A week later, Tom had walked me home from another bonfire party. We sat on a bench looking out over the ocean, the full moon making a road across the water to us. Seagulls drifted overhead like ghosts. We stayed there talking until a line of pink gradually widened along the horizon and the sea slowly disgorged the great fireball of the sun. He told me he was leaving home. His parents didn’t understand him. They were philistines, he said, and I asked him if he knew who the Philistines were. When he said he didn’t, I explained, and then he kissed me. My father was about to go to prison, I said, watching his dark eyes open wide. When I crept back into the house after dawn, I was relieved to find I’d not been missed.
18
I was afraid of what my father might do in the days leading up to the court case, I told Tom. Especially with Marsha and her children away on summer holiday, and him staying in their house all by himself. Marsha had been my father’s girlfriend once. Now she was just his friend. My father was not well. He’d asked me to stay with him there, to keep him company, now that my exams were finished. My mother didn’t think it was a good idea, but who else was going to do it?
I packed a bag. My mother drove me to the edge of that leafy estate where my father’s one-time girlfriend still lived with her teenage children. She made me promise to call her if I needed her.
‘Just keep it ordinary,’ Tom said. ‘Just use your instinct. Watch films. Keep him talking. Call me.’
There were books he wanted to talk to my father about, he said. He’d come over. I told him it was probably better if he didn’t.
This was the house I’d watched from my seat up on the hill. I’d never been inside. My father had often invited me to meet Marsha. I’d like her, he said. She was smart, and she knew all sorts of things about books and music and films. But I’d refused. I didn’t want to meet the family I’d seen through my binoculars. I didn’t want those neighbours to see me getting out of my father’s car, walking along the path that he’d walked with them. I didn’t want to put myself into that world.
But now I was inside. There were pictures of Marsha with her ex-husband and children. There were pictures on every wall: babies, portraits, holidays. There were photos of my father with her, and with her children and their friends. Those were her books on the shelves, that was her music collection next to the record player.
That week my father drank from the moment he woke until the moment he fell asleep on the sofa twelve hours later. He’d bought a case of whisky. He woke in the night and paced the house, clutching one of his battery-operated radios. When he started talking about killing himself – how he was fit for nothing, how he was so ashamed, how he’d never forgiven himself for killing his father, for leaving my mother – I made more tea, gave him films to watch, or talked about anything and everything that came into my head.
Tom tapped on the window one night, and I invited him in. He and I sat at the top of the stairs, my father asleep downstairs on the sofa under the rug I’d pulled over him. When Tom saw the checklist I’d made of things to hide from my father – the knives in the kitchen, the painkillers in the medicine cabinet, the keys to the car – he told me I was being way too over-dramatic. I think you mean melodramatic, I said.
A week later, my father was given a twelve-month prison sentence that would, my mother told us, probably be reduced to three months. There’d be no more running for him now, I told Tom. He was safe. He had a new iron room, I said, and then had to explain what an iron room was. Tom asked why anyone would want to build a church from corrugated iron. I told him it was complicated, and that one day I’d explain. My father would be fine, I repeated. He’d have books and pens and paper. He could finish that play he’d started writing.
Why would they call a prison ‘Wormwood Scrubs’? I asked Tom, but he wasn’t much interested in what I knew about the Bible, so I didn’t tell him that Wormwood was the name of the star in the Book of Revelation that blazed like a torch, fell from the sky, and poisoned all the rivers and springs. The waters turned bitter, and many people died. Falling stars, comets and poisoned waters were all signs that the End Times were coming.
It was July. School had finished. I was in love. My father was in prison and he was safe. And York University had offered me a place to study English literature.
The largest bundle of the letters Kez found in the envelope my father had labelled ‘Prison Letters’ were from Tom. During my father’s time in prison, Tom and I were walking the streets of Brighton at night, sneaking into the back of gigs so we didn’t have to pay, lying under the stars on the beach in the early hours of the morning talking about books, God, music, swimming at midnight, waiting for our A-Level results. Through all of that, Tom, who’d met my father only once before the court case, had written to him every day he was in prison. And my father had written back. That surprised me. They’d written to each other about T.S. Eliot, about Camus and Sartre, about transcendentalism. Tom told my father not to worry about my silence – that though I wasn’t writing to him, I was thinking of him. I was busy, he wrote, with all the various part-time jobs I had: ‘two pubs and a shop … She often talks of you.’
I was busy. But the real reason I didn’t write to my father in prison was that I’d had enough, and I was furious with him. Not because he’d shamed the family – that hardly seemed important – but because it seemed to me that he’d played straight into the Brethren’s hands. I knew that the news of his prison sentence would be travelling down Brethren networks. The Jims would be using him to tell the same old story: look what happens when you leave. Look what happens when Satan gets hold of you. They’d be using my father’s story to frighten more teenagers into compliance. Look what happened to Roger Stott. Outside the door, son, there is only darkness. My father had written the Brethren the perfect morality – or immorality – tale, and there was no undoing it.
I needed new air. In August, Tom wrote to my father to tell him that my A-Level results had been unexpectedly good. York had confirmed my place. Classes started in the middle of September, just two weeks after my father’s release date. I had, he wrote, already started packing.
19
When people asked me about what happened to my father after prison, I’d tell them he’d landed himself a job at the BBC. For ten years he worked as a researcher for religious programmes, and then he was promoted and made three brilliant films. He interviewed George Steiner and various eminent bishops for his first film, A Brief History of Hell, I’d tell them proudly. He’d even met the Pope. He’d worked with Susan Sontag on his second film, Just an Illness, which was about illness and ideas of divine punishment. In his last film, The Isle is Full of Noises, he used poems by Yeats and Heaney and Hughes to show how ancient spirits and gods haunt our landscapes.
And I’d be thinking to myself: he never let up, did he? He’d spent all his post-Brethren years trying to figure out what had happened to him – in his memoir, his plays, his poetry, the books he read, and then in his BBC films. When I listened to myself describing my father’s post-prison years like that, it sounded like a redemption song: the lost man who gets back on his feet and makes something of himself.
But his life was more complicated than that. There were other sides to it; there always are. I’d try to avoid telling people about how he’d continued to steal or borrow from my brothers and me and from his friends so he could keep returning to the roulette wheel, that he’d been sacked from the BBC for financial irregularities, that he was still gambling online on his deathbed.
We all knew how that particular part of his life story was going to play out. So I wouldn’t tell people that he and I had been estranged on and off over the years, that I’d stopped talking to him when he came out of prison and I went off to university, and again when he conned money out of family members and lied to cover his tracks. But, I remembered now, the silences between us had never lasted for long.
He’d say the gyres were still opening up, and that we were all caught up in them, especially him, and th
at he couldn’t help himself – but I don’t see it that way. To me the world is made up of delicate branching webs and connections. That way of seeing comes, I think, from reading Darwin and George Eliot in my second year of university; and, when I fell prgnant, thinking of the child growing inside my womb and that miraculous network of neural pathways forming in both his new brain and my older one. We were all ‘netted together’, just as Darwin had said. Everything we did had an effect on the people around us.
I thought of those networks again when, decades later, I found my sixteen-year-old daughter Hannah crying outside a temple in Jaipur. She’d seen me praying at the Hindu shrine, she said, and because I’d brought them all up in a secular way, my prayers had felt to her like a kind of betrayal.
‘Does that mean you believe in God?’ she asked, her eyes swollen and dark. I cursed myself. I should have talked with them more about God and religion and souls, I thought. We’d talked about other difficult subjects like love and sex easily enough. I’d told myself it was best to leave them to puzzle out their own beliefs about God, not for me to tell them what I thought; but the truth is I probably wouldn’t have known what to say.
A woman had said to me once, I told Hannah on the bus to Pushkar, that there were some mysteries we’d never figure out. I saw mysteries everywhere now that I was older. Not just about God, but in the science I read about – in pure maths, in animal behaviour, in studies of consciousness and the mind and memory. The more we find out, the more mysteries we seem to discover, I said. I was thinking of my mother greeting the moon. ‘Hello moon,’ she’ll say as she closes the curtains on the night, ‘there you are again.’
When I lost myself praying in the temple in Jaipur, I told Hannah, it was because in India I felt that mystery of who we are and where we’ve come from and where we are going like a fire in my blood.
‘I look at you,’ I said, ‘and I think about all the voices and questions in your head, and your brother’s head, and your sister’s head, and the thousands of miles of neural pathways you have between you – and that’s a miracle too. There are things we’ll never know.’
‘You taught us that,’ she said, and we were both crying now. ‘You taught us that it was OK not to know.’
When our Muslim guide asked if we wanted to join the Hindu ceremony on the banks of the holy lake at Pushkar to mark New Year’s Eve, it was Hannah who volunteered first. She wanted to sit and watch the sun set on the last day over the holy lake with all those other people, she said. And when the setting sun made a burnished road across the lake and the lake birds rose all together as the temple bells began to ring out, and the drumming began, I told her it had reminded me of the night of my first kiss. She laughed. It had made her think, she said, of how little we are.
When I think of my father now, I often think of two jars. The first is made of transparent plastic. It sat on a shelf in my son’s attic room at Christmas twenty years ago, a treasured, closely-guarded jar, half full of brightly-coloured cellophane-wrapped sweets. Jacob had vacated his bedroom, begrudgingly, for his grandfather’s visit. Though he liked Dodge, as we all called him by then, and thought of him as a bit of a legendary scoundrel, he didn’t much want to give up his room, especially at Christmas.
In the days leading up to Christmas, my father quickly filled my son’s room with the detritus that he always scattered around himself: newspapers, empty wine bottles, notebooks full of columns of numbers. I dared not look. I knew how this would end up. My son would be outraged, despite the fact that at the age of twelve he was, like his grandfather, a detritus-scattering boy, his room on a normal day full of abandoned clothes and the tangled wires of computer equipment. So I steeled myself when he came to find me in the kitchen on Christmas morning, beckoned me to follow him upstairs to his room, and gestured through the half-open door with an expression of both horror and intense admiration.
There, among the old newspapers and discarded clothes, amid a scattering of sweets and empty wrappers, was the sweet jar, now filled with bright-yellow liquid.
‘Someone’s been sleeping in my bed,’ Jacob said, reciting the words from ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, his eyes shining. ‘Someone’s been peeing in my sweet jar, and they’ve filled it right up.’
We closed the door quietly and took ourselves back downstairs to the kitchen, where my father was holding forth about Yeats or Dylan Thomas again. My then-husband glanced up from basting the turkey with a look of exasperation.
Through the eating of the turkey, and the paper hats, and the toasts, and the exchanging of gifts, Jacob returned again and again to the sweet jar. He came to tell me it was still there. The next day, after we’d driven my father to the station and said our goodbyes, and he’d told Jacob that he’d send him Seamus Heaney’s new collection, my son and I went back up the stairs to the attic bedroom together. The jar was on its original shelf, the sweets back inside. We stood there, he and I, staring at the jar that was now misting up with condensation.
‘Good old Dodge,’ Jacob said. ‘Sound. Nice work.’
And of course I wanted to say something about how a man might steal, embezzle and betray, and you’d still want to be in his part of the room. That a man might be both sublime and abject; and I thought, if Jacob asked me what that meant, I’d say that my father could be downstairs talking about Yeats or free will, and upstairs peeing in his grandson’s sweet jar. But I knew there was no way I could explain that yet. Jacob would have to figure some of those things out for himself. We high-fived instead.
The second jar was the same shape and size as Jacob’s sweet jar, but made of opaque red plastic. The woman at reception at Cambridge Crematorium asked me to sign for it as she passed it across the desk. It had my father’s name on it, and the date of his cremation. The red of the plastic was dark: somewhere between blood and wine, the texture slightly mottled.
‘That’s him?’ I said. ‘That’s all of him?’
Had they really managed to get all of him in there? His bones, sinews, bile, arms, legs, and that scar that ran from his ear to his Adam’s apple?
‘They removed your father’s pacemaker first, of course,’ the receptionist said, checking her files, as if she thought I was complaining of being short-changed. Did I want to take that away with me too?
No, that’s not it, I wanted to say. It’s just that he was so big. He’d stand in my kitchen reciting poetry or explaining why Poliakoff was the second-greatest playwright currently writing for British television, or describing the pattern he’d seen growing in the columns of numbers he’d made, and it would be so hard to get around him, he took up so much space. I’d ask him to sit on a chair so I could cook or get to a baby, and he would sit, but then he’d spring back up again to reoccupy the middle of the room.
Instead, I signed the form she gave me to say I’d taken the ashes but not the pacemaker.
It was raining. I put the red jar on the passenger seat of my car, and turned the ignition so that the wipers cleared the windscreen. We sat there together, he and I, in the cemetery car park, while I waited for the rain – and my own sobs – to subside. Now there was only the red jar with the lid screwed tight.
‘Say something back,’ I said. ‘Just say something.’
There was only the sound of the rain on the roof, the windscreen wipers screeching against the glass, and the caw of a crow from a nearby tree.
But I hadn’t tuned in. I wasn’t listening.
‘Yeats, you see,’ my father was saying, ‘believed that time was a necklace of interlinked spirals.’ And he’s drawing the gyres on his betting slip, circling the axis points with his red pen, ‘See?’ And he’s slipping seamlessly from Leda and the swan to the angel appearing to Mary, and on to the crucifixion.
‘Sooner or later,’ he’s saying, ‘the burning walls of Troy become the burning walls of our monasteries and abbeys and country churches …’
And I’m saying: ‘Does that mean you still believe in God?’
20
&
nbsp; I haven’t seen a Brethren family for several years now. There are 45,000 Brethren around the world, but they keep to themselves; they blend in. So I was surprised when Kez found an assembly last summer in rural Norfolk, just a few miles from the house I’d rented in Norwich.
I’d read Mark Cocker’s Crow Country and bought myself a pair of binoculars so I could go off on weekends to the marshes and broads. Sometimes Kez would come with me. It was summer, the wrong time of year for the great rook displays, the Strumpshaw Fen birdwatchers told me, but if I was patient I’d see bitterns, marsh harriers and kingfishers instead.
I spent several Sundays listening out for the mating boom of the bittern on the marshes, but failed to hear it, so I decided to go further north, out of the Yare Valley and up onto the broads. Kez said she’d join me.
A few days later she rang to say that if we left really early on Sunday morning we could park outside the Brethren Meeting Room at Salhouse and watch them all go in to break bread before we went off to find the bitterns. She’d found the Norfolk Brethren Meeting Rooms on Google Maps a few weeks before. There were only two: a small one in Salhouse, and a huge one in Rackheath.
‘It’s perfectly legal,’ she said, when I protested. ‘The Meeting Room is right next to the station car park. We could watch from there. We wouldn’t be trespassing.’
‘But we’d never see over the wall,’ I said.
‘This one seems to be made of some kind of metal with gaps,’ she said, ‘with shrubs along the inside. You can see through in places. I’ve checked on Google Street View.’
We drove through the streets of an eerily empty Norwich at 5 a.m., heading north. A thick blanket of fog hung across the fields, pooling in pockets in the lower ground. When a young fox crossed the road in front of us, the fog curled around him like currents in a river.
As we approached Salhouse down a farm track called Muck Lane, floodlights on the horizon lit up the morning sky. That was the car park of the Meeting Room, I told Kez. I remembered the lights at Vale Avenue in the early morning. They’d hurt my eyes when my father lifted me out of the car half-asleep.
In the Days of Rain Page 28