by Neil Cross
By the time we arrived at Big Dave’s office, I’d stopped fighting. My shirt was untucked and my tie had been pulled into a knot so tiny I’d need to buy a new one.
The prefects told us to wait and stood there like policemen. McEndrick and I put our hands in our pockets. We looked at each other. Looked away. We were dishevelled, untucked, scraped, bruised. I felt good. I offered McEndrick my hand. He refused. I offered again.
I said, ‘Come on,’ because that’s what you did.
Finally, not happily, he gave up and we shook. Then Big Dave came from his office to shout at us. Big Dave was the head teacher. He was big, and his name was Dave. He had one ear. Where the missing ear should be was a rude hole. I didn’t want to look at the hole as he yelled at me, but I couldn’t help it. When he’d finished shouting, he whipped his belt from its legendary housing, over his left shoulder, under his sports coat.
He delivered four stripes across my palms, two on each. Then McEndrick’s. He made it hurt far worse than Mr Boyd. He was much taller and his arms were longer. His technique was better, too. But still it wasn’t too bad.
Then he told us to tuck in our shirts. He watched as we did it. He told us to straighten our ties and we tried. Then he sent us away, past the silent prefects, down the empty lunchtime corridors. And after that, everything at Biggar High School was all right.
Soon it was the Christmas holidays. Everyone said goodbye to each other and wished each other Merry Christmas and it was good to feel part of it. As the coach pulled from the playground, away from the school, I felt pretty good. There was deep snow on the ground. Christmas was coming.
On the first few days of the holiday, I dressed up warm, put on a woolly hat and gloves and I walked the dog on the snowy bing. She loved the snow. She rolled and skipped in it, like surf, and she scooped it into her mouth and tamped it down, and she left complex trails, paw-print mandalas. I trudged in her wake with my hands in my pockets.
At home, I played Christmas songs on the record player: Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole. I read the Christmas edition of the Radio Times and the TV Times, and I planned what I was going to watch.
A few days before Christmas, Mum and Yvonne came home early. Mum looked ill. She had been losing weight for a while. But now, as Yvonne led her inside, I thought she looked haggard and gaunt, even confused.
She sat down in the front room. She kept her coat on. So did Yvonne. I sat down too. The dog couldn’t tell that something was wrong. She went from chair to chair, wagging her tail, burrowing her cold nose in our hands, waiting to be patted and told she was a good girl. Eventually she gave up and sat in the corner, watching us.
I said, ‘What’s wrong?’
Mum said, ‘Oh, God.’
She tugged the skin on her throat with a thumb and forefinger. Her eyes were raw. She had been crying.
I said, ‘What?’
She couldn’t tell me. She couldn’t speak. You could see it. There was a mess inside her head: a bank of screens turned to different channels. That schoolgirl serving behind the counter at The Sweet Basket. That woman who stood at the side of the road, thinking Just one step. The woman who lived for a year in an Edinburgh bed and breakfast. The Bishop’s happy wife, laughing when the American boys said wadder. She couldn’t make sense of it. There was no sense to make. So it was left to Yvonne to tell me that Derek had left us.
There’d been gossip for quite a while; months, in fact. Church members in Edinburgh had seen Derek with another woman. They looked intimate, happy. They looked like people in love. The woman was not a member of the church.
Yvonne spoke to friends in Livingstone. They were shocked to lose their bishop so suddenly. You might have expected them to take some pleasure in the circumstances of it, in our humiliation, but not one of them did.
Yvonne also spoke to old friends from Edinburgh. Many of them had known about Derek and his lover. Eventually, she called David Chapple, who had liked Derek and been his friend. So it was through David Chapple we learned that Derek, patriarch and racist, had fallen in love and left us for a black woman.
26
I knew Derek. I’d known him since that moment in Romco, his failed shop, when I saw the false smile drop from his face as if weighted at the corners. And ever since he once, with shocking bitterness, incorrectly advised me that Yvonne was a lesbian, I’d long suspected him of trying to seduce her. He wanted to make her his spiritual wife. Having two or more sexually available women under one roof appealed to him.
Nevertheless I wondered if that failed seduction clarified Derek’s purpose for moving us to Tarbrax. Mormon polygamists in Utah lived in what were always described as isolated communities. We didn’t live in Utah, but he’d done the best he could. And so his sense of profound fellowship with the Prophet continued to deepen.
Joe Smith enjoyed success, celebrity, notoriety, gratifying tribulations and a large, mostly devoted following. At one point, he even decided to run for President of the United States. But he also enjoyed a great deal of sex.
In the summer of 1831, he was unlucky enough to sleep with Miranda Johnson, the fifteen-year-old daughter of his landlords, an adventure for which he nearly paid with his pearls of great price. A scandalized mob numbering forty or fifty–some of them energetically disappointed Mormons–dragged the prophet from his bed by the hair, carried him down the street, stretched him on a board, mocked him in ‘the most insulting and brutal manner’, stripped him naked and requested of one Dr Denniston that he perform a public emasculation. Denniston demurred when he took pity on the prophet ‘stripped and stretched on the plank’.1 Instead, the mob satisfied itself by giving Joe a beating, covering him in tar, rolling him in feathers and dumping him in the woods.
But Joe kept his pecker up. And soon, God was revealing unto to him the expediently sacred nature of polygamy. Joe took his first ‘plural wife’ as early as 1833, two years after his near-castration. Between 1840 and 1844, he took about forty more of them.2
Emma, Joe’s first and only legal wife, was so repulsed by this incontinence that God was forced to make a revelation which threatened her by name, if she didn’t behave herself and let Joe do as God commanded. She explicitly didn’t believe a word of it. But that didn’t stop Joe; he just stopped seeking Emma’s blessing.3
Some of his plural wives, like Mary Kimball, were as young as fourteen. In addition, a number of them were at the same time married to other men, with whom they continued to live. Joe simply had divinely mandated sexual access to them.
So everyone was happy, not least Joe, who cheerfully lied through his teeth about the subject whenever necessary, which was often. ‘What a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery,’ he wailed in 1844 when he was committing it with at least thirty-nine women.4
By the time he received the divine commandment expressing the sacred nature of plural marriage (and the amendment, expressing the cussed nature of Emma), Joe had been trying for many years to keep his complicated sex life a secret. And even with God’s written authority, a secret it remained until eight years after Joe’s perhaps inevitably violent death.
But finally, in 1852, Joe’s disciples concluded that, if plural marriage was good enough for the prophet, it was good enough for the men who followed him. And for the women, too. For a time, the sacred institution of polygamy was adopted as official Mormon practice. But it caused grave difficulties, not least of them with the government of the United States. In October 1890, with some regret, it was dropped again.
The missionaries hadn’t told us any of that, probably because they didn’t know: the church was wary of its own history. It spent a great deal of money buying up problematic documents and locking them away from scholarly investigation.
But that didn’t matter. To Derek, there were always deeper doctrines, always layers of truth, always secret histories. And it was all there in the theology, if you made the connection. Like Joe Smith, he had never chanced upon a single church or a single woman that met his particul
ar needs: that answered his questions, that explained to him the intolerable mysteries of the universe. He and Joe had found them all wanting. He and Joe always wanted more. Perhaps failure to establish a polygamous household had pushed him into the open legs of a lover. He’d told me often enough that sex was different for men. It was like a hunger for fresh food. So I wasn’t surprised by his infidelity. But I had never expected that he would leave us.
There was a funny feeling in my chest, under the ribs.
I said, ‘That fucking cocksucker.’
I said it because I wanted to shock them and because I imagined it to be an adult response. But neither Yvonne nor Mum noticed and I felt diminished and childish and powerless.
We talked about it all evening, even though we knew nothing, except that he’d gone. We said the same things, again and again. We used the same words.
I wanted to do something. I wanted to go running, but it was dark and cold and treacherous outside. I went to my bedroom and threw darts at the Kirby poster. I tore it down. Mum helped me rip it to pieces. But it was a paltry reaction. Nobody’s heart was in it, except mine. I wanted to break everything in the house.
Already, Mum looked like a face on the news, like the survivor of a train crash or a hijacking. In the days that followed, the skin sucked onto her bones like a special-effect. She was addled. She couldn’t hold a conversation. She sat in confounded silence. When I spoke to her, she looked at me with fuddled eyes, as if I’d spoken in a different language.
Friends from the church were benevolent and unembarrassed. We were visited by a cheerful man who called himself Norman the Mormon. He had big Michael Caine spectacles and hair to his collar. He drove a long way to see us, over icy roads, to make sure we were okay. He invited us to stay over Christmas.
He said, ‘Just for a couple of days. Or maybe just for Christmas. Just come for dinner, if you like.’
But Mum couldn’t leave the house. When she stood, her limbs trembled. She looked thirty years older.
Nobody knew where Derek had gone. Nobody had heard from him–not even the people at Kirby, for whom he hadn’t worked for some time. He hadn’t been a very good vacuum-cleaner salesman. In fact, he was no longer working for them when he gave me the poster. It had been a kind of merciless joke. He just wanted to see if he could make me do it–cover my posters with a picture of a vacuum cleaner. He must have thought of it, hanging there, and chuckled to himself.
Around the time he went missing, so did the money from the Livingstone Ward’s Bishop’s fund–the money that his congregation had given in tithing, 10 per cent of their gross earnings, accumulated over many months. They had entrusted this money to their Bishop, who of all people they could trust. Derek had frequently expressed his desire to build a church with it–a building of their own, a place to belong, of which they could be proud for the rest of their lives. Nobody suggested that he had stolen the money. Nobody could bear to.
But Derek hadn’t just run away. It was nothing so simple as an abandonment. The hatred that boiled inside him had secretly bubbled for us too, like a tar pool, as it bubbled for all the people who loved and respected him, because they did not love and respect him enough.
It had been revenge. He’d fantasized about it, and seeded his fantasy with details, little time-bombs, such as giving me the poster. He’d wanted to trip us up and kick us in the kidneys and run away, laughing,
On Christmas day, I opened my presents. Mum had been saving all year, at Mr Strachan’s Xmas club. My present was a music centre, something a bit better to play my records on. Yvonne had bought me some records to play on it.
Mum and Yvonne cooked the dinner. It was roast chicken and veg. Mum couldn’t eat. She prodded her plate with the tines of her fork and she smiled down at her lap. The rest of the day she sobbed in her bedroom.
I played The Specials at top volume and, in the late afternoon, I took the dog for a walk on the snow-blanketed bing. The landscape was fresh, halogen blue, edged with pink as the sun began to set. I sang ‘Walking in a Winter Wonderland’ and the dog nosed at the snow and followed scent trails that ran over paw prints, and that was good.
The days that followed were strained and desolate and silent. Mum shrivelled up on herself. I thought of those burning ants, long ago.
Norman the Mormon came round to help us pack. We packed the boot and the back seats of his car. He said he’d bring our things to us as soon as he could, and he drove away.
We stuffed our clothes into a couple of suitcases. I put my records in a carrier-bag. Everything else, we left behind: the furniture, the TV, the stuff in the kitchen, the beds, the toys I had not quite grown out of. Most of my books.
Mrs Lamb agreed to look after the dog for a fortnight, until Yvonne was able to bring her to us. I said goodbye to the dog. I hugged her neck. She knew something was wrong. She looked at me with brown eyes. Her tan brows knit in the middle. We said goodbye to Mrs Lamb and we left Tarbrax, the bing shrinking in the window behind us until it was a smudge on the horizon; the pine forests snow-covered, like a Christmas card.
Yvonne drove us to Waverley Station. I remembered everything. We passed Dalry school. We drove past John Menzies on Princes Street. I thought of the Club: Celebrity Edition with Victoria Principal in it, and I wondered if it had mouldered to nothing in that plastic bag beneath a lump of concrete on the waste ground, or if it might one day be discovered by a foraging young boy.
It felt like everything had been ending for longer than it really had: everything had been ending since it started. It felt like Biggar High School had already slipped into another life–Mr Boyd and the prefect and attendant girls and the fat boy who was a sex person. And Dalry Primary School had happened to someone else altogether, a little boy it made me sad to think of.
Yvonne parked and we got out of the car. She carried Mum’s suitcase. Mum was too weak. I wore a donkey jacket and my Dr Martens. I had a newly shaved head. I was taller than Mum and Yvonne. I hardly recognized myself in the shop windows. I carried a suitcase in one hand, my records in the other.
The train stood on the bitter platform. We said goodbye to Yvonne. Mum was too stupefied to be upset, even when Yvonne hugged her tight and said, ‘Goodbye, Ma.’
Yvonne hugged me too. I said goodbye. Then Mum and I took our seats on the train. Yvonne stood outside, at the window. She had on a woolly hat and mittens.
When the train pulled away, slowly at first, we looked out the window. Yvonne waved, then slipped away. Mum was saying goodbye to Edinburgh. I could see it in her face. Her reflection looked very old.
The heating on the train was broken. We huddled in our clothes. Yvonne had given Mum some food for the journey, but I couldn’t eat. My teeth hurt. I couldn’t close my mouth, they hurt so much.
Eight hours later, we arrived at Bristol Temple Meads. There was a light powdering of snow on the ground, and Bristol had been brought to a near-standstill by it. Mum and I laughed. We felt superior. We told everyone how deep the snow had been in Scotland, but it hadn’t stopped anything. Nobody in Scotland was bothered by a little bit of snow.
27
We moved in with my sister, Caroline.
She was twenty-two, divorced, a mother of two young boys called Marc and Nathan. She lived in a council house in Stockwood. It was a short walk from Dad’s house; five minutes from Stockwood Primary School; the place where Clive Petrie and I had once been friends, clambering over the apparatus.
The house had three bedrooms. Marc and Nathan shared one of them. The big one was Caroline’s. The third, which had been spare, was now mine. Caroline put in an old sofa bed.
Downstairs was a living room and a small back room, off the kitchen. Mum used the back room as a kind of bed-sitter–a place to go and sit and be alone, which is all she wanted to do.
She furnished the room with things Norman the Mormon drove down. He turned up early in the New Year. Norman the Mormon, from Livingstone, stood at my sister’s door in Stockwood, south-east Bristol. He he
lped us to unload our things from the back of his car, then bid us a merry goodbye and drove straight back to Scotland. Norman the Mormon was a fetch, a ghost of the living, a thing that flitted between worlds.
Mum spent most of her time alone in the back room. She had stopped eating. She was permanently confused. She forgot what you said to her, even as you were saying it. The end of a sentence was not connected to its beginning.
On Friday nights, Caroline and I watched horror films, the kind starring Joan Collins or an overweight Elizabeth Taylor. We sat in the blue, flickering dark. Marc and Nathan slept upstairs. Mum sat silent and still in the back room, looking at the walls.
A week or two after Norman’s visit, Yvonne delivered the dog. The dog was delighted to see me. She skipped and yelped and put her paws on my chest and licked my face. But when Mum stepped forward to greet her, her tail stopped wagging and she turned pointedly away. She greeted my sister instead, and the children, and immediately became theirs.
Yvonne didn’t linger. There was tension between her and Caroline. Caroline thought it sinister that Yvonne called our mother ‘Ma’. Yvonne must have sensed it, because she addressed her as Edna, instead. It sounded false. She’d never been Edna: she’d been Sister Cross, then Ma.
Yvonne bid us another goodbye, but it was hesitant and awkward. We’d said our goodbye on the freezing platform at Waverley Station. She had stopped being my pretend sister the moment I boarded the train. The family she belonged to had never existed.
For a while, she and Mum exchanged letters. They were always addressed ‘Dear Ma’. But over the years, the letters diminished in frequency. They dwindled to birthday cards and a wedding invitation, then just faded away and became silence.