Paperboy (28 page)

After these trips, Bill was always more surly and curt with my mother. I no longer hated him, but my disappointment felt infinite. Why was he so easily swayed by his mother’s venom? Surely he could see beyond the words to her real intentions? Either he loved Kath and should stand up for her, or he didn’t, and should set her free. It was obvious to me that they were both made miserable by the gruesome roundelay of recrimination that occurred after each visit Bill made to his mother’s house.

During the most recent visit, Mrs Fowler had surpassed even her own exacting standards, putting in a performance worthy of Iago by implying that Kath sought to be unfaithful to her husband whenever she was left alone. Since the main reason for my mother’s loneliness was Bill’s allegiance to his own mother, the idea required quite a feat of double-think to hold it together.

On yet another Saturday morning spent wedged beneath an oily motorbike, desperately hanging on to one end of a brake cable while my father swore and huffed with a spanner, I momentarily lost concentration and felt the greasy line slipping through my fingers. It whipped back, lashing me around the face hard enough to cause an instant welt.

My scream of alarm only served to anger Bill more than ever. I jumped up, clutching my cheek, the cable loosening
as
the bike toppled over on to a can of oil, tipping it across the hall carpet and splashing it up the walls.

My father’s hand came down harder still across my forehead. He had forgotten he was wearing a ring. A gash appeared across my eyebrow, releasing a curtain of blood into my right eye. The injury looked worse than it was, but it made me howl loudly enough to bring Kath out from the kitchen, and to be honest, I was prepared to turn it into a full-blown drama.

‘What the hell have you done to him?’ my mother cried furiously.

Bill was never at his best when forced to defend himself. ‘Your son’s a useless little nancy, he needs some sense knocked into him.’

‘He’s not good at doing the things you make him do.’

‘We all have to do things we don’t like doing, even him.’

‘So you thump him? And he’s just
my
son when he’s done something wrong?’

‘I don’t know who he is. I don’t know what he is. There’s nothing in him I recognize.’

‘I suggest you take a good look at yourself. If he turns out to be like you, he’s in for a bloody miserable life.
He
knows who he is.’ Sometimes, Kath championed me at her own expense.

‘Leave him alone, for God’s sake. You’re always pulling him about, he’s not a baby.’ Bill ran oily fingers through his thinning hair, frustrated. ‘I just don’t understand. He gets good results at school. He behaves himself. He’s always well turned out. He knows right from wrong. It all looks good on paper, but when you turn it into flesh and blood something’s just not there.’

‘Here, let me see that cut. Goodness, you can stop making such a noise, it’s not that bad.’ I knew my mother would deal with the wound first, then the carpet and
finally
the walls. Her aim, as always, was to restore everything to how it was. No sign of upheaval would ever be allowed to remain.

This time, coming to my aid was the worst thing Kath could have done. It only served to widen the crevasse that ran through the middle of the family. The sides moved further apart, with both parents using their respective children as aides, and a few cinema trips were no longer enough to create a lasting truce.

Steven had no idea that his loyalty was being manipulated, so he and I were able to remain steadfast allies. But seated in the garden with a book on my knees, away from the house where no normal conversation could be held, I wondered about myself and my father. Perhaps we could never be friends, not because we were too different, but because, in some mysterious way that I had yet to understand, we were too alike.

Overhead the mouldering plane trees were rustling with fresh rain, and in the council flats opposite someone was screaming blue murder. Kath came out to join me with a red plastic first-aid kit in her hand. She sat beside me on a dead stump – all that remained of a once thriving tree my father had over-pruned – and put a quick stitch into my eyebrow. Thanks to her post-Victorian upbringing, she had always been handy with a darning needle.

‘He loves you in his own way,’ she told me sadly. ‘But he’ll always be his mother’s son.’

So will I
, I thought.

‘This is going to sting,’ she warned me, wiping the wound with disinfectant. ‘Think of something else. Tell me something. Can you remember the first time you enjoyed reading?’

The memory was always quick to return. My first school, Invicta Mixed Infants, had a cherished square of grass behind its playground, just a small emerald patch of
calm
that caught the lunchtime sun, and you were allowed to venture on to it only if you were going to read a book; even comics were not allowed. I had taken an American novel from the library,
Two Years before the Mast
by Richard Henry Dana Jr, and lying on my stomach, began to read.

Soon the dust of the suburban street, the drowsy warmth of the sun on my back, the distant susurration of bumblebees and the faint dampness that could always be felt through English grass all faded away, to be replaced by the snap of ocean spray, the creak and sway of the clipper, the bitter mess of salt beef and hardtack, the coarseness of sail and rope on my hands.

Finally sensing the unnatural quiet surrounding me, I looked up and realized that I had missed the break bell, and the first twenty minutes of my afternoon class.

I wanted to try and explain my feelings to my mother, but found the words drying in my mouth. I could hear them in my head, but was not able to explain aloud.

Kath sat back, detachedly admiring her handiwork, and something broke. Her face refused to maintain its immobility. Her eyes shimmered as she tipped back her head. ‘God, look at us. What a state we’re in. We should all be rejoicing the fact that God has given us life, but instead we waste every single thing we have. And you’re just as bad as he is – you couldn’t be more selfish if you tried. Why can’t you give something back, just for once? At least give him a reason to respect you.’

‘Why? I don’t respect him.’ It was the wrong thing to say, but I could not help myself.

‘Then we’ll just go on the way we are. Not much to look forward to, is it?’ She snapped the lid of the first-aid kit shut and rose, furious with me.

1
During the Crimean War they tried to make a similar thick paste from horses called Chevril. It didn’t catch on.

27

A Private Thing

LONG BEFORE THE
sexually permissive sixties boiled down into the shabby, leering seventies, Bill began to notice that he was missing out. He re-read his elderly
Playboy
¹
magazines and sent off for the odd bit of Dutch porn (clinical, scary, overlit and more instructive than arousing – second drawer down in the wardrobe behind the socks), and after seeing
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
fancied trying a bit of wife-swapping. But the only wife apart from his own that he even knew to nod to was his boiler-fitter mate Ron’s missus, and she was a boiler. He’d never bothered to make friends with anyone, and was starting to see how small his world had become.

Sex was in the air, but everything conspired against Bill getting any. Kath had by now undergone a grotesque, painful hysterectomy that had involved a doctor waking her up to announce that her womb ‘and the parts
governing
your sexual feelings, which you don’t need’ had been removed while she was unconscious, without her consent.

Everything was changing around them. As a concession to modernity Kath finally purchased a cream plastic trimphone, which was so light that it flew up into the air whenever she lifted the receiver. She didn’t have anyone to call, but it had been embarrassing having a telephone table without a telephone on it. Bill solved the problem of the flyaway phone by supergluing it down. Kath would stare at it longingly, half willing it to ring, half fearful of what to do if it did.

And to make matters worse, ‘Aunt’ Mary came to live with us. She’d had a stroke, and reminded me of a scary old tree. Her smile involved a baring of the teeth that frightened even the dog.

It seemed that the old lady could not do anything for herself, except when she thought no one else was watching, when she moved like The Flash and returned to her position in front of the fire before you could register what had happened. Every time she outstretched a clawful of year-old toffees in my brother’s direction, Steven ran screaming from the room. She smelled of old cupboards, damp and death, and the room seemed brighter and more cheery whenever she left it. She was also subject to narcoleptic fits, and after drooling for a couple of minutes with a faraway look in her rheumy eyes, would periodically fall sideways and drop off her chair, once bludgeoning herself into a trance on the fireplace surround. Somehow, these little moments of downtime never seemed to faze her, and she would spring straight back up with a croak of ‘Well, what are you looking at? Don’t you have anything better to do?’

And there she stayed in the middle of the lounge at Cyril Villa, sucking up the light, a silent, yellow-skinned,
joy-draining,
tartan-covered obelisk who simply would not die, seated between parents and children, stifling any possibility of spontaneity, joy or conversation above a whisper. She was there before we got up and long after we went to bed, and she hardly ever spoke to anyone. I suspected that, having denied herself a life of her own, she now took great pleasure from crushing all communication that might lead, no matter how circuitously, to some form of happiness.

First, we made any excuse we could think of to leave the room. Then, when it seemed that she could levitate from one area to the next behind our backs, we made any excuse to leave the house. I took to walking the dog six times a day. Bill went off to dig up some rose bushes that had been doing quite well without his help. Kath took her copy of
Bleak House
to the bathroom for hours at a time. Steven played happily in the garden, because he was still innocent and adorable.

Finally, something wonderful happened to ‘Aunt’ Mary. She died. During the reading of her will, we discovered that she had left fifteen thousand pounds to a cat shelter, money that Kath insisted she had siphoned away from her mother. But at least we were free. It was only for a few weeks, though, because sadly my grandfather’s lungs, thickly coated with tar from his old job on the roads and a lifetime of chain-smoking Senior Service, gave out and he too died, leaving Mrs Fowler with nowhere to stay.

I found my mother sitting in her partially wallpapered bedroom, crying. ‘What can we do but take her in?’ Kath said. ‘Carrie can’t do it, she’s got her hands full with her nerves, and no one else will even talk to her. Bill wants her to come and live here, with us. She’s not like Aunt Mary. She’s strong. She’s going to live for ever. She’ll outlive all of us. She’s like those tins of fruit that never go off, the ones that are still fresh after years and years.’

It seemed as though our family was cursed. That dark and rainy night, immediately after the funeral, Mrs Fowler appeared at the front door in her wicker hat and navy-blue coat, clutching her ebony stick like a character in a particularly dreadful Victorian children’s novel. But now she also had a battered brown leather suitcase with her.

‘Well,’ she sniffed disapprovingly at the hall wallpaper, ‘it would appear I’m to live here. My son has specifically asked for me. Am I to be invited in or what?’

I knew that once the invitation had been issued and she had crossed over the threshold, nothing would get her out until everyone in the house had been sucked dry of blood.

My mother held the door open and got out of the way as her arch-nemesis trundled forward like a gunboat entering a harbour. Having badgered her husband into a submissive decline, Mrs Fowler now had the little house in Reynold’s Place to herself, but conveniently glossed over the subject when Kath asked her about it, moving swiftly on to the arrangements of the household.

Kath wrung her hands inside her apron, a stress-relieving habit she had developed along with pressing the back of her wrist against her chin. ‘Would you like me to take you upstairs and show you your room?’ she asked.

‘Show me the kitchen,’ said Mrs Fowler. ‘My son needs a decent meal inside him.’

The tiny galley-like kitchen was Kath’s sanctum sanctorum, the only place she could call her own. Now, it seemed, she was to share it.

After a good night’s sleep, Mrs Fowler rose early and began the rehabilitation of her son’s diet by restoring lots of peculiar old products to the kitchen: lard, dripping, treacle, suet, dried prunes, turnips, syrup of figs, castor oil, molasses, pickled eggs, gherkins, some kind of sepia
cabbage
in a jar. If she could have laid her hands on some whale meat or snoek she would have done so. In clouds of flour she bashed and rolled and thumped pastry about until it was grey. Filled with inchoate vexation, she inched across the workspace so that Kath was slowly driven back against the boiler, before being impatiently asked to move out of the way. My mother retreated to the door, hovering uncertainly while her rival boiled mutton to extinction.