by Jude Cook
It was in this demolition-scarred no-man’s-land of south London that, one night, she attended a party thrown by graduate teachers in a Habitat-infested flat. That providential evening she arrived late, finding the hashish-demented revelry in full swing. Twenty minutes in, and her gaze fell on a shortish, balding man wearing square clothes, grappling with a 45 rpm single held by the host, himself resplendent in beatnik black. The two were face to face, eyes bulging.
‘I don’t care if they’re the latest thing,’ the shortish, balding man protested, ‘it’s those unbearable voices and that thud, thud, thud—the tyranny of the beat!’
A foreign female voice (of the erotic type always present at parties) offered, ‘It ish only rocks schmoosic. Don’t ve so anal!’
‘Yes, Des,’ said the host, now slightly calmer, ‘this ain’t your party—and we’ll have the bastard Beatles if I say so.’
A cheer went up from the few interested souls who had overheard this deeply embarrassing exchange between two men in their late twenties.
‘Here. Vivaldi. The Four Seasons!’ said Des, desperately. ‘I’m sure if we did a quick poll of the room, if we put it to the vote, then Vivaldi would come out on top.’ A sweat—for it was a broiling summer night in the mid 1960s, with all the sash windows thrown open to the static, dust-flavoured air—had appeared on the unappetising dome of Desmond Easy’s head. ‘Think of your neighbours! You’ve come close to being slung out already …’
At this point, the single over which the two men were still tussling snapped crisply down the middle and a disapproving groan could be heard around the room. This seemed to decide the matter. And so the old Venetian had his way. Soon the cramped quarters swelled with the rarefied pizzicatos and tiptoeing melodies of ‘Summer’. The cackles and chatter resumed, escaping out to the bewildered street below.
It also decided something in the vertiginous Goyaesque beauty holding a lonely glass of Cinzano that was Sinead Mary Maguire. Here was a man, she mused, with whom she could fall in love; a man of sensibility, intellect (‘slung out’—she loved that! And, over the years, it would become a phrase she would grow to hate more than any other on earth). Here was a man not afraid to give his opinion, to fight for it (again, a quality that would eventually drive her to paroxysms of Irish distraction). Above all, he sported leather patches on the elbows of his diseasedly brown corduroy jacket. This, for her, denoted adulthood. She had finally arrived. Sure, he was almost shoulder-height to her and she had seen newborn babies possessed of more hair, but in that split-second … (that manful struggle over the record, representing the battle between two extremes; of high culture with low, of black rollnecks with professorial corduroy, of Ringo Starr with Vivaldi—plus the sexy ‘snap!’ made by the vinyl in the stultifying night) … in that split-second something had been decided: here was the man who would father her child.
And that child was me.
They married within the year and moved first to the blighted satellite town of Luton, then to neighbouring Hamford on realising that a concrete post-nuclear wasteland of piss-filled underpasses (and where, indeed, most of the buildings resembled public urinals) was no place to bring up a child. Hamford, with its broad avenues of deciduous trees, placid, murky river and Norman church, its outlying estates that promised (and delivered) unimaginable violence, would soon become a mythical place for me; but for newly-wed regular hardworking Desmond and his attractive wife it was just a place to send a kid to nursery school that wasn’t Lewisham. Things were good in Hamford for a couple of years. After I appeared, Sinead took eighteen-months’ leave from the local junior school where she was again making fast progress with the magic wooden letters. And Des, tired from a day analysing a new commando-strength laxative, would appear every evening with his tie askance, hungry for the phenomenal Irish stews that had played such a vital role in Sinead’s wooing of him. Every night at six p.m. she would hear his key in the lock and there he’d be—every night (if that were possible) slightly balder and ready to rest his head where it most naturally fell due to their height difference: on her sternum.
Yes, things were good for a couple of years in Hamford, if not a little … well, boring. In retrospect, this could have been the end-of-life-as-she-knew-it for Sinead Easy (the atrophying of those vital energies) if it wasn’t for what happened when she returned to the school. She met a man. She met a man who would eventually (and literally) sweep her off her feet—that most destructive of female aspirations. To quote my namesake, maidens, like moths, are ever caught by glare. His name was Delph. Delph Tongue. Scandinavian in origin, so I’m told. And he was (very Lady Chatterley’s this) the assistant caretaker, the man who painted the glutinous, supernaturally straight pure white lines on the football field every summer. And also a man who had watched her—married, unavailable Sinead Easy—walk through the low gates every day like a galleon-tall, devil-black vision of erotic invitation.
I’ve often wondered why my mother—so nurturing, so at home in the bewildering polytheistic universe of the under-five—only ever wanted one child. It has taken a number of years to realise that, for her, dealing with children every day brought her close to tearful and justified mass murder. It looks like an easy gig, teaching: those endless holidays that stretch long into scorched August; the early finish to the day leaving the evening free to run a red biro facetiously over a couple of exercise books. But you would be wrong. I read somewhere that only airline pilots and those in the nursing profession suffer the same stress-levels as teachers. Cases of burn-out, if not outright crack-ups and suicides, are high. A teacher’s mornings and evenings are often filled with interminable meetings, sandwiching the daily descent into the braying aviary of the classroom. And then they have to take it all home with them, in the form of essays to mark, lessons to plan, administrative assessments to wade through. It must be like having homework for ever.
So it was this life that Sinead Easy (aged thirty-three) found herself leading; and it was into this life that strutting, cocksure northerner Delph Tongue walked. The truth was, after a couple of years in Hamford, Sinead’s veneer was beginning to chip off. Every night she’d flop crimson-eyed into bed after a day of unintelligible mayhem and five hours of epic marking. Every night a little less beautiful. Every night a little less certain why life had to be lived, or what it was even for. Desmond would be in his armchair, listening detestably to Radio Four, some half-brick-heavy tome open on his lap. Often he’d be picking his nose. She felt like the classic neglected woman. Then along came Delph.
It helped that he was a northerner too. They had that instant rapport born only of geographical serendipity. Though of Dutch or Danish parentage, this Viking had grown up in the grim wool-town of Wakefield and had spent his early twenties drifting from job to job, itinerant and predatory. A narcissist with shaky self-esteem, he was an aggressive, dominant man. Also, it would transpire, a very strange human being. He was even taller than Sinead, an attribute she had learnt to value ever since her teenage days of towering over sweating suitors in the cinema queue. When he was finally introduced to me as ‘Uncle Delph’, I remember thinking he had the ugliest name I had had the displeasure to hear up to that point in my short life. Tongue. Delph Tongue. How the forename seemed to me phonetic of inadmissible sloppiness. Like the sound of a flannel or towel roughed between coalsack-hairy buttocks. The squidgy ‘ph’ mimetic of drying underpants. Ignorant of its Nordic roots, it sounded to me like one of those mid-fifties American boy-names like Ralph or Wayne or Duane or Dean, made all the more ludicrous for its displacement to grey rain-racked Wakefield. An awful used-johnny of a name. A stupid, juvenile, jaunty name for a man. A name never forgotten once injected into the fire-bright bloodstream of a young life.
And then the surname: Tongue. So biologically explicit, redolent of meaty flesh and puking; strangely congruent when appended to Delph, perhaps the most perfect onomatopoeic for chucking up you will ever find.
The two of them embarked on a torrid secret affair which laste
d eighteen months, containing all the usual pulse-quickening rendezvous (store cupboard, groundsman’s hut, staffroom sofa after-hours), plus lies and evasions of such labyrinthine complexity that even Richard Nixon would have had trouble keeping up (the Watergate scandal running roughly concurrent with their great amour). After almost two years of adultery, they were at the stage where—like in all the most terrible TV movies—the phrase ‘we can’t keep doing this’ would conclude their every liaison. Then fate threw them a hand. Diatrix decided to transfer temporarily some of its less vital employees to France. So Desmond Easy found himself leaving his groaning shelves of beloved books for a one-room coldwater flat in smoke-belching Lille for a fortnight at a time. This was the green light the affair needed. In Desmond’s absence, athletic (but mentally tortoise-slow) Delph would take up residence, leaving only when the joyously unwitting cuckold returned to see his five-year-old boy—me.
Previously, Sinead had been neurotically fastidious about secrecy. She had learnt her lesson from the married headmaster up in Leeds. I once asked her why she kept referring to Delph as my uncle, when my father had reliably informed me that I didn’t have any, only aunties. I remember my mother suddenly averting her eyes and straightening the mauve headscarf which she always wore in those days.
‘Well, your father’s not always right.’
‘But either he’s right or you’re right or someone is fibbing.’
‘Jesus wept!’ moaned my mother, her eyebrows raised at this interrogation. ‘Will you give it a rest. He’s your bloody uncle. You’ve been asking the same question all week. Now go and play.’
‘But I don’t like to play,’ I pleaded. ‘The big boys say they will steal my bike.’
‘You tell me which boys next time, and we’ll see how big they are.’
I remember Delph entering the room at this point. Unreliable Uncle Delph—long before he became my stepfather. He always appeared from nowhere, like a gargoyle-faced ghost. He was tall, physically taut and overbearing. I hated him.
‘Are you my real uncle, Delph?’
He didn’t answer. He merely gave his equivocal smile which often looked like a sneer to me. My mother flashed him a glance of desperate appeal.
‘Will you hark at him!’ she cried. ‘He’s like a stuck record. As if I didn’t have enough books to mark.’
Delph turned to me, and spoke in a voice much louder than I had expected. This always scared me.
‘Don’t cheek your mother!’ he boomed in his porridgy Yorkshire accent. Then, with real nastiness, when mother was out of earshot: ‘One day your bloody mouth will get you hung.’
For eighteen months nobody in the school knew about their ‘shenanigans’ (as Sinead herself described them). Their affair had been conducted as espionage; with coded meeting times left in pigeonholes or playground bins. Now she didn’t care. Let the world know she had been neglected; that she was deliriously in love with an assistant school caretaker! Let the net curtains twitch until they fell to pieces in the hands of those with nothing better to do!
Somehow I made it through to my thirteenth birthday alive.
I am standing in the mica-bright khazi of the train, sweating. I’m also shaking, hyperventilating and invoking Allah. I can’t be sure if my teeth aren’t chattering too. My forehead, that dome of shameful retreat, that Dunkirk of the follicles, is resting on the mercifully cool plane of the steel mirror. Once I’ve squeezed the tears from my eyes I find I’m staring at a thundering stream of my own urine as it hoses away the fascinating stains already present in the aluminium thimble of the toilet bowl. Impressive. That’s a lot of puke for four in the afternoon. The part of my mind that is still rational informs me that it would take a Scottish football team a number of hours to produce that much vomit. I’ve seen troughs on cross-Channel ferries or in the Gents of a rugby club at six in the morning on New Year’s Day that held approximately the same amount of sick. But never in the cramped can of a British Rail train at four in the afternoon. We haven’t even moved yet. The bar isn’t open for another twenty minutes!
As I watch the expressive rope of piss (still going strong one minute in) churn through the regurgitated prawns of a thousand hors-d’oeuvres, the carrots of a main course, then finally the laval swirls of a colourful dessert, I start to laugh. The kind of laugh that sounds like sobs to anyone who doesn’t know you well, or isn’t in the immediate vicinity, like the queue that’s surely beginning to form outside the bolted door. I start to bang my forehead rhythmically against the sheen of the metal, producing a pleasing concussive effect every time I pull away. Oh dear, oh dear. The pain of providing all that—it must’ve been close to childbirth. Whoever came up with that much spew must be walking around with half their original body weight. The confined booth of the bog has taken on a different atmospheric pressure due to the stink of it. I let out a last hoot of derision as I zip my fly. Then I stop. Hold on—that puke. That’s mine. That’s my puke. That’s what I did first before I finally unloaded the seismic pressure on my bladder … So what happened? And why am I still shaking?
This is what happened.
Five minutes ago I was sweating on the tartan seat of the train, in a kind of suspended state; a levitation or trance from the stress of remembering. The stress of encountering so much past in the present. This, after all, was half my mission, but I didn’t feel equal to it. Hamford isn’t a place I visit very often when trawling the archives. For a start, I haven’t been back for ten years. There doesn’t seem any point. Nor have I spoken to my father. After my mother’s second marriage (to Delph, who else?) ended in a trauma of broken furniture and immense vindication for everyone who said it would never last, she moved up north. Back to her people. Or what few of them there were, with her mother dead and her old man a toothless miner who, like Delph’s, sat wrapped in a travel rug by the coal scuttle all day, conjuring myths and roses from the flames. She was happy there, she said, with her own.
So my mother was gone. I was barely nineteen. And then, around the same time, my father decided to emigrate. Always a man to take life’s blows lying down, always too easy; always conforming to nomenclatural accident, he found himself involved with one of the research operatives Diatrix employed in Lille. Research operative was a euphemism for human guinea pig, those drifters and loners who willingly allow fearsome strains of newly patented drugs (in this case laxatives) to pass through their systems in exchange for francs. Usually people who’d tried everything in life twice already, and still hadn’t found their place in the world. Wasters, economic migrants, clochards—haggard survivors of bottom-dollar hotel work, stints of fry-cheffing, college terms of life modelling, prostitution, begging, smudging and skanking. This particular woman, Des’s chosen chérie, was a sparrow-thin ex-grape-picker named Emmanuelle Deborache. A woman who habitually found herself in Lille when the vine harvest ended, knocking on doors for cleaning jobs. The chance to take her life in her own hands (or at least, the future of her colon) by ingesting the sulphurous and virulent shit-inducers concocted by Des and his colleagues must’ve seemed like a gift from heaven. The money was fantastic; the hours great, although they often tested full-strength on a Friday to give the operative the weekend to recover. This played merry havoc with my father’s courtship of the Piaf-like Frenchwoman when cinema seats had to be hastily vacated on a Saturday night, or when entire restaurants were cleared by a single fart as new ‘X-Shift’ found its tenure in Emmanuelle’s digestive system.
They married in a leaf-strewn registry office on a rainy morning in November 1990, six months after meeting each other. The best man was Des’s French boss, Didier. The witness was Emmanuelle’s scowling sister, Marie (as strikingly fat as Emmanuelle was strikingly thin). There were no other guests. A year later they emigrated on a whim to Sydney. I have often thought my father’s island upbringing, somewhere in the lost patterning of his subconscious, informed this move. And I am sure I have many emaciated and bald little half-brothers and sisters who are impressively bilingual
. But I’ll never find out. Unless one of us picks up that telephone.
So Hamford—that sweet Ithaca—isn’t a place I visit very much, physically or mentally. The long, elm-shrouded avenues must still dance with tree-thrown shadows under the blissful agitation of a June breeze. The mythologised sandpits and treehouses where I played (and once found a sodden, discarded flat cap seething with earwigs) must cringe to the sound of other children’s laughter. The fag-strewn, rotten-vegetable palisades of the market where I ingested my first tab of acid, the one bearing the cartoon squiggle of a Pink Panther, must now be suffering vandalism by other biker-jacketed lads, their collars up against the tidal teenage night. The place is still there, in the memory, but I’m absent … So, back there in my cramped seat, I found myself in a kind of altered state, a translucent stasis. After ten minutes of intense meditation—the soul visiting, enraptured; dazed by vividness—I discovered that I was bursting for a piss. And not a little sick. I caught a flash of myself in the darkened train window and saw a half-bald, salmon-faced tippler who hadn’t spoken to his father for ten years. And I knew I had to go. My mission: the khazi.
It wasn’t easy.
For a start I upset the game of dominoes the Accountant Couple had been playing ever since I put my notebook away. Such a simple movement—onto my feet, palms pressed against the bare surface, a twist of the hips and then out—but so much carnage. Ten apologies later and I was snaking down the aisle, absorbing the punishment of innumerable glances. Yes, I’m drunk! It’s Christmas Eve, for God’s sake! A quick pratfall over a suitcase someone had helpfully left in my path (and which seemed to intensify the steel blade in my bladder) found me in front of the flimsy door to the loo. A strip on the ridge of the handle showed red. Engaged. I started hammering.
‘You in there long?’
There was no answer. I started to feel the first bilious twinge; a pigeon-like undulation of the Adam’s apple. ‘I’m bursting …’