This Party's Got to Stop

by Rupert Thomson

  I didn’t know what to make of this. Why would my brother and his girlfriend bother to ride all the way from London to Eastbourne, a distance of more than seventy miles? And even if they did, what would they take from the house? Perhaps Dad had been dreaming – or perhaps he was becoming confused. Perhaps this was what happened when you took barbiturates night after night, year after year …

  It must have been at around this time that Robin showed me a photo of Ralph standing on the drive. Ralph was dressed in a black leather jacket and narrow black trousers. His feet were encased in heavy-duty motorcycle boots. His hair, liquorice-black, stuck up in a towering Mohican, and his mouth twisted in a trademark Billy Idol sneer. Wraparound sunglasses hid his eyes. Outlined against the eggshell-blue of the garage doors, he looked as though he had just teleported in from some post-apocalyptic future. I thought the picture was wonderful, but I could understand why Dad might be dismayed or even threatened by his son’s new incarnation. It was Dad’s belief that Ralph had undergone a profound change since meeting Vivian, not only in appearance, but psychologically. He was convinced that Ralph had fallen under her spell, and he had taken to calling her ‘Svengali’ – though not, I imagined, to her face. In an underhand and vicious poem – one of the most impassioned that he ever wrote – he portrayed her slouching on a chair in the kitchen, picking her nose. With her ‘racoon eyes’ fixed on Dad, she whispered poisonous instructions into Ralph’s ear. It occurred to me that Dad feared physical assault.

  When I put all these fragments together, I couldn’t help but see Ralph and Vivian as a kind of latter-day Bonnie and Clyde, yet they hadn’t committed any crimes, and nobody was after them – at least, not so far as I knew. Though maybe the truth was subtler than that. Suppose Ralph and Vivian themselves felt under threat? What if they saw the world as malicious, parasitical, destructive? They had found each other, and they weren’t about to let anything – or anyone – come between them. There was a sense in which the feral nature of their intimacy was romantic – the spurning of the world, the wariness, the constant flight – but didn’t it also smack of paranoia?

  The silence was finally broken in the spring of 1981 by the arrival of a letter. Ralph had written to tell me that he and Vivian were planning to get married and to ask if I would be his best man. Not having seen him or even spoken to him for more than a year, I felt as though a chasm had opened up between us. I had heard that he had become a Catholic – he had spent time in a monastery, apparently, undergoing rites of Christian initiation; Vivian’s family were calling him ‘the Convert’ – and while this story had the ring of authenticity, Vivian herself being a Catholic, I’d had no choice but to file it away with all the other stories I’d been told. To me, Ralph was not unlike the Scarlet Pimpernel – a figure shrouded in rumour and hearsay, none of it verifiable. I wrote back saying that he should find somebody else. I tried to explain my thinking. A best man ought to be a person who was close to the groom, I said – a confidant, in other words – and since we had fallen out of touch I viewed myself as being unequal to the role, if not actually inadequate.

  When the wedding day came, Robin travelled up from Newport, where he was now at art college. Though Tina and I were still living together, her name had been omitted from my invitation, which seemed to confirm her theory that she was to blame for the rift. Robin and I caught a bus to Hampstead. Robin wore a green tweed suit he had bought from a charity shop in Wales. My suit was also green. Borrowed from Dad, it had been hanging in his bedroom cupboard since the late sixties, and smelled acridly of mothballs and dust. My hair was dyed Natural Red, as usual. According to the instructions on the packet, you were supposed to wash the henna out after twenty minutes, but I always left it for about three hours, just to make quite sure it worked. Robin’s hair was a curious whitish-yellow. He had bleached it himself, using hydrogen peroxide. Only the week before, he had met Dennis Potter, the famous TV dramatist and playwright, who told him that he looked like a badly upholstered settee.

  Arriving at the church, Robin and I loitered on the edge of a crowd of people we didn’t recognize. These, presumably, were Vivian’s family and friends. Naively, perhaps, we were unprepared for the reception we received, which veered from coldness and suspicion to outright hostility. While we were waiting to go in, a man in a dark blue suit with a flamboyant chalk pinstripe strolled aggressively towards us, his chin lifted, as though daring one of us to land a blow. He wanted to know why we were against the marriage.

  ‘We’re not against the marriage,’ I said. ‘Why would we be here …’ My voice petered out.

  Hands in his pockets, the man looked at me for a long moment, one corner of his mouth curling, then he turned on his heel and walked away.

  Vivian’s relatives were convinced of our antagonism, and our family’s meagre turnout did nothing to dislodge that belief. Dad had stayed at home – though that, in itself, didn’t mean much. Even if he had approved of the wedding, he wouldn’t have gone; he didn’t go to anything. My mother’s brother, Frank, and his wife, Miriam, hadn’t appeared either. In Cornwall that week, they had been unwilling to interrupt their holiday. There was no sign of my stepmother, Sonya, and her two children, Rosie and Halliday, but then Ralph might not have invited them. Was my father’s brother, Roland, there? Possibly. My cousins? I’m not sure. I seem to remember a number of Vivian’s relations having to be shifted on to our side of the church so as to make things look less embarrassing.

  Seeing Ralph at the altar, I was surprised at the change in him. Gone was all trace of the swaggering Mohican, gone the Billy Idol sneer. His hair was cropped, and he looked pallid and gaunt, like somebody who had been fasting. I remembered the golden quality he’d had about him at fifteen, an almost carnal glow, and wondered what he had been through. Had Dad been right to worry?

  ‘Was he always that pale?’ I whisper in Robin’s ear.

  ‘He doesn’t look very happy, does he?’

  ‘Perhaps he’s nervous …’

  We may not have been against the marriage, Robin and I, but at the same time neither of us took the idea very seriously. To us, it seemed at once bizarre and conventional, a bit of a joke.

  We have so much to arrange during the days leading up to the funeral that we struggle to keep up. Functioning in a group seems to help. As I write to Hanne, We all go round together, in a little army. No one has mentioned the man in the paint-stained overalls or the loud hammering, but the episode seems to hover in the air between us if we’re all in the same room, and once, when the word ‘lock’ crops up in a sentence, Robin slides a glance my way, one eyebrow cocked. I feel Ralph and Vivian have called our bluff. They acted without asking our permission, and we haven’t dared even to raise the subject, let alone protest. What we’re left with is an uneasy spirit of accommodation – the idea that the boat must not, under any circumstances, be rocked. Is this cowardice or common sense? I can’t decide. The whole set-up’s unusual. I’ve never heard of anybody doing what we’re doing. A father dies. His three sons return to the family home, start living there … Sometimes I have the feeling we’re made up – characters in a story, part of a myth. We’re like children again, but with no parents. We’re on our own, and completely in the dark.

  I’m tempted to take Ralph aside and tell him there’s no need for such radical measures, but either Vivian appears as I’m about to speak or else I hesitate too long and the moment is lost. Maybe, in the end, I feel I’m on shaky ground. What do I know about their needs? I have no idea what is going on in Ralph’s head – to say nothing of Vivian’s. Clearly, they trust no one, least of all those closest to them, and they are more determined than ever to safeguard what is theirs, especially now they have a child.

  But a lock, though?

  Do they still believe that we’re against them? Do they honestly think we wish them harm? If so, why move back into the house? Why take that risk?

  I walk downstairs one morning to find the kitchen door ajar. A mysterious, repetitive grati
ng or scraping sound is coming from inside the room. Vivian has her back to the door, as usual, and she is bent over the table, her right elbow working rhythmically. Greta is sitting in a high chair beyond her.

  Pushing the door open, I say good morning. Greta bangs the tray in front of her with a plastic beaker. I step closer, then peer over Vivian’s shoulder. In her left hand is Dad’s grindstone, concave on both sides from years of use, but the knife she’s sharpening isn’t one I recognize.

  She speaks before I can frame a question.

  ‘It’s a flick knife,’ she says. ‘Ralph’s got one too.’ She leans back and tests the blade against her thumb.

  ‘What for?’ I say.

  ‘So we can defend ourselves.’

  I nod slowly.

  ‘They’re identical,’ she says.

  Later, as I replay the encounter, I have the sneaking suspicion that she was hoping either Robin or I would catch her sharpening that knife. It was a gesture of defiance, a show of strength. She wanted us to know that she and Ralph are not to be taken lightly. First the Chubb lock, now the flick knives.

  So we can defend ourselves.

  That evening, in the sitting-room, I tell Ralph that I saw Vivian’s knife, and that she said he carries one as well. Without a word, he reaches into his jacket pocket and produces a knife that is an exact replica of hers. When I ask him how it works, he presses a small button on the handle, and a long thin blade springs out. Eyes lowered, face consumed with a sort of quiet, almost mystical relish, he balances the knife on the palm of his hand. The steel reflects a neat slice of the ceiling. Does he take the knife to work with him? Is he prepared to use it?

  ‘Jesus, Ralph,’ I say, ‘you’re dangerous.’

  His eyes lift from the blade.

  He smiles.

  Call Me by My Proper Name

  My mother’s brother was christened Cedric, but people always called him Joe. As a child, I don’t remember seeing Uncle Joe, not even once. All kinds of stories were told about him, though. A brilliant scholar, of whom great things were expected, he was expelled from public school for taking a group of younger boys to the cinema in Maidstone. In his early twenties, he was offered a job by the London Bank of South America. He flew to Colombia. Within a few months of landing in Bogotá, he moved out of the approved lodgings for single employees and registered in a hotel under an assumed identity. He had sex with local women. He grew a beard. The bank transferred him to a less prestigious branch in Ecuador. A year later, in circumstances that have never been entirely clear to me, Joe was deported. Back in England, he joined the army, but since his superiors at the bank had given him a one-line reference, stating merely that he had been in their employ, he wasn’t considered officer material. Sent out to Korea, he managed to avoid active duty. He also managed to burn down a hut belonging to the regiment. On returning from the war, he worked down a coal mine, then in a petrol station on the A5. Later, he delivered milk. In his mid-forties, he took to his bed, sleeping naked in sheets that were soaked in olive oil. He claimed it was good for his skin. The beard grew again, longer this time. He lived on boiled rice and packets of Benson & Hedges. If family members tried to visit, he would tell them to bugger off. Most years, a Christmas card would arrive at our house, signed ‘Uncle Joe’, or he would send a mouldy bar of chocolate, which would immediately be consigned to the dustbin, but Joe himself remained an enigma. The few facts I was able to gather only made him harder to imagine; he seemed to disappear behind them, as one might disappear behind a wig and a false nose. All Dad would ever say was that he was a ‘bad influence’, and that Wendy, our mother, had been frightened of him, and had avoided him; Dad seemed to worry that we, his sons, might have inherited Joe’s genes, and might end up the same way. In the late seventies, Joe’s life took yet another turn, perhaps the most unlikely one of all: he became a Muslim. Suddenly he wasn’t Cedric any more, or even Uncle Joe. He was Abdul Rauf.

  In 1986, Joe’s brother, Frank, offered to take me to see him. By then Joe was living in Wolverhampton, in a place called Penndale Lodge, which Frank gave me to understand was some sort of refuge for destitute old men. From Four Oaks, the private estate where Frank and Miriam lived, it was a forty-minute drive, and within a quarter of an hour of setting out the landscape began to deteriorate. During the nineteenth century, Wolverhampton had been a thriving industrial centre, with a huge steel works, several well-established coach-builders, and a famous bicycle manufacturer – great fortunes had been made in the town – but now, on every side, there were boarded-up shops, derelict factories, and vacant lots littered with builders’ rubble and broken glass.

  As we drove through this urban wasteland, I turned to Frank. ‘I hadn’t realized how run-down it was round here.’

  ‘Oh, it’s terrible,’ he said, ‘just terrible.’

  He stopped in a suburb called Whitmore Reans, outside a scruffy grocery store whose sign was in Arabic. When he returned, he was clutching two brown-paper bags. He told me he had bought some things he thought Joe might appreciate.

  After driving for a few more minutes, we turned into a narrow street of terraced housing. Penndale Lodge – the name was on the gatepost – had a dull red-brick façade and grubby windows, and its front door was painted a shade of blue that reminded me of the police. My stomach tightened, and in an attempt to quieten my nerves I started talking. ‘It doesn’t look much like a lodge to me.’

  ‘I know.’ Frank’s eyebrows lifted until they were almost at right angles to each other, and his eyes squeezed shut. ‘He just dragged himself down, Joe did. He was determined to drag himself down. All the way to the gutter.’

  ‘You told me a story once,’ I said, ‘about the time he showed up on your doorstep. He’d been living rough, in Birmingham …’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘He hadn’t changed his clothes for weeks, apparently. He smelled awful.’ Miriam had told me that Joe had been wearing his underpants for so long that it was impossible to work out what colour they had been when they were new.

  ‘Yes.’ Frank was nodding now, but with the same anguished expression. ‘Yes, yes, I think that’s right.’

  My probing always seemed to put Frank under pressure. I was after details that would bring Joe to life, but these were the very details Frank concealed from himself. I imagined Joe must have been truly desperate to have thrown himself on his brother’s mercy; in the stories I had heard, he came across as a proud man, somebody who would go to almost any lengths to avoid invoking pity or condescension. I recalled another snippet of information Frank had once let slip.

  ‘He was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, wasn’t he?’

  ‘I think so,’ Frank said wearily. ‘I’m not sure. He was in the same hospital as Mummy for a while – St Andrews, in Northampton.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘In the fifties. Fifty-seven or eight. I was in there too.’

  I turned and looked at him. ‘Were you? What for?’

  ‘I had a breakdown. It was worrying about the mill that did it. Waiting to take over the mill, and Eric being such a bastard about it all.’

  Eric was Frank’s uncle – my great-uncle – and the mill was a family business that Eric used to own and run. Built of smoke-blackened brick, and dating from the early Victorian period, it had a flat roof, tottering chimneys, and row upon row of tall, blind windows, and it stood beside a sleepy, desolate canal whose water was permanently hidden by a skin of pale green algae. It took ninety women to operate the weaving machines, and I had always been intrigued by what they manufactured: the tape and webbing could be transformed into the loops in the back of a pair of boots, the edging of a horse blanket, or the straps on a rucksack or a parachute. As retirement approached, Eric had needed to start thinking about a successor. Since he had never married or had children, his eldest nephew, Frank, was the obvious choice, but Eric had constantly threatened to overlook him in favour of Norman, an epileptic he already employed in a minor managerial role. He would tell
Frank how impressed he was with Norman, how Norman had what it took. Frank, he said, was ‘nesh’ – local slang for ‘incompetent’ or ‘weak’. It seemed to amuse Eric to play the two men off against each other.

  ‘God, he was a bastard,’ Frank said.

  I had to smile, partly at Frank’s language, but also at the way in which he had succeeded in making himself the subject of the conversation. You could ask Frank any question, and it would invariably lead to one of a handful of riffs and rants that now defined his life for him. Still, he had told me something I didn’t know: in the late fifties, not long after I was born, my grandmother and two of my uncles were all inmates of the same mental home – and then there was my mother, Wendy, with her so-called ‘high spirits’ … Dad must have wondered what sort of family he had married into.

  With a heavy sigh, Frank levered himself out of the car. I followed him through the gate and up to the front door, then watched as he jabbed at the bell with his finger. The woman who answered the door was bulky around the middle, as if she had a pillow strapped on underneath her clothes.

  ‘We’ve come to see Joe Gausden.’ Frank spoke fatalistically, like somebody expecting to be turned away.

  The woman stood back and signalled towards a door on the left side of the hall. ‘He’s in there.’

  Frank led me into the front room.

  ‘This is your nephew, Rupert,’ he announced.

  On the far side of the room, next to a modest fireplace, sat a man in an ankle-length cream-coloured djellaba and a pale yellow kufi skullcap. He had an olive complexion and dark eyes, and both hands were clasped on a cane that stood upright between his sandalled feet. A greying beard reached down over his chest. He was fifty-eight, but looked a decade older. The word ‘ayatollah’ floated into my mind.

  ‘This is Rupert,’ Frank said. ‘Wendy’s son.’