasties, PE lessons, weird people we see on the street, news headlines, girls we fancy, girls we don’t fancy, ice-cold Slush Puppies that leave stains around our mouths; all are measured by their ability to melt the upturned eyeball.

  We decide to perform Krapp’s Last Tape, Beckett’s monologue about an old man listening to the tape recordings he made in his youth whilst he tries to start a new recording. John would perform the monologue and I would direct: it would be a Mullen–Caveney Production. I would love Johnny’s choice to be a poignant comment about loss and his leaving. But it wasn’t. It was a chance to mess about with a reel-to-reel tape recorder and put on a play that we knew – hoped – none of the school would understand. It was his, and therefore our, chance to make dick jokes and get away with them. To suck on a banana and pretend that he was unaware of any potential obscenity. It was the gig we finally got to play, the one we had spent hours imagining for Cat Food Crucifixion or The Dada Trapeze Benefactors or any of the other thousand and one bands that had stoked our imagination during the four years of our friendship.

  Our opening night draws maybe forty assorted students and staff. Father O’Neill is in the front row, Jock Roland a few seats back. I’m in the wings, John on stage. Bananas are being sucked, but this is laugh-at-Beckett laughter, knowing, reverential. ‘Box three, spool five . . .’ Johnny is fully immersed, a young man playing an old man listening to his younger self. He’s Patrick Magee, he’s Max Wall, he’s Buster Keaton. ‘Shall I sing when I am her age? If I ever am?’ He stares at the machine. ‘No. Did I sing as a boy?’ He looks out at the audience, the bemused stupid-stare that he has taken from Ian Dury. ‘No. Did I ever sing? . . . No. We’ve just been listening to an old year, passages at random . . .’ He is beautiful. He is my friend and now the stupid school will know just how clever these clever boys can be.

  Then the tape machine breaks down. A reel didn’t reel to the other reel. It spun and hissed and whirred, before dying a most Beckettian death.

  The room lets out a snigger. Johnny stays in character, plaintively looking out, demanding to know who these people are and why are they laughing at his life. Kevin O’Neill stands up. He says that he’s seen lots of Beckett, interpreted in many different ways. But he’s proud and delighted that tonight he’s seen a Beckett that was more Beckett than Beckett himself (the laughter is gentle now, indulgent); a Krapp, as it were, of which Sam would have approved (our audience love him and because he loves us they love us too). He thinks that it’s a real testament to these boys that they have had the ba . . . , I mean, nerve to take on one of the most difficult writers of the twentieth century and bring him to life tonight in a way that he guarantees none of us will forget. He thinks we deserve a warm round of applause. They applaud. Curtain.

  One of the reasons I never told my story as a novel – or when I tried it never worked – was that the scenes in which Kevin molested me always seemed out of character. I would write a scene drawn from an event like the one above, one in which he was the charismatic Rev Kev. Then I would write about the abuse and the prose would start to write someone else – a villain from some nineteenth-century novel. Sexual abuse is a crisis in genre. My abuser wasn’t a gothic monster. He was deeply charismatic. If he hadn’t have been charismatic he wouldn’t have had the chance to become my abuser.

  He molested me the night of the play, having rescued Krapp from our ignominious fuck-up. By this time his attitude had become more assured. Was it that he no longer feared me exposing him? Who would I expose him to? Who would un-expose me?

  Had he convinced himself that I was enjoying it, that this was some consensual deal? If so, I would like to point to the stump that is my cock, the cock that refused to give up its treasures no matter how hard you pumped. And, by the way, if I was consenting, would I not also be initiating occasionally? Would I not be suggesting that you molest me in new positions, or try out a couple of new fantasies (let’s play Confession)? Maybe you thought that I was thinking, I can’t wait to get him home tonight where I can give him some hot molestee action. Or did you expect me to suggest we go shopping, a day trip to Manchester where we could buy sex toys, giggle our way through a selection of naughty underwear? When you saw me look at women, what did you see? Did you think, that Debbie Harry ain’t got nothing on me? When I told you – with my quiet manipulative malice – about women and girls and ass versus arse, and Siouxsie Sioux in her fishnets, or Rickie Lee Jones in her red beret, what did you hear? I’m guessing that you heard a boy talk of sex, and, regardless of its insistent heterosexual content, you decided that this talk of sex was a clumsy come-on. What was it you said when the bishop finally confronted you, confronted you after I’d reported you? ‘It takes two to tango.’ That was what you said. It’s there in my – our – notes. Not exactly Beckett, is it? Two to tango? As if all that cock-cum-mouth stuff was like you and me strutting along the Rio de la Plata in the 1890s, a rose between my teeth. Was it the two of us tangoing when you threatened to expel me? But now you’ve got me getting ahead of myself. You’ve got me going.

  Next

  ‘Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it . . . I have no family feeling and visitors make me almost feel as though I were maliciously being attacked.’

  Franz Kafka, Diaries

  He takes me to meet his mother. I think there’s probably a world in which that sentence is the punchline to a joke, some sick variation on a mother-in-law gag: (‘If you think being molested is bad, wait until you meet his mother . . .’). This must surely be the time from when I can date his transition, the point at which he made the switch. I no longer had the sense that he was yielding to temptation. There was no guilt, none of those mumbled apologies or averting of eyes. He had rationalized our relationship, and ‘relationship’ is what it had become. I was now his girlfriend. Because he had taken my innocence I was no longer an innocent. Because sex had been had, so sex could be had. Molest a boy once, twice, three times, and it may have the power to instil self-recrimination. Molest him a dozen times and it stops being molestation. It becomes what you do, both of you. It becomes the norm. Why wouldn’t you take him to meet your mother? It’s what couples do.

  About the weekend I remember:

  A night in a hotel on the way there. (Where was it? Somewhere around the Lakes?)

  A moment of relief when we enter the hotel room and I see two single beds. (How did he book the room? I’d like to reserve a room for myself – Father Kevin O’Neill – and the sixteen-year-old boy who will be escorting me.)

  A couple next door who are fucking. (She is making getting-fucked noises.)

  I don’t make any noises. I’m silent. And bored. I make myself float up to the ceiling where I look at a man I don’t recognize fuck a boy I don’t know.

  His mother’s name is Winnie, a wisp of a woman who appears in my mind now as a ghostly flicker, an apron and permed hair. I worry about not knowing what to say to her, to Winnie.

  It is somewhere in the north-east. (Middlesbrough, Sunderland?)

  We drive to the coast.

  And that is it, the sum total of my memory of visiting Father Molester’s very own Bates motel. You’d think I could do better than that, right? You’d think that someone who can remember where he was when he first heard The Clash’s ‘Bankrobber’ (an outdoor record store on Accrington Market since you ask) would be able to recall more details about a trip to his abuser’s mother than some vague drive to the fucking
coast. But I can’t.

  The inability of survivors of sexual abuse to remember the details of their abuse is one of the most frustrating aspects of their survival. Some aspects – the early scenarios – feel like they are imprinted on the back of my retinas (retinae?). Others, like the trip to Mother country, feel like they happened offstage. Jock Roland once told us that the reason Duncan’s murder happens offstage is that otherwise we would lose sympathy for Macbeth. He wouldn’t be a tragic hero: he would just be a murderer. Is this the reason I can’t get to the memories, that I want to preserve a version of him or me or him and me as tragic, rather than merely grubby? Does it make it less abusive if I don’t remember the details of the abuse, or more?

  Next

  ‘There is reason that all things are as they are.’

  Bram Stoker, Dracula

  ‘Acedia’ is the name given to it by Catholic theologians, a kind of spiritual ennui, what Aquinas called ‘the sorrow of the world’ (rather than the sorrow of God). Kathleen Caveney doesn’t call it that. She calls it ‘moping’. And she won’t have it. Not in her house. She won’t have the ‘I’m-not-hungry’, not when she’s gone to the trouble of cooking a meal. But I’m not hungry. I’m not hungry because I feel sick. I look at my plate – a large mound of yellow mashed potato with a viscous brown stew of minced beef and onions poured over the top. It looks like how I imagine a Florida swamp to look. And sound. I can hear it breathing. I pour Daddies brown sauce over it and stir. It becomes like baby food, although, as Kathleen says, ‘It’s not bloody baby food. It’s Mince and Mash: it’s your favourite.’ This used to be true. I used to plead with her to make Mince and Mash. The sound of the masher tapping against the pan would make me salivate. I say, I have to go to the bathroom. I go to the bathroom and puke up my guts. I brush my teeth with Colgate (‘the ring of confidence’), come back downstairs and we start all over again. Nothing. I’m not. I haven’t. I am. What? I do. It isn’t. Leave me alone.