In her letter to Lionel she suggested that he might have me to dinner. He wrote back and insisted he would meet me at the airport. I could stay with him a day or two and then head off to see my father’s relatives. I accepted the offer.
It was to prove a very poor decision.
Chapter Four
Lionel had large bug-eyes. They protruded from a round face topped by a bald head, save for some fluff coming out his ears. He looked like a malevolent koala. His body was short, round and ready to burst, as if he’d been inflated with a bicycle pump and a halt had been called just in time. He spoke dramatically, emphasising every word, even if the subject matter was a shopping list. He also turned out to have a domineering personality. He was probably in his sixties, while I was nineteen. I can’t call him a paedophile since I was old enough, at least under the law, to have made a run for it. I did learn later that exactly what happened to me had happened to a whole swag of young men, all from Australia. From the time he picked me up at the airport it took me five months to escape.
Once he had you in the flat it was hard to break free. I still find it difficult to explain why. Partly it was his ability to break down the self-esteem of whichever young man had fallen into his trap: he’d put you off applying for a job, from taking a trip away, even from travelling into town on your own. He would smile indulgently but contemptuously, implying that you would wither without his assistance. And, after a while, the prophecy became self-fulfilling. Like most young Australians, I’d intended to find a job within a few weeks of arriving: barman or theatre usher were the usual options. I had limited funds. By talking me out of applying for anything – ‘That’s a bad part of town’, ‘I think you can do better’ – Lionel’s work was half done. Soon, it became difficult to avoid becoming his dependent.
He would also tempt me with stories of his influence. He could get me a job as a coffee boy at ITV’s Elstree Studios, the first step on my glorious journey towards being a junior floor manager on a TV soap opera. He had contacts there. ‘It will take just three more weeks,’ he’d say, repeating the promise after each three-week deadline had elapsed. And then he’d say, ‘I’ll be so lonely if you go,’ looking at me with pleading bug-eyes. So perhaps he was preying on my good side, my bad side, my ambitious side, my bankrupt side, my fearful side, and doing so all at once. At this distance, I still feel embarrassed I didn’t have the strength or fortitude or dignity to say: ‘This is awful, I’m leaving, I refuse to be your victim.’ I don’t really understand why I didn’t. It was my lowest moment.
Lionel was after companionship more than sex, although every few weeks he’d more or less force me into bed, as I’m sure he’d done with at least some of the young ‘house guests’ before me. Afterwards he would stand in his bathroom with the door open and scrub himself with pHisohex to remove any trace of what had occurred, strangely keen for me to see how he was sanitising himself, despite the fact the sex had been at his insistence. I had a bedroom at the other end of the apartment in which I would cry myself to sleep most nights, burying my head in the pillow to muffle the sound. Amid my tears I’d plot ways to leave. I’d imagine scenarios in which I’d explain that I was going to Scotland, or leaving for France, or heading off to see my aunt, but I’d always get stuck at the point of his reply, knowing that he’d somehow talk me down, humiliate me into staying.
I then began plotting how I’d leave in the middle of the night, sneaking out without a confrontation, interrupting my own train of thought with a question: ‘Since you’ve been here so long, maybe you should wait just another couple of weeks for that job he’s promised. What’s another week?’
I would also – at this point in my escape fantasy – remember that the outside door was triple-deadlocked at night.
Lionel had a heart condition which required daily treatment in the rooms of a Harley Street specialist and so each day would follow the same course. We’d get up, eat breakfast and then be picked up at 9am by a mini-cab driver who’d take us to Lionel’s medical appointment. I’d sit in the waiting room for an hour and a half while Lionel, wearing a heart monitor, rode an exercise bike. We’d then take a mini-cab home, pausing at a bakery, where Lionel would buy huge quantities of cake which he would eat in the back seat of the cab.
I did mention, didn’t I, that he was obese?
We’d spend the rest of the time sitting in his flat – me trying not to breathe too heavily, or move too briskly, due to his concern for the antique glass ornaments with which the flat was bedecked. It was as close as you could get to living in a booby-trapped tomb.
Some pages back, I pointed out that my life was hardly Angela’s Ashes, but at this point it did bear a passing resemblance to The Collector by John Fowles, that mesmerising portrait of a young person imprisoned by a weirdo.
After about five months of misery, Lionel’s job offer finally came good. I was given a holiday fill-in position as an ‘assistant stage manager’ at Elstree Studios, a few hours on the train from London. I still lived at Lionel’s but had the daylight hours without his poisonous presence. At the studios, I fetched coffee and operated a sort of video clapper board at the start of each take, mainly for a soap opera called General Hospital. The people who worked there were friendly. I was employed for three weeks, enjoyed the experience, was good at the job . . . and then the holidaying employees all returned to work after their summer break.
This was considered quite unusual. Most years at least one of them wouldn’t come back, and I would have inherited the position. The gig as an assistant stage manager was over and hadn’t led anywhere. I was back at Lionel’s full-time. In terms of my TV industry dreams, I’d aimed low and missed.
Into this sad scene I must introduce an unlikely hero: my mother. She’d come on a brief trip to Britain, planning on seeing some London theatre and visiting the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford. Naturally, she came to visit me at Lionel’s. I was thin and drawn and miserable-looking. She rapidly deduced that I’d been caught in a trap and set herself the task of helping me escape.
She moved into Lionel’s, bustling about and using her high-pitched posh voice to tell Lionel he’d been ‘far too kind already’ and she ‘absolutely insisted’ that her son not take advantage of his generosity for ‘a moment longer’. Lionel did his best to fight back – ‘it’s really no trouble at all’ – but soon realised he’d met his match. Within two days of my mother’s arrival, I’d booked myself into a Hampstead boarding house, spotted in a real estate agent’s window, and was waving Lionel goodbye.
I marched up the hill towards my new lodgings carting a heavy backpack containing all that I owned, but with shoulders that felt like a crushing weight had just been removed. I never saw Lionel again, although I can still recall with a shudder every corner of that house.
My mother and I never had an open conversation about my situation and nothing was said by either of us to Lionel. I do know that once she returned home she told my father about my plight and her heroic role in my rescue. Years later, looking through my father’s papers, I found a begging letter detailing the funds she’d expended on the visit and asking that he pay her back: ‘You know it took me nearly two years to earn back the money it cost to go to England to help Richard . . .’
I had somehow become the cause of her trip.
Steve Stephens must have been told about the drama, presumably by my father. I don’t recall my father writing to me about it, but Steve did – addressed to my new accommodation in London.
His letter was composed at a coastal caravan park, to which he’d taken himself for the weekend with, he said, the express purpose of writing to me. In the envelope were four densely filled pages typed with a muscular hand on a small machine in the old journalists’ way, the ‘o’s and ‘p’s breaking through the thin paper. It was a couple of thousand words in length, starting, after a few opening sallies, with a beautifully funny appreciation of London:
History heaves and pukes under every paving stone. Lift one up on
a Friday afternoon and, whoops, there it is, the skulls of 500 who drank the local water a year or two back, then there’s the charred remains of a thousand or so who stayed behind to stare at the fire and get warm for the first time in their lives, and never lived to tell the tale. Of course, it’s the worms . . . There are more worms in English soil per square inch than anywhere else on earth. The fat ones are all on top, and should you take up a shovel and dig down some 20 or 30 feet, why the history of the last 500 years wriggles below you. It’s not till you get up to the Cromwell era that they begin to thin down a bit. Up-stream from Westminster is the best place to find them . . .
He continues in this fashion for some hundreds of words, taking the time to make me laugh. Finally he comes to the subject of my time with Lionel:
. . . which, I now understand, was a bit unbearable. What puzzles me, old son, is why the hell you put up with it for so long without giving the old sod a swift kick in the balls and marching off with the toes still tingling. Oh, well, all things pass, Rich. Sure, it’s a platitude, but the bloody trouble with platitudes is that they are always the truth, nearly. Despite the fact that I am a cunt of a correspondent, you do seem to occupy an uncommon quantity of my awareness and wondering.
Towards the end, he abruptly talks about his regard for my father. ‘Your father, Richard old son, is in many ways, and most of them are those which matter, a fine man . . . I love him.’
‘Now enough,’ he finishes. ‘I’m tired of this terrible typewriter. It can’t type, punctuate or spell. Look after yourself, old son. I think of you a lot. And think a lot of you.’
I hope I appreciated the letter as much at the time as I do re-reading it now. All that effort, all that love, his skill with language, his attempt to amuse me. Steve was part of my life for a shorter time than Lionel was part of it – two months as against five months – but Steve, and this is the truth, had far more impact. I’d met bad in the world, and I’d met good, and good had the louder voice.
My life improved dramatically the moment I left Lionel’s. The boarding house in which I was now ensconced was run by an ancient and hospitable woman with literary leanings. Her name was Daphne, and, according to her own account, she’d attended Cambridge back in the 1930s. Before renting out a room she’d quiz prospective tenants about their favourite authors; accommodation was refused unless you could show familiarity with at least a couple of the lesser novels of Evelyn Waugh. While this may be considered a tad discriminatory, it did mean that the house was full of well-read young men and women with tastes as 1930s Anglophiliac as my own. After months being isolated and exploited, I was offered an instant group of friends, hand-chosen by a smart, kindly great-aunt. Within a few weeks I had a spectacularly attractive American girlfriend, conveniently living in the room across the hallway, and a British best mate in the room above. And, freed from Lionel’s dissuasion, I quickly scored an enjoyable, well-paid job working for a family of cockney spivs in a theatre ticket booth in town, ripping off tourists whose only crime was a desire to see a show by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Well maybe they deserved it.
All the young residents of the house would go drinking together in a Hampstead pub, the Flask, then tumble back nightly at ten, at which point our landlady would open her living-room door and invite us all in for ‘a little whicky’ before bed, serving out the Scotch as she talked to us about the novels we were reading. What bliss. The only possible downside: the house had a blue plaque, proclaiming it had been home to Robert Louis Stevenson, so I’d be woken each Sunday morning by the noise of an American tour group being instructed as to the historical importance of my bedroom.
At the end of the year I returned to Australia, applied for various jobs at the bottom end of the TV business and failed to get any of them. I was making a habit of this ‘aim low and miss’ trajectory. In desperation, I enrolled in a university course in Canberra, thinking I could at least claim to be busy with an arts degree while making the sort of upwards leap necessary to be allowed to serve coffee to actors in television.
One of my school friends was renting a suburban house with a converted garage out the back. It still had the roller door on one end, but someone had added a tiny bathroom. I moved in. It was dank, drab and full of mould, but incredibly cheap. I attended university while continuing to apply for jobs: still mostly as an assistant in TV, but occasionally for positions writing advertising copy in commercial radio. I have kept the rejection slips – a large pile of ‘good luck with your search’ and ‘we are not taking applicants at this time’ – that together form a sort of anti-résumé. Driven by a desire to fill the void in which I found myself, I started to focus a little more on my university degree. I also began to work at the local community radio station and to write pieces for the student newspaper.
One day, noticing a poster for a student play, I wandered into the ANU Arts Centre and offered my assistance. The producer, if that’s not too grand a term, was a third-year student called Debra Oswald. I’d seen her in the student refectory where she sat with a group of other formidable women. She was also in classes with some of my school friends who, of course, were now two years ahead of me. She was staging a production of Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw – a favourite of mine – and was busy with the set design and decoration, wearing a pair of bib-and-brace overalls in which she looked incredibly alluring. I offered to help paint her sets, which I hope doesn’t sound too much like a euphemism.
I wonder now what would have happened if that holiday job in British TV had led to permanent employment. I speculate about that possible me who lives in Birmingham with his English wife and two English children. He dreams sometimes of Australia, but enjoys his job as director of a long-running TV drama. Does the life I have instead, the one in Australia, depend on that failure? Does it all rest on this unusual event: all six of the company’s permanent stage assistants choosing to return to work after the holidays? Of course, I’m now enormously grateful for that moment of disappointment, and for my subsequent failure to land similar jobs. Success at those moments would have robbed me of everything that came later. This is what I find so interesting: in the end, the doors that close determine your path in life as much as those that open. And even things which are painful at the time – my experience with Lionel, most obviously – end up fashioning what you are.
Not long ago, I interviewed the British chef Rick Stein, whose life story hinges on a licensing infraction which forced him to close down his nightclub and bar. He was free to reopen one room, but only if the place became a restaurant. The licensing decision, which left him ashamed and shattered, led to everything good. After the radio interview with Stein, a listener rang with a similar story about fate. He was camping close to a small town. He tried to attend the local night spot but it was full. Disappointed, he and his mates drove to a different town. At this second establishment, he was refused entry because he had bare feet. Disappointed again, he tried to charm the bouncer: ‘Oh, go on, mate, at least I won’t wear down the floorboards.’ It was a funny line. More miraculous still, the bouncer had a sense of humour. He smiled and let him in. Our bloke, almost instantly, met his future wife. Many decades of bliss followed.
So, thank God for bouncers with a sense of humour. And full discos. And licensing police who shut down your nightclub. And those six stage assistants at ITV in London who returned to work in the summer of 1978. With their help, I’d gone home to Australia, been forced into university and met Debra Oswald. Better still, I’d met her in such an appropriate spot: on the set of a sex farce.
Chapter Five
Even though I wasn’t living with my father, I kept being pulled back into the chaos of his life. He was depressed and still drinking heavily. His second wife, Ivy, was tearful and exasperated. My father had seemed such a good catch – handsome, gregarious, intelligent, a successful businessman. Then, once they were married, she realised the various design faults: the obsession with my mother, the anger towards ‘that bastard Phillipps’
, the tendency towards self-pity, the drinking. Quite understandably, Ivy would call me up, demanding my attendance at the house. Sometimes I’d make excuses for why I couldn’t get there, but often I’d drive over in my car. My father would be in the hallway, ranting. Or comatose in the lounge, sleeping it off. ‘Look at him,’ Ivy would say. ‘What am I meant to do?’ I don’t think she expected me to intervene. She just wanted an act of witnessing, for someone else to understand what she was going through.
Meanwhile, the painting of Debra’s theatre set had resulted in us becoming friends. One night, I thought I might see if she was interested in something more intense. I invited her back to my converted garage for dinner. The people from the main house were out for the night, so I made Debra a meal using their kitchen. I concocted Fried Eggplant, using a recipe from The Vegetarian Epicure, one of the world’s worst cookbooks.
‘Oh, I love eggplant,’ Debra lied, peering at the slices, sitting covered in salt on a filthy teacloth.
‘Terrific,’ I answered, wishing I knew how to cook.
I had an electric fry-pan at the ready, into which I was pouring an unfeasibly large amount of cooking oil.
‘You don’t think you’re overdoing the oil?’ Debra said, over the glug-glug-glug sound of me adding more.
Flesh Wounds Page 4