Heartland

by Neil Cross

  When I got home, Mum and Brian were asleep. I let myself in, crept upstairs and went to bed. Days passed and I hardly saw them.

  For a year or two I was close to my stepbrother Wayne. He was big, beefy, excellent at sports, well-liked. He still had the cowlick; it made him look innocent and good, despite his size. His good nature was belied by a local reputation for having a dangerous temper. The reputation meant it was irrelevant if the temper actually existed.

  When I had just turned fifteen, a young man called Gary Ball beat the living shit out of me, head butting me while still wearing a motorcycle helmet, then punching and kicking me up and down Ladman Grove. It was only Wayne’s tearful intercession that gave Gary Ball pause.

  ‘I know you’ve got a temper on you, Wayner,’ said Gary Ball, and walked away, leaving me to bleed in someone’s front garden.

  Wayne suggested that I spend more time at Dad’s house.

  I began to alternate a week at Dad’s with a week at Brian’s. But there was something wrong with me.

  Dad disliked the way I looked: my hair and my clothes. And he disliked the friends I made. They were different from Wayne’s friends. They didn’t play football. Although Wayne didn’t much like them either, he defended my friends on my behalf. But even that did no good.

  Dad never shouted at me. Occasionally, he showed his frustration and disappointment by joking about my clothes or what I’d done at school that day–what had I done at school that day? Had I done anything?

  Margaret tried, too. She bought me clothes that I never wore. She cooked for me and cleaned for me. They tried. They tried much harder than I did. But, by degrees, I stopped staying with them. In the end, and although they never showed it, it must have come as a relief.

  I spent hundreds of teenage evenings in Victory Park, drinking from a plastic gallon-container filled with a mix of sweet and dry scrumpy. I wore my hair dyed black and backcombed. I wore make-up and boots and rips in the knees of my jeans.

  Kids met in Victory Park to sit round and drink. There were always people there. Sometimes twenty of us, sometimes half a dozen. Being drunk in Victory Park was the happiest I had ever been and the friends I made there felt like the best I would ever make. I loved it in winter, when it was so cold you spent half your night pissing into the frosty darkness. And I loved it in summer, when you sat on the creaking swings with the gallon warming in your lap, just talking.

  Sometimes when I was drunk and on the way home, I smashed things: I threw bricks through shop windows, through house windows. If I found an unbroken line of cars, parked down the street, I ran along their roofs. I never fell off. Sometimes I just walked along the street, snapping off wing-mirrors and aerials as I went, tossing them into the gutter.

  One night, I was walking with a boy called Andy Smith. He was tall and blonde. As we walked, Andy Smith happened to nudge the shoulder of a fat, middle-aged man who was on his way home from the pub.

  Andy and I went on down the street. We were laughing at something else, something that someone we knew had said or done. Then we turned, because we heard running footsteps. The fat man was lumbering towards us, because he thought we were laughing at him. He punched Andy in the face. The back of Andy’s head hit the wall and he fell over.

  The fat man ignored me. He was too focused on beating up Andy Smith. I grabbed his punching arm by the elbow.

  I said: ‘Leave it out, mate.’

  He turned to me, because my voice was deep.

  He looked at my hair and my make-up. I was no longer tall for my age, but when he looked at my build, he realized his mistake.

  He said, ‘I thought you were a fucking girl,’ and he kicked me in the balls so hard I landed on the bonnet of a car.

  I was beaten up many times. I was beaten up on the street and in nightclubs and in Victory Park. I was chased by carloads of young men who wanted to hit me with sticks. I was glassed. I was kicked and punched and head-butted. But that was the last time anyone ever got me in the balls.

  If it was too late to go home, or if it was Saturday night, I walked to Caroline’s house and banged on the door. Steve opened the bedroom window, still mostly asleep, and dropped down the keys. Caroline and Steve never turned me away; not even when I turned up filthy with blood or my own shit.

  When I slept at Caroline’s, the dog wandered up to say hello. She nudged my palm with her cold nose and I told her she was a good girl, even when I was very drunk and very tired and just wanted to sleep. The dog and I always took care to acknowledge the fine friends we once had been, walking on the snowy bing. Then she wandered downstairs again, to sleep in her corner.

  Eventually, Steve took her to the vet to be killed. Her back had been bad for many months. In the end, she couldn’t walk. It was all the beatings she took as a puppy.

  Caroline cried when she told me about it. She said that Steve hugged the dog while the vet administered the injection; that he cuddled her and told her she was good, and at the end she had not been afraid.

  She said, ‘Good old Tarbar. She was a lovely dog, really.’ Tarbar is what Caroline had called her. It was a good name, a name with love in it.

  Often, I slept at a friend’s house. A night here, a night there. It was surprising, how long I could go, without going home.

  When I was fifteen, a boy I knew very slightly was killed in a motorcycle accident. He was racing along Stockwood road when somebody opened a van door. He went straight into it.

  It was a dramatic day at school. Everybody who had exchanged two words with the dead boy were transported by their lamentations.

  After a sombre evening in Victory Park, I passed the house of a boy called Brian Jones. He noticed me walking by. I was looking up at his window because I knew he lived there. He tapped on the window and invited me inside.

  I sat in his bedroom and we talked about the boy; not because we knew him well, because we didn’t, but because it was possible for him to be dead. We related his death to ourselves. It seemed profound.

  Brian Jones’s mother knew what had happened and she made us long glasses of vodka and orange. She was a kind woman, hard-faced, with old tattoos on her forearms, gone blue. Although I was already drunk, I had three glasses. Then I lit a cigarette. I puffed on it until it was good and hot, then I rolled up my sleeve and pushed the coal slowly into my upper arm.

  Brian Jones watched with drunken concentration.

  I took the cigarette away. Curls of smoke came from the skin.

  Brian Jones said, ‘Fucking hell, mate.’

  I didn’t reply. I was too studious. I lit another cigarette, puffed until it was hot, and stubbed that out on my arm as well.

  ‘I think you’d better stop now,’ said Brian Jones.

  But I did it a third time, more slowly still. I moved the coal in little circles, to make the burn bigger.

  I don’t know how I got back to The Ridings that night. I know I stood in my stepfather’s little front garden and pissed on the spindly thing that grew in the middle of it. And when I woke up, my arm was gummed to the white sheet. Mum came into my room, to get something from the airing cupboard. She noticed the burns. They were weeping, full of yellow pus that had dried like egg yolk to the bedding.

  She nodded at the burns. ‘And who did that to you?’

  I said, ‘I did.’

  ‘I’m not having that rubbish,’ she said. ‘Somebody’s done this to you.’

  She gave me a look. Then she got some towels from the airing cupboard and walked out in disgust. The towels smelled summer-fresh.

  In June 1984, Mum and Brian married at Bristol Register Office. Mum wept during the vows. She couldn’t sign the register because she kept crying.

  After the wedding, she put her leg on the spoiler of a car and raised her skirt to show a garter, and she wore the rictal smile she’d worn, the day she sat alone in the cold sea and splashed and said it was lovely, that we should all get in.

  On Saturday nights, they went out dancing. Brian, who thought it repulsive
that I wore eye-liner, carefully dabbed foundation on the purple discoloration on his left cheek, blending it in with circular movement of his fingertips. Then he splashed with Aramis. You could smell him coming downstairs. The smell of too much aftershave made me think of a toilet that someone has just shit in, then tried to deodorize.

  They’d been married for a couple of months when Caroline came round with a letter from Derek Cross. You could tell, just by looking at the handwriting; his ostentatious loops and curls. Derek was proud of his penmanship.

  He’d addressed the letter to Caroline’s house because he didn’t know where Mum and I lived. Caroline sat on the sofa with her handbag on her lap and Mum sat in the chair and opened the letter. She was very composed. She smoothed down her skirt a couple of times, and coughed into her fist before she began to read it. But that was all.

  In the letter, Derek asked us to come back. He said he was sorry. He said he couldn’t live without us. I believed that he meant every word, that he’d wept as he’d written it. He had failed and was lonely and naturally blaming someone else: this time it was us, for not being there. Our coming back would make it all better.

  Had I said I was willing, Mum would have packed her bags and gone to him that afternoon. But I said, ‘That wanker,’ and Mum set her mouth and tore the letter to confetti.

  Long before, Brian had made her destroy her photographs. We had no pictures of Derek, no images. I wouldn’t have trusted them anyway. He’d have become transparent, like the snapshot of a ghost, a double exposure. That torn begging letter was almost the last of him. Derek Cross, in shreds.

  But not quite the last. Now and again, I heard something, caught a glimpse of his after-image. Before the end of the 1980s, he married at least twice more; neither time to the woman for whom he left us. He even tried going back to church, the Edinburgh branch. But he didn’t stay for long. He turned up, humbled and diminished, and soon dwindled away.

  Gradually, Mum fell out of contact with her remaining friends in Scotland, with all those loyal Mormons who remembered her as Sister Cross, and who were not acquainted with a different woman whose name was Mrs Stone of 38 The Ridings, Lower Dundry, Bristol.

  When a member stopped attending church, the Mormons called it going inactive. And that’s what happened to Derek Cross, in the end. He went inactive. He tied himself in a knot and vanished inside it, just like the American farmer with whose disappearance he had once, a very long time ago, so terrified me.

  There’s no point wondering what became of him. He preened himself in the mirror and saw nothing looking back. If he’s alive, he’s still doing it. But he probably isn’t alive. He probably never was.

  In 1985, just before my sixteenth birthday, I was finally arrested for vandalism. There was blood on my knuckles and on my hands and down my arms and on my clothes. I’d left a long spoor of smashed windows and vandalized cars. The police had followed it until they found me. They shoved me around and handcuffed me, and I spent that night in a cell.

  I was given another caution. Another sergeant shouted at me. Told me I was on the wrong path. And I had to discuss my feelings with a psychologist. But I didn’t have any feelings, except when I cut myself on the arms or burned myself. And I wasn’t going to speak to a psychologist about that.

  When she learned of my arrest, Mum wept with shame and panic.

  She said, ‘There’s no excuse. No excuse.’

  And, ‘What will people think?’

  I thought it was funny, her saying that. But she didn’t think it was funny. She was ashamed to be seen with me, just walking down the street, because of my clothes and my hair and my make-up.

  One Saturday afternoon, I saw her in the town centre. She met my eyes and made a jerky, panicked movement with her hands. She flashed me a warning expression that said that I was not to acknowledge her. She didn’t want people to think she knew me.

  She hoiked her handbag on her shoulder and walked on by, a bit more quickly. I remembered how I had pictured her, when I was little, the day she left us. I had imagined her, clutching her bag exactly like that, clutching her bag and running and running and running.

  Later that spring, somebody set fire to the headmaster’s office. It wasn’t me, but I was questioned about it by the police and by the school. And not long after that, I was expelled on a pretext.

  After everything they’d punished me for over the years, the pretext was a haircut. Ian Hand had given me a mohican by shaving the sides of my head in his back yard. We were listening to Joy Division through his bedroom window.

  I spent the summer letting school go out of me like a long exhalation. It was good to be gone before it ended. Already, friends were drifting away. You could sense them, pausing, the way you do before diving into a pool, then stepping on, into other lives: to jobs and cars. My stepbrother, Wayne followed my dad into the Post Office, and Dad was proud.

  I moved from friend’s house to friend’s house, and spent much of my time at Caroline’s. Playing with a candle, I set light to the sofa and nearly burnt the place down. But even that Caroline forgave.

  I was walking down Sturminster Road, on my way to Brislington. The sun was low in the sky and blinding. The hot concrete smelled good; it smelled like being young.

  Dad’s car pulled up in front of me and stopped at the kerb. The same Lada. He leaned over to open the passenger door.

  ‘Hop in.’

  I got in and said hello. I put on my seatbelt.

  He said, ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Briz.’

  He pulled away from the kerb. He was looking at the road.

  He said, ‘Look at the state of you.’

  On top, my hair was still long and backcombed and dyed black, but at the back and sides it had been shaved: the mohican had been a bit lopsided. I wore boots and ripped jeans and a leather jacket and eye-liner. But I didn’t think he was talking about my clothes or my hair.

  We drove to Brislington. It was a short drive and the evening traffic was light. Dad stopped the car outside the White Hart, just opposite the Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was close to Victory Park.

  He leaned over to open the passenger door.

  I took off my seatbelt.

  He said, ‘I’m glad you changed your name. I don’t want you to have my name. You’re not my son.’

  I looked at him. He was trying not to cry. I had the metal end of the seatbelt in my hand.

  I said ‘Okay’ and went to go. I opened the door.

  He said, ‘Wait.’

  He dug into his back pocket and took out his wallet. In his fist, he crunched up a five-pound note. He passed it into my hand as if it were a secret.

  He said, ‘Keep hold of this. Wherever you go, you should always have a fiver in your pocket. In case you should ever need it.’

  I said, ‘Cheers, Dad.’

  After what he’d said, I hesitated to call him that. But there was nothing else to call him. To me, Dad was the only name he ever had.

  I got out of the car.

  He said, ‘You look after yourself, mind.’

  And I said, ‘Okay.’

  And that was that.

  I closed the door and he drove away. I stood there, shrinking in his rear-view mirror.

  Sometimes I slept in the park. It was an adventure, but even in summer it grew very cold at night. I always woke up feeling ill; the cold had oozed from the ground and into my bones. I was sick with cider and cigarettes. Sometimes I puked and shat in the bushes.

  My friends and I had never spent much time in local pubs; the way some of us looked made us unwelcome. But, late in the summer, we discovered that a new nightclub had opened in Bristol town centre. It was called the Whip. It was held in the anteroom of a larger nightclub, the Studio; years before, it had been called the Locarno.

  The people who went to the Whip seemed unutterably elegant: skinny boys and girls with long, backcombed hair, dyed black or bleached white. There were meaty psychobillies with sleeveless T-shirts and enormous
, lurid quiffs. It looked like a better place to be. Much better than sitting on a park bench, drinking cider.

  The Whip was held every Friday night. The DJ played songs I already loved and songs I came to love: a song called ‘In Shreds’, a song called ‘Heartland’. The dance floor was violent and amicable. The girls wore basques and painted nails. I never wanted to leave.

  I began to stay with people I met there–at their bed-sitters and their squats and their squalid, shared houses. I stayed all over Bristol, and believed myself cosmopolitan. In the morning, I woke up, lit a cigarette, put on a record, made coffee; instant, black. I much preferred a cup of tea, but coffee seemed more suitable. The bed-sitters and squats smelled of patchouli and incense and garlic. There were posters on the wall, records on the floor.

  But, wherever I slept, I still sometimes returned to Brian’s house. I was sixteen. It was supposed to be where I lived. The last time I went to Lower Dundry, it was a Wednesday. Mum was at my grandmother’s. She went there three days a week, to cook and clean and to walk Tiny, the Yorkshire terrier. She was a good and attentive daughter.

  I let myself in and went upstairs to my bedroom. I lay down. I was tired, needing a bath. I put on an album. I played it on the music centre: it was four years old by then, and sometimes it played records at the wrong speed. But it was okay. I played an album called Pornography. It was by The Cure. I was obsessed by The Cure. I lay on the bed and listened to the record.

  Brian came upstairs and to my bedroom door. He was wearing blue jeans and a white vest, tucked in nice and tight. His shoulders and arms were snarly, hairy, auburn, grey. The hair on his head was neatly parted. He had hair like a Tory MP. His bifocals ran low on his nose; he was sweating because he’d been doing something in the little patio garden. He’d heard me playing The Cure.

  He stood in the doorway. He had a little trowel in his hand. He said, ‘Turn that rubbish down.’

  I sat up. I turned it down.

  He said, ‘You should be out looking for a bloody job. Paying your own way.’