by Tim Pears
I tried to learn from him. ‘Like a teacher wiping the blackboard,’ I ventured.
‘No,’ Greg frowned, slowly. ‘Like a bookie,’ he said.
On occasional Wednesday evenings we were invited to accompany Dad on his one and only hobby. The stadium was situated a few streets away from us. As well as dog racing, it also hosted speedway which, since it didn’t interest Dad, Greg and I only ever heard: a whine, like a plague of angry motorbikes descending through the night sky, reached us in our beds.
‘There’s no pleasure in gambling on machines,’ our father claimed. ‘Think about it, boy.’
In the holidays Dad would tell Mum, as we sat around the dinner table, ‘The lads can come to the track with me tomorrow night,’ as if good and generous news was unmanly unless filtered through a woman.
‘Why can’t I come, Daddy?’ Melody complained.
‘You’re too young!’ Greg or I would authoritatively inform her. ‘It’s not for girls!’
But the satisfaction gained from this confirmation of our maturity was short-lived, since none of us could bear to see Melody disappointed, so the rest of the evening was spent competing with each other to promise her the best consolation.
‘I’ll take you tadpoling,’ I could suggest.
‘Let’s go to the pet shop,’ Greg would trump me, ‘and watch the aquariums.’
Melody gave us her tolerant smile.
‘Don’t spoil her,’ Mum said, and then, ‘You can come shopping with me Saturday, love, and we’ll have tea at Lyons.’
‘We’ll split our winnings with you,’ Dad declared, which amused not only Melody but every one of us.
On the night of the dogs Dad would be involved in some odd-job or paperwork. The time Greg and I knew we ought to leave would come and be long gone when he’d abruptly drop what he was doing, bark, ‘Jump to it, lads, we’re late! On our way!’ and stride out of the yard. Dad rolled and lit a cigarette as he marched, Greg and I lagging behind his brisk pace then scurrying to catch up, in children’s awkward, unfair trot-walk.
In the executive lounge of the stadium fat and pallid people in synthetic clothes sat in a gruesome wash of bright light and plastic, ate scampi and chips and sipped their beer or Babycham, and gambled in a polite manner. Not us.
We were out on the concrete terraces in a nervous crowd of men, up from the bookies leaning their blackboards against the fence along the home straight. If he remembered, Dad bought himself a pint of beer, and bottles of Coca-Cola with straws in for Greg and I. The floodlights made people who strayed into their glare too realistic. Dressed in cotton coats, dog owners paraded their hounds to and fro before each race. Fragile, tight bundles of springy sinew bred for brief speed, who’d been steered to an evolutionary fulfilment in this tedious, eternal, uncomplaining circling of race-tracks after a motorised hare.
The bookies stood with one hand on their board’s shoulder, a stub of chalk and a duster in the other, and they kept stealing glances at each other’s boards like girls at a dance.
Checking his competitors –3–1 on here, on dog number three; 7–2 there – a tout erases figures and chalks up 4–1. Some of the punters were systematic gamblers who spread their bets in good time, but the ones you looked for and couldn’t take your eyes off as the tension began to build before each race were the men standing at the back of the terraces to get a wide view of all the blackboards, the gimlet-eyed men, blinking less as a race approached, watching the bookies chalking and wiping and changing the odds. Men who’d forgotten to eat, and smoked their cigarettes hungrily. On the days he felt lucky, Dad was up amongst them. Men with beaked noses and unnatural stillness who ignored the dogs being gathered behind the starting cages, watched only the bookies’ boards, the dusters and chalk, until, when the dogs were in and the gates about to be sprung, the men swooped down the terraces and swiped their wads of dosh all at the same tout, whichever one had outguessed his fellows with the best odds on offer at the last possible moment. Then the race shot off.
Here I am, tracing the ring road, as ridiculous as any greyhound. I’ll turn off for work next time around.
I loved the dogs but I was frustrated by an inability to grasp the essential nature of the event, which Greg clearly got without having to try. It took me a while to even catch on that it was not about the dogs, the sport, the racing. It wasn’t social, it wasn’t the men or the beer. ‘OK,’ I told Greg, ‘it’s about the money. I can see that.’ But I still couldn’t. It was right in front of my eyes. I tried to work it out, to find the logic at the heart of it. The punters didn’t care about the dogs, and neither did the bookies. They never even looked at the dogs until a race started. No one had superior knowledge of form, fitness, potential. The dogs were living dice thrown on to the track, their placings from race to race, week to week, almost entirely arbitrary.
‘It’s about the odds,’ Greg explained to me when finally I asked him. ‘Men put their money on the odds.’
Far from solving a riddle, Greg’s lucid explanation only moved it further away, because the logic of the game is one men either feel in their guts or miss altogether. ‘That means they’ve got no control,’ I complained. I was nine or ten then, thirsting for clarity.
‘I know,’ Greg smiled. ‘Gambling, John. It’s great, isn’t it?’
No, Greg wasn’t stupid, not at all. He was a dab hand with a slide rule and he memorised half of his log tables. He did well at school, passed exams in almost every subject, but he left at sixteen to enter the family firm. For Greg, school books and other ones were entirely utilitarian objects, their value measurable by the information they stored, their status as collectible items or, yes, he would accept, the pleasure they gave. ‘Or insight, or understanding, or wisdom, John,’ Greg would concede. ‘Sure.’ It was just that whatever qualities you said books possessed had to be at least theoretically measurable to make any sense.
Greg still sees things this way. If you tell him Lily took you to see the new film showing at the Paradise he’ll say, ‘Was it good? What do you give it, John? Marks out of ten?’
Our mother’s timidity made her a detective. She had to construct portraits of people – not even their secret lives, merely basic facts about them – from the flimsiest evidence. Surveillance from behind net curtains, glances on the street. She hoarded these observations and what she deduced from them, and only brought them out in the open when she felt that we, her audience, were ready.
‘You know that chap who moved in to the old house on the corner,’ Dad said one dinnertime. ‘With the Ford. Couldn’t get it started this morning. He had to handcrank it, I haven’t seen anyone do that in years.’
‘Poor Mr Budgen,’ our mother chose to contribute. ‘I hope his hands were not harmed.’
A general mystified silence, expectant stares.
‘Mr Budgen, I believe, is something of a musician.’
‘He is?’
Our mother nodded sententiously. ‘He was carrying a piece of sheet music under his arm the other day.’ Turning to my brother and me, she said, ‘If you see Mr Budgen struggling with his car again, boys, you might offer to help push-start it. Or get your father to fix up a tow. Mr Budgen is a sensitive man.’
Mum revealed in such moments of triumph only, in reality, the paucity of her privileged information, and how negligible was her contact with other people. You understood at once she’d never exchanged so much as a word with Mr Budgen. Such moments provided also the closest she came to criticising our father, to engaging with him at any kind of contentious level – critical burrs which sailed right by him. The next time Dad, our uncouth, outgoing father, saw this Budgen character he’d be sure to greet him, ‘How are you, mate? We heard that you tickle the old ivories.’
Let me admit something: I can be sly. Cunning. I observe things. I always have.
At the age of ten or eleven I noticed that our mother possessed a strange and furtive habit. After visiting the lavatory my mother, I began to notice, would worry that she had
n’t flushed the toilet, and would return to check, invariably re-emerging a moment later without having had to do anything.
Over a period of days, I cottoned on to what Mum was doing. I’d hear the flush of the toilet and rush to the bathroom. If it was our mother who emerged I’d come up with a reason to stick close by her over the following minutes. Sure enough, she’d become oddly uneasy, and I do believe I knew why before she did. After a minute or two she’d stop what she was doing and return to ascertain she’d flushed the toilet or that the flush had actually carried away her effluent. I’d follow her at a distance.
This little routine – the creeping uneasiness, the compulsive return – was unvarying, yet no one else seemed ever to notice, which says a lot about Mum’s low profile.
I never told her. I never told my brother, either, and already then I told Greg everything. I suspect Mum was only dimly aware of this habit of hers, or at least would have been shocked to be told that she did it every time she performed an evacuation of any kind – which she, after all, like the rest of us, did and does a dozen times a day. So I never told her. It was enough satisfaction to me, even then, to know. And, I confess, some part of my sly mind thought it might be useful to hold in reserve for a time when it might be needed. When I could use it against her.
Melody joined Greg and me helping Dad on the stall on Saturdays. ‘My little customer magnet,’ he called her, and he was right. People queued up to be served by Melody, and they were patient when she forgot the price of beans or had to call on Greg to help add up a convoluted order. But sometimes it wasn’t so obvious, or focused, you just realised that the stall was pulling people towards it in a way that didn’t happen when Melody wasn’t there.
‘Oh, she’s so pretty, your girl,’ frowning, middle-aged women told Dad, as if accusing him of obtaining her illegally, or as if her parents had contrived to somehow exaggerate her looks.
‘She’s such a pretty one,’ they’d say to Greg or me, shaking their heads, as if to inform us, Aren’t you lucky brothers? But also, Poor girl, poor father, poor family, what she, they, have in store. Foretelling a future, inevitable catastrophe. Which in a way, some might say, turned out to be the case. Though not me, oh no. Not me.
Years later, in therapy, to which I was referred by my GP in the hope of curing the depression that dogged me all through my twenties, the therapist did her best to convince me that the burial of envy of my older brother’s attention, if not the denial of jealousy at a younger sister’s arrival, had been devouring me all these years.
‘Own your envy,’ she urged me. She was a prematurely white-haired wise woman and she was all wrong for me. I divulged the information I felt I should, and had it turned against me. She had me make up stories. Strange spontaneous fairy tales emerged from my mouth. Out in her consulting room the oxygen of her, our, attention destroyed them. She seized upon disintegrating fragments.
‘What does this figure, the simple-minded mother, mean? Why did you say that in those words?’
‘It’s fiction,’ I said.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘What are our whole lives, if not fictional narratives? And where, if not in fiction, can we be our true selves?’
We discussed art, me the philistine merchant. Painting and sculpture. Yes, fruitseller, that’s right, market-trader. People forget I went to university. A yow-yow barrow boy, living it up with the Hooray Henrys, the ya-yas and the la-di-das.
It’s ironic, Greg and I were earning cash, real money, from early on, as soon as I joined him, during a period, in the late seventies, when the best art was critical of any kind of economic enterprise. Money was evil. I read novels, watched films, attended plays that inveighed against the iniquities being perpetrated upon society by men such as myself. Socially, people spat out the words capitalist, bourgeois, liberal, expelling dung-words from the sanctity of their mouths.
‘Late Capitalism,’ they’d claim, referring to the period we were then living through, ‘has completed the transformation of works of art into commodities!’
How times change. Little did they realise it was – still is – Early Capitalism.
My therapist and I had fantastical conversations, as she sought the truth behind the fiction of a self I presented to the world. I was unhappy. Why? Women don’t love me. Did your mother love you? Or is it that I don’t love women? Remember the mother figure in that story you told me? Let us discuss her, no? I have some ideas about her.
I wonder now whether my therapist was not a great and thwarted artist – in the same way that for a while certain critics saw themselves as artists. Or maybe, in fact, not thwarted at all. I mean, does art need an audience?
The therapist’s only audience was the bringer of the material she worked with, the bearer of cargo. Her audience of one was also the canvas she worked on. Her form, and her content, were at the same time her living witness. Perhaps that was and is enough?
My therapist wasted weeks trying to persuade me I was in love with my mother – not that she believed it, it was merely a hypothesis that needed to be tested, but like an article of faith in gods or quarks I had to admit it in order for it to be tested in the first place. Yet she entirely overlooked the possibility that I might be in love with my sister. I’m not saying I am, but if the poor cow had asked to see the photos that I carry in my wallet of each member of my immediate family, man would she not have changed tack instantly? Watch that boom. Everybody duck. This boat is changing direction.
An abiding image I have of Melody is from when she was a teenager, fifteen or sixteen, at the pretty, lissom height of her loveliness: I was in town and I happened to spot her walking alone along the bustling High Street. Her dark lustrous hair, her Mediterranean complexion, her almond eyes. Aware of other eyes upon her. Perhaps most teenagers suffer a particular self-consciousness, this assumption that they are the centre of others’ attention, but in Melody’s case, it was true! She didn’t hunch herself in, no, she still walked tall as she always did as a child, but I saw how she was both bashful and surprised by the head-turning, stalk-eyed gawking she attracted, walking through the shopping passers-by.
That was it: my sister looked startled by her own beauty.
My favourite breakfast as a child was a fry-up. Looking back, it was the only meal Mum didn’t boil or strain the taste out of. There’s no cooking involved, is there? Unless you count the potato cakes, or croquettes as Mum called them. They had to be mashed and mixed and coated, though I don’t imagine she added mace, nutmeg, even parsley.
Croquettes. I’d forgotten: Mum started giving all sorts of dishes foreign – French – names. Without changing the way she cooked them. ‘Parisian potatoes,’ she’d say as she plonked a plate of cubed chips on the table. ‘Pommes Anna,’ she said proudly as she cut into a splodge of spud it’d taken her hours to ruin.
It’s a bad thing to be ashamed, isn’t it? Shame has no place in the modern world. We want authenticity. The details betray us. Take Mum, who was brought up in the northern suburbs of Greater London, and had elocution lessons when young. Though not enough, not nearly. I believe some of the brighter girls in her class, no, more likely the best-behaved, had been awarded the prize of a few such lessons in which they were taught to mimic the vowel sounds of the upper middle class. The rain in Spain, and all that. Four score poor Moors. But the result in my mother’s case is that she’s sounded ever since like a mimic; her speech a never-ending pastiche. If a stranger overheard her talking to a person born and bred in the class she aspires to they’d be hard pressed to guess whether she was acting cravenly towards that person or parodying them.
Because certain vowels my mother exaggerates. Corn, dawn, last in her mouth subtly longer than they should. She ends up speaking English, her mother tongue, sounding like someone incredibly close to conquering a foreign language. An immigrant into the middle class, not in it at all, not even in her own head. And one vowel sound above all betrays her estuarine origins: her elocution lessons must have been cut short before t
hey got to How now brown cow. Instead of sounding haughty she pronounces that syllable like a cat’s miaow. In a more self-confident woman such words could have remained as stubborn vestigial homages to her respectable working-class heritage. But not our mother.
My brother and I took on our father’s, our own local, West Midlands accent. Greg’s is almost as broad as I remember Dad’s being, while mine has been neutralised by the company I’ve sought.
At school, in the neighbourhood in which we grew up, being a successful pupil automatically rendered you a suspicious alien, a clever dick, ripe for ridicule and bullying. This struck me as unfair, since I’d made no conscious effort to push myself forward to the front of the class. I simply wrote essays, handed in homework, sat exams, and tended to receive high marks.
Having Greg as an older brother shielded me from actual threat, but I could sense resentment. And whether it was this or merely the habit of working hard during my progress through Headley Comprehensive School, I gradually developed ambition. It kindled inside me, and it was stoked by a desire to grow out of our world, to see what lay beyond; to make my own mark out there, to build a home far grander than any prefab, to live and work well away from fruit and vegetables.
I woke up early – I was a light sleeper, and I think Dad made just enough noise to wake me when he drove out of the yard – and used to lie in bed thinking of the future, making plans at dawn. On the way to school I shared my dreams with Greg, and he told me his, which were the opposite of mine, and it must have been the sharing itself that made us respectful of each other’s divergent journeys.
Greg set up a second stall as soon as he could drive, shortly after his seventeenth birthday. He drove a van to weekly markets in towns around about us. I knew Greg planned to expand the business, that he would work as hard as Dad but that he’d also employ other people – a tactic Dad regarded as reckless – buy more vans, maybe rent a shop.