Your Fault, page 8
Your mother once ran away with a black man. Perhaps this is the man. He is much taller than your father, as tall as the ceiling, and in one large hand he grips the handle of a brown leather bag; in the other he pinches a king-sized cigarette. His shoes are highly polished, his pin-stripe trousers have turn-ups. Neither this man nor your father pays you any attention, and you notice that your bedroom door is a little way open. The curtains are closed. Mummy must be in there in the dark. You can see the atoms vibrating.
What’s the matter with Mummy? you ask. Is Mummy poorly again?
But though they glance round at you, neither man answers. Your father solemnly follows the black man downstairs. You stand at the top of the staircase and watch them shake hands, as men do, first clamping their cigarettes between their lips. When the stranger touches your father on his shoulder he seems even taller, your father much smaller, as small as a child. Your father opens the front door for him, quietly shuts it behind him.
Back to bed, he says then, growing larger as he comes up the stairs. Never you mind now, just you get back into bed.
Later your mother will confirm that a doctor has been, and no, she does not think he was a black man, and he didn’t come to see her, because she was in the hospital, visiting your sister.
This time you are the one who is poorly. The doctor has prescribed two bottles of medicine, oddly flavoured syrups, one pink and one white. You allow the syrups to be tipped into your mouth. You sink back to the pillows, sink back into sleep, and picture a pavement, a soldier, a tree. The pavement is perfectly smooth, a grey so pale it is almost white. It passes beneath the branches of the tree, a tree so shiny and sharp it must be fashioned from steel. You are looking down from a window, your perspective some way over the tree, when along the pale pavement comes the soldier. He is dressed in khaki green. The fabric is smooth and synthetic, permanently pressed. It is Terylene, possibly that. The backdrop is blank; the soldier’s expression is blank. He might be blind. His footsteps make no sound. As he passes under the tree he tilts his face towards you. Repeatedly he passes under the tree, which is a fruit tree. Must it be an apple tree? There is a single fruit, a pear. The soldier looks up at you. Sightlessly he sees you, and then you are falling, tumbling towards him, which is when you wake, afraid you might be sick again.
For seven days and nights you remain in your parents’ bed, taking your medicines, the mop bucket beside you, your fever subsiding, the sheets becoming fustier, until finally your mother says you must go back to your own bed. Daddy thinks you have had long enough to get better; it is his turn now to sleep next to Mummy.
And it is often this way, your father’s wishes communicated by your mother in a voice that is both kindly and stern: Lorraine, she explains, will be coming home soon from the hospital, and there is no need for you to keep having nightmares, to keep complaining that you are unwell.
All right, you say.
A good boy, you do as you are told. Barefoot in your pyjamas, you stand to one side as she begins to strip down her bed, then you turn and walk through to your own bedroom, which smells sourly of the nights your father has slept there.
You sit on the edge of your mattress, re-acquaint yourself with the appearance of things. The sun dims. Streaks of rain slash the window. You sit and look at the roofs of the houses behind, the clouds overhead. Chicken soup? asks Mummy, and you nod. It must be dinner-time. She is clutching a bundle of sheets to her tummy. She tells you to put on some clean clothes, bring your pyjamas downstairs for the wash.
Your sister is never as sickly as you are. Already, in 1967, when you are seven and she is five, you have shared in all the usual contagions of childhood – mumps, chicken pox, measles, innumerable colds – and it has entered the lore of your family that your sister does not know how to be poorly. You have heard your father saying those words: Oh, this one doesn’t know how to be poorly. Which is, it seems, another mark in her favour, though your mother, you realise, is exasperated by her refusal to rest, her impatience to be up and about.
Conveyed home from the hospital in Uncle Sidney’s pale blue Cortina, she smells of the ward, and wears a lumpy lint dressing over her left eye, and a transparent patch over the dressing. The white elasticated strap for the patch cuts into her hair, causing it to curl out at odd angles, and there is a circular Elastoplast on the back of her hand. This is where the needle went in, she tells you. It put me to sleep, I had an operation.
You’re skinny, you remark, and notice, too, that her lips are as pale as her face, and dry. She has been to the hospital and had an operation, and yet still – the moment Uncle Sidney beeps his horn and drives off – she begins an inspection of the house, a headlong tour of her toys. She takes her tricycle on a circuit of the living room, then drags out her box of teddies and dolls from under the sideboard and lines them up on the settee, then disappears upstairs and carries down from her bedroom a sloping pile of jigsaws and games that holds her attention for a matter of minutes.
Amused, your father watches over her, while your mother tidies the mess she is making. Envious, you kneel on the fireside rug and sort through the gifts she’s been given.
There are so many things, enough to fill the kitbag your father has retrieved from the attic. It seems Lorraine has been rewarded in hospital with an additional birthday, for there are cards and colouring books, comics and crayons, sweeties and bottles of squash. You extract a Sindy doll, an air hostess with a glistening helmet of blond nylon hair on which is perched a blue BOAC cap, and a game called Frustration, the rattling box depicting another family of four, all of them laughing, their faces eager, delighted: father, mother, their two children. POP-O-MATIC, says an arrow on the lid.
Can we play this? you ask, and tilt the picture to show to your mother.
No, she says, and snatches a bottle of Lucozade from the rug. Your father follows her into the kitchen, his hand reaching for her bottom, and she slaps him away. She is angry, it seems; you cannot know why. But your father is cheerful. For now, he is smiling.
Lorraine has come home, and though in the weeks to come your mother will have several long murmurous conversations with Sally Clough in your living room, and will often be tearful, and your sister will return several more times to the hospital, and there will be eye-drops and patches, and visits to an optician in town, soon enough it will be confirmed that her vision is fine. She will be able to see from the eye that you stabbed. You won’t have ruptured the globe; her eyeball won’t have deflated. But the pupil will be forever misshapen, making her appear at first glance to have a boss eye, or even a fake one. Other children will tease her. She will never be sickly, but you will have spoiled her. Perhaps you did this on purpose; that thought will never leave you. Perhaps you have made her less pretty. For now, you won’t be able to tell, though she will remain her father’s favourite, of that you will be certain – and you will be glad; in time you will come to be glad about that.
1968
it is none of your business
It is 1968, and at this time, in your town, fewer than one in five households has a motor car, though the national figure is nearer one in two. Fewer than one in four homes has a telephone, against a national figure of two in every three. But the figure for most other amenities is higher than the average: more refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, radiograms, televisions. And of course for the populace, who have come to escape the congestion and squalor of the great conurbations, the environmental amenities are equally plentiful, at least to the west of the Works: fresh air and spacious horizons, well-built homes with decent-sized gardens in healthful, well-planted surroundings.
Yours is a town of rented accommodation but few private landlords, full employment but little self-employment. The Works is the principal employer, and almost all of the housing is owned by the Development Corporation, some by the Council. Every house comes with a handbook. One day you will read it. Pets are permitted. Alterations, additions and installations are not, though tenants are invited to treat their homes as if they were their own. They are advised to redecorate every five years, and urged to be house-proud and to keep their gardens tidy; they are challenged to be the envy of their neighbours. And many do try, including your parents.
At this time, in your town, there are more young married couples and more young children, and fewer of the middle-aged and the elderly, than may be found in many other, more established towns. These couples are busy home-making, and determined to prosper. A documentary film has been made about them, a cinema newsreel that you have yet to see, which shows them congregating in a community hall to listen to a lecture. A planner points to maps, drawings and diagrams. In their winter coats and hats and scarves, the audience is attentive, appreciative, and applauds at the end. They have a pioneering spirit and optimistic outlook that means they are at ease in the company of strangers. They are willing users of public transport. They hail each other across the shared public spaces. Almost all of them belong to the working or artisanal class.
The managerial and entrepreneurial middle class live in the surrounding villages, which was not part of the plan, and is regrettable, since your town was intended to mark a victory for the rational, the balanced and the purposeful; it was designed to run with the ease of a piece of precision machinery, providing opportunities for a full life, economic and social, in order to produce a new type of citizen, freed from the bane of class segregation. You are supposed to become that new type of citizen: self-respecting, dignified, and possessed of a sense of civic belonging, though of course you won’t know this. You are just eight years old.
You are eight in 1968, and until you move up to second year Juniors you will remain in One Red: a mere first year, though big enough now to be sent out on errands, in a neighbourhood where everyone knows everyone, in a town where it is safe for children to wander. You are big enough now to run and fetch your father’s cigarettes from the precinct. He smokes forty, fifty, sixty cigarettes every day, and really he ought to give up. Your mother is tired of telling him. He can kill himself if he wants to, but she is sick of the sound of him coughing, and sick of the smell of him, too.
She does not want him near her.
You fetch the pad of blue Basildon Bond from the drawer in the sideboard. Your father writes with a black fibre-tipped pen, issued by the Works, which he keeps clipped to the inside pocket of his donkey jacket. You know this because you have been spying, though that is not a word you would use; you would say looking. The jacket is grimy and stinks of the Works and hangs from a peg in the shed, the gas and electricity meters above it.
He sits at the yellow-topped table in the kitchen, and you stand and watch as he dates and carefully composes the letter. He is proud of his penmanship, his tidy calligraphy:
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am writing to request that you sell my son 60 Embassy Tipped cigarettes. I have enclosed a pound note and I would be grateful if you would give him the correct change.
Yours faithfully.
His signature is illegible, but just as neatly inscribed. He traces out the curlicues, then adds a full-stop as if tapping in a rivet. He flattens the banknote and folds the letter over it, then folds it again, pressing the creases as sharp as the line in his trousers. He is going somewhere important – Never you mind where – and will be staying overnight. He has packed his army kitbag. He is wearing a black knitted tie.
Don’t lose it, he warns you.
Can I get some sweets?
Don’t drop the change either.
Dad, can I?
Sixpence. That’s all.
You run most of the way, tightly gripping his note. The precinct means sweets; you can choose them yourself. But there is something else too, something like a secret; you sense it each time you go there.
The shops are arranged as two parades, aligned at right angles to each other. The passage between them leads to a rubble-strewn field of tussocky grass, awaiting development. One parade is longer than the other – five shops and three shops, you have counted them. A continuous canopy in white concrete unifies the shop-fronts and creates an impression of architectural harmony. It affords protection to pedestrians in bad weather, shade for the window displays on sunnier days. It shelters the passageway.
Above the shorter of the two parades rises the tallest building in your estate, a block of flats four storeys high that looks down on an expanse of paving slabs in which are dispersed three slender trees in protective cages, three slatted benches, four metal bins.
You leap onto the first of the benches, balance on the end of it. Your shadow is small, a fat little fellow. You look around at the shops, this familiar scene, and you are struck by the thought that you are observing a memory, something you will later come to remember. The Spastics Society girl waits outside the Fine Fare; she will always be waiting. Carole Coatley serves inside the bakers, where you must never go. The door to the greengrocer’s releases a smell of soil and carrots and leaves, and all is expectancy, everything still. Nothing here is any older than you are, and nothing will ever be this modern again.
To your older self, recalling this moment, the precinct will resemble a planner’s scale model, an architect’s drawing. But the future it promises will never arrive, and may already have gone. In a few more years the concrete will begin to discolour; chunks will fall from the canopy. The paintwork on the shop-fronts will blister. The bins will begin to corrode, and will be emptied less often, an attraction for flies in the heat. The saplings will perish, despite their cages. Stripped by boys of their bark, they will be skeletal even in summer, and when eventually the precinct is re-contoured to make space for a car-park the trees will be taken away, along with the benches.
By then the passageway will have begun to smell pissy. A gathering place for teenagers – smoking and spitting – it will mark the boundary to a new territory, an infill estate of flat-roofed, high-density dwellings, a warren of alleyways, courtyards and culs-de-sac, possessing no through-road, and no centre. Graffiti will appear. The shops will be secured with metal shutters at night. Some shutters will remain lowered all day. Some will remain lowered for years.
History cannot be predicted. The Lingwood Road precinct, intended to mark a break with the past, will come to stand for a different past, a different future. But none of this – the inevitability of this – can yet be known to you. Perhaps this is its secret.
You don’t go into the Fine Fare, where there are aisles of goods and trolleys to fill and no one to guide you. In the Fine Fare the assistants sit tight at the tills, and the sweets are in wrappers on shelves, the kind you see everywhere. Instead you jump from your bench and charge over the precinct to Grieve’s, the post office and general store, where nothing may be handled before it is bought. Each item in turn must be requested from one of the assistants and taken down from the shelves at the back of the shop. Mr Grieve wears a white shop-coat and operates the ham slicer; Mrs Grieve peers out from the enclosure of the post office counter. The lady assistants wear brown nylon aprons, and have moveable steps to reach the highest of the shelves, and whenever you present them with a note from your father they will smile and confer. Isn’t that lovely? they will say; what lovely handwriting!
Twenty Embassy Tipped costs 3/10d, which makes 11/6d for sixty, and you are given a sixpence in your change. Then you are in charge; the tanner is yours.
At the sweetie counter, on any other day, one of the ladies will wait on your instructions and patiently fill a paper bag with a selection of sweets priced in ha’pennies and pennies. But not today. Today you ask for two packets of Barratt’s Thunderbirds Sweet Cigarettes, since each pack of ten costs 3d and contains a collectable card. Andrew Clough has the full set, pasted into an album. The glue smells of fish.
You get a number 23, Jeff Tracy’s house, and a number 31, Lady Penelope’s drawing room. Neither is an action shot, or one of the Thunderbirds craft, and in your disappointment you eat four sticks at once, a squeaky mush in your mouth, and drop the cards in one of the bins in the precinct, where you notice an Embassy coupon, still in its box. You slip the coupon in your pocket, then inspect each of the other bins and retrieve three more of them, all fives. It cannot be stealing to take them.
Every pack of twenty Embassy contains a sky-blue coupon worth five points; every pack of ten contains a coupon worth two. Embassy – The Best in Smoking declare the coupons, above an address in Glasgow for obtaining a catalogue. Your father keeps his coupons on a shelf in his wardrobe, neatly stacked in blocks secured with rubber bands. The catalogue is slim, and isn’t for children. Whenever you ask what he is saving for, he says an iron lung.
No, but really? you press him.
Really, he says.
As you stroll home now from the precinct, a red-tipped candy stick held between the fingers of your right hand, your father’s Embassys in your left hand – a mini-man, a smoker – you scour the kerbs and shrubberies for more discarded coupons. Some are discoloured, some grubby with dirt, and each time you reach for one you clamp the sweetie cigarette in your lips. You pinch your eyes against the smoke, exhale from the side of your mouth. You are only pretending.
Dad, look! you call as you come into the house; I found you some coupons!
But if he is grateful he does not reveal it. You have nearly made him late with your dawdling. A black cab has drawn up at the kerb, and as your father hurries from the house you notice the shine on his shoes, as bright as the cellophane wrap he tears from the cigarettes and drops to the pavement. He is carrying his best suit on a hanger, sheathed in a Sketchley’s green wrapper. He is going to Glasgow to bury his mother, though this is not yet something you know. No one has told you. It is none of your business.
