Father O’Neill clears his throat as a cue to start morning assembly. He says, It’s nothing to do with any of us, here in Britain, what a bunch of criminals get up to in a prison in the North of Ireland. We’ve no need to ask why they would go to such extraordinary lengths, such desperate measures as starving themselves to death just to be recognized as people who had a rationale for doing what they did. That, he says, is nothing to do with us. He looks around the assembly and smiles. Every student there is, or is friends with someone whose parents are, Irish.
It is nothing to do with us, he continues, voice a semitone higher, if those men who are guilty of terrible crimes also wish that we acknowledge the context for their crimes, or to acknowledge that their crimes were not born just out of wickedness or spite but out of a long and complex series of events. That has nothing to do with us. Has it, Mr O’Brien, Mr O’Toole, Mr Horrigan?
And so he goes on, not defending the hunger strike exactly, but certainly not condemning it either. He took Thatcher’s pious intransigence and unpicked it piece by self-serving piece. If he hadn’t been sexually assaulting me for the past twelve months, I would have loved him. He was brilliant, he was Mark Antony come to bury the Republicans not to praise them. He keeps on saying how it is nothing to do with us, each time showing us precisely how it is. And his rhetoric is peppered with direct appeals to the students, the O’Rourkes, the Flanagans, the O’Byrnes. And the Caveneys.
When he says my name it is the first time he has acknowledged me since our return from Crete. Did I imagine it or was there a longer pause before he chose my name, a fraction in which there was time to register that my name was not as Irish as the others, was the odd one out in his roll call of descendancy. He knows that I hate my name, the un-nickname-ability of it. He also knows that it somehow makes me feel bogus, or he should know. I used to tell him often enough back when we were ‘courting’, back when my every insecurity was listened to with his complete groomer’s attention. He knows that I wished that the grandad whom I’d loved had either been properly Irish – a no-nonsense O’Kaveney or a lilting Cavanaugh – and not the bastardized change-it-at-Liverpool Caveney that he became.
And so I hear my name as a punchline, a faintly ludicrous tag-on to his sermon on the H-Block. Or maybe he meant to reach out, to include me in his litany of the oppressed. It may well have been a kindness. The problem being that once you’ve been fucked, you tend to be suspicious of kindness, especially when it comes from the one who was molesting you.
I’m called to his office.
He says, I was wondering if you’re all right. You seemed to be uncomfortable this morning. In assembly.
I’m fine.
It’s been a while since we had a proper conversation. I’ve been worried about you, you’re not . . . Your attitude. Seem to have changed. This punk thing. Doesn’t suit you.
I’m fine. Not a punk. Just music. Doesn’t matter.
It does matter. Very much. So long as you’re a pupil . . . My pupil . . . At this school . . . It matters a great deal. Teachers tell me you’re doing well . . . The workload. But it’s not just the work . . . That was never going to be a problem . . . It’s everything else. The smoking . . . You don’t seem . . . You’re not the boy I used to know.
It goes on for fifteen hours. It goes on for fifteen minutes. It’s the grilling of a witness who knows that the lawyer cross-examining him is the one who has done it. And that the judge is his accomplice.
I’m aware of him becoming Father O’Neill, how easily he is able to shed the Rev Kev’s skin and adopt the weightier body of The Headmaster. Every time he crosses his legs he seems to be advertising his ownership of the office. His posture is confident, hands folded calmly on his stomach, head slightly back. He sits in a chair with its back against the window. The sunlight is a spotlight, beaming from behind. His voice is rich, homiletic. I have sat in this office dozens of time, sat with him in these same chairs, drinking wine and talking about how we were both prime numbers.
It’s not the same office, he’s not the same man. And me? He’s right, I’m not the same boy. I’m a sulky spoiled bastard who wants to smash this office up but knows that he can’t. I sit perched on my lower-than-his wooden chair unable to speak. I don’t mean that I can’t find the right words. I mean that words – the right ones or not – don’t belong to me. A couple eventually come to me, on loan. I don’t know whose they are but I’m grateful for them, say them anyway, blurt them out . . .
. . . I don’t believe in God. Or anything, really . . . So . . .
I don’t say fuck you, but he can hear it anyway.
He says, Think about what you’re doing at this school. And, Reconsider your position. He doesn’t say, Expulsion, but it hangs in the air between us, like incense.
Next
‘We are not hurt only by tragedy: the grotesque too carries weapons, undignified, ridiculous weapons.’
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
There’s days of not sleeping, and not eating, and sulking around my house saying I don’t feel well. And pinching Jack and Kath’s fags and thinking that if I was Siouxsie Sioux’s slave then I would be happy (I still think that). There’s King Street WMC and accidentally pulled waste-not-want-not pints of beer. There’s The Doors and the way they sound like music that hasn’t been made yet. There’s writing letters to Johnny in Cambridge and talks about a visit. There’s diary entries with bad poems about secretly fancying skinhead girls. There’s a visit to the doctor who tells me I should take up cross-country running.
And then there’s Big Frankie Grant, the domino player for whom ‘nigger’ is just another word.
I don’t remember exactly why I was round at his house on a Saturday afternoon, what my thinking was. He had been asking me round, reminding me of his address every time I saw him (‘pop in, tha knows where I mean . . . ?’). Nothing particularly strange about that. People asked each other round. It was what mates did. But ‘mates’, a man in his mid-forties and a boy of sixteen? It didn’t seem as odd as it does as I write this now. And besides, I had form, I was used to being befriended by men who were older than me. Did I think he’d shed light on my situation at school? Was there a sense in which he was the antidote to everything that Kevin was not? The rarefied air of books and schools had proved to be not so uplifting after all; perhaps I thought that a no-nonsense man-mate may offer me some clarity, cut through the fog.
He is next to me on the settee. There is porn. It’s the first proper porn I have seen. I’d stumbled on some in the park near our house, torn-out pages of a grubby Penthouse that had grown grubbier as they’d become entangled amongst twigs and dead leaves. But this wasn’t that. This was clinical stuff, nothing pouty or cheeky here. There are close-up pictures of what I know must be vaginas; and horses’ cocks and women with faces covered in semen. There is his hand around the back of my neck, the other hand clutching his erection. There is a whispered question that is also a threat: ‘Dost tha want to suck it?’ He’s in the zone, muttering variations on this sentence like it’s a chant. ‘Tha wants it, don’t you? Say it. Say tha wants to suck it.’ This man drills holes in roads for a living. The phrases ‘hands like shovels’ and ‘vice-like fingers’ are more than metaphoric. This man is hard. We used to say the word all the time at school, ‘hard’. It was much coveted, spoken with awe. We meant ‘able to fight’, capable of doing some serious damage, but also not frightened of doing so. Someone who wasn’t afraid of the consequences. This man, the man I’m calling Big Frankie Grant, is hard.
I don’t know, I can’t think, I don’t remember. It’s flickering and it’s like the ride on the Big Dipper at Blackpool just before it reaches the top. It isn’t like anything. It isn’t Kevin being lost inside his own abjection, it’s this man and his absolute presence, and his absolute presence as a man. It’s in the chest and it’s running away and it’s something animal in me.
A door handle, something about how sticky the door handle was, how it made openin
g and twisting more difficult. His mum? Fuck, yes. His mum around somewhere, the kitchen, just back from town? He didn’t. I’m not. I’m on Burnley Road. I think of going to the Accy Vic Hospital and then think how stupid because there’s nothing I can tell them and nothing they can do anyway. I can’t go home. Why, why can I not go home? Because things are supposed to be normal there, and I’m far from feeling normal.
There is a phone box. I pull the trick I’ve pulled scores of times, ringing the operator and telling her that the phone swallowed my money and what should I do and she says what number were you trying to ring caller and I tell her it because I know it off by heart and when someone answers I say the same words I’ve said scores of time too. I say, ‘Can I speak to Father O’Neill please?’
I sit in the chair I have sat in back when he loved me and I loved him and I don’t say anything. I don’t remember the bus journey, or the walk up the hill. But here I am, back in the priests’ house, a brandy to steady my nerves. I cannot tell him that I’d been sexually assaulted, that a man who I knew, who my parents had trusted, had tried to force me to suck his cock. To tell him that would have meant talking about his cock, or my own cock. And I knew that our cocks were strictly out of bounds, were no-go-zone cocks.
It would have meant saying something like: Father, you know the way I really loathe the way you used to touch me and shove your cock around on my stomach and come all over me? Well, another man wanted to do something similar to me. Bastard eh? No, not you!
Accusing one would have been to accuse the other, and I wasn’t up to an accusation just then. I go to him in the hope of comfort. And I get it. I find comfort from one attempted abuser in the company of an actual abuser. He doesn’t bother me for details of why I’m there. He doesn’t try to fuck me, a non-fucking for which I feel pathetically grateful.
I took the secrets from one man who tried to force them upon me and hid them with a man who had made me carry secrets of his own. It’s the logic of abuse. Secrets start to migrate to each other, they divide and multiply. Like cells, or bacteria.
I never did tell Kevin – or anyone else until now – about the assault. I must have fallen asleep, as I woke up on his sofa with sheets around me and an unused bucket by my side. He took me home, straightened out the parents.
I decide that nothing happened. And that nothing matters. And that somehow this nothingness is the same as freedom.
I flinch when people touch me. I miss myself.
I tell Julie that I feel almost grateful to Frankie Grant for allowing me to hate him with such unambiguous passion. There were no bookish kickbacks with him, and therefore no ambivalence.
Compared to Kevin I hardly think of Frankie at all, but when I do I hope that he died alone. I hope that he died in his dead mother’s house, surrounded by empty beer cans, pie crusts and hard-core pornography, and that his body wasn’t found for a week.
Julie thinks that I channel the complexities of my emotions for my first abuser into this seething loathing of my would-be second. She’s right.
There is, I think, an emotional economy to sexual abuse that is similar to the law of diminishing returns. It is a logic that says the more sexual abuse there is the less abusive it becomes, as though the abusive experience is somehow diluted through its repetition. If the abused get used to their abuse, as they must in order to survive, then it somehow ceases to register as abuse. Indeed the more abuse an abused child reports, the greater the suspicion that any ‘real abuse’ has occurred at all.
The status of victim becomes problematized by the number of perpetrators. It’s like a version of Oscar Wilde’s joke about bereavement. To have had one abuser is unfortunate; to have two starts to look like carelessness. The presence of a second abuser lessens the impact of the first: it may even undermine it altogether. People begin to detect patterns. They start to wonder.
The matter is further complicated by the fact the once-abused become easier prey for their abuser-in-waiting. The abused are vulnerable, availably damaged, in need of all sorts of validation. If ever there was a group that was open to sexual exploitation, it is the already sexually exploited.
My old CBT counsellor called it a boundary issue. Which is one way of putting it.
Next
‘Inside out / And round and round’
Diana Ross, ‘Upside Down’
In my single bed, with its tightly tucked-in polycotton sheets, I lie and think about how words divide up between odd and even numbers. Ideally I’d like all words to be evenly numbered palindromes. I like ‘palindrome’. Not just a neat ten, but each of the two fives sounding complete in themselves, complete enough to be words to which a solitary ‘s’ need only be added to make both of them even. Abba were of course palindromic, as was their hit single ‘S.O.S.’ – a state of affairs that I looked on as a personal triumph at the time. ‘Madam’ is a palindrome, as are ‘level’ and ‘refer’. They are all five-letter words. I need to find a non-five-letter palindrome or something terrible will happen. ‘Civic’, ‘radar’ . . . five again. I put my hands on the side of my head and massage my temples, as though I could squeeze words out of my brain like the juice from a lemon. There’s got to be others, others with more than five letters. My bedside clock is ticking. There has to be . . . ‘Racecar!’ Thank Christ for that.
It’s going to be light soon.
Next
‘Believe, and you shall be right, for you shall save yourself. Doubt, and you shall again be right, for you will perish. The only difference is that to believe is greatly to your advantage.’
William James, Rationality, Activity and Faith
Johnny is back from Cambridge. He arrives replete with hair and the over-caffeinated energy of the underfed. When I ask him about university he says, ‘There is nothing more stupid than a right-wing academic,’ a statement I instantly believe to be true even though I have no idea how. He tells me that the LP is over, that he is going to get Barclays Bank to disinvest from South Africa, that the way to grow a beard is to shave twice a day (and then stop; obviously), that he is teaching himself Japanese and that he has met Adrian Mitchell. He tells me that he has decided to like The Monkees more than The Beatles (‘it annoys people’) and he tells me we are going to Hyndburn Peace Group.
I expect the Hyndburn Peace Group to be perfumed with joss sticks, populated with hairy men in Afghan coats and doe-eyed women who look like Melanie Safka. These people, I think, will be my people. They will share my utopian vision and hear the poetry in my soul. There will, I think, be a girl there who might snog me.
We are in the back room of the Labour Party office, a gable-ended terraced house opposite Accrington railway station. There is indeed an Afghan coat, belonging to an ageing drop-out called Sid, who it turns out isn’t really called Sid but, ‘seeing as that’s what everyone calls me, I may as well be’. I recognize several faces from the War Game screening. There are a smattering of trade unionists (collective noun: a discontent? a belligerence of?) who are sat, with a row of empty chairs between them, next to a handful of people who clearly have god (small ‘g’ as I now think of Him) on their mind. There are the usual Labour-supporter suspects, their faces sallow from years in committee rooms, their postures already defeated. Opposite these, resplendent in combat trousers tucked into Dr Marten boots, army jackets over slogan T-shirts, are the Accrington branch of the Socialist Workers Party.
There are three of them. One, male, late teens, has dyed red spiky hair and a ponytail that is dyed blonde. He looks totally emaciated, as though he has just been kicked out of a hostel and can’t remember where he lives. The second, a couple of years older, is what used to be referred to as ‘a big woman’. Casual misogyny notwithstanding, it was also a term that was spoken with a certain reverence, an appreciative nod and respectful outbreath. This woman is a big woman, and she carries it with pride. Her hair is black and curly on top, shaved sharp at the back and sides. She has one of those disdainful mouths, its lips poised somewhere between a sneer and
a dirty laugh.
Between them is a tall man with John Lennon specs and a woollen hat. He wears a moustache with which he has yet to feel comfortable and sits cross-legged, looking around him as though he is both deeply curious and bored at the same time.
I know that they are the SWP because they have copies of Socialist Worker tucked under their chairs and red-fist badges proclaiming their allegiance pinned into the lapels of their jackets.
I don’t know what a socialist worker is exactly. I suspect I may already be one.
I sit with Johnny toward the back, near the table selling copies of other left-wing papers, and pamphlets, and books from publishers I have never heard of. The meeting was about Tomahawk and about how Americans were planning to launch their missiles from UK bases and how this was part of a wider move to mutually assured destruction. I remember being amazed that there were so many disagreements among a group who I thought were all in agreement. I had never really sat and thought about multi- or uni- or gradual disarmament, or the Industrial Military Complex. And what the hell was ‘a people’s bomb’? I thought the purpose of the meeting would be how best to tell people that nuclear weapons were bad and that peace would be better. I thought the problem was that people simply didn’t know. The issue, it seemed, was more complex than that.
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness Page 16