Vital Signs

by John Metcalf

  “You wicked boy! You’re wasting water while soldiers are dying in the desert.”

  Even at the victory celebrations, when they lit a huge bonfire right in the middle of our street and the road melted and someone shot the grocer’s shop, a secret worm of guilt gnawed at my pleasure.

  My anxiety extended from myself to a distrust even of the inevitable processes of nature.

  I had been convinced that in my case sperm would never flow.

  I had despaired of growing pubic hair.

  I had thought it likely that when my voice broke it would later break back again.

  I was consciously kind to a ginger-coloured boy called Probert, who had an undescended testicle, because I felt that there but for the Grace of God.

  But, always, it was my mother who instilled in me the deepest sense of failure and despair. I can still hear her voice in its litany of sorrows:

  “You’re breaking my heart.”

  “You were born for the gallows.”

  “How can we love a boy who . . .”

  ‘’I’ll try to find it in my heart to forgive . . .”

  “You’re breaking Jesus’ heart . . .”

  “I never thought a boy of mine . . .”

  “You’ve let down everyone who loves you . . .”

  When my mother returned in the evening from the parent-teacher interviews, I was in bed reading. I heard her footsteps coming upstairs. She was wearing her Sunday clothes, a turquoise costume with a horrible turquoise hat which was bandaged with sort of turquoise net stuff and stuck through with a hatpin with a big turquoise lump on it. She said nothing. She closed the door.

  Her face was set; she had that deadly calmness about her which is more frightening and dangerous than rage. She opened her handbag, groped in it without taking her eyes from mine, and then dropped on the coverlet a copy of Health and Efficiency.

  It lay on my stomach like a lead block. It had been confiscated from me during music the week before.

  She pulled up the chair and sat beside the bed.

  In a quiet, almost conversational voice, she started. She could scarcely credit that a boy of hers had deliberately set fire to another boy in the metalwork shop. Why had I not told her I had broken the bench drill? I had broken the drill by disobeying orders. Rules were made to be obeyed. Had I considered what would have happened had the broken drill bit killed, maimed, or blinded another child? My father, impoverished as we were, would buy a new drill and a new apron for the boy whose apron was burned. Even if I did hate algebra so much, was it really manly to hide in the lavatories? Was that facing up to my responsibilities? Mr. Dodds had seemed evasive; was there anything I wished to tell her about geography? Anything I had not confessed? I would feel better if my conscience were clear. Her heart was sore that I had been detected smoking behind the bicycle sheds. Mastery of Latin could not be expected if I frittered away my time passing surreptitious notes. What was in the notes? Some lewdness, she had no doubt. And what wickedness could have possessed me to trace that word in the dust on Mr. Taylor’s car?

  I didn’t deny doing that?

  Did I know the meaning of that word?

  Did I?

  The true and unspeakable meaning of that word?

  If I did not throw myself on God’s mercy and mend my ways, if I did not apply myself to my studies, if I did not shun evil companions, and if my heart was not contrite, she had no doubt that I would end up as a common labourer with no future but the gallows.

  All this, however, was of little importance.

  The sacrifices that she and my father were making to give me a good education were nothing, merely duty done. She could bear the shame I had brought upon her and my father and my brother. She was, by now, used to such shame. She loved me deeply; my father loved me; my brother loved me; my uncles and aunts loved me. But it was obvious that there was no love in my heart. Actions speak louder than words. Was it not obvious from my actions that I did not return the love so freely given? If I loved others, then I would not wound them.

  This was obvious, wasn’t it?

  My heart was a heart of stone.

  That pain, that mother’s sorrow, too, she could bear.

  But it cut her to the quick—

  She pointed to Health and Efficiency and tears started to roll down her cheeks. She was unable to express, heartbreak, inner wounds, shame, the defilement, the revulsion in her that this, this filth, this degradation, wallowing vile filthy nastiness, this lewd and sinful filth—did I wish to kill her? She would die of a broken heart. She could never raise her head again. She was heartsick that she’d lived to see this day.

  For those who gave themselves to this there was no salvation. Christ Himself would shun them and condemn them to suffering eternal.

  Her face was blotchy with tears. She gripped one of my hands in hers. Her grip was so fierce that the stone in her ring was cutting into my flesh. She brought her face closer to mine.

  “If I had known,” she said, “on the day that you were born what I now know, if I had known that that baby was to become what you are, do you know what I’d have done?

  “Do you?

  “Do you?”

  Spittle was flecking my face.

  “With joy in my heart,” she said, “with joy, I’d have had you taken from my arms and put you out for adoption.”

  Still gripping my hand, she knelt by the bed pulling me down towards her.

  “Oh God,” she prayed, “forgive me my sins and wickedness. I am weak but Thou art strong. Take from me this bitter cup. Make known unto me wherein I have transgressed that Thou shouldst punish me by making bitter unto me the fruit of my womb. Wreak upon me, Oh Lord, Thy wrath, but spare, I beseech Thee, this boy . . .”

  There was a lot of this stuff and it went on for quite a long time. She was rocking herself backwards and forwards in its rhythms and pulling me with her. By the end of it, she’d reduced me to a shuddering, tear-racked hysteria. She eventually left me to my tears and the glow of the reading lamp.

  In the doorway, she turned and half-whispered,

  “Do you know what I’m going to do now?”

  I shook my head.

  “Do you?”

  Her eyes moved from mine, glancing at the magazine.

  “I’m going to wash my hands.”

  I cried until I could cry no more. I felt empty, exhausted, sick. I turned my pillow to the dry side. I hated myself. I looked with loathing through Health and Efficiency, which had been left on the bed in accusation.

  I stared at the roses on the wallpaper grouping them into different patterns.

  Mournfully, I wanked myself to sleep.

  * * *

  When i was fourteen we moved again to a new church in a different circuit—this time not far from London. By now I could hardly contain my hatred of my mother and her comfortable world of teas, scones, Agatha Christie, and missionary boxes. The Night of the Annual Report was, in memory, the turning point, though in fact the whole process must have been more complex, drawn-out, and guilt-sodden. But the feeling was hardening that if for the gallows I was born then to the gallows I would go, but I’d give the crowd a tune and a jig on the way to the Tyburn Tree.

  It was with this move and in this new house that I started the daily practice of dipping my mother’s toothbrush in the lavatory.

  Between the years of twelve and fifteen I was building for myself a new identity. I did no more than pass at school; I was absorbed in more important tasks. My reading had always been wide and precocious but now I read so much and secretly late into the night that in school I was pale and lethargic and could hardly bring myself to go through the motions with Bunsen burners and balances and x and y and contour maps from which one was supposed to draw bumpy hills. My reading in non-fiction was mainly of rationalist history, theology, and studies of religious d
eviation. I devoured the works of H. G. Wells, Professor Joad, and the popular essays of Bertrand Russell. I became something of an authority on witchcraft, heresies major and minor, and the rites of the Copts. I was particularly pleased to discover that in Ethiopia, Judas Iscariot was worshipped as a saint.

  I started to carry the fight to my mother by introducing the unspeakable under the guise of religious knowledge. At the tea table, I would offer such topics as the derivation of the word “bugger” from “Bulgarian,” explaining to her the Manichean background until my father cleared his throat for silence or my mother said, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”

  I read The Voyage of the Beagle because I understood that Darwin had totally undermined Christianity, but the book was not helpful; The Golden Bough, equally heralded, was equally disappointing, but it was enlivened by accounts of some sexual customs which I would never have imagined.

  Father and Son by Edmund Gosse was a particular joy.

  I also managed to irritate and hurt my mother by insisting on going to churches of other denominations; I presented this as a religious and ecumenical enthusiasm. I goaded her with a show of great interest in the Roman Catholic church and invented a priest called Father O’Neil with whom I claimed to be having fascinating conversations; I managed to intimate that Father O’Neil was bent on conversion.

  One of my greater triumphs in the first months of that new church was with yaws. A missionary campaign was being carried on to collect money to relieve our African brothers. A missionary had shown a colour film at church of these disgusting raspberry-like sores and skin lesions. I looked “yaws” up in the library, as I looked up everything, and could scarcely contain my pleasure.

  At the tea table, I enquired as to the success of the campaign; my mother was out every night with a collecting box. The campaign, it seemed, was going well.

  “I was reading about yaws today in the library,” I said.

  “Poor things,” said my mother.

  “In a book by Dr. Schweitzer.”

  (Actually a brief paragraph in a medical encyclopedia, but the saintly Schweitzer was better for my purposes.)

  “Some more tea?” said my mother.

  “It seems,” I said, “that yaws is a form of venereal disease.”

  A cup clinked on a saucer in the silence.

  “What’s venereal disease?” said my brother.

  “Pass this to your father,” my mother said to him.

  “If unchecked,” I said, “it has much the same effects as syphilis and . . .”

  “Cake?” said my mother. “It’s got raisins in it.”

  “. . . and like syphilis is caused . . .”

  “Would anyone like another cup of tea?”

  “. . . caused by a spirochete. A spirochete of the same family.”

  “I don’t think,” said my mother, “that the tea-table . . .”

  “Dr. Schweitzer,” I said, “didn’t actually say if yaws was contracted in the same way as syphilis but if the spirochete . . .”

  My father cleared his throat and I busied myself with a slice of cake.

  She was badly shaken.

  But it was fiction that sustained me and offered models of subversion. And what a strange hodgepodge of books it was. I cannot remember even a fraction of them but I do recall the effects on me of Tono-Bungay, Sons and Lovers, The Moon and Sixpence, Wuthering Heights, The Constant Nymph, and the opening sections of David Copperfield and Oliver Twist.

  My favourite poet was Keats, my favourite poem “The Eve of St. Agnes.” I was bewildered that a poem so patently lubricious was endorsed for school consumption. Swinburne earned my allegiance with the lines:

  Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world

  has grown grey from thy breath,

  Sentiments which accorded exactly with my own.

  I read the plays of Christopher Marlowe because I’d heard he was an atheist and was murdered in a pub; I identified strongly with Tamburlaine.

  I haunted the local library in my quest for knowledge. Not only was it a very good library, but I lusted after one of the younger librarians who had a nice smile and breasts that gave the impression of great solidity. I spent hours wondering how much they weighed, what one would feel like hot and unconfined.

  It was in the library that I found one day a book called The March of the Moderns by the art historian William Gaunt. I have never seen or read the book since. It struck me with the radiance and power of revelation. The mundane world fell away; I was oblivious to the smell of floorpolish and damp raincoats, the click of the date stamp, the passage of other browsers along the shelves. I read standing up until closing time and then took the book home and finished it in bed.

  It was like the Second Coming of Mr. Montague.

  The book revealed to me a world where brilliant but persecuted people drank champagne for breakfast and were pissed by lunch, took lobsters for walks on leashes, shaved off half their moustaches, sliced off their ears and gave them to prostitutes, possessed women by the score, consorted with syphilitic dwarves, lived in brothels, and were allowed to go mad.

  Somewhere in the sun, D.H. Lawrence was at it.

  Hemingway was giving them both barrels.

  Ezra was suffering for the faith in an American bin.

  Painters everywhere were possessing their exotic Javanese models.

  I, meanwhile, was in Croydon.

  But Art was obviously the answer; it was just a question of finding my medium. The problem with the novel was that writing one took a long time and nothing interesting had happened to me. I tried poetry for a time, being particularly drawn to the imagists because they were very short, and seemed easiest to imitate. H.D. was one of my favourites. Painting, because of the models, attracted me the most but I couldn’t draw anything that looked like anything; abstraction was the answer, of course, but secretly I thought abstraction not quite honest. I had a go at a few linocuts but gouged my hand rather badly. Drama was soured for me by memories of endless pageants and nativity plays where kids tripped over the frayed carpet and I had to say:

  “I bring you tidings of Great Joy.”

  But I was not depressed.

  I settled down to wait. I lived in the manse, ate scones, and went to school, but I was charged with a strange certainty that I was somehow different, chosen, special; my Muse, in her own good time, would descend and translate me from Croydon to that richer world where women and applause were waiting.

  The calm of this newfound certainty soon began to fray; though I had no doubts about my calling, it was bringing me no immediate relief; it was bringing me no closer to an actual girl. Being new to the area I had no friends. And I had no idea of how I could approach girls. I envied the boys at school who could indulge in easy badinage at the bus stop or tobacconist. For all its crudity, it seemed to work. I would have liked to say to the girls, as they did,

  “Carry your bag, Miss?” or “When are you going to wash your hair, then?” but it was not simple shyness or fear of rebuff which prevented me. I felt myself to be so other, that had I offered such pleasantries, I knew they’d just stare or be frightened or call a policeman.

  Girls obsessed me, but apart from being shy I was also frightened of them. Not frightened of humiliation, though that would have been bad enough, but frightened of other things less realized, fears I was scarcely able to formulate—that contagion with which my mother had infected me. Although intellectually I rejected all her attitudes and ideas, I still somewhere felt the flesh to be sinful, obscene, disgusting. I’d once asked a boy who’d done it what it was like and he said, “hot and slimy”; this had only confirmed what I knew instinctively to be the truth. And jokes boys told about the smell of kippers. I feared, also, the disease they might carry; the word “lues” was
more than a word I’d found in a dictionary; it was a physical horror. And then there was all this menstrual business. For all my lust and desire, some puritan cancer sat in my heart.

  (A few years ago, I read a biography of Ruskin that recounted the debacle of his wedding night. Ruskin, intense, pure, and idealistic, was acquainted with the female form only through sculpture and paintings; his first sight of pubic hair brought him to the verge of nervous collapse; the marriage was annulled. His situation then, and mine at fourteen and fifteen, had much in common.)

  For all my strange reading and precocity, another thing troubled me, something impossible to talk about with another boy, however close, a type of ignorance impossible to admit to. I had studied diagrams of female apparatus many times, followed the arrows that pointed to the various parts, read the labels, but still did not really understand the layout. Much as in botany, it was simple to learn the diagrams of a cross-section of a stem, flower, or trunk, and label the neat pencil lines “stamen,” “carpels,” “vascular bundles” etc., but it was a completely different matter working from an actual specimen. My specimens always turned out quite differently from the way the book said they ought to be. How much worse, then, with girls where I couldn’t even follow the diagram to start with. And the possible vagaries of an actual specimen didn’t bear thinking about.

  For some unremembered reason I had become convinced that, within a small area, were three orifices, each capable of receiving a penis. But only one was the right one. I imagined dreadful scenes ranging from a contemptuous “That’s my urethra, dear,” to shrieks of protest and pain. Nor did I much like the sound of labia majors and labia minors which, medical works informed me, “covered and guarded” the entrance to the vagina. One presumably had to get past them first before even standing a chance of finding the right place.

  It all made me very anxious.

  I still pinned my hopes on Art; I bought a book called Teach Yourself How to Draw in Pencil and Charcoal and the largest size sketching pad that Reeves manufactured. I laboriously traced with tracing paper from the Teach Yourself book two nudes and some drawings of leaves and twigs. I transferred the tracings into the sketching pad and then hung about the local park and stared intently at things, pencil poised or measuring whenever girls went past. The impression I gave, alone and palely loitering by bench and drinking fountain, was, I hoped, Byronic. What was supposed to happen was this: a girl, attracted by my artistic absorption and obvious sensitivity, would approach me and say,