It was bad enough being so big and tall, I thought. I was never able to merge into the crowd, but strutted around like a self-conscious tower or an ostrich on stilts, only I wasn’t able to bury my head in the sand, worse luck. Dad hated it if I stooped. I used to beg Mum to buy me flat shoes, had nightmares that platform heels would return to fashion. Six foot two was conspicuous enough. It was only on the rugby field or playing basketball or in a pub when things grew ugly that my towering height seemed to have a purpose. Then I thought of last night and poor Charles getting quietly beaten up, and I crossed out the last of those advantages. I hadn’t lifted a finger to help Charles, and the fact that no one else had either didn’t help my conscience, but only made me feel worse.
As I tentatively scraped my bristle with the razor I told myself off for wanting to be a hero. Heroes always ended up getting stabbed or shot, and I wanted to live a bit longer. Then I thought of doing P.E. at college and my future didn’t look all that bright. I remembered the phone number I’d flushed down the pub toilet and suddenly I wished it was back in my hand.
I shrugged. I would have been afraid to call Gerald. I would have been at a loss for things to say. But it would have been someone. I wanted a someone. Wanted a someone sometime. You could write a song about that, I thought, sing as you played the piano, tinkling the ivories under candlelight. I tried to smile, tried to pretend that it was funny, but I was thinking why I wanted to ring Gerald, asking myself Why? and then running away before I heard the answer.
Mr Murray — we called him Minty — was not too impressed with my essay on E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. He said it was structurally weak, which I suppose was a clever way of saying that I couldn’t put my ideas down on paper in the proper order. “You ought to borrow one of Richard Ward’s essays,” he told me. I nodded my head and mumbled something, but I knew I wouldn’t ask Richard for it. No one wants to look an idiot, do they?
I would have liked to talk to Richard though. He fascinated me with his rambling conversation and the way he used his hands expressively when he talked. He must get his ideas down better on paper than when he’s speaking aloud because he was nearly always top of the class. Richard had a place at Sussex University to do English if he achieved the required grades, though I couldn’t see anything stopping him, not with all the A-minuses his essays earned.
Of course doing so well at his studies, Richard had the reputation of being a creep, but I liked him because he never seemed to be conceited, never boasted about his grades. In fact I think he would have been happier getting strings of Cs, so that he could have had mainstream anonymity. He hated speaking in class, and I think he rambled because he was so nervous. You could see the reluctance in his face when a teacher asked him a question and of course, being top of the class, he was in danger of being Teacher’s Pet.
I wasn’t Richard’s friend, though if I was to tell the truth, I’d have to say I wanted to be. There was something about him that interested me. Strangely, I sometimes wondered if Richard felt the same. Once, I’d been sitting looking at him, and he’d turned and caught my eye. It was as if we’d spoken then, given some sign that we wanted to be friends. The trouble was Richard seemed to hate sport and he’d been a victim of the bullies and loud-mouths. Unfortunately, some of the loud-mouths were my friends, so the two of us had had little chance to talk to each other.
The English group I was in was a bit of a mixture. Mostly there were girls, some of whom intended to go on to university. Others yearned for nursing, the armed forces or some quiet little office somewhere. Some had stayed on because the job situation was so bad, yet they didn’t stand an earthly of passing any of their ‘A’ levels. These seemed destined to serve in Woolworths or British Home Stores. There were a couple of blokes who never read any of the books and played noughts and crosses or poker at the back of the class. Quite a few more laboured through Forster, Milton and Auden, preparing for jobs in the civil service, an insurance company or one of the banks, and a smaller number, no more than three or four, had hopes for university or a polytechnic. Then there was me.
I read the books, but I only half understood them. I needed to talk about them before anything would get clearer, only there was no one to talk to. I couldn’t see Mum or Dad or Steve chatting on Forster’s liberal humanist view. I suppose I should have asked questions, but I always got tongue-tied talking in front of the class, and I knew that Minty, as well as everyone else, thought I was pretty thick. After all I played rugby, didn’t I, and no one in our rugby team was much of a scholar. In our school all the brainy sportsmen had chosen to play football or do athletics. The rugby team were the Duffers and I was one of them, unable to articulate my ideas, incapable of giving my thoughts expression … At least I guessed that was what Minty had thought when he’d marked my Forster essay. I suppose he couldn’t care about us C-minuses, we made up over half the class.
I sat in my place for a moment after the bell had gone, watching Richard get up from his chair. Suddenly I remembered a week ago. At the blind end of a corridor we’d collided into each other. I’d knocked poor Richard flying. As I’d helped him up I’d taken his hand. It had felt so small in mine. As our eyes met I’d felt him tremble. Startled, I had pulled away, but I’d seen the interest flicker in his eyes. Now, it reminded me of Gerald, only this time as I thought of Richard I was aware of wanting to be close to him, wishing he was my friend.
Almost jealous I saw him leave the classroom talking to a girl. I realised then for myself how attractive he was. Average height, about five eight, but slim with thick blond hair and grey eyes. And there was something about his face, as if just beneath the surface there was a smile, a warm person waiting to be reached. Some of the girls fancied him and he was always surrounded by females. Some boys said he was a bit wet with all those girls round him. I suppose they were jealous really. I hardly talked to any girl except Linda, and that wasn’t quite the same as she was Steve’s girlfriend and so couldn’t really get out of talking to me.
But Linda genuinely liked me, in a different way to how she felt about Steve of course.
Linda laughs confidently rather than giggles and that won me over straight away. Giggling girls irritate me, but that might be because I’m always scared they’re giggling about me being so tall and gangly-footed. I have this habit of knocking things over, especially cups of coffee. It’s bloody hard not to cry out when you’ve spilt hot Nescafe down your trousers, but the pained expression in my face has them rolling in the aisles.
I wondered if anyone ever took me seriously. Unfortunately I seemed stuck with the nickname, Jumbo. I was clumsy, I was thick, I played rugby and if I danced with a girl she hobbled off the dance floor with deformed feet after a hearty dose of crushed toes. But Linda had a way of laughing with you, and not at you. She never made me feel stupid, instead her laughter seemed to celebrate my slow-footedness and awkward hands. When I spilled coffee she laughed, but she always fetched a cloth.
“It’s about time I found you a girlfriend, Jumbo,” Linda would say, and she always did her best to find me one at every dance we went to, only she hadn’t been very successful so far. I’d danced with a few girls, even ventured to kiss one or two, but that was that. “I expect you prefer to be a bachelor boy,” said Linda, knowing that wasn’t true. But then you didn’t want to talk about being lonely, did you? Loneliness was a word we never used with each other, though not saying it didn’t make the feeling go away.
Sometimes I used to feel my loneliness like an ache inside, and though I never mentioned it, Linda knew. Walking back from parties, or the pub, she used to take my hand and squeeze it for a moment, her other arm around Steve’s waist. Other times she used to walk in the middle of us, holding both Steve’s and my hands, and I used to kid her that she was mother walking her two little boys.
If I was uncertain about anything I knew I could always turn to her as a friend. Only I never did. You see I didn’t want anyone knowing too well what went on inside my head and heart
, not even her.
In the sixth form common-room everyone lounged on vandalised foam rubber seats or stood chatting over the loud music, sipping cups of coffee purchased from the vending machine.
I felt lost for a minute, unable to find a face I could talk to, and then I noticed Gordon sitting on his own. I went over and asked him if he was all right. “Surviving,” Gordon replied, and then we went through the normal boring duologue that everyone goes through when they’re talking for the sake of it to people they only half know and don’t really care about.
I suppose that sounds very cynical, but I wasn’t usually like that, normally I didn’t question anything, was quite content to talk or listen to anyone I knew. My friends thought I was a happy-go-lucky soul, though I had my quiet moments just like anyone else.
But I was changing. That was the sad thing, or was it simply that I was growing up, gaining a better idea of who I was? Gerald had started it off, unsettling me with his nervous smile, and Charles had increased my worries. But it was Richard who disturbed me most.
Again I recalled the look in his eyes when, in helping him off the corridor floor, I’d held his hand. Had he trembled because he was thrilled by my touch? I was abruptly aware of the times we’d looked at each other and, conscious of the other’s interest, turned quickly away. I was frightened then.
I was beginning to think about life, question myself and the people around me, and of course that was scary. It was like being given the chance to open the black box you’d wondered about for ages, wanting to know what was inside, only now, when your fingers were on the lid to open it, you had the disquieting feeling that there was something nasty inside, something you didn’t want to see. The trouble was, if it had been just a box I was curious about I could have left it well alone, but it was me that I was worried about.
There isn’t any way you can turn away from the truth inside you, not if you want to be happy. Of course there are thousands of people who don’t want to question themselves or see who lies inside. People can lie to themselves, they can pretend that they don’t know who they are. Some pretend so well that they can’t see the truth inside them, maybe because they’re afraid.
But I can’t criticise. At that moment, standing there in the common-room, I think I was one of those people trying to pretend that everything was hunky dory. I didn’t want to think about what was worrying me. I didn’t want to look in that direction. It was as if out of the corner of my eye I could see a stranger standing in the shadows and I was scared to look too closely in case I saw who it was. Worst of all the stranger seemed to have wriggled under my skin, or had grown inside me all my eighteen years, only now for some reason that stranger was not content to stay in the shadows but wanted to step out into the light and be seen.
I was afraid of that stranger. I wanted him to go away, step outside my body and shrivel up. But he stayed inside me, breathing more deeply, becoming more and more alive, and as he grew stronger I was more scared and, like anyone frightened, I wanted to destroy him. But no matter how hard I squeezed the stranger’s throat, there was no way I could wring all the life out of him without murdering something that was, for good or bad, a living, breathing part of me.
So I waffled on to Gordon and listened to his tale of drunken adventure, and I wasn’t even fully aware that inside of me the stranger was trying to gather his strength, preparing to fight for the life which I, with all my conscious doubts and fears, would do my best to deny.
3
There was nothing good on television that evening and Dad, lost without something to do, paced restlessly around the house like a caged tiger. Mum sheltered in the kitchen doing the ironing, and so Dad decided to turn on me.
“I’m pleased about your acceptance from the college,” he said, fishing for my reaction.
“Yeah,” I said, vaguely, giving my father some more rope to play with.
“You will take it, won’t you?” he said, leaning back in the armchair, and there was a slight edge of worry in his voice.
“I’m thinking about it, Dad,” I said. I suppose I was playing with him. I thought it would be good to see just who was running my life, him or me.
“What’s there to think about?” he argued.
“Whether I want to go, or not,” I answered, getting down to brass tacks.
“Of course you want to go.” His voice grew louder and more incredulous. “That’s what you applied for, isn’t it, to go there and study Physical Education.”
Dad couldn’t see how I could possibly want to turn it down. He’d always sung the praises of the education system and encouraged me to stay in it as long as I could. But then, after working as a porter in a vast office building for twenty years, who could blame him? He hated his job, being bossed about by all the new trainee managers fresh from college. He was determined his son should be on a level with them, only I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a college lad.
“You’ve always taken it for granted I wanted to teach P.E.,” I told him. “You practically filled in the application for me. Well, now I’m thinking about what I want to do.”
“You should think what’s good for you,” Dad warned, nearly losing his temper. “There’s millions unemployed, do you want to be on the dole?”
“I could find a job,” I said, only I knew I was on weak ground here and Dad knew it too.
“What would you do then?” he challenged.
I pulled at my jumper defensively.
“I could work in a bank.”
“What? You a banker?” Dad sneered, treating it like it was the greatest joke on earth. “You?”
“And why not?” I said, needled.
“Because you’re not the type.”
“What type am I, then?”
Dad glanced at me with his bright blue eyes and nudged his nose with his hand. It was the sort of question he wasn’t comfortable with.
“You’re not a banker. You like fresh air.”
I thought he was grabbing at straws.
“It’s a good job, banking,” I said, sounding as if just this minute I’d sent off applications to Barclays and the Nat West.
“It’s a white-collar job,” he said uncertainly. “An office job. I want more for you, Martin. I don’t want you to be a paper-pusher. You’re better than that. You don’t want to be a mincing office boy, that thinks he knows it all and arse-licks when he makes a hash of it.”
I knew it would come down to this. I suppose I’d wanted him to say it all along and now he had, I hated it. I think he saw the anger in my eyes, because he tried in his own way to put things right.
“You know what I mean,” he said, feebly.
“Do I?”
“You’re not cut out for an office life,” he told me. “You like the outdoors. You’d go mad in an office.”
“But what about my brain, Dad, don’t you think my brain deserves something?”
You can use it teaching. Teaching’s not donkey work, is it? As a teacher you would use your brain and be outside with your sport.”
This sounded too much like a good argument, so I ignored it and went back to the subject that was niggling me.
“Would you think I was a Wet if I worked in an office?” I said loudly.
“Of course not …
“I’d just be a mincing office boy then. You said it.”
“You’re being silly.”
“Am I?” I stared straight at him and I could see something in him back away. I picked up my rifle, metaphorically of course, and advanced. “I’m a man as long as I play rugby. A namby pamby if I work in a bank.”
Dad didn’t say a word.
“You’re such a narrow-minded kid,” I burst out, and of course I’d gone too far then.
Dad practically flew out of his seat.
“You’ve no right to call me that,” he shouted. “No right at all. It’s you who’d better grow up and learn some manners too. I’m your father … ”
“Worse luck.”
There was an awful sil
ence. I don’t think either of us knew what to say then. I looked at Dad and he seemed to have grown smaller, shrunk with defeat. I knew I’d hurt him and I wished I hadn’t. If Mum had come into the room then and looked at me with her anxious eyes I would have cried. It was awful. All of a sudden I was falling apart.
And then, even then I could only think of Charles, his short red hair and trimmed beard, the worried mouth and in those eyes the fear and the pain which men like my father had put there. I thought of the pot-bellied man and the man with flint eyes and saw my father there too, making fun of the queer, ready to put the boot in, loud and beery-voiced with the others who agreed that animals like that should be locked up. And still Charles’ wide green eyes looked at me, alight with pain, the faint traces of mascara smudged on his cheek.
“Dad …”
“You’ve said enough, haven’t you?” Dad stood there in the room like a waxwork, unmoving, and then I think he realised he could come back and hurt me, and he took that opportunity because I’d scared him and he couldn’t let that happen again.
“Martin,” he said quietly. “You know how your mother is. If she could hear you speak to me like that she’d be so upset.”
I couldn’t look at him, couldn’t argue because I knew it was true. It was then I realised just how strong a weapon truth could be. Dad used it against me now, skilfully cutting me down with the sword he’d found in his hand.
“Think about what your mother would say,” he went on, not satisfied with an easy victory. He wanted me chopped up. Even in love, especially in the proud, possessive kind Dad gave to me, there is room for revenge.
“You know how your Mum wants you to go to college. It was your Mum’s dream you would teach. Are you going to let her down?”
I was silent as if Dad had cut out my tongue.
“What about your mother?” Dad said, standing over me.
I bowed my head and found a small voice inside me.
Who Lies Inside Page 3