by Neil Cross
I rang the buzzer. I thought about that sweetly powdered, fat woman, that creaking oar of a husband. The unimagined woman with them.
I rang and rang.
No answer.
I stood back. I yelled at the window. I said, ‘Fucking come down here.’
Caroline yelled too. She stood next to me and shouted. Mum wandered up and down on the pavement, shaking her head and muttering like someone on medication.
Garry waited at the wheel of the white Capri. He was embarrassed and nervous. It wasn’t his family drama. He’d only come because Caroline asked him to.
Nobody answered the buzzer. Nobody came to the window. I thought of him in there, Derek Cross, exchanging supercilious, nervous glances with his mother and her husband and his lover. All of them pretending we weren’t there: hoping we’d just go away.
I wanted to shout to his lover that he thought her a nigger, that he was fucking her because he hated her. And sooner or later that hatred would manifest itself in more than a grunted orgasm. He’d be gone while it still glistened wet inside her thighs.
I stood there and shouted and pressed my finger to the bell. But the windows stayed lighted and blank, like an autistic face.
Mum stopped wandering. She took off her shoe and, with the heel of it, smashed the headlights of the red car. She found a jagged quarter-brick and started on the windows, but couldn’t smash them. She scraped at the paintwork. She tore off the wing mirrors and the windscreen wipers. She was silent. Her mouth was set. In one hand, she held on to her handbag.
I was about to join her; to take the brick from her hand and do some proper damage. But Garry got out of the Capri, put his hand on Mum’s shoulder and ushered her away from the red car. She went with him. She was confused and compliant. She got into the Capri, with Caroline.
I stood there. I wanted to obliterate Derek’s car. I wanted to take off the petrol cap and drop in a match. I wanted the concussion to shatter the windows of Helen Cross’s flat, to send shrapnel whirling into the furniture, the doors: into their heads and bodies. But Caroline was calling me, so I went to the Capri and got in. The engine was running. Garry pulled away before the door was closed.
He was laughing. He said: ‘Bloody hell, Ed.’
We drove back to Caroline’s house. In the front room, I lit one of Garry’s cigarettes, an Embassy Regal. Nobody said much. Eventually, Garry went home. He only lived down the road. He lived with his mum and dad. They all had a drink together, Garry’s family, Sunday afternoon down the Antelope.
The next day, the police phoned. Mum panicked and didn’t listen. She just heard the word ‘police’, and that was enough. She put down the phone with a quivering hand and said, ‘They’re coming to arrest us.’
She sat on the sofa in a state of nervous terror. Her hands were in her lap. I went upstairs and put on my boots. I didn’t want to be arrested in bare feet.
There were two officers, one with a big copper’s moustache. They crowded the doorway, monumentally. They seemed too big. They stood in their dark uniforms, their white shirts and black ties, and I thought of the missionaries, smiling in the doorway at 30 Duff Street. The same dog went similarly crazy behind a different door. She howled and gnashed and clawed at the wood. The police, like the Mormons, were unmoved.
They asked if they could come in. They took off their hats and wiped their feet. They went through to the living room. They sat on the sofa. Mum sat on the chair. Caroline and I sat on the floor with our backs to the gas fire. Caroline was wearing pin-striped jeans. They were fashionable. She turned down the TV, but left it on. I was aware of it, flickering silently in the corner of my eye, like somebody trying not to laugh.
The officers introduced themselves.
The officer with the moustache said, ‘And this is Neil, is it?’
He looked at Mum, not me. Her foot was tapping. Her fingers fiddled with loose skin at her throat.
I said, ‘Yes.’
He looked at me.
He said, ‘What’s so funny?’
‘You leave him alone,’ said Caroline. ‘He’s nervous.’
He looked at his little notebook. ‘So he should be, by the look of it.’
The second officer said, ‘Neil has been reported for criminal damage.’
I said, ‘What?’
‘Your gran saw you, mate. Smashing up the car. She watched you from the window. You weren’t very clever about it, were you?’
There was quiet.
I looked at Mum.
She tapped her foot. Tugged at the skin on her neck.
I said, ‘I didn’t do it.’
‘Well, your gran made a statement that says you did.’
I waited for Mum to speak. She didn’t look at me.
I said, ‘It’s not even their car.’
The second officer said, ‘You’d better wipe that smirk off your face, mate.’
‘Don’t you dare speak to him like that,’ said Caroline.
They ignored her. They were glaring at me.
She said it again: ‘Don’t you dare.’
Mum was looking into space with her head weirdly cocked, as if none of us were there. She sat there, tapping her foot and playing with the skin on her throat, rolling it between thumb and forefinger.
The officers read it as shame on my behalf; shame that her son was a vandal. They took some notes. They weren’t arresting me, but they’d be back. They got their hats. They’d be in touch.
Their presence faded slowly from the room, like the memory of an argument or an afterimage of the sun.
It wasn’t late, but my teeth hurt and I went to bed. Caroline brought me a packet of cigarettes and an ashtray. I sat on the bed, smoking, tipping ash out the window.
Because it was essentially a domestic incident, because I had just turned thirteen and because it was a first offence, I was given a caution.
Caroline came to Broadmead police station with me. Mum stayed home. She didn’t want to risk people seeing her walk into a police station. Caroline sat on the bus with me, not saying much. At the station, she waited while I was taken into a room. A bored police officer in shirtsleeves talked to me for a long time like I was a cretin. He told me that I was on the wrong path, a bad road, and this was my only chance to put things right. And it was no good to sit there smirking because this was deadly serious. It was only a caution, but it would be held on record until I was eighteen. If he or any of his officers had cause to speak to me again, he would personally come down on me like a ton of fucking bricks, and we’d see who was smiling then, mate. Did I understand?
I nodded and agreed. When it was over I went out of the room and my sister gave me a cuddle. And, as we walked out the doors, she linked her arm through mine, like she was proud that I was her brother and wanted everyone to know it. She kept her arm in mine at the bus-stop, and when the bus came she gave my arm a squeeze and let go. And we caught the bus home, the number 54 back to Stockwood.
30
Every Wednesday, Reeves Nightclub at Arnos Vale held a divorced, separated and singles night. Pernod was 50p a glass, and it was free entry for ladies. Caroline had split up with Garry, amiably enough. So she and Mum decided to give Reeves a go.
Mostly, the women went to have a laugh, to have a cheap drink and a giggle. For most of the evening, they danced to Abba and the Dooleys and Chic while the men lounged round the edges of the dance floor, watching and sipping pints of lager. Later, when the men were drunk enough, they nodded to their friends and strolled onto the dance floor. When that happened, most of the women left.
Mum met Brian Stone on her first visit, her first Wednesday night. A couple of nights later, she went out with him again. On Sunday, she brought him round to meet me.
He was fifty, divorced, particular. He liked cricket. He wore a neat parting. He was ursine and very hairy, but there was something womanly about his broad hips and big thighs. When he wanted to make a point, he tucked his chin into his neck and peered over his bifocals. Looking at him
made my skin feel unpleasant. His voice made my scalp tighten.
He took us on holiday: me, Mum, Caroline and her boys. It was early in May. He chose the cheapest holiday he could book, cramming us into a little caravan in a deserted holiday camp.
In the holiday photographs, my mother sits in the grey-brown sea. She is splashing and smiling. She is very thin. She is all alone in the water. In the same set of photographs I am on the beach in a sweatshirt and a coat, and I still look cold. I have let my hair grow.
Mum’s desperate, skeletal jollity made it impossible to relax. I went to the camp shop. It was too early in the season for it to have developed the intoxicating, English smell of half-molten beach balls. From the spinner by the checkout, I took a copy of Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. It was big and I had time, and it looked frightening.
I began to read it that night, babysitting the boys while Mum and Brian and Caroline went to the empty clubhouse. It rained, and as the young vampire Danny Glick tippity-tapped on Mark Petrie’s window, asking to be let in, the rain drummed hard on the thin metal ceiling and I huddled in a blanket, too scared to stop reading.
After the holiday, Mum said we were moving in with Brian. We’d been in Bristol less than six months. His house was on the other side of town, on the edge of a vast council estate called Hartcliffe. It was a starter home on a neat private estate called ‘The Ridings’. His lawn was demarcated by a tiny white fence. His neighbours were young, married couples. He was like an old maid living among them, this hairy, prissy man who hurried to fluff the cushions the moment you stood up to go to the bathroom.
The living room was narrow, and Brian kept it swelteringly overheated. Upstairs was a small double bedroom with a mirrored wardrobe, and a single bedroom the size of a death cell. The walls were painted magnolia. The house was pale and sterile. It had no smell, other than dust burning on the radiators.
I said, ‘But what about school?’
‘There’s a lovely school close by,’ said Mum.
I had learned that ‘there’s a lovely school close by’ meant simply, ‘there is a local school’. I didn’t want to change schools again.
I said, ‘Can I live with Caroline?’
‘Caroline won’t have you living there.’
‘That’s not true. If you asked her, she’d let me.’
Caroline wouldn’t let anybody criticize me. It didn’t matter who it was. Nobody dared, not while she was in the room. She watched horror films with me. And having Marc and Nathan was like having two little brothers. I drew pictures for them and carried them on my shoulders.
I said, ‘Have you asked her?’
Mum wore that pursed, disgusted look. It looked worse, bitter, now she’d lost so much weight.
She said, ‘You can’t go and live with Caroline. I’m not having it.’
I said, ‘I don’t want to live here.’
‘Then perhaps you should go and live with your father.’
I said, ‘Okay, then.’
I went to Dad’s house that weekend. I told him about Brian: that he lived in a creepy little hutch, that he fluffed the pillows behind you when you stood up, that the wheedling sound of his voice made me want to scream. I told him I didn’t want to change schools again. I told him I was sick of always moving.
I said, ‘Can I come and live with you?’
He didn’t hesitate. I might have been asking for bus-fare.
He said, ‘Of course you can, my Sonner.’
I supposed they’d been considering this possibility since I got back to Bristol. Margaret was breezy and generous. She talked about how we could redecorate my old room. I’d grown out of it, the way it was.
She said, ‘And we’ll have to see about getting you some new bloody clothes.’
There were no undercurrents to her generosity. There were no lies in it. There was just Margaret, offering me a home. Whatever had been wrong before, it wasn’t wrong now.
Dad drove me to The Ridings–Brian liked to give the full address as ‘Lower Dundry’, which the Post Office didn’t recognize–and dropped me off. I said goodbye. Then I walked to Brian’s house and knocked on the door. Mum opened it.
She said, ‘Well?’
I said, ‘I’m moving in tomorrow.’
She stepped back and let me in. I went upstairs, to the tiny bedroom that overlooked the two-tier, patio garden. Some of my clothes were there. Mum followed me. She sat on the edge of the bed. It smelled of washing powder. All the fabric in the house smelled of washing powder.
She said, ‘And Margaret was all right about it, was she?’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘Margaret was amazing. She said we could decorate my room. And I could get new clothes and stuff. She was really good.’
Mum nodded. She said, ‘Well. I hope you’re very happy, living there with her.’
She began to cry. I watched her for a while. I wished she’d stop.
I said, ‘Mum. I can’t stay here. It’s miles away. I don’t like Brian and he doesn’t like me. He doesn’t want me here.’
‘Yes, he does.’
‘You know he doesn’t. He won’t even speak to me. I say something to him and he pretends I’m not there. He acts like I’m not in the room.’
She was nodding. She said, ‘What am I going to do?’
She was fifty-three. She had nothing.
I looked at my clothes. It would take me five minutes to stuff them into a bag and be out of there. Five minutes; less, if I hurried. And no time at all if I forgot about the clothes and just left. It was a question of strength.
She sat on the edge of the bed, sobbing.
The next day, I caught two buses to Dad’s house. Brian didn’t want to drive me. He was too tired. He sat on the sofa reading the Bristol Evening Post. He read with his head tilted back and his bifocals slipped down the bridge of his nose and his mouth agape. You could hear him breathing through it.
I walked from the Stockwood terminus to 92 Bifield Road. I walked up to Dad’s door and knocked on it. Margaret answered. She said, ‘Come in, Nipper.’
I went inside.
In the front room, I sat on the sofa, next to Dad. I took his offer of a home and I threw it back in his face.
He wasn’t surprised. He just said, ‘Well, you’ve got a home here any time you need one, Nipper.’ And that was the last time he or anyone else ever called me by that name.
I spent most of the summer at Caroline’s house. She’d met a man, too. His name was Steve. He was an ex-copper and in those days he still wore a copper’s moustache.
Steve didn’t like the same music as me, but he liked music and he played me things I’d never heard of. He wrote poems; he had a bin-bag full of them. It poured out of him. Sometimes he read them to me and we discussed them. On Saturdays, he drove us to Schwartz Bros, on Gloucester Road, to buy us hamburgers. There was still a shop on Gloucester Road called The Sweet Basket.
That fine summer was at its best when Caroline’s neighbour went on holiday. Scared of being robbed, she lent us her new VCR. So Caroline, Steve and I spent two weeks driving to the big video rental shop in Whitchurch and renting six or eight films at a time. We watched them, one after the other, sitting in a darkened room in the mid-summer sun, and on through the evening and into the early hours of the morning. Steve didn’t like horror films, but Caroline and I watched I Spit on Your Grave, Driller Killer, The Evil Dead. Eventually, we watched The Exorcist.
Just holding the case frightened me. It had gravity. It showed the silhouette of a tall man in a Homburg hat. He was staring up at an ominous house, from one window of which beamed down a sinister light. The box seemed to radiate corruption, and when I slotted the cassette home, ferns of evil unfolded in the corners of the room.
The girl’s first use of the demon’s voice–that old, genderless croak spitting horrible obscenities–pinned me to the sofa like a fist.
Caroline thought my terror hilarious. I’d never seen anyone laugh so much, or felt so bewildered by someone’s am
usement. The Exorcist was a scary film, she said, but not that bloody scary.
It was a long time before she felt able to make me a cup of tea or let me smoke a cigarette without first croaking ‘Fuck me, Jesus, fuck me’ in her best Exorcist voice.
Because of that, The Exorcist lost its grip. And gradually it, too, faded away.
31
When we lived in Edinburgh, what other people thought hadn’t seemed important to Mum–not when she bought her clothes from the Spastic’s Shop, or invited the smart young missionaries to eat Sunday lunch at the vermin-ridden flat on Duff Street. It hadn’t been important then, because she believed herself loved. But it was important now.
So, once it had been publicly established that I lived with her and Brian in the funny little magnolia house at 38 The Ridings, Lower Dundry, and not with my father and his wife, it wasn’t necessary that I actually spend much time there.
I didn’t. Brian’s dislike for me permeated even the closed door of my little bedroom, like the stink of toilet bleach. I couldn’t relax. I sat alone in my bedroom and ground my teeth until the muscles cramped in my jaw.
I’d agreed to move in on the condition that I didn’t change schools. But Brislington was a long bus-ride away, so I left early in the morning. (And was still late every day.) I went home after school, but only to change my clothes and be on the next bus back to hang around with my friends. I caught the midnight bus home. It emptied as it went, and I walked alone to The Ridings from the local terminus. It was night-time silent and the streets were patrolled by skinny, skittering dogs and I was scared.