Heartland

by Neil Cross

  Then the door opened and Derek came in. He was white. His hair was black. He was breathing through his nose. I stopped laughing, and so did Mum. She kept washing up.

  Derek pointed at me. He said, ‘Don’t you dare bloody laugh at me. I’m warning you.’

  I said, ‘I wasn’t laughing at you. I was laughing because you said “pig dog”.’

  He stood there, staring at us. He looked short in his anger; a breathless, angry little man. It was as if there was someone else living inside him: someone wrathful and malignant, glaring out through his eyes.

  One morning in August, Derek came into my room and sat heavily on the bed. His face was blank with shock.

  He said, ‘I have some bad news.’

  He told me to get up and get dressed. I did as I was told. I was in a half-panic.

  I ran to the front room. Derek was waiting for me. He put his hands on my shoulders. He said my name.

  I said, ‘What?’

  He said, ‘Elvis Presley has died.’

  He was about to cry. The gravity of that terrible thought was enough to start me off, too. I sobbed for Elvis, and for Derek’s bereavement: but mostly I sobbed with relief that nothing worse had happened.

  Derek hugged me and drew strength from my sorrow and he did not weep. He hugged me and let me sob into his shoulder for the loss of dear, dead Elvis.

  A bit later, I saw my first punk rocker. He wore tartan drainpipe trousers, with zips and a bum flap. He had spiky orange hair and National Health spectacles. I hesitated as he passed, and made eye contact with strangers, and we laughed because he looked a bit stupid.

  Then Derek’s mother came to visit.

  I waited in the hallway outside the flat as she levered herself upstairs. Derek was behind her, carrying her luggage. On the landing, she paused to catch her breath, then minced imperially through the front door. She squeezed through the hallway like a ship in a canal.

  She was an immense sugar mouse, swathed in layered gauze. Her skin was soft, like chamois leather, and it hung loose from dimpled jowls. Her face was cherubic, talcumed and white as the full moon. Her mouth was a scarlet rosebud, too dainty for her face. She wore it in a permanently pursed kiss, which she placed on my mother’s cheek. Then she held out her arms. Empty bags of flesh swayed on them. She enveloped me in a embrace. She kissed my cheek.

  ‘So this is Neil.’ She spoke with a deliberate lisp, like a little girl playing kings and queens.

  ‘This is Neil,’ said Mum.

  ‘Then come here, darling, and give your gran another kiss.’

  I gave her another kiss. It was like surrendering to a mattress. I feared her. Her teeth might have been needles, clogged with skin and snotty blood.

  She let me go. She looked at Mum.

  She said, ‘So. This is home!’

  Mum smiled for her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s not much.’

  She sounded proud that it wasn’t much, or perhaps it was defiance.

  Gran’s husband followed. He was Derek’s stepfather, just as Derek was mine. But Derek didn’t call him Dad; he called him John.

  John looked like a comedy husband. He was thin and wore a pasted combover haircut. His spectacles were thick and made his eyes washy and unspecific. But the husbands in comedies were defeated, gently rebellious souls, and John was not that. He looked at me through watery-crooked eyes and I could read his thoughts.

  At least Derek’s mother was mysterious: at least she had the grace to smell like I had always imagined witches might, of good things like talcum and icing sugar and roses. And she affected that baby-doll voice, which any child would recognize as an ensign of malevolence. John was just sour inside, like a half-sucked sweet.

  They sat on the sofa. She vast, he made of liver spots and sinew. Sparse hair greased to his freckled pate.

  Gran said, ‘Give them their present, John.’

  He pretended to have forgotten. He was trying to annoy her. Perhaps they’d argued in the car, and now he was exacting his revenge. Then he leaned over the side of the sofa and picked up a brown-papered square, the size of a bathroom window. He handed it to Gran, who handed it to Mum, who began to unwrap it.

  Gran said, ‘I hope you love it.’

  Mum finished unwrapping it. It was a painting, a still life; irises and daisies in a vase.

  ‘Oh, Helen,’ said Mum, ‘it’s lovely.’

  She held it to the light, to see it better.

  I said, ‘Did you do it yourself, Gran?’

  Derek had suggested that I call her Gran. She’d like it.

  She simpered. Her face folded in on itself. She squirmed. She said, ‘Yes, I did.’

  I said, ‘What, the colouring and everything?’

  ‘Of course, darling.’

  It looked just like a real painting.

  Mum put it down, leaning it against the chair.

  I said, ‘Did it take ages?’

  ‘Quite a long time, yes.’

  ‘So,’ said Derek, ‘how was the drive?’

  ‘Bloody awful,’ said John. Then he said, ‘Is it always brass bloody monkeys up here in Haggis Land?’

  Derek giggled. I’d never seen him giggle. He did it behind his hand. He looked at me.

  I said, ‘What does “brass monkeys” mean?’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Derek.

  He never said that. I asked him again.

  He met John’s eyes. Amused exasperation passed between them. But it was false. Derek was only pretending to be exasperated and John was only pretending to be amused.

  Derek said, ‘It means it’s very cold outside.’

  ‘But what’s that got to do with brass monkeys?’

  John fixed me on the line of his gaze. Something hard beneath the water, like jagged boulders in a summer stream.

  He said, ‘It means, it’s cold enough to freeze the bollocks off a brass monkey.’

  Mum looked at him. There was a brief silence, like when someone’s name is called in a waiting-room. But I wasn’t embarrassed.

  I said, ‘Why should a brass monkey’s bollocks fall off?’

  ‘Good question,’ said Derek, and narrowed his eyes. ‘Velly intellesting. Velly intellesting.’

  Mum made a cup of tea and put out some Mr Kipling’s Madeira cake. Derek and John had a couple of lagers. Then, while Mum rinsed the cups and plates, Derek, Uncle John and Gran sat around talking about South Africa.

  Uncle John wasn’t South African. He was from London. He used different funny words from Gran and Derek. Their funniest word was ‘kaffir’. John’s funniest words were ‘coon’, ‘nig-nog’ and ‘jungle bunny’.

  I wasn’t sure what a kaffir was. I said, ‘What’s a kaffir?’

  ‘A kaffir,’ said Gran, ‘is a black person.’

  ‘Like you get in Africa.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You know,’ said John. ‘Nig-nogs.’

  Mum was washing up behind us.

  I said, ‘Why do you call them kaffirs?’

  Gran said, ‘Because it’s the Afrikaans word for them.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Jungle bunny,’ said Derek, and John laughed.

  I said, ‘Does it?’

  I thought a jungle bunny sounded like quite a nice thing.

  Derek said, ‘Actually, it’s not Afrikaans. It’s from Arabic. It’s just a word we use for black people.’

  ‘For natives?’

  ‘I am an African native,’ Gran said, ‘and I am not black.’ She said, Blik. ‘And Egyptians are Africans,’ said Gran, ‘and they’re not black either. They’re Arabs.’

  ‘So really it just means nig-nogs,’ said John. ‘Wogs.’

  ‘John,’ said Derek.

  (He told me later that a wog was something else entirely).

  ‘It’s just different words for the same thing,’ said Derek.

  ‘Then why not just call them Africans?’

  ‘Because there are all sorts of African,’ said Derek.
‘They’re divided up into tribes–’

  ‘Like red Indians.’

  ‘A bit, yes,’ he said. ‘But a bit different too.’

  Everyone laughed at that, except Mum, who still had her back turned.

  Derek’s eyes flicked to mine as he chuckled at himself, but he wasn’t laughing really. There was an apology in there somewhere, I didn’t know for what.

  I began to ignore their conversation, sitting cross-legged in front of the TV with my back to them. The volume was down low, so I had to lean forward to hear what the people on screen were saying.

  Later, Derek read to me in bed, but not as much as usual.

  I said, ‘Gran’s a good painter isn’t she?’ and he laughed. It was a big smile, a proper smile.

  He said, ‘It’s called “painting by numbers”.’

  Someone else had done the drawing. All the grown-up had to do was the colouring-in. Even this was made even easier by colour coding: a number 1 printed on the petal of a flower meant, for example, Paint This Bit Red.

  I said, ‘That’s cheating.’

  He said, ‘I know,’ and kissed my forehead. Before he left, he said, ‘But don’t tell her I told you.’

  They stayed up late, laughing. Every time I drifted off to sleep I snapped awake. Sometimes, I heard Mum join in, but her laughter was shrill and not true.

  John had a raspy, insidious chuckle, like the tongue of a cat. And Gran laughed like a little girl. It didn’t make a happy sound, all this hilarity–it wasn’t like the sound of adults forgetting to be quiet on Christmas Eve, which was oddly soporific; it made you feel safe. This was the opposite of that, the opposite of Christmas Eve.

  When the lights were out and everyone was in bed, the house felt wrong.

  They stayed for a week. I felt Gran’s voice on my skin. It had something dark and rich at its centre, like shit concealed in honey. Whenever she complimented Mum or me or the flat or Derek, I could taste it.

  John watched as I sat in the corner, playing. His eyes were yellow behind the spectacles. I could feel him looking, even when he laughed or accepted a cup of tea, or a biscuit and a slice of cake.

  We took them to the castle, the Royal Botanical Gardens, Arthur’s Seat, Holyrood House. They were contemptuous, Gran with her rosebud mouth and John with his sour combover.

  When they left, Gran smothered me in her flesh, kissing me with her sugar mouth. She told Mum how lovely it had been, and she told Derek that we really must go to stay with them. John said something about brass monkeys and laughed and stalked off down the stairs behind her, walking in italics. Derek followed, carrying the bags, and they left.

  But their essence hung in the air. It was if they had altered something in the walls, the way exposure to light will alter film.

  At night, I sensed that somebody was in the living room, asleep. It was a Siamese twin. John and Gran had fused into a single creature, with fat legs and thin legs, and four eyes open in the dark. The creature looked through the walls, at the room where I slept. It was hungry. And it never blinked.

  During his mother’s visit, Derek had, as usual, filmed everything. He directed the camera upon us as we strolled the castle grounds, self-conscious with the lens on our backs, or ate ice-creams on a park bench. He filmed the squirrel that scrambled up my body and perched on my shoulder, eating peanuts. Its quick little claws nipped my skin. Watching the film, we laughed to see the horrified look on my face.

  At first, I was captivated by the novelty of seeing myself up there. I was laughing, running across the grass, cringing in terror from the nibbling squirrel. So it was only after watching the film two or three times that something at long last occurred to me–in our flat, there were no photographs.

  In the flickery darkness, I glanced round. I wondered if familiarity had simply rendered them invisible, like the tick of a clock. But no.

  I turned again to watch the film and thought about it.

  It made sense that Mum had no mementoes: the day she left Bristol, she left everything. And anyway; she didn’t take photographs, she featured in them.

  But for Derek, it was different. He had a need to record and to watch that I recognized but didn’t understand. Watching the films, he was bearing witness. They comforted him. And yet he owned none that pre-dated his move to Edinburgh.

  He’d been married all those times (four times, or five, I couldn’t quite remember, and sometimes it seemed that neither could he). It didn’t seem possible that he had failed in some way to document those who came before us. But there were no old cine-films, no old photographs. There was nothing of his childhood. Nothing of his father and mother. Nothing of his former wives. Nothing of his son. There was nothing of him.

  I had no doubt that earlier films, earlier photographs, had existed. If nothing else, there must have been pictures of all those wedding days: snapshots of Richard’s first birthday, his first Christmas, his first ride on a bicycle.

  I realized that Derek had gathered up those images, all those pointless memories, and he had destroyed them. When he walked out on a marriage, he snuffed out an entire reality. That is why he’d spoken of his former wives and his biological child with such neutrality. They no longer existed for him, any more than he existed as the man he’d been, when he was with them. I thought of a snake, sloughing its skin, leaving behind a brittle hollow of itself. The cast of a serpent, translucent and empty.

  I looked at Derek, watching us on film. I watched the cone of dusty yellow light that joined the projector to the screen, a radiant umbilicus. However we twisted and turned, however those unsteady images fell off the edge of the frame, the lens always jumped back to us.

  As long as he wanted to watch us, we were trapped up there, in the projected light.

  11

  The dog had a lot of energy; she was still a puppy. But we lived in a flat; there was nowhere nearby to exercise her properly, and Derek and Mum were out most of the day, working. So she began to chew up the flat.

  Mum came home to find she’d ripped apart the sofa, or chewed up Derek’s record collection. Debris was scattered all over the floor: bits of book, shoes, bits of the Radio Times, fragments of sofa, of carpet, of kitchen lino.

  The dog cowered on her pale belly, ashamed. Then she dragged herself towards Mum, her tail thumping slow time on the floor.

  Mum didn’t punish her. She’d be punished enough when Derek got home, unless we could hide the evidence. We never could. When I got back from school, Mum would be on her hands and knees, her lips compressed, brushing detritus into a dustpan.

  The dog would bound to me. She’d put her paws on my shoulder and lick my neck and face.

  I took her out to shit, round the corner by the railway lines. Once, as she squatted, a loop of audio tape popped out of her. It wasn’t shitty; it was just audio tape, shiny grey-brown. When it had emerged to the length of several feet, I stamped my foot down on it. The sudden increase in tension shocked the dog and she ran away. I kept my foot on the tape, and as the dog ran it unspooled from inside her.

  I was laughing so hard that she took it for approval and began to frolic, skipping and running in excited circles. More tape came out. It was very long. There were metres and metres of it. When the breeze caught it, it rose and fell in waves. I didn’t want to touch it; it had come out of a dog’s arse. So I watched as the wind whipped at it, wrapping it round cars and lampposts. When it had all come out, I stood for a while, watching it making waves and half-circles in the breeze. Then I took the dog inside and in the morning the audio tape had disappeared.

  But I didn’t take the dog for proper walks, because I was too scared. Not of other children; not even I got beaten up when I had an Alsatian with me. But, a year before, I’d been attacked by two mongrels called Laddie and Lassie. They’d bitten my calf and thigh when, stiff-legged, I tried to hurry past them. Derek and Mum had taken me to hospital. There were adverts on TV about rabies. But the bites weren’t too bad.

  Laddie and Lassie still skittered un
accompanied around the cobbled backstreets. Usually, they ignored me, having forgotten our earlier acquaintance. Once or twice they trotted over to sniff my crotch and I went rigid with terror and smiled like a monkey and went clammy-handed until they trotted off.

  I was scared of being bitten again, and I was scared of a dog-fight; that my loyal dog would see Laddie and Lassie for villains and set about them. Dog-fights were vicious, and I didn’t want my dog to be hurt.

  Mum didn’t walk the dog either. It was not the kind of area, she told me, where a woman could walk unaccompanied, not unless they were interested in men. She told me this because one sunny day I went out to play in the park across the road. It was the summer holidays. Mum had been urging me to venture outside, just for five minutes, to get some fresh air. She promised to watch out, to make sure I was safe. I scuttled out when the park was empty, and I started clambering over the climbing frames. Climbing frames were safe from dogs.

  Because Mum was in the window, watching, I wasn’t too bothered when Tam Higgins’s big brother came sauntering down the street. Tam Higgins’s big brother lived in the ground-floor flat. He was fifteen or sixteen, the eldest boy of the family who owned Suzie the neurotic dog. His brother Tam was in my class.

  Tam’s big brother saw me. I was sitting on the climbing frame, pretending not to have noticed him. He had a cigarette in his hand. He snorted and walked up to me. He stopped. He puffed on his cigarette. Then he slapped me in the face. He told me I was a fukken wee radge.

  Tingles danced on my skin like bubbles. I didn’t respond. I knew Mum was watching. Soon she’d shout something, or come rushing downstairs to help me. But Tam Higgins’s brother kept his face jammed into mine, like a lid about to be screwed on to a jar. He was so close he was spitting on me.

  When I glanced over, I saw that Mum wasn’t watching over me. A car had pulled to the kerb beneath the window, and she was busy having a conversation with the driver.