Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  I suppose it was the drugs. Anybody seriously into drugs has to accept that life is mostly anticipation. All that waiting around, knowing that any minute or half-hour, or possibly sometime early the next day, someone ‘holding’ might bother to turn up. But we weren’t a drug party scene. How could we be? There was scarcely enough to go around Kensington Market at the time let alone Upminster.

  When the beer ran out we moved on to the cheap Riesling, and the herbaceous borders ran with puke. It was almost a ritual. The early part of the evening was spent commiserating with some poor girl whose friend had had to be helped into a quiet room. ‘Don’t go in there, Alison is lying down.’ Alison, fourteen, had celebrated her first introduction to alcohol by drinking half a bottle of Stone’s Ginger Wine and a pint of cider. ‘She shouldn’t mix. Take things easy, silly girl. No, don’t ring her mother.’ Wise words but later, the Party Seven gone, and, somebody having stubbed out their cigarettes in the half-finished cans of Guinness, we usually risked the rest of the ginger brew ourselves, on top of five pints of beer and the remains of that Blue Nun.

  Sometimes, I woke up in the middle of playing fields, wondering what arrangements I might have made to stay the night. What time was it? Where was that party anyway? Wasn’t I supposed to be staying there? I was miles from home.

  It was then that the wastelands of outer London became their strangest; the houses with their black windows, under the constant yellow glow of the street lamps, looked false. I turned a corner once and found a whole cul-de-sac under six inches of water in the middle of the night, nobody around but me; the street a shallow canal reflecting the unearthly, inhuman dormitory glare.

  Once, maybe twice, it was my turn. I brought the whole party back to Epping.

  ‘We’ll stay in the back room,’ said my parents firmly.

  ‘No, no. It would be much better if you went out.’

  ‘This is my house. What is that you intend to do, that I can’t be here?’

  Well, of course, they wouldn’t want to know The boot was on the other foot in the door. What was I going to do to keep out those blokes who arrived and said, ‘I’m a friend of John. John said I could come.’ John was handy. There was always a John, somewhere. And it was those friends of the non-existent John who wrecked the place.

  ‘I’m going to make them food.’

  ‘No, no. They won’t want food.’

  ‘They must want to eat. If they eat it will stop people getting drunk.’

  Dear God. They want to get drunk, that’s the point. The more food provided the more they have to grind into the carpets. What does she think this is? A dinner party?

  Sometimes entire houses were trashed. It was common for banisters to come loose, for fires to be started in the kitchen, for white carpets to be stained an indelible, purplish-red, for precious porcelain models of shepherdesses to be decapitated, for prize-winning gardens to be trampled and razed. In the worst cases, furniture was stolen and people were taken away in ambulances. It was not possible to explain what fun this was to an adult. Better, much better, for an interim period to elapse in which some restoration was accomplished.

  How many times had I helped some panic-stricken school friend, standing pale and horribly wild-eyed after everyone had been kicked out and the lights turned back on to reveal the horror. ‘Christ! My parents will be back in a few minutes. Help me get some of this sick off the carpet.’ Usually, I was staying the night. I would be sleeping on the sofa. I would have to try to blend into the bamboo wallpaper while the leading member of the Upminster Fun Gang, a storm trooper of joint-trashing himself, cowered before sober reality.

  ‘What on earth has been going on here?’

  ‘It’s just a little mess. We put salt on the worst of it.’

  ‘We trusted you, and this is how you repay us.

  ‘There were some gate-crashers.’

  ‘Did you call the police?’

  Stupid men, fathers, sometimes. Somebody else, a neighbour probably, had called the police, yes. But they were long gone. Often, it was only my being there that stopped it spiralling upwards into a family court.

  I settled down on the sofa. ‘No, no, I’ll be fine here, honestly.’ And I slept, not even bothering to take my boots off, turning over to block out the muffled recriminations coming from somewhere upstairs.

  Whose house was it where I spent the night trying to cope with the mysterious noise? I switched off the light, pulled the blanket over my head and after a few seconds the rattling sound started, somewhere in the room, not loud, but insistent. Finally I could stand it no longer, got up and switched the light back on and it stopped, instantly. I waited, switched the light off and stumbled back to the sofa in the dark. It started again. This happened three times before I found the hamster cage behind the curtains. It was three in the morning. He sat with his paws raised and an inquiring look in his black dewdrop eyes in the bottom of his wheel, waiting, politely to get back to his nocturnal exercise.

  I dreaded the mornings, especially if the mum insisted on making breakfast. ‘Here, bacon, eggs, black pudding.’

  ‘Thanks, Mrs Macey.’ A long silence followed, while Macey and I stared at the greasy plates through throbbing eyeballs and pounding heads, fighting back nausea.

  ‘Your father thinks someone was in our bed. What sort of people did you have here?’

  ‘They were just normal people, weren’t they, Rhys?’

  ‘Yes.’ Can I push this stuff around the plate without actually throwing up?

  ‘But I don’t understand. Would your mother allow this sort of thing to go on, Rhys?’

  ‘Mmm…’

  Well, of course she wouldn’t. She would have to be got out of the way too. Because in the end, it wasn’t the damage, or the recriminations, or the period of grace that would allow a modicum of tidying up, it was the loss of face that was at stake.

  I have done it myself now, sat, like Virginia McKenna locked in the gun room, while a group of savages on day release from inner London day schools laid waste the governor’s palace. It’s a phase. Of course, we didn’t believe it was a phase. We thought we had invented the genre.

  Somewhere in the middle of this I had met Jane, who was a very naughty girl, and I had fallen deeply in love with her.

  I picked her up at a party. Or she picked me up. Yes, she picked me up. This was a rare event and what made her rather exciting. I should have known she was only dallying with me.

  She was short and blonde and had been going out with someone who had just left the upper sixth. She talked to me to annoy him, but she was very direct, and I was seduced by her worldliness. The little girls — the fifteen-year-olds we were expected to focus on — were like us, tentative, but Jane snogged furiously and groped extremely efficiently. When I went to her house she introduced me to her startled mother and led me straight up to her bedroom for a bit of torrid fumbling. There wasn’t any actual sex. None of us seemed to get sex, however much we boasted, though we discussed the possibility endlessly. The girls were generally far too canny. But we could rub and pant and get sticky, and Jane seemed to want to do that as soon as we met.

  Jane was a wild child. I certainly wasn’t. I sat and had tea in the kitchen afterwards, all flushed and wobbly, while Jane pointedly ignored her poor mother. I remember the journey home, sitting on the front seat on a completely deserted upper deck of the later bus, away from the usual rush-hour crowd, exulting in the agony of adolescent passion. This was it. I was completely and utterly consumed by the aptness of Jane, her blonde, slightly dirty hair, her nylon school shirt, her willingness, her secret personality, her femininity and understanding of my needs. We had groped in her room! With her mother downstairs.

  A few minutes later, as I lurched through the night, I discovered that I couldn’t remember what she looked like. I sat in a panic. But I was in love with her! I just couldn’t quite recall her face. But the way she hitched her high-school dark-blue skirt around her waist. And the way a few tendrils of hair hung u
pwards on her cheek from an earlier cut that was growing out … and the way she talked to me about … what? We usually glued our faces to each other pretty quickly. Ah yes. I remembered her face. Yes, that’s who I was in love with. Phew.

  So, if I really, really loved Jane, because she was older than me and more knowing and experienced, why on earth did I tell Gotley about her at all? Why did I tell him that I met her in the woods at lunchtimes and near as dammit fucked. Not really fucked, but got pretty close.

  Because the following lunchtime, when I met her in the woods again, we turned a corner heading for the bracken and there they all were, at least a dozen of them, sniggering and grinning. ‘Fancy seeing you here, Stubs.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce us to your friend?’

  ‘Bugger off!’

  She didn’t say anything. But she could see I was really just a kid. Come next Saturday and the next party, when I arrived longing for her, I discovered she had already gone off with someone else.

  One of the girls from the joint historical society tried to comfort me. ‘Forget her. She was just anybody’s.’ That was the point. She was as dirty-minded and sex-obsessed as a bloke. But she wasn’t mine any more. But by the end of the evening I was back with my mates, getting drunk.

  9. Mersea

  ‘Is that the Peldon Rose?’ my mother asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  The darkened pub flashed by. As children we liked it when we stopped for supper on light evenings on the way back from the boat. It was the first place on the mainland. We ate on furniture made of grey logs, unsawn, like branches from trees, and, since they looked so improvised, surprisingly heavy to lug about — pork pie, Scotch eggs, rubber sausages. My father liked hot mustard, and just the traces from his knife where he cut ours in half had seemed an impossibly adult taste.

  The other way beyond the pub, the road dips, the screens of Essex blackthorn lift and white fence markers appear. In the daylight, an expanse of salting stretches off to the west to Tollesbury. At night the blank coastal strip simmers under a Lucozade dawn. Sometimes at high tide the road is covered completely. The creeks on either side are shallow and clogged with mud. It felt American. So did the whole island. All the English virtues of civic dignity and properly organized pavements seemed slow to catch on. Is it still like that I wonder? It was too dark to see. It used to be characterized by private lanes with improvised road surfaces and half-developed plots. The people of West Mersea seemed in denial, or perhaps their council was. They refused for years to behave outwardly like a modern, settled 1970s community.

  I turned off into Firs Road.

  ‘Oh, you know the way,’ my mother said and surprised me.

  ‘Yes.’ I knew the back route, even though I had never driven here as a teenager. I had never driven at all as a teenager. There was no chance of having a car, and my father wasn’t going to lend us his, so there wasn’t much point in learning. Perhaps we always took the main road through the ancient little village, another American place of clapboard houses. The boat was usually parked in a car park in front of the Victory pub. My mother wouldn’t have been a regular at the Club. My father wouldn’t have let her.

  I was speaking at the West Mersea Yacht Club as a guest of the Royal Naval Sailing Association, East Coast Branch, and as we parked and as I helped my mother out of the car, I wished I wasn’t. It wasn’t a particularly focused wish, just the usual ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ gloom that accompanies every after-dinner speech and makes me curt and unsociable when I arrive. I would have to meet and talk with elderly strangers. (There were dozens in the bar.) I would have to eat an indifferent meal. (It was fair but hardly celebrant.) I would be sat next to the chairman, and we would run out of things to say to each other by the end of the hors-d’oeuvres. (He was a nice man with a boat he kept in Bradwell, right on the other side of the Blackwater. We persevered until half-way through the main course.)

  As we stood in the bar (the sort of place where you have to tiptoe carefully around the subject of why you don’t drink) all I really wanted to do was look at the black and white photographs of sleek fifties racing yachts owned by brigadiers. These were the yachts we used to pass on the way out of the creek on a Saturday morning. The Kim Holman and the Robert Clarke designs that had glistened in the Essex sun and seemed so elegant, fit and organized compared with our ersatz boating experience.

  I was glad my mother had been able to come. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer two months before. This was a cruel eighty-first birthday present.

  ‘They keep telling me it’s only younger women. They even stop testing you after a certain age.

  They also told her not to worry. ‘Something else will probably carry you off before this cancer does.’ But that was what they had told my father at the age of seventy. It was the cancer that had quickly carried him off.

  My mother was being defiantly selfless about it — talking in surprised tones about how she seemed to think about it all the time, as if this was the last thing she had expected. She had finished treatment the week before. It had tired her, but she wanted to come. ‘I’m sore,’ she told me, and I pulled a sympathetic face. In some polished gentlemanly society, sons can talk about the bruised and aching breast of their elderly mothers. As for me, I grunted and commiserated and tried to change the subject. She had a large and dutiful ‘bosom’, as she called it. This was the bosom I had rested my head on. This was my mummy’s bosom. Now she was too sore to even hug.

  She was a victim of too many assaults of old age: mugged by legs, attacked by arthritis, happy-slapped by a painful replacement knee, and now this. She talked about my father. The round of life brought everything up in turn. (‘He would have liked this.’ ‘Oh, that was so like your father.’) She told me that she wanted him here now, when she was frightened, more than any other time.

  It seemed, despite all this, that she never faded. She just went on, my mother. This was me, in denial of the facts. There were still lunches and meetings and people calling. I accepted all the doctors told me, about how this thing would settle and how it was less virulent, because it was convenient to do so. I spent time persuading her that they were hopeful, but I knew that after all the mechanical failures this seemed like something irreparable. I was reminded of my father. (‘I had to tell a woman that her husband would not survive an illness. He was eighty-seven. Do you know what she said? “Why him, doctor, why him?”‘)

  I was speaking at the club because Derek had asked me to. Derek had retired from the Navy as a chief petty officer and joined the police. When he sailed with my father he was a detective chief inspector, the most clubbable, social, entertaining policeman you could hope to be arrested by. How on earth he hooked up with my dad I have no idea. We often sailed in a little flotilla round the east coast, bumping into Derek and his family, doing things together.

  You make assumptions about your parents’ friendships as a child. Or rather you don’t. You simply accept these adults and you ask no questions. Why these two different men should have spent any time together only seems curious now.

  To us kids Derek was the best. He told incredible long-winded and carefully performed jokes. He was easy-going in any society, confident, ready to laugh off accidents. I used to wonder, though, what he would have been like as a policeman. There were always, behind the huge smile and easy laughter and the brilliant stories, these sharp detective eyes, alert to other human beings; unlike my father.

  It was a good laugh for the audience at the club that night. ‘I go back a long way with Derek. He banged me up for three years.

  ‘No, we never came in here very much,’ my mother explained in the bar beforehand. ‘Your father used to say it was the most expensive 100 he ever joined.’

  I told them that in the speech too. In fact I got provided with half the funny stories for the beginning of my ‘talk’ simply by prodding memories, as we stood surrounded by all these men in blazers with their little floati
ng garden sheds.

  ‘Your dad,’ Derek told me ‘was immensely proud of Windsong. And one day we were in here … it might have been …’ He looked around. (It probably wasn’t. It was probably in the Victory. He would have gone there for his lunch because it was close to where the boat was kept in the winter.) ‘And anyway, I spot Maurice Griffiths on the other side of the bar, and I was amazed that your dad had never met him, and he revered those boats.’

  I wasn’t amazed. My father would never have freely introduced himself to anybody.

  ‘So I introduced him. And Elwyn went up to Maurice and said, “I’m so pleased to meet you because I am so proud of the boat I own that you designed.” “Which boat is that?” asked Griffiths. “Windsong,” says your father. “Oh, that old hulk. That was the worst boat I ever built.” And your father was so crestfallen.’ Derek laughed.

  Is that what they thought, then, what all sons suspect about their father, that the rest of the world is laughing at them? But he would have been crestfallen. It wasn’t my father’s way to be party to the broad stroke of humour. He found social demands perplexing. If he was doing something else, he couldn’t cope with them at all. I have that trait too. I had arrived at the club trying to work out where I would be talking from, fiddling with the computer that I’d brought but which wouldn’t show my photographs through their screen projector, utterly preoccupied with what I had to say and unable to let that ride and concentrate on chat, small talk and the basic demands of humanity. God damn it. Yes. This is exactly how he would have behaved. I am behaving exactly like my father!

  When did my father let me take the boat off ‘without him? It was a bold thing for him to do. Would I even trust my son with my bicycle? But at some point in the sixth form, after A levels, perhaps, I took a couple of friends and we drifted up the coast one hot summer’s week, going around and on into Brightlingsea. How could he let us? He was nervous. He was always so worried about safety. I have written calumny about him here, because that’s the side of him that stuck to me, but he must have been understanding and resolute to do that.