by Tim Pears
We were a blue-eyed, plug-ugly Anglo-Saxon family. Yes, we were. White and skinny or white and lumpy: that was the choice our genes offered us. My father had a childish kind of face, without depth; small eyes, nose, mouth popped on a spherical head. He was balding, yet instead of ageing him this merely exacerbated the infantile roundness of his cranium. He was like a cartoon character whose creator refused to allow him to age, to mature, to learn more. Our mother had a fine-boned, delicate, feeble face, that of an anxious bird, but her body was short and bulging, low bosom and tubular waist persuading clothes out of their manufactured shape and into hers. My brother too was stocky and his features were squashed and pugnacious, while myself, I was stringy like Dad and plain, neither noticed nor remembered. A friend once told me I had a Photofit face.
‘Steer clear of crime, John,’ he advised me.
And out of the midst of this bunch, this unpromising thicket of genes, rose a pretty, slender girl who appeared to share not a single trait with any one of us. Almond-eyed, brown-skinned, poised. Melody. She made my blood hum.
Four of our family formed a proud praetorian guard around the fifth, this adopted young princess. I understood that was what we looked like. My parents, my brother and I guarding a young member of foreign royalty, temporarily fostered with as humdrum an English household as possible. Melody gave our family a fairy tale dimension.
My brother liked to frighten Mum. He used to imitate birds. No, not birds, it wasn’t birds, it was flying pterodactyls, made of Plasticine and filmed in stuttering animation gobbling up semi-clothed actors. They cawed like hoarse ravens when they, i.e. he, crouched on sideboards and windowsills and swooped down on Mum’s shoulders as she passed by.
Do all small boys zigzag through a period of insanity around the age of six or seven? When they make funny sounds explicable only to themselves, jump up in the air, dash in and out of rooms for no apparent reason?
Greg regularly brought home from primary school a thick ear or black eye that he explained reluctantly. ‘I had to sort X out,’ he would say sadly. ‘Y was asking for it,’ he’d sigh. After the jealousy of his first years Greg never fought with me or any other member of the family. It could have been that he’d flushed such antagonistic behaviour from his system, but I think it more likely that a mental shift took place: you faced out from your circle, and fought the world. It became unconscionable for Greg to turn his violence inward upon those close to him, it would have meant turning his moral radar inside out.
He was a wonderful older brother. Because of Greg, no one bothered me. ‘Call me on this walkie-talkie if you’re in trouble, John.’ He afforded me space to work out for myself who I wanted as friends, allies, enemies. To make my own calculations. No one wanted to mix it with Greg. He wasn’t tall, by the time I was ten or eleven I’d caught him up. But Greg was not merely bullish, he was unstoppable. Other boys could overcome him, but they could never subdue him. If they put Greg on the floor, he’d get up again. If they hurt him badly he’d nurse wound and grudge together: he’d recuperate and come back for more. No one wants to fight that kind of relentless aggravation, the kind they’ll never be rid of.
My first calculation was that I should keep close to my older brother. Or perhaps I should say, keep him close to me.
* * *
From the moment the world came into her focus, a smile was rarely absent from Melody’s countenance. The baby we coddled, the toddler we jostled each other to spoil, Mum admonishing, ‘She’ll get ideas above her station,’ this baby smiled indulgently up at a crescent of fools’ faces. These games, these songs, these peek-a-boos, Melody responded to more like a benevolent judge of some talent contest than the audience of one for whom the show was put on. She was a self-composed child.
It was the same with her friends. Other girls schemed for intimacy with the prettiest girl in school. They prowled the playground in shifting packs, allegiances sworn in blood and broken in spite, tears spilt over snide, precise cruelties. I caught glimpses of such female strategy even in Melody’s class, two years below me and across the gender divide, of which Melody herself appeared quite unaware.
The friends she brought home were unpredictable. There might be one of the other glamorous figures in her class, but they could just as well be misfits and oddballs. Like Jimmy Green, a boy who had to stare at people or objects or his own thoughts before responding to them. As if he had to peer into the essence of a thing, had to have a long hard look at you before knowing how to address you. Melody let Jimmy hang around our place for a few months, spooking Mum in the kitchen whenever she turned round to find this wide-eyed silent kid staring at her.
Or there was Sally something, her surname’s gone, who liked to pretend that she was disabled in some way. That she lacked one of her senses. I once came across Melody and Sally in the warehouse, as Dad called his wooden storage shed, with their eyes closed, opening boxes and identifying contents by shape, texture, smell. Describing them.
‘It’s smoother than a peach,’ said Melody. ‘It’s not as waxy as an apple. It’s a pear. But it’s not shaped like a pear.’
‘So what variety is it?’ Sally demanded.
‘I don’t know,’ Melody admitted, eyes screwed tight shut as if by an exaggerated frown of ignorance. ‘I forget that stuff.’
The last to open their eyes was the winner of this game, and Sally and Melody were able to play it for hours, being equally honest and incurious people. I tried to join them but couldn’t restrain myself from peeking. Another time they built a wobbly tower of fruit and a vegetable dome with their eyes placidly closed. I grew instantly impatient watching them, although funnily enough they inspired a habit I retain today: when checking a batch of potatoes I close my eyes and concentrate on the way they feel, and smell.
I’m reminded of one occasion. I wasn’t much of a disobedient child, but one lunchtime I got it into my head to throw my food on the floor. No toddler, mind, I was six or seven years old. I have no excuse, I knew what I was doing. The idea surged into my head to throw food on the floor and I did so, methodically, a spoonful at a time.
‘John!’ Mum said. ‘What do you think you’re …? Stop that.’
I continued.
‘Pick that up, John. Stop it at once.’
Greg and Melody just stared, as if waiting for some sense in what I was doing to reveal itself.
I remember looking up at Mum with what I knew to be insolence and defiance. She crumbled, whisked away my plate and began clearing the mess off the floor herself, saying, ‘Wait till your father gets home, young man. We’ll see what Dad thinks of this.’
Sure, Dad came home, took me to their bedroom, gave me a good belt across my bare backside. We danced that duet a few times. But it’s Mum I’m thinking of. What was I doing? I don’t know, asserting myself, of course, that’s easy to say. But it looks to me now rather as if I was bullying her.
Greg was and is Mum’s favourite, it was an open secret. Melody was too perfect and different from her to give Mum that wrench of love in her stomach. Greg spent his infancy beating Mum up and she adores him. Adored Dad too in her way. I remember she used to say of our father, ‘He’s the sort of man who sweeps leaves in the wind.’ Not said aggressively, no, she was timidly teasing him. With pride, indeed. Accompanied by a shake of the head, and a frail laugh. ‘My husband, he’s the sort of man who sweeps leaves in the wind.’ As if to say, Yes, he’s stubborn, my old man, he doesn’t give a monkey’s what people think of him; he’s eccentric, he’s an individualist. He’s individually mine.
Though she was right in another sense: our father only thought of sweeping leaves, it only occurred to him to do so, when presented with the sight of them being blown around our yard. And then he couldn’t wait. He’d go and grab a rake or a broom and condemn himself to a mighty Canute-like encounter. He was unable to put off such a task to a more suitable time. Dad lived in an always now or never.
Our father had a way of adding certain words to the end of sentence
s that implied that what he’d just said contained depth one might have missed on first hearing. ‘Council’s taxing traders off the street. Carry on like this there won’t be any markets,’ he’d say, and then: ‘You see what I’m saying?’
Or, ‘Your grandmother was born while Queen Victoria was still alive. She’s seen two centuries. Haven’t you, Nan? Think about it, boy. See what I’m driving at?’
By the age of nine or ten I already wanted to yell at my father, ‘Of course we can see what you’re driving at, Dad! It’s a straight bloody line!’
His customers were more indulgent than me, his son. Or no more intelligent than him, perhaps. It’s a confusing moment when a boy begins to apprehend that he’s brighter than his father. Not to mention an irritation. Nor an embarrassment.
I mustn’t draw an inaccurate picture. Our father was excitable, tense, too busy for solemnity. He was a workaholic, a bony, blurred figure lifting sacks of spuds and boxes of apples and crates of caulis in and out of the van. Sharpe’s Fresh Produce. Juddering out of the yard with a fart of putrid exhaust smoke. Dad was like a child, that’s what it was, he jumped with excitement. He often got hiccups. He drank milk when he came home, went straight to the fridge and poured himself a glass, like a boy, and downed it breathlessly, adorning himself with a milk moustache. And when our father was tired he’d just flop on the sofa, sigh, his eyelids fluttered, and there he was fast asleep.
When Dad ate he stuffed his face. He ate like a horse, our thin father, dolloping in food with his lips the way a tinker’s horse mouthed a carrot off your palm. But even that took too long, so he also shovelled his bangers and mash in with fork and spoon. Dad looked like he was force-feeding someone else’s mouth, punishing them with meat and two veg. What it did to his digestion one can only imagine, as barely-masticated mouthfuls of food were packed off to his unfortunate gut.
THE OTHER week I plucked up the gumption to visit my young doctor, and confess the unease I’d been feeling lately.
‘About your boy?’ he asked. ‘Surely not. Not now.’
‘No, no,’ I assured him. ‘About myself.’ I said, ‘I get a prickling in my scalp. Also, in the skin of my thighs. Worst of all, on my back.’
‘An itch?’
‘I scratch at the isolated pinpricks, convinced it’s just a couple of midgey fleas. You know the sensation? Like, on my legs. You lift your trousers and give the fleshy back of your calves a good scratch. Run your fingernails up and down the shin, where the skin’s close over the bone. Or in there at the back of the knees. The relief.’
‘Yes, yes, indeed.’
‘Higher up, and you can scratch your legs through the material of your trousers or, in meetings, thrust hands deep into pockets and, surreptitiously…’ I shrugged. ‘Detected, the movement could be mistaken.’
‘Quite.’
‘You might attempt to squeeze your hands down between waistband and underwear and give a good scratch.’
‘I see.’
‘Of course, if I’m on my own, there’s no problem. I undo the trousers – take them off if I care to – and give myself over to a good bout of scratching.’
‘Sounds reasonable.’
‘But meetings, Doctor – that’s the trouble. What do I do then? Discussions, chats, with however menial a hand. Meetings happen all the time. We employ three hundred people.’
‘Here? No.’
‘Of course not. I meant if you add up everyone all round the country. Yes, yes, including part-timers. Yes, and the migrant workers, of course, but there aren’t many of them any more. Jobs, I mean, not migrants. More migrants than ever. More than we need. What was I saying?’
‘Meetings?’
‘A job interview, say, with some young applicant. I’m not one of those freaks, you know, those monsters.’
‘I’m not sure I follow.’
‘Megalomaniacs. Unlike my brother, I do try to accord every individual a certain respect. Even the lads we get.’
‘Young men.’
‘For washing, packing jobs. They sit there dumb. Dense. Marooned. No social skills, Doctor, I guess it’s, oh, it’s everything, isn’t it? It’s staring at a screen, it’s absent fathers, it’s that relish of ignorance in our working-class culture. Where’s the vim of youth? The girls have it. Girls no longer teach themselves to be still. They’re the ones with spunk now. Really. We recruit more women every year.’
‘And in meetings?’
‘What?’
‘You were saying.’
‘Yes, I was. Like, my hands, it’s easy, I quietly rake them. Scalp too I can scratch openly, just taking care not to do so so often it attracts attention. But the back, Doctor. This is the problem. How can I reach my spine surreptitiously? You tell me. No, of course not. I can only suffer and squirm. If it’s bad enough – and it can become unbearable – I’ve been known to excuse myself from meetings and rush to the toilet, there to wrestle jacket, tie, shirt from off my back and let myself loose in a frenzy of scratching.’ I leapt up, shed garments, mimed. ‘With pen, or keys, or – if I remembered in my agitated state to grab one on the way out – a ruler, acting as an extension of my arm and fingers so that I can stretch, you know, contort, and reach that unreachable spot, the inside of the shoulder blade there, where the insect loves to lurk.’
I sat back down, having gone to some trouble to suggest the full extent of my exertions. Got my breath back.
‘Of course, there are no insects, as I am forced, each time it happens, to admit; as well as the fact that the itching is not on the skin, it’s under it.’
The doctor nodded his head in that reassuring yet infuriating way of medical men.
‘It’s a non-specific itch?’ he asked.
I smiled. ‘A non-specific itch roaming around my body, Doctor.’
‘Let me examine you,’ he said.
THE RING road curves ahead. I’m cruising along here and my mind turns over. My father. Me old dad: he was all nervy, a flurry of too many things to do, but he’d stop and puff himself up. Try and give an example. Think. OK. It’s a Sunday morning. I’m thirteen years old. My mother asks over breakfast how I intend to spend my day. I say I’m not sure whether I want to go to my room, to do the homework I need to do before the end of the weekend, now or this evening.
My father considers this a moment, frowns across the kitchen table, nods gravely and – though I’d not asked for any response from him at all – says, ‘Son. You do whichever you feel like doing.’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I will.’ It’s not possible to say, Of course I’ll do what I feel like doing. I, Dad. Me.
And a little later a neighbour will drop by and I’ll overhear Mum tell her, ‘The lad’s in his room, studying. His dad told him to do his homework now instead of this evening, get it over and done with and out of the way, if that was what he felt like doing. So he’s in there now.’
And my father, sitting by the fire, rolling himself a thin cigarette he’ll take outside to smoke, frowns with smug sagacious modesty. The wise father.
I guess, looking back, my mother really was as stupid as him. Dad’s paternal authority was based on a weak impression of command, but it convinced Mum as well as himself. Well, he fooled me for a few years. I have a child’s image of him discarding a finished cigarette: he held it between thumb and forefinger and he had a habit of flicking it away, into the mud, with great deliberation; with a flourish. An image from the years when I still loved and respected him.
In my memory our mum spent all day preparing the evening meal. That’s all I see her doing: slowly washing, mixing, plucking, stringing it out like an old lag consigned to kitchen duties. Coping with the tedium by taking any excitement or creativity out of cooking, sliding into a trance.
‘Always peel your potatoes in advance,’ I can hear her advising her daughter. ‘Save time later, Melody. Cut them up and leave them to soak.’ Generations of women letting the vitamins in potatoes leach out.
Dad and I were doomed to fight. He alw
ays considered me lazy. He lacked the imagination to see that reading, and study, could demand intense and exhausting commitment. Because he in his time had idled through school, a prison sentence to be endured, he thought scholars were just people who actually enjoyed daydreaming. Dad lived in the body, expressing himself in action, and nothing else made sense.
When I look back now, what saddens me is that a lifetime’s rumbling conflict was based on such an absurd misunderstanding. I try and tell myself that this is not possible, it’s too pathetic to be true, that there was surely a genetic, a chemical, incompatibility between us. That in fact we were too alike, two tall, thin, clumsy men desperate to achieve what we set out to in this world. We were reflections of each other, Dad and I, distorting mirrors that showed us only our flaws.
Dad made fun of my reading and I fought him, and our love was fierce and tense and fluctuating. Mum supported me, always, and all I’ve had for her has been contempt, really, for the self-imposed limits of her existence. Now I can appreciate what it took to raise three children, the years of selflessness in which Greg and I and Melody could begin to grow in our own directions. But the brutal fact is that this recognition can’t wipe away the derision that built up in my feelings towards her over so many years.
I do my best to love Mum, a dutiful middle-aged son, to play my albeit junior role to Greg and Melody in providing everything she needs in her gaping dotage, but it’s too late for me to take my mother seriously.
Greg too was mystified by his younger brother’s bookishness. He was as sharp and jumpy as Dad on the stall: before he’d reached double figures Greg could haggle in a variety of styles, from flirtation to insult, generosity to pleading, according to what you deemed this or that customer was most likely to be seduced by. He could tot up running totals of this many strawberries and that much cabbage as he weighed them out; was able to file an interim figure on a little shelf in his brain if he needed to chat about the weather or invite the lady to give his ripe banana a prod any time she liked; and then, as soon as note or coins had changed hands, each sum was erased from Greg’s mental slate.