by Ron Butlin
‘It’s not fair!’ you cried out. ‘It’s not fair!’
At this your father laughed out loud, but you were so upset that you ignored him.
‘How big is the world?’ you asked after a few moments.
‘As far as you can see,’ he replied, ‘and then there is always more. Go further and you’ll always see more of it ahead of you.
‘See that farm,’ he pointed, ‘if you went out through the front door and kept walking in a straight line for long enough, you’d walk in through the back door – now d’you understand?’
You could sense his pleasure in deliberately confusing you – but one thing at least seemed clear: ‘There’ll always be some bits that are far away then, and not their right size?’ you asked.
He smoked his cigarette and said nothing.
You hesitated, then prompted him a moment later: ‘Always?’
‘Yes, always,’ he replied abruptly.
If only, you thought to yourself, you could be everywhere at once so that nothing was ever far away but was its right size. Even for one moment.
Suddenly you remembered the running tap in the farmyard, and knew that when you went back to the car you would have an opportunity to turn it off. Also, it would be its right size when you were there.
A sense of joy began to fill you as you sat anticipating this. You gazed out beyond the road, across the Borders landscape as far as you could see. It was as if you had already turned off the tap, as if you had reached out and briefly were touching everything in sight – even the furthest hills.
However, during the thirty years since then you have learned to reason much better; these days, in fact, you rarely feel sadness or even the slightest disappointment. Soon you will be able to reason well enough to feel nothing at all.
Fear. Standing on the bottom step of the hall stairs while grasping on to the wooden banisters, ‘frozen’ as in a game of statues. Alert. Listening outside the lounge door, trying desperately to make out the tone of his voice or the quality of his silence, as though your life depended upon it. Which, of course, it did – and has done ever since. Terrified to enter the room he was in – and yet quite unable to go away.
You wanted to approach him where he sat in his armchair – just to say ‘Hello’ and perhaps touch the back of his hand lying on the armrest. But even to imagine that as having been an actual event in your childhood, if you thought about it now more than thirty years later, would make you catch your breath in fear.
Had he glanced at you, smiled and replied to your greeting; had that commonplace event ever happened, even once, it would have been the miracle to change your life. One moment of certainty that for all the years to come would have been yours to recall at will, saying to yourself: that was me.
Instead you spent your entire childhood in the corridor, as it were, knowing full well that if you dared to enter the room and address him or touch the back of his hand – if you dared, that is, to make the slightest demand upon him – he would ignore you. Or, at best, he would turn in your direction without speaking one word, his glance saying quite clearly: ‘Well, and what could you possibly have to say to me?’ Any affection you showed, he withdrew from. Any love you expressed, he crushed utterly.
One evening when you were in the kitchen cleaning your shoes for school the next day, he came into the room. You would have been about twelve years old and had long since learned to tense at his approach, but, as your back was towards him, you continued singing a sentimental pop song to yourself while brushing your shoes in time to keep the beat.
You have never forgotten the anger in his voice: ‘What could you possibly know about love?’ he shouted.
You turned to see him standing a few feet away, his arm pointing accusingly: ‘I said, what could you know about love?’
His hand was trembling violently and his expression so full of rage that you had to look away. He repeated the word ‘love’ over and over again, with scorn, with disgust. Then he left.
Afterwards you remained standing at the kitchen window, holding your shoe in one hand and the brush with the polish still on it in the other. It was dark outside, pitch black. You felt, as you looked out into the night, that if all the darkness covering the village, the surrounding fields and woods, were taken into you, it would not be enough to hide the sense of guilt and shame that was there now.
But you were wrong. By your own efforts you have managed to keep these things hidden from the world – and from yourself. Quite forgetting their existence, in fact, until recently, when, while standing at a railway station on the way to work one morning, you were once again brought face to face with them. In that one moment the restraining force of over twenty years was suddenly released – tearing apart the darkness and yourself.
2
You’d decided to make a night of it, to get lushed and laid. At the first party you’d dived into the punch: gin, orange juice, wine, cider, plus some ethyl alcohol left over from what were described vaguely as ‘Mike’s experiments’.
‘After three glasses of this you will be anybody’s!’ the hostess stated as she filled the glasses.
‘I’m anybody’s now!’ you replied with a laugh. There was no sense of loss in your voice, not then – a Friday night all those years ago.
A party was a few paper cups, a towel wrapped around the pink bulb in the main room, loud music from speakers the size of bathtubs, three other people in the toilet and ash in the sauerkraut. The average was four parties a night – Friday and Saturday. Other people went to parties and got drunk, you got drunk and went to parties. There were bars like market places where addresses were swapped, routes planned – though, of course, if you heard Mick Jagger through an open window as you walked down the street, there was no harm in trying. Your father’s death was announced at the third party that night.
Ring the bell so merrily, the two of you. I used to live here, you explain to the girl you’d met and brought along from party number two. Ring the bell again – the music’s loud – and in you go. Hand in hand. Into a corridor of coats, rolled-up carpets and empty carry-out bags. Into the pink light and the boom-boom music. Boom in the stomach, boom in the groin.
‘It’s a sine qua non, of course,’ says a man with a moustache. He looks at you, but seeing you are already with someone, he relaxes.
‘A sine qua non,’ he repeats, turning back to the girl beside him – her expression doesn’t change.
‘Somebody’s locked themselves in the toilet – and Charlie here’ll be throwing up any minute,’ says a small man.
‘Into the garden, Charlie, out the back window.’ Good advice.
Charlie keeps leaning against the locked door, and the locked door keeps sliding from Charlie.
The girl – who’s called Sandra, you remind yourself – is holding your hand. ‘The kitchen,’ you suggest, leading her past the boom-boom music, the sine qua non and Charlie. Across the slidy kitchen floor. Time to get the vital body fluids up to par.
‘Something to drink?’ you ask. ‘It was like the Great Trek getting here!’
You make a joke about party-Boers, then slide towards the paper cups. Hello there, hello there, you greet the natives. They smile at you, then back away as if you were exerting some strange force upon them. They look at each other. White-man magic? you wonder to yourself.
‘It’s okay,’ you explain to Sandra, ‘they seem friendly enough.’
Helen, who lives here now, has put down her paper cup and is coming towards you. So is another friend of yours, Andy. From opposite sides of the room. They glance at each other, neither of them smiling.
It would not be hard for you to remember this. Not really. But you refuse even to try. Once upon a time you thought you knew and understood the ending: walking down a lane that gets narrower, and leads to your father sitting dead in his armchair. But now you have begun to suspect there is a great deal more to what happened, you would need to keep jumping to the end of the story – to the point where you walked Sandra home
, then sat in her bedsit and began kissing her gently at first.
Helen and Andy are standing in front of you. The host and hostess. You introduce Sandra. ‘We met on the way here.’ You try the joke about the Great Trek and the party-Boers again, then continue: ‘Looks like a good party.’
They don’t smile back. A very white-faced Charlie slides past on his way to the back window.
‘A very good party,’ you repeat. You smile, and still they don’t smile back.
Andy has taken your arm, and Sandra isn’t beside you any more. The kitchen is suddenly emptier and bigger. Helen and Andy stand in front of you. For several seconds.
Then Andy says, ‘Your father has died. Your mother couldn’t get hold of you, and so she phoned here.’ He grips your arm and asks if you are all right. Helen takes your other arm, and it feels as if they are going to frogmarch you down that narrowing lane towards your father sitting dead in his armchair.
Sandra was wearing white gloves which she didn’t take off even when you had arrived in her bedsit. You remarked upon this – stopping yourself just in time from asking her if she was going to perform magic tricks – then asked instead if there was anything to drink.
‘On the shelf,’ she replied. A small bottle of rum and some glasses.
She sat on the bed, still keeping on her coat; you went to sit beside her, putting the rum and two glasses on the small table. What should you have done now? Your father had just died. This girl, who you had met only a few hours ago, placed her hand on the back of yours. She did not look at you. She was biting her lip nervously.
‘You can stay with us if you want,’ Andy had suggested. Helen grips your arm again. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘stay with us. There’s a back room; because you don’t want to—’
But instead of answering, you’re listening to the boom-boom music coming through from the hall. Girls would be dancing in the half-light, or standing at the edge of the floor—
A squeeze from Andy, and you’re back again, being frogmarched down that lane towards your father. You can see that his head has slipped to one side against the wing of his armchair. Around him it is very dark.
The party is for Helen’s twenty-first birthday, you remember now – and you have a present for her, a silk scarf, in your inside pocket. But because your host and hostess are comforting you – holding your arms at both sides – you cannot get at the small parcel. It would seem insensitive to shake yourself free of them. You begin to tell them not to worry: your father had been ill for some time, and his death is not really so unexpected. In fact, you add, it is a kind of release for him as he had been in considerable pain for some time. Lies, of course, but the tension eases a little, and so does their grip on your arm.
You try to raise your hand once more to get at the silk scarf. Immediately the lane narrows again, and you are brought close enough to see his slack mouth, his eyes staring straight ahead.
You cannot bear to look at him for long – sensing the measure of your own life in the distance between this dead man and yourself. Every moment is clamouring for your attention, even the briefest: the quality of that silence, for example, after you had given Sandra her glass of rum, the pause usually filled by proposing some kind of toast.
She was sitting at the edge of her bed with you, a complete stranger whose father had just died. She was still wearing her coat and gloves, and now at your suggestion she removed them. She had dressed carefully for a pleasant evening, and now she sat in silence. Before drinking the rum, as though to distract her from the unspoken toast, you turned over her hand very gently and lifted it to your lips to kiss the palm. Then you smiled at her, raised your glass and drank. She said nothing, but took a sip from her own.
‘My ears are still buzzing,’ you remarked. ‘The music was much too loud.’
Sandra nodded in agreement. You gave her hand a slight squeeze.
‘It’s always too loud at parties,’ she replied.
You were sitting close beside her. When you replaced the glass on the small table you put your arm behind her, then gave her hand another slight squeeze.
‘All right?’ you asked.
She half-smiled, and so you put your arm on her shoulder to draw her towards you.
‘He had a bad heart,’ you explain to Helen and Andy. The unintended ambiguity of your remark allowed you to say exactly what you felt about your father.
‘In a way,’ you continue, elaborating what you have already said, ‘it’s a blessing. But even so, when it does . . .’ And you can tell by the way they are looking at you that they believe it all.
You add: ‘I’ll have a drink first and then go home.’
Andy begins to repeat his invitation to stay, but you are quite firm. You feel all right, you answer them – and anyway, you can’t abandon Sandra.
‘We can easily—’ begins Helen.
‘No,’ you interrupt, and smile. ‘It’s okay.’
Then to settle matters you turn to go and get some wine. The miracle is about to happen.
You felt Sandra trembling as she sat beside you on the bed. She was eighteen years old, a first-year student, she had said. Into her small bedsit with the photographs of her parents, a Marc Bolan poster, and a teddybear propped against her pillow, you had brought the death of your father. You had made her the visitor in her own room. She sat on the edge of the bed, her head on your shoulder. You comforted her, speaking gently, stroking her hair, then her cheek. Gradually you turned her face upwards. She closed her eyes. You wanted to kiss her. Her cheek was wet. You kissed the warm dampness, letting your tongue briefly touch the salt-taste on her skin. Already you could feel the beginnings of an erection.
The boom-boom music is almost inside you now as you walk across the kitchen floor towards the drinks table. You know you are not drunk. You have just been told that your father has died. The room is steady and your mind very clear. You glance around for Sandra. She is standing by the cooker, isolated. You pick up two paper cups and move towards her. By the look on her face you realise she has already been told about your father.
‘We’ll have this and then go,’ you say.
She doesn’t reply, but looks at you uncertainly.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll take you home,’ you add.
There are still a few people in the kitchen, but no one else speaks to you. Everyone looks awkward – the sooner you leave the better. You raise the cup to your lips, quite unaware of the miracle about to take place.
You sip – and nothing happens. Nothing. No wine. You sip again – and again nothing happens. You tilt the cup right back – and still nothing comes out. You look into the cup – there is red wine, and the level has remained the same.
This, you realise suddenly, is grief. Your senses must be utterly disordered by the news of your father’s death. You can see the wine three-quarters filling the cup, you can feel its weight – and yet, even when the cup is turned completely upside down, the wine still remains inside. You hold it up to the light. There is no mistake: either the laws of gravity have ceased to work – or else you are so overwhelmed with shock that although you feel nothing, your senses have momentarily failed.
Andy is beside you again. He has gripped your arm and brought you face to face with your father at the end of the narrow lane, close enough to touch him. But, you reason to yourself while examining the cup, these scrambled senses, this miracle of the still wine that you are observing, must be simply the result of your own emotional delay.
How lucid, how clear your mind feels!
Sandra is standing beside you. She keeps her eyes lowered – maybe, you think to yourself, it would be better to take her home now. Andy and the others are looking at you, your arm raised to hold the cup up to the light.
‘It’s the wine,’ you explain, ‘it won’t come out.’
You demonstrate, and if there is any trace of disappointment or confusion in your voice at this moment, it is because of this fact alone. Not grief at the death of your father – you are not referri
ng to that as you turn to Andy, repeating, ‘It won’t come. See?’ Again you turn the paper cup upside down, and sure enough, the wine remains in it.
After you had been holding Sandra for a minute or two and kissing her cheek, you began again to stroke her hair. Then, as you undid the top button on her blouse, you remembered the expression on her face as she had said ‘Mine’s the same’ – and turned her cup of wine upside down as well.
The first and second buttons were undone easily. You began on the third while you kissed her neck, your tongue gently licking the skin. Your hand moved to stroke her breast. She caught her breath suddenly. Excited. Your erection was getting stronger. You kissed her tenderly while undoing the third button, so that you could touch her breasts.
‘No, no,’ she whispered. ‘Please, no.’
You stopped briefly, then began once more to kiss her throat.
‘No,’ she repeated. ‘I—’ and again she caught her breath. ‘No, no,’ she was shaking her head slowly from side to side.
You continued kissing her throat. But more cautiously. The expression on her face came back to you again: ‘Mine’s the same,’ she’d said as she turned her cup upside down and dipped her finger in it.
‘Jelly!’ she had cried out, laughing.
You had laughed too when you’d understood, laughed out loud, but now there was the scent of her skin, her warmth. Helen had been holding your arm to support you while Andy said ‘Your father is dead’, and everyone else could hear only the boom-boom music.
Sandra was beginning to grow afraid; she whispered, ‘No, no—’
The sound of her voice was coming from further and further away as you unclasped her bra and began to lick the nipple erect. She tried to push you to one side, but you grasped her hand tightly, guided it and held it against your growing erection. The boom-boom music became loud enough to drown out the sound of her fear. ‘See,’ say Helen and Andy together as they force you down the narrowing road, ‘See – your father’s dead.’ They make you stand in front of the crumpled broken-down body in the armchair. You were gathering into one moment all the years of his hatred and cruelty; you longed to push them so far into Sandra that—