I’m thinking of the wings beating above the two staggering girls, Mary and Leda, already pregnant, already incubating, feathers everywhere.
‘History spirals out from moments of violence like that,’ my father continued.
‘It was rape,’ I said. ‘Not seduction.’
‘What?’
‘You said Zeus seduced Leda. He didn’t – he raped her.’
‘History isn’t kind,’ he said, as though I was being sentimental. ‘It’s violent and unstoppable; it builds to bloody crescendos.’ He was beating out the rhythm on the steering wheel again:
And-Ag-a-mem-non-dead.
We’re all caught up in history, I thought, like the girl on the swan god’s nape.
After the towtruck finally arrived and pulled us out of the ditch, and we got going again, and when my father had parked and managed to persuade the ushers to let us creep into the back of the theatre, we caught McKellen doing his ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ speech. I began to see it all more clearly: the gyres and the witches and the whole relentless unravelling. Macbeth knew exactly what he was doing. Even if he suspected there’d be a price to pay for his apparent invincibility, for seeing out his course, he just didn’t know how to stop. He turned himself into his own private gyre. My father was doing that too. He didn’t know how to stop either.
‘I am in blood Stepped in so far,’ Macbeth mutters to himself, ‘that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.’
He imagined himself wading through a river of blood. He was up to his thighs in it. But it was too far to go back, so he told himself he might as well just keep going, let the gyre run its course, because he couldn’t stop it.
My father must have felt that way too, I thought, when he looked at the final demands that piled up unopened on his desk, when he looked at the pattern of numbers he believed he’d discovered. Neither he nor Macbeth knew what lay ahead, but they had to run their course.
Did my father think the future was knowable? I still didn’t know, but I could understand why he might have wanted to believe that it was. It was all going to come right, he thought: with that One Big Win at roulette he’d be redeemed, lifted off the earth as it crashed and burned into the thunder and lightning, earthquakes and plague of the Tribulation.
16
Through the winter of 1980 my father drove me to see plays in London, in Bristol, and in small theatres along the south coast. We talked about music, morality, Bergman and Shakespeare, his gambling system, his new diet, about the books I was reading. But I still couldn’t find a way of putting into words the questions about God and free will that I wanted to ask. He brought me books to read each week, ragged copies from his own growing collection and new ones he’d buy from local bookshops, including those he kept returning to: novels by E.M. Forster and Saul Bellow, Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.
Our conversations were not always easy. Those early years of locked doors, banned books and secrets had made me curious in a starved, urgent kind of way, convinced that the now-open door would swing shut at any moment, that the grown-ups would suddenly repent of their looseness or indiscretion, or that the page I was reading would be torn out before my eyes. And though I wanted to know what he thought, I hated being lectured at. I’d spent too much time not being allowed to ask questions or interrupt. He’d spent too much time expecting not to be interrupted, particularly by women.
A photograph of me taken by my father in a theatre foyer in 1980
We disagreed; sometimes one of us would shout ‘Nonsense!’ or ‘Don’t be absurd!’ or even ‘Bollocks!’ I got better at challenging him. He got better at appearing to listen while still maintaining his position. And running through everything was always a shared feeling of urgency, a sense that time was running out.
At home, my mother and I did not speak of the defection that had broken our close domestic alliance. I was often away from home now, not just with my father but with friends, drifting around the vintage clothes shops of Brighton, reading in a park, working at the newsagent’s, or listening to music in Chris and Alan’s squat. I no longer helped out much around the house.
My mother made me a bedroom in what had been the pantry so that I could study for my exams away from my siblings. It was a surprise. She’d squeezed a single bed and a chest of drawers in there, made a desk from an old sewing-machine-table base to which she had attached a long slab of wood she’d found in a skip and varnished to a high shine. Behind the bed she hung a curtain to hide the pantry shelves. She made it out of the blue-and-green-striped fabric she’d salvaged from the old bedspread on her and my father’s bed. She’d cleared a space for my school books on the shelves between the plastic boxes of oats and the rice and the boxes of Smash powdered potato. I was delighted. We were both embarrassed when I hugged her. The boiler hummed on and off through the night, but I no longer had to put the light out before I wanted to.
I did not tell my mother about my father’s notebooks, and the columns of red and black numbers he was showing me. His system was almost perfect, he said. He was working on the last details. He was winning. He’d point out the repeating patterns he saw in the columns of numbers, circling the ones that came up at regular intervals. I could not see the patterns he described, nor did I think that numbers acted in such predictable ways – but there was no telling him that.
Did he think the universe was ordered, and that he had found a way of reading it? When he described his intricate system, he behaved as if he was sharing a great confidence, an alchemical formula, the secret of the philosopher’s stone. If he could predict numbers, I wanted to ask him, then why couldn’t he predict other things?
I found another column of numbers in the back of his notebook. It was a list of his winnings and losings. I ran my fingers down those columns. He was, of course, losing much more than he was winning. So the system wasn’t working after all. How, I longed to ask him, could he know one thing – that he was losing vast amounts of money – and still believe another – that his system was infallible?
I had to come to the casino with him, he told me. He had to show me how the system worked; then I’d see for myself. He picked me up from school one afternoon when I knew I wouldn’t be missed. I had brought a change of clothes in my sports bag, as we’d agreed, clothes that would make me look older than my fifteen years. ‘None of that hippy stuff,’ my father had said. ‘Something smart.’
The doorman called him by his first name, shook his hand, refused the £10 ‘tip’ my father offered him, a bribe that, I guessed, was supposed to make him overlook the fact that I was underage. The red-velvet-upholstered alcoves, mirrors, and dim light inside made the interior seem a place of perpetual midnight. A group of men in expensive suits sat at the bar with cocktails. Four or five older men were playing roulette, shadowed by glamorous, much younger women with loud laughs who didn’t play. A croupier saluted my father ostentatiously. He fetched a high stool for me and placed it in the corner of the room so I could use the high shelf there to keep a list of the winning numbers. He took out a roll of £50 notes from his inside pocket.
The way my father moved around the roulette table, sliding coloured chips from the pile in front of him to the numbered squares, slipping backwards and forwards from his chips to the wheel, was different from the way the other players moved. He looked as if he could make these moves in his sleep. The others cheered when they won. He was silent, rapt, his eyes shining.
The numbers were stacking up in the patterns again, he told me, glancing at the list I was keeping. Could I see? There was the red seven, a black thirteen, two red nineteens. Opposite me, in the half-light, an old woman in a white fur coat pushed £50 notes down a hole in the roulette table with one hand, very slowly, passing her chips from square to square with the other hand, as if she was moving underwater.
When my father won, he collected his winnings from a hatch at the back of the room in rolls of notes held together with red elastic b
ands, but instead of leaving, he started feeding the notes straight down the hole again, buying more chips. It would take me fifty hours to earn a single one of those notes at the newsagent’s shop, I whispered as he leaned over me to check the list of numbers again, but he was already back to the roulette table dance. Soon he seemed to have forgotten I was there at all.
I began to visit him after school in the new smaller flat he’d taken near the Stott and Sons warehouse. I could walk there on my way home. It smelled of cigarette smoke, old newspapers, off milk, socks and kitchen rubbish. I washed up. I cleaned. I made a pile of his dirty clothes and left notes telling him to take them to the launderette, with diagrams about how to get there and information about how much change he’d need to take with him. I threw the mountains of newspapers in the bin, making sure to cut out the crosswords first. He liked doing crosswords when he couldn’t sleep.
He took me to see a performance of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck at the National Theatre in London. I was sixteen. In the car, he explained Ibsen’s idea of the Life Lie with great care and attention. Life lies, he said, were the lies people told themselves to make life bearable.
The Ekdal family in The Wild Duck, he explained – father, mother, teenage daughter, grandfather – were poor but happy. They keep going, he said, because they have delusions. The grandfather thinks he’s a great hunter. The father is convinced he’s on the verge of creating an invention that will make him famous and pay off all the family debts. The daughter thinks her father is a great man. These were their Life Lies.
‘So Ibsen,’ said my father, ‘sends in a visitor, Gregers, an old friend of the father’s. Gregers exposes all their Life Lies, and tells them a few more things they would rather not have known. Then Ibsen makes us watch what happens next. It’s not good, of course. But that’s the point: Ibsen isn’t sure we should make people see how deluded they are.’
How could my father see intricately complex patterns in the black and red numbers of his columns, but not have seen his own Life Lie reflected back in Ibsen’s mirror that evening?
‘I just need one big win,’ he told me again as we drove back through the night. He’d begun to rant about how the new partners at Stott and Sons were fleecing the business. ‘Just one big win will make everything come right.’
17
My mother noticed the whited-out entries on the cheque stubs, and the ragged holes in the income and out-goings ledgers. Though my parents had separated, she was still working in the Stott and Sons office down at the warehouse. She must have guessed that the stubs had something to do with my father’s afternoon disappearances, but she could not have known the scale of what would unravel when the partners decided to bring in specialist accountants to take a closer look at the books.
It took the partners, the accountants and the police several weeks to gather the evidence needed for my father to be charged. He’d been embezzling money for years, fiddling the books to pay for his gambling. For some reason he’d stopped trying to cover his tracks in the last months of 1980. Did he want to be caught? Did he want someone to make it all stop?
The police investigation was secret, but my father must have sensed the walls closing in. He hadn’t been sleeping for some time; he complained of stomach pains; empty bottles of whisky rolled around in the boot of the car and under the passenger seat; he kept boxes of antacid tablets in the glove compartment, and took seven or eight at a time; his skin looked grey.
There’d been another suicide. Anna Napthine, a young Brethren wife and mother, had hanged herself in London. My father collected the newspaper reports and added them to his file.
‘They’ve learned nothing since the Andover Tragedy,’ he said, passing me the clippings. ‘The journalists don’t get it, of course. They never do.’
He’d had to ask around about Anna Napthine, he told me. He’d phoned some ex-Brethren to find out what happened.
Jim Symington, the Elect Vessel, had decided that there was a backlog of sins that now had to be ‘cleared’ if the Brethren were going to get clean enough for the Lord. He’d gone over old tapes of Meetings to identify people who’d been troublemakers, or who’d asked difficult questions back in the sixties and seventies. Hundreds of sinners had not been properly disciplined the first time round, he’d told the Brethren, so priests must root out these people in their local Meetings and put them under seven days of ‘assembly discipline’ to get them properly clean.
London Brethren, my father said, had put Anna Napthine on their list. Years before, she’d ‘confessed’ to adultery but had not been ‘shut up’ at the time, so now they told her it was time for her to get properly right with the Lord. They’d shut her up for much longer than the now-statutory seven days, although no one knew why.
In her bedroom, isolated from her family for weeks, tormented by her own thoughts and the visits of the priests, Anna Napthine got sick. Her husband took their two young children to the local park one afternoon, and when they came back to the house they found Anna’s body hanging from a ceiling joist.
‘They’re completely unshameable,’ my father said.
Symington, my father told me, had preached about the suicide in a ministry Meeting in Australia the following day. He told the Brethren that Satan had used Anna Napthine as a weapon to stop them from doing the Lord’s work: ‘The devil urged her to do that to counter the Lord’s demand for a review and an adjustment of defective assembly administration.’3
My father looked stricken and depleted.
‘How many more?’ he asked.
That winter of 1981, after he’d been arrested, charged with embezzlement and fraud, and released on bail pending trial, my father played me the Bergman ‘Faith’ trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence. He sat on the floor of his flat, among the discarded newspapers, drinking his way through another bottle of whisky, pausing and replaying scenes to puzzle out their meanings to me, and to himself. I was sixteen.
In Winter Light, a priest who has lost his faith gives communion to the last two or three remaining members of the congregation of his remote Lutheran church in midwinter. Although he goes through all the rituals and preparations, he’s tormented by God’s silence, God’s failure to say something back.
We watched the light move around the empty church up on the screen, slanting in through windows, lighting the priest’s tormented face as he gave his sermon or collapsed in exhaustion in the vestry. We watched him berate and entreat God, perhaps trying to provoke him into sending some kind of sign. In one shot, the priest stands looking out at the snow falling across the fields, his face lit up. This is all there is, Bergman seemed to be saying, just the light on the snow. But look how beautiful it is. We are too busy fretting about the next world to see this one in all its strange beauty.
When a tortured young man, the father of a young family, comes to talk to him, the priest stops just short of telling him that there is no God. The young man disappears into the snow, and is later found hanged. The priest, racked with guilt, takes communion just the same.
We watched The Silence the same afternoon. It was even more haunting and incomprehensible, scored by the sound of clock hands ticking and fans whirring. Two sisters and a ten-year-old boy, travelling across Europe on the brink of war, wall up in a two-room apartment in a semi-derelict central European hotel. The elder woman is dying, self-medicating with vodka and cigarettes, and trying to finish a manuscript. The child, whose mother is the younger sister, goes wandering in the corridors of the hotel. He meets a troupe of Spanish dwarves, and stares out the window as a lone tank rolls down the road at night.
‘No one says anything,’ my father said. ‘That’s the thing. Everyone’s locked into the silence. Everyone’s trapped. They’re all talking into a void.’
Especially the boy wandering the corridors, I thought. Especially him.
That boy reminded me of the boy my father had once been, the boy who had collapsed on the steps of his house when he thought his mother and sister
had been taken in the Rapture and he’d been left behind, the boy counting up the Bible letters in the Meeting, longing for time to himself, hectored by the father voices he heard in his head and beguiled by the mother voices. But when the silence finally came for that child, it had engulfed him.
‘I’ve met a boy,’ I told my father, just weeks before his court case. We were sitting in his flat. I could still smell the smoke from the previous night’s bonfire in my hair. I had twenty minutes to get back to school for my afternoon history class, and because my father was in a hurry to show me Through a Glass Darkly he didn’t ask me any questions about the boy. We watched the film, and I missed my history class.
I’d met the boy at a bonfire party a couple of weeks before. In the summers, my friends and I roamed the seafront promenade like flocks of birds gathering on wires. Emma lived in the next street, and her parents took in language students too, but they were much younger and wilder than the ones who boarded with us. They invited us to parties on the beach, where they gathered in large numbers around a bonfire after dark. We’d bring our friends. That night we were sitting on old blankets thrown over the pebbles, drinking cheap white wine, smoking weed, talking about university applications. I’d missed too much school, I told them. My teachers must have predicted very low grades for me. I’d had four rejections out of my five applications. Someone was telling me I should think about signing up for a kibbutz instead.
I’d been watching the boy over on the other side of the flames playing his guitar, his enormous brown leather jacket pulled around his hunched body, his long fingers picking out chords. He wrote his own songs and music, I heard someone say; he was in a band. His name was Tom.
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