by Neil Cross
During the same holiday, I joined my parents, Caroline and a large group of holidaymakers in the ‘Hokey Cokey’. We screamed and ran, hands joined, to the centre of the room. And we screamed and ran, half-stumbling back again.
My brother, Clive, clashed with my father about his motorcycle and his long hair. Caroline listened to David Cassidy in her room and sulked about boys. Lin, my other sister, got pregnant.
And Ed had a lover. He forced his way into the house and attacked my dad as I grovelled in the corner.
Even with Dad in a hospital bed, Mum denied having an affair. She swore it wasn’t true. And Dad believed her. He had no choice but to believe her. So he sued the man for assault.
It was only under under cross-examination that Mum admitted adultery. It hadn’t been a fling; it hadn’t even been an affair. The man had been her lover for a decade.
Dad sat there and listened while those ten years rushed out of him like air.
When it was all over, Mum promised to make it better. And Dad loved her. So he crammed it all inside him–the lies, the adultery, the beating at the hands of a man who had cuckolded him for a decade; he packed it inside him like wadding, and he took her back. I don’t know if it took courage to do that, or weakness; I don’t know if it took pride or self-hatred. I do know that it took love.
But something secret bubbled inside my mother, like mud in a pool. And, a few months later, she met another man. No one knew who. Someone from work.
Whoever he was, she very quickly left us for him. She left her family–her husband, her four children, her first grandchild, a boy–without a forwarding address or a goodbye. Without even a note.
She faded from the empty house like an apparition, as if she had never really been there at all.
3
Dad swam through the months that followed like a fish in a tank. He was jovial, laughing, gulping for air.
One lunchtime, my teacher asked why I was crying. I was crying because lunch was cheese flan. I hated cheese flan: it made me feel sick. But the rules were that you had to clear your plate. (Once I’d been caught trying to sneak the skin of a baked potato into the bin. It seemed obvious to me that potato skins were deadly poison.)
The teacher didn’t believe I was crying because of the cheese flan: not even when she followed me to the lavatory at a half-jog and saw me vomiting in the sink. She kneeled at my side in the lavatory. She made the fittings look tiny. She dabbed at my mouth with a coarse paper towel, moistened under the tap.
She said, ‘Is everything okay?’
I said, ‘I don’t like cheese flan.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But apart from not liking the cheese flan, is everything all right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
Lin came to pick me up from school. She was pushing a pram. In it was her young son. Sometimes when Lin and I went to the Top Shops, people thought she was my mum. We thought it was funny. I told them, ‘She’s my sister!’, and people laughed and said, ‘I’m ever so sorry, my love.’
I lived with Dad, my two sisters and my baby nephew. Our brother had married his girlfriend, Jackie. She and Clive lived in Pucklechurch. They too had a baby son.
Lin looked after us, because she was the oldest. She got me up and dressed in the morning. She buckled my sandals. She said, ‘Lift your arms!’ and helped me into my jumper. She kneeled to pull up my socks.
In the afternoon, she cooked tea for Caroline and me. But she also had her baby to look after. He was a lot of work; she had to make his food and keep him in nappies and clean clothes. She never complained, but looking after all of us made Lin very tired.
Most afternoons, we had eggs on toast for tea. I didn’t mind. I liked eggs on toast, especially when the toast was a bit overdone. You added a bit of Heinz Tomato Ketchup to the egg, banging on the base of the bottle until it came out in a red dollop. Then you broke the yolk: it mixed with the cold ketchup and the melted butter, and it was lovely.
Then, after a few months, Dad met Margaret. She worked in a café at Temple Meads, the railway station. Dad met her there. Perhaps she’d served him a scone or a cup of milky tea.
Margaret wasn’t like Mum. She was a broad woman with pale, fat arms and legs. And she had enormous breasts, from which draped her floral smocks in a way that made them look too short. She walked flat-footed in Scholl sandals. Her hair was dark and curly, shot through with threads of grey. Her voice was raucous, hard-edged, sometimes strident. She swore a lot.
She was younger than Dad. He was fifty, she was thirty-five. She was divorced–the marriage hadn’t been a good one–and had two sons, Gary and Wayne.
One day, I was introduced to them. Gary was a year older than me, Wayne a couple of months younger. Each had a smirking, moon face and an impudent cowlick. They were dressed identically.
Dad told me it was a happy day, because Margaret, Gary and Wayne were coming to live with us.
On Saturdays, Dad drove Margaret to Bath, so she could do the shopping. She liked to buy food from Marks and Spencer; she called it Marks and Sparks. She cooked salmon and new potatoes or lamb chops with peas and mash.
But she only cooked it for Dad and her sons. They ate together at the table, and later they had dessert: trifle or ice-cream or Arctic roll. Whatever was left of the salmon and the trifle, or the chops and the ice-cream, Margaret scraped into the bin.
Lin still cooked for Caroline and me. But Dad didn’t give her enough money to buy our food at Marks and Spencer, and anyway she had no way of getting there. So Caroline and I kept eating eggs on toast, and Margaret continued to scrape into the kitchen bin salmon steaks and lamb chops and roast beef on Sundays. The bin was a better place for it than Caroline’s plate, or mine.
Dad didn’t mind. He was scared of making Margaret unhappy. It was because he was scared of being alone; but it was also because she could be terrifying. Sometimes she beat Gary and Wayne. She slapped them hard across the face with her open palm; or sometimes she hit them with something she picked up, a slipper or–once–a length of bamboo she brought in from the garden. It didn’t matter which of them was being beaten, Gary and Wayne both wept, bent before the screeching onslaught.
I could feel Margaret’s gaze passing across my skin. She never beat me, never even threatened to. She just wished I wasn’t there and let me know it with her eyes. She wanted me gone from the house, and my sisters too, because from now on it belonged to her.
Gary and Wayne needed new clothes. But Dad wasn’t paid enough to keep buying new things for everyone. So he and Margaret decided to give the old clothing to me. They dressed me in the old anoraks and the torn jeans and the washed-out underpants that were no longer good enough for my stepbrothers. And Margaret came back from town with carrier bags of jeans, T-shirts, jumpers, jackets, trainers.
Once, I cried. She’d bought a new Action Man uniform for each of her boys. They were very excited: the uniforms were extra special ones, with all kinds of accessories. Gary had the Escape From Colditz costume: Wayne had Field Marshal.
Margaret saw me trying not to cry.
She said, ‘What’s wrong now?’
I didn’t want to tell her. But I couldn’t help crying as she stood there, waiting, glaring at me. My words came out all snotty and broken.
Margaret listened. Then she said, ‘Oh, pissing hell.’
She stomped out. I heard the front door slam. She was gone a long time, because she stomped all the way to the Top Shops. But I waited in the chair until she came back, because I was scared to move.
Then she came back. She slammed the door behind her. She stomped into the living room and threw a box into my lap. It was a new Action Man uniform.
She said: ‘There. All right?’
Dad and Margaret married on New Year’s Day, 1976. Gary, Wayne and I wore identical clothes; brown corduroy jackets with furry collars, and brown corduroy trousers. I am there, in a photograph, sitting on Dad’s knee. Wayne stands
to our right. Gary is behind us. I cannot read the expression on Dad’s face.
We moved to a new house, at the other end of Stockwood. It was modern suburbia, a place for the aspirant working class. It stood on the edge of the countryside.
It was a bigger house, designed and built in the early 1960s, which stood in a block of four. There was a patch of unfenced front garden. As you entered, there was a small lavatory to your left. Dad put a wooden plaque above the cistern which read: We aim to please. Would you aim too, please?
I looked at it every time I went for a wee. I read it over and over. I knew the extra O and the comma changed things. But I couldn’t quite make sense of what the plaque was trying to say: I didn’t understand what it meant, to aim to please. It was like a riddle. It circled through my head like the words of a trapped song.
The house had a fitted kitchen with a service hatch that opened on to the living room. The living room was a big square, with a swirly carpet. At the back, Dad and Margaret put a table. And there was a sofa: on Sundays, Dad liked to take forty winks on it. He kicked off his soft shoes and lay out with the newspaper on his belly and soon he was snoring.
In the far wall of the living room, double glass doors gave on to a long garden. At the end of it, a wooden gate opened on to a track. It was dry and cracked in summer, muddy in winter. On the other side of the track were some hedges. Behind the hedges were fields that belonged to the local farmer.
The first few days in 92 Bifield Road were busy. Margaret was angry because the kitchen cupboards smelled of the previous occupants. She was a very clean woman. She scrubbed the cupboards over and over, until the smell was gone and the cupboards smelled like Marks and Spencer.
She was glad to be gone from the old place. It had been difficult, living in the house my mother had left, with the man and the children she’d deserted. It made her feel like second best. It filled her with jealousy and fury. But now she lived in a new house: like my Dad, it belonged to her and to her sons.
At first, it was a close-walled and unhappy house, full of bitterness and rivalry. But soon my sisters would be gone from it. Lin and her boyfriend were due to marry. And anyone could see that Caroline was desperate to leave: soon enough, she would. Then it would be only me; an unfledged squatter, an unwanted and gaping mouth to feed.
But I was the most timid of trespassers, one who kept to empty corners. I longed to go unnoticed, to become invisible. The longer I lived with Margaret, the more I felt myself growing silent. The more I felt myself vanishing.
Two years is a long time, when you’re very small.
One day I was walking home from school. I wore grey shorts and carried a satchel over my shoulder. I was with Clive Petrie. He was a clever, flat-footed boy with whom I painted model soldiers. I had once trodden dog-shit deep into his house. We were pupils at Stockwood Primary School. I was six years old.
The school was a few minutes’ walk from our house on Bifield Road. It was a low-rise, open-plan building in the modern style. There were no classrooms, just different segments, nooks and alcoves that ran off the main corridor. All day I sat, cross-legged, listening to the teacher. At the book sale they held in the gymnasium, I bought the Ladybird Book of Dinosaurs.
As Clive Petrie and I walked home, a black-haired woman materialized in the corner of my eye. Clive and I knew we should be careful of strangers, so we kept walking. My legs started to shake. They felt funny beneath the knees.
The woman smiled. She half-squatted. She put her hands on her knees.
She said, ‘Hello, Neil.’
I stopped. It couldn’t be a stranger if she knew your name.
She said, ‘Do you know who I am?’
I said, ‘You’re my mum.’
She said, ‘That’s right. I’m your mummy.’
She came up to me and gave me a cuddle. Her coat was cold. She smelled unfamiliar. She asked how I was. I told her I was okay. I had an Action Man. She said that was nice. She gave me a present; a wrapped-up box. Then she began to cry because my legs looked thin.
I said goodbye to Clive Petrie, who had to walk home alone. Then Mum and I went to my nan’s flat, which was in St Jude’s, in the centre of Bristol.
I hadn’t seen my nan for a long time. She and Dad didn’t get on; there was something about money. But the smell of her flat was familiar; the thin, blue perfume of Calor gas. There was a plastic tablecloth in the little kitchen, brightly floral. And there was her Yorkshire terrier, Tiny.
Over her bed hung a small, white crucifix. It was a single bed. My grandfather had died shortly before I was born. I played on the bed with my present, a box of American Civil War soldiers. Mum watched me playing. She asked how I was. Did I like school? Did I have lots of friends? Nan made me drinks and gave me slices of cake.
In the evening I went home again. When I got there, I went inside. I shut the door on an afternoon that already did not seem real. It felt like a brilliant dream, fading. As soon as I took off my coat and sandals, it seemed to have happened a long time ago. The woman had been my mum, but she was someone else, too. She was spectral, shifting. She was two people at once.
Neither Dad nor Margaret asked me how my afternoon had gone. They didn’t mention it; it was like it hadn’t happened.
I kept the soldiers on the window-sill, ranked according to colour, their rifles pointed at me and away from me, at the windows and doors. I never played with them. I just kept them there, neat and unchanging.
4
I knew something was going on because, not long after Mum came to see me, Caroline gave me a present. It was a Roman helmet, short sword and breastplate. They were a bit small. Whenever I turned my head, the helmet scratched the top of my nose and the breastplate dug into my armpits the way new shoes cut into your heel. But I understood the present to have some weird significance. In some way, it was connected with the brief reappearance of my mother.
To show I appreciated its unspoken gravity, I wore the helmet and the breastplate for days and walked around the house ostentatiously swishing the sword, smiting invisible foes.
Then, one night, the whole family came round–my brother and sisters, their partners, their children. They stood in groups and talked, like it was Christmas. It grew late, past bedtime, but I was allowed to stay up.
The living-room door opened and Dad came in. He was singing a nonsense song and dancing a lop-sided samba. In his hands was a gift-wrapped box–another present. He sambaed up to me and gave me the box.
He said, ‘Here you go, Nipper.’
Everyone gathered round. They were eager to see what was in the box. I ripped off the paper. It was an Action Man armoured personnel carrier. With it came an Action Man Commando. Gary and Wayne got presents too: a tank and a helicopter. But nobody found their toys as fascinating as mine.
I pushed the armoured personnel carrier up and down. But I didn’t like to be watched: I liked it when people ignored me. Then Dad came up to me and kneeled. The room went quiet and seemed to change size. Dad stuck out his hand.
He said, ‘Come with me a minute, Nipper.’
I stood up, put my hand in his and went with him. Silence followed us like the wake of a boat. Everyone watched us leave.
I followed him to his bedroom. We went inside and he turned on the light, then closed the door. He squatted there, with his back to the door. I could feel the emptiness of the room behind me, the made-up bed and the wardrobe: their shapes were a coolness on the back of my neck. Dad squatted on his haunches. His eyes were level with mine. He touched my collar. Straightened it.
He said, ‘Nip, I’ve got something to tell you.’
He took my collar in both hands and straightened it again. He brushed it down.
I said, ‘What?’
He said, ‘Well. You’re not going to be living with me any more. Tomorrow, you’re going to live with your mum.’
A rush of memory. The spectral woman. The thin blue smell of my nan’s flat; the white crucifix above the single bed.
‘Because a judge decided it was best for you.’
He looked away. He kept straightening something on my shirt, some smudge or wrinkle or fold.
I said, ‘I want to stay with you.’
He tried to smile. He still wasn’t looking at me. There was birdy flutter of panic inside me. It was like when the bad dog on Coape Road launched itself at the garden gate.
He said, ‘I want you to stay with us, too.’
I said, ‘I don’t even know where she lives.’
‘She lives in Edinburgh.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘In Scotland.’
He tugged down on my collars.
My feet were cold and my hands were cold.
‘She’s got a nice house. You’ve got your own bedroom. There’s a park across the road.’
I said, ‘Please.’
He wrapped his arms around me and he pulled me into him, into his neck. It was a bit bristly. I could smell his aftershave. Beneath it was the smell of his skin, like no one else’s. Something had hitched in his chest. Then he finished hugging me. We went downstairs. We were holding hands.
In the morning I got dressed. Then Dad carried my suitcase downstairs. We waited. After we had waited, there was a knock at the front door.
We went to the front door. Dad opened it. On the other side of the door stood my mother. Her handbag was on her shoulder, hung by a thin strap. She was book-ended by two policemen. They seemed monumental and unreal.
Behind Mum and the policemen, a red Morris Marina was parked at the kerb. A man sat at the wheel. I could only see the back of his head and the reflection of his eyes. He was watching everything in the rear-view mirror, like a spy. He had tilted the mirror so the angles were right.