by Jude Cook
The fall-out from that appalling night resulted in a week of noncommunication. I felt, bruised, ill, anguished, confused … You are the first person I’ve shared this with, and I’m still not sure I can trust you with the knowledge. This of course is part of the special trouble I referred to earlier, that you might have difficulty understanding. Not the usual writers trouble, money-trouble, soul-trouble; but crazy scenes such as these. I mean, have you ever experienced anything similar? And if you have, what did you do with such moments? Under what heading did you classify them? What taxonomy can encompass such unleashed spite, mania, martyrdom? Even Hazlitt, in his Liber Amoris, would struggle to write up this sort of stuff and keep his sense of humour.
So, did I ever learn to punch? Well, later that year, as Mandy lay on the bed after the abysmal scene in the curry house, I had my first lesson. Terrible to admit it, but it felt quite natural, hitting a woman. It all came easily, as it does to many men, programmed as they are for violence. I think I mentioned that evening witnessed one of the most bloody battles ever recorded in domestic history. Well, there was blood and for once it wasn’t mine. After my bottle of lager had sent shards of glass over her Latina bedspread she looked up at me with bored scorn. Then she turned contemptuously away. Her words to Sarah from earlier resonated in my head. ‘You—are—a—stupid—fat—whore.’ No, there was no way she was getting away with that, I thought, as the red mist descended before my eyes. No way she could flagrantly insult people dear to me. It was at that moment that I realised I really did have people dear to me—strange how the saying of vile, forbidden things should clarify one’s own thoughts. I really did love my sister; unspotted and undeserving of such calumny. And my mother too, sitting there patiently in black, as if, like Chekhov’s Masha, in mourning for life itself. I really didn’t want Sinead exposed to such perverse hatred, not at her time of life, after all she had gone through, after all she had done for me. This finally pushed me over the edge.
Approaching Mandy on the bed, I thought I saw a gratifying flinch of fear in her face. This, after all, was just what she had counted on me never doing. As she rolled over, she laughed at me. Then I smacked her in the face.
My heart is pounding at the recollection of all this. I didn’t like the man I had become that night, full of curry and beer, knocking the missus about. No, I didn’t expect such things in my life … The train is rollicking through the dark enclaves of the North—Dales gates and low cottages. It really is impossible to see any detail outside the smeary window, just the racing cables rising and falling. Beyond that, nothing. Darkness visible. Forcing one to peer inward. The darker it gets beyond my window as the train hurtles towards Wakefield, the more, paradoxically, I find I can see.
Michelle is still sitting before me, writing text messages (most probably effusive Christmas greetings to her friends and family), while Robin has vacated his seat to ‘spruce up’, as he termed it. We are getting closer to the end, closer to the final destination. The feeling of warm incipience at King’s Cross has been replaced by contemplation of final things. We are all saying goodbye somehow. I take out my battered notebook and balance it on my knees so Michelle cannot sneak a peek at what I’m writing. That was a bad move to show her the passage about Mandy’s card earlier on. Pearls before swine, and all that. That card—the corny but touching bougainvillea curling from well-kept window boxes, the simple Mediterranean light evoked by a wash of powder-blue from the watercolourist’s palette. And that heart-rending message, in my wife’s all-too-familiar hand (I hadn’t seen it for a couple of months, but I recognised it instantly: from birthday cards, inscriptions on flyleafs, cheques written for goods we couldn’t afford). ‘Our little home. We’ll find it one day’. And which day was that to be? Why did she give me such false hope? Such final cruelty. My heart thunders when I think of that last card. ‘Our little home’—admitting to the dream of safety, of permanence, of becoming each other’s family (in the absence of parents) that we had both secretly entertained before getting married. How could she so be so arrantly contradictory? How could she leave me, deceive me, then write such nonsense? She must hate me very much, I concluded, to send this masterpiece of contradiction. What perversity! ‘We’ll find it one day …’
It is getting late now, late in my curve or journey: it is now a question of racing time to its inevitable conclusion. An idiot-check on the Self. What do I have left? Thirty years at the most. The best is past. I am closer to the end than to the beginning. Why not put an end to it now, the sad and sorry dance, the flicker of shadows on a screen that passes for this life. I could get off at the next station and put my head on the line. No, too much anticipation, too much mental suffering. And way too much blood. What about pills? My mother is sure to still have her apothecary’s kitchen cupboard full of potions. Why wouldn’t she? Yeah, pills would do the trick; to flow out gently on the current—through the Pillars of Hercules, shaking hands with Thanatos as darkness descends before my eyes. Hold on, I really don’t want my mother to find me dead in her house! Now that would be an insult. No, somewhere private where I won’t be disturbed. And a gun. If only I could find one! A gun is always the best option. Swift and clean. The quick gesture with the tensed finger and the longed-for oblivion. Hopefully.
There arrives a time in one’s life when you forget what you came here for. Especially once you’ve hit thirty. Like the visit to the corner shop where you wander around annoyed, racking your brains, wondering what the hell it was you needed. What did I expect to find, on the plateau of my thirties? Peace, harmony, children, a break in the battle? Success, respect, vindication, a happy marriage? Career and family? No, none of these are present in my life, aged one-score and ten. The famous summit proved to be an optical illusion. Instead, all I encountered was more of the same: intense death-anxiety, regret, failed love, thwarted aspirations, stagnation, saliva.
Of course, a shrink would conclude that I had separation anxiety, or abandonment issues—that I should learn to say goodbye more easily: to people, to my twenties, to this vale of tears we all eventually have to relinquish. And he would be correct in saying so. Extend that anxiety to places and the seasons and he would be even more acute. I could never leave a house, or a summer month, without intense, childish sadness. Leaving my mother’s place the last time I saw her caused great upheaval, agony even. I remember taking a moment to myself on her balcony that overlooked the usually dour Leeds-Liverpool canal. At once the sun came out, piercing, pastoral. A stolen pleasure there on that ledge: the buffeting gusts and sun-supernovas on the ripples, like beaten panels of adamant; the armadas of mallards arriving for a feed; the dreadful flame in the poplars; everything shockingly bright, afterlife-bright; everything tainted, somehow, with death.
‘That bog doesn’t get any cleaner,’ announces Robin, breaking my reverie. ‘Looks like a football team has puked down it.’
‘I think I might have contributed to that,’ I confess weakly from my facing seat.
Ignoring this, he turns to his still-texting wife and asks, ‘What’s the next station, Mich?’
‘I think it’s Wakefield, darling.’
At these words my heart seizes. I had forgotten that the dreaded wooltown was the next stop. I feel a hot humming in my ears, my chest expanding with unmanageable emotion. I really don’t need to see Wakefield.
‘Excuse me,’ I stammer, getting to my feet. I will have to sit this one out in the smoking car. All the negative capability in the world won’t get me through the sight of the raw name on the platform sign. Wakefield—the very noun in its first syllable is somehow treacherous, dangerous, foreboding. Our visits there in the 1970s always felt like some kind of wake. The rain, the satanic mills, the graveyard streets. A funeral for my mother and real father—the death of childhood.
Bursting through the five adjoining carriages I feel as if hornets have taken residence in my stomach. First I have to find someone from whom I can cadge a cigarette. Helps if you’re female, I always reflect … I am in t
he sparsely populated, overlit smoking carriage, a rank cloud in the air, like the aftermath of an explosion. I survey the booths and choose my victim. A man with high Aryan cheekbones is sitting with his back to me in row F. He is bearded in that self-consciously rugged way men adopt when they want to co-opt some extra quotient of masculinity: he’s too young for it—like Kris Kristofferson in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. I clear my throat and the man turns. Suddenly I am face to face with Delph Tongue.
Wakefield, the mid-seventies. Where my self-respect made its last stand. For some obscure reason, I always associate the place with child molesters. Why, I have no idea, because nothing of that order ever happened to me there. Some of the men just resembled nonces, that’s all. Not the feeble-framed flasher with his rheumy eyes and comic chuckle, but a harder, altogether more professional beast. The man (usually a family man, maybe even a pillar of the community, like the football manager or school governor) dedicated to a career of self-justified paedophilia. His face meaty and ingenuous; his look stern, opaque, plausible. There he’d be at the five-a-side game of a weekend, leering the boys on, leading the whistles and applause. In his more casual moments, he would take the guise of the donkey-jacketed bogeyman, with his tremendous impunity, walking his mutt by the monumentally depressing slag-heaps or closed-down collieries. Hanging around the swings, ‘playing cheeky’ with his dog, as Delph would put it. Of course, he would discreetly disappear at any sign of an adult. Undetectable to any but a trained eye. But once you notice, he is everywhere.
So why should I notice, and why should I care? No pillar of the community ever tried to put his pillar into me. Because it didn’t happen up there, it happened at home, where these things have a habit of happening. I might have to deal with some unfaceable things here … There comes a time when we all have to face unfaceable things. I may as well tell you a few more secrets I’ve been putting off for some time, reader. After all, we don’t know how much longer we’ll both be around. We must speak now while we still have the chance, still have the time.
The hour is midnight (when else?) and I am ten years old. I have just been very naughty (an unremembered and unremarkable misdemeanor), requiring a back-hand blow from my friendly ‘uncle’ Delph as I cowered at his unusually loud voice. After this he ordered me to get in the bath and prepare for bed. Where is my mother? I don’t remember. No, that’s right—Delph is ‘babysitting’—ironic as he is a baby himself, savagely overgrown. It is a Sunday night, or the Sabbath, as Delph insisted on calling it. My mother is out, and I have sensed her dangerous absence all evening. With her not present, anything could happen. The curious thing is that the evening had been harmonious up to the predictable eruption. An inedible tea of baked beans and burnt bangers. An episode of Charlie’s Angels. The construction of a Meccano robot claw. But a ruction was always a sure-fire occurrence when alone with Delph. He would have to play the tyrant before the day was out—for a man like him it was irresistible. For half an hour I had struggled quietly with my bolts and washers as he smoked and guffawed at Man About the House. I had stayed silent while he made mysterious calls on my mother’s phone. Then I put a foot wrong. I wish I could recall the offence! As his intimidating frame towered over me, male to male, all the more soiling for the concord of the evening thus far, I felt guilt for upsetting the applecart. But was it my fault? Something I said, most likely, inflamed his righteous opprobrium. And I had to let his fury run its course. He had to ruin everything—that was an absolute rule with him.
Number fourteen Dovecote Lane had felt big and empty that night, all the lights burning uselessly, like a showroom. (Why do I remember this detail? Because Mum always insisted on the lights being extinguished in an unoccupied room, that’s why.) Corner lamps glowed, softening the vulgar black-and-orange-spored design of the bouncing sofas. Sudden noises were magnified. A torque of strain could be registered around the whole house. After his explosion, shaken, humiliated, scared, alone, I ventured down the stairs (which seemed bright as Crystal Palace) to say goodnight as instructed to Delph, who was sitting brooding, massively spreadeagled on the sofa.
‘The little heathen’s ready for bed then?’ he grinned mirthlessly from his perch in front of the telly. I hated being called a heathen. Even though I had no idea what it meant, I knew it was derogatory.
‘Yes,’ I said in a small voice.
‘Why don’t thou come and sit thyself down next to me. The God-spot’s just about to come on. That’ll improve yuh. One day your mouth will get you hung,’ he said, though in a quieter voice than before. His legs were dramatically splayed, a great distance between his bony kneecaps.
I didn’t want to comply, but there seemed no choice, no mother to run to, no excuse at hand. More worrying was his changed, conciliatory tone. The old hot-and-cold routine. He had utilised this before after a cataract of violent rage—it was disorientating in the extreme. My dressing gown felt big and cumbersome over my pyjamas. I could smell the apple shampoo that I had used on my hair, which I had been permitted—with seventies laissez-faire—to grow long. There was something threatening about the forced amity of Delph’s half-smile. A kind of Fagin’s leer. I stood for a moment before walking forward and depositing myself at the far end of the sofa; the adrenalin of humiliation making me unusually aware of everything. My hands felt hot and too big, like the flesh pinnacles of delirious dreams. I could smell the reek of Rothmans from Delph, sitting a foot away, examining me with an evaluating smirk. I could hear the drip of rain from the lane outside, the odd car rumbling past. I wished very much that one of them was my mum’s.
‘Why don’t thou cuddle up next to me,’ he said, his voice egregious in the silence.
‘I don’t want to,’ I answered in the sulky tone available to all children, the one that constitutes their only defence. Children learn the value of their consent, their volition, at an early age. Delph’s invitation was really quite stunning. At no point in his sojourn had he ever made any physical contact with me, other than blows. He wasn’t what you call touchy-feely. He was a cold, vain, dynamically unpredictable man. The notion of sitting next to the tyrant of minutes before was a nauseating thought. And perplexing, too. At that age I couldn’t reconcile anger and contrition, violence and warmth; the capricious swing from one extreme to another. I also knew there were adult appetites in play, phenomena I didn’t understand.
‘You might catch cold after your bath.’
His eyes were burning a hole in the side of my skull. I remained resolutely fixated on the Archbishop of Canterbury who was expostulating with a furrowed brow on the black-and-white screen, wringing his hands. Then, with a big easy movement to the left of me, Delph’s rearing arm reached over and scooped me over onto his horrible lap.
My heart pounded as I murmured, ‘It’s not that cold. You don’t have to.’
‘Aye, but I want to,’ he said, with a sentimental burr.
The scene before me is extremely vivid. The things you think you miss at the time are the things you remember for ever. I can picture the saffron blinds, whose job it was to keep out the night, lifting and falling in the breeze. Our cat curled almost once around itself in an embryo-like huddle on the paisley beanbags. The smell of the ashtray, acrid, with its raw dogends-and-beer stink of pubs, unavoidable a foot away from my nose. The squirls of peacocks on the shade of the standard lamp. The steel couplings on the underside of the square Habitat coffee table, the table that would spend half its life on its back. And the big, inadmissible hands of Delph, hugging me to him, stroking me with an overmanning tenderness which, he probably imagined, conveyed all his shallow contrition.
I suppose he must have copped a feel. Every part of my body was touched in time. His strong, hot sentimental grasp wouldn’t let me go for what seemed like an hour. I remember him cooing soft, penitent sentences into my ear as he did this; shame for his loss of temper earlier. I don’t remember exactly what was said. I was too confused by this unprecedented scene, the fact that he was holding me in a manne
r which healthy adults would term ‘inappropriate’. But he was sorry. That much I understood. So very sorry for scaring the wits out of me. He wanted to make it up to me somehow. He wanted to show me, to give me as much affection as his foolish, hasty hands could afford. I don’t suppose it went further than that, but his hands that had greedily appropriated everything in my life (my mother; my self-respect) must have irresistibly found their way to my unprotected parts, and taken whatever twisted pleasure they could as he fondled them. His satyr-like rapture continued until he was startled by the sound of a key turning in the lock. With surreal alacrity, he pushed me to the other end of the sofa and set my dressing gown straight.
Seconds later, my mother was in the room, face to face with her lover and small son, innocently watching the archbishop arguing the finer points of Anglican theosophy with an interviewer who resembled Gary Glitter.
I didn’t tell a soul. Especially not my mum. I didn’t want to cause pain by revealing that her trust had been betrayed; that Delph was a dissimulator of the highest rank. I didn’t bother to inform her about a similar betrayal that occurred on a schooltrip to Wales either. This time, more predictably, it involved that old short-eyes, Mr Cave, the headmaster.
The formidable, salt-laden, sin-laden air of Anglesey, exposed as it was to the broadsides of the grim Irish Sea, was just what Hamford Boys’ School deemed invigorating for their first years. The April after my eleventh birthday two minibuses of farty, boisterous lads made their way to Wales for a week at a ramshackle bed and breakfast. A week of awful teas and orienteering in depressing windcheaters. Of course, any excursion that admits only males comes to resemble military manoeuvres. This pleased the martinet Reverend Cave very much. His chastising voice could be heard in the early morning outside our doors, rousing us for a bracing dip in the medicinal waves. Army discipline, conflated with the rhetoric of Christian soldiery, was what us ’orrible little oiks required, apparently. You can be certain that we were all out of our blankets like a shot. We all complied. Any delay would have him charging into the room and plunging his hand (reduced to a freezing temperature under the cold tap beforehand) down your pyjama trousers. And nobody desired that. Nobody wanted to see his sweating upper lip (thin as a curl of ham), hear his despotic voice, or behold his. gloating, sly, confident eyes behind coke-bottle specs appear in the room when they were in a state of dishabille.