It’s them that I can’t forgive you for, the way in which you made their hopes and aspirations the tools of your own needs. It’s them who spent their lives worrying if it was something they had done wrong to make their boy turn out the way he did. They had more trust in you than I ever did, more belief in what you represented. They were innocent, and it was them who got the blame. So rot in hell for that.
And I’ll rot in hell for my own stuff, of which there is a depressingly large amount. Not child-fucking though. I remember reading, years ago, about how most abusers had been abused and wondering if I would develop a taste for it, and planning how to kill myself if I started to find myself being sexually drawn to underage kids. Thankfully it’s just not in me, whatever the ‘it’ is. There’s plenty of other stuff though: needy, manipulative, petty, vindictive, the familiar motifs of adults who have been abused as children (or just the familiar motifs of adults). I’m not good at being a survivor, at baring my wounds bravely or gently. I rely on kindness but am suspicious of it, suspicious of why I rely on it. And why it’s being offered.
I’m getting better though. I no longer drink vodka for breakfast or carve up my arms to let the pressure out. I go to AA and tell my story. Or a story. I tell them about the booze and the blackouts and the regrets, and the adjustments to a life lived in sobriety. I don’t tell them about how, some days, most nights, I can still taste your tongue at the back of my throat or how my stomach becomes a tsunami every time I encounter someone who I perceive as having power over me (which can be anyone). I say that I’m grateful for what I’ve got rather than bitter about what I’ve lost, and try to convince myself that I am. I say that I live my life one day at a time, which isn’t true, and that I say the serenity prayer each morning, which is.
They talk in these meetings of a Higher Power, a phrase that at first sent me straight back to you and your boozy theological grooming. It’s a measure of how desperate I was to stop drinking that I kept going to those meetings, kept showing up in those draughty church basements. Now I can conceive of a God who is nothing to do with you, a God who doesn’t need my body to quell the loneliness of a middle-aged man.
On Sundays I go and sit with the Quakers. For an hour I sit and listen to the wind outside and the way it blends in with the sound of passing cars. I close my eyes and feel my breath go from my nostrils down into my chest, making its way to the soles of my feet. I feel the blood coursing through my veins and sometimes I know what Quakers mean when they talk about ‘that of God’ being in everyone.
We drink coffee afterwards and they tell me about their gardens or their classical-music recitals, and I walk home and grumble to myself about how bloody middle class they are and how if they had had my life they wouldn’t be so concerned about everyone and everything. And the next week I go back. And the week after that. And I keep going back because people aren’t perfect but staying away from them doesn’t make them any more so. And so long as there is one breath, there is always the chance of another.
Footnote
1 Not just southerners, actually. There was a time when Coronation Street used Accrington as shorthand for a certain kind of existential dread. ‘A face like a wet Wednesday in Accrington’ was one I remember.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to: Ross Bradshaw and everyone at Five Leaves Bookshop; Caroline Hennigan and the staff at Nottingham Broadway; Janna Graham, Merce Santos, Alba Colomo and all at Nottingham Contemporary.
Thanks also: Katherine Carroll, Hilary Cook, Russell Christie, Julie Crosby, Joel Davie, Brendan Flanagan, David Hesmondhalgh, Ian Kershaw, Rebecca Kidd, John ‘Mac’ McClelland, Maggie MacLure, Brian McCormack, Deirdre O’Byrne, Tracey Potts, Emma Robertson, Mark Russell, Frank Rutten, Nick Stevenson, Helen Steward, Matt Turpin and Colin Wright.
Thanks to my agent Tony Peake, my editors Ravi Mirchandani, Nicholas Blake and Ansa Khan Khattak. A special thanks to Jonathan Coe and Julie Hesmondhalgh, who conspired to get this book out in the first place.
‘What Caveney achieves in this powerful, distinctive memoir is the positioning of his repeated sexual abuse into the landscape of an early Eighties adolescence . . . By turns honest, angry, funny, thoughtful, acerbic and desperately sad . . . Caveney impressively resists reaching easy conclusions . . . The book is percussive with black gags, as Caveney attacks the contradictions of his teenage years.’
Richard Beard, The Times
‘[The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness] is often bleakly funny and, alongside its troubling main theme, tells a more tender story of adolescent male friendship, unspoken parental love and music’s redemptive power . . . [Caveney’s] voice on the page is humane, big-hearted and without self-pity . . . It demands to be read.’
Guardian
‘A defiant, important memoir . . . Graham Caveney recounts with great courage and candour how, in the 1970s, as the clever, awkward, nerdy, only child of devoutly Catholic working-class parents in Accrington, Lancashire, he was groomed by a priest at his local grammar school in Blackburn, and then sexually abused by him.’
Observer
‘Caveney . . . writes with such robust, defiant attack that he never leaves the reader feeling like a prurient spy. His anger is blistering, any comedy not so much black as bile green . . . Caveney tells the story of his life brilliantly, but still you wish there was another one he could have written.’
Sunday Times
‘The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness is a fascinating book, a hilarious book and a horrifying one. On the surface it is a vivid, funny memoir of growing up in 1970s Lancashire; a wry treatise on the British class system; a hymn to traditions, rituals, ways of life and habits of thought which are already sliding into oblivion. At its core, however, lies something darker, much harder to talk about, and profoundly disturbing. It’s a book which blew me away and shook me to the core.’
Jonathan Coe
‘Fascinating – an honest and funny book about a clever kid growing up in the North and the long-ranging effects of trauma.’
Cathy Rentzenbrink
‘The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness is about the dark ironies of growing up working class and Catholic in a small industrial town. It is an incredibly powerful book about addiction (to alcohol), music, politics and books and the long road to recovery.’
Julie Hesmondhalgh, Observer
‘Devastating and wonderful. A story that is at times almost unbearable to read except that, in the telling, the story – and the man telling it – somehow, impossibly, become beautiful and whole. Like John Healy’s The Grass Arena, Graham Caveney’s book is an instant classic.’
Howard Cunnell
‘A thoughtful tale about music, class, religion and sexual abuse in 1970s and 1980s Accrington . . . Gripping.’
Manchester Evening News
‘Extraordinary . . . brilliantly detailed, vivid and frequently very funny . . . A remarkable feat.’
Editor’s Choice, The Bookseller
‘I turned down page after page filled with lines I wanted to quote . . . I was moved to tears countless times, and I laughed the same number of times . . . Ultimately, I felt grateful to him. For sharing his struggle, for being honest and insightful and great, and making me laugh. I admired him most of all for surviving, and for telling it so beautifully.’
The Australian
The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness
Graham Caveney is a freelance writer. He has written on music and fiction for the NME, The Face and the Independent. He is the author of two previous books, on William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.
Also by Graham Caveney
Shopping in Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction
(with Elizabeth Young)
The ‘Priest’, They Called Him: The Life and Legacy of William S. Burroughs
Screaming with Joy: The Life of Allen Ginsberg
First published 2017 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2018 by Picador
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ISBN 978-1-5098-3069-5
Copyright © Graham Caveney 2017
Photograph: Graham Caveney aged sixteen. Background: Steve Ball / Alamy Stock Photo
Design: Ami Smithson, Picador Art Department
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