by Neil Cross
Eventually, the other driver overtook the Skoda and braked just in front of us, hard. Derek stamped on his own brake. We jerked in our seatbelts. The Skoda came to a noisy halt, just behind the other car. We waited.
The other driver turned in his seat. He smiled. He gave Derek the finger. He unfolded it slowly.
He enunciated the words ‘Fucking wanker’ then pulled away.
When he’d gone, Derek swept the shiny lock of hair from his forehead. His eyes flicked into the rear-view mirror. They narrowed.
He said, ‘If he’d have taken one step out of that car, I’d have killed him. I’d have bloody killed him.’
I said, ‘I know.’
He looked comical in that moment: imperious and absurd.
And he looked just as silly now, sitting there in his wet coat with his driving gloves still clasped in one fist, repeating fictional ultimata he’d delivered to his boss, pretending to have walked out when he’d been cast. Derek had been sacked. His boss had told him to go and not come back. And on the way home, he’d turned this effrontery into a triumph of dignity. He had walked. He had bloody walked.
Mum believed him, because she had to. Otherwise, what was she doing here, in a village in the middle of Scotland, far from her family, far from everything: far even from the far place to which she’d run away. She barely saw her daughters or her daughters’ children. Her eldest son, her first born child, had not seen or spoken to her in nearly a decade. She had never seen his children. Her own mother, approaching her eighties, was living alone in a sheltered flat with a Yorkshire terrier and a crucifix on the wall.
It was not possible to have done all this for a man who proved to be a liar. And when they spoke of it at church, this run of bad luck, they would say it was the devil’s doing. It was the devil, tempting them from the true church, away from God. It was the devil, who sometimes was a gentleman.
And Derek soon landed a new job. He told us about it one Sunday afternoon, on the way home from church. His new job was selling vacuum cleaners. They were called Kirbys. They were magnificent machines. They would sell themselves. He was going to make a fortune. He was very excited.
He ran through what we’d do with the money. We’d get a big house. I’d have proper pocket money. Kirby was the best possible turn of events. It was a gift from Heavenly Father. It was good luck. It was velly intellesting.
My final day at Dalry Primary School ended at lunchtime.
Just before the bell went, Mrs Simmons took five minutes to address the agitated class. She thanked us for being lovely boys and girls and wished us good luck for the future. She hoped we’d go back and see her one day, to tell her how we were getting on. Then the bell went. Everyone scrambled to be gone. Mrs Simmons stood there, laughing, watching the children leave without a look cast backwards.
For my classmates, leaving Dalry Primary School was a small ending. They all lived nearby. The summer holidays lay ahead. They’d see each other and play together, and they’d see each other as first years at Tynecastle Comprehensive. But I’d never see them again. My final weeks had hurt with nostalgia. I had wanted to stop time moving, but I couldn’t. I reviewed the five years I had spent there with gratification and shame. After all this time, I belonged with them. I had earned my place.
I waited at the gate until everyone had gone. I wanted to bid each of them goodbye. I was cataloguing, trying to set each of their faces in memory, each of their names. When they had all gone, I walked round the empty school grounds, remembering it, the layout of it, the smell, the exact fall of light and shadow.
I walked to Duff Street and stood outside the old house. It was empty and boarded-up but not yet demolished. I looked at the graffiti on the wall: Neil Go Home.
It made me sad, for a child that I wasn’t.
Yesterday, I came into possession of my final class photograph. I saw those children for the first time in twenty-five years. The faces were familiar, but almost all their names had gone.
24
Derek’s job, selling Kirby Heritage vacuum cleaners, often kept him away, sometimes overnight. But when he was at home, we watched TV together in the evenings. One of the films we enjoyed was called The Wild Geese. It was about a group of British mercenaries sent to Africa by Stewart Granger; their mission was to release an imprisoned African opposition leader, thereby establishing democracy in his country. Stewart Granger turned out to be a villain. The other stars–Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Roger Moore–were too old for all the running around, but they seemed to be enjoying themselves. Another of the team was played by Hardy Kruger, an actor whom Derek admired.
The film began on an aeroplane, with a murder. A man was stabbed in the back, through his seat.
Sunday was a hot day. After church, I went outside with Michael and Adi, the other deacons. We walked across the car-park and sat on a low wall, kicking our heels. We talked about The Wild Geese. Michael and Adi had watched it, too.
I enjoyed discussing films. Who shot who, who blew up what, who died.
I said, ‘And did you see that bloke getting stabbed on the plane? The one guarding the nigger.’
I made a face, to show how much it must have hurt, and how cool it was.
Nobody said anything. I wondered if they had heard me.
I said, ‘There’s this nigger on a plane…’
They weren’t looking at me. They were looking at the sky.
I felt something hot rise from the small of my back. I felt it rise up my neck and my cheeks. It rose into my scalp. I had forgotten that Adi was a nigger.
I wanted to apologize. But I couldn’t, not until he or Michael acknowledged what I’d said. Neither of them did.
We sat on the low wall and kicked our legs to beat out the passing silence, and I didn’t look at them. After a while we began to discuss The Wild Geese again. My hands were shaking. A bit later still, we went inside.
Now Derek was Bishop, we were usually the last to leave, so it was several hours before we got home. We sat in Derek’s car: me, Mum and Yvonne. Derek at the wheel, pleased with how things had gone that week.
At home, we turned on the TV. Mum was in the kitchen, making roast leg of lamb. Roast leg of lamb was my favourite. We watched TV until dinner was ready. Then Yvonne and I laid the small tables, putting down a knife and fork and a glass of water on each; a glass of orange squash on mine. Mum brought in the dinner, two plates at a time. I turned down the TV while Yvonne said grace. Then I turned it up again and we began to eat.
I cut up my lamb and put some in my mouth. I chewed.
I said, ‘Dad?’
He said, ‘Yes?’
‘I’m not going to church any more.’
He looked at me: the smooth, chubby face, the broad forehead, the shining, nearly black hair. He raised an eyebrow. He plucked them. He said that good grooming was a very masculine trait.
He said, ‘And what makes you say that?’
‘I don’t believe in it.’
Mum sucked in her breath. She said, ‘Oh, Neil.’
I looked at Yvonne. Her eyes were guarded, but she was okay. She nodded, so small you could hardly see it.
Derek said, ‘And when did you reach this conclusion?’
‘Ages ago. A long time.’
I looked at my food. I cut up a roast potato. Shovelled gravy on it with my knife. Watched the gravy running off again.
I said, ‘I just don’t want to go any more.’
Mum said, ‘It was you who got us involved in the first place. You used to love it.’
I said, ‘I was nine, Mum.’
She went to speak. She was angry. But Derek silenced her by half-raising his knife. He was looking at me. There was no rebuke in his eyes. He had dignity and in that moment I could have wept for loving him.
He said, ‘I’d like you to come to church. But I know that if I force you it will only drive you away in the long run. So, if you don’t want to come, don’t come. But the minute you want to come back, you’ll be very welc
ome.’
He kept his eyes on mine. They were the eyes that I remembered. I had not seen them for a long time. I could see that he believed it all. He believed it so much, he was willing to let me stray from the true path. That way I could discover it again, all on my own. That, after all, was the way he himself had found it.
After dinner, I took the dog for a walk. It was summer and it was still daylight, but I wore a jacket because the evening was paling.
Every time I thought about Adi, I had the compulsion to curl into a ball on the floor, in the shadow of the bing’s weird contortions. It made me want to moan out loud, just to let it out, and sometimes I had to stand still and press my fist into my mouth and bite down, to stop it coming.
I thought about Derek, telling me never to let a nigger through his door. And I thought of him, proud before his congregation while Adi passed round the sacrament, those silly chunks of Mother’s Pride and little plastic cups of tap water which represented the agonized blood sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Adi, not knowing that his own grinning bishop hated him. I wondered at the scale of that betrayal. And I thought of the way Derek had looked at me over dinner, with those soft eyes, and I began to run.
But the dinner lay heavy in my belly, and before I’d run very far I had to stop or risk being sick and I sat in that false desert, that scrap of barren wilderness, and watched the dog as she fossicked for prey.
At the end of June, I flew back to Bristol. On the plane, the cabin crew no longer gave me special attention. I looked older than I was. At Birmingham airport, I was met as usual by Dad and Margaret. Gary and Wayne stayed at home.
I smiled. I could feel it on my face.
They smiled too. They said, ‘Hello, Nipper.’
We waited at the carousel, to get my suitcase.
Dad plucked at my lapel.
He said, ‘What’s all this business?’
Mum had bought me a fake Crombie, a knee-length overcoat, black. And I wore Dr Martens. My trousers were taken up a bit short, to show off the boots and their yellow laces.
We went to the car-park and found Dad’s Lada. The Yellow-Wheeled Speed was long gone. I got in the back seat and watched the motorway lights pulse overhead, like a squadron of invading UFOs.
I walked into 92 Bifield Road, into the familiar smell and, all week, I waited for someone to mention the solicitor’s letter, but nobody did.
On Wednesday, I was alone in the car with Dad. He parked. We were on the other side of Bristol. He gave me the car keys.
He said, ‘I won’t be long, Nip.’
He gave me money, ‘for a book or something,’ and told me to wait. Then he hurried into a bowls club. It was not a bowls club that I’d seen before. Someone had been taken ill and Dad was taking their place in an important game. Or it was something like that.
I got out of the car and went for a walk. I found a W.H. Smith. I browsed the books, then bought one and took it back to the car. It was called The Fellowship of the Ring. When Dad got back, I was halfway through it.
On Saturday morning, I asked him to let me know when it was five o’clock.
He said, ‘Why? Do you have to say a prayer or something?’
I said, ‘No, Suggs is being interviewed on Radio 1.’
Suggs was the singer with Madness.
I dreamed that the letter had been lost in the post. I prayed to a God in whom I did not believe. I petitioned his imaginary son, Jesus. I fell to my knees at the side of the bed. I prayed in the shower and over breakfast. I prayed while I pretended to watch TV. And as the days passed–the same Saturday evening football results, the same Sunday dinner, with Jimmy Savile on the radio, followed by Dad taking the same forty winks on the sofa, sleeping with the newspaper open, face down on his belly–I lost the resolve to deny the possibility of it.
Then, on the last night of my visit, Margaret took Gary and Wayne to the cinema again. Just like before, it was just Dad and me. He turned off the TV and sat at the table. He was wearing his work trousers and a white shirt. You could see his white vest, beneath it. He had a glass of Bell’s whisky in front of him. He clutched it in his hand.
He said, ‘Sit down, Nipper.’
I sat down. As I sat, it telescoped in my mind. A disconnected part of me began to narrate the scene.
Dad took a sip of whisky.
He took a sip of whisky, I thought.
I gripped the edge of the table. I wasn’t wearing my boots. Without them, I felt half-dressed and weak. I crossed my ankles behind me. Put my feet flat on the floor. Crossed them again.
Dad said, ‘So, what’s all this business with the solicitor’s letter?’
Inside, I felt a swirl of pity for Margaret. She had sobbed in the kitchen because I was spoiling her home.
I said, ‘Well, it’s true.’
Dad said, ‘Oh baloney.’
That was the closest he ever came to swearing. He took a sip of whisky. He looked at the wall. There was silence between us.
He said, ‘I’ve spent thousands of pounds on you. Flying you down here.’
He didn’t pay maintenance, though, because Derek wouldn’t accept another man’s money. I wanted to say that, because I wanted to say something malicious. But I didn’t have the courage.
I wished I had my boots on. My feet felt peculiar.
I said, ‘Margaret doesn’t like having me here.’
He said ‘Baloney’ again, more angrily. Then he said, ‘Is this your mother’s doing? Or Derek’s?’
‘It was Derek’s idea to go to the solicitor,’ I said. ‘But only after I told him what Margaret said.’
He was still looking at the clock. It didn’t appear to be moving. The light in the room was slow and old.
He said, ‘Look at what I do for you, Nipper. And all you do is turn round and stab me in the back.’
The words went through my chest and out between my shoulders.
He said, ‘All you do is betray us.’
Most of the year, Dad lived with Gary and Wayne, who loved him and respected him and obeyed him and were good sons. They were well-behaved at school and they played football for local teams. When they scored, their names were in the local paper, in small print on the sports pages. Dad watched them from the sidelines.
And every few months, I turned up: a strange boy who in some minor ways resembled a child he’d lost, five years before. I was taller, dressed differently, or I’d joined a strange American church of which he knew nothing. I began to change the day I left Bristol in the hired Morris Marina. The change consolidated and accelerated, like a malignant tumour. It wasn’t stopping. It would have been better for Dad to have said goodbye when I was seven. Then he could have mourned me, the way you mourn any death. And by now he’d have recovered, the way people always did, eventually.
He loved me because he couldn’t help it: he loved me because of who I’d been. But he didn’t like me. There was no reason why he should; he barely knew me. I wanted to point that out to him, but I didn’t know how to say it. I was narrating it in my head and all the words were wrong.
The conversation wound in a descending spiral and wore itself out. It never concluded.
He said, ‘Do you ever want to come and see me again?’
I said, ‘Yes, of course.’
Then we drifted into an exhausted silence. For a long time, neither of us moved from the table. Then I stood and went upstairs. I left Dad with his whisky in the quiet room with the tired light.
On my bedroom door was a small plaque. It had been there for years. It showed a vintage car, a Model T Ford. Beneath the car it read: Neil’s Room. There was a similar plaque on Gary’s door, and one on Wayne’s.
In the bedroom, I saw that Margaret had washed and folded my clothes and left them out on the bed. I packed, leaving out something to wear in the morning. I picked up The Fellowship of the Ring and got into bed and began to read.
Later, Margaret, Gary and Wayne came home from the cinema. Gary and Wayne came up to bed. I heard them on the s
tairs. I heard them peeing and cleaning their teeth. Dad and Margaret came to bed, too.
It sounded ordinary, and it nearly was, but for my presence. Dad had said what was to be said, and they were all relieved it was over. I was like a ghost, haunting their life from a silent corner. When I left, things would return to normal. And that’s all anyone ever wanted. Just to be normal. Nobody wanted a ghost in their house.
The next day, Dad drove me to the airport. We said goodbye at the gate. He smiled and waved and I smiled and waved.
He said, ‘Cheerio, Sonner.’
I said, ‘Bye, Dad.’
He said, ‘Look after yourself.’
I went through the gate, carrying my suitcase.
He stood there in his soft shoes. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. He put them in his pockets. It was pointless, both of us standing there, waving.
25
I spent the summer alone in Tarbrax.
In the morning, Mum, Derek and Yvonne left before I was awake. I got up late and read Doc Savage: Man of Bronze or Conan of the Isles. When I was bored of reading, I wrote my book. It was the story of an ordinary man, a bit of a coward, who unexpectedly slipped into a parallel universe, where a war was being fought between the forces of good and evil.
In the book’s early chapters, the hero was incarcerated in a POW camp on a vast, desert planet. With the aid of a mysterious, elderly prisoner known only by his number, 73172, the hero effected an uprising and a mass escape. They hijacked a supply ship and escaped to join the rebellion. The rebels were a various bunch, most of them characters borrowed from films and books and comics, but given other names. Making up names was the worst bit. That’s why I called the old man 73172.
The end of the book was sad: the rebels lost and everyone was killed. Every time I finished it, I read it back, discovered it was rubbish and started all over again. The book was called Another Kind of Warrior, and I had been writing and rewriting it for four years.