Broken Music: A Memoir (7 page)

I will not sleep tonight but will lie awake in the darkness of
our hotel room. It’s as if a well has been sunk deep into the sediment of my life, an artesian well drilled into the stratified, impermeable bedrock of the past, and every memory that is forced to the surface breeds another ten in front of my eyes.

I watch as these memories unfold themselves on the ceiling above my head.

THE DAIRY ON STATION ROAD SEEMS TO HAVE RETURNED TO its normal routine and I go back to school with a letter from my mother to Mr. Law, the headmaster. It is not a truthful letter—my mother does a nice line in convincing sick notes, and she finds it easier to lie and say that I’ve had a “bilious attack” rather than admit I’ve been helping my father on his round. I think she believes that the word
bilious
gives the note a kind of medical validity, and she enjoys using it. She will use it in every letter that she will write for me, although I don’t remember ever feeling bilious at all, or even sick for that matter. The reasons for this deception are complex, and involve some degree of shame and a social instinct to keep our difficulties private. I am, of course, complicit in this without being able to articulate it.

Some days I simply don’t want to go to school. I’m bored there, and I find it easy to coerce my mother into letting me stay home. I think she is glad of my company, and after a statutory lying-in she’ll allow me to get up and help her with the housework, or to just sit and watch the fire. Sometimes I’ll close the curtains to a chink and watch the motes of dust floating like galaxies in the beams of the sun.

The Victorian building where we live is large and convoluted enough to find hiding places. A cupboard under the stairs becomes a
priest hole, the space behind the dresser a hermit’s cave. I sit on the slate roof of the dairy like a sentinel and imagine the house under siege. I’m a dreamer and my mother recognizes this, and she also recognizes herself in the faraway stare of the traveler lost in the world beyond the window. I return to school the next day with one of my mother’s sick notes in my jacket pocket.

Sometimes a bank of fog rolls off the Tyne and you can’t see a yard in front of your face. I love walking to school on mornings like this, when the world has disappeared and the ruined sides of houses loom like the ghosts of ships, or on bright spring mornings when the moon is still visible, hanging palely in the blue sky like a pared fingernail. But also along my route is a bomb site from the war, street after street of burnt-out houses that the Luftwaffe mistook for the shipyard a decade and a half earlier. There are shattered wooden staircases leading nowhere, bedrooms cruelly exposed to the sky, sad hangings of old buckled wallpaper and the musty smell of decay, broken floors and cross beams, redolent of a crucifixion.

I love the romance and mystery of the ruined streets, but there is always an uncomfortable spooky undercurrent, a dread that such impermanence and desolation can easily tumble over the perimeter of the bomb site and engulf everything around it like a poisoned cloud.

There is a general election coming up and the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, and his Tory Party have a new poster campaign.

YOU’VE NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD
, it says in the confident guise of graffiti.

The local Labour Party have created their own posters using the same Tory slogan but crossing out the last two words.

It reads,
YOU’VE NEVER HAD IT
.

    My father has gone to work. It is a school day and I have woken early. I get dressed and make my way downstairs to build a fire in the
back room. As I turn the corner on the first landing, I hear a noise at the end of the passage that leads to a small porch and the front door. Crouching down, I see the shadows of two people behind the opaque glass of the porch. I move very quietly down the stairs, careful not to make any sound, supporting my weight on the wooden banister. I can hear soft moans and the quickening of breath from behind the glass door and see the shapes of two heads pressed together against the wall. I move slowly and silently down the long passage, not daring to breathe. The moaning is louder now, it sounds like pain, and as my hand reaches to open the door, I am terrified and fearless at the same time. I am driven by compulsion and curiosity and perhaps, although I haven’t entirely thought this through, the need to rescue my mother from some terrible danger. As I turn the handle on the door there is a sudden panic on the other side of the glass. I manage to open the door only a crack before it is violently shut again.

“It’s all right, it’s all right.” I hear my mother’s voice trying to soothe me with the unconvincing tones of normality. Suddenly we are like a doomed family in a falling airplane, my mother desperate to hide the danger from me and desperate to hide her own fear.

I have seen nothing, but I run, and behind me I hear the front door slam. My mother doesn’t find me when she comes up to my room. I am hidden, deep in my cave under the stairs, entrusted with a secret I don’t understand.

    I have no idea whether my father has somehow found out about the affair or whether he has had an intuition that something was going on and found some expedient reason to fire him but Alan is no longer with us. Nothing is said by anyone, nothing at all. Whatever the politics, I am relieved that perhaps now our lives can return to some sort of normality, but I am still in an emotionally disturbed
state and becoming increasingly introverted and uncommunicative. I wonder if I am to blame, and I have no one to confide in or to reassure me that I’m not.

I do begin to spend more time at my grandparents’ home, and while I don’t feel I could share my secret with Agnes or Tom, I feel more secure within the stability of their cozy house and of all their years together. I also like to hammer away at the piano in the front room, which sits beneath a picture of the Sacred Heart, a portrait of Jesus with his organ of compassion glowing luridly and exposed within his chest and surrounded by cruel thorns. I’ve begun to miss our piano since they took it away, and Agnes’s upright seems a perfect sounding board for my unspoken confusion and anger. This is the same room and the same piano where my mother accompanied my father in happier times, and the memory of “Goodnight Irene” lingers like a faded perfume. I close the sitting room door and draw the curtains across the window. With both pedals hard to the floor I attack the keys with a decidedly unmusical ferocity. Sweet harmony may be what I am seeking in my damaged world, but that is not what my unschooled hands are producing. It sounds like hell and strangely gives me some comfort.

Without the piano as an outlet for my aggression, I may well have become delinquent, vandalizing bus shelters, stealing junk from Woolworth’s, and other petty crimes. God knows I had the contacts. This might have been some consolation for Agnes and Tom, who have to listen to this cacophony, if they only knew what was wrong with me, but they don’t. No one does.

I can see my grandmother now, slowly opening the door to the front room. She is peering nervously over her tortoiseshell reading glasses. I stop midcadenza, as if I’ve been caught at something shameful.

“Eh, son, can’t you play something nicer than that—” she struggles to find a word to describe my efforts—“that …that broken music?”

I lower my head, afraid now to look at her. “Yes, Gran, I’ll try”

In spring the weather improved, so a replacement for Alan has been easier to find. Matters at home have reached a kind of détente. My parents are at least civil to each other, if not overly warm. The porch is no longer a safe place for my mother’s assignations with Alan, and my mother has seemingly limited her social life to visiting Nancy at her house on Thursday nights, or at least that’s what she tells us. She takes the car and my dad stays at home with us, sullen and silent. My mother may well have tried to end this clandestine relationship with Alan at various times, but her emotional needs and her romantic bond with him would have been too strong. She had found the love of her life, and she would be torn tragically between this love and the bonds of her family until she died.

    It is Easter of 1962 and I have won a scholarship to the grammar school in Newcastle. There are forty other eleven-year-olds in my class, but only four boys and ten girls have sufficient percentages to qualify for a place in what is considered the top echelon of the school system of the time, the grammar school. My friend Tommy Thompson is not one of the chosen ones, although to my mind he’s smarter than all of us.

My dad is never willing to spend money on anything frivolous, but my mother has convinced him that I should have some kind of reward for my academic efforts—I secretly think she feels guilty about Alan and wants somehow to make it up to me, without of course mentioning any of it. I have been hinting that I’ve seen a new bike in the bike shop—it’s red with drop handlebars and whitewall tires and four
gears. It costs fifteen guineas, a king’s ransom. I know I’m chancing my arm, but I also know that I’ll never be in this situation again. Ernie, with some reluctance, walks with me to the bike shop, which sits just off the High Street next to the funeral directors’. There it sits in the center of the window, like a prize in a TV game show—even my dad gets excited, the engineer in him marveling at the lightness of the frame, the gears and the brake system. Holding the handlebars I inhale its newness, and its chromium gleams like a promise of the future.

“Thanks, Dad.”

“You just be careful now.”

“Yes, Dad!”

Tommy lives on a council estate about a mile away, and this is my first trip on the new bike. It is spring and everything is new, the bike a shining symbol of adventure and escape. I park the bike at the side of Tommy’s house, next to the cracked paintwork of the kitchen door.

I walk into the kitchen. “Is Tommy in?”

“He’s watching the telly,” says his mother. “He’s not in a very good mood.”

Undeterred, I march into the front room. “Hey, Tommy, I got a new bike.”

The room is dark, as the curtains are drawn, and Tommy, seated in an armchair, is staring intently at a test card on the television screen. It’s a black-and-white image of horizontal and diagonal lines, which is the only afternoon programming of the time, I suppose for the use of TV technicians so they can tune in this new technology that is bringing the world into our living rooms.

Tommy doesn’t respond. He just keeps staring at the screen, his mouth set grimly, and now that I’m getting used to the gloom, I can see that his eyes are red and swollen.

His mother comes in from the kitchen. “What’s the matter, our Tommy, cat got your tongue? Say hello to your friend.”

“Shurrup, you!”

I wince, horribly embarrassed as she turns to me. “Oh, the tough guy’s been crying’ cos he didn’t pass the scholarship.”

“I said shurrup,” shouts Tommy.

The air is thick with the threat of violence but his mother will not be quieted now that she has me as an audience for her ranting.

“Oh aye, mister big shot, wouldn’t go to school, playing the wag and smoking his tabs and God knows what else, but he was crying like a baby when he got the results. Weren’t ye?”

“Fuckin’ shurrup.”

“Don’t you set your cheek up to me, you’re not too big that I can’t hit you.”

“You can just fuck right off!”

And with that Tommy leaps from the chair and bolts across the room. He is now framed cinematically in the kitchen doorway, and slowly turns toward me. “You coming or what?”

I sheepishly begin to follow him, trying to make myself invisible. “Er, good-bye, Mrs. Thompson.”

“Good-bye, son,” she says resignedly, and then screeches at Tommy’s retreating back, “And you’d better be back before it’s dark or your da’ll take the belt to you. Do you hear?”

But Tommy is out the door, and so am I.

If he notices the new bike, he says nothing; there seems to be an instant and tacit understanding between us that he won’t mention the new bike and I won’t mention the redness of his eyes.

“Where shall we go?” he asks, and I’m somewhat taken aback, as it’s always been Tommy who has set the agenda for our wanderings.

“I thought we could go to Gosforth Park,” I venture.

“All right, let’s go.”

Tommy walks into a ramshackle wooden shed at the side of the house and emerges with the dilapidated old bicycle that he inherited from his sister. It has clearly seen better days. As well as having the lowered crossbar of a girl’s bike, the front wheel is slightly buckled and has one or two spokes missing, it is far too small for him, and it has been hand-painted with black emulsion. It is, in short, an embarrassing joke, but not one I feel brave enough to share with my friend, who seems to be daring me to say something disparaging. He is still refusing to acknowledge the red trophy that gleams like an insult in my hands. I wonder if this is some sort of test. In my joy at winning the scholarship I suppose I’d assumed that Tommy had done the same; he certainly is smart enough. I had also forgotten about Tommy’s ridiculous heirloom, but the effect of my friend’s regaining his bravura despite the embarrassing difference between his steed and mine is a little like seeing Clint Eastwood in the first scene of
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
astride a donkey: yes, the bike is ugly, but I wouldn’t risk saying anything.

Gosforth Park is about five miles away to the north of Newcastle. There is a racecourse there, in a semirural setting that is the nearest thing we have to available countryside. We set off, Tommy behind me on the wreck.

We haven’t gone but a few streets before it is apparent that Tommy’s bike is no match for mine; at every corner I turn round to see him struggling with the tiny wheels and wait for him to catch up. My friend is now angry and getting more and more exhausted. The next time I stop to wait for him, I see he’s furiously kicking the prone bicycle into the gutter. “Fuckin’ piece of shit.”

I ride back toward him, a vision of dazzling red and chromium.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” he explodes.