Success (8 page)

‘You’re a yob.’

No I’m not. I’m posh. I know everything there is to know about class, and about how you can locate it. I was present that historic evening five years ago when the girl sitting opposite me now came into the television room of Rivers Hall, where the family was watching a series about pre-war servants and their mistresses and masters, and unthinkingly curled up on her nanny’s lap. The nanny (since retd.) did not move as she accepted the weight of her fourteen-year-old charge.
At no point did they take their eyes off the screen
. I know all there is to know about class. I say sofa, what?, pepper-and-salt, lavatory, vale
t
(I could even say behind instead of ass if I liked). When
I
was fourteen I did a quiz in a magazine: anyone who completed this quiz, the idea was, would know at once how posh they were. Halfway through — yes, I tipped the soup bowl away from me; no, I didn’t put the milk in first — I could tell I was going to be very posh indeed. The last question was about what you had called your children, or what you would call them if you ever had any (this was when people could still afford them). Would you call your son (a) Sebastian, Clarence, Montague, or (b) Michael, James, Robert, or … As I poised to give the (b) section an imperious tick (I hadn’t fallen for all that (a) bullshit), my eye trailed over the (c) section, which ran: (c) Norman, Keith, Terry. The biro tinkled from my hand. So my dad was a yob. So what else is new? (Do you still
think any of that matters, class and so on? It doesn’t. It’s crap. It’s
crap.
)

‘Yobs go
tonto
too, you know,’ I said.

‘Oh no they don’t,’ said Ursula.

‘Oh yes they do. What’s it like?’ I asked dully, ‘ — I mean leaving home and stopping being at school and being in a town and jobs and everything? I’ve been doing it for ages now and I still can’t tell what it’s like. There’s something …’

‘Well, I wouldn’t know yet, would I? Cos I’m still at school. What do you think it is? More nerves?’

‘Yes, more of them all right. But that’s not it. Good. I’m drunk. About bloody time too. I just wonder what all the fuss was about — spend your life getting ready for
this
. No one has a good time after they’re ten just worrying about it. It’s, I think it’s just — ’

‘… How’s Gregory?’

‘How is he ever? A monster of conceit. And a hustler. And a faggot.’

‘Oh, come on, Ginger. Anyway, what’s a faggot?’

‘Look. Don’t ever call me Ginger again, okay?’

‘I thought you liked being called Ginger.’

‘Well I don’t.’

‘I thought you did. I’m sorry.’

‘What made you think that? I don’t like it at all. I don’t like it one bit.’

‘I’m sorry.’

I looked round in bewilderment, at the girls, at the couples. During such moments my ugliness hangs on me like cheap heavy clothes. I looked at Ursula. What good was she to me? I didn’t even want to fuck her — I wanted to hurt her, to do her harm, to lash out at her shins with my boot, to swipe my wine glass across her face, to grind out my cigarette on her fluttering hand. Oh, what’s going on here?

‘Oh, what’s going on here? I’m sorry. Let’s go. I’m sorry.’

We walked in silence to Gloucester Road Underground.
‘I’ll see you home,’ I said. We took a train crowded with drunks to Sloane Square. We walked in silence down tapering, underlit streets.

‘This is it,’ she said. ‘I ring the bell now.’

‘Well, that’s sorted
you
out for life.’

‘Mm?’

‘I’m no good at all this any more. I’ve got to lock myself away until I’m fit to live.’

We kissed, in the usual style — so that the centre of my lips rested at a slight angle on the corner of hers.

‘Terry,’ she said, ‘you must stop all that. You’ll make yourself just how you pretend to be.’

‘I know I will.’

Then she held me closer, with a kind of girlish authority, and we kissed again, mildly but firmly, on the lips.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

She put her mouth to my ear. ‘I hear voices,’ she whispered. ‘In my head.’

‘What sort of voices. What do you mean?’

‘In my head.’

‘What do they say?’

‘Never mind. But I do hear them.’

‘Hey look, I’ll ring you tomorrow, all right?’

‘All right.’

‘Good night. Look after yourself.’

‘Sweet dreams,’ she called, moving up the steps to her door.

And it all peopled my mind along the moist avenues, during the vivid tube-journey, and in the rain and shadows of my own familiar streets. The rain, that kiss, those voices. Just think about it, boy, I tell myself — you can do it. Ursula-fuck, sister-fuck … 
foster-
fuck? No, I can’t do it — I can’t even think about it. That skein of corny decadence I leave to the suburbs of Gregory’s imagination.
He’s
always enjoyed hystericizing the few junior touch-up sessions he had with Ursula in his teens (I had a few with her too, in a sense). But I’ve been through all that, I’ve done all that and it’s all too complicated.
And I’m touchy about sisters generally. I had one who died and I’m sentimental about them. Let’s forget about sisters. I’ve had enough of sisters. Fuck
sisters
.

I stood on the landing outside our flat. There is a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling window there that creaks and bends when the air gets turbulent. It wobbles in the wind. It shivers in the cold. It hates stormy weather (it isn’t up to its job). I saw my reflection in the pane. Raindrops were dribbling down my face in lugubrious rivulets. I listened to the traffic; I thought of me, and all of you out there, laughing at my losses. I pressed my head against the glass. It gave an inch. I pressed harder. I felt at any moment I might hear it crack.

This is the way it began.

Whoosh
. I am six — my sister is hardly there yet, a hot wad of freckles and tears in the neighbour room. Two or three times a month, in the kitchen at supper time, seven o’clock, a slight, tickling, migraine haze would envelop and gradually retard our evening meal. Uh-oh, the air was saying. My father, a tall, lumpy, sober-looking man with flat red smalltown hair, a bent little slot of a mouth and stark protuberant eyes, sits to my right, saying nothing, eating his eggs, chips, beans and tomatoes with fastidious dispatch, paying shrewd justice to every foodstuff on each forkful, so that he will be left with, say, a sliver of yolk, a stub of chip, two baked beans and the pipped crimson gook of the tomato for the final prim swallow. My mother, a lean, nervous and intelligent woman with nutcrackerish features (she lost her teeth; she never did find them again), sits tight on my left, saying nothing, mashing her skiddy eggs, beans and tomatoes into thin brothy spoonfuls. Sitting between them — and looking, I should think, about the same as I look now — is me, Terry at six, the long-ago boy. I work at my fishfingers; no one speaks, though you feel everyone is trying to, everyone would if they could, and the air
gets itchier and itchier until the sound of our irons on the plates is like the alarum of advancing kettle-drums which swells up to fill the room, then dies down again, then gathers once more.

And it’s a completely normal evening — we all think it’s a completely normal evening — except for this curious, unpleasant headache haze and this strange false clarity of sound. But perhaps, too, we can all sense something else, an extra thing, activity starting to occur somewhere in my father’s brain, and maybe in my mother’s mind also a perverse, insidious reciprocity has begun.

Time for you to go to bed, Terry, says my father to the air. Don’t forget to clean your teeth, my mother adds, stacking the plates, her head bowed. I walk to the door and turn. For a moment I feel I am on the edge of their exhausted, frightening, migraine world, and feel that I could deliver them from it, tell them something quickly about the other side. But I say,

Good night.

Good night.

Good night.

And I walk softly upstairs, use the bathroom in watery porcelain silence, undress shivering and slide between the heavy blankets, crush the pillow to my head — and hear the house start to come alive like a big machine: the walls shudder and sweat, the ceiling splits, the floor bounces my bed high in the air, the cold sheets hug me in their fire.

When I was a bit older — taller, stronger, more aware that my parents were up to no good — I used to think that by simply appearing, by simply showing them I was there, that they would have to stop, and stop straight away and never do it again. (I had an absurd faith in the sacramental power of my own presence. What happened to that?) See! I’m here while you’re doing this. Can’t you tell what it must be like for
me
?

I stood waiting in my room. I wanted to hide, hide, but I made no move to get undressed. There had been that
dizzying tingle again, and that sharp low threshold of sound, and I knew it would have to happen soon. Then the stirrings began, random and intermittent at first, like the collapse of distant breakers, harsh music over choppy water. Out on the shaken landing, the walls veering about me, down the stairs which creak by on a slowing treadle, part of the old machine the house becomes as I head for its heart, the back room, a place of dangling black pans, sooty cisterns and something I’ve never seen before. In the downstairs passage the noise is almost unbearable — and not the discrete, inanimate noise of battle and wreckage, but warm, sweaty, human sounds, as of pain and distress, of something far too intense to be seen. I enter the kitchen; I cross the room and push the half-glass scullery door; it swings open and I stare. At what? At my father’s eyes as they focus incuriously on my face. Eyes without a trace of hatred or anger or surprise or any emotion I have felt myself or seen in another, pure and abstracted eyes gazing up from some impossible task.
Whoosh
. The room is full of migraine and I hardly make out my mother where she bends on the plastic floor: the headache air seems to bulge up to expel me, gusting me out and cracking the door shut inches from my face. Then the world and I retreat, recede from the back room, and the soft machinery begins to stir again, again cautious and intermittent, choppy music over distant breakers.

Everything would be all right the next day, more or less. My mother would look appreciably more fucked up than usual over breakfast but visibly relieved, my father preoccupied, vague, but at peace — an air of heavy compromise. Why did it have to get so much worse? I could have taken any number of those nights of migraine, and the appeasing quiet of those mornings. But things fell apart — I suppose they had to — ending in a few shrill seconds of panic, when my mother got killed and then it was my sister’s turn and he never hit me. Why?

Ursula was wrong. Yobs
do
go
tonto
. I’m going it a
different way to my father, but I’m going it. I think everyone is going it a bit these days (I wish I knew somebody, so I could check the theory out). I’m going it, and
I’m
one of the people whom people like you see in the streets and think, ‘Sometimes I wouldn’t mind being like him — no joys, no pains, no soul to vex you.’ But I have got a soul (and it wants to be kissed same as any other soul). Madness is being democratized too, you know. You people can’t go on hogging it forever. We want our share too.

I finally had it out with that wastepaper-basket. I thought I’d rid myself of one bad thing. I got a whole packet of special black rubbish-bags from the supermarket (I reckoned they’d be handy for carrying my laundry in as well). I got drunk on a Saturday lunchtime and emptied the wastepaper-basket into one of these special bags. It was rough, but I handled it (it went on forever, like the strata of a Pompeian latrine). While I was in the mood I put a cache of dirty socks, underpants and shirts into another of these special black bags. I dropped the rubbish in the dustbin and went on to the launderette in Ladbroke Grove, where I left my stuff with the old woman who does it for you if you pay her (other people, most of them foreigners, are poorer than me and wash their stuff themselves. I feel quite flash, I feel like Gregory, in the launderette). When I turned up to collect my clean clothes on Monday morning, a disgusted manageress returned my special black bag to me. ‘Do you want us to wash that?’ she asked. ‘How many dries, sir?’ The bag was full of rubbish, of course. I ran back to the flat. The dustmen had been that morning. Four shirts, five pairs of underpants, six pairs of socks. Another bad thing. Thanks for that. I think I’m losing my bottle. I think I’m going
tonto
.

A fucked-up hippie lives in the streets near us. I see him two or three times a week. He looks more fucked-up every day. He lies wedged in the doorway of a barricaded shop in Moscow Road. He has a suitcase and some carrier-bags.
His orange-peel face is scored with trickly yellow lines from crying in the cold sun. I’m going to speak to him soon and ask him what it’s like.

Of course, it’s all nonsense about ‘incest’, you know.

In this country at any rate,
incest
(‘the crime of sexual intercourse or cohabitation between persons related within the degrees within which marriage is prohibited by law’ —
OED
) wasn’t even considered a misdemeanour until 1650, when, quite out of the blue and grouped willy-nilly with various other delinquencies, it was arbitrarily promoted to a capital offence. Following the glorious second dawn of the Restoration, naturally, the suppression of the ‘crime’ fell to what the self-righteous Blackstone ruefully called ‘the feeble coercion of the spiritual courts’, though Bills to re-establish it as a felony were repeatedly introduced in Parliament — only to be laughed out of the House every time.

In 1908, however, legislation was sneaked through (the Punishment of Incest Act) under which sexual intercourse of a male with his daughter, mother, sister or granddaughter (
sic
!) was made punishable by up to seven years’ imprisonment. And did it matter in the slightest whether intercourse was committed with or without the female’s consent? Not a bit of it. Indeed, the consenting female was on conviction liable to the same punishment as the male. (Formerly all proceedings under the Act were held in
camera
, but this provision was repealed by the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1922. In
Rex
v.
Ball
[22CX, CC366] it was held by the Lords that evidence of previous intercourse was sufficient to establish guilty passion and rebut innocent association. Well, it would be, wouldn’t it?)
The terms ‘brother’ and ‘sister’, by the way, included ‘half-brother’ and ‘half-sister’, whether or not the relationship could be traced through lawful wedlock.