Mum had said that all she wanted was for me to be happy, and then she’d burst into tears in front of me, which I can’t really say did the job. After a couple of years she had a special friend called Keith who would come and stay. Mum and Keith had an elaborate foreplay which involved them both walking around the garden in the late afternoon while he pretended to be interested in all the flowers she had planted. Then she cooked him a meal and Keith would stay the night. I wondered if he wore that stupid cravat under his pyjamas as well. They would go to bed at the same time and then they would get up about twenty minutes later and go to the toilet a lot. I used to lie in bed listening to them walking across the landing and then flushing the toilet over and over again. I wondered if perhaps Keith’s house didn’t have a toilet, because whenever he stayed with us, he always seemed to make maximum use of ours.
It was only later that I realized that they’d been having it off, and then the idea of my mother having sex completely horrified me. When it was explained to me that my parents must have had sexual intercourse in order to conceive me, I remember being disgusted and wishing they hadn’t. ‘But then you wouldn’t exist,’ my friend had said.
‘That’s fine. I’d rather take that option.’
After a year or so the toilet flushing decreased, but the noise was replaced by the sound of Mum and Keith shouting at each other. I was always packed off to bed early because Mum and Keith couldn’t wait to be alone so they could get down to another bit of fighting.
Being only eight years old, I didn’t really understand that I was disturbed by yet another round of shouting and tears in my home, but I suppose it wasn’t normal behaviour to stand on the end of my bed every night and urinate against the wall. Every night in the same spot. I don’t know what possessed me to do it; it’s not as if the toilet was constantly engaged any more. Mum had builders, plumbers and plasterers round – none of them could ever work out why the wallpaper was peeling off, the plaster was crumbling and the carpet was rotting. I remember being scared that one of them would guess the cause. As if the head builder would suck the air in through his teeth and shake his head. ‘Ooh dear. No, it’s not wet rot or a cracked boiler inlet feed. No, that’s yer classic subconscious cry for help by an eight-year-old traumatized by his parents’ divorce. I could get my chippy to have a look at it for you, but really you want a proper child psychologist, and my one’s on another job.’
I decided against putting all this in my letter to Dad because I didn’t want him to think I was trying to make him feel guilty for walking out when I was five. Though I bloody well hoped he did feel a little bit guilty for walking out when I was five. There had been a time when I’d hated him for leaving Mum, but now I no longer based my view of people entirely on what my mother had thought. I didn’t still think that Liberace had just never found the right girl.
Eventually Keith found someone else’s toilet to flush, and for years after she was abandoned the second time, Mum didn’t let herself get close to anyone. After that I was her man; I was the one who filled her tank when we pulled into the petrol station. And at the weekends I would obligingly play the role of husband substitute, walking around clothes shops with her, shrugging indifferently as she emerged from the changing room in a variety of equally frumpy dresses. I had to grow up fast; maybe that was partly why I’d contrived a second childhood in my thirties. Finally I left home and went off to college, and Mum suddenly met and married a man from Northern Ireland. I think for the last year of her life she was quite happy. She invited me to the wedding, because she said she thought I might like to meet him, which was thoughtful of her. I can’t say I cared for him a great deal; he was all firm handshakes and meaningful eye contact, and he said my name too often when he was talking to me. But that didn’t stop Mum from moving back to Belfast with him. I wished I’d made the effort to see her after she moved there, but I never did. And six months later she was walking through the city centre when she got knocked down and killed by a speeding car. And that was it. Now there is a big empty space where she should be. In a shop, sitting in a chair, standing in a bus queue; there’s an empty person-shaped gap where she would be now if she hadn’t stepped out in front of that car.
Telling people about the death of a loved one is supposed to be a therapeutic part of the grieving process. Not in my case. When I told all my college friends that my mother had been killed in Belfast, they all said, ‘By a bomb?’
I would continue to stare solemnly at the ground and explain further. ‘No. By a car.’
‘Oh, I see.’ And then there was a pause. ‘A car bomb?’
‘No. Just a car. She was run over by a man driving down the street.’
‘Blimey. That’s awful. She hadn’t been informing on the IRA or anything?’
‘No, of course she hadn’t. It was an accident. He was just driving too fast.’
‘Oh. Joyrider, was he?’
‘No, it was just an ordinary car accident. It wasn’t a car bomb or joyriders or an IRA execution. It was just a common or garden road accident. They do have them in Belfast.’
Every person I had to tell would do the usual embarrassed sympathizing bit, and I’d say thanks a lot and then there was that awkward pause when they felt they had to say something to fill the silence. ‘You must have worried about something like this happening when she moved to Northern Ireland . . .’
‘No,’ I said sharply. Obviously everyone thought that Mum had brought it upon herself, I mean, moving to Belfast, well, that’s just asking to be run over by a seventy-five-year-old man, isn’t it? At the funeral one of her cousins said loudly, ‘I warned her she’d get herself killed if she moved to Belfast.’ I finally snapped and shouted, ‘For God’s sake. She was run over. By an old man in a car. It happens in Belfast; it happens in London; it happens in fucking Reykjavik!’ And someone said, ‘All right, Michael; there’s no need for that.’ And another relation put an arm round my mum’s cousin and said, ‘Well, of course, it’s a very dangerous place, Belfast.’
You can always rely on funerals to bring out the worst in a family.
Perhaps if she had still been alive I would have told all my problems to her, because I certainly had little idea how my father would react to this letter when I posted it. I told him about everything that had happened since the children had come along. How I had spent endless days in my room making compilation tapes while Catherine had struggled through the hardest years of being a parent. How Catherine had thought I’d been working sixteen hours a day when really I’d been having naked piggy-back fights with beautiful young girls and boozy barbecues on Clapham Common. How I had tried to have everything – the love of a family and the liberty of a single man, the commitment of children and the carefree wastefulness of youth. There were pages of it by the time I’d finished – frank and emotional outpouring that my father would probably have thought as interesting as I found his news about Brian’s discounted Mondeo, but next morning I sent it off to him anyway.
It felt good to have got it all off my chest. As I posted the letter I knew I was definitely doing the right thing. I had no choice but to make myself think that – the postman refused to give me the letter back when he finally arrived to empty the pillar box an hour and a half later. Now that I had shared my secret with someone else I felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Suddenly everything was crystallized. You cannot break off an affair and carry on seeing your old mistress. Dad had tried that with Janet the chemist and had ended up moving in with her. I had promised Catherine I would be home the previous evening, but I had ended up playing around again. The only way forward was clear to me now: I had decided to move out of the flat: my double life was over. I would set up my studio equipment in the loft or the shed or in our bedroom; it didn’t matter, but I couldn’t carry on as I was.
As it turned out I never really talked to Dad about the enormous revelation that I had sprung upon him. I suppose the therapeutic act of writing it all down and posting it had been wh
at was important, so in that sense the letter had already done its work. By the time I spoke to Dad again, what he thought of it all no longer seemed very important. Because when Catherine got to read the letter, her reaction rather overshadowed everything else.
chapter eight
just do it
‘Michael, how would you like to have your own record in the charts?’
I’d been building a brick tower for Millie when Hugo had rung my mobile. The trill of the phone jolted me out of my trance, and I realized that Millie had actually wandered off some time before and that for the past couple of minutes I’d been playing with little bricks on my own.
‘My own record?’ I said, standing up.
‘Yup. With your name on it and everything. Top of the charts. How does that grab you?’
This was obviously some scam designed to talk me into doing some crappy underpaid job for him, and so a cautious voice at the back of my head told me to say I wasn’t particularly interested.
‘Well, I’d be very interested,’ I said. ‘Though, um, in what way would this be my own record?’ Hugo proceeded to explain and no amount of phoney excitement on his part could convince me that this project would be my personal Sergeant Pepper. Through one of his various Soho contacts, Hugo was putting together a CD called Classic Commercials. Everyone’s favourite pieces of classical music – namely the ones they only recognized because they’d heard them on TV ads – now available together on one great album.
‘And I immediately thought of you, Michael. You love all that classical stuff, don’t you.’
‘I’m pretty sure this idea has been done before, Hugo.’
‘Not for at least eighteen months,’ he said. ‘And now there’s the technology to recreate the orchestra with all your clever equipment, so we don’t have to fork out a fortune to pay a lot of poncey violin players in dinner jackets.’
‘Well, when you put it like that, I’m really flattered that you want me on board.’
I attempted to maintain a disdainful air, but Hugo was determined that I was the right man for the job. ‘It has to be you, Michael. You’re the man that put that tum-te-tum tune into the instant-tea-granules ad.’ It was true. I had indeed been the man who had made Verdi’s ‘March of the Hebrew Slaves’ synonymous with ‘the cuppa that’s easy as one, two, tea’. When Classic FM had its annual vote for their listeners’ all-time top one hundred pieces of music I had felt quite chuffed to see Verdi’s ‘March of the Hebrew Slaves’ make its first entry in the charts at number nine. If it hadn’t been for instant tea granules I doubt whether it would ever have made the top one hundred.
So this was to be the extent of my recording success as a musician. It wouldn’t be my own compositions on the CD, it would be my synthetic arrangements of Beethoven, Brahms and Berlioz listed according to composer, title and brand of panty liners that they had promoted. I couldn’t help but feel a slight sense that my dreams had been compromised since I’d left music college.
‘Why don’t you just do a compilation of all the classic overtures as played by mobile phones?’
‘That’s not a bad idea. We could do that as a follow-up.’
We talked about which pieces of music they had in mind and I attempted to explain to Hugo that in reality no technology could adequately recreate the sound of an orchestra, but he was unmoved.
‘Just stick on a bit of extra reverb or something we’ll give you a budget to get in singers or whatever for the ones like when that fat bloke from the opera is so sad he wants just one cornetto.’
‘“O Sole Mio” is not from an opera.’
‘Whatever.’
‘You could do it, but it would sound shit.’
‘Yeah, but the sort of people who’ll buy it won’t be able to tell it sounds shit.’
I told Hugo he was the most cynical person I had ever met and he was genuinely flattered. But by not refusing to do the job I found that somehow I seemed to have agreed to do it. Commercial Classics would be a pick-and-mix CD, a collection of cheaply produced orchestral soundbites for people who didn’t want to commit to a whole symphony. Although I felt vaguely uncomfortable about the whole idea I sat down to work out which little ditties would make up the list. From the opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan there would be Rimsky-Korsakov’s famous ‘Flight of the Black and Decker Paint Stripper’. There was ‘Jupiter’ from Hoist’s Planets suite – better known as the theme from the Dulux Weathershield ad. There was the Hovis Ad, sometimes known as the New World Symphony. Antonin Dvorak had written this music as a tribute to the United States. I think putting ten seconds of it in a TV ad said more about the American way than his symphony ever could have done. There was the ‘Dance of the Little Swans’ from Swan Lake, for which Tchaikovsky had wrought his emotions in his quest to express the convenience, the delicious flavour and sheer absence of calories that is Batchelor’s Slim A Soup. And there was, of course, Beethoven’s Blue Band Margarine Symphony.
Within a quarter of an hour I had scribbled a list of about twenty to thirty pieces of music that had been made famous by their repeated exposure on television adverts. Catherine had overheard my phone call and, despite being stretched out on the floor like a beached whale in a futile attempt to be comfortable, she tried to see what it was that I was writing down. I was embarrassed to tell her about the project, but she understood my reservations.
‘Don’t do it, then, if you find it distasteful.’
‘Well I’ve sort of said that I would now.’
‘Well ring him back and tell him you’ve changed your mind.’
‘But you don’t know what Hugo’s like. I’ll come off the phone having just agreed we should make it a double CD.’
Catherine was irritated by my weakness when confronted by people like Hugo. She told me I should stick up for myself and, not having the courage to argue with her, I meekly agreed that I would in future.
‘I’ve got an idea to make some money,’ she suddenly announced. ‘A compilation novel.’ And she started making some notes.
‘What?’
‘Well, if you can buy all these CDs that bring together the most popular bits of classical music, somebody ought to publish a compilation novel.’
Catherine was more of a literary person than me. Every month she attended a reading group where about half a dozen women got together and spent five minutes talking about Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and the other three hours slagging off their husbands.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘How can you have a compilation novel?’
She cleared her throat to read out her work in progress. ‘The action starts in the Wessex town of Casterbridge when the mayor wakes up one morning and notices that he has turned into a beetle. Now Mrs Bennet decides that he would no longer make a suitable husband for her daughter Molly Bloom so she escapes from the attic where she was imprisoned by Rochester and sets fire to Manderley. “The horror, the horror!” exclaims Heathcliff as the white whale drags Little Nell beneath the waves to a tragic death, and Tom Jones sits alone in the garden of Barchester Towers knowing he had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.’
I chuckled at Catherine’s fantastically vulgar idea and pretended to recognize all the references. Inside part of me was thinking, Actually, as someone with absolutely no knowledge of English literature I wouldn’t mind reading that.
‘Quick, quick!’ she said suddenly, placing my hand on her bump. ‘There. Did you feel that?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re not really pregnant, are you?’
‘Ah, you’ve rumbled me. No, I’ve just been eating loads and loads of cream cakes.’ And we both laughed and then suddenly I said, ‘Wow! That was a big one!’ Sometimes when Catherine giggled the baby inside her would give approving little kicks to show that it too was enjoying the moment. I watched the baby’s heel or elbow or something ripple across under her stretched stomach like Moby Dick just below the surface. Catherine was now over halfway through her pregnancy. A whole new human being
was shaping up. In a few months’ time I would be a biological parent for the third time, but somehow I didn’t really feel like I was a fully formed father yet. The birth of our baby would be a long and painful business; I suppose there was no reason why I should expect my own transition to be any easier.
The baby now made a neat little bump at the front of Catherine’s stomach and the received wisdom was that this made it more likely the baby would be a boy. Folklore and fishwives have provided all sorts of ways to detect the sex of the unborn infant: the shape of the bulge, the nature of the mother’s food cravings and, of course, the wedding ring test. This involves lying the mother on her back and dangling her wedding ring on a piece of cotton above her womb. If it sways slightly it’s a girl; if it spins it’s a boy. Catherine’s ring span and swayed and I spent a week worrying that our new baby would grow up to look like the girl on Simon’s computer.
A pregnant woman’s bulge needs to be a lot larger than Catherine’s for her to be absolutely sure of being offered a seat on the underground, but as yet no woman has ever been twenty-two months pregnant. It would be nearly Christmas before Catherine would get really big, and by then men sitting on the tube would have no choice but to do the decent thing and hold their newspapers so close to their face that she couldn’t possibly catch their eye. Or so they thought. But Catherine being Catherine would peer over the top of their papers and say, ‘Are you comfy enough sitting there or would you like to put your feet up on my bump.’ I suspected that it was embarrassment that prevented some men from giving up their seats – the thought of talking to a complete stranger on the tube, a person of the opposite sex who they would specifically be addressing because of that woman’s gynaecological condition; it’s enough to make the average Englishman shrivel up and die. I put this thesis to Catherine, and she listened carefully and nodded and then proposed her own carefully considered analysis: ‘You don’t think it might just be because men are all selfish bastards?’ Embarrassment was not a concept Catherine really understood, but I suppose that once you’ve been naked with your legs up in stirrups as a group of medical students look on from the end of the bed, it would take quite a lot to make you blush.
The Best a Man Can Get Page 17