by Neil Cross
We had been pulled by that strange attractor, the compulsion to forge from what we are given and the places we find ourselves, something ordinary, something normal, something to which to belong.
19
In September 1980, I moved into Primary 7: the oldest class: There were no more big kids to avoid. They’d moved on, to become small kids at a bigger school. I was eleven. But, over the course of the summer holiday, I’d mutated. My voice had broken. There was hair on my upper lip, on my legs, on my genitals. And I’d grown. Suddenly, Tam Higgins and I were the tallest in our class.
Our teacher was called Mrs Simmons. She was a sometimes cantankerous woman, curly-headed and greying. She wore tweed skirts and clumpy shoes. Once, vexed by the incessant braying of her surname–Mrs Simmons! Mrs Simmons!– she slapped the desk and shouted, ‘For God’s sake my name is Margaret.’
Nobody ever called her Margaret.
In the top, right-hand drawer of her desk, she kept the belt: a fearsome creature, a thick strip of brown leather, fringed at one end. When the class grew rowdy, she removed it from the drawer and laid it on the table. She never used it. But once or twice she hit the desk with it, and that was enough.
Quietly, Mrs Simmons often gave me books. Red Planet by Robert Heinlein, The Flying Saucer Conspiracy by Donald E. Keyhoe, 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke.
She created the Top Group, a little island of six children who sat on a square of tables at the head of the class. It consisted of Brian Hunt, who was still called Babs, Judith Collins, Nicola Barton, Paul Stewart and me. Paul Stewart was new. He was tanned, with blonde hair.
Then Tam Higgins was moved up. Tam my neighbour: he lived in the ground-floor flat. Suzie was his dog. His brother had once tried to stub out a cigarette on my eye. Tam was a pale, lanky kid, messy-haired. His fringe fell over his eyes. He wore scruffy jeans and old trainers. He liked Madness.
I liked Madness too. They were a band from North London. I liked their exaggerated Englishness. I saved up to buy their album. They were pictured on the sleeve, doing something like a conga line. They wore good suits and narrow ties, pork pie hats and Dr Marten boots. I played the album again and again, on my little mono Dansette record player, a gift from Brother Burton.
Brother Burton was a nervous, liver-spotted and softly spoken old man. He smelled of whisky and cigarettes, but nobody ever mentioned it. One Sunday, on the way to sacrament meeting, he stopped me and placed a gift-wrapped box in my hands: the record player.
He said, ‘Here you are, son, from Brother Burton.’
He moved shyly on before I’d even registered receipt of it, let alone that it was a gift. I hurried through the milling congregation to find him and thank him. But it felt somehow ungrateful to ask why he’d decided to give it to me, and I never found out.
In my bedroom, I practised the appropriate dance moves, a kind of staccato stomp, as pictured by Chas Smash on the back of the sleeve. Because the bedroom was small, I could smell the plastic of the album and see the stylus riding the warp of the vinyl.
Derek didn’t like Madness. They weren’t Mormon enough. But Mum was reassured by their suits and their crew-cuts and she pronounced them ‘clean-cut young men’. I itched to correct her mistake, because Madness belonged to me. But I knew a tactical miscalculation when I saw one, and clean-cut young men Madness remained, notwithstanding their songs about razor-blade alleys and underwear thieves and dirty old men who still lived with their mothers.
Paul Stewart gave me posters of Madness from the centre pages of Smash Hits magazine. I sellotaped them to my bedroom wall. I dreamed of Camden Town, which was the place they lived and sang about. I’d never seen Camden Town, but it sounded to me like the most English place in the world.
20
Derek left the supermarket in Corstorphine. I didn’t know the circumstances. He wouldn’t talk about it. But he seemed to leave with a lot of money–enough to lease and stock a corner shop on the far side of town. He called the shop Romco. He thought it was a good name for the retail empire it would someday become.
It was one of those small stores that tried to sell everything: milk, bread, beans, chocolate, toilet paper, lightbulbs. It had that small-shop smell. Derek stood behind the counter in a brown overall. When a customer entered, he gave them a big welcoming grin and his eyes followed them as they browsed.
I no longer had to spend time in the basement of St Cuthbert’s, but the back room of Romco had the same cardboard boxes, the same damp smell: the smell of the secret room behind all shops. I felt at home there, reading and drawing while Derek stood at the counter, bagging J-Cloths and scouring pads and Fairy Liquid.
Once, while a customer waited, he popped out the back to get something, some carrier-bags or a length of string or some Sellotape. He told the customer he’d be just a moment and he smiled, then turned and stepped through the fringed plastic curtain. The grin dropped from his face. It didn’t fade, like a polite smile at an unfunny joke: it fell as if weighted at the corners, and it took his eyes with it. For a moment, while he thought nobody could see him, Derek’s face was utterly vacant.
I looked away, because it was like seeing someone naked. But naked people looked human and silly and tender: you felt sorry for them. Derek’s naked face belonged to something ancient, something unspeakably resentful.
It made me sad, and later that evening, I hugged him and kissed his cheek and I told him I loved him.
He peeled my hands away to look at me. He laughed. He said, ‘What’s all this in aid of?’
I said, ‘Nothing,’ and he laughed some more, because he didn’t believe me. He thought I wanted something. But I wasn’t laughing, and when I looked at Mum she wasn’t laughing either. She had the dishcloth in her hand, and she was looking at us, and I could feel things changing.
He bought a van, a big, green Commer, very old and battered. He used it to transport stock for Romco’s shelves. My classmates called it the Armoured Tank.
There was something normal and unmalicious about their mockery, so I didn’t mind–besides, everyone wanted to ride in the back of the Armoured Tank. One afternoon, Derek obliged. He drove some kids home: Babs and Colin Fairgreaves and Paul Stewart. We jostled in the back, like paratroopers waiting for the drop.
The next day, everyone took the piss again, mocking Derek’s posh voice, but only because they were embarrassed to have been so excited, just to be bumping around in the back of his old van.
After school and at weekends, Tam Higgins and I began to hang around together. We walked all over Edinburgh. We talked about Madness and Star Wars and sex: about how much we wanted to do it, and who we wanted to do it to. I wanted to do it to everyone.
We walked into town and wandered round the shops. I took him to the Science Fiction Bookshop. We went to John Menzies on Princes Street. It was a big shop, on two or three floors. It sold toys and books, newspapers and magazines, singles and albums. It was a good shop.
We went to the magazine section. We looked at the top shelf, at Club and Men Only and Playboy. The women on the covers were smiling: their hands or their forearms covered their breasts, squashing them a bit. Or they were sitting, covering themselves with a crossed leg.
My eyes alighted, flicked away, alighted. I’d spotted a magazine called Club: Celebrity Edition. In it were naked pictures of famous women. On the cover was Victoria Principal, who played Pam Ewing in Dallas. It became a matter of immediate and absolute importance that I see Victoria Principal without her clothes on.
Tam and I were tall for our age. We had scrubby moustaches. But nobody would believe we were eighteen. So we couldn’t buy the magazine, even if we’d had the courage to try.
Tam nudged me in the ribs. He said, ‘Knock it.’
We stood together, gazing up at Victoria Principal. She looked younger than she did in Dallas. She had a heavy fringe. Inside, she was naked.
I said, ‘You do it.’
He said, ‘You.’
We spent some time doing that.
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I said, ‘All right, then.’
I had no choice. My breathing was loud in my ears.
The adult magazines were shelved over more sedate periodicals, some of which were given over to model aircraft. I selected one of these and took it from the shelf. I flicked through and made interested noises, looking at the skilfully painted Stukas and Hurricanes and Lancasters.
I mimed to whoever might be watching that I was seriously considering buying the magazine. Then I communicated that, although the magazine was very interesting, I’d probably buy it another day. I went to replace it on the shelf. But, distracted by some other interesting journal, I unintentionally placed it one shelf too high, with the soft pornography.
But my hands were shaking and, when I tried to slip Airfix Modeller next to Club: Celebrity Edition, half a dozen magazines fell from the shelf and tumbled in noisy, flapping slow motion to the floor.
There was a long moment. Then I stooped and picked up the Men Onlys and the Playboys and the Clubs and the Airfix Modeller, and I replaced them all on the shelf, in their proper places. I stood back and pretended none of it had happened.
Tam called me a radge. I felt like a radge. I didn’t know what a radge was.
But I needed to see Victoria Principal naked. I waited for as long as I could stand it, until everybody who’d looked at us was looking away. Then, still blushing, I stood on tiptoes and, from the top shelf, took down a Club: Celebrity Edition, shoving it immediately up and inside my jacket. Then Tam and I about-turned like well-square-bashed squaddies and strode across John Menzies, to the back door. A check-out assistant followed our progress with some compassion.
At the back door, I tried not to run. Then I pressed the magazine to my side with my elbow and ran. I was weightless. I was a good runner. I was very fast. Tam was at my heels.
We rounded the corner and turned onto Princes Street. It was crowded. We slowed. Then we began to run again. We hopped on a maroon and cream bus and stamped up to the top deck. We sat in the front seat. We still hadn’t looked at each other.
We got off the bus outside Dalry School and headed for the no-man’s-land between Dalry and the West Approach Road, behind the petrol station. We went to a bushy, shaded area and sat down. We looked around, in case a security guard had followed us and was waiting in ambush. You could just hear the traffic.
Then I took the magazine from under my jacket. In my haste and terror, I’d stolen two copies. I hid my surprise and passed one to Tam like a benediction. Then I opened the magazine and flicked through it. I ignored the flash of celebrity breasts and celebrity thighs until I found Victoria Principal.
She wasn’t naked. She was topless, in faded blue jeans. She was smiling. The photo was old. She looked different. But there she was.
Eventually, Tam and I stashed the Club: Celebrity Editionsin a scavenged carrier-bag and placed it in a soil hollow beneath a lump of concrete. I thought about Moroni and the golden plates.
If you knew where to look–under bushes, by railway lines, holes in walls–kids’ places abounded with pornography that had been stolen, ogled and discarded. Tam and I began to collect it. It was much easier than stealing from shops. We went on porno hunts. We usually found something. We assessed it, discussed it, usually kept it. In the carrier-bag beneath the lump of concrete, our collection grew thick-paged and damp. Pages would rip when you tried to turn them. When they dried, they dried into a mass.
One day, we found a curious magazine. It was in black and white and badly reproduced. The women inside weren’t pretty and they weren’t smiling: they weren’t even naked. They were dressed as schoolgirls. They posed, bent over old-fashioned school desks, the kind with lids, with pleated skirts lifted above their arses. Men stood with canes rested against the women’s exposed buttocks or posed, mostly out of shot, while the women in uniform bent over and sucked them off, their eyes looking at the camera. Or the women sat on the desks with their legs spread and their shirts open and one breast exposed. They looked angry. Tam and I looked through this book, mystified and unexcited, then agreed to put it back where we found it, under a bush at the graveyard end of the wasteland.
Several times a week, Mum, Derek and I passed that scrubby no-man’s-land on the way to church. It made me feel good to know they were there, those grinning, naked women; those precious books, buried in the earth.
I didn’t worry about God. How could he disapprove, when he’d sired his own son in lust, like a stud-bull?
The Mormon God was not just a physical being, an old man with a white beard; before becoming God, he’d been a mortal, an ordinary man–albeit an ordinary man on a distant planet. He was conceived through sexual intercourse and nurtured in the womb. He suckled at the breast.
His human name had been Elohim. He ascended to Godhood by obeying the will of his own God, who himself had once been mortal man, on yet another planet. There were infinite Gods, infinite planets.
Being a physical being, God naturally had a functioning penis. It became erect in the presence of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Into Mary, God inserted himself. Inside her, he worked himself to orgasm. Presumably, he was a skilled lover, leaving Mary satisfied as well as fertilized. But, whatever his dexterity, it remained that Mary was a married woman: God fucked Joseph’s young wife and got her pregnant.
I thought about it a lot. He was God, so he could do what he liked. But more importantly, he was a man. And Derek had several times gravely instructed me in the ferocious nature of male sexual desire.
To a second-rate mind, this might have looked like cuckoldry. But of course, it wasn’t. God, by his very nature, cannot commit sin, and nothing that he commands can be sinful.
So I wondered what else God got up to, driven by that sinless appetite. Derek had often hinted at ‘secret things’ that took place inside the temple, rituals that he and Mum would undergo one day, about which they’d never be able to tell me. I wondered if Mormon women went to the temple to have sex with God. It made sense. I looked at some of the younger women in church on Sunday, and the thought filled me with queasy excitement.
Then, shortly after Derek was made a Melchizidek priest, he and Mum took a special coach to London. In the temple, their marriage was sealed to time and all eternity.
They returned tired and joyless. Neither would tell me about the marriage ceremony, or about anything else. Once again, Derek hinted darkly of an oath to silence, taken under pain of punishment, which convinced me the temple ceremony had something to do with sex. Only sex was ever kept that secret.
Eventually, worn down by my nagging interrogation, Mum surrendered a detail: now that she’d been sealed to Derek for time and all eternity, she was required to wear sacred undergarments.
I asked her to tell me what they were like.
The idea of sacred pants struck us both as hilarious. Mum got a set and held them up to the light, and my ribs hurt for the laughing. They were white long-johns, marked on the breast with compass and square.
I said, ‘Do you wear these?’
She was laughing. She couldn’t believe it. She said, ‘Yes!’
‘Are you wearing them now?’
‘Yes!’
The saintly long-johns were contrived to deflate the appetite of any man who sought to gaze upon the disrobing wife of a good Mormon patriarch. Only the patriarch himself–and his patriarch, God–was permitted to be aroused by a Mormon woman, or to know her full beauty.
We shouldn’t have laughed about the holy pants in front of Derek. But there was nothing funnier than being told ‘please be serious’ by a man demanding that due reverence be extended to his knee-length undergarments. He grew white-lipped and red faced and sent us from the room.
Undaunted, I nagged Mum to tell me something about what she’d seen in the temple. Anything. There were rumours of proof. That people who went there and made the appropriate, terrible vows, were shown something–something that rendered their faith beyond question.
I said, ‘You must be able to
tell me one thing. Just one little thing. A teensie-weensie thing. Tiny tiny tiny.’
She said, ‘I can’t.’
So my imagination grew rich with Byzantine ceremonies, with robes and chanting and smoke and mystic chants. And I wasn’t far wrong.
The ceremony1 began with washing and anointing of the initiate. For this Mum and Derek were naked but for a cotton poncho. Their heads were oiled. Each limb and member was touched and a blessing pronounced upon it. The celebrant reached under the poncho to touch their ‘shoulders, back, breasts, bowels and loins’. Then each of them had another name, a secret name, whispered into their ear.
Derek was told Mum’s secret name: he’d need it if he wished to summon her to heaven. But his new name was none of Mum’s concern. It was between Derek and God.
Then Mum was dressed in white, with a veil. Derek’s outfit, also white, was accessorized with a soft white cap and a green apron in the shape of a fig leaf. They joined many others, also jauntily attired, in a large auditorium. Women on the left, men on the right, separated by an aisle.
The endowment ceremony took the form of a dramatic, filmed presentation that addressed the ‘terrible questions’: the eternal nature of God and Jesus Christ, the pre-existence and eternal nature of man, the sanctity and eternal nature of the family. The reality of Satan.
The hero of the film was Elohim, which was God’s other name. Lucifer, naturally, was the villain. Jesus and Adam also appeared, using the names Jehovah and Michael.
Elohim said, ‘Jehovah, Michael, see yonder is matter unorganized. Go ye down and organize it into a world like unto the worlds that we have heretofore formed. Call your labours the First Day and bring me word.’
And off Jesus went, to create the world on God’s behalf.
There were hours of this.
And later, Peter, James and John appeared. They instructed the initiates in the secret handshakes and passwords that would be required for them to gain entry to Heaven.2