Cedilla (28 page)

Except with Mum, the famous playwright was personally popular. The young literary lion had selected Bourne End to be his personal safari park. He brought an extra bit of distinction to the area – not that we needed it. The great man did his writing in a Victorian boat-house, also thatched, which stood on a tiny island reached by a narrow bridge.

Some of his neighbours, true, complained about the noise. It wasn’t wild Bohemian parties, it was peacocks. They made those cries like tortured babies, and they didn’t stay where he put them, on the lawn. When he acquired them he seemed to assume with his playwright’s imagination that they would stay decoratively put, like stage props, waving their ocellate plumes. In fact your peacock is a wanderer and a pecker. In India peacocks are common wild birds, celebrated in Hindu cosmology as the resplendent vehicle on which the God Murugan rides. They are experts at catching snakes, seeming to enjoy dodging the strikes of a cobra with its hood raised, to the point where it is widely believed that they ‘dance’ with cobras.

Mum didn’t care about where and how Tom Stoppard did his writing, she didn’t care about his ornamental livestock. She only cared that he was on the loose, brainy and philosophical, virtually in her street, certain to make her look stupid if they met. The things that he was famous for, the mental quickness, the cunning jokes, the animation and charm, were exactly the things that gave her the screaming ab-dabs. How would she defend herself? How was she supposed to cope, if she found herself standing next to him in the queue at the
butcher’s or the greengrocer’s? He would grin with his vast white teeth, shake his tousled mop of hair, and subject her to an onslaught of epigrams, paradoxes, philosophical conundrums. He would reduce her to mumbling rubble. His brain would crackle with cleverness and hers would simply short-circuit. She would be humiliated and shown up. She would die, that’s what she would do.

Dad refused to humour her compulsions, saying she should make more effort to control herself. I thought she was doing her best, myself, and I did my bit to help her along. I said I thought it was very unlikely that famous playwrights did their own shopping. Had she ever actually seen him in the butcher’s or the greengrocer’s? She insisted that she’d seen him coming out of a shop. She recognised him from a picture in the local paper. If he could come out of a shop then he must have gone in, which meant that nowhere was safe. Which shop was it? The off-licence. He had seemed to leave the premises surfing on a wave of highbrow laughter. I said he had probably only popped in to pick up a bottle of wine to take to a dinner party – he would have been in a mad rush and in no mood to stop and banter. There was no risk of his queuing up for lamb chops at the butcher’s. Couldn’t she see she was safe?

I could see I was getting nowhere so I changed my approach, saying that it was never wrong to make neutral comments about the weather – it was expected. In fact that was probably why he had moved to Bourne End, to escape the chore of being clever all the time in London. She wasn’t reassured, I have to say, but for the moment her nerve held steady. She might adjust the lie of her scarf in the hall mirror for a long moment before she left the house to go shopping, taking a deep breath as if she was about to go on stage, but she made herself do it.

Mum’s equilibrium was under threat, but mine was pretty sturdy at this time. Eckstein had read my essay. He had got more than he bargained for, I dare say, but then he didn’t know that I had a hotline to Lorca’s secret soul in the person of María Paz Binns. ‘This is a bit sketchy, John,’ he said in class, ‘it needs some more flesh on the bones. But the bones aren’t too bad.’ This faint praise was a deafening accolade
by Eckstein’s standards, and just as well. There weren’t many people I’d let talk to me about bones in that way. ‘I take your point,’ said Eckstein, ‘about Lorca’s … women …’ He was signalling pretty clearly that my knowledge of Lorca’s most tortured thoughts should remain private. I’m not sure anybody else at school would have been particularly interested.

With Mum feeling so shaky, there was more than enough agora-phobia around. I began to suffer from the opposite condition, and to feel the urge to get out and about, to profit from my new mobility. One weekend I decided I would hurl myself out of the nest good and proper. I set off for London with only the vaguest idea of how to get there, or what I would do when I did. Would Dad draw me a map? He would not. Dad, who was perpetually on the lookout for strangers looking even vaguely lost, so that he could overwhelm them with hand-drawn maps and sketches of landmarks, instructions in numbered paragraphs, told me to use my initiative. Initiative! If Dad had had any initiative himself, he wouldn’t have ended up under my orders, growing mushrooms that had a death-wish.

I wanted to find Covent Garden, having fond memories of
My Fair
Lady
, and fetched up in Soho instead. At first I thought the women who accosted me in my car were flower-girls like Eliza Doolittle, but they weren’t, not quite. They were themselves the flowers they sold, and very good saleswomen they were too. Very friendly, very confident of giving me a good time. There was no talk of giving me a discount, which was a definite sign of progress.

I didn’t tell Mum and Dad about the chatty prostitutes, but Peter was fascinated and wanted to come with me on my next expedition. I let him do the map-reading, and somehow we ended up at the Palm Beach Casino Club. I got Peter to push me inside, more or less as a dare. The moment we were inside he said, ‘This place is rigged. Everything’s crooked.’ Under the tacky glamour it smelled of stale flowers and desperation, and I was sure he was right, but that was no reason not to play. It turned out, though, thanks to the Gaming Act, that you had to join the club 24 hours before you played, so I joined on the spot and made plans to come back the next weekend. Peter, not yet eighteen, wasn’t eligible to play, but I was all right. Peter could come to push, and watch.

During the week I worked out a system. I didn’t want to make a killing, just incremental earnings. Peter had a toy roulette wheel at home, and I cut my teeth on that. The system wasn’t very sophisticated, but it either guaranteed small wins or limited your losses. I may even have got it from a book or a film, though I’d like to think I was on good enough terms with numbers to work out something of the sort by myself.

It isn’t complicated. You wait, without betting, until either the red or the black has come up three times in a row. Then you put a pound on the other colour. If you lose, put two pounds on. Then four pounds. Then stop.

I didn’t do badly, small wins and smaller losses. Peter did notice, though, that any time I won anything, there were men who came round inconspicuously to make a note of what I’d done. It wasn’t getrich-quick – it was more like get-poor-slow, but it was a night out. I made a few pounds and we had fun.

Until Dad got to hear of it. He was fascinated, and got me to teach him my system. He couldn’t wait to try it himself, and he wasn’t going to take me along with him either. I wish I had held out on him about the address, refusing to give him directions, but he’d have found out another way if I had. All I could do was emphasise that it was crucial to follow the rules exactly. He didn’t. What a time for Dad to stumble across his hidden hoard of initiative and spend it all at once!

He lost the housekeeping money and some savings as well, and had to get a part-time job driving a van to make good the losses. He came home very crestfallen and blaming me, saying it was the last time any of us went to that hellhole. Which was very unfair, but didn’t make much difference anyway, since Palm Beach Casino was closed down very soon afterwards by the police for rigging their wheels. I didn’t grieve. I’d more or less lost interest once I’d proved my system within its limits.

With Dad being a van driver at weekends, the mood of the house lightened. Mum and I found a little hobby of our own, not as ambitious as wine-making or mushroom husbandry. We started to indulge in the gentle art of candle-making. At first Mum resisted the idea, because of the element of danger: saucepans became hot, wax could scald. Precisely what appealed to me about the whole thing. I had to
convince her that I was a different person from the callow boy who had scalded a neighbour’s child. Finally she said that it would be all right so long as I read out directions and gave instructions, while she took care of the lifting and the pouring into moulds and so on. I tried to look disappointed for form’s sake, but this division of labour was exactly what I had in mind. I was delighted.

Soon we were ordering pounds of slab wax. We learned to hack bits off without making too much of a mess. Then we heated it gently in a bain-marie, which Mum told me was also the proper way to make custard. In another saucepan, a much smaller one, we melted a little stearin and added dye to it. The quantities were so small that Mum sometimes let me do that. I had the idea from the name that stearin must be a sort of steroid, like the ones that had done so little lasting good to my generation of Still’s Disease patients, but couldn’t find out for definite.

Mum said we couldn’t buy a wax thermometer. They cost too much. We found out the hard way that thrift can be wasteful. Our candles often developed a sort of dandruff, which is what happens when you pour your wax too cool. Other times, when we poured too hot, they became filled with small bubbles so that they looked like fizzy drinks frozen in time. Then Mum’s hatred of imperfection led her to change her mind, and we invested in a wax thermometer after all.

I was aware that candle-making was a little bit babyish, even as hobbies go, but I didn’t care. No one seemed quite sure what matur ity would mean in my particular case, and nobody made it sound in the least bit attractive. Mum had the clearest idea, I suppose – her idea was that I would depend on her every day until one of us died. Which of us? I wonder if she gave that question any thought. Some married couples manage not to, after all. If she died first then I would be well and truly helpless, any independent spark long since extinguished, but if I died first then so would she. She was prone to saying, with ominous tenderness, ‘What would you do without me, JJ? You’d be lost, it’s as simple as that.’ My needs were a handy screen for hers. I would never escape from her loving
clutches. Puberty meant that she delegated certain unsavoury tasks, but apart from that there was to be no growing away from her in my growing up.

In theory Dad was all for pushing me out of the nest, that being nature’s way, but in practice he dithered, pulling me back from the brink by my tail feathers more often than not. One holiday, for instance, Peter and I heard screams and mechanical music. Our ears had detected the possibility of a funfair, and soon our noses picked up the clinching smells of ozone and candyfloss.

Peter wanted to spend all his holiday money on the dodgems. I wasn’t so ambitious. I had my heart set on the Ghost Train.

When I told Dad, he said, ‘Negative, John. I can’t allow it.’ Under pressure he agreed to go on it himself, in case the ride was smoother than it looked. At the very least he would describe exactly what went on, though we both knew that wasn’t the same thing at all.

He came out rubbing his head, looking rather pale. I begged him to tell me what had happened, and he said, ‘Well, there was all the usual stuff, screaming, cold damp gloves trailing against your face, and then some great rubber thing comes down and donks you on the head. Made me see stars – Damn good job you weren’t in there too … I couldn’t’ve protected you from something as sudden as that, Chicken. In any case, those tracks jerk really sharply inside there. They could hurt your joints and do a lot of damage. Tell you what, though …’

His idea was that it was almost as much fun watching people’s faces as they came out of the Ghost Train as it was riding it yourself. There was a place where doors were flung open and the cars clattered out, only to swerve and dash back in again, so that’s where we positioned ourselves. Dad said it would be a good way for me to become a student of human nature.

It began to seem that my speciality in life was going to be the theory of things. Theory of First Aid at Vulcan, theory of car maintenance with the BSM, and now the theory of the Ghost Train.

The main thing we learned about human nature was that courting couples, clattering into the open for a few seconds mid-snog, with their hands all over each other, don’t much like it when they find they’re being watched by a middle-aged man and a teenager in
a wheelchair. One boy flashed us a V-sign (not the one that Dad was familiar with, the triumphant one from the War) and for a moment it looked as if the girl was going to throw the remains of her toffee-apple at us, before the mechanism whisked them away again into the darkness full of muffled screams. We pushed off before we found ourselves up on charges. At the time I thought Dad was being unnecessarily hasty – I couldn’t imagine ever having a criminal record. I didn’t see how I could hope to get my mugshot on the list of Most Wanted. A criminal record was just one more wonderful thing out of reach. I needn’t have worried. Karma has been kind – though of course it wasn’t all that much fun when it finally happened.

From the start, my desire to drive had overlapped with the desire to find sex. In that respect I was a normal adolescent. The intimacies I had enjoyed in the past, at the Vulcan School, had been laid on inhouse. No travel was necessary – it was just a matter of seizing the moment, or of failing to get out of the way. But if I wasn’t planning on living in an institution then I would have to stop relying on such windfalls of pleasure. I would have to cater to my own appetites and meet pleasure half-way.

With a car I was able to seek it out, and to take myself to places where wickedness might be found. Someone mentioned that there was a disreputable pub in Windsor, ‘louche’ if not positively queer, but without further details I couldn’t find the sins I sought. I had to rely on instinct. It helped if I imagined there were three of us looking for what the world might offer, loitering and looking sidelong at promising strangers (to the extent the neck allowed) in the hope that they might look sidelong back at us. Federico García Lorca, Boyde Ashlar and me. We should really have brought Tennessee Williams along, for a bit of humour and common sense, but we didn’t think of that. There just wasn’t room enough in the Mini.