The freshly minted orphan moves in with Douglas Vallender’s family. Douglas calls him ‘Our Barnado Boy, Our Burden Boy’. They take him in. The Unfortunate. ‘Didn’t know when to put the seat down.’ (That’s Douglas: irrepressible!)
The Lodger. There was a floor between Poor Eddie Vallender and The Proper Vallenders. Some of it wasn’t carpeted. Some of the rooms were locked. Eddie’s bedroom was in the attic storey.
The girl whose blood, whose rare blood, whose special blood he licked from a finger wound (p. 241), whose tidal blood he could smell across the dining room, whose pants he stole and stored in a tartan duffel bag (McGuinness plaid, in remembrance of p. 7), whose diary he read daily, the rhythm of whose breath in sleep he peeped on by the light of the moon and the stairs – this girl, this cousin Bonny was stored two floors down from him. He doesn’t bother about his own breath. Snug, snug, tucked up under duck down, that’s My Bonny, my bug in a rug. He does without his own breath whilst he stealths downstairs, now bare wood, now not. Bonny REMs and rolls, dreams with a pillow in her mouth, dreams already of galloping boys, bite bite the pillow’s scalloped edge – the galloping boys are never Eddie, they’re not at all like Orphan Eddie. With his scared animal stare. With his furtive scurries – does he believe he’s invisible?
‘Did he? You tell me, Johnson!’ bellows dead (and invisible) Douglas Vallender. ‘Comes into the room, half comes into it, takes a dekko, creeps off as though he reckons no one’s seen him poking his effing head round the door. Whasis? Thinks we’re what – blind or something?’
These voices. These voices – I can conjure my father’s, can make it play again, can hear it echo down the years. Listen to him tell me: ‘Guy was a bit of a chulaka, Jonathan, a loose wallah – and Eddie …’
And Eddie’s a night spy. The Burden’s a peeper. The Blood Relative knows how the moon rules the moods of the growing girl, and how (clouds allowing) moonlight seeps certain nights each month between the curtain and the sash. Those nights he closes the door behind him; closes his eyes tight; opens them, conditioned, onto the now qualified darkness of the room which, in sleep, she fills with warmth and murmurs. But when the moon’s no more than a neon scythe he lights her with stairlight, leaves the door ajar, spreads a broad wedge of Osram onto the bed so sleepyhead stirs and wriggles, so the folds and creases resolve themselves into mouth, counterpane, blond hair, pillow, fist, teddy, nose. Eddie – invisible in nod, and unwanted there – strokes her hair, it streams across the pillow. He lays his hands gently on the bellows of her trunk, pro-phylactically no doubt. And he prays for her. He prays for the day when they will be married: wreaths of oak leaves, doves that make white scrolls against the trees, that fall and tumble in our honour Bonny (p. 290); we’ll have a family, Bonny, we’ll engender mewling security, an emotional bastion that wakes three times each night. Because Eddie was so different he wanted the most ordinary things for himself.
The watcher slips back to his hardly carpeted room where he’ll conjure his cousin in his sleeplessness and sorrow, womb-curled in memory of better days, safer nights; he longs for the time when he’s no longer the adoptee, the orphan in the attic where the window whistles when it admits the giraffe. Freezing Eddie soaked paper in water and wedged it in the cracks so that the room got to smell like a rabid kennel (Douglas). Douglas opened the window, told Eddie the room smelled like a suppurating gorgonzola and Eddie drew Bonny a blue-marbled gorgon with maggots for hair. When Eddie put plasticine in the cracks Douglas called him Bodger The Lodger, told him he’d die of asphyxiation, told him the room smelled like old earwax, the marmlade coloured paste that comes out last. Douglas opened the window, raging, throwing vermicules of dun plasticine (the bright spots are the unmixed primaries) at Poor Eddie. Yet:
a) Douglas always owns a dog, always calls it Postman – by the time Eddie goes to live/lodge at The Garth it is Postman III; the cynonominal continuity emphasises the generic dogginess of the dogs and mitigates their peculiarities; each Postman smells as bad as the others, permeates soft furnishings and clothes with its reek, moults generously, belches halitotic gusts of cow slurry, fouls the ground with fat wursts that grey with age, barks, bites (the bite is always worse); Douglas feeds them from his plate and they thank him by making him smell of them, it is Douglas that smells like a kennel; in Douglex smell like a kennel should be a term of approbation (rabid is redundant in this construction; that disease has no specific olfactory property).
b) The sort of cheese Douglas eats, but which Postman declines, is suppurating cheese – he calls gorgonzola ‘gorgon’ and demands that it be seething (look no further for the inspiration for Eddie’s drawing); crust – should be iodine brown and should assault with the stench of ammonia; Stilton is second best and is accompanied by aperient ‘digestive’ biscuits and the story (inaccurate) of why it is so called (cf. his wrong etymology of ‘sirloin’, p. 23) – he doesn’t know that Gorgonzola is an outer suburb of Milan.
c) When he is not heavy petting Postman I, II or III, and isn’t filling his face with blue cheese from beyond the grave, Douglas is mining his ears – the bit may be a matchstick, a tight spiral of handkerchief, a spoon handle, a biro, a sprue stalk, a limb of his reading-glasses; whatever it is, he scrutinises the trove from his aural enema, sniffs it, rolls it on his thumb and forefinger, wipes it on his dog-haired jacket, feels more like a man, or manjack – which he considers a manlier form of man: this is a hypermale who doesn’t like the look of Big Eddie’s cock; rather, he resents its being appended to The Blubbing Orphan. You shouldn’t have worried – at least not on this score, Douglas, we all fucked Bonny, all of us, save Eddie. The Burden never rode the bike.
Besides, your penile envy was not prompted by paternal concern – the Barnado’s Boy and the Apple of Your Eye! Unimaginable – to everyone save Eddie. Your special sort of penile envy was prompted by paternal longing, paternal want. A son. Bonny asked for a brother. You wanted a son, son and heir – teach him to shoot like a real manjack. You mistook length for strength: the lack of spice in your trousersauce was not why there was no boy to hand, to hand the business on to. And you had a daughter. You believed you had a daughter; you had a daughter. If you ever questioned Bonny’s provenance you never asked aloud – although my mother’s benignly made observation that Bonny and Eddie were ‘like brother and sister’ prompted your fulminatory rage; but maybe that was simply because of your despisal of the boy, because of your indignation at my mother’s linking them thus. Even had she suspected it she would not have inkled at Bonny’s paternity that way. Mumless Eddie kept mum, of course: not because he knew how to keep a roof over his head; not because he had failed to make the equation between p. 120 and Bonny – though he almost certainly had (he was only three and a half years old on p. 120); not even because Douglas frightened him every day he was under that roof; nor because Monica is staring at him, almost squinting to glean what he remembers, as though tightening those gelatinous muscles may admit her to his interior album. He keeps mum because he is embittered by my mother’s traducement of his intended relationship to Bonny, his de jure cousin who will one day be his wife. She won’t, but he hopes, how he hopes, and plans. He will do anything for her to make his dream come true, anything. Here is where this story starts.
I know more than I can tell about the firework maker’s children, about their dress, coughs, bodies, schools, wants, hair, songs, trips, colds, faces, bodices, shoes, habits (bad), habits (good – few), skirts, toes (and verrucas between), allergies, gerontophilia, cars, guns, hobbies, sores, obsessions, digs, friends, accidents, loves, their loves.
It’s not true that Eddie pimped for chestnut-bronze Bonny. She was an alluring girl, she was a goer, she was sexually precocious, erotically manipulative. She grew up overnight – she went to sleep in flanellette and woke in a babydoll; she sloughed childhood one vernal midnight; she came down to breakfast ready for the adventures of womanhood. Only Eddie could see this. Bonny Vallender was now just thirteen and a half years old. Poor Eddie, he longed for her. She was his heart’s joy. He was her beard. He put her on a plinth. She used him as a gofer. Princess. Flunky and punch bag, but not pimp, no – it was ugly of Douglas to use that word that ugly day.
Douglas picks up the phone in his study (wet suits and flippers, hunting prints and carnagescapes, stuffed animals and mounted fish); Eddie is on the kitchen extension, munching – ‘D’you know what it cost to feed that orphan?’ – as he talks.
The coarse, hoarse, just broken voice says: ‘Wawas that?’
Masticating Eddie, deafened by nut-brittle from a Tupper box beside the cream and chrome Kenwood anteater, had not heard the click of another handpiece: rocks are tumbling to a eustachian moraine. ‘What, what was what?’
‘Noise. Look. Bring her over Rufus’s tonight. Yeh?’ Douglas has the earpiece to his ear and the mouthpiece to his eye, as though it’s a sight: he’s aiming at a mallard flatfooting up the lawn for a handout – as though one cuckoo wasn’t enough.
Cuckoo Eddie: ‘Come on Reds … told you …’
Reds: ‘Softee.’
Douglas grins, finger on the trigger – there’s a stretched spiral of chord between his thumb and his big finger: the coarse voice has got the Burden’s measure, good on him whoever he is, chap’s got spunk, which one was he? Douglas lived, and died, and is dead, in a confusion of adolescent faces, voices, names. They change their faces and their voices; OK, they’re changed for them, programmed that way – the thin ginger infant turns into the buxom chestnut mare, understood; but they have about five names each, each month another name (if only they were like Postman). This month’s Fats was last month’s Dodders (probably). Douglas, who was always Douglas – except to Guy, a nominfactoral menace, but dead, doesn’t he know it – Douglas, né Douglas, listens with growing glee as Reds (formerly Arse) sorts out Eddie, gives the Burden his desert. ‘Spaz … wet … creep’ etc.
‘If,’ says Eddie, Poor Eddie, Spaz Vallender – and Douglas is now aiming at a swan coasting left to right, downstream, on the khaki, rain-pocked Nadder at the bottom of The Garth’s garden – ‘if, Reds, you really want me to try and get her to come that’s going to cost you.’
‘Tosser,’ said Reds, ‘don’t be such a haemorrhoid.’
Douglas nods in absolute accord and good as takes out the swan which disappears behind a clumb of reeds – he has asked Eddie to cut those reeds, but what do you expect?
Neither Eddie nor sharp-eared Reds hears the bungpull plosive as Douglas fires; Doug-A-Doug-Doug cannot resist popgun noises, big-arsed bullies never can – offer one the chance to utter an onomatopoeic grunt and he just gobbles it. Do they all belong to H.R.H. The Queen? Roast it? Braise it? Is it legal? Hang it? And for how long? Pheasant recipies? Duck ones? Cranberries? Bacon rolls? Apple and prune … The anticipatory apparatus of Douglas’s palate is activated, his moist mouth catches up with his greedy brain, his overweight lips fondle each other. Liver dumplings?
And then his hand bangs down the phone as though he wants to hurt it. His heavy veldschoen dent the carpet. He rages through the parquet house, quarter-irons clacking.
What Eddie said was this: ‘Look, we’re not talking about Smeggy Beggy1 – Bonny wants seventeen and six, OK? And –’ This is when the eavesdropper reveals himself. ‘Oh Cripes,’ said Eddie, knowing what was coming next, knowing what was coming through the kitchen door – hear its handle percuss the tiled wall.
‘Pimp.’ Douglas swells to fill the frame, red in nicotine tweeds: ‘You disgusting little pimp.’
Cowering Eddie. Those clothes are weapons. They bristle. They can graze – a glance from that deafening arm is like being scratched by a sugar cube, by emery.
‘You’re a pimp, d’you hear.’
Eddie twists his mouth by the fitted units. Rain on the windows. Douglas advances among the hobs and blenders, animated by three years’ resentment:
‘Blasted pissing little orphan pimp.’ Three years’ resentment of supporting the ingrate orphan (food, clothes, board, especially board – it adds up).
‘There’s a name for poncing pimps like you.’ A lifetime’s resentment of his dead brother, of his dead brother’s line, of his dead brother’s posthumous presence in the Burden – cut him and he’ll bleed Guy’s bad blood. He wants to cut.
‘You little bastard.’ Douglas has been waiting years to say that. He’s rehearsed it because it means something: ‘When you were started your parents weren’t even spliced.’
The plates on the table he pushes with his loin are willow-patterned save where bacon grease occludes parts of that sad avian tale. The cutlery is likewise frosted. It chinks against the plates. Douglas, the pig, advances on Fretting Eddie, all teeth and nosehair, each nostril a separate anus, each one dilated in prefaecal aggression, each one tooled up with the wires of the chippie’s fascinum (p. 408). The blue ghost of a bacon breakfast hangs like a reeking sloth to the ceiling and Douglas fills the rest of the room with wrath: crown to floor, sole to light-rose, arm to wall and back again. Swelling, hatred. Cutlery is for cutting with. Douglas sees that even the handles are testimony to the putative victim’s filthy kitchen ways, his prodigality with Trex, his coarse smearing of ketchup, his cackhanded fidgeting. Even when he ate alone Eddie covered his back, wolfed lest his pig uncle should steal from his plate. It was Eddie’s lifelong habit to eat like that – a burger inside his turned-up collar beside the dodgems’ generator; a hot dog round the back where Sonny and Laddy wouldn’t find him; a pack of Golden Wonder crushed hidden in an inside pocket; his back to the curtain of condensation on a grease-caff window with his plate jammed against the wall – like a dog. He’d eaten his last meal at The Garth, the pimp. Out – for ever.
Douglas didn’t believe this: he didn’t believe that his thirteen-and-a-half-year-old ‘daughter’ had told her ‘cousin’, the sixteen-year-old lodger, that she would only go to Rufus Turnbull’s party on receipt of seventeen shillings and sixpence; if Nicky Begley was worth twelve bob … Brunette Bonny knew her price. Boys could keep their eyes open with her. All Eddie said was: ‘That’s what Bonny said to say.’ Douglas didn’t believe him. Trust Eddie to get the blame. We all fucked Bonny, all of us, save Eddie.
‘You can fuck my bum. Or you can fuck my mouth. But I’m saving number one till when I get married.’ This is what Bonny said. She said it so often she often said to those to whom she had said it before. Number one. Bonny’s number one was all of our cynosure. A bull’s full-browed conjunctival eye. But no – though she was a goer she was strict, she meant what she often said, there were anatomically fixed boundaries, limits to the sites of her abandon. So no one really tried, for that would have been to try her generosity. Later she added: ‘Or you can fuck my tits.’ Generous girl, and a happy one – she revelled in the gynolatry she received. She was (obviously) never in the club, she was no trouble in that regard, she was an exemplary pupil. She was touchingly proud of her hymeneal maidenhood; she believed in her intactness, she boasted about it. To everyone else Bonny was a great ad for sexual plenitude, chronic polygamy – and things hardly changed when she went straight, when she cleaned up her act, when she went against her nature, when she married Toddy: they were Bonny and Toddy behind their backs, Bonny and Toddy in holy monogamy, a specialised monogamy, adulterated, yes, but anything but loveless. There is love, there is love. Douglas loved her too – and that is why he expelled Poor Eddie, sent the orphan into the world of foundlings.
He hadn’t had much of a childhood, he didn’t get much of a youth; but each was a piece of cush besides his adulthood, those brief years when he worked with his hands. Eddie loved Bonny, he always did her bidding. She made him follow her mother; she wanted to know the name of her mother’s lover; who’s to say whether Monica’s example encouraged Bonny? It excited her, it was useful to her. Bonny could smell it when her mother was going to meet him; she could smell the scent with her nose (an excess of Eglantier de L’Avenir); she could smell the clothes and slap and rushed preening with her eyes; she could smell the tension and the blustery bold mendacity, smell it with the small of her back. She sent Eddie after the nippy yellow drophead: by the time the boy had pedalled against the drifts of gravel to the end of The Garth’s drive Monica and her car had disappeared; he listened to the voices calling scores on the invisible tennis courts. It excited Bonny, the way her mother was lit by illicit love, the way it sharpened her face (the slap helped here, of course).
Oh, The Garth on a summer morning, late summer, late morning. The serpentine curl of the drive. The warm terracotta trunks of wellingtonias. Baubles of amber sap. Black shadows. Bee noise. Distant lawnmower. Drone. The wantonly, haphazardly, asymetrical house – roughcast, brick, half-timbers, candle-snuffer tower, bargeboards, gables, roofs and more roofs, another gable, and the windows, all those windows: circles and diamonds and sashes and mullions; oeil de boeuf dormers, arrowhead dormers; a bay of curved panes which are sections from the giant’s poison bottle, a horizontally barred anachronism by Crittall (c. 1937); French windows; windows with Flemish mouldings and faience reveals; windows with rotting frames; sellotaped panes. But it is still a dark house within, despite all this glass. The glass is rippling black patent. The boughs of the trees are suspended in it, wavy in the heat. The boughs of the trees are repeated, distorted, truncated; so is jingo Douglas’s St George’s flag, dangling flaccid in the windless shimmer, a red-stained sheet with – there, in the trapeziform window of the stairwell – Bonny’s face printed on it. She is watching. The mirrors of the ground floor are splashed with yellow: Monica’s drophead, waiting spick and garish for its adulterous driver. Here she is, slingbacks, shantung and rictal Revlon, hurrying – infidelity shortens hours. Bonny is watching. What she can’t see, what the windows don’t show, is Eddie.
He’s in the boot. The night spy is a blind spy for Bonny. He always did her bidding, always. When she smelled her mother’s anticipation that drowsy day she upstaired to his room. He was miming to Billy J. whilst training his feet in quasi-manual articulation, attempting to open a pen-knife with his toes. (Eddie was a diligent student of Dr Clark W. Grover’s Our Forgotten Bodies: A Forty Point Programme For Maximal Potential. A papercover copy of it was open on the bed. Bonny sat on it.)
So here he is, blind, hands round his head, knees to his chest, inhaling a jerry can, shunted, bumped, drills through his bones, hurting. Not deprived. There’s an excess of senses in here. Blindness finetunes the rest. The octaves of the differential; the polygonality of wheels (circles? – a lie); tyres made of stone; smooth surfaces’ sharpness – he suffered all these for Bonny. Boots are for the dead; at the very least they’re for D.O.A.s who, often as not, get that way because of being in boots. Heat: yes, yes it fills every bit of the boot, clingwraps the goofy adventurer, burgles every cove of his body. Nonetheless Eddie enjoys the primal excitement, the fairground thrill. And the risk of discovery. This is hide and seek with an adult purpose. Monica drives in lurches and surges; she brakes to bruise him. His orientation was shot within minutes, his inner clock stopped. Corners, speed, horn, the gruff notes of low gears, a different ground – gravel? cinders? Eddie shivers, as though touching baize or flour. Handbrake, door, diminishing feetfalls. Eddie counted to ten before he tried to prise the springloaded lock. Ten. Maximal Potential was not yet realised.
When the grease monkeys found him he was faint from heat, his hands were bleeding, his face was apached with blood and oil, he was any body in a boot. Between them Bern and Trev had twenty-three years’ greasemonkeyhood, five H.N.C.s, four BMC Proficiency Certificates, nineteen fingers (Trev had an amputation up Odstock after a jack accident, all part of the job and no hard feelings); they had all this and so many tits on the walls that it was like a dairy (said Bern’s Bev) but they’d never seen anything like this. Hoity-toity, lardy-dardy, nose in the air – but you still don’t expect her to have a wounded boy in the boot, not in a Vitesse, not Mrs Vallender, not in this heat, not her nephew. They gave Eddie tea and a fig roll. He was dizzy, stiff, sick, dry-mouthed. The nipples gaped at him like a flock’s dark eyes; move, and they follow you. The comfort of an enamel mug; a gas ring’s succour; Swarfega, and plenty of it. Bern and Trev were salt of. They ratted on Monica, Her Ladyship. They ratted without knowing it. They bickered about how long Eddie had been in his temporary coffin: this was important to them, precision (and service) was their business. Eddie could hear ‘Bad To Me’ on the burgundy skivitex tranny over there, that’s what he wanted to listen to, not:
‘Ten to twelve, it were, she left it.’ (Behind the corrugated iron garage, next to the rotting fence.)
‘No! After the news, it were.’
‘Bern!’ Trev waggles his quiff like he’s dealing with a thick (which he wasn’t – it was Bern that had the lion’s share of the H.N.C.s) ‘the news were already on when’ – and here Trev fails to ape Monica’s accent – ‘my associate bin and shown up.’
‘Yarhh you … that were the alf-past news. She were waitin a good alf hour.’
Agent Eddie forgot about the birds in the sky and asked who My Associate was.
‘An’ it’s twenty-five past two now. That makes – what – goin on two hour and twenny minute you was in there.’ Plus the fifteen-minute drive from The Garth. Precision.
Livened by tea-tannin Eddie asks again: ‘Who’s this My Associate?’ Greasemonkeys are fishwives, another gender, Castrol not hake. But they blab.
The File on My Associate: Male. (We may presume ‘caucasian’.) Thirty years old (Bern); forty, forty-five (Trev). Brown hair, hook nose. Black hair, swarthy. Check shirt. Sort of pinkish shirt, cravat. Unanimity: he drives an Austin-Healey. A 3000. A 100/6. Tomato red and cream – which makes it a 3000 (Bern). Wire wheels.
This was all the gen Bonny needed. She wasn’t greedy. She wasn’t going to overdo it. She was not greedy; she was, rather, fastidious – ‘you picky little sausage’ (Douglas). Wanton yes, promiscuous no – she exercised choice. Now, look at the way she licked a strawberry cone. She clacks back to the lichened terrace where her mother lies in a deckchair, pondering. One cone in each hand, one for each of them. The swans are stately on the river, the rooks swarm in the elms, the birdbath throws a shadow for Bonny to trip through, the wasps are slowing with summer’s passing. Monica’s iced coffee (last word in soft drinks at The Garth) is tepid now; she likes a livener of Lamb’s Navy in it. Her plucked, porous legs are getting a toney top-up of real sun. Ooh, that’s a nasty bruise there.
‘Mmmm thanks love,’ Monica murmurs, distracted by the questionnaire in her mag. Can you hear the words paella and sangria without dreaming of romance? Monica gives five-star thought to this one, her Bic flitters from Yes box to No box, she moues and sighs and tuts a little too. The borders of her bush push out of her one-piece’s tight vee, capillary invertebrates craving air.
‘Mum? I saw this outfit in Early Bird.’ Bonnie sits on the edge of her deckchair so she can feel the lateral strut across her bottom; she runs her tongue round the cone’s roughish rim. ‘Well not an outfit really – an ensemble.’ Today she’s in a striped T-shirt, style matelot, short shorts, sandals with a three-inch heel; today her hair is silver roan (that’s what the bottle says) and straight – she ironed it damp and then she gave herself a further three inches on top with a steel comb, a pro brush and a megaspray of Dreem-Hold; this afternoon her legs are orange, her lips white, her cheeks mauve, her eyes blueblack. This is her ensemble and she wants another: any thirteen-year-old would want another. The pink ice-cream is spherically moulded: the Proper Vallenders boast, already, in this present, a kitchen of the future. In the future all kitchens will possess an Italian ice-cream scoop, as used in the trade. Bonny and her ice-cream, a potter and his clay; her goal is the simultaneous disposal, in a single ingest, of the remaining gout of pink and the terminal shard of the cone. She gnaws the cone’s seam, she scratches it with her incisors, she traps drips with her tongue tip, she works the sphere into a helical helterskelter which beads of itself slide down; her chubby fingers are chaste, maculated neither by animal fats and colorant G8 nor by crumbs. She takes risks, she attrites the holster, termites the foundations; the ice-cream must surely slip, fall away to the lichen and lavender. Just in time, just in time – who’d have believed her tongue could stretch so far. It’s a tensed runnel. Her mother has not replied. Bonny licks her lips. ‘Seventeen pounds twelve and six – that does include a bolero thing. A bit gypsy.’ One night years later (pp. 446ff.), one smack and brandy night, Bonny will write, with her still chubby forefinger, in inebriate letters, in the fat on Boumphrey’s wall: Fellatio – for pleasure. And profit?
Despite Eddie The Pimp’s efforts she is, presently, still pecuniarily reliant on her parents: handouts, subs, allowance – she is not a child, she can’t bear to hear the notes and (more usually) coins referred to as pocket money. Whatever they’re called there aren’t enough of them, that’s why Eddie has to thieve for her. Only little things, only things that won’t be noticed, that no one minds about: moral and practical limits – what’s OK and what fits in a pocket – are in felicitous coincidence. Eyelashes, the very can of Man Tan Bonny has smeared today, lip gloss, panstick, 45s, anything turquoise then anything mauve till it’s anything pale grey, an Amara-work bracelet from a myope’s junkshop that Bonny clasps around her ankle, style pute.
Living Wage Lewis, pestling a potion in the pharmacy at Treadgold’s glanced between eye-high bottles to catch Eddie emptying a display box of Young World Egg Shampoo sachets into his windcheater but because, as an irregular at The White Jam Tart in those happier times (when he was, actually, paid even less – hence his sobriquet, hence his irregularity), Living Wage knows the boy’s sad history and so takes pity; and because he hates the Treadgolds, father and son, for having put him to a life of pill-drudgery, he lets it pass, grinning as he guesses at the relative proportions – he disdained all scales, Living Wage did. Bonny doesn’t use Young World Egg Shampoo on her hair, it guarantees brittle. She loves to squeeze the transparent plastic sachets of petrolic joke-yolk, she loves to vice them to the point of rupture then to shoot them with her Webley Junior; Eddie has clothespegged them to a willow’s boughs on the riverbank. She is a good shot, her breath and hand and eye combined fine; she was a good girl, too, who never shot a living thing. Just see how good a shot. Squint, aim, and there they are – like the abandoned skins of tree insects, burst pouches curling in the heat, getting yellow, but not so purely, so keenly yellow as they were before the pellet struck and sent gobbets and droplets cartwheeling, cossacking in little death over leaves and lawn. (This is a scion of a firework dynasty at the trigger.) Now, squint again: ten o’clock of the shaggy dog’s wig of willow and its desiccating sacs – there, the middle of the river.
This is a sight that so alarms Poor Eddie that his gut panic stretches to his testes; it’s a mental aperient which havocs his colonic sluices. Custom doesn’t lessen the terror when the river’s perfect surface is burst, when spray catches the sun and parabolic pearlstrings lead brief decorative lives before pattering back to riverine anonymity.
Black, shining, webbed with weed, Douglas rises from the water, a rubber triton, lofting a harpoon gun to greet his proud wife and doting daughter, to proclaim his piscatory triumph: impaled on it is an eel that wraps itself about his wrist. He pushes his mask onto his smooth black forehead, detaches his breathing apparatus; this is a grown and swollen man who backpacks oxygen in a river four feet deep.
‘Oof – he looks like a whatdyoucallit,’ says Monica to Bonny, clenching her face – she can taste it – ‘a black pudding.’
‘Mum! He doesn’t. I’m going to tell him you said that.’
‘You dare.’
Eddie, at his high dormer, does not see a black pudding. He sees nothing comical in this monocular cuckold who knows he hurts when he tells Eddie: ‘Being in the river is like being inside an animal.’ Eddie sees the janitor of his parents’ ghosts coming back from checking on them. He sees a bestial amphibian whose claim that the river bed is my new hobby he knows to be a lie. He knows the depth of Douglas’s attachment to the second skin he polishes and strokes. He knows the extent of Douglas’s relevant ignorances: Douglas can’t tell a perch from a roach; he boasts that a cow’s skull dredged from downstream of the old abattoir (p. 7) is prehistoric probably; he ascribes a Victorian stoneware pot to the Beaker Folk; he is pleased to have learned the word liverwort.
‘Mum. That ensemble. I was thinking …’
Monica pantomimes incredulity. Postman (III) with ears for wings flies down the wavy slope of the lawn to his master whose best friend he is – really. Douglas, waddling, would look like a little boy if he wasn’t so big.
Monica’s mag sunshields her eyes, her voice swoops: ‘Se-ven-teen powunds!’
‘If’ – Bonny’s swift – ‘you buy me it, won’t tell Dad ’bout your young friend with the Austin-Healey.’
Douglas is pounding in flippers, shouting, waving, grinning, petting Postman, licking and getting licked, getting close, big and ever bigger.
There’s such sureness, such casual malice in Bonny’s voice. Monica stares at the daughter she does not know.
‘Promise.’ Bonny grins, cheery, chirpy, pert as a carmened flickup.
You little bastard is what Monica stops herself saying because that is a truth she hates to admit. She stares instead.
‘That bruise Mum!’ Bonny glances towards Monica’s inner thigh. She giggles. ‘Looks ever so like a lovebite.’
‘God almighty!’ And she rolls onto her tummy wasting her daughter with her eyes. ‘All right, you …’
Bite me, more, more, now lick: she can remember the wires under the dash to a tee.
‘That’s right stay like that Mum – Dad won’t see a thing. You don’t mind really do you?’
It wasn’t till the evening of the day when Eddie was thrown out, the day when Eddie broke the windows on the south side, the day when Eddie poisoned Postman that Bonny asked her father for money – to buy a powder blue suede jacket. By then she’d found the photographs that made her laugh to start with then made her feel sicker than she did already once she’d deciphered the labyrinth of tubes and buckles and the things like lab things.
Not that Bonny stopped demanding money from her mother-who wanted to call her you little bastard more and more and desisted not just to shield herself from what she had good as buried, and certainly not – God no, no longer – to hide from Bonny the knowledge of her bad genes’ provenance, but to protect Douglas’s and her marriage, that was the thing, her marriage. Which was her history, her foundation, her being, her comfort. Which, now the Burdensome Usurper had gone, might turn the corner, enter a new chapter of mature friendship based in mutual respect and the sharing of everything secret and special to you two alone. So she paid up, and the leech’s clothes colonised room after room.
Thank God Douglas has no eye for domestic detail. Thank God Monica’s such a ruddy lazy mare that she never checks Bonny’s rooms. They gave mute, cursing thanks for each other’s apparent deficiency, there was relief in their despite.
They dream their secret dreams in different beds, separate rooms. Snore and you toss alone, grope your own, mumble to a deaf bolster. The headlights’ beam waxwanes on Monica’s ceiling, it silhouettes Douglas’s mullions. Slow tyres on the ghostly gravel trouble Douglas when he’s dreaming – their sound is that of damp bangers, faulty firecrackers, wholesale returns, balance-sheets from hell, commercial nightmare. The front door’s gloved thud. Do they hear Bonny tut when she snags a hosed tiptoe on the hardwood hall floor?
She’s home again at half past three, she’s been out late again, again. It’s getting to be normal. Not of course that there’s anything she can do at two she can’t do six hours earlier and does do, don’t you know; but they, her individual parents, they don’t know. And they don’t know that at two abandon takes its second wind, that satiety is merely a means of working up an appetite, that she speeds on fatigue, that there are things she didn’t do earlier; the long night lights the light of beneficence in her. She thinks: why the hell not? She was no trouble really, a paragon in a way, good as gold, diligent, A-stream, top in divinity and above average in every subject (save Latin – ugh, those gerunds, Mum), she was helpful, she was a collector with a slot-top tin and cardboard tray on flagday in the market square – not like Eddie who falsified his Bob-a-Job sheet. And she communed with Our Lord, on her knees, in the cold perp sternness of St Pelagia’s,2 drinking His blood which had been bottled in Devon, gustatorily famous too as a sort or source of chocolate (p. 13). If the wafer stuck to her tongue she waited – no matter how great the discomfort, no matter how close to choking she came – until she was back at her pew before she peeled it and glued it to a dusty hassock.
She was a good girl but that’s not why her parents so indulged her: neither guessed why the other, the other half of the conjugation, should also have gotten suddenly tolerant of their one and only’s mores and movements. Nor do they suspect that this weekly mutating girl, the chromatically adaptive apple-of, is gnawing the bough of the Vallender family tree they all three perch on – a stout bough, please, here, for the Proper Vallenders, the only ones left. But no matter how stout, Bonny still gets through it. She has such teeth that girl.
And doesn’t he know it, doesn’t ‘Cary’ Grant know it. ‘Cary’ Grant is Monica’s Associate, tracked, before he left – the car was a giveaway – by Dogged Eddie, ever loyal, to inside a sheepskin coat, inside a paraffin-heated breezeblock lean-to where he sells seeds, bedding plants, Xmas trees etc. The man is a pro seedsman and amateur swordsman with the fearful eyes of a chancer on the point of being found out. His boring furrows stretch down downland to where grass starts and there’s surface chalk like year-round snow. Look at the poles, the spruce toshed huts. Go-ahead? In the fields on the south side of the B-road he will pioneer PYO. That takes vision.
He never knew whose daughter she was, this girl with the magic laughing tackle, this little mystery in Greenhouse 3 where, for the sake of a longer cyclamen season, the heat thugs your throat. She was lost – it seemed – among the scarlet poinsettia and show pelargonia; she wasn’t a regular. Oy-oy, he said to himself and to the RAF grey heater that wobbles the Ullswater on the wall. Oy-oy: that’s what he thought. He needn’t have. She sobstories him into giving her a lift in his 3000 (you was right, Bern). In drizzle when tarpaulins glister at mustardy dusk, in his Mille Miglia driving gloves (which tighten climactically round the wooden rim), in his sheepskin, in a Foden’s lee, in the lay-by at Pepperbox by the steamy windowed caff where silhouettes swill char and chomp wad, in the driver’s seat, in mean November, in a minute near enough – she was that good, he was that excited, the lights are wobbly in the puddles in the mud.
She smiles, now, a secret smile at her mother who never knew why, just fretted more, just hated that much more, just cursed the little bastard oftener beneath her breath. Thus Bonny gnawed their parlous perch. She bit her way out of childhood, keeping mum about her mum’s seedsman’s seed she’d swallowed, saving it (the secret, the threat) for when she might need to use it. She lived by secrets, they were her power, the condition of her freedom, her weapons, her corrupt currency. And the more secrets she had … she’d observed, for instance, the way ‘Cary’ Grant kept money folded in a cigarette case. She was sent to earth to pry.
She fostered Monica’s paranoia, fed her guilt – no wonder the woman was so touchy (p. 6), no wonder she skulked, haunted, through that house of hostile tiles and belligerent cornices fearing there were spies behind the chesterfields, contorted in the davenport. There was always something, someone, blocking the path to total fulfilment and truer happiness, the kind of happiness you can (it says here) test like it’s pulse and comes through A1 every time, 70 per min, no question mark, clean bill – whole happiness; the someone in the way isn’t meant to be your daughter though. It doesn’t say anything about a daughter’s casual blackmail. Nor about that law of the familial jungle which states that the void occasioned by the clearance/culling/natural wastage/taking out of one Burden is invariably filled by another whose characteristics may be contrary to those of the predecessor but who, according to Hugh Richards,3 ‘nevertheless focalises resentive aggression and targets the animosities of the parental units, including self-animosities typically prompted by the reluctance to recognise that the organs of sexual pleasure may also have generative consequences’. Or, as in Douglas’s case, not; but he didn’t know that. And though he learnt to fear Bonny he never resented her; he loved having given her life, loved her through all the humiliation she wrought. And he did understand, he could see the way it shocked her, that’s why it was his secret (though obviously not by its very nature his alone); so long as it was secret there was no shame, but he kept it secret because he knew the potential for shame that was there. He should never have brought the photographs home. He kept the buckram albums of his vital joy in his office safe at Vallender Light and they would never have left there had Bollock-Features Last from Telegraph Insurance not threatened another sodding premium raise if the safe were not replaced ‘by yesterday, by one made this century’.
The weekend the locksmiths from Chandler’s Ford were installing the new Banham was the weekend Douglas called his nephew pimp and the order of the house, of their lives, was changed for ever. There was new light in The Garth that day. Bonny’s itineraries about the house were unfamiliar to her and she approached doors from angles different enough to make the mouldings, the lintels, the recessed panels like ones she had never seen before. The stairs were shallower. The sun unfurled beams that stretched into places it had never bothered with before, which Bonny had never seen: she didn’t know there were initials carved in the capital of a pilaster in the panelled hall; they’d been there almost a century. The house was silent. Poor Eddie packed. Bilked by life again. Monica drove to So’ton, to the fabric department at Tyrell and Green. Poor Eddie was incredulous: he knew Douglas meant it when Douglas handed him an uncrossed cheque for thirty-two pounds, eighteen shillings only. By what formula did he compute that sum? What are its components? The recipient’s presumed loss, the donor’s guilt, two pounds for each year of the former’s life?
Douglas said to Eddie: ‘I’ll be back at five.’
Eddie said nothing, he knew what that meant, he wondered where the matching comb that slotted into his tortoiseshell-handled hairbrush was and wished he could think of something else like where is he going to spend the night if he can’t stay at Rufus’s after the party, and the night after, and the nights stretching to the infinity of his seventeenth birthday almost two hundred nights away, and who will want him now that he is unwanted more than ever, and if he walks into the cold river and holds himself down to die by drowning the way his genes must be urging him to will he meet his people again, and what is he going to do now?
But he finds himself fretting about the torn babyblue-white striped sleeve of ‘Only The Lonely’ which his mother bought and listened to as though it might tell her something; she scraped her crown and listened still when the needle scratched the circular song’s mute core, over and over, in the ghost bungalow down Britford Lane. The sleeve was faded, frayed, a bit unstuck. Little things: shock has a talent for minute detail, for deflecting attention from its cause and its consequence. It faces the grave with frivolity; the shocked lack application, cannot concentrate. Poor Eddie knew what he should be thinking about, but those silk Flags Of The World, that cap badge, and here’s the letter from the boy in Lorraine with whom the exchange trip had to be aborted. He packed methodically, he ran up and down stairs, inventing reasons as he went. Even the preface to an adventure is an adventure. He fought his helplessness by folding clothes, by rearranging his chattels. This was reduction – the only child of two dead parents filled just two suitcases and a dufflebag with all their possessions.
Bonny studied the little piles he made and remade, taxonomically almost, before he packed: ‘Can I have that?’ she asked of four or five things, and he nodded each time. She skipped away to see how a scarf of his mother’s did as a cummerbund – it didn’t; she abandoned it over the edge of a wash basin.
She was excited. After Douglas had foot-prodded Postman into the car and gone to inspect the locksmiths’ progress she went down to his study, poured herself a double-double Mirabelle, winced at its buccal punch and idly inspected the contents of his desk whilst keeping half an eye on the televised rally-cross. She thinks about telling Eddie how sorry she is but puts it off and refills the glass with Cinzano bianco, plus Benedictine for extra warmth; she thinks about telling him how easy it is to cope out there, in the world beyond this world of The Garth and the warders who chanced to have them in their charge. She is convinced she could cope; she will see.
There’s no question that, at sixteen, Eddie was still a child. None of them was less fitted to fend for himself.
Bonny opened a window to relieve the heat and then the rooms were filled by curtains buckling and doubling and looping like ampersands in the nor’wester’s rush. Bonny giggled, a table lamp’s shade caught the wind, became a sail. Eddie heard the crash as he opened the door to the top terrace but didn’t let it deflect him from his purpose: shock might obviate purposeful thought but it didn’t inhibit action. He acted; he may be dazedly incurious about life (‘the brumous forest in front of me’ sang Jean-Marie translating his father’s famous line), about the puzzle of how it all moves and how what comes to be comes to be, about gaining entry to the mysteries, but he can still do something.
Douglas had expelled the wrong one of his brother’s children; he had expelled him with a gleeful hunch about how ill he might fare. None of them was less fitted to fend for himself. Douglas had picked on the pigeon not on the princess, Bonny, who is now groping in a deep drawer for money. Douglas had picked on the pigeon who was also a cuckoo and made him a hawk for an afternoon.
‘Deary me there’s a spill an’ an ’alf that’s an upset for the Nuneaton lad, goin’ so well he was,’ says the commentator to Bonny who withdraws her arm from the drawer like a vet from a cow and peeks over the desk in anticipation of mangled limbs in monochrome, is disappointed, is struck by a gust that lifts the curtains’ skirts to show a glimpse of black gladstone against the wainscot, is surprised to see Eddie coming from the direction of the outhouses with a can of Mickey-Take held at arm’s length in front of him with just two fingers, gingerly. He treads like he’s on a tightrope.
When Bonny goes to the kitchen to fetch ice for her Fire In Limehouse (mixed according to the book but with treble measures) and for something to force the gladstone’s lock with, Eddie is genuflecting before Postman’s big bowl, an enamel former pie dish crusted with crenellations of desiccated minced mare and with a pyramid of same – but juicily, deliciously, temptingly moist – in the middle on a bed of Sprat’s finest.
‘There’s a chicken here,’ says Bonny squirting ice oblongs from a rubber tray. ‘Be nicer. Stth ooh.’ She wipes moult and grime from two ice bits then displaces drink onto her wrist with them.
Eddie attempts, ineptly, to conceal between his thighs the copyright-infringing can of Cuban rodent poison whose packaging design is of Mickey Mouse (© The Walt Disney Company) clutching his throat in his death throes. (Ah, those Cubans and their wacky humour!) This is how Eddie did for Postman, who would soon be replaced by Postman (IV). He mixed enough of the rotenone-rich powder into the dog’s mince to take out approx eighteen mice or ten black rats (Rattus rattus, so bad they named it twice). This was the first stage of his tripartite revenge on the man who had killed his mother (he’d decided). Bonny giggled, told him she’d tell on him, giggled again, vomited on the gingham-printed plastic worktop, reached for the kitchen-roll roller, lost her balance, pulled it off the wall with rawlplugs, gouts of plaster too, ends up all ends up splayed, giggling. Eddie broke the Havana’d plastic spoon and stuffed it in waste-disposal, switched that on, buggered it, hadn’t meant to, but was pleased he had, it sounded like a big-end going, he looks down at Bonny.
‘Bonny? Can …? Can I …?’
‘Eddie!’ All motherly. ‘Tdbe incest.’ Too right, Darl. ‘Don’t be silly.’
Oh that necessarily practised grimace he wears – of cosmic pathos, of sorrows, infinite past sorrows exhumed by every slight.
‘Respect me as a friend yeh?’
She sucks at a cut hand, a carmine incision he has to touch now he’s seen it, wants to taste so much because he may never taste her again, who knows. He squats beside her, licks the little wound that has been lent him to play with, out of pity, for a while, feels the ferrous spritz on his tongue, adores it because it’s her blood which he may taste over and again, who knows, when they’re more than friends as inevitably they will be, later on, bonded by love that is latent in her now but is there, deep down, definitely, that’s his faith – it is the very condition of faith that its subject have no foundation in evidential certitude; we have faith in what we cannot know; faith creates expectation and feeds off it; it’s solipsism with a collar and tie, an exclusive order of solace through delusion. No wonder faith is such a comfort, such a source of strength. Poor Eddie had so many faiths because he had so little else; he believed for the sake of believing, his capacity for credulity was to be measured in jeroboams, imperials. He didn’t have faith in the power of his hands, he didn’t need to because he knew about that power that visited him when they all willed it, when all the retinal rods and warm hearts of the congregation focused their analeptic favour on the hands that, by chance, were attached to his body. But it was faith – so he would insist to Chubb – that did for the windows just as surely as it was Mickey-Take that did for Postman (who was the only other creature he ever killed, ever, in the course of his life which was a life devoted to life). That’s what he claimed, what he stuck to: faith.
Of course, no one saw him. Bonny had by now forced the gladstone’s lock with a barding needle and was engrossed. Eddie finishes in the kitchen. He secretes the poison in Mrs Gub’s cupboard of fermenting mops and felt-lagged pipes where the floorcloths are stiff as stockfish. He eats: a peanut butter and Sandwich Spread sandwich, toasted; a chocolate spread sandwich; spongecake dipped in Lucozade; a tin of white peaches in heavy syrup. He carries Douglas’s big jar of birthday gift Stilton up the half flight from the larder. What an animated cheese! It seethes with vermicular life, it blast-reeks toxins, its veins are rush-houred by an off-white army, it’s granular where it should be smooth, fudge-brown where it should be cream. Maggots? Cheese lice? Lactic crabs? No microscope needed. The scooped centre is a pond of port with a meniscal film of teat fats. This is where Eddie pisses. This is the first time he does anything of the sort (character development). It didn’t occur to him that Douglas would probably consider the flavour enhanced. The lamb’s liver, sliced special nice and thick by Twose so Douglas can eat it burnt outside and raw within, lies in a bowl in the fridge growing a skin of blood. Eddie closes the larder door behind him, sits on the half flight, spends eight and a half sore and boring minutes masturbating (picture a spectral Bonny) before he ejaculates onto the liver. He mixes his twelve c.c. of emission with the hepatic blood of the lamb.
At 4.14 he puts his head round the door of Douglas’s study and asks Bonny: ‘Are you going to come to Rufus’s tonight?’ She does her best to stand, creases some of the photographic prints on the floor, shrugs.
Then she looks down at the photographs: ‘Yes, I’ll be able to come.’
At 4.19 Eddie, holding all his possessions, went out of The Garth’s front door for the last time and broke the windows. The version according to Chubb (pp. 360ff.) is that the newfound foundling stands on the gravel in the dusk with his bags floored beside him and the house in front of him. In this light the house aims to scare – why does a tourelle spell terror, why is a hipped gable a device of tectonic fright? Eddie stares at the house for a while then wills the windows to burst, to implode. He stares and he stares, with a gaze the far side of concentration, with unalloyed confidence in his power to amend molecular composition, to do the glass actual physical harm, aggravated damage, extra ill. He knew he could do it. He knew he could achieve Maximal Potential. Was Poor Eddie Vallender a witch? No one saw him do it. He was his only witness. There were no special effects of light or sound or wind, save those occasioned by the very act of rupture. There was nothing peripheral.
I am merely repeating here what Eddie told Chubb and what Chubb duly recorded: ‘I wanted, I wanted, I wanted. You know? There was an instant when I wasn’t there, more than an instant. Like when you go from A to B and when you reach B you can’t remember the bits in between, you know? You might as well have sleepwalked it. Well it was like that but … even though I wasn’t there I was seeing it. I was very – I was going to say very cold but that’s not – right. It was like I was temperatureless, like temperature didn’t count, you know? And it took a long time. I mean it doesn’t usually take long for the glass to fall out of a window frame does it? But it was all crackled, crazy paving, the panes, it was all like that and still in the frame – I could see it like that in all the different windows, waiting to fall out and I had to make more … I had to want more to get it to come out the frames. It was just waiting. I was like halfway there, you know? I’d broken it but I hadn’t … budged it. It was on the brink. The process wasn’t whole. D’you see? So I made it happen … It’s like creating your own storm. It’s like being a generator. A power station, yeh?’
Chubb’s investigations of Eddie’s gift were curtailed before he had done anything other than tape record eleven hours of (mostly) repetitive recollection and fantastical boasts. He was prevented from proceeding to the stage of interrogation and of, specifically, challenging Eddie’s accounts of unobserved phenomena such as the breaking of The Garth’s windows. There is no question that most (though not all) of the windows of the entrance front were smashed; but those that weren’t were on the second and third storeys and inaccessible from roofs, balconies, other windows etc. There is, equally, no question that Eddie believed that he had effected the multiple breakage by will; he wasn’t lying, not wittingly, anyway. But rage is a drug, as liable as alcohol to promote amnesia. Moreover, as Chubb discovered and admits with understandable reticence: ‘The validation of certain acts of healing (and “harming”) is not susceptible to the usual proofs.’4
Bonny heard nothing. She was at the back of the house. The televised ice-hockey international – ‘the battle of Brno’, as it’s still called by those in ice-hockey who can pronounce it – was on at full vol. And her ears were filled by the ululating groans of senses rearranged by a bottle-bashed brain. But her eyes can still see – oh, yes; alcohol’s obfuscating gauze can’t stop these messages getting through, can’t stop them fazing her like a phone breather who’s guessed correct. Douglas’s photographs are of several sorts, none of them to be trusted to the GPO (what would the sorters think?), none of them to be greeded by eyes other than his – furtive guilt heightens the excitement of stolen moments with stimuli that are private as dreams: Bonny has trespassed into a secret garden of oneiric analogues, a forbidden site, a place where base and fantastical imaginings are made plastic. Some of the photographs are gummed to the pages of two ‘family’ albums with marbled covers and leather spines; Bonny may be badered but her mnemonic capacity is not so shot-up that she can’t recognise one of these albums as the pair of that in which her own (and often similarly naked) progress from birth to toddling is recorded, sometimes with Eddie beside her pram, sometimes with Eddie cropped by pinking shears so that whilst one side of the snap may be borderless it is still wavy edged.
Dirty, dirtier, dirtier still, disgusting – but fun, mind, and funny. How funny is proportionate to how complicated. Bonny is unusually sexually practised for a girl of her age, in that age/place/milieu; but by the absolute standards of congressional invention she is a tyro; she may be keen to please (herself, too) but she has much to learn – she sees that. What novelty in numbers! Whose is that? This flesh exists in an extra dimension. It’s choreographed with imaginative ingenuity for a future audience: Bonny is delighted that these, one, two, five, five people should, a long time ago to go by their stockings, stays and hairdos (and there’s little else to go by), have made themselves into a baroque knot for her on this special afternoon; and these three, more recently no doubt – what guileful gynogymnastics they’ve perfected in their attempt to become one cephalopod. Watch them go in frozen show-rapture. And her father looks too, peeps, pores on them and on all the other actors in the meat carnival, the carnal pageant – these special actors who are their roles, who are propless and beyond the code of pretence, who are different from their audience in never being alone. Who has comprised this sodality of the genitally articulate down the years? Where are they now? The rest of the race is recognised by name, by face. Bonny replaces the albums in the gladstone and picks up a manilla folder, opens it.
Oh God no that hurts it’s ill. This exhibit is made up of seventeen burns photographs; this is Bonny’s father’s souvenir of the injuries suffered by the four female workers (another died, and two were male) in the explosion and consequent fire in the bunkered priming workshop at Vallender Light early in the afternoon of Monday May 14 1956 just after the end of That Little Ray Of Human Mirth Starring Butt Of The Joke, Ray Butt, on the Light Programme. Poor reception because of the quasi-subterranean disposition of the building even though the aerial is on the asbestos roof; but good enough to hear.
‘Gaw ’e’ll make me split moy britches one o’ thum days,’ phoneticised Shirley Fletcher the very moment before half her head was blown onto the ceiling.
There is no photograph of her here; that’s a different taste. There’s no necro not because of a moral boundary but because it wasn’t to Douglas’s taste. His taste is for these things: you must take my word for it, they are faces, mainly, but also hands, thighs, other parts shown in close-up that obviates a reading of the body’s geography. This is skin. It may look like fondue, glue, failed crackling (which is skin too), putty, icing, plasticine, melted latex, bubbly rubber: but it is skin, cooked, roasted on the hoof – each of these women has a crisp chop for a jaw, a drumstick stuck to her cheekbone. Each would wear an expression of shame on the face that is the cause of the shame if that face could be thus contorted but it can’t, it is set, dead as steak, mute about its own disfigurement. Only the eyes signal anything, and that is the further fear that the camera recording them may explode, may hurl its lens at theirs.
These photographs are not purpose-built fetishes; they are perverted to that end, given new meaning by the more orthodox material they are stashed with. In the doctor’s Nissen office at Odstock Hospital they are medical tools set out on a scratched table; they are the pre-surgical complements to those which will be taken later, after James Elsworth Laing has rebuilt the faces and limbs with an eye to beauty rather than verisimilitude: ‘No point in putting them back together as they were if they looked like neeps.’ (It is from Laing’s office that Douglas Vallender stole the photographs, the day he visited their subjects, who still sued Vallender Light.)
Bonny drank a White and Mackay’s, then another with a precautionary Alka Seltzer stirred in. She felt guilty, repulsed, betrayed, powerful, older. She was going to kiss Eddie’s cheek but he was in and out the room so quickly. She did kiss his cheek that evening at Rufus’s, just before she went upstairs, there to ape in the playground of her host’s parents’ bed some of the specialist contortions she’d conned that afternoon.
Not these though: again, it took her six neck angles and several spins of the first photo before she saw. She strewed them on her father’s brothelish ottoman daybed, all across the floor. Here was her father! Shit. He was in the photographs, in the frame, in rubber but no longer a rubber triton, no longer hoisting a triumphal eel, no longer in the river but in a room which Bonny thought looked like the upstairs of a pub (it wasn’t), a room with darkness in it and a carpet woven for poor people in the days when carpets had flowers and borders and now so thin, so greasy, it coalesced with blistered lino, a room with a picture of a horse at plough hung skew, with a scorched lamp shade and alpine sheets on a big bed and shadows and a person. This person is in the room of sad wallpaper with her father who is flipperless. This person is not so fat as he is but the bulk is still there and it’s quasi-male despite the lips, the breasts, the genitals which, together with the puckered winking anal iris, are the only exposed parts of this man-woman. Head to toe rubber. Shiny, lumpy, like a piece of something else, like something with a piece missing, like something from before scales existed when fins were far in the future, when creatures were at one with mud, when slime might go either way, when animal was vegetable and vice versa. The apertures are metal ringed. The breasts that gape through them have nipples that photograph dark as black rubber. The unshy bush is a coarse puff of sofa-stuffing seeping from a split. This person has lips but no face, no eyes. This person is a machine. A tool of torture and solace, a fantastical toy. This person is the game, Douglas is its player. Look at this tableau, look at it through his daughter’s disbelieving eyes: this person – who is not a person but a reduction of a person, a self-made merkin, penetrable mineral, a porn pawn whose sex organs are pleasure pits – this person in this photograph with her father has its halma head to his glans. Bonny never knew her father had such a shortfall of tackle: that was another thing to appal her – it’s a snack not a lunchpack even though this person is gripping its root with pliers and there is a bulldog clip clamped to his scrotum: one clip suffices for two balls. His rubber all-in-one has holes the same as the person’s. Now he’s hooded, now he isn’t. But even had he been masked in every frame she’d still have known him by the black downlands of his belly, by the contours of his arse which, in the one we’re looking at, has grown a tail. A tail made of hose. A tail that stretches to his mouth. A tail he sucks at like an autofellationist. But that’s not it; Bonny knows he’s no Nijinsky, that he’s trying something else. This person’s teeth are sharpened, its fingers are tipped by steel plectrums, prosthetic claws. Bonny wonders at her father’s appetite for danger. She wonders who took the photographs (p. 70). She wonders who this person is. She wonders where this person’s stained room is.
The answer to the last is Pompey, Military Road in Hilsea, a house with a history, the house where Commander Crabb – Lionel to his proud old mum, Buster to the wardroom – passed part of his last afternoon out of water, on earth, the house behind the Territorial Hall.
See that curtain? The one Douglas is kneeling by whilst he eats from the dogbowl and this person pushes a spike heel in him where his tail should be? Pull the curtain and there’s a picture window that’s the envy of one and all, a feature: the picture is the cliff of Portsdown, Fort Widley on top. (One and all agree, too, that lovely as it is the view might be a teensy bit enhanced by a bolder eyecatcher, a stronger accent up there on the escarpment.) Military Service: that’s what this person calls it and Douglas is proud to share a taste with old Buster who was topped for freedom: ‘My favourite caller when I was getting started in the profession.’ This person gives Douglas the can of Mickey-Take that Eddie so abuses.
A sailor had suffered persistent nightmares of Mañuel The Hand Pirate who severed sailors’ hands with a kukri and attached them with wire loops to his belt and his ears where they swung like sticky pygmy gloves as he walked the furzy cliffs whistling hand shanties. This person listened with sympathy to the sailor’s tale.
The solution to oneiric woe, to fear of amputation? Blindfold the sailor so he enters dreamspace; tongue-wet his fingers, stick them in orifices filled with honey; and, whilst his hands are primary instruments of pleasure, scrape his penis with talons till beads of blood ruby the urethral ridge, then rub the glans with chilli paste. The sailor thanks this person for efficacious therapy with the gift of his can of Mickey-Take, a souvenir of old Havana, of Batista days, of when they had a real sense of humour and the whores’ painted labia grinned at passers-by from the seats of Buicks and Fleetwoods. He no longer dreams of that pirate, of those amputations.
And this person passes it on to Douglas, on a whim, because he’s that kind of gentleman caller, because he has that same sense of humour as the sailor has (and Cubans had), because he’s the only other one with an appetite for chilli. Douglas doesn’t suffer bad hand dreams. He craves chilli for its own sake, for its special accomplishments: chilli burns, chilli is fructose heat, chilli is fire without combustion. There’s no flame to photograph, the ointment’s big property is not thus transmitted, the camera lies by omission, it obscures, Bonny is in the dark, in her father’s room and in her father’s distant dreamroom which is gymnasium, lavatory, theatre, lab and parrot’s death-trap – the dull and backward who dailies for this person finds two bell chillis in the tiny bloodstained kitchen.
Whilst she’s hoovering the mess off of the carpet Joey squawks: ‘Famished for lack of nourishment, famished for lack of nourishment, famished for lack of nourishment.’ On and on he went. The dull and backward couldn’t very well disturb her employer who was entertaining a gent. So she went to the kitchen, chopped the funny tomatoes, broke up a crust, smothered the lot with salad cream, shoved it into Joey’s cage. Did he squawk! Lawks. When Douglas arrived there was no chilli to anoint him with. ‘They don’t grow on trees … least they didn’t, then. Wasn’t a Patel on every corner … course you can’t tell Pompey from Madras now, all Halals and whatsitcalled – galangal.’ Douglas lost his rag that day – all dudgeon and dander. He was a dangerous man in such circumstances. You should have seen him when he returned to The Garth the afternoon that Eddie left.
The house looked like it had been bombed. While Postman hurried inside to eat the Last Supper Douglas stood, stupefied, he about-turned to check he hadn’t driven into the wrong drive (even though there was no other drive that resembled The Garth’s). Then, very slowly, because time (dependent on his mentation, and out to prove it’s not an absolute) was hardly ticking over, he counted the wounded panes. Was there solace in numbers? Was the act of inventory an aid to belief? Does shock foster need for detail? And did he get it right? Or did he count the same one twice and mistotal? He could have done, for he looked back at a window in the tourelle three times and each time saw Bonny’s silhouette pass across it in the same direction. He shook his head. He bellowed. He found Bonny coming downstairs gripping an ungrippable rail smiling a smile that was not the smile of a Dada’s Little Sausage but a smile about his little sausage, inter alia; this was a smug and cunning smile, a codecracker’s smile. He didn’t see it. He growled, he stamped, he slapped panels, he kicked wainscot. He didn’t see what Bonny’s smile said. He didn’t read that the familial rules were about to be changed, that the end was beginning (with the biggest glazing bill he’d ever paid).
Bonny short and curlied him, the balance of bullydom shifted. Whirling his arms, cursing the Burden, computing the damage, he was locked inside himself listening to rage’s generator, blind to the new order, to the filial tyranny he was now to be subject to.
‘I’m not going to have to show them to Mum am I Dad – don’t want to upset her, do we Dad?’ Coercion in a pronoun. The girl’s learning. Top of the form again, albeit in a specialist study. Where did she hide the sample photos? Douglas’s wintry veal face is beef-red, his nose is glans-claret, for a moment there’s a ring in it, for a moment she fears he’ll charge. This is a bad day for him, she understands that. The house is inside out, out of control, there are random slammings, the elements love to colonise places previously denied them, gusts and currents shove like gatecrashers looking for the action. The house might as well have been burgled. He doesn’t take his eyes off her when he throws a crinkly roll of notes to the floor, petulant as a baby.
‘You little bastard,’ he murmurs; him, he’s free to say that, uninhibited by literality. In the kitchen Postman is beginning to die, victim of a revenge killing (p. 199). He’s never seen this girl before. She is new. She has created herself to fill the void occasioned by The Burden’s expulsion. It has taken only hours for that space to be squatted by this cocky painted tartlette. Butter wouldn’t, wouldn’t seep so easily into a mould.
And Monica is broody for another. God forbid – you build them, then they rebuild themselves out of ingratitude. That’s the partial, the parental diagnosis – commonplace but not inevitable, just as parenthood itself is commonplace but not inevitable. Childhood is, it’s a mandatory stretch which Bonny has now completed. She’s out, and blooming, all over life, with her mum in one pocket and her dad in the other, lapping it up, cynosure and honey pot, loved, longed for, loving it, believing that she’s her own, that she owns herself.
That night Douglas sat in the blowy kitchen eating Stilton with a spoon, thankful for gustatory solace, thankful for Postman’s moans of sympathy even though the dog is overdoing his solicitude. He wishes he had given his daughter a pituitary drug to stunt her, to fix her forever at four years when she was such a joy: he had doted on a fantasy, on a person who is past, who lacks a dog’s constancy and incapacity for change – so that’s why they’re man’s best friend; well, some men’s, those men who would embalm their daughters, commit them to an eternal kindergarten, to stasis in a smock. He wanted a daughter who wouldn’t give her old toys to cause-vultures scavenging to ease their consciences and someone else’s famine, who didn’t thus dispose of part of his life too – you remember them by their dolls and their garages, as well as by their smiles and their credulous dependence; those objects are the links when they’ve flown, grown different faces, betrayed you by owning bones that expand, expand, expand. He wanted a daughter who didn’t have a cousin who was his burden and her rogue varlet, her knave, her witch. The pimp. He wanted a daughter who wasn’t his daughter. Why couldn’t someone else have had this daughter?
Oh, but someone else did, Doug-A-Doug-Doug, someone else did. And then there was —— too. And ‘Peter’, ‘Dick’ and ‘Rod’. The Toxins – that is Douglas’s word for them, for all of them: Toxin of the Month, Spotty Toxin, Damned Noxious Toxin Hopping From One Leg To The Other. Etc. It wasn’t a word Bonny minded, she indulged her father by acknowledging it, even using it, collusively sycophantic. But she adored the poison, it was beneficent as an opiate. She didn’t think of it the way her father did. Here are Bonny’s Top Toxins Winter 64/65:
Micky Izzard. Pro: Really nice voice, looks like the one in The Raiders who wears the dark glasses and plays mouth harp and tambourine. Con: skint; says his father, a ranker major, won’t give him dosh, always bumming fags, ‘borrows’ money for cinema/booze/taxi home to the army estate where he lives and where Bonny is never invited, I’m not. Bonny wanks him in the Regal, Endless Street whilst they’re watching The System starring Oliver Reed, Jane Merrow, David Hemmings (dir: Michael Winner, 1964); Smeggy Beggy, sitting two seats away and escorting the present writer, demands loudly: ‘Where did it go. Where’s the wet patch?’ Present whereabouts unknown, last heard of working as a boat nigger in Antigua (c. 1972).
Tim Dudley. Mature, crackshot at adult conversation, shares risqué jokes with Douglas, drops names of shoots, fishing flies etc. Mature but thick: claims that his father, a colonel, a martinet who is decidedly not a ranker, has traced family history back to one King Duddo of Northumbria. Pro: great sense of humour (e.g. filling the gin bottles with water at one of his parents’ parties), makes a girl feel special (never a slouch with flowers), own car. Con: Duddotoxin (Douglas has a great sense of humour too) enjoys a reputation – he jinked out of a paternity suit by persuading four of his friends to say that they too had slept with the luckless mother of his first child; he overturned a carful of his muckers, some of whom would still lie on his behalf; his liaison with the daughter of a bearded, bonhomous doctor prompts that doctor to phone his daughter’s friends’ parents with warnings about Duddo, Potential Vector of Veedee. He and Bonny are longterm, going on two months at least. He buys her two Zombies singles and The Lancastrians’ cover of Gale Garnett’s ‘We’ll Sing In The Sunshine’. Love nest? A beach hut at Hengistbury Head owned by Roeskin’s parents and not used by them during the week. Now a PR executive in Tamworth, Staffs.
Jimmy Roe, aka Roeskins. Aka thus because either someone made a crummy pun on foreskin which stuck (the pun, that is, not the prepuce (which didn’t)) or because someone picked up on his habitual cry of ‘Gor any skins?’ Con: wimp (a word unknown then – wet will do), liable to whine, dress sense of a Daltonist (goose-shit green with claret, mauve shirt and brown trousers). Pro: nothing much. Bonny sucked him off in the back of a Mini-van on the A338 on the way to a party at Avon Castle, the kitsch-integral housing development south of Ringwood; she spat it out, her way, then she lit Vallender Light bangers and pushed them through the skylight in the roof of the tiny vehicle I was driving. Issigonis provided for such diversions and for a reflective view of the interior and the road behind where the Classics and Cambridges braked and swerved, reflexively. James Craig Roe, ‘The Time Share King’, now lives in Sintra, Portugal.
‘Cary’ Grant. Once a seedsman …
Lewis Brian Hopkin-Jones. Pro: good looking, world famous hairdo. Con: unreliable, itinerant, alcoholic, sadistic. Bonny certainly went to see The Rolling Stones play at Longleat on Sunday 30 August 1964. She may have made up the rest. Stone dead July 1 1969.
Gavin Mungo-Geddes. As sexually precocious as Bonny though less discreet. Pro: the oleaginous manner of a small-town gigolo (which is what he aspired to be); this appealed to Bonny who considered him sophisticated as well as charming, handsome etc. Con: the same. His manners didn’t invariably cut the mustard. He flirted with Monica who called him The Greaseball. Bonny was exceptional among his paramours in being younger than him. Property developer and bobsleigh international, currently serving 21 months for fraudulent conversion (Ford Open).
Me, the author, the present writer, Meades. Mea(des) Culpa. Downstairs there was shouting, laughter, Concrete and Clay, Blue Turns To Grey by the Mighty Avengers, something by The Kingston Trio, Go Now. Bonny and I had ascended to a dark room in this house neither of us knew where coats were piled on a double bed, and mufflers and scarves and handbags and hats – a freezing March it was. I greased her arse with vanishing cream. I stood, untrousered. She bent over the bed. Her skirt was round her waist. She wore off-white knitted stockings. She was silent. I couldn’t really see her face. I could see that as I fucked her arse she was going through the pockets of the coats her head was buried in, she was searching purses, nicking lipsticks, clutching folding money in her fist, tutting when she fumbled coins. I guess I should have been insulted by such lack of attention, but I was, in truth, grateful for the loan of that aperture. Thus we bugger our characters.