About the Author
Philip Wilding is a journalist, writer and radio producer who lives and works in London. His debut novel, Cross Country Murder Song, was described, variously, as ‘like a worm inside my brain’ and ‘compelling and sophisticated writing’. He ghost wrote Carl Barat’s acclaimed autobiography, Threepenny Memoir, and helped launch the BBC 6 Music network as producer and co-presenter on The Phill Jupitus Breakfast Show. He currently spends his days producing at talkRADIO. And when not sat near a microphone, he dreams about running a half-marathon in less than two hours.
The Death and Life of Red Henley
Philip Wilding
Unbound Digital
This edition first published in 2018
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© Philip Wilding, 2018
The right of Philip Wilding to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-912618-27-9
ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-912618-26-2
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
For a badge-hoarding, poetry-writing, tifter-sporting, Renaissance man: always working, always angry, the incomparable Phill Jupitus.
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Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Dear Reader Letter
Super Patrons
January 1956
January 1980
February 1980
March 1980
April 1980
June 1961
May 1980
June 1980
May 1961
June 1980
Summer Solstice 1980
July 1980
June 1961
July 1980
June 1961
August 1980
September 1980
October 1980
November 1980
December 1980
Thank You
January 1956
‘ A daughter? ’
His shrill damnation blotted out the noise of the newly born baby as she wailed her way into the world. She didn’t yet know it, but her father’s ire was aimed at something indistinguishable that sat far above the roof of the hospital wing and delivery room they were in: his Lord.
‘A daughter?’ he asked again, imploring the ceiling’s glare. ‘A daughter,’ he said again, but this time his voice was softening, with something like acceptance creeping into it as he stared at the bloody, vacant gap of his daughter’s sex. He was trembling and quiet now, glaring at the midwife holding his daughter out towards him, apportioning blame, his eyes murderous and dark, and by the time the nurse had turned to the washed-out face of his wife there on the operating table and back again it was to the silent flapping of the delivery-room doors, the memory of his shape scything through the air.
As she grew up he dressed her in boy’s clothes; people would stop and tousle her hair and coo things at the little boy seated in the pram before them. Her father never corrected their mistakes: he grinned broadly and then his face would register sadness and disappointment as the truth focused his thoughts and the trilling women walked away. Her mother had died when the girl was barely a year old, a red station wagon mounting the sidewalk and snatching her away while her hand still played lightly on the pram. She remembered laughter and her mother’s face glancing in at her, softened by a golden light, her features glimmering in a halo and then the revving of an engine, a car screeching out of control and suddenly her mother was gone as if she’d been pulled into the sky, and in a way she had been. The car came to rest against the corner of a women’s clothing store, her mother caught between the shining veneer of the hood and the ruddy brown of the building’s bricks next to a large picture window advertising that season’s latest styles; she was broken almost completely at the hips, her back pressed hard against the wall, her mouth a surprised circle, there was steam rising from the car’s ruptured radiator, a horn keening loudly, the day was shattering, coming apart like a jigsaw that had fallen to the floor.
Her name was Rose, but her father called her Red, because, he said, her colour was the same hazy copper shade as her mother’s had been when they first met. She grew up in plaid shirts and shapeless jeans, her father took her from school and taught her at home as soon as he could, they spent all their days together, he kept her hair cut short, and one day she found a painting of Joan of Arc among her mother’s things, the flames rising from the wooden logs at her feet to claim her, her hair austere, almost brusque, but somehow right for someone who had spent her short life caught in a fight. Joan was staring upwards, her eyes filled with a brilliant light, and though her mouth was open, Rose didn’t think it was in fear or a cry for help from her God, to her it looked like jubilation, like she was exultant, as if she were finally going home. She liked her own hair a lot more after that, it made her feel that she too was fighting the good fight, though she wasn’t sure for who or against what.
As Rose grew, she learned to play basketball, began to enjoy the high metallic sound it made when she bounced the ball against the concrete of their drive, comfortable with the ball in her hands, enjoying the swish of the chains hanging from the steel hoop tacked above the garage door. She played with her father, one on one, learning to dip past him and climb towards the rim, momentarily weightless; she imagined cameras flashing as she slammed the ball to score, her father’s delighted whoop reverberating behind her as she fell back to earth, the sound of her trainers slapping hard as she landed. She developed calluses on her hands tossing a football back and forth in their back yard, snatching the spiralling torpedo out of the fading winter light. Summer she swung bats at curving baseballs and felt the tendons tighten in her arms, the muscles harden, her father’s pitches coming faster, the strike reverberating in slow shocks along her bat.
When Rose thought back on her father she had to concede that he was probably never the giant she thought he might be. There was bluster and the banging of doors, but when he turned his back to her it was with small, round and inexpressive shoulders – she’d never seen him stand up straight since the death of her mother. In his silent moments, which grew longer like shadows as the day draws to an end, he looked like gravity had become too much and was slowly pushing him down into the earth. Grief’s monstrous weight, she thought, as his glistening eyes settled on her from somewhere deep inside his skull.
In his never-ending quest to free her from her own sexuality – to have the son he’d always wanted – he’d taken her into the mountains one morning with a surprising, frantic glee. He harried her out of bed and into her indeterminate outfit (she was twelve and hid her period and slowly emerging body like Victorians used drapes to cover the legs of their pianos) and told her they were going to spend the day together in the mountains that sat in neat peaks in the distance; with a flourish he produced an old BB gun that she’d never seen before. He brandished it before her with a zeal missing since her mother’s death. It was a long piece of varnished, chipped wood with a sleek, dry-looking, matte black barrel. It came in a canvas bag with a shoulder strap and excited and scared her equally.
They set off into the rain that came at their car at an angle; it fell from a sky that was all drizzle and paunch and clung to the serrated face of the hills, the low cloud looking like it might roll down the incline at any moment and land like a deflated parachute in a tangle at the base of the mountain. They parked up the car and walked past the lake with its cement edges and submerged, rusting-junk heart. She’d heard stories of boys skinny-dipping there, their limbs suddenly snagged by a bicycle frame, flailing uselessly against fate. She’d heard the stories from a friend of a friend, all her friends had. There was nothing there now, but silt and the pockmarks left on the water’s impassive face by the rain.
They were at the first real crest of the hill. Her father gazed in a measured, distant way at the countryside below them; miles away lay the suburbs they called home, which slid slowly towards the city, coming to a halt where she imagined its walls might once have stood. Did American cities ever have walls, she wondered? Like Jericho laid low by the shrill call to arms of an army’s horns or the foreign walled cities she’d read about, London, York, Rhodes, as she sat quiet and still like a cat in her room while her father roamed the house, chasing the loneliness from the shadows like hounds flushing grouse. She had found him once standing at the foot of their stairs clutching the banister until the colour had almost completely left his hand. He was looking upward to a point she knew she’d never see no matter how hard she stared. They stood there in mute disappointment, the light going out down the hall where the sun was setting through the kitchen window.
‘Your mother,’ he said finally, ‘used to come down those stairs and she’d be singing and the song would carry in through the rooms and into my study and to my desk and the house would fill with her voice. It was like she was calling to me.’ Then his features
fell inwards, his eyes tightly shut as if that might stem the tears, and she didn’t know if she had ever seen him look so old.
‘Rose,’ he handed her the gun and she was surprised by how cumbersome it felt. The rain had become a thin wave of drizzle here and settled on her face, making her lashes dewy and her cheeks cold. She tried to hide her struggle with the gun from him; she imagined sinewy arms, arms she felt were rightly hers, her birthright, when she dunked a ball or rifled a football; she wanted them to feel taut and full of leverage. With enough power there to swing the gun up into place and let off a round, cracking a clay pigeon and watching the red disc splinter to make a jagged splash of colour in the sky before falling away to the damp earth below. In reality, she felt held by the gun, not it by her. Her father helped her with it, placing it against her shoulder and holding his hand beneath the stock so that the barrel was still, the distant hills rendered fuzzy and out of focus against the defining point of the gun’s sight. She squeezed the trigger, she could hear her father somewhere off in the distance telling her how to do it, not to jerk the trigger, to be gentle. The sharp whip and crack almost made her drop the gun to the ground, but her father’s reassuring fist held it solemnly still before her. The recoil hadn’t been the terrifying seizure she’d imagined, the untraceable arc the pellet made after its innocuous exit was a huge disappointment. She imagined that each shot fired would be an invitation, an opening to something unrealised; in her mind’s eye she saw the sky splinter and crash, falling away like a great pane of glass as the bullet impacted, revealing the real world beyond as some sort of sanctity past the shimmering façade.
The rain was clear and solid as it fell; her father snapped the barrel back into place, making the gun look whole again. He turned swiftly, raising it to his cheek, and fired and a small bird fell from a branch: a sparrow, brown with a smear of yellow along its beak. He had it in the palm of his hand now, the body cooling, the life drifting away on the currents of air. Her face was hot and the tears came quickly as disgust and anger drew lines in her father’s features. From a distance you can see the father offer Rose the bird and the furious shaking of the young girl’s head and then he offers her the gun and she turns, her coat pulled up tight to her throat, her hair slicked down, thick with rain. It’s silent, but he’s saying something, the words are abrupt and rattle like gravel thrown up by a passing car. Then they’re both still until her father slides the gun back uselessly into its case.
The Death & Life of Red Henley Page 1