My grades didn’t improve, either. By the time of my mock GCSE exams, I was barely scraping by. In English, my marked paper had lots of question marks on it, with the comment, try to be clear about what you’re saying. In Double Science, my papers were a mix of ticks and crosses. Use the approved wording, and, it’s not enough to know the answer: show your working. Music was fine in theory, but there was no way to backdate keyboard practice, and my performances brought my average down. Karl put paid to my chances of success in other subjects.
Mum wanted me to get into college, and go to university. Dad thought it best that I ‘start earning’ since, by the time I had paid off university debt, I would be a ‘middle-aged loner still living with his mum’. Max helpfully suggested that the latter would happen in either case. As it turned out, I got an A, two Bs, a C, five Ds and an F, meaning that I didn’t qualify for college, so, if only by default, I took my dad’s advice and joined the working world.
There was an advert in the Salisbury Plain Dealer for milkmen: ‘cheerful, reliable, early to bed and early (3am) to rise’. Thankfully qualifications weren’t mentioned at all in my interview with Mickey, the operations manager, who looked like an oversized, milk-fed baby. While I was too young to drive, I would work in the depot, stacking bottles on each of the floats to match the orders that had been requested on the system, and then after a year I could get my licence and drive my own float.8
I would come home from work about the same time the rest of my family got up. As I was to learn, I had entered a dying trade. You see, milk lasts much longer than it used to, so people can buy lots at the supermarket and keep it all week and half of the next. And then there’s long-life – don’t get me started on long-life.
But it was a good job while it lasted and did, at least, avoid the doldrums of a nine to five. I would get up while everyone was sleeping and walk to the depot, past drunks trading poorly aimed haymakers over their stilettoed princesses, the peal of war cries rising even as sirens burst through the stale air.9 I would arrive at the depot crunching over broken glass, sober as a drudge and dressed in my white coat. I’d take my float and drive my figure of eight round the neighbourhood, picking up empties and delivering bottles of creamy white cow-juice, capped with red foil. The silence was impeccable at around six. The sun would rise pink or orange like a furnace. Sometimes there were squirrels, or foxes, or woodpeckers.
I felt a certain smugness that I had seen so much of a day before the other residents had even mastered consciousness. I’m not one of these people who snaps awake at six every morning, while others dream of stretching out the morning as they fumble for the snooze. I am by nature a late riser, a lover of sleep. For me, the only thing worse than having to wake up would be not waking up. I have known what it is to doze like a cat through a summer’s day and out the other side, woken only by my mother for the family dinner. And so, to wake so early, to have out-flanked even the early risers, was satisfaction enough. There were small pleasures, too, and each day I might find a little joy in the way an empty bottle trapped the first pink light of dawn, or the symphony of willows in wind.
I continued on in that job for some years, only realising I’d come out the other side of adolescence when I discovered, one evening, that I couldn’t lie down properly in the bath. Suddenly, arbitrarily, it had been decided that I was now a Responsible Adult. At twenty-one, I couldn’t just buy alcohol; I could sell it. I could adopt a child, and then drive it around in an HGV, such was the trust conferred on me by society.
As I towelled myself, dressed, went to the kitchen and hugged my mum, I saw that we were Russian dolls10 that didn’t fit any more. I was no longer a solid little offspring, but a big, hollow shell of my own.
The four of us sat at our kitchen table for dinner, munching while my mother soliloquised on her latest obsession (… Thomas Hardy, Norse mythology, Buddhism …), or tried to teach us new words. My parents had a tacit pact whereby Dad was allowed to stuff food into his mouth for precisely as long as her lesson lasted, at which point Mum would stand abruptly and sweep the plate out from under his fork. Over the years, this had turned Dad into an incredibly efficient eater.
As luck would have it, the subject of today’s homily was Employment. We were having lasagne, Dad’s favourite. He removed the top layer of pasta, scraped all the remaining béchamel away, grimaced, and shovelled a forkful of mince into his mouth. He really loved Mum’s lasagne.
‘Do you want a glass of wine?’ asked Mum, hovering.
‘God no,’ said Dad, smothering his mince in Worcestershire sauce. ‘Can’t drink on a weekday. I’ll never get up.’
‘Oh, come on, live a little. You’re retiring, you should enjoy yourself.’
‘It’s bloody boring. I want to be out there making a bit of money.’
There’s more to life than making money, signed Mum to everyone as she sat down. Why don’t you sign up for a course? she asked Dad. Learn something? We should all keep learning, throughout life.
People don’t take courses any more, I signed. If you need to know something, you can just google it.
But learning opens doors, she signed back. If you had more qualifications you might be able to get a different job.
What’s wrong with my job? I asked.
Nothing’s wrong with it, she signed, but it gives you options. Learning makes your world bigger. There are two ways to change the world. Go out there and make it better, or change the way you think about it. Knowledge gives you the option to do both.
You can talk, I signed. Even I’ve got more qualifications than you.
Mum looked wounded. Max pushed mince around his plate, looking down, which was like putting his hands over his ears.
‘We can all imagine a better life for ourselves,’ Mum said judiciously, her voice wavering ever so slightly. ‘And you’re capable of so much more.’
I flushed with shame and pride. No one other than my mother had ever really believed that I was capable of anything. I secretly nursed the idea that I might be an undiscovered genius, and sometimes googled ‘Einstein’s school report’11 to cheer myself up, but I got on better with ideas than I did with people, and it is rarely left up to ideas to decide whether you’re a serial underachiever.
‘Don’t go giving the boy ideas, Mathilda,’ said Dad. ‘He’s hardly a bloody rocket scientist, is he?’
‘Very supportive, Arthur, thank you.’ She turned to me as Max looked up. ‘Günter, you can do anything you set your mind to.’
Yeah, signed Max, You’re a regular superhero. Charmless, half-blind and fat.
Clark Kent has glasses, I signed.
They’re a cover. He can see through walls, you dick.
I walked into that one.
When someone you love dies, the first thing you have to think about is paperwork. You may have recently concluded that all human endeavour is no more than a way to keep our hands busy until we, too, die, our life destined to wink only briefly in a cold and unobservant universe. But the first thing you are asked to do is to ignore all that, and to help out with some good old-fashioned box ticking (‘Mathilda. With an H. Glass. 2 February 1955. Salisbury. I’m her son. About ten days. Yes, I was there with her.’)
Max’s new employers said that, since he was new, he was only allowed to take a day off for the funeral as annual leave, so he couldn’t help much with the arrangements. Everything happened in a kind of sleepwalk, fumbling along and saying the same things you would say if she was dead: yes, it’s a terrible loss; hydrangeas were her favourite, but we might ask people to donate money to a charity. Dad sleepwalked more than me. Overnight, he became a wandering, forgetful shade. He didn’t know when he had last eaten, or what day of the week it was.
During this time, others also referred casually to ‘what she would have wanted’, as if she had granted her approval over our every decision in advance. But Mum was full of surprises. I think she might have been amused by the idea that anyone in the family, least of all my father, had any in
kling of her preferences. I suspect the whisky fire alarm was a typical misfire, and that Mum was so bewildered to receive it that Dad refused to own up to such an obviously poor pairing of wife and gift. I’m not saying we didn’t love her and sometimes also pleasantly surprise her, but after witnessing Mum’s brave face for twenty-two consecutive Christmases, all I know is she didn’t like bath salts.
I wandered the streets around Salisbury a lot around this time.12 I would often go and stare at the cathedral and think about how long it had been there. I would think about why people liked to see an old building, and whether all anyone really wanted was to weave themselves into the story of the world. Salisbury Cathedral:13 now that was a big part of the story. People could try and be important for a day, like celebrities or politicians, or they could try and ingratiate themselves with the story by spending time with things that lasted, like vicars or academics. It was a question of how to find your place in the ecosystem.
One day, on my way back from the cathedral, I wandered past a primary school. I stopped by the tessellated diamonds of the fence to watch them play. The children were effortlessly happy, albeit in a volatile, slightly primal way. They were playing near a drain, which was overflowing with scummy water. To an adult, this was distasteful, but to a child it was Lucerne by moonlight, it was anything and everything. A boy ran up in his scuffed Velcro-fastened shoes and booted the water as if it were a football. It sprayed a nearby group of girls who squealed and shivered with mingled terror and delight, and the fattest girl – the enforcer – ran after the boy. Screams sailed into the air as they sprinted off towards the other end of the playground.
My thoughts were interrupted by a call from my boss, Mickey.
‘Günter, you have to come back to the depot.’
‘But I’ve delivered all the milk.’
‘I know.’
‘Have I left something behind?’
I heard the boss sigh.
‘Let’s say yeah. Would you be so good as to waddle down?’
‘I’ll be there in half an hour.’
I walked back to the depot, and found Mickey behind the same car-boot-sale desk he was always at. He leant back on two legs of the chair with his hands on his round, taut belly, the cold halogen strip lighting gleaming off his bald pate.
‘So what did I leave behind, Mickey?’
He leant forwards and his chair hit the floor as he picked up a plain white envelope.
‘This.’
It was a cheque.
‘I’m sorry, Günter. You’re a good lad but this is an old man’s game. We’re gonna have to let you go.’
‘You’re firing me?’
‘Redundancy, yeah. People don’t want their milk delivered in this day and age; they want to order it off their phones and have it delivered to their work address, they want long-life that lasts a year because they’re never home—’
‘Please, Mickey. You don’t have to explain.’ I shook my head bitterly. ‘I’ve seen the rows of UHT in the supermarkets, they’re taking over. I understand. But this is a very large cheque. Are you quite sure I qualify for this kind of severance pay?’
‘Are you fucking crazy?’ he asked me.
I thought for a moment.
‘No.’
‘Then keep the cheque. I’m not gonna tell anyone.’
‘Does that mean I’m not supposed to have it?’
He rolled his eyes.
‘Just do us a favour and leave, okay?’
On my way out, I took a bottle with me and peeled back the cap, sitting on a wall by the loading bay. I drank it dry and watched the sunlight play through the misty white glass. I wondered how the bottles looked when they were clean. Probably beautiful in the thankless way of everyday things.14
The next day I went to a recruitment centre in town. Everything was blue or grey, and after I filled out a clipboard’s worth of information, they took me through to a little room with a sofa made out of two seating blocks pushed together, and a little plastic plant. I sat down with a recruitment lady and we talked over my skills – attention to detail, honesty and integrity, neatness, good with hands. She asked me if I’d ever considered a career in recruitment.
‘No, I hadn’t. Isn’t that what you do?’
‘Yes. A role has just come up. Not mine.’ She tittered.
‘So, if I did it, I would be recruiting people for jobs?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And if I were in your shoes, would I be offering people jobs in recruitment?’
She looked less certain about this.
‘I suppose I’m asking a two-part question,’ I said. ‘Is it a pyramid scheme, and if so, what will we do when everyone works in recruitment?’
‘I can’t really say. Shall I put you down as “quite interested” for that one?’
I said that that would be fine, and left.
5
Church Attendance
On the day of the funeral, Dad, Max, and I stood in the lounge not talking. I was so nervous I felt cold. Relatives and ex-colleagues started to trickle in, some wearing hats. When there were enough of us, we followed the funeral director, Ivan, who, despite his hunch, looked almost inhumanly tall in his hat, as various relatives put magnetic flags on the roofs of their cars. Dad, Max and I got in the hearse, which followed Ivan at walking pace to the end of the road, trailed by the other cars in a giant parti-coloured snake. Ivan got in and we proceeded through Salisbury, slowing traffic. White-van men let us out at roundabouts. Our line was broken once, by a BMW driver. I forced myself to assume that he hadn’t realised what he was doing.
We arrived at the cathedral. When we had booked the venue, it had felt like a gesture of profound love for my mother, but now it suddenly seemed overblown and ridiculous. There were about forty of us, and the building could probably seat ten times that number. It was gargantuan. One of the life-sized statues built into the wall was holding his own model cathedral.15 Each of the building’s hundreds of arches were built into further, larger arches, spires multiplying on the spires, all pointing up. The huge central spire not only pointed up but seemed to be grasping at something beyond the sky. I thought I saw the very tip of it flash red.
People kept looking at us with dramatically turned-down mouths as the coffin was unloaded. Some of them came up to say they were sorry for my loss, as if it was really no loss to them, and they had only come out of politeness. I probably looked thoughtful, or mildly affronted, as I thanked them, but I was mourning too far below the surface to put up much of an appearance of mourning.
The nave was even larger than I had anticipated as we followed the coffin inside and our small band huddled up in the front rows, the majority behind them empty. A choir was singing a song I didn’t know. We were asked to sing a hymn, and very few people sang along properly, perhaps not knowing the tune, perhaps feeling that this wasn’t the occasion for an enthusiastic performance. We were asked to pray and I didn’t say ‘Amen’, and I felt bad because almost no one did. A woman decked in long robes at the lectern, or whatever it was called, introduced herself as the Very Reverend Dean Angela Winterbottom.
‘“So they poured out for the men to eat,”’ she began. ‘“And it came to pass, as they were eating of the pottage, that they cried out, and said, O thou man of God, there is death in the pot. And they could not eat thereof.”16 Unfortunately, Mathilda’s story is as old as stories themselves. So much has changed since the writing of the Bible, and yet, even in our technologically enhanced age, we still find ourselves afflicted in the most basic ways, and the same things continue to matter to us: our search for family, for friends, for work and for meaning in God. We may have every right to feel that Mathilda was taken from us before she should have been, but seeing you all here today, it’s clear that she made a lasting impact in this world.’
The Dean kept indicating the coffin as if my mother might somehow have a right of reply, or as if she was some bottled genie who might at any moment jump out to verify any g
rand claims made on her behalf.17
‘And it may seem hard to tell whether the life she has lived was a good one,’ the Dean continued. ‘“There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful; and the end of that mirth is heaviness.”’18
Even as I listened to her vintage wisdom, I felt that my mother’s funeral was being hijacked. I had to wonder if she’d have wanted to attend her own ceremony.
‘Everybody will one day find that their time has come, and if one tries to bolt the door, one might just find that death is come up into their windows,19 so to speak.’
I looked away from the Dean and the coffin. Light filtered in through stained glass, transforming it from white-grey to ruby, like water to wine.
‘“For where a testament is, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator. For a testament is of force after men are dead: otherwise it is of no strength at all while the testator liveth.”20 And we can take comfort from that.’
I felt my shoulders sag. I glanced across at Max, who was biting a nail. Dad gave a defeated little huff, and stood, a handwritten page shaking in his hand as he made his way over to the lectern. He hated public speaking. He said hello to everyone, and glanced at Max, who gave him a tight nod.
All I can hear is echoes, said Max.
Can you lip-read? I signed.
Too far away, Max replied.
Okay, I’ll sign: ‘Mathilda was an amazing woman. I met her completely by chance when I was a door-to-door salesman. She answered the door and I started trying to sell her whatever I was flogging back then, but she’d just moved to England and barely spoke a word. Bloody hell, I thought—’ (now he’s apologising to the Dean for swearing) ‘—she’s a corker. So rather than bother with my swatches or whatever, I told her I was an English tutor.’ (Uncle Dave just did his dirty laugh.) ‘She really went for it, though, so I started giving her these lessons, and before I knew it she could speak English better than me. I expect everyone here knows that won’t have been because of my language skills. She was always looking things up in dictionaries, you know. She loved her weird words.’ (A couple of people are chuckling.) ‘She was clever and ambitious. But one thing or another clipped her wings. The move came at a bad time for her and she didn’t get the right qualifications to go to a university here. She moved in with me, and I always think I didn’t do enough to encourage her. Then we had the kids. When you’re young, you always think you’ll do everything, you’ll beat life, and then you wake up one day and realise life’s been beating you.’ (He’s stopped, he’s crying.)
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