Heartland

by Neil Cross

  In her classroom, which was on the first floor, the desks and chairs were arranged in the shape of a U. I sat at one corner of the U, my back to the great sash windows that let in all the daylight. Miss Dick had to stand on tiptoe to open them, even when using the hooked pole she kept propped in one corner. I sat next to Nicola Barton.

  By now, I knew all my classmates’ names. Nobody in class bothered to ask if I was a Fenian or an American, or if I was an English cunt. Nobody asked me to say something because I spoke strangely. Nobody fell expectantly silent whenever Miss Dick asked me a question.

  But lunchtimes weren’t so easy. At lunchtime, someone was always angry. Because I was small and not well-liked, and because nobody’s parents knew mine, an angry boy and his friends would often hassle me into a corner, push me, call me names (‘wee fucken bastart’). The angry boy would punch me. He grabbed a handful of hair and pulled down on it, so I was forced to my knees. He kicked me.

  While it was happening, I always smiled.

  Looking scared made things worse. So did speaking: if I opened my mouth, the angry boy chose a word and made me say it again and again, slapping me each time I said it. He looked over his shoulder so his friends would laugh. Then, although I spoke with a West Country accent, he put on a Little Lord Fauntleroy voice and asked if it was ‘awfully nice’. And he kneed me in the guts or in the testicles.

  The worst effects of being kneed in the testicles could be offset by pressing your thighs together and bending away from the blow. It looked girlish, but it was effective. Looking girlish was better than being kicked in the balls. Being kicked in the balls really hurt. Sometimes it made you puke.

  When it was over, I waited until the angry boy and his friends had gone. Then I returned to class and sat next to Nicola Barton. If my clothes were damaged, I was anxious and unable to concentrate, because Mum would be angry when I got home. Sometimes, the sight of my torn clothes threw her into panic, like a bird in a living room. Her hands shook so badly she couldn’t hold anything.

  She said, ‘Why can’t you be more careful?’

  I was getting through two pairs of trousers a week, she said, although it wasn’t true. How was she supposed to cope? Where did I think the money came from, to keep me in bloody clothes?

  We were silent until Derek got home.

  When Mum was really unhappy, it filled the flat like smoke. Derek could smell it when he opened the door. He kissed her hello and she followed him to the bedroom. I heard her sobbing.

  Later, she sewed a patch on the trousers or repaired the shirt collar, and returned the clothes to me and said, ‘There.’

  Some days, Mum came to meet me at the school gates. In my class, only Peter Macdonald and I were met by our mothers. But I didn’t mind because the walk home, although short, was perilous: often, there were Big Kids in the concrete park opposite 30 Duff Sreet. If I walked home alone, my arrival was routinely delayed.

  Sometimes, there was just a bit of name calling, or a bit of shoving or a few stones lobbed at my head. Once, a kid stepped out in front of me and threw a piece of roofing slate like a Frisbee. It arced in the air and sliced through my upper lip.

  The kid hadn’t wanted it to happen. I could tell by the way he stood there with his mouth open. It had been a lucky throw; it had caught an updraught or something. I felt stupid, with my lip cut in two, and I pressed my hands to my mouth and walked past him with blood percolating through my fingers. I took a few days off school, until it healed.

  Other days, the children in the park ignored me. But there was no way to predict that, and there was no way to get home without passing the park; it was directly opposite the entrance to 30 Duff Street. So I was happy when Mum came to meet me, even though it was embarrassing.

  But one day, she was late. When she arrived at the school gates, she saw a flexing scrum in the playground. It pulsated like a jellyfish.

  That afternoon, as I waited at the gate, a boy had started to shove me and call me names. I nodded and smiled and said, ‘Yeah, yeah’. He reached up and grabbed the hood of my parka. He tugged it over my head. Then he pulled down on it, so I was bent double. He kept me bent while his friends and a lot of onlookers made a circle around me. It was a tight circle. They kicked me in the ribs and in the guts and in the arse. He tried for my face, but it was difficult, the way my hood was bunched. It was claustrophobic inside the coat. I couldn’t see anything except afternoon sunlight filtering through the blue nylon, and I was being pulled and kicked in a continuous, jerky circle. I couldn’t see where the next kick was coming from.

  Mum saw this and ran towards the chanting group. In the process, she spilled a bag of mint imperials. She had just been to Bessie’s corner shop to buy them. The mint imperials rolled away in all directions, like marbles, and for a second she hesitated, as if to chase them down and pick them up. Then she walked into the crowd of children. It parted, but didn’t disperse. It just broke into individuals who stood there, staring at their feet, catching each other’s eyes and grinning. Mum pulled me free by the elbow. She took the boy by his collar.

  She said: ‘Right, you little sod.’

  She went as if to drag him to the headmaster’s office. But I stood in front of her and begged her not to. So she let him go. He was flushed and breathing heavily, a fat kid in a dirty argyle sweater.

  By the time we got home, Mum was laughing about the mint imperials. Sometimes, the oddest things struck her as funny. Whenever she told the story, the mint imperials were the point of it. She thought it was hilarious, the way they’d spilled all over the playground. She would say, ‘Do you remember the time I spilled my mint imperials?’ and laugh.

  What I remembered was the claustrophobia inside that hood, the sound of my own breathing, my clothes bunched up around my chest, the air on my back, the chanting. I didn’t think of mint imperials.

  The next day, the fat kid and I shook hands. Boys thought shaking hands made them men. This time it seemed to mean something, because nothing like that happened again, not between that boy and me.

  9

  Something in Derek stirred and grew restless. At first, he tried to keep it from us, but he failed. I knew him too well. Sometimes, when we were watching TV, I could tell he wasn’t really watching. He was just pointing his eyes at the light.

  It alarmed me when he went blank like that. I didn’t look at him, but I was aware of his empty presence–as if, while he sat, his soul had departed the room.

  Around that time, he decided that Sunday was to be a day for attending church. I was bewildered. Derek’s knowledge of the world had always seemed to bring him peace, a kind of wisdom. I could not imagine what he needed God for. But there was no peace inside Derek: there was a raggedy hole. He crammed it with soiled rags, but they grew blood-wet and sopping and fell loose; the wound remained. He went to church like a thirsty man to a dirty ditch.

  We never discussed it. Had I argued, he’d have said I was to do as I was bloody told. Had I enquired after his motive, he’d have said: ‘Yours is not to reason why.’

  So on Sunday, we got dressed up and went to the local Catholic church, the smell of incense and moist stone. A pale Jesus hung writhing and bloody on a high cross. His thighs were pressed together, as if he was trying to avoid being kicked in the testicles. There were flower-heads of blood on his palms and feet. Fat drops of it ran from a second set of lips, under his ribcage.

  At great length, a man in a white dress and Ronnie Barker glasses addressed a smattering of old women in hats. There was listless singing. We sat looking at him. I was bored beyond description. We went home.

  All afternoon, Derek was quiet and irritable.

  I asked if we were going back next week.

  He said, ‘No.’

  Instead, we went to the more austere Church of Scotland.

  As we were preparing to go–we were bathing and dressing, knotting our ties–Derek became tense and unforthcoming. The thought of church made him grim. I couldn’t understand why he so
wanted to go.

  But to the Church of Scotland we went. Inside were more old ladies with hats. Derek Cross smiled for them and said ‘good morning, good morning’, as we squeezed down the old wooden pews. But it was his St Cuthbert’s smile–affected courtesy and therefore not quite real.

  It was because he was nervous. He sat rigidly through the sermon, as if expecting the minister at some point to announce his name and the congregation to turn and admire him, like somebody who’d won the bingo. But nothing happened. Derek awaited a revelation that didn’t come.

  The next week, we went somewhere else. A week later, somewhere else again. We never went anywhere more than twice. Then it was nearly Christmas and Derek gave up. He seemed to rally himself: to fill up whatever was breached, to concentrate on other things.

  The day before Christmas Eve, he called me to one side. He was sitting in his deckchair.

  He said, ‘Why don’t you sit down for a moment?’

  I sat down. He half-stood in the deckchair and repositioned it so he was facing me. Our knees were nearly touching.

  He said, ‘Now. I’ve been thinking.’

  I said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘How would you feel about calling me Dad?’

  Derek never had another name for me. There was no equivalent of Nipper, or Nip, or Sonner. I considered it to be an unspoken function of respect.

  And he never got angry; not if I did as I was told, which was always. He was never too tired to read me a chapter of Kidnapped or Treasure Island or Tom Sawyer.

  If there was something I didn’t understand, he found a way to help me understand it. He never said ‘I don’t know’ and opened the newspaper. If he couldn’t help, he explained why not–and then, if I was still interested, he talked to me about how we could find the answer together. We went to the museum together, the zoo, the cinema. He never made me feel that it would be better, was I not there.

  And now he was asking me to be his son. Even Gary and Wayne only called my father Alan. I felt like a hero.

  I said, ‘Okay.’

  And he said, ‘Good. Jolly good. Right, then.’

  At first, I was self-conscious about it and so was he. I hesitated before addressing him, because the word caught in my throat. I could feel him sensing my hesitation and ignoring it. But soon, calling him Dad began to feel natural. It was calling him Derek that felt wrong.

  On Christmas eve, he drank some beer and told me the truth about Christmas. As it turned out, the Star of Bethlehem wasn’t a star at all: it was probably an alien spaceship. Jesus was most likely some kind of alien.

  I found this very interesting. It hadn’t occurred to me that Jesus might be an alien, but now I thought about it, it made sense. Derek could see my excitement and went on to tell me that UFOs appeared throughout the Bible. There were hundreds of them, if you knew where to look. And there were aliens, too.

  He went to the bedroom and came back with the black book, gold stamped on the cover, and he read to me from Ezekiel1

  And I looked, and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire unfolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire. Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man. And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings.

  Then he lay the Bible in his lap, face down. He put on his baddie voice. Sometimes it sounded German, sometimes Japanese–sometimes it sounded both in the same sentence.

  ‘You see?’ he said, narrowing his eyes. ‘It is velly intellesting. Velly, velly intellesting.’

  Back in Bristol, Dad threw a party for New Year’s Eve. My sisters and brother were there, with their partners and their children. Gary and Wayne’s uncle was there, too, and so was their grandmother. She hunched like a cockroach and wore a knitted cardigan. She smoked so heavily the leading coil of her grey hair was stained yellow.

  Everyone called me Nipper. It sounded wrong, but nobody knew how to stop. To call me by another name would admit that I had become someone else: an imperfect, shoddy copy of a lost boy.

  We put the Rolf Harris LP on the record player. Dad was red-faced and jolly. His sleeves were rolled, his collar was open and his white vest showed beneath it. My nephews, my nieces, my stepbrothers, my real brother, my sisters, Margaret and I all marched and danced in a line behind him. The younger ones were over-excited. We sang ‘Six White Boomers’ and ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’. Then Dad put on Showaddywaddy and we danced to ‘Three Steps to Heaven’ and ‘Under the Moon of Love’. Dad waltzed with Margaret. He whirled her round the floor. She screamed and laughed. She said he was bloody mad, that man, your dad: he was a bloody lunatic.

  10

  The people in the flat upstairs had a German shepherd called Sheba. She was big and shaggy; her coat sashayed flirtatiously when she walked. Across the road lived another German shepherd, Sabre. We didn’t see him around much, because his owners couldn’t control him. He attacked other dogs, straining at the leash in his craving to eviscerate them. So they tried to keep him indoors.

  But somehow, Sabre and Sheba mated. I noticed her, shambling and newly bulbous, up the stone steps to the top floor. She lived next door to the genteel Blackwoods.

  Derek decided that a boy needed a dog, and I agreed. So one evening in 1977 we went upstairs.

  Spring rain beat against the high glass ceiling, with its Meccano of metal struts. The staircase was like a salt-cellar, vast and discarded, and we were like Borrowers living inside it.

  The floor plan of the upstairs flat resembled our own. In the living room, Sheba lay on a sheet of pulpy newspapers. Her tongue flopped. She was panting. As we entered, she raised her head in greeting, then dropped it again, disappointed.

  She began to strain and tremble, like she was forcing out a turd. I watched it ease out of her. But the turd was grey, sheathed in a veined, stretchy membrane. And from it unfolded a tiny puppy, black and wet and blind. A rich smell came from it, earthy and autumnal. The owner passed the puppy to Sheba; she whined, so high you could hardly hear it, and began hungrily to lick the puppy.

  We watched six or seven being born. When it seemed like Sheba had finished, I was asked to select one of her brood. I looked at them, a shiny knot wriggling at the dog’s pink dugs, like baby’s toes. They were soaking the newspaper with their birth juices and they made me think of the dead mice we found downstairs, and of the mice that sneaked in their unseen thousands throughout the buildings.

  I looked at Derek.

  I said, ‘Which one?’

  He pointed. He said, ‘I think we’ll have that one.’

  Six weeks later, I came home from school, and we had a dog. I didn’t know if it was the dog Derek had selected. How could they tell? She looked so different; she had become a skinny Alsatian, black and tan, with big paws and a lazy ear that hung in a bunny flop.

  When I came through the door, she hurried to the corner of the room and cowered there, to assess me in safety. She knitted her eyebrows. She had brown eyes, the colour of treacle toffee.

  I knew you couldn’t oblige an animal to like you, especially dogs. Dogs could smell your fear. So I showed her how the cat and I played fetch. I balled up a page of newspaper and threw it, underarm. The cat gambolled on weirdly stiff legs, batted the ball with her assassin’s claws, then returned it to me.

  The dog watched. Then she pranced on her paws to show the cat how it should be done. She flattened the ball with her great, flat feet, shook it until it was stunned, then returned it to me.

  For a moment, the cat seemed impressed. But then she grew competitive. I watched the dog and the cat race each other, skidding, bumping into furniture, for the privilege of returning the ball to my hand.

  Finally, the cat grew impatient and batted the dog’s face, open-handed. Her claws caught in the dog’s upper lip and stuck there, like fish-hooks. The dog shrieked. Then leapt back, still shrieking
. The cat was trapped. Evidently astonished, she was dragged along by the yelping dog. Her back legs clawed the carpet for grip. The dog howled. The cat looked scared.

  Mum separated them. It took a while; she had to catch them first. Then she had to unhook the cat’s claws, one by one. It was like undoing a duffle coat.

  When they were freed, each animal sulked in a different corner. The dog kept touching her upper lip with the pads of her paw, and trying to lick it. Her tongue wasn’t long enough. She made a comical snuffling sound and tied herself in knots. The cat observed her gymnastics with arctic contempt.

  Mum put out food. The cat cautioned the dog with a malevolent glare. The dog didn’t touch the cat’s food. And later, they slept curled up round each other. We laughed at them as we watched TV.

  Derek decided the dog’s name was Tara. It didn’t sound like a dog’s name–especially not this dog. I didn’t like it.

  The dog was locked in the front room overnight. In the morning, we discovered a curl of her shit on the kitchen linoleum. The newspaper Mum had laid out for her was pulpy and urine-soaked, so she had the idea; she’d tried.

  But Derek believed in firm discipline for animals. He grabbed the dog’s loose scruff and rubbed her face in the shit. She made panic noises and tried to back away. She struggled and squealed and scrabbled and finally twisted from his grip. So Derek punched her in the neck. She was stunned. She looked at him. He slapped her in the mouth, open-handed.

  He stood there, florid, breathing heavy in his sweater with epaulettes on the shoulders and patches on the elbows. A lock of hair had fallen across his brow.

  He said ‘Pig dog’ and strode from the room.

  I looked at Mum.

  I said, ‘“Pig dog”?’

  She hushed me, and that made me want to laugh. I stood there, trying not to. But it was difficult. Then Mum started to laugh too. She turned her back so she wouldn’t have to look at me. She pretended to do the washing up. Watching Mum pretending to do the washing up to hide her laughter made me want to laugh some more.