Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints (8 page)

I felt like a marked man.

*  *  *

My parents’ euphoria faded quickly. The following morning they woke up to a potato wine hangover and a jolt of reality. The burden of Uncle Ken’s care—his food, his laundry, and his complex medications—had now descended onto their shoulders.

(Much as it pains me to compliment the two people who imported Narg into our home in the first place, I have to admit that Betty and Terry always embraced the responsibility of their problematic in-laws without a lot of whining. If there is a Nobel Prize for taking care of extremely frightening relatives, I would like to think that my parents are under consideration.)

Uncle Ken was pleasant, blond, and quite good-looking. Like Narg, he was a paranoid schizophrenic. Despite their common diagnosis, they were quite different. While Uncle Ken was more generally appealing than Narg, he was infinitely more out of it. Narg’s lobotomy had made her somehow more present.

Uncle Ken had only a glancing connection with reality. He was often to be seen having conversations with invisible people or performing strange pantomimes involving various aspects of the coal-mining process. Kenneth had been a mining engineering student at the time of his departure from his trolley. He was quite nostalgic about his night shifts “down the pit.”

Now he worked as an attendant at the Arthur Hill Memorial Swimming Baths. My sister and I were frequent visitors to this institution. Ken always seemed pleased to see us. He would acknowledge our presence by dumping large buckets of powdered chlorine onto us while we were swimming. It was nice to get preferential treatment.

*  *  *

Our first ensemble dining experience constitutes my strongest memory of Uncle Ken.

It started off auspiciously enough. Ken seated himself next to me. I was happy. It was like having a big brother.

Then the food arrived.

The minute Ken’s plate hit the table, it was as if a starting pistol had been fired which only he could hear. He grabbed his knife and fork and attacked his food, eating noisily and with astonishing speed.

“Slow down, for God’s sake! Savor the flavor!” begged Terry of his younger brother, but to no avail.

Gobbling food was probably a habit he picked up in the asylum prior to arriving chez nous. Meticulous, refined mastication was doubtless out of the question in such an establishment: there was no shortage of aggressive inmates waiting to swipe your grub off your plate if you did not shovel it down your gullet in record time.

Having wolfed down his lunch in a matter of seconds, Ken retired to a fireside armchair. Here he rolled the first in a long series of handmade cigarettes. He performed this skill without watching his hands. He just stared into the middle distance.

Uncle Ken did not make eye contact easily. He had a strange habit, when addressed, of focusing his gaze on one’s upper forehead. If you wanted to look him in the eyes, you were obliged to stand on tiptoes. This worked for only so long. After a while his gaze would ascend once more, obliging one to fetch a stepladder or throw in the towel.

“How was lunch?” said my mum, little knowing that an incomprehensibly dreadful and unforgettably nasty series of events was about to take place. Straining to get into his field of vision, she stood on tiptoes and repeated the question.

“Hello. . . . Yes. . . . Betty. . . . Thanksverymuch,” Ken replied incomprehensibly and raised his gaze.

From my vantage point, everything then seemed to go into slow motion and to cut, cut, cut in a cinematic frenzy. It was all very reminiscent of that scene in
The Birds
when Tippi Hedren observes the unfolding mayhem from a phone booth. I was Tippi.

Scene one: Uncle Ken takes a long drag on his hand-rolled ciggie and exhales in a wheezy rush. Cut.

Just at that moment, Hawo, the ailing cat, walks into the frame. Cut.

Betty rises from the dining room table and heads toward the kitchen with an armload of dishes, addressing the cat on the way with a “Hello, Hawo!” Cut.

Close-up on Uncle Ken’s feet. Cut.

Soundtrack builds.

Hawo looks at Uncle Ken.

Close-up on dilating cat’s pupil.

Hawo walks calmly toward Uncle Ken.

Hawo stares malevolently at Uncle Ken’s shoes.

Hawo vomits on Uncle Ken’s shoes.

The actual vomiting takes several seconds, but Uncle Ken is too out of it on horse pill tranquilizers to do anything other than stare blankly and continue to enjoy his raggedy homemade cigarette.

Cut to Betty who, oblivious to the unfolding drama, lights a fag, pours herself another glass of Château Doonan, and sets about washing the dishes.

Cut back to Ken. Maybe it’s that hastily gobbled lunch, or
maybe it’s the fact that his feet are now covered in foul-smelling cat vomit, or both, but Uncle Ken starts to go a bit green. He stares at the vomit, and the vomit stares back.

Uncle Ken suddenly stands bolt upright (handheld camera). He has a wild, confused look about him. He lurches out of the dining room and into the kitchen, toward the sink. He elbows Betty out of the way and vomits into the sink full of dishes.

Holding her fag in her bright-orange-rubber-glove-covered right hand, Betty stares out the window. It’s hard to read her expression. Cigarette ash falls.

“The almond tree needs pruning. The branches are hitting the buses again. Better be getting back to work,” says Terry and departs.

Fade to black.

*  *  *

It was then, after the cat vomit episode, that I became utterly convinced I would end up just like Ken, doomed to a life of deranged misery. I knew that schizophrenia was hereditary. I had read all about it in one of the moderately glossy current-affairs magazines which came gratis with our Sunday newspapers. Now I could clearly see my future unspooling before me in a grim montage of hallucinations, electric shock treatments, and nicotine.

My life was already beginning to unravel, just like one of Ken’s horrible-smelling cigarettes. I had failed the entry examination for the grammar school. Even Biddie had managed to get into the bloody grammar school! It was now official: I was an idiot. What was the difference between an idiot and a lunatic? Not a lot.

It was hard to feel bubbly and jazzed about my future. I would probably stay at the idiot school until I turned sixteen. After that, if I had not already gone bonkers, I would get a job at the Huntley & Palmers biscuit factory. I would work there until I fell into some heavy machinery or went mad or both.

I would wish away the remainder of my days staring at people’s foreheads with nothing to look forward to except the occasional deluge of cat vomit.

*  *  *

Salvation appeared in an unexpected form.

One day, while crawling round the floor of my parents’ incredibly untidy bedroom in search of Hawo, I happened upon the very meaning of Life, or so I thought at the time.

Next to my mother’s bed I found a copy of a swanky magazine called
Nova.
On the cover was a picture of a ravishingly brittle, glamorous Italian socialite.

“Principessa Pignatelli plucks each hair off her legs with tweezers,” read the cheeky headline. “With that dedication and £5,348 a year to spare, you too might make ninth on the best-dressed lists.”

I took the magazine to my room. Snuggling excitedly onto my bed, I began to read and reread the intoxicating editorial about Principessa Pignatelli. A vain fashion junkie, Luciana Pignatelli crisscrossed the globe, traveling with a vast wardrobe of Valentino couture, ankle weights, and eight or nine hairpieces. She resided in a glamorous, floor-pillow-strewn Roman palazzo. She was one of the Beautiful People.

Oblivious to the viciously sardonic tone of the editorial, I instantly developed an infatuated identification with the jetsetting
Luciana. I was particularly impressed by her beauty tips: “She splashes the insides of her thighs with cold water and never puts her breasts in hot water because it makes them sag.” The regimental order and glamour of her life contrasted sharply with the tawdriness and unpredictability of my own. I became obsessed.

I could not imagine any Uncle Kens daring to vomit into
her
sink while she was doing
her
dishes. If she got up to pee in the night, I was sure nobody leapt into the corridor, as my grandmother Narg frequently did, and accused
her
of being a streetwalker.

She was the anti-Narg and the un-Ken.

On first reading, the principessa’s world seemed depressingly remote.

Italy seemed such a long way away. The only place we ever traveled to was strife-torn Belfast to check in on my belligerent grandpa.

As I splashed the insides of my thighs with cold water, I thought about the Beautiful People. I did not care how far away they were, I would find them and befriend them.

And soon, very soon, they would like me enough to pretend that I was one of them.

I
once took my blind aunt Phyllis out for a walk and fractured her skull.

She wasn’t really my aunt. Phyllis was one of a gaggle of women, friends of Betty and Terry, whom we referred to as
aunt.

There was Auntie Iris with the tunnel curls, whose attractive Polish husband had lost both legs in the war to frostbite. And heavily perfumed Aunt Toni with the gravelly voice. She wore loud charm bracelets, tempestuous gypsy blouses, and tiered
dirndl skirts with petticoats underneath. Like Uncle Ken, Aunt Toni rolled her own cigarettes, except she used a little machine. Hers were much tidier. She walked with a glamorous limp and a fancy cane because of a motorcycle accident.

And let’s not forget Betty’s favorite, Auntie Muriel, her childhood pal. She worked as a street cop in Northern Ireland. Auntie Muriel was living proof that you can wear red lipstick with a uniform and still be intimidating.

By contrast, there was gushy Aunt Sheila. She was more femmy and helpless than Aunt Muriel, as evidenced by the fact that she once broke her finger putting on her girdle.

Of all these ladies, Aunt Phyllis was my favorite. Paradoxically, she was the only one whose skull I fractured.

*  *  *

I vividly remember the day that Phyllis blew into our lives, like a lonely, disintegrating tumbleweed.

One afternoon in the late 1950s, I skipped home from primary school to find a forlorn-looking woman in a gray suit sitting in our living room. Though she was only in her thirties, her crumpled posture gave her the appearance of an old lady.

It was obvious that she was depressed, and even more obvious that she was blind. Helen Keller could have seen that she was blind. Some sightless people wear dark glasses to shield those around them from the drama of their handicap. Not Phyllis. She did not conceal her blindness with chic little sunglasses like Jane Wyman in
Magnificent Obsession.
Everyone could see that Phyllis Robinson’s eyes were missing. She had no eyeballs, and she did not care who knew it. In their place were two rather startling sunken pits.

Her accessories? A small rhinestone daisy lapel brooch, a sturdy handbag, a battered leather suitcase, and a large female Labrador wearing a well-worn white leather harness.

My sister and I fell upon this beautiful golden beast, hugging her and playing with her massive silky ears.

“Phyllis and Lassie are going to be staying with us for a couple of weeks,” declaimed Betty by way of explanation. She lit up a Woodbine cigarette and shot my sister and me a look that discouraged the asking of moronic questions, adding, “Just until she gets back on her feet, of course.”

As we played with Lassie’s ears, twisting them into Austrian braided hairdos on the top of her head and making her look like a canine Hofbrau waitress, we had no idea that Phyllis was destined to stay for ten years, outlasting Uncle Ken, my crazy grandmother Narg, and many of the other lodgers.

Though Betty was a tough-talking broad who professed to loathe do-gooders, she regularly found herself unable to resist the impulse to reach out and give a fellow human being a helping hand. Phyllis was in need of help.

“We have to take good care of her—she’s addicted to purple hearts,” explained Betty in a hushed but matter-of-fact tone while Phyllis unpacked her meager possessions. These notorious pills were the preferred downers of the 1950s. Phyllis’s addiction was causing her to lose her hair and parts of her mind. Betty had decided to rescue her.