Here’s the thing: I always fail the psychometric tests that they give you in interviews. I say my favourite colour is white and my favourite number is zero. But they lap it up, dazzled. For now I represent a challenge; an affront. ‘We need a maverick,’ said Finnegan. ‘Someone who thinks outside the box,’ he said. But outside the box is space, nothingness, void. I got too far outside the box. I just floated from day to day.
One day it was Sunday, and I went to work. I had no qualms about working on a Sunday; in fact, I relished it. I liked the way the streets were quiet and empty and there was only the occasional tourist or pissed-up reveller on the ‘walk of shame’ home. There was an eerie solace to everything, and you could even hear birdsong through the thrum of the buses. I listened to it as I made my way through meandering alleyways and passed quaint, dark pubs with panelled-wood rooms; then the tall, striking buildings; the modern and archaic; gargoyles and plinths peering up at one-hundred-metre daggers of glass.
And I liked the way the smugness started from my belly and ended up in a zipper-like grin on my face. I liked how the boss looked up and assessed me, with a little flicker of surprise – the tremulous nod of approval. All the time I was there, even if I just wanked into a spreadsheet, I would feel virtuous and brilliant and top dog and top drawer.
‘It’s a fucking Sunday,’ I thought, as I stood in the office and surveyed my city. ‘It’s fucking Sunday and I’m here.’
They’d only recently given me the job. Through a sheer fluke, as it happens. I had been at a party, full of dicks and whack jobs. One of Nancy’s friends had thrown it – someone who was born into money and would die out of money, probably a heart attack while reclining in a rooftop spa pool.
Anyway, Nancy was desperate to get us talking; she was desperate to turn our luck around. I was just doing administrative temp stuff, then. So she wheeled and dealed and coquettishly teased him. There was lots of hair flicking and eye fluttering and laughing at miniscule jokes and softly wetting her lips. I could see it all happening, and I tried not to care, tried to see it as a compliment.
‘This is Matthew Rickshaw,’ she said, her pupils big and unfathomable. ‘He works in the city.’
She made it sound like a magical city, like the Emerald City, come-meet-the-fucking-wizard city. It was a different city to my own; threadbare and worn, full of holes and impurities.
But it turns out it really is who you know. Matt set me up with Finnegan Fishman, which led to my climb through the world of commodities exchange and dancing figures. But it also led to Matt kissing my girlfriend. It led to my girlfriend being dead. Life can be funny like that. It can go ahead and pass moral sentence all by itself.
But it’s not all bad. Because I’ve excelled in this job. At work, I show guile. I am relaxed and extrovert, I have a spring in my step and a sparkle in my eye. To be a good commodities broker, you need zing, pizzazz, the gift of the gab. I have all this and more. ‘Ability to negotiate’ was on the job description. I thought about how the untruths just slip off my tongue, and I signed up straightaway. Lies can be a good thing. Lying can buy you snazzy clothes, a tropical beach, a pretty girl on your arm. Lies can give you success.
It’s a shame that Nancy didn’t see it that way. When we left university, we struggled, but she seemed to revel in it, at first – it conformed to the story in her head. She loved renting the tiny flat in zone 6, with slits for windows and a half-size bath. She loved eating beans on toast and watching box sets in pyjamas. She sometimes got a bit down that she couldn’t find work as an actress, but that wasn’t fuelled by a desire to pay bills, it was a desire to fan an inner flame. She’d come from auditions with her eyes sad and droopy and a kind of atrophy in her limbs. ‘I didn’t get it,’ she’d say, but even these four words were an effort. She never got it. She never got the parts and she never quite got that maybe she just didn’t have ‘it’. She skulked in corridors, waiting for auditions, refusing to give up her dream. There was the odd am-dram – sorry, ‘fringe’ – production, a photo shoot in a magazine (I think it was for shoes). She got some minor model work. At least I knew she wasn’t sucking cocks.
The sad thing is that she was actually a brilliant actress. I would get tingles watching her practise her lines in the mirror. The way she looked at her reflection, the way she’d change the expression, even the animus in her eyes… I would see her and this reflection as two different people, and it made me panic. It worried me to see how she could inhabit these characters; the way her face could fall so easily into those feelings. It was the opposite to me: I’m a terrible actor with fiction, but a brilliant actor at real life. I always seem to get the best lines.
So I thought she’d cheer up when I started trading – and, for a while, she did. But there were long hours to put in and parties to have and contacts to network. On her side, there were too many dinners for one and too many one-way conversations. I couldn’t buy her approval, although I tried hard. It was strange, sometimes, to come back very late and see her curled up asleep in one of my old sweaters. It was like she was cheating on me with an old version of myself, one that didn’t exist anymore. How can you not change, endlessly, countlessly, time and again? Every second, millions of cells in the body are replaced with new ones. Every little experience changes and adapts the brain. So how can we stay the same person? Why was the sweater scrunched up in her hands, why was she loving the form I had made a ghost? It had shrunk in the wash; it now fitted her, not me.
But it’s me who sees ghosts, now. She always did laugh the loudest.
You see, Nancy’s death left a missingness in the world: like the imprint of your shoe in mud or that rush of air as somebody passes. It feels like she should still be here, that maybe she might come back, that all the signs suggest it.
Her cupboard, for example: in those early days, before the funeral. Her dresses and cardigans still messily lined up, belts heaped up on a shelf, shoes slotted in underneath, like mollusc shells: things that looked waiting, expectant, ready for the right-sized body to fill them. Looking through the clothes, I had memories of her wearing them: that one was Cornwall, this one was the National Gallery. That yellow dress she had teamed up with a straw hat, as we swept over Hyde Park, the sun beating down on our bodies, our noses getting pink, a lazy Sunday stretched before us. I saw there were still grass stains on the hem, and that is when I lost it.
Everything was marked by absence. Everywhere were shapes and indentations. Intangibles turned tangible and spoken words slammed into walls; banged into cupboards like kinetic particles of heat. Mirrors reflected what wasn’t and rooms grew gaps – gaps grew on gaps – like cancer of the hole. The kettle shrieked her name, the curtains fell like hair. Silence clung to clothes and hissed in the ears like a body deflating. Numerous people called round to see me and, although sympathetic and cooing and making all the right noises, they didn’t seem to notice that anything was different in the flat. The paintings hung on the wall and there was this hint of perfume in the air and that coffee book was open on exactly the same page. They drank from glasses once held by presence, once bought by form: absence trapped between the fingers, a sniff of skin once kissed and held. Nobody noticed, nobody but me, who had to pick up that invisible body and hide it away.
I did this by moving out. I did it very quickly, so I wouldn’t turn into a forever griever like my mum. I had a conversation with our flatmates Jamie and George about who might take over the room, how I might break out of the contract. They listened to what I had to say and nodded uneasily. Trying to smile but not smile too much. Unsure when to make a joke, whether they should speak softly around me. They were upset too, catastrophically upset (I heard them weeping sometimes through the walls); but they knew my grief must be worse and this frightened them. We were British, we were blokes, we were crap at this sort of thing. Nobody knew the codes, the etiquette, the conduct. Nobody teaches you that. Something had snapped between us. They would never treat me the same again.
Jamie and George were friends from university. They were one of the first planets to orbit around me and Nancy. They were both in Nancy’s drama class. Jamie was gay and in love with George who was in love with Nancy, who had just fallen in love with me. It was complicated. But it worked. We existed in harmony through some crooked commensalism.
What I’m saying is – the system worked fine. Nobody wanted to rock the boat and risk losing contact with the object of their desire. It must have been painful for Jamie and George at times, but they came to accept it. And, anyway, even they would admit that the cult of Marcus and Nancy was exhilarating. We just carried charisma, like a mist of cologne or the heat of fire. We went well together. We added up to more than the sum of our parts. But I’ve told you this already… I mustn’t keep saying it. It’s just that those were the happiest days of my life. You must have had them, too. They’re usually when you’re young. Proper young. You feel heady and invincible. All the songs sound louder, all the colours are brighter, and life is a list of ‘first things’ that you can’t wait to discover.
#
I wanted to punish God for Nancy’s death, so I decided to break the commandments in order. The first one is kind of lame, truth be told. ‘You shall have no other gods before Me.’ Well, this is the 21st century and I can fucking idolatrise until kingdom come. What don’t I label a god? I worship at the altars of naked women in magazines, of waitresses who bring me tasty food, of movie men who say all the best lines. Fuck it, I even made Nancy a goddess, for a bit, in those early days. I read between her lines and I genuflected at her breasts and I supped at her pussy until we transubstantiated into cum. You get the drift.
The second one is ridiculous, something about making yourself a carved image, a likeness of heaven – idolatry, I guess. So, anyway, I went out to the shops and I bought anything I could lay my hands on: awful posters, crucifixes, some pisstake cartoons. And I bowed down to them in mock worship, I asked God to enter into my emptiness and fill it with something, anything, just fill it up and reseal it. Then I took everything into the side garden, and I struck a match on it all, and just watched it incinerate.
I was trying to break a commandment a day, but some are too easy. So while I watched everything burn, I struck off number three, and I spat out God’s name and I cursed him or her or it or whatever the fuck is in heaven. I took his name in vain and I delighted in the old-fashioned thrill of retorting ‘Oh god’, ‘For heaven’s sake’: all of that. When the flames died down, I looked up into the stars and saw things twinkling down at me that were billions of years old, that were already dead. And I wanted to be up there, in the swirls and whirls of the outer galaxies. Perhaps up there is an advanced planet with an extraordinary telescope that you can point at Earth and you will see the past pulsing, your history reanimate, the lights of her eyes all still lit up and dancing.
I remember they told me that in Physics GCSE. Fifteen years old. The teacher, Mr Lennon, jabbing furiously at the board, trying to whip us into a frenzy. He always tried so hard to excite us, to get us interested in the subject. How his heart must have sunk when he looked around the class and saw a boy yawning into his fist, a girl passing a note to her friend, the sound of bubblegum smacking against somebody’s chin, a glazed eye peering up at the time, willing it to strike lunch o’clock. But there was also me in that class, and I sat up a bit straighter when he told me the bit about the stars. It was like fiction was fact and I didn’t know what to believe or disbelieve. My lies could be credible. My life was anything I said it was. The world was malleable and shifting.
I saw that the note was passing over to me. ‘Marcus’, it said on the front. It was covered in hearts. I looked up and saw Charlotte winding her long blonde tresses around her finger. She blew me a kiss from sticky lipsticked lips.
I could scarcely believe it. But then, the stars were actually dead and yet present, and time travel was possible, and reality was unreal. Maybe Charlotte fancied me. I had lost a little weight. I had stolen Jackson’s jacket. I unfolded the note and there was the punch line: ‘you thick ugly purvurt [sic]. I wouldn’t fancy you in a million years.’ Then half the class exploded into laughter and Mr Lennon stopped teaching us facts and started waving his arms about, trying to conduct our behaviour. It was atonal as fuck.
Jackson had left school by then, but he had a girlfriend in my year. He was standing by the school gates when I left that day; smoking a cigarette, trying to look like Michael Hutchence before the sex noose stuff.
I tried to shrink, to camouflage, to turn invisible, but he spotted me at once. ‘That’s my jacket!’ he barked, and pulled me by the collar. ‘That’s my fucking jacket!’
‘I didn’t know,’ I stuttered. My policy was always to deny everything, even when all the evidence was stacked against me. Even if I could plant the tiniest seed of doubt in their minds, the possibility of my innocence, I called that a victory.
‘How could you not know? You little shit! I’ve been looking for that jacket everywhere.’
‘Mum put it in my bedroom,’ I lied. ‘I thought she’d gotten it for me or something. She must have mixed up the washing.’
He released his grip on me but looked unsure. ‘I didn’t put it out in the wash. Jackets don’t get washed.’
‘Maybe Mum thinks they do. Maybe she dry-cleaned it. I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Mum. All I know is that it ended up in my bedroom. I mean it, Jackson. Leave it out.’
But by then he was distracted and walking away. Kitty had landed on the asphalt runway, her skirt hitched up, the sunnies on, her hair flicked back. She flashed a billion-watt smile at Jackson and they sort of melted together, their flesh tangled up and disgusting.
It wasn’t long after that that I joined the church group at school. Maybe it was the thought of Jackson’s dick in Kitty’s underage cunt. (I often heard them going at it in their bedroom.) Maybe it was the constant rejection from the girls. Maybe it was what Mr Lennon had said about stars. Suddenly the world opened up to me, like a glorious flower, and I was heady from the scent. I saw mystery, glorious and blissful, radiate from everything around me. And in that mystery I saw a source, ineffable and potent, and I decided it was God.
The church group were also the only people who were nice to me. Once I started to approach them, they always sought me out at lunch times and assemblies, offering me bites of ciabatta, friendly slaps on the back, enthusiastic talk about timetables. And revelation and temptation and original sin. But that was by the by. Mostly it was just solidarity and camaraderie. I would be lying if I told you that they were fascinating, stimulating people. On the whole, they were all the stereotypes you can imagine: serious and quiet and mousey and dulled. But they had smiles for me and came from tidy homes where lunch was full of sundried tomatoes and balsamic glaze. They spoke in twisted facts, and it was so nice to hear my language. We’d converse about floods that cascaded over the world and killed every living thing (except the 50,000 animals that managed to fit inside Noah’s boat). We enthused about people who lived for days within whales and the magic trick of turning water to wine. Our faces would go quite pink when we told these stories, and our voices would drop to mere breath, like our soul was already leaving our bodies. Sometimes, I admit, I would get tears in my eyes. The thought of so much love, so much hope, so much endlessness.
I would replay scenes in my mind of my death. My enemies at school: their howling and their wailing, this dramatic sense of guilt. A couple even kill themselves. One is a girl from afar, who has always been a bit in love with me, but hasn’t been able to say. And then there is Jackson, his hand beating his chest, repeating over and over: ‘I never told him how much I loved him; I never told him how much I loved him.’ And the jacket gets tossed on top of the casket, the pockets sucking up soil. ‘Keep it forever,’ he says. And then he retreats to the background, where my mother and grandmother stand, their bodies darting with grief. ‘He was always my favourite,’ my mother whispers into Nana’s ear. ‘My beautiful boy.’
And then there is the best bit. The momentous, majestic, almighty bit. The bit where my spirit shimmers out of my body and out through the casket and looks down on these sorry folk and then ascends through the clouds. Up, up, I go – then suddenly a whoosh and acceleration and a tumble and flare. Then things are mottled and vague and indefinite. Things are more thoughts than things. Nothing is confined or restricted or actual. And there’s this parental sensation, this overwhelming worship. I’m in the arms of my creator, the one who approves me. The angels play at harps. It’s a ‘welcome home’ party and everyone in heaven is invited.
I wish I had believed in God and Jesus and everlasting love when I was fourteen. It came a year too late. Because, when I was fourteen, my dad died. One minute he was driving home from work, singing along to the radio; the next he was crumpled into a lamppost, his brain skewered with shards of glass. It was just before Christmas, which might explain why I didn’t want to celebrate Jesus at the time.
On Christmas Day, my mum went to bed with a migraine. We were put into a taxi and sent to my nana’s, where we pretended to be happy. Her toyboy carved us some turkey and we put party hats on our heads. Except Jackson wouldn’t do it – his sorrow soared into anger, he smashed up the bedroom and drank all the bottles of brandy. He jumped on his bike with his face mulled red. No-one could find him, but my nana didn’t want to worry my mum, so she didn’t tell her anything. Instead, she went back to the table and pulled a cracker with me. I read out the joke, and we all fell about laughing at how terrible it was; and Toyboy Tony made me say it again, as he didn’t quite get it. And I did all of this, and I somehow performed it quite brilliantly. Sometimes a fantasy is easier, the pretence is a comfort. I didn’t have that distraction at night, when I switched out the lights, and I saw my dad’s face in the darkness. The radiator pipes gurgled and the floorboards groaned. Even the house was releasing its breath, was unleashing its sadness, now that no-one could see. So we both cried together, and my hand stroked the wall like it was somebody’s face.
After the first month, things started to change. I got to understand the phrase that life ‘moves on’. I really could feel this rapid conveyor belt that I had to stay on top of, that I had to hold on to. It was sink or swim. Drop off or survive. So I let go of Dad until I could barely remember his face. When I tried to picture it, it was usually a memory of a photo, or else it was pixelated, with none of the detail. He was getting left further and further behind. He had dropped off the belt.
I was young enough that the whole thing was swept up into an overarching narrative. The accident didn’t feel real, so I wrote it into an epic story in my head: triumph over adversity, endurance and valour. A sob story, no less. But Jackson took it worse than me. And my mother, the worst of all. My mother was never, ever the same – and I hated her for it.
Maybe that’s why I wanted to punish God so badly when Nancy died. Because he had done the same thing to me twice. He had given me something I loved and that loved me back and then he had destroyed it in exactly the same way. What could be a clearer message than that? It was a vindictive act, an act of swollen power. I sort of pictured him as a Super Accountant: performing miracle formulae in spreadsheets as he reckoned the grand total of sins. Or maybe like a beardier Alan Sugar: the no-nonsense work-harder who didn’t take any crap. ‘You’re fired,’ he’d say, as he pushed the less savvy into Hell. ‘You’re fired,’ he’d say, casually kicking folks from the game. Argh, and after all I had done for him: the sore knees on pew cushions, shrapnel tossed in the tin, the fervent preaching of gospel. The best days of my life – all given to serve the Big Boss in the Sky.
But there were other days, you know, there were ones he didn’t get, before it all went wrong. I remember when dad took me to the horses. I was eleven, so Jackson was fourteen; this meant that he was getting into hanging out at shopping malls and bowling alleys and trying to peer up teenage skirts. So Jackson wasn’t coming. It was just me and my dad.
Dad wore a suit. It was a throwback pastel blue from his prime. His tie was a little too long and he tucked it into his trousers. The hair was slicked back, with an excess of gel, and he reeked of chemical sandalwood. ‘Come on, son,’ he said, and pushed me out of the door with his hand on my head.
There was a sense of occasion about everything, the way there is at ceremonies or festivities, Christmas or weddings. Dad pulled up besides the bank and very gruffly said, ‘Wait here.’ It seemed like an eternity that I sat there, playing around with the dials of the radio, blinking up at the sunshine, watching women push their pushchairs past, the frantic dance of shoppers shopping. But time did indeed pass, like all time must, and eventually he was back beside me, solemnly flicking through a wad of notes with an enchanted, faraway look on his face.
‘You see this?’ he said; lowering himself a little, to make sure he was staring me right in the eyes.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s money, isn’t it?’
‘Yep.’
‘And you know how we get this money?’
I knew better than to roll my eyes in front of him, but I did think, jeez, Dad, I’m eleven, not five. But I copied his gravity and nodded emphatically. ‘You and Mum make it.’
‘We do indeed, son. Now, listen to me carefully. You better listen. You hear? Right: money is a precious, precious thing, and not to be thrown away unless you can afford it. What Daddy has done is save up very hard so he could have this little outing with his boy. The same way we save up for a holiday every now and then. It just so happens that Dad likes to relax, he needs to relax, and he finds going to the horses relaxing, you see? So he’s been saving for a while, keeping his money, the money he makes and takes out from the bank, you know? He’s been doing that so he could have this next outing, and he could take his two sons. Now it’s a pity that Jackson isn’t here, but you’re here, Marcus, and that makes this a little dad and son outing, right? So we’re going to have fun with this money, but I want you to know that I saved it up properly, that I’m not spending money I can’t afford to spend. You hear?’
It was a longwinded message but I gave him another solemn nod, the kind that might fool him into believing that he’d given the speech of a Churchill or King. I would give him anything, anything he wanted; I just wanted to be his favourite son, like this, sitting next to him in the car, with the wind whizzing through my hair and making my eyes water up.
When I think about it now, that wad of cash – so formally held aloft – was about a hundred quid. I’m pretty sure it was a pile of ten pound notes. I mean, that’s the way I remember it. But in his hands it had the significance of millions. It represented freedom and fun and adventure and ‘relaxing’. It represented a rare day out between father and son.
The races lived up to this speech: it was a spectacle on a scale never hitherto seen. There were women with sculptures on their heads, elaborate bows and nettings, lips heavily rouged, their heels a good two inches higher than normal. A lot of the men wore suits, like my dad, and many of them bought champagne, including my dad, who purchased a glass, just the one, and then drank it very slowly. He sat down on the grass, beckoned me over, and let me have a sip of it. It tasted like bubble bath and I wanted to spit it out, but I saw the look of expectation on his face, that reverent, trance-like gleam. I had a sense that this was a glimpse into some distant, other world that he longed to be part of, so I returned his appreciative look, and he chuckled loudly and ruffled my hair.
The day reminded me of pantomime. Every Christmas we would get dolled up and go to the local theatre for the once-a-year treat. There was always some washed-up celebrity in the title role, usually a full-on-top soap star or a one-hit wonder. I always wanted to get the programme but my mum always said it was too much money. I would enjoy the red velvet seats against my arms and the buzz of expectation just before the curtain began to lift. To me, it was the most exciting thing that there could possibly be, sitting there, amongst all those people, all seeing and believing in the same storyline, all knowing the same lines, the same ‘Look behind yous’ and the ‘Oh no you didn’ts’. It was comforting to buy into this together and watch people play the parts they always played, with their heroes and villains and the happily ever after: so delayed, so tremulous, and yet so sweetly inevitable when it happened, such a relief that yet again it had happened, and exactly as we’d hoped it.
So these people around me were all dressed up too, all head to toe in their fancy garb, their special occasion clothes. And they seemed to speak in this strange, private language of numbers and figures and the passing of currency. I didn’t know the script yet, but I enjoyed watching them say it, especially my father. He turned to me.
‘What shall we bet on, boy?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What horse!’ He laughed. ‘That’s a list of horse names, there. You see it? They’re going to run against each other, and if we pick the right horse, we win some money. And I’m going to place about a third of this money’ – he waved the wad in front of me again – ‘on this race. So who’s it going to be, son?’
‘They’ve got some funny names, Dad.’
‘Yes, they’ve got a good sense of humour, these jocks and trainers.’
‘Are they really called this?’
‘Yes, son. Come on, Marcus, before the race starts…’
‘Ha ha, I like that one.’
‘What one?’
‘Hoof Hearted.’
He studied the note very carefully. ‘You see those numbers, son? They’re the odds. What I mean is – that there is the likelihood of a horse winning. And that’s 30 to 1, so they’re pretty low odds. He’s not going to win, son. If he wins, he’ll win us a lot of money, but it’s a gamble; because if he loses, and he probably will, we’ll lose all our money. You see?’
I did see. And I thought that my best chance of seeming commonsensical and keen was to pick the horse with the second-highest odds of winning (the highest would be too obvious). My dad smiled at my choice, and said, ‘Yes, that’s my gut, too.’ And we went over to the booth and we paid together.
Just like the pantomime, the happily ever after arrived to some rapturous hollers and whistles and roars of applause. I was pleased, especially when my dad picked me up and spun me round laughing. Yes, I had known it had to happen, but that didn’t devalue the happiness. There is a kind of deliciousness in knowing a formula and watching it happen, again and again, this eternal alliance of hunger and satiety. The only problem is that films and stories can make you think it happens like that all the time.
But I had never seen my dad look so happy. Not even when the princess got the prince and the ugly sisters were sent away and the bad guys put in prison. I watched as money magicked into being and the paper quadrupled in his hands. And to think that was it – just paper. Whole lives lived in deference to paper, in fear of paper, in thrall to paper. How could the trees have turned into this?
My mother and father met when they were both very young. He was apparently ‘Not like the others’, not like the ‘boys’, as my mum would spit. My dad, by contrast, was always a ‘man’. He bought her flowers on their very first date. I pictured him with slicked back hair, like he wore it at the racetracks. He probably tucked his tie in then, too. My mum didn’t really mention what he wore, but she said that he listened like a gentleman, didn’t ‘try anything on’, although I didn’t get her meaning. ‘He had rough hands but the softest voice.’ That was always the final statement, and her lips would part and her hands splay open, as if to say, ‘What?’ What could she have possibly done, other than fall in love with him? He had rough hands but the softest voice! For heaven’s sake. Who wouldn’t have fallen in love?
This was the most passionate I ever heard her. She was always flitting in and out of things, my mum, never holding on, never fully there – except when it came to Dad. One time she was a receptionist at the doctor’s surgery; for a while, she worked in Littlewoods, on the front desk, customer services, so it happens. There was even talk of her becoming Assistant Shop Manager, until the incident with the clothes hanger. But her biggest stint was as a dinner lady, when Jackson and I were at primary school. So many embarrassing moments whenever I saw her, standing there, with greasy hair in a net and baggy grey overalls. She never seemed to serve pudding; she always dished out plastic peas and shapeless mash.
Dan Fletcher’s mum also worked at the school, but she was a teacher and wore colourful beads and always spoke with a titter. Mrs Fletcher taught us about rock cake and planets and food chains. She was an omnivore, she said, because she ate both plants and animals. Some creatures are prey, others are predators, and some can be both to different things. It all depends on where you are in the food chain. (I thought of mum, then, as we snaked around the frosty hall in our lunchtime screeches, and mum scooped up cabbage that stank of old bin liners and kept her eye forever on the clock.)
Mrs Fletcher said that food is energy, and energy constantly moves from one thing to another. It never gets lost. So the bigger things eat smaller things – but everything eats something. It doesn’t really matter who gets the biggest bit of food in the end, you just need the energy flowing, you just need to keep the system in place. (I thought of mum, then, as I shuffled along in the queue and those eyes swivelled to me, the ladle lifting in greeting, the happy recognition in her eyes, and I just looked away, felt food tip and ooze on the plate, kept moving forwards, forwards, forwards.)
Mum and Dad were grafters. They were both from working class families with aspirations. They wanted to work hard, do well, find a way out of this mire and mud. And my dad was a listener, he was a gentle and educated man, but he still had to plaster and decorate and come home with specks of paint in his hair. ‘He had rough hands but the softest voice.’ Those rough hands could strap her in like a seatbelt on those cold, lonely nights that are made for enduring.
One winter, I remember it, we were particularly cold, frozen down to the bone. You could see the ice on the pane, and wind blowing through cracks so it shivered the curtains, they very visibly moved. Jackson and I spent more and more time round friends’ houses, where there was warmth and even heat, and you could stand with your back against the radiators. Back home, we’d slip on the jumpers and Dad would give us hot water bottles to hug.
Mum wasn’t doing very much at all back then, she was just there in the background, nothing much to do with her time. We didn’t know why, nobody ever mentioned the why. I still remember that dressing gown, all starched and fusty, as she sagged on the sofa. She flicked through magazines, ate pot noodles, sometimes looked at the TV, mostly stared at something I could not make out. Oh yes, she liked to watch films, romantic comedies but also the kitchen grit. She loved Charlton Heston: his solid, bullet-shaped body and the ire in his eyes. On better days, Mum cleaned around our feet and chatted to friends on the phone, people who never hung around long but always seemed important at the time.
Finally, the dressing gown would slip off and the clothes would return. Another job would be found – for a while, at least. And then Mum and Dad would be back around the table, sorting out paperwork, doing their sums, always worrying about money, always fretting, always trying to make the ends meet. If the ends didn’t meet up, then the circle wouldn’t complete, and then you’d have chaos.
I would go to the toilet in the middle of the night – always very quickly, in case I woke up the monster in my wardrobe – and see the lights on in the hallway downstairs. I’d stay still for a moment and listen to their low, hushed voices, always sounding a little stern, a little sad and disappointed. I felt this awful, unbearable weight of adulthood. This dark, shadowy outline of things that lay before and beyond me. I could feel it slither up the stairs and slip around my ankles and hiss in my face. When Dad died, I thought to myself – at least he doesn’t have to worry anymore. At least there is that.