The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness

by Graham Caveney

  Next

  ‘The boy next door is me.’

  The Feelies, The Boy With The Perpetual Nervousness

  Picking up glasses gives me an In, and therefore a way out. King Street men start to recommend their local pubs, urge me to pop in, give me the thumbs up. I learn of the good pubs, the hard-man pubs and the tarts’ pubs; of where they serve a good pint and a late pint (rarely the same thing). When I go down The Elite snooker club, I no longer go to play snooker. I go and sit in the back room, the one which says ‘Bona Fide Members Only’ and where none of the members are bona let alone fide. There I sit and watch men play ‘Jacks or Better’ – a version of five card draw poker. I watch Big Frankie play in a school with a couple of Asian taxi drivers and Colin from the front desk and notice that Frankie’s friendly straight-talking racism seems to stop talking when he’s in the company of other races.

  Earning fifteen quid a week makes me eligible to join this school: it’s the only qualification necessary. There’s no ‘going easy on the kid’ breaks either. If you’re old enough to win, you’re old enough to lose. The lessons taught to me by my grandad serve me well. I know to concentrate on the other person’s hand, and appear nonchalant with my own. My grandad’s advice had been simple but effective: maximize your good hands, minimize the bad. I start to win, respect as well as money. I’m not, I’m told, as daft as I look. Which makes me wonder how daft I do look.

  And so I become socialized in the ways of men, different kinds of men than the ones I’d known or thought I wanted to know. Julie tells me that I was man-tasting, checking out the different flavours of masculinity available to me. The Rev Father had had a bitter aftertaste, I needed to find something with less complex notes, a fuller body.

  Next

  ‘It really moved me.’

  The Passions, ‘I’m In Love With a German Film Star’

  I returned from Crete to my parents like the prodigal son. Except that I hadn’t been prodigal, I’d been molested, the whore with whom others have been prodigal. But now I’ve stopped it and it’s no thanks to them. If it hadn’t had been for their blind Catholicism, their creeping deference, their fawning over all things better than them, then I wouldn’t have been molested in the first place. Or be sat here: watching Seaside Special and trying not to hate them for laughing at the comedian whose entire act seems to be saying the word ‘Germans’ in a stupid Scouse accent. Or watching Are You Being Served? and trying not to wish that I was still going to Manchester’s Royal Exchange, or the Bolton Octagon. Because I miss him as well as despise him. I miss the trade-offs, the cultural kickbacks, the bookish bribes.

  I am triumphant at having stood up to Father the molester, but bereaved at my loss of Kevin the mentor. I want to be back, rooted in the solid dependability of my parents, although they proved to be neither as solid nor as dependable as I needed them to be. For they too were seduced.

  I will, of course, make them pay. Never again will I entrust them with those secrets that children are meant to be able to take to their parents. When Kathleen tells me that I should know that I can always talk to her about anything, anything at all, and that there’s nothing we won’t be able to work out, and that nothing is ever as bad as we think it is, I’ll grimace through gritted teeth and call her names to myself that I was told men should never ever use about women. When Jack asks me for the hundredth time that day about A levels, jobs, the possibility of university, he doesn’t know that I’m going to fail my exams on purpose, and that he won’t be looking so fucking pleased with me and my future and therefore himself when I: marry a foreign girl, turn myself gay, go to Cambridge to live with John Mullen in a squat, hitch-hike around America, get a job that is as boring as yours to punish you for wanting me to have a life that is more interesting than yours.

  Kevin has forced me to grow up too quickly and thus prevented me from growing up at all.

  Next

  ‘It is disconcerting that the director always credits the patient with total cinematic recall, instead of showing the blurred, spotty, personalized texture of spontaneous recollection.’

  Manny Farber, ‘The “Psychiatry Movie”’, Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber

  Diary:

  Go back to church, get a clean slate for your soul.

  And:

  god’s a cunt.

  More than ever now I think in and through film. I need flickering images: I want to internalize them, possess them. There’s an aerial camera permanently fixed outside my bedroom window. It lingers on me stretching in the morning, wondering why Paul Newman’s white vests look so cool whilst mine have threads hanging down, and stains on them. It tracks my newly bought Doc Marten shoes as I stride along Blackburn Road like Lee Marvin in Point Blank. It cuts to a close-up of my face as I stand at the concert-room bar, my inner voice narrating a voiceover à la William Holden’s in Sunset Boulevard or Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity. I don’t so much speak as script my sentences, listening to the dialogue play out as other people fade and dissolve at my editorial will.

  And Again:

  Try to feel like you feel when you’re watching films when you’re not watching films.

  On a pre-molesting school trip to London I’d gone to see Polanski’s Tess. Post-molestation, I try myself out as Nastassja Kinski, cringing at the absurdity of the comparison even as I conjure it up. Besides, Kevin ain’t no Leigh Lawson. I’m not sure who he is. My inner casting director is fickle, restless, overambitious. I’m a tragic heroine from a nineteenth-century novel. I’m the angriest of angry young men. I’m a ruined Emma Bovary as played by a young Alan Bates. I want to have attacks of the vapours, swap my school uniform for Brontëan bonnets and fucked-up petticoats. If I cast it right, the film in my head might still redeem me.

  And:

  Feel sad for Jack and Kath. It will help you to like them.

  Try to picture them crying.

  Film is my way in, my way back and through to my parents. I know what Kath likes and scour our weekly Radio Times to find them. ‘Women’s pictures’ she calls them, a bafflingly elastic term when I first heard it, but one that I’m coming to realize has rules like any other. I’m searching for dates (1948–58) and actresses (Bette Davis, Joan Crawford) and those haiku-type reviews which I always complain about but secretly rely upon. I’m looking for women who are well off but unhappily married, or happily married but about to become ill and die. I need – Kath needs – women who have been betrayed yet remain defiant, or who have sacrificed duty for desire, or whose love-lives promise to be the death of them. I want staircases and smoking, sobbing and slapped faces, I’m looking for Jezebel or All About Eve or Mildred Pierce. Nothing doing. Then I see it, tucked away on a Tuesday night, some weird time, 5.20 or 6.35, never a Straight o’Clock. All That Heaven Allows. Got one, I say to her. And a date is made. There will be tea and shop-bought custards or apple turnovers. There will be ‘How old is Rock Hudson now?’ and there will be ‘Shhhh’.

  I know I’ve made a good choice two minutes into the film when it becomes clear that Jane Wyman is a widow, and rich. And that she is disappointed with her life because it is peopled with tiresome neighbours and uninspiring men. I can feel Kath’s empathy for this character, except it’s not quite empathy. It’s an identification with the character’s inner life that is also a fantasy of something like revenge. The film is a way of letting Kath have it both ways. She loves the otherness of this world whilst being reassured that it is not that different from her own; even beautiful rich American women and their country clubs are riddled with petty jealousies and quiet despair. It’s why she never liked British films, I think. There was nothing fantastical for her in seeing Rachel Roberts fetishize the boots of her dead husband in This Sporting Life, or watching June Ritchie slowly turn into Thora Hird in A Kind of Loving. She had a phrase for films she knew well, like Now, Voyager: ‘I could play that part myself.’ She meant she knew the dialogue off by heart. Yet she was also saying something about p
laying a role, about her fantasy, about how she knew she could’ve been Bette Davis.

  I didn’t think that stuff then. Then, I would enter a distracted trance and wonder about the creases in men’s trousers and why they all wore hats. And I would hope that Kath was enjoying it, beaming at her when Jane and Rock hit it off, snarling with her when Jacqueline de Wit is a right old cow. My responses were Kathleen’s responses; for ninety minutes we shared a common language. In having chosen the film, I was being given access to her inner life. I would watch her watching Rock Hudson and know at that moment that my mum wasn’t just my mum: she existed in 3D.

  Next

  ‘A photograph is a secret about a secret . . .’

  Diane Arbus

  Kath’s right. My skin does look better. And yes, I have thinned out, lost that puppy fat. And yes, I did need a haircut. There’s Dean looking all mischief-eyed, arms crossed, his red footie shirt contrasting with the ice-blue ocean behind him. And Paul, sulking at being dragged to yet another site of ruined grandeur. And me, alternating between bumble-bee shirt, a white cheesecloth number and a bare chest. There’s nothing particularly arresting about any of these holiday snaps. They’re holiday snaps. Me and Dean. Paul and Dean. Me and Paul. Me and Paul and Dean: mountains, sea, taverna. I can’t remember whose camera was used but it’s obvious who snapped them. Because he’s not in them.

  There’s one picture of the three of us taken as we stand around a sign with writing in Greek and English that says: ‘Military Controlled Area’ and underneath ‘Taking Pictures is Forbidden’. My hand grips the pole, Gilly’s also, both of us appearing to smile at the obvious joke. I remember how he was keen to take this particular image, how he kept laughing, saying that we were a threat to national security. Kath’s not amused though. Forbidden is forbidden. If you weren’t meant to take pictures then you didn’t take pictures. They didn’t say these things for the good of their health you know. He of all people should know that. I say, It was a joke, Mum. No harm done. I defend him against her, partly because she didn’t defend me from him. It’s her punishment.

  I have spent too much of my life looking at – thinking about – this photograph, about its cheap and transparent staging of rebellion. At times I’ve used it to remind myself that Kevin’s sense of himself as maverick had no more depth than this Kodak moment. Taking a picture of a sign forbidding the taking of pictures? Well move over, Weegee, how very rock ’n’ roll. It’s essentially a schoolboy prank, and looking at it reminds me of how schoolboyish he could be. I remember him sulking as we came back through customs and him buying up his duty-free allowance and asking me to take through a bunch of cigarettes and me refusing. And I remember my feeling of contempt for him, for the way he was desperate to be the Rev Fucking Kev with his hipper-than-thou cutting-edge self-image. So this photograph keeps him small, keeps him at a manageable level of wannabe desperado.

  At other times this picture torments me. When I’m feeling grand I compare it to that portrait of Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub. It torments me because the ‘joke’ of the photograph is being bought at my expense. He is, after all, the photographer. It’s not his sagging middle-aged spread that is draped over the forbidden sign. It’s mine, and those of two other boys. Did you make copies of these, Father? Did my, your, our holiday snaps keep you company on the long winter evenings after I cut off your supply to adolescent flesh, or at least to my adolescent flesh? Did you keep them under your pillow? Did you save the ‘taking pictures is forbidden’ one until last? You did, didn’t you? I know you. I’ve had my whole life to think about you.

  Next

  ‘It was extraordinary how my absolute conviction of his secret precocity – or whatever I might call the poison of an influence that I dared but half-phrase – made him, in spite of the faint breath of his inward trouble, appear as accessible as an older person, forced me to treat him as an intelligent equal.’

  Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

  Hot water, says Jack, as hot as you can stand it. It softens the bristles, opens the pores. He gives me a badger-hair shaving brush and tells me that it was designed by a badger, and I laugh even though I’ve decided to stop laughing. He shows me how to scrape down on the cheek and up on the jaw, working first with, then against the grain. I nick myself just under the nose and, in the words of my newest companion, Alex from A Clockwork Orange, red red kroovy flows real horrorshow. I’m transfixed by the sight of myself performing adulthood, that there is a me who is taking on the trappings of a man. I’m impatient to be rid of my childhood whilst feeling that it has yet to begin. I’m losing something I never had, and thus am I doubly bereaved.

  I shave the skin that is no longer covered in acne, that has improved in the Cretan sun. I now wear my tie loose or not at all. I am allowed to tie my jumper around my waist and wear trousers that aren’t strictly regulation so long as they’re black. People stop telling me to get my hair cut.

  School isn’t school any more; it’s college, sixth form. There are boys from other schools who have arrived to sit their A levels, boys who don’t believe in the One True, or any, God. There are boys who didn’t know me from before: new and cool boys, clean-slate boys. There are girls.

  It is easier than I’d thought to become invisible, to slip beneath Kevin’s headmasterly radar. No longer taking RE means no more classroom contact. I bury myself in my other A levels, long hours in the library. I think of the other teachers as a buffer between me and him.

  ‘Politics’ doesn’t seem to be about politics at all. In fact, it seems actively hostile to it. It’s about how Westminster administrates itself, the efficacy of select committees or the drawbacks to the single transferable vote. I become quite good at it. The time I would have spent with St Paul I now spend with R. M. Punnett. I think of it as being like Latin: irrelevant but strangely noble.

  I’m fired up by history, American as well as European, a new and slightly disreputable combination at the time. I remember being impressed by how not very far west and not particularly old the Old West was. I like the way the South was the villain, and lost a righteous fight, but that everyone seems to prefer it. It’s my new lost cause, and I play The Band’s ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ with the satisfaction of my new insider knowledge.

  And I dissolve into English lit: Keats and Chaucer, double Shakespeare, Lawrence, Pope and Tourneur’s Revenger’s Tragedy, which Jock Roland assures us is much funnier than we think it is. Sometimes I sit and look at him and wonder if he too wants to fuck me. And then I try not to think that. I tell myself that just because Kevin wanted to fuck me doesn’t mean that anyone else will want to fuck me. But it doesn’t mean that they won’t.

  It means negotiating between the fucking that has already happened with the fucking that might yet occur, and knowing that there is no relationship between these two things whilst suspecting that there is every relationship between them. Also, I suspect I may want to pursue some consensual fucking of my own at some point, an activity that books and films suggest can be complicated enough in its own right. I tell myself to shut up. I go and sit in the library.

  And it is also true that:

  It’s impossible to be invisible, to slip between the cracks of Kevin’s authority. The other teachers ultimately report to him; he’s their headmaster too. He pops in on lessons, a friendly face advertising his accessibility to staff and students alike. He takes general studies lessons, he takes morning assembly. I see him in the corridors, hear him in the playground. Nowhere is Rev Kev-free, not even the library.

  I befriend a few of the new lads – Dave ‘Harry’ Harrison, Martin ‘Eggy’ Eggleston, Phil Curran. Our record collections morph and bind us together, commingling through the magic of TDK C90 tapes. Music allows us to tell each other who we are, or who we think we might want to be. Our compilations advertise our credentials. They are performances. Each track in conversation with every other track, suggestive, revealing.

  Bowie and Iggy bootlegs were highly prized
(have I dreamt this but did people even charge just to make a tape of Live in Santa Monica?), but also Can, Beefheart and Hendrix. Of the post-punk bands it was Joy Division who I remember most clearly as being spoken of in jaw-dropped terms, Curtis’ suicide sealing the deal on their legacy. Yet even more important than our bids for obscurity was the announcement of what we were not, and what we were not was: soul boys, disco kids or funk freaks. It wasn’t that this music was ‘black’ music (although it was and, as such, not ours); it was also that this music all seemed to be about having a good time. And if there was one thing me and my friends were certain of, one thing that united us in our collective second-hand overcoat, it was that we were not, nor would we ever be, in the business of having a good time.

  Starting smoking was an extension of this un-pleasure, a statement of my anhedonia and commitment to fashionable misery. Considering Jack and Kath’s forty-plus a day habit, it is amazing that I remained smoke-free until I was sixteen. But when I did start it felt right, as though tobacco had moved from black-and-white to Technicolor.

  Next

  ‘For he alone knew what no other initiate knew: how easy hungering was. It was the easiest thing in the world.’

  Franz Kafka, The Hunger Artist

  He was on wonderful form that particular morning. Another of the Irish hunger strikers had died, or maybe the strike was being called off. I remember having been mesmerized by the news footage that had been coming out of the Maze, the grainy footage of men sat in cells that they had smeared with their own shit, the unmistakeable Northern Irish accents demanding to be treated as political prisoners. I particularly remember the dustbin-lid protests, hundreds if not thousands of women each night banging their bin lids on the cobbled backstreets of Belfast and Derry. I remember thinking that someone should make a record with this sound as a backing track, or that they should form themselves into a full-blown orchestra and perform cover versions of English classics (The Brotherhood of Man’s ‘Kisses For Me’ as performed by the Falls Road Ensemble, three hundred housewives wielding dustbin lids and various kitchen utensils). I write to Johnny Mullen and tell him this, joking that our next band should be called The Blanket Men and we should release our first EP (‘Our Toilet is Your Shame’) in the Gents of the House of Lords. He writes back and tells me that it’s already been done. It was called ‘God Save the Queen’ by the Sex Pistols.