Lucien broke in the end. I remember standing on the doorstep one day, peeping at him over the privet hedge as he walked away from our house, eyes down, shoulders hunched, head jutting forward like a tortoise. He looked like he’d been under a car crusher. Mum appeared and stood next to me. Even she was shocked. She said it wasn’t until she saw him from a distance that she realised what a bad mental state he was in. Said he looked like a schizophrenic. He wasn’t a schizophrenic, he was depressed. You can tell a depressed man from his walk. It’s not necessarily a slow walk – they can beetle along, off to work or the pub – but the tension in the shoulders, the curve of the spine, feet not lifting far off the floor, even a deliberate, superhuman effort to stand up straight and swagger is a dead giveaway. Walks have always been important to men: the puffed-out chest and confident stride of a businessman, the bully’s swagger, or the limp and dip of gangstas and dudes. They’re all attempts to signal that this man is in charge, in control, not to be messed with, that he is fit and able to fight. A warning to other men that they’d better not risk attacking him. This guy is not ready to be culled. A man’s walk is a primeval warning system, a survival mechanism. And when the walk has gone, the man has gone.
37 I was losing a lot of blood from my thumb. I couldn’t let it go on any longer, I had to retreat. Flailing through my memory bank, trying to think of what to do, how to stop the pain, I was so desperate that I pleaded with my brain to help me and, in response, my mind just opened up. Everything I’d ever learned was revealed to me at the same time, as if a spiv had swung open his coat and exposed hundreds of rings and watches sewn into the lining. I swept across this jumbled landscape searching for a little gem of wisdom to get me out of my predicament. I was sure I possessed a useful piece of information somewhere. I sorted and groped, shifting my focus about inside my skull. Nothing. Where is it? Go down further. Come on, come on. I was panicking. All the blood, it felt like time was running out. Just when I was about to give up hope I hooked onto a scrappy little fact and began hauling it up to the surface, dredging what I hoped was a pearl from the deep. The information seemed to take forever to arrive in my conscious mind. I remember thinking, Here it comes, here it comes, before I even knew what it was. The answer busted into my head with such force I nearly blacked out.
‘To get a pit bull to unclamp its jaws, insert two fingers into its nostrils and pull upwards.’
Conkers
After two years of unbearable tension, Mum, Pascale and I went to visit our Aunty Phyllis in the country for a week to have a break. The summer before this, Haringey council had paid for me and Pascale to go away for a week because we were in such a state of agitation. Pascale went to a children’s convalescent home in Bournemouth. I was to be sent somewhere else but refused to go at the last minute and stayed at home.
Lucien 08.04.67 – Kath has taken the children away without asking me or telling me where she is going with them or when they will return. The only way I knew was a note from Viviane saying they will probably be back next Monday.
26.05.67 – In order to maintain my sanity and protect myself I have only one alternative and that is to leave my home, pushed out by Kath, Pascale and to a lesser extent, Viviane. I realise I count for nothing in the children’s eyes, let alone Kath’s. I have to face the fact I have no family left. I went to my room and started packing as if driven by some force and will other than my own. My last feeling being helplessness.
28.05.67 – Today I left. The removal was carried out by a young chap and his private van who I contacted Saturday evening. The time of leaving was around 11.25 p.m. at night and I felt incapable of describing how I felt.
This was the last entry in Lucien’s diary. Well, I did it, I was brave and opened the bag. Good for me.
Mum didn’t keep the house after the divorce as Lucien suspected she would. She couldn’t possibly afford it. We moved to the council house by the gasworks and she got on with bringing us up. Lucien moved to Dagenham, bought a flat and a car, and grew his hair into a Beatle-do.
Pascale and I were interviewed during the court case, not in the main courtroom but in a little antechamber out the back. The judge took his wig off to ‘look less frightening’, he said. We stood before him dressed in our maroon school uniforms and new white socks. Mum had polished our shoes until they were as shiny as conkers. I did the speaking as I was the eldest. I said that we wanted to live with our mother; we hated and feared our father and refused to live with him.
And that was the end of it.
Lucien started his adult life in England as a handsome, arrogant young Frenchman, but he was a foreigner in a country that was wary of foreigners. He was also narrow-minded and a slow thinker; he wasn’t able to adapt to the changing times. Eventually he was kicked out of the way and the world moved on. He wasn’t culled as swiftly as Mr Shilling, but he was thoroughly crushed by the end of his life and only just managed to limp to the finish line. I didn’t see my father again for seventeen years, and when I did, he still had that Beatle hairdo.
Drowning
You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.
Attributed to Flannery O’Connor
I’m frightened. I feel like I’m falling. Falling and failing. I feel sick. My mother, whom I’ve idolised and respected and thought loved me unconditionally, was – is it overdoing it to say this? – cruel. How can I overcome my upbringing? How can I be a good person, or a good mother, after that upbringing? How can I love or be loved? Could Mum love? Maybe my ‘mad, stupid, ugly’ father was the only person who’s ever loved me after all.
I wandered around Hackney for weeks in a sick fog, feeling as if I might vomit at any moment. I’d always wondered if Mum knew that Lucien was going to leave home while we were on that holiday with Aunty Phyllis; whether she and Lucien had cooked it up between them and that’s why we were taken away. At last I knew the truth, if it’s even worth knowing. Mum must have been as surprised as Pascale and I were when we arrived home to find the house had been emptied of our father’s possessions and quite a few other things, like pictures and ornaments, and he was gone.
The two biggest shocks from my father’s diary were that Mum wasn’t the heroine she always made herself out to be, and she didn’t seem to like me very much. I only became the favourite through circumstance, because I was all she had left, not because I was a lovely person and a good daughter. Is that why I thought up The Favourite Theory after she died? Did my unconscious remember things that I didn’t?
38 As soon as the pit-bull solution surfaced in my brain I shoved a finger into each of Pascale’s nostrils and burrowed into her nasal cavities. She was foolish to let me do that. She must have wanted to hurt me very badly not to pull away. As soon as my fingers were in as far as they’d go, I curled them into hooks – they were strong from guitar playing – and yanked upwards. I intended to tear her nose off her face, that’s what I envisioned. Her jaws sprang open and I was released. I leapt away from the bed, half crying, half shouting, ‘We hate each other! We hate each other!’ Mum lay perfectly still with her eyes closed. Mia pressed her back against the door, trying to disappear. The walls, the sheets, my shirt looked like abstract paintings, as if Joan Mitchell* had smeared and daubed them with a giant, red-soaked paintbrush.
But worse than all of that, I’d failed.
Radio On
while from my mother’s
Room the radio purls: it plays all night she
leaves it on to hear
The midnight news then sleeps and dozes
until day which now it is …
James Schuyler, ‘The Morning of the Poem’, 1980†
Whenever I wanted to talk about our family’s past or asked Mum, ‘What year did Lucien leave home?’ or ‘When did we move from Woodland Gardens to Woodberry Crescent?’ she would become hostile. ‘What do you want to know that for?’ she’d say. Or, ‘I don’t know! How am I supposed to remember all that time ago? I suppose whatever’s gone wrong in your li
fe is all my fault now.’ Two years before she died she bought a shredding machine, pulled all her papers out of the drawers and cupboards and shredded them. Mum had more paperwork than furniture. She owned a few bits and pieces that she’d bought along the way. The old lady next door left her a table and four chairs, and her armchair was given to her by Aunty Phil. The TV was Mum’s most expensive possession and the radio her most used. She was from the generation that called the radio ‘the wireless’ and she listened to it every day. The radio was so much a part of my environment when I was a child that I hardly noticed it. I can just about conjure up the brown cloth with red and green threads running through it that covered the speaker and the polished dark-brown veneer casing. Big it was. As she aged, Mum began to loathe the ‘entitled male voices’ on the BBC and tuned in to LBC Talk Radio instead (‘the first sign of senility’, said my friend Maura, who’s found herself doing the same recently). For decades Mum slept with the radio right beside her head all night. I couldn’t imagine what she was drowning out. What does an elderly, retired woman with nothing to do all day have to worry about? I thought for years. Why doesn’t she want to hear her thoughts?
When I moved to Hastings and started making ceramics, building things out of clay whilst my marriage was disintegrating, Mum gave me a shiny black Roberts radio to keep me company. It was the perfect present for those lonely times.
Vida was seven years old when we left London to live by the sea. Our departure was such a terrible shock and wrench for her that she had some kind of nervous collapse and developed shingles. Two months later, I showed her round the studio I was renting in the middle of Hastings, two rooms at the top of a tall white Regency building that used to be an art gallery. The day she visited, sunshine streamed in through the full-length windows, seagulls squawked and dived outside and the old oak floorboards glistened like dark honey. Mum wandered around the room admiring the white plaster cornicing, the ceiling rose and the black wrought-iron balcony (not safe to step onto) and surprised me by saying, ‘I’m so jealous. I’d have loved this, to come here every day and work.’ This bright, high-ceilinged room appealed to her, tugged at something lying dormant within. Something she didn’t know she wanted until she saw it. The expression on her face was numinous, as if she’d stepped into a church and was overcome with a vision of a higher calling. Much as she supported and admired me when I was in a band, making records, playing gigs, touring, or going to film school and directing, those lives didn’t tweak at her the way this studio did. This was a world, a room, that had she been born into a different time, she would have loved to have spent her days in.
* Joan Mitchell (1925–92), abstract impressionist
† I was led to the poems of James Schuyler by Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, 2016
39 All that effort, all the grappling and grabbing, tearing and bleeding, was for nothing. Pascale was still on the bed. I couldn’t think of what else to do. I was racking my brains for a plan when Mia came into focus, walking towards me, unsmiling. I thought, She’s going to chuck me out of the room. I wasn’t going to go quietly. I remembered being told that a person’s hearing is the last sense to go when they’re dying, so I quickly leaned down, put my mouth right up close to Mum’s ear and said in a loud clear voice, ‘Mum, Pascale’s being a bitch.’ It was my last chance to wound Pascale before I was ejected, to ruin Mum’s death for her like she’d ruined it for me. I wanted to show her that I could overstep the mark and ignore Mum’s feelings in order to hurt my sister too. Mia rushed at me and corralled me into a corner. I let her do it, no way I was going to fight her. Once she had me trapped, she began hopping from foot to foot with her arms outstretched, like a schoolgirl defending goal in a netball match, making sure I stayed put. But on one of her hops she jumped too far to the left and a little gap opened up. I darted through the space and wiped my bloody, spurting thumb down the front of Pascale’s new blue-and-white-striped T-shirt. Marked her. It was her best top, she wore it for my book launch. I was wearing my best shirt too. Both ruined.
The Green Bag
Even though she had lived there for over thirty years I couldn’t feel Mum’s presence anywhere when I packed up her flat after she died. Not until I stood at her bedroom window, pressed my face against the worn yellow satin curtains tied up with mismatching ribbons and looked out at the London plane tree with its mottled grey and brown trunk and flat three-fingered leaves did I feel something. Mum fought with the council every year to make sure the tree wasn’t pollarded too viciously. She recognised the pigeons that nested there and told Vida stories about them. That’s where she stood to wave me goodbye every time I left her flat, even when I told her not to. ‘Let me do it,’ she’d say. ‘I like to.’ I’d stop at the gate and glance up at her third-floor window to catch a glimpse of her thin, drawn face peering down through the trembling leaves, hand fluttering. It was as if every time I left her she thought she’d never see me again. That’s when I cried, standing at the window in her bedroom, really sobbed. Then I got on with emptying the flat. It wasn’t quite as chaotic as Lucien’s, but there was nearly a hundred years of past to plough through.
All Mum’s trinkets: a tiny wooden hedgehog, two miniature glass cats, a spotty dog from the 1930s, a Victorian marcasite brooch and a Bible she won in a school spelling competition, things like that, I put into the ‘To Keep’ box.
Rummaging through her chest of drawers, I discovered she’d kept all the drawings and little notes I used to leave on the kitchen table for her when we lived together during one of my many homeless periods. She also kept the letters we wrote to each other when I was staying at the Iroquois and Gramercy Park Hotels in New York (both dives back then) while on tour with the Slits in the seventies. I was excited to be in America for the first time but even though I was twenty-two and surrounded by the band and roadies and people were always coming up and wanting to speak to me after shows, I was lonely. I missed Mum. I sent her my itinerary so she could write ahead. I looked forward to being handed a letter full of everyday chat when I arrived in a new city, illustrated with stick-figure drawings of Mum rushing off to work or carrying her shopping home.
Sorting through her paltry possessions and stacking up the furniture – ready for a house-clearance crook to take away in a van and charge me a fortune for – I came across her stash of damask napkins and had another little cry. I bet every old lady has a bit of damask tucked away in a drawer. My mother’s damask wasn’t inherited, she bought it from charity shops. Couldn’t pass up a piece of clean, thick, pressed damask – what woman of that age could? I kept the four heavy, ironed and folded silk squares and the tablecloth. There was something so old-fashioned about the fabric and Mum’s respect for handcrafted work. I remember how excited she was when she bought them, turning the pieces over in her knobbly hands and marvelling that they were ‘As good as new, and such quality, and with hand-sewn edges too.’
Nestled between the layers of damask I found a red, heart-shaped leather purse. Inside was a photograph of David, Mum’s child by her previous marriage. A soft-focus, black-and-white picture of a two-year-old boy smiled out of the circular frame inset with tiny pearls.
I sat back on my heels. I wasn’t shocked; I knew about David’s existence, and had met him a few times when I was young, but no more than that. My first thought was, It’s a plant. Mum put the picture in the heart-shaped purse on purpose and left it in her drawer to be found by me and given to David (even though she never saw him and I didn’t know now if he was dead or alive) to atone for the life they didn’t have together. ‘I don’t feel like I have three children. When people ask I always say I have two,’ she said to me once. Why then did she keep David’s photo in a little heart-shaped purse tucked up in the damask all these years? I tried to track David down to give him the picture – it was obviously what Mum wanted – but I couldn’t find any trace of him.
I put the purse and the photograph in the ‘To Keep’ box and continued clearing the flat, wondering, as I emptied dr
awers and wrapped cracked vases and mismatched china in sheets of newspaper, why I had such a suspicious nature. But after years of dealing with her secretiveness I knew that what Mum said didn’t necessarily tally with what she did. My outspoken and forthright mother wasn’t as honest as she appeared.
Late on the second afternoon, still working through the clutter in Mum’s bedroom, I climbed onto a chair and peered over the top of her wardrobe. Sitting up there all on its own was a small shamrock-green Aer Lingus zip-up flight bag, hand-luggage size, with cracked white piping running along the seams. It looked like it was from the 1960s. This was a poverty-stricken person’s bag, bought for pennies from a charity shop or found on the street. Mum had loads of suitcases and bags stuffed with woollen blankets, straw hats, pegs and photographs in her flat. She even had two smart, fireproof aluminium cases for important documents like her bank details, will and passport. But no case or bag she owned was as downtrodden and pitiful-looking as this droopy green receptacle. I grasped the yellowing, fake-ivory plastic handle – it looked like it was moulded from melted-down old people’s teeth – and pulled the case towards me. A cloud of dust mushroomed into my face, settling on my hair and eyelashes. Shabby as the bag was, it somehow didn’t look insignificant. As I lifted it down I noticed that scrawled across the front in thick, white Tippex letters was the instruction:
‘To Throw Away – UNOPENED.’
Mum wasn’t daft, she knew Pascale and me: that we’re disobedient, inquisitive and never do what we’re told. (I’ve asked lots of people if they would have opened a parent’s bag if this was written on the front, and they’ve all said yes.) Mum left that bag to be found. She’d have shredded the contents with all her other paperwork if she didn’t want us to see them. The little green case, like the little red purse, was a plant. Well, if they read it, it’s their own fault. I left instructions for it to be thrown away. I sat cross-legged on the brown carpet. Another dead parent, another empty flat, another dodgy bag.
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