by Jude Cook
The memory of this experience has resulted in a peculiar idea: maybe there is no heaven—because we have had it already. In childhood. All notions of Eden may stem from this. A moment during a childhood day—not the photo-moment, misleadingly captured—but a real, living sun-gloried afternoon when time stood still. Usually in a sylvan setting. My hours in the long grass of the overgrown tennis court approached this notion of the paradisal. After all, the word ‘paradise’ derives from the Persian for ‘garden’. It is a memory unique to each of us: plural, though defiantly singular in its particularities. A seafront somewhere; a taste; a safe hand. The Godlike hour afforded every man. If we were to locate this moment, this second caught in a windfall of light, on the grid of memory it would be at the centre, the very apex. The absolute centre of experienced time, by which we judge all other moments. That flash of high balance, with the sun so sympathetic to the leaves, the leaves so sympathetic to the sun. That hour of splendour in the grass. Our adult memories can never compete with this paragon, this near-Platonic recollection. What can we provide to compete with it? The wedding day? The best night of sex we ever had? The great meal with friends that gives one the sensation of life deepening sensually and emotionally? All are shadowed by time, corrupted by time. They all tear past too rapidly, are located on the outskirts of the brain’s memory map. On the dim periphery. No, it is the childhood sun-epiphany that occupies the throne. It is eternal for as long as we are. So maybe there is no heaven. No eternity. Because we have had it already. In that moment.
Back at the ticking house, things were about to change for ever, though I did not know it then. One of the last occasions when my mother, father and their boy were together was the cold Christmas I was allowed to chop the firewood. I must have been six or seven years old. Frost had settled on the red-hot pokers of the back garden; Russian gusts troubled the high branches of the birches and evergreens. Puddles became mirrors, oozing up brackish water when broken with the heel. Inside the warm cocoon of number fourteen were a couple of sealed-up Victorian fireplaces that Des had uncovered with pickaxe and monkey wrench. He claimed that a house without an open fire was ‘barbaric’. Once they were functional, he would sit close to the flames, a book open on his lap, Mendelssohn’s violin concertos in the background. And my mother itching with tedium, no doubt. That Christmas, I was helping him to fetch the newly halved logs in a wicker basket.
‘Are you really moving to France, Dad?’
He gave me his evaluating look and scratched his sweating pate. ‘I’m afraid so, but you’ll still see me. I’ll be back every two weeks to keep everything shipshape.’
‘Do you have to go? That means I’ll be with Mum all the time.’
‘I’m there for as long as Diatrix need me. And what’s wrong with your mother’s company all of a sudden?’
‘She might bring Uncle Delph around again. I don’t like him. He’s a freak.’
My father ceased unloading the logs and looked suddenly apprehensive, though he quickly disguised this by seeming out of breath. He puffed, ‘I think you’ll find his bark is worse than his bite.’ Then, thinking of Mum, he let out a bizarre chuckle. ‘More’s the pity … Come on, why don’t you help me chop the last of the wood.’
In the easy way that children are distracted from their preoccupations, I gasped: ‘Can I?!’
‘Why not? You’re getting to be a big boy now.’
In my excitement I started to dance around the room. I was aware that my father was sharing in my happiness—in a reserved way, of course: he always appeared uneasy during open displays of high spirits. Uncomfortable, as if he wanted them to end as soon as possible. He stood there with a look of broad approbation, a grin opening up his face. To hide his embarrassment at this pleasure he massaged his temples—both at once with thumb and forefinger spread, a characteristic movement. Then I did the worst possible thing: a silly spontaneous thing that still causes me inexplicable shame. I accidentally knocked his glasses off. They narrowly missed the flourishing fire and landed in the wood basket. At once this lit the blue touch paper of his temper, and he began scrabbling among the logs for his spectacles, hissing and cursing. In my panic and shame I ran outside into the failing light and waited for him. At the bottom of the garden the tall evergreens swayed like the conifers in Chagall’s Le Poète allongé.
He soon appeared, glasses replaced, slightly less ogreish, but still hassled, impatient. He took up the hand-axe and demonstrated how the logs should be split. Severely, he stated, on no account should the axe be brought down while holding the log. Instead, the sharp edge should be tapped into the wood, allowing enough purchase to lift both at the same time. Then he did a practice hit for my benefit. Smack! The wood parted effortlessly on the block.
He didn’t seem to have exerted any force at all—it was all in the angle, he told me. Then he passed the brutish blade to me. Of course, I immediately forgot his instructions. My trembling left hand grasped the dusty log. It was now or never. Upstairs, when he had assented to letting me chop the firewood, I had never felt closer to him. It was one of those father-and-son moments—my first and last, as I was to discover. But my act of rank clumsiness had left me feeling foolish, incompetent, degraded. An extreme reaction, you may ponder, but this is the Bildungsroman of a poet here, not an investment banker. I brought the axe down … and hit the thumb of my left hand with a square blow. Blood welled up, then a glimpse of bone; white and exposed like the dome of my father’s head. Expecting fireworks, I was to be proved wrong. Des merely took the axe and quietly led me through the blue back door in search of a tourniquet; the tall trees now even more like Chagall’s against a sky of furious purple.
Despite my bandaged hand dangling from a sling I managed to have the best Christmas Day I can remember. The nights preceding it were rich with an unforgettable excitement, the blue air deep and cold, ringing with carols. The opening of each gold-glitter window on the advent calendar caused an intolerable ache of anticipation. Then, on the magical morning itself, there seemed to be presents galore, some of them bought by Delph as an ingratiating gesture towards my mother, though I did not realise this at the time. I sat like young Stephen Dedalus, happy to see the real fire banked high and red in the grate, the Christmas pudding with its welding-torch party-hat borne in on a special plate. A sense of peace was the vital component here, the determining factor. Quietness and safety and excitement. The Christmases of childhood are always jewel-like, somnolent, special. Special in the qualities of the light: the gold and green created by the tall candles; the serene properties of purple enhanced by Christmas tree bulbs; the reflective silver bands on school-provided crêpe paper. Then there are the gilded, aureate flashes thrown by the Angel’s Wheel, as small flames are lit one after another; the radiant seraphim slowly beginning their flight over the copper bowl; the celestial chimes making the most sacred and delicate sound. Church bells from beyond the stars heard. A hushed, exalted time, the year all guttered out into short afternoons of dismal December rain and walloping winds. Also, the quietness of the living room on Christmas Eve, chocolate coins ransacked to the last wrapper, and only the intense nest of the tree for light, a cargo of gifts at its feet. There is a unique pre-emptory quiet that belongs exclusively to that silent night—a deep, restful hush that seems to emanate from every house on the street, as if, after long agony, the whole world had finally downed its weapons for an evening.
Enter Delph Tongue. The jolly thriving wooer. Who the fuck let him in? Well, my mother of course. My mother who was always there. And against the best advice. After Des took up residence in Lille, the posturing northerner was everywhere, as cheap and brash as his Brut aftershave. He was a tall man, muscular, with corpse-like cheekbones white and drawn under a thin Viking skin. His cleft-chinned face towered over me like some statue of Stalin in Red Square. However, as much like Uncle Joe as he eventually became, this being the seventies, his role model was the Travolta of Saturday Night Fever, and in accordance he wore his trousers too tight
and too flared: the awful bullybag on show at all times. In fact, this was at the core of my revulsion—in contrast to Des, he was an overly sexualised man: pheromonal, engorged, straining, erect. He carried an air of overmanning stupidity, of defiance and boundless ignorance. In those days, I used to bring my Gertrude breakfast in bed—and there they would both be, propped against the distressed pillows. There was a sense of urgency to this servile act—I had to be quick: with the two of them working in the same school, they left the house at different times. Stopped the tongues from wagging unnecessarily. There was also something inappropriate in the way Delph sat, naked down to his abdomen, among the luxurious covers as I handed him and mother the charred toast and milky tea. Mum would be deep in the duvet, a pinkish fresh look on her face that I hadn’t seen before, her jet black hair fanned and ringletted against the fat pillowcases. I would be wondering when my father was coming back and what he would think about another man in his bed. But I never questioned the fact of an ‘uncle’ sleeping with my mother. This was just what adults did, I surmised, when they reached a certain age. As I deposited the tray and the post on the sheets, Delph would always have a witless witticism to hand, the trademark of the humourless man. Men with no sense of humour shouldn’t attempt gags, that way they at least retain the kudos of the strong silent type. But this didn’t deter Delph.
‘You’re a cheeky one,’ he’d say, ‘barging in on two people with no clothes on.’
Where’s the wit in that? He would be smiling, as if he’d just delivered a devastating one-liner at the Carnegie Hall; waiting for the raucous applause.
‘Leave him alone, Delph,’ my mother would groan. ‘It makes a change to be waited on hand and foot.’
‘Aye. He’s like a little butler. Little Lord Fauntleroy!’ he chided, laughing indulgently.
Once mother had left for the school, and while my ‘uncle’ climbed into his paint-spattered overalls, I was regaled with gruesome stories about the hell-holes he had worked in: mental homes, meat-factories, sewers. Apocryphal or not, they were the kind of tales he probably thought would amuse a young lad. But instead they had a deeply disturbing effect. Before rising to the rank of school caretaker, Delph had worked as a mortuary assistant and grave-digger. One morning, as he zipped up his blue-cotton boiler suit, he said, ‘When you die, make sure you don’t leave your gold fillings in.’
‘But I don’t have any gold fillings. Mine are black,’ I replied, slightly bewildered as to why people wore gold where nobody could see it.
‘Oh aye, just make sure you don’t.’
‘But why?’
‘Cos those were the first things me and Tommy had out. Then the wedding rings. One got stuck on this old bloke’s finger. Like a bloody limpet, it were. We tried soap, hot water, everything. In the end we just chopped the bugger off.’
I gulped, ‘Was there … was there blood?’
‘Dead people don’t bleed, lad.’
‘Are they cold?’
‘Cold as ice. Well, they been int’ freezer. Best gag I played on Tommy was when we were switching shifts. I dressed one of the stiffs up in my clothes and sat him in a chair for when he came in. You shoulda seen the look on our Tommy’s face!’
‘Did you tell Mum this story?’
‘I wouldn’t blab about that to your mother, if I was you.’ He looked at me, and I saw all the animal cunning of his Aryan features. A kind of threat mingled with a base need for acceptance. ‘You should respect your mother. That’s your problem. You’re too cheeky by half. In my day you would’ve got the back of someone’s hand for telling on folk.’
Yes, these threats and mirthless practical jokes were his stock in trade. A sort of substitute for wit. I remember him concealing a real spider in a bathtowel for my mother to find, almost scaring her into a state of catatonia. Not a joke spider, you understand, but one of the eight-legged fiends from the downstairs can. There was an element of cruelty in these pranks, and of control, too, of dominance. As the years of his tenure drifted past he would try to assert his usurper’s authority in different ways, but at the time there were these chilling ruses. He also made it very clear to me that I would never beat him in a fight. Never. Not even when I was eighteen, twenty-five, thirty-five. He would strut around in a yellow posing pouch (which bore the laconic legend: ‘Danger—Long Vehicle’) and flex his pecs.
‘You’ll never win a fight with me. Even when you’re bigger. I’d bray thee.’
Ah, the archaic thees and thous—so shocking at first, so alien and impertinent to the ear, ludicrous in any context lacking an altar and a lectern. But every sentence seemed to contain one of these pronouns culled from the King James Bible. ‘Thou’s just a little sprat—skin and bone.’
Finally, on these strange mornings, he would challenge me to an arm wrestle. I crumpled, of course, but I felt I couldn’t lose face by backing down. And he always asked me to touch the straining, vein-throbbing heft of his biceps as he pretended to struggle: ‘Go on, feel that. Hard as bastard granite! Like Rocky in his flicks.’ Then my knuckles hit the canvas. I like to think my dad could have won such a contest, and looked forward to the day when I would, regardless of the threatening nonsense he poisoned me with.
Of course, this was the honeymoon period for Delph and Sinead, the golden summer of their ‘shenanigans’. They celebrated this with a nauseating, declarative ardour that was unsettling to behold. Delph would turn up at number fourteen with gift-wrapped bouquets of sickly carnations; trinket boxes containing necklaces and cheap-looking diamond rings; his ’n’ hers dressing gowns, and all manner of gaudy crap. But there was no disguising the smell of something rotten in the county of Hertfordshire. My mother suddenly and mysteriously took up keep-fit, putting in half an hour of aerobic stretches before work. Her wardrobe changed, too. Banished were the simple black suits that matched her eyebrows, in were seventies rollnecks, wigwam bell-bottoms, clingy tops and ringletted hair like Farrah Fawcett-Majors. Yes, the seventies had everything to do with the tastelessness of their epic amour fou. The dyspeptic dribble of free-love and bra-burning that had started in late ’69 had now morphed into a garish tide of anything-goes. The mid-seventies: nipples everywhere and inadvisable Stuart-era bouffants on every man. Powercuts, political scandal, peccadilloes. The disturbing physicality of disco. Instead of Mendelssohn, the house now bopped to those slick four-to-the-floor productions, all played off quaint 45 rpm singles. RAK, Columbia, Tristar. The high watermark of white flares. YessirIcanboogie. Saveallyourkissesforme. Youmakemefeellikedancingdancingdancing. Also never off the turntable, the eternal Christmassy harmonies of Abba. Sinead and Delph would mince around to this soundtrack for hours on their forbidden weekends before sitting glued to the television, seemingly joined at the hand and lip.
Naturally, their eternal summer started to fade. I remember the terror I felt on first overhearing a violent argument between them. My mother shrieking from the kitchen downstairs; the explosions of broken crockery; the leonine male voice roaring above it all. How could two people so detailedly devoted to each other find themselves in such combat? How could reechy kisses so swiftly turn to blows? It was a sickening paradox for me. Worst of all were the discordant scenes over food. Those unquiet meals made for many ill digestions. I remember Delph calling my mother ‘an ungrateful bitch’ at the dinner table, after she’d expressed mild dismay at a disastrous lasagne that he’d slaved over. The rest of the meal was sat out in excruciating silence as Sinead sobbed quietly, the food suddenly forlorn and inedible on everyone’s plate.
Delph would be in the habit of doing the weekly shopping, a great bootful of bags that filled the freezer to bursting point. This extravagance was in direct contrast to the occasional trips to the market for vegetables and fish that used to satisfy the palates of Des and his wife. To add to this abrupt reversal, Delph often spent time at the rickety kitchen table clacking out mini-printer sell-by dates which he affixed to every item before they were stored. A psychiatrist could probably make much of t
his prissy compulsion coupled with his strident masculinity. In fact, he exhibited all the unwitting campery that goes with overpoweringly masculine men. I always related this to the awful seventies virility of the Bee Gees—beards, gold, cream trousers. Their measurement of libido in a walk. So this was what it meant to be a man? Two decades previously it was a short-back-and-sides and doing your National Service that made you a man. Now it was a falsetto and a Colgate grin. I can recall my father, years later, when Sinead and Delph were unhappily married, calling his usurper a ‘woofter’ to a friend. Was there a touch of lavender in their later marriage? I was too young to tell, although I always found something anomalous about Delph’s flatmate, ‘Mike’, who we occasionally saw before my new uncle had his size elevens under the table. Now, that would have been a double insult. My mother sharing a pavilion with a guy who hadn’t even sorted out which side he was batting for.