Broken Music: A Memoir (6 page)

I LIE IN THE DARKNESS of my attic bedroom above the dairy, where I have successfully ejaculated into my hand for the first time.

Philip Larkin, in his poem “Annus Mirabilis,” claimed that sex was invented sometime between the lifting of the ban on
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
and the Beatles’ first LP, but apart from Tommy Thompson’s baffling intelligences, sex for me does not yet exist. Sex is never talked about in our house. There is no sex on television, and if there is any sex in the cinema, I haven’t seen it. Christine Keeler and her friends may be entertaining the minister of defense, and about to bring the Tory establishment to its knees, but the newspapers don’t know about it yet. The Lord Chancellor may be about to lift the ban on a dirty book that D. H. Lawrence wrote thirty years before, but none of this means anything to me.

I have no idea what it is that has exploded into my hand in the dark, only that it has the viscosity and temperature of blood. The delicious thrill of the moment is tempered with a terror that I have injured myself and that my body and the sheets of my bed will be a bloody mess in the light of morning. A light would waken my little brother. This is my secret, and already I can feel the welts on my legs from my father’s hand. Fear, guilt, and fumbled ecstasy are already
forming the seductive cocktail that will wallow in the warm pit of my loins long after this first intoxication.

My father is not given to outward displays of affection, and seems to regard hugs and kisses as needless and flamboyant affectation. He is of a generation for which this lack of physical warmth and intimacy is considered normal and manly; it is as if a society sandwiched between two world wars has unconsciously attempted to create a race of Spartans, inured to the hardships and emotional sacrifices of wartime. Anything that veers from this norm is considered sissified and effeminate; we don’t cry, we don’t run into each other’s arms, and kissing only happens in the movies. My father is neither cruel nor sadistic, but he is a product of his generation; he is a good man who loves us profoundly in his heart but does not know how to show it; he is like a prisoner in an iron mask, increasingly sullen, desolate and utterly trapped.

My mother is a different animal entirely, spontaneously emotional, and as prone to tantrums and tears as she is to laughter and the joys of life. She craves romance and excitement. She is a rare and exotic bird, dangerous and unpredictable within the confines of her domestic cage. I adore my mother, but I’m also afraid of her.

On Sunday afternoons we watch old black-and-white movies, “three-hankie jobs,” on the BBC: Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in
Brief Encounter
, James Stewart in
It’s a Wonderful Life
. My mother watches the screen with the rapt attention of a child, captivated by the shadowy images and more often than not awash with tears at the first hint of sentiment as the sad threnodies of violins and cellos pour into the room like warm syrup. As much as I am my mother’s boy, I am also my father’s son, and there is an ache at the back of my throat as I bitterly swallow the urgency to weep, to hold my mother in her sadness and wipe away her tears. My father is asleep as usual in
the afternoons; he has no time for films. I sit like his deputy, grim and stony-faced, in what must look like suppressed fury.

My father’s daily routine hardly varies. He finishes his round by midday, has his lunch, and then goes to bed for two or three hours. When he awakens, he reads the evening paper, then goes out to the pub—usually the Penny Wet on the High Street or the Rising Sun on the Coast Road near to where he delivers milk. He is not a boozer and will often complain of a headache when he has had one too many. But he never comes home drunk, nor does he come home late.

My mother does not drink and she never accompanies him to the pub. It is not considered respectable, and my mother definitely has “airs and graces.” Only a common sort of woman would be seen in a pub, at least that’s what was thought at the time. She spends her days looking after my two younger siblings, cooking three meals a day, shopping in the High Street or chatting and laughing with Nancy the redhead in the back room behind the shop. My mother does not work in the shop; she considers herself a lady and so does everyone else. We have a car now and a telephone, when no one else in the street does.

The back room is where we have the record player. My mother has taught me to jive to the forty-five of the Champs playing “Tequila” and slow dance to the Everly Brothers singing “All I Have to Do Is Dream” (it may be the first time that I’ve heard, or at least paid attention to, close harmony). We do the “twist” at Chubby Checker’s urging and hula hoop till we collapse with exhaustion or pains in the chest. These are happy times; we laugh a lot, but in the afternoons we must be quiet so Dad can get his “shut-eye.” During those hours my mother will sit behind the lace curtains of the upstairs window and watch as people pass by in the street.

Despite our relative prosperity there are clearly money problems.
On Saturday afternoons my dad, Ray, and his brother Billy bring the weekly takings into the back room. I am often put to work stacking pennies into piles of twelve, threepenny bits into piles of four, sixpences into twos, shillings into twenties, and florins, or two-bob bits, into tens. I even remember counting farthings, four to a penny, as well as ha’pennies and half crowns. But the figures often don’t add up, barely covering expenses. I watch as Ray and Billy shuffle, ill at ease, from foot to foot as my father checks the numbers again and again.

One day four men arrive at the front door in brown overalls and manhandle the piano down the stairs. As they load it into the back of a blue van waiting at the curbside, I see something die in my mother’s face. My father does not move to comfort her, nor do I.

Shortly after this, Billy goes missing. Ray turns up one morning saying he can’t get an answer at his brother’s door. He and my dad take the van round and knock for about twenty minutes, but there is no response. Ray and my dad split up Billy’s round, and even though it’s a school day I have to work. We don’t finish until the middle of the afternoon. I go to bed exhausted along with my dad. Billy does not turn up the day after or even the day after that. Ray has no idea where his brother is. “Maybe he got a skinful, I dunno,” he says with a shrug.

We never see Billy again, nor is he ever spoken of, and we must now find a replacement.

Some days later, a sad and far from inspiring procession of job applicants traipses into the back room from the Labour Exchange. Nancy, standing in the corner with her arms folded across her chest and holding a half-finished cigarette, can barely contain her disgust at what she seems to consider such pathetic excuses for manhood and snorts audibly like a stage vamp. Betty is crying quietly in the corner, her face a picture of misery, wet with tears and made even
more grotesque by an angry swelling on her lower lip from her tryst of the previous night. My mother attempts to comfort her without success. The Labour Exchange will send more men this afternoon, reminding my father that it is the winter and very few people would want to run around the streets in such weather.

“You can say that again!” I whisper under my breath.

Maybe it’s the wisdom of hindsight, or memory conflated with imagination, but I can see this scene clearly. My father has gone to bed for his afternoon nap, having just chosen someone “presentable” to take over Billy’s job. His name is Alan; he is a little younger than my dad with reddish blond hair, blue eyes, and regular, handsome features. Alan has come back to pick up a pair of overalls, the “round book,” and a money bag. Nancy is in her corner having another cigarette—this time smiling her approval—Betty has been sent home, and in walks my mother.

I am invisible as time is frozen, and a look between these three is burned into my memory. It is a look of inexplicable mystery and power and stillness, and I am its witness.

The
mestre
calls the session to order and a final ritual song will close the proceedings. From our basic Portuguese we gather something about light, peace, and love, but little else. Everyone is now smiling, laughing, hugging, like shipwreck survivors who’ve lived through a terrible storm, and there is a palpable air of joy and community in the room. Trudie has been in a vast Neptunian palace, in the presence of a godlike deity, flowing beard and trident, sitting astride a massive throne and surrounded by the smiling faces of beautiful women. All of her visions seem to have been transcendent.

Our hosts are keen to know how we have fared. Was the experience too strong? Were we afraid? Did we see visions? Were we given insights? Did we meet our ancestors? Did we speak with God? But I am too bewildered to give anything like a coherent answer. Yet when we walk outside into the cool of the evening, the jungle is vibrantly alive, in fact disarmingly alive, and I have never felt so consciously connected before. I may be out of my gourd, but I seem to be perceiving the world on a molecular level, where the normal barriers that separate “me” from everything else have been removed, as if every leaf, every blade of grass, every nodding flower is reaching out, every insect calling to me, every star in the clear sky sending a direct beam of light to the top of my head.

This sensation of connectedness is overwhelming. It’s like floating in a buoyant limitless ocean of feeling that I can’t really begin to describe unless I evoke the word
love
. Before this experience I would have used the word to separate what I love from everything I don’t love—us not them, heroes from villains, friend from foe, everything in life separated and distinct like walled cities or hilltop fortresses jealously guarding their hoard of separateness. Now all is swamped in this tidal wave of energy
which grounds the skies to the earth so that every particle of matter in and around me is vibrant with significance. Everything around me seems in a state of grace and eternal. And strangest of all is that such grandiose philosophizing seems perfectly appropriate in this context, as if the spectacular visions have opened a doorway to another world of frankly cosmic possibilities.

I have to sit down on the steps of the church in dumbstruck awe at the beauty of the jungle and the stars above my head, but it is almost too much to bear. I lower my eyes to see a small gap in the stone steps, and there in the darkness, six inches down, at the bottom of the narrow crevice formed by the rough slabs of granite, grows an exquisite purple flower. It is like a forget-me-not, five petals of magenta radiating from the central mandala of a five-pointed yellow star, reaching bravely toward the light with an extraordinary life force and I am the sole witness to the courage of its struggle. In this moment I am led to an understanding that not only must such tiny, beautiful, and delicate living things be charged with love, but also the inanimate stones that surround them, everything giving and receiving, reflecting and absorbing, resisting and yielding, and I realize perhaps for the first time that love is never wasted. Love can be denied or ignored, or even perverted, but it does not disappear, it merely takes another form, until we are consciously ready to accept its mystery and its power. This may take a moment or an eternity, and there can be no insignificancies in eternity. And if this is true, then I must continue to remember my story and attempt to make some sense of it, to try to remake the drab prose of my life into some kind of transcendent poetry.