He’s not threatening to expel me either. There’s no need, for one thing. I’ll soon be gone of my own accord, and he can chalk me up as one of his success stories. He wants to talk about universities, about my choices. I can’t remember now if I’ve already made the decision or if it’s already been made. Either way, it’s a subject he’s keen to talk about. It is, after all, his school. But before that he says . . .
. . . that he heard me talk in the common room, the school debate about the Falklands War. Unsurprisingly enough I was against it. I’d cobbled together an argument that was half SWP and half common sense: no one knew where the Falklands even were, let alone that they belonged to the UK; British troops were being killed by weapons we had sold to the Argentinians; er, something about imperialism and, er, a cynical distraction from the real issues of the day. Like . . . unemployment, and stuff.
He said that he’d heard me and that I hadn’t said a single thing that he hadn’t known beforehand that I was going to say. He could have predicted it to the letter. I had talked in ‘isms’ as though they were truths and seemed happy to wrap myself up in jargon, jargon (throat-clear) ‘of the most vacuous kind’. And on he went, dismantling my performance limb from cliché-riddled limb.
I’m not the golden boy any more. This isn’t ‘How I know God’ and a world of ‘aren’t-you-clever’ grooming. He’s no longer entranced by my curiosity or eager to lend me books. There’s no suggestion of a trip to the theatre. This is: remember whose school this is, whose boy you are.
Maybe it’s because I no longer know God, or maybe it’s because I don’t want him masturbating onto my stomach, but he’s decided that I need taking down a peg or two. And he’s right. Show me a seventeen-year-old boy who doesn’t need their pegs taking down. It’s what makes them boys, this placing of pegs.
I recall this conversation with more bitterness and shame than I do all the grooming and sexual assault and grubby furtive invasions combined. It seems to me a cruelty on which he really spent a lot of time and effort. Had he sat and rehearsed it, calculated the most efficient way to remind me of my insufficiency? Or was it more inspired than that, a semi-improvised riff that he warmed to as he watched my arrogant face try not to crumble?
In its own way, it was a masterpiece. It took power and pedagogy and politics and enacted them in such a way that all three became one. Like the Holy Trinity. It was a speech designed purposefully to undermine my status and reinforce his, to inscribe each other in the structures of the classroom. It said, I have created your rapacious adolescent ego and now I will expose it.
Thirty-three years later I still replay that conversation, just as images of him groping and grabbing and fucking me replay themselves: unexpectedly, intrusively, all-consumingly. I should have said, Lucky that Catholicism (and sneered when I pronounced the last three letters) is so refreshingly free of ‘isms’, that it has no catech . . . ism or trinitarian . . . ism or that it’s impossible to predict to the letter exactly what the Church’s position is going to be on, oh I don’t know, abortion or contraception. And then I will say, Was that jargon-free enough for you, you failed vampiric celibate?
But of course I don’t say that. I don’t say anything. I stand there and perform the trick I’d learned before, the one he’d taught me in his bedroom. I close my eyes without closing my eyes.
Julie says, It was payback; you had seen him naked and he had nowhere left to go. She says, He must have been frightened. He didn’t know who you might tell, or what you might tell them. He thought you had power, and he needed to show you that he had more than you. And he knew that ideas were what you prized the most and so what made you most vulnerable. It was his job to know those things. He’d had years of practice.
So I close my eyes whilst keeping them open, and let his words become sounds, like the voices on an out-of-synch film. He is nothing more than traffic noise now, mild feedback. But he wants more.
Hull is relatively close, should you choose it as your university. He chews this over, as if being close is a factor, as if he is going to be popping over at the weekends. A few of our boys have gone there. Larkin’s the librarian.
I didn’t know that. I imagine Philip Larkin stood behind the desk, stamping piles of books and collecting overdue fines, sssshhh-ing people. It never occurred to me that Larkin would have another job. I wonder how much poets get paid. I know that I won’t be going where any of my contemporaries have been, or are planning to go. My plan is to become a virgin.
He says that I don’t really appreciate how far away Kent is (I do because I’ve looked it up and thought, Kent’s a long way away), that it’s one of those places that sound great (it sounds great) until you realize how difficult and expensive it is to get home (I won’t have to come home) and how that can be very isolating (isolating? I know!) and that reading English can be isolating enough as it is.
The film is back in focus, back in synch. He’s talking to me and it’s my turn to speak. I say, Not English, English and American Literature. I don’t say this as well as I say it in my head. I say it in the shallow-breathed way I seem to have developed, where words don’t come out at first, but then once they do come out I have difficulty in turning them off. I think, but don’t say, You did English. American literature is my way of reclaiming English literature. I’ll make it mine again. I’ll read books you haven’t read.
He barks a cough, catches it in his fist.
He doesn’t know much about Warwick except, wasn’t it the stomping ground of ‘that bitch’ Germaine Greer? (I forget, you hate women. Not just Greer, but I’ve noticed: the girls in the sixth form, the female teachers. You don’t know what to do with them. Or to them.) And E. P. Thompson? He’s building up to an aphorism, some bon mots that he’ll quote himself on later. He clears his throat. Here it comes: a red-brick university that builds revolting students.
It sounds wonderful. It sounds like heaven.
Next
‘. . . his armour-hard back.’
Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis
The head down, the eyes darting up in a way that is both accusatory and furtive. Cigarette held between thumb and middle finger, the reverse of the extended two fingers favoured by girls. Smoke released with a cocky indifference. Cuticles of fingers chewed, the autumnal stains of nicotine to be sandpapered away later with the side of a matchbox.
Spit to be spat every ten or fifteen minutes; options of hawking or flobbing or squirted from between the teeth.
Hands – where else? – in pockets.
Subject of discussion: Fit Girls, The Fitness of Girls, Of Girls and their Fitness.
Gradations thereof: 100% Fit, Totally Fit, Fairly Fit, Really Fit, Absolutely Fit: occasionally a single and emphatic ‘Fit!’
Taxonomies of Fit: arse on that, tits on her, lips and their cock-sucking potential.
Gestures: the side of the left hand brought karate-style into the inner cleft of the right arm causing elbow to raise the forearm in a mock erection with closed fist taking the role of ‘bell end’. Thumb and forefinger placed in an O for OK and then penetrated by the finger or fingers of other hand. Tongue extended and flickered.
Noises: slurping, howling, barking, groaning, bleating.
I’m getting better at this, this pantomime of sexual bravado. I run my hand through my hair (stop that!) and make sure the gel’s still doing its job, keeping the spikes in place on what is a not-quite punk mullet haircut. I say, I’m saying nothing . . .
It gets me an appreciative laugh. I say it in a way that suggests just how much I would have to say if I were to say something, but that I’m too grown-up to say it. Which is true, but not in the way that they think it’s true.
My school mates talk about sex all the time, which means that I don’t have to. I use my silence about the sex I’m not having as a cover story for the silence about the sex that was done to me.
They play games of ‘would you rather?’, a competitive form of gross-out in which ‘I wouldn’t’ is not an optio
n. Eat shit or suck dick? Suck snot through a sock or go down on your granny? I think, One of them is going to say, Fuck the Rev or . . . ? If they say it then I’ll choose it, because saying it might just exclude me from the suspicion of having done it. Saying it could even be my alibi. But then again it might stick, might become a defining joke. It’s a high-risk strategy: there’s sour bile in the back of my throat. But of course no one says it. Why would they? It’s not that kind of game.
I wonder if I’m the only virgin among them, a virgin who also knows more about what sex really is than all of them combined.
One of them has an actual girlfriend. They have, he’s told me, full-blown condom-wearing sex. She is called Kay and wears pencil skirts and low-cut jumpers. I decide that I’m in love with her.
My grown-up leftie mates don’t seem to approve of sex, which is fine by me. It’s one of the reasons they’re my mates. They think it’s over-rated, an empty system-propping pleasure, like shopping or going to a disco. Sex replicates the power relationships of capitalism, coerces us into compliance, divides us into monogamous units. Sometimes that also sounds fine by me, though I don’t say that bit.
Kay has decided I’m her safe not-going-to-try-anything new male friend. Her favourite records are Pink Floyd’s Relics, Deep Purple’s Machine Head and Kings of the Wild Frontier by Adam and the Ants.
I somehow know that the best way to guard secrets is to get other secrets, ones that are easily discovered. Wear this secret well. Be a triple agent. Your secret will be that you are someone who has secrets. Advertise the fact that you have secrets and you’ll be allowed to keep the secretive secrets secret.
I bring Kay to the Railway where she meets the comrades who she doesn’t think of as comrades. They think she’s my girlfriend even though they don’t say the word ‘girlfriend’. I enjoy the perception of having her as my girlfriend and know that it’s much much better than her actually being my girlfriend. An actual girlfriend would want to touch me, and even though that’s what I want, I worry that it will make me sick. And I don’t want her to think that she makes me sick.
Next
‘One can begin so many things with a new person! – even begin to be a better man.’
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Yet somewhere and somehow I find Dave Hesmondhalgh. Or he finds me. Ask Dave how we met and he’ll tell a couple of stories about having met me as a young lad, twelve or thirteen, playing ping-pong down the local sports centre. He’ll tell you about a lad with long hair who was notably and intensely competitive, ungraciously celebrating his every fluke. I don’t remember this, but I do remember seeing Dave at the Peace Group, a lad my age with a nose for the issues, keen to make a difference. I remember an afternoon drink in the Railway and a conversation about The Mighty Wah’s ‘The Story of the Blues’. I remember an invitation to Oxford, where he was studying, and being slightly affronted that I wasn’t the only clever kid on the block. I remember him reading things with a pen in his hand, and the way he gripped the pen like a chopstick. But what I remember most vividly about Dave ‘Hesy’ is thinking that here is someone with whom I want to be friends.
He was an Accrington boy but not a Catholic, although his mother had been. He was an athlete without the sportiness, a lad without the laddishness, an activist without the dogma. It was Dave who reminded me of what a life outside Accrington could look like, yet also what there was in this strange little mill town worth keeping hold of. Dave was the first person I met who made being kind look charismatic.
He invites me to Oxford for the summer after my exams.
Exams are all I can think of.
Next
‘Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again.’
Frank O’Hara, Meditations on An Emergency
Escape. I need to get out of Accrington, away from Jack and Kath. I need Rev Kev to stop looking at me in the corridor, in the library, in the smokers’ corner when I’m smoking with Kay. I need to get to university. Which means doing well at A levels. Which means revising. Which means spending time at Jack and Kath’s, in the library, and smoking with Kay.
I’m looking now at the diaries I kept then. There is page after page of homework schedules, revision timetables, the day broken down into the free periods in which I can cram notes from books into the inside of my head. Jock Roland recommends that I go over every essay, every notebook, and underline the most relevant paragraphs. I do this. I then copy out those paragraphs and go through them again, underlining the most relevant sentences in them. I then copy them out, and so on. And on. I record my entire history notebooks onto a portable cassette player. I go to sleep to the sound of my own voice talking about the Declaration of Independence and Causes of the First World War. I work each night from six until nine, when I then go down the Railway, notebooks in hand. I take Sons and Lovers down with me to King Street and memorize quotes about Miriam being frigid. In between collecting glasses I underline couplets from An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, and when anyone asks me what I’m doing I say ‘nothing’.
I still miss god who, as John Lydon’s PiL now remind me regularly, spelt backwards is ‘dooooog’. I miss Dave Hes even though I’ve only just met him. And I miss my mum and dad, even though I hate them. Me and Jack just don’t fit together any more. The last time we did was when we went to see The Long Good Friday together, John Mackenzie’s brooding vision of an old-style gangster watching his London, his ‘manor’, slip away from him. I can feel Jack’s discomfort at the swearing, but also his sheer pleasure at watching Bob Hoskins swagger around the docklands, a man torn between impotent rage and crumbling self-belief.
We walk home and he says how they don’t make them like that any more, and I say they obviously do because they just made that. He says Hoskins was like Cagney and Helen Mirren like Bette Davis, especially in that hat with the veil. I say that he was also like John Cleese and Connie Booth in Fawlty Towers: he keeps messing things up and she keeps straightening them out. He says no they weren’t, they were like Bogart and Bacall. I say no they weren’t, they were like Kermit and Miss Piggy. He says you’re like Kermit. And Miss Piggy. And the scruffy one that plays the drums, and I love him like I used to love him before.
But we don’t go to the flicks any more. Or skim through the Radio and TV Times together, hungry for the week’s films. Neither do we go for walks, or play snooker; and we definitely no longer joke about me being one of the Muppets. Take away the movies and he can’t find a way in. I overhear him and Kath, his complaint that he ‘can’t do right for doing wrong’. It’s a phrase that used to send me into paroxysms of rage, the closed-circuitry of it, the way in which its tautology seemed inescapable. Kath too is at the end of her tether. She knows it can be difficult, what with the work and the exams. Much though she likes Gary and Sara, she’s not sure that it’s good for me, to always be around people that much older than me.
She suggests that I get in touch with Father O’Neill. He, of course, is not a person who is older than me. He is not a person. He is a priest, and as such wise and ageless. If anyone will be able to sort out her son it’s surely his headmaster-mentor-teacher.
I punish them with my reticence. I tell myself that nothing of mine will ever be theirs again, that their blindness to the abuse-that-I-still-don’t-call-abuse disqualifies them from all my future intimacies, confidences, troubles. Fuck them and their petty-minded deference. Fuck the rosary beads that are draped over the luminous statue of the Sacred Heart that still stands on the chest of drawers in my bedroom. Fuck the old pope and the new pope and every grovelling pope-lover who descended on Manchester when he came to visit the other month. Fuck Lourdes and the stupid fucking holy water that we keep on the sideboard next to the missionary box. Fuck also everyone who goes to Lourdes: if they’re stupid enough to believe that jumping in a river will cure them then I hope they fucking drown. Fuck mass and confession and the stupid fucking dog collars that Father Fuck once told me would look good on
me. Fuck the Holy Ghost, the baby Jesus and particularly fuck the Virgin fucking Mary.
What was it about the Marists, about the Society of Mary, that appealed to you, Herr Reverend? Why not the Jesuits, the famed Society of Jesus, a bunch of intellectual heavyweights if ever there was one. Not up to it? Or too long? Their gig lasts seven years, doesn’t it, a long time to be kept away from young boys and all that young energy. But no, it wasn’t that. Or just that. It was a mum thing, a woman thing, a mum who is a woman but doesn’t have sex thing. I could see it when you took me home to meet Winnie (and fuck her too, while we’re at it). I could see the way you were solicitous of her, needed her to bless the unholy fucking paedo-rimony that was taking place under her roof. You needed her to like me, and me to like her. (I didn’t, by the way. That night’s sexual assault kinda distracted me from appreciating her finer points.)
Next
‘The house next door is never the sanctuary it at first appears to be.’
William Maxwell, Time Will Darken It
Which raises the following question. If I am as enraged as I seem to be by the Holy Roman Church, then what am I doing defending it to a pair of revolutionary socialists in the bar of the Railway Hotel?
I can’t remember how the subject came up, although if you are drinking in a pub with Gary and Sara the topic of politics and state control is never far from the surface. It wasn’t Catholicism in particular, it was Christianity in general. Which meant God and goodness, the truth of material conditions versus the idealistic fantasies of the well-intentioned. It meant ‘opiate of the people’ and religion as a form of ideological anaesthesia. It meant ‘no need to bother about this world, be happy in the next’. Gary and Sara are adamant that religion equals political passivity, a way of getting the docile masses to embrace the status quo.
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness Page 18