Boys Don’t Cry
‘For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.’
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Mum is home, asleep in bed. She’s obviously very ill, but nobody has said anything about exactly how ill, and I haven’t asked. I walk into the kitchen and put my school bag down carefully.
‘Now, boy! Come and have a word!’
Dad is around the kitchen table with Derek, which is a novel sight and not a welcome one. I sit down with them. Dad’s eyes are bloodshot. He’s got something on his mind, Something That Needs To Be Said. And he seems to have decided that he’s the one who’s going to have to say it, because other people lack his common-sense ability to face facts. He’s actually angry. He starts talking and the world ends.
‘Y’mum’s poorly, boy. It’s terminal.’
You can get quite a lot of juice out of that word ‘terminal’, if you speak with a Lincolnshire accent and are quite drunk. The way he says it, the ‘er’ sound is dug from the very depths of his diaphragm. I look across at Derek, who is leaning an elbow on the table with a hand covering his mouth. He nods a tiny confirmation. Incredibly, somewhere in the room, Dad is still talking.
‘It’s ’orrible, boy, but that’s it. That’s life. Now, I don’t know if you want to come and live with me or . . .’, he looks around the kitchen, ‘I mean, you’re probably going to need a cleaner, Derek, because . . . well, it’s hard, int’ it? It’s hard keeping a place clean.’ Derek nods. It is indeed hard keeping a place clean. This is what we are now talking about. Dad warms to the theme. ‘I mean, she’s probably too busy but Josie, who cleans my house, she could probably come and do a couple of hours a week. It’s all you need really, a couple of hours.’
Derek says, ‘Well, this is it. Is she not Woodhall, then?’
‘She is Woodhall, mate, but I know she does a couple of Coningsby properties on a Thursday.’
‘What does she tend to charge, like?’
‘Well, I give her a fiver, mate, but I don’t know if she might be wanting a bit more for petrol, coming out here.’
Derek is alarmed by the prospect of paying Woodhall Josie £5 plus petrol money and he’s about to haggle, but stops because he’s noticed I’m crying.
‘I know, boy,’ Dad says, ‘it’s ’orrible.’
Here I am then, with Mum about to vanish, stuck here in the kitchen with the Dickhead Brothers talking about Dad’s fucking cleaner.
Dad takes me outside and gives me an awkward hug. My sobbing has drained some of his anger and he’s on the verge of tears himself.
So he leaves. Having discharged his duty and given everyone a firm lesson in how to face up to reality, he gets in his van and fucks off back to the pub. It’s quite a new van, actually. On the side is painted the name of his business, which today looks less like an advertisement than like a rare flash of self-awareness: ‘Paul Webb, Ltd’.
‘Fred’s a bloody nuisance, he always has been.’ I’m next to her on her bed, later that day. With effort, Mum draws herself up on her stack of pillows. ‘I’m sorry, darling, that wasn’t a very nice way to find out. I should have told you myself.’
I make an ineffectual gesture to help with the pillows but I’m scared of getting in her way. She’s got Dallas on the portable telly with the sound turned low. Bobby Ewing is having a long meeting with assorted oil barons.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ I say. Her skin is a yellow-grey now and at the top of each breath there’s a distant gurgle which gets closer by the week. All the signs that I chose not to see suddenly reveal themselves with pathetic eloquence. She’s obviously dying.
She says, ‘Now then, is there anything you want to ask me? Or is there anything you want to say to me?’ I feel a thousand future selves lean in to listen with interest. I rack my brain: there is no question up to the task and no statement either, apart from ‘I love you’, but I don’t trust myself to say that without losing it. I don’t want to do that; I’m her son and I want to be strong. So I say the thing that bothers me most about being seventeen and me.
‘I suppose . . . I mean, this isn’t important.’
‘Go on . . .’
‘I suppose, well, people talk like I’m having sex all the time and I’ve sort of gone along with it. But actually I’m a virgin.’
She starts to smile, but doesn’t want to look like she’s taking the piss. Also, smiling takes effort and she’s working hard to talk. She says, ‘I won’t say I’m surprised; I won’t say I’m not surprised. But you’ll catch up.’
‘All my mates have got girlfriends.’
‘You’ll overtake them. In everything.’
This emboldens me, so I try a promise. ‘I’m going to get three As and go to Cambridge, Mum.’
She’s ready for this one. ‘I know you’ll be happy wherever you end up, Rob. I’m proud of you already, so don’t worry.’
We watch Dallas. It looks like JR has gone round to Cliff Barnes’s office to do some gloating. We both love the show and have watched about a dozen versions of this scene. But tonight it looks like they’re just going through the motions. It used to be fun – when Bobby would throw JR into the swimming pool, the annual punch-up at the Oil Barons’ Ball . . . when no one had grey hair, when my brothers were still at school, when Mum used to tuck me in every night after reading a story.
– Goodnight, God-bless and see you in the morning.
– I ’ope so!
She says, ‘I know your father said something about moving in with him. You do as you think best. But as far as I’m concerned, this is your home.’
I nod at this, wondering if there’s something she’s asking me to do. ‘I’ll try and spend more time with Anna-Beth.’
‘No, darling, she’s got her own father. She won’t remember me, but she’s got a father. You do your own thing. I’m saying you don’t have to live with Fred if you don’t want to. He’s a bloody liability.’
And then, suddenly, she adds, ‘You came along soon after Martin died and I think that’s why we’ve always been close.’
I look at the children’s illustrated Bible that appeared next to her bed a few days ago. The one that I know has ‘To Martin John’ inscribed in her handwriting on the inside page. My atheism still has a few weeks to run – it will disappear when she does, because I won’t accept that she has disappeared. It takes all my remaining courage to say: ‘Maybe you’ll see him again.’
She turns to me and says, ‘I ’ope so.’
I beam at her but she senses that I can’t keep it together much longer and neither can she. ‘Now, be a good lad and go and make us a cup of tea.’ I do as I’m told with relief.
*
Derek falls ill under the strain for a couple days and Mum’s friend and boss from the Dower House, Carole, steps in and quietly takes charge. Over the next few weeks she demonstrates what could be fairly described as the point and meaning of friendship. She all but drops her hotel, she brings casseroles and lasagnes, she coordinates the Marie Curie nurses, she maintains and regulates Mum’s medication when the nurse isn’t around, she doesn’t flap, she doesn’t showboat, she talks and listens to Mum, cushioning her pain and hiding her own, even eliciting the odd laugh. She is a model of practical good sense. When I grow up, I think to myself, I want to be Carole.
In contrast, and in the middle of all this, here they come: the well-wishers, the payers of respect, the pains in the arse. We entertain a procession of half-forgotten friends and the kind of intimate family members who ring up to ask for directions. They’ve just popped in to say – wait for it – ‘hello’. Mum insists on getting herself upright in a wheelchair and it’s obvious that this ritual parade of visitors is just another part of her endurance. One of the oddest things about being terminally ill is that you get a new job – host. Essentially, she is looking after them – telling Derek where to find another vase for the flowers, nodding through the strained banter, the mirthless gags, the bullshit about ‘when you’re back on your feet’ etc. One friend that she’s never much liked even weeps on her – cheers. If dying is a test of character, so is being that person’s friend. Mum and Carole get top scores. Some fail completely. Most of us muddle through.
The whole place smells like a medicine cabinet. I’m listening to Violator by Depeche Mode, which seems about right. I keep the volume low.
April 17th
Derek was ill this morning. Mum’s condition deteriorates. I felt so alone, so pathetic today. She’s dying. I’m not ready for any of this.
April 23rd
Dr Campbell says 24 hours at the most. Christ, I want it to be all over. Is that wrong of me? The drugs ensure that she’s in no pain but mean that she is only ever semi-conscious. I miss her.
April 24th
Mum dies at 2.45 p.m.
I love you.
Sometimes it snows in April.
I was in my bedroom, supposedly writing an essay for Economics, but actually just staring out of the window.
Carole knocks lightly on the door and puts her head round. ‘I think you’d better come into the bedroom, dear.’
I get up from my little desk and go into Mum and Derek’s room – a room which now scares me.
Mark is there. ‘She’s gone, mate,’ he says, ‘she’s gone.’
I look to the bed. Mum is there but not there, seemingly asleep as she has been for days. But now the long-distance breathing has stopped. Whatever is in that bed is something new. It’s not unfamiliar, but then neither is it Mum.
Mainly, I just don’t believe it – the endness of the ending. I mean, this has all been very unpleasant, but she wasn’t going to just stop, right? She wasn’t going to just disappear and never come back, right? It’s not like I was never going to hear her voice again, or look in her eyes again, or feel her embrace or smell her smell again, right? That stuff can go away for a while, but it’s not going to go away for the rest of my life, is it? Right? That’s impossible.
Mark leads me out into the back garden.
‘Oh, Robbie Robbie Robbie.’ We hug tightly. I’ve never seen Mark cry and he’s trying not to, probably for me. I’m trying not to as well, for him. What strange creatures we are. We stand apart then, looking out on the land where Derek keeps the effects of his business – ‘the yard’ – a wilderness of brambles from which rusting tractors poke their heads, like relics in a neglected theme park. I suddenly say, ‘John and Trudy!’
‘I know, mate, I know. They must be wondering what they did to the world to deserve this.’ I try to look for a consolation.
‘At least we’re young,’ I say.
‘We’re young. You’re right, Rob. It’ll be easier for us.’ Mark tests what he’s just said against the situation and the result is a bleak joke. ‘Although it doesn’t much bloody feel like it.’ I give him a smile as clenched as our hug. Every muscle in my body has contracted. It’s hard to breathe.
Andrew is home not long after. His hair is madly ruffled like he’s been rolling his hands tightly around his whole head. I say, ‘Are you all right?’
He replies, ‘Are you all right?’ We don’t answer each other’s questions because we are plainly both not all right.
Nan Webb, Dad’s mother, arrives too late to see Mum. She takes the news and sits quietly in the living room. Anna-Beth, aged three, wanders in and asks, ‘Where’s Mummy?’
OK, that’s it. Stop the world. That’s enough. We’ve all had our fun with the impossible disaster but this is getting silly.
Nan Webb doesn’t miss a beat: ‘With Jesus!’ She says it with serious eyes and a cheerful voice. The disconnect is startling – the eyes have seen it all; the voice is there for the child – the children, counting me. Another actor in the family and you need a lot of conviction to get away with a line like this.
‘Mummy’s gone to live with Jesus.’
I want it, I will it to be true. I stretch for the truth of it like reaching for Narnia through the back of the wardrobe. You’ll feel the cold air if you just concentrate. If you just try harder. At this point, anything is better than nothing.
Anna-Beth is sceptical – she suspects the old lady has made a joke and gives her a slow grin. I take A-B in my arms for a cuddle and for some reason start to think about bicycles.
A welcome digression about bicycles.
The Grifter had always been temperamental. One day at the Golf Club, I was standing up to pedal when the chain slipped, bringing my eleven-year-old crotch into violent contact with the crossbar. My granddad John happened to be nearby. ‘Ooh, you poor thing!’ he said. ‘Y’poor old goolies, mate!’ But then, ‘Yeah, don’t cry then, mate. Don’t let Nana or Trudy see you cry.’ It seemed a perverse thing to say since I couldn’t care less about Nan or Tru seeing me cry – the shame was in letting John see it.
And then in the front room, I’m thinking of the bicycle that came next. A racing bike that was a Christmas present from Mum. And I’m thinking about my one and only road accident.
I’m riding my new racer through Coningsby, on my way to work at Gateway. There’s a turning on my left but I’m heading straight ahead. Coming towards me is a car, signalling to turn right. I assume he’s going to pause and wait for me to pass as per – what’s it called? – the law. I assume wrong. He makes the right turn directly in front of me and the racer and I concertina into his passenger door at about fifteen miles an hour.
The driver – posh, tinted glasses, RAF officer – gets out and addresses the crumpled heap of boy and bicycle with considerable self-importance. ‘Now that . . . that was entirely my fault!’
I pick myself up and he helps me get the bike to the pavement, where he gives it a brief inspection. ‘Should be fine,’ he says, turning the obviously buckled front wheel back and forth in his driving gloves. ‘Yup, that was lucky.’ And then off he goes.
And it was lucky. I had a slightly bruised knee, a graze on one hand . . . and that was it. But the moment I’m thinking about as I cuddle Anna-Beth in the front room of the bungalow is the one just before that collision.
I’m remembering its implacable seriousness. The way the danger, the terror was unswervable, non-negotiable – this was going to hurt and there was nothing to be done and nowhere to hide.
That is what bereavement feels like to me. A wide-eyed rush towards a painful impact.
The good thing about being three years old, I think, stroking A-B’s hair, is that she might be vaguely aware of the impacts happening all around her, but she herself has not crashed. She’s little enough to slip through the gaps in the wreckage. There will be consequences, but the consequences will form her idea of what’s normal, just as it was normal for me to be scared of my father and wake up shivering on those winter mornings.
And the good thing about being a teenager, I further reflect, is that we bounce. We bounce for Britain.
A-B and me, three and seventeen – wow, this could have been worse. Six and ten? Seven and twelve? Bless them and no thanks.
And although this is a reasonable thought, it provides a springboard for a less reasonable thought, and this is where the bouncing goes wrong. A romantic narrative, a story, starts to take shape. The reality is too much to bear, so it has to be turned into a story. It has to be given meaning. The dreadful news has to be balanced by good news, the clouds demand a silver lining, the suffering hero must find a purpose. Death, I believe from the example of Martin, has to give way to new life. My life. And this ‘outspoken’ woman who just fell silent has to be given a voice. The voice of someone with a childhood Messiah complex who used to have twelve imaginary bodyguards. Someone younger, stronger, better educated, male. Someone like her, but with unfair advantages that she didn’t get in this unfair world. Her youngest son.
I’m the good news. I’m the silver lining. I don’t need a meaning: I am the meaning. Me. She’ll sing through me.
It’s an exciting idea and almost completely insane. It would be bad enough if this big-screen self-image had come from a healthy imagination. As it is, it’s a desperate parting shot from emotions that are otherwise busily trying to shut down. Something in my heart just turned to ice. That’s a reasonable self-protective measure in the short term, but will cause a lot of trouble later. Believing that I’m about to conquer the world on someone else’s behalf – someone I think beyond reproach – will cause even more trouble.
I set Anna-Beth down and go back to my room. I’ll finish the essay, I think. I’ll show them. Whoever ‘they’ might be. I sit at my desk, pick up my pen and look out of the window. I’m fascinated by the idea of what a hero I’m going to be.
I do nothing.
*
Mark drives me directly to school from the funeral. The QEGS sixth-form blazer and tie are both black and so, this morning, I had an off-the-peg funeral costume so long as I unpicked the gold badge from the blazer.
I had the badge in my back pocket during the funeral. I sew it back on in the car, quickly and about as well as you’d expect for someone who would normally have asked his mum to do it.
There’s a Lower Sixth Form trip to Nottingham, to a university fair. It’s a sort of open day where many university admissions officers will be gathered in a big hall to hand out prospectuses and have a chat. I don’t want to miss it. If Mark is starting to think I’ve gone a bit strange – his little brother madly sewing away in the seat next to him – he doesn’t show it. The badge on my blazer is now at a slightly jaunty angle which I decide to like.
If I’d left last year, to do A levels at Lincoln or Boston College, as some did, I wouldn’t have this uniform, or any uniform. I could have been one of those guys who waited a month before making a special trip into school in their ripped jeans and new piercings to tell the rest of us how they ‘couldn’t believe’ that we ‘just haven’t moved on’. They pissed me off at the time. Now I have the Dead-Mother-Load of ‘moving on’. Now, doing my running stitch, trying to compensate for the bends between Woodhall and Horncastle, I long to talk to one of those boys. I’d let him go on for a while about how cool college is, about how he’s grown, how he can’t actually believe we’re still here with a ‘uniform’ and a ‘headmaster’. And I’d listen. And wait for the perfect moment. And then quietly, modestly, drop my dreadful news on his arrogant, know-nothing haircut. And then just sit back with a benign shrug and watch the fucker squirm.
Grief turned to anger.
We should really start a How Not To Be a Boy drinking game where you take a sip of a tough guy’s drink like Bacardi and Coke every time you notice a male turning a negative emotion into anger. But without me pointing it out. I’m going to stop pointing it out. I predict that top students will be arseholed before Chapter 12. Non-drinking students are allowed herbal tea. You just have to count trips to the loo.
The head of sixth form, Mr Edwards, a friendly Welsh man who normally teaches RE, is giving a briefing about the Nottingham trip to the whole Lower Sixth – about seventy people. They’re gathered in the common room and he has his back to me when I open the door.
He turns. ‘Join us, Robert, join us.’
It feels like every one of them knows where I’ve just come from. I quickly spot Tiffany and Will sitting together and they simultaneously shuffle apart to make a space. Will is frowning with a pursed grin and looks almost sick with sympathy; Tiffany smiles broadly and gives the space they’ve made for me a playful pat. Oh, thank God. Thank God for friends.
I walk towards them as Mr Edwards resumes. And I’m aware of something else, as I feel seventy pair of eyes on me. I’m slightly enjoying this.
Not the attention exactly, but the way I get to shrug the attention off. Not the Impossible Disaster, but the way I’m humbly and bravely coping with it. They are all wondering how they might react if their mum died and I’m going to show them. Considering that this morning I tossed a rose into her grave, and had to listen to a eulogy delivered by one of those unlucky vicars who clearly doesn’t know who the fuck he’s talking about, this is easily the most fun I’ve had all day.
In Nottingham, the university reps are seated behind desks around the sides of a huge hall to talk to A-level students from far and wide. The longest queues are to see the guys from Nottingham or Leicester Polytechnics (they become universities a year later), followed by a medium number for big civic universities like Leeds and Manchester, a shy smattering for Bristol and Durham and then . . . I peer into the far corner – ah yes. A grey-haired lady with a Cambridge sign on her desk is sitting completely alone. She’s reading but occasionally glances up to give passers-by an encouraging smile, trying, it seems, to radiate approachability.
I start walking towards her, wondering who the hell I think I am.
I hover awkwardly next to the empty seat across from her. She looks up suddenly and says ‘Please!’, gesturing to the chair and whipping off her reading glasses. ‘You’ll have to forgive me, catching up on a spot of work.’
I take the seat, saying, ‘No, I . . . I just thought I’d . . . say hello.’
‘I’m glad you did. Tremendously bad form for me to be reading at all. Most forbidding.’ She gives me a conspiratorial smile and waits. I don’t have a thought in my head. She’s tall in her chair, slim and in her late fifties, her long grey hair pulled loosely into a ponytail. Her voice is beautifully modulated, which reminds me of Tess Rampling. None of this helps.
‘Well, I’m doing my A levels . . .’ Oh, you dick. Every fucker in the room is doing their A levels. ‘. . . and erm . . .’ I go completely dry.
‘And you have an interest in applying to Cambridge,’ she offers.
‘Yes!’ I almost shout with relief and embarrassment. I’m actually blushing. This was a terrible idea. Just keep talking. ‘I’m only at a grammar school . . .’
‘Which one?’
‘Er, it’s in a market town in Lincolnshire. I mean, it’s only . . .’
‘Queen Elizabeth’s. In Horncastle.’
I stare at her. ‘Yeah. You’ve heard of us, then.’
‘We’ve heard of everyone.’
Oh my God. She’s going to recruit me as a spy! Do I want to be a spy?! No, not really! I’m still looking at her, dumbfounded.
‘And is there a particular subject you’re interested in studying at Cambridge?’
I wish she would stop saying Cambridge. People will hear. ‘English.’
‘My own subject. And a particular college?’
‘King’s.’
‘My own college! Well, now!’ If this were a first date, it would be going quite well. But I know that the moment will come when I accidentally let slip that I’m a pathological liar with halitosis and a criminal record. Best if I get that out of the way now, so she can tell me to get lost and we can forget the whole thing. Then I can go back to Derek and the morphine bungalow.
‘The thing is . . . I only got four As and four Bs for my GCSEs. So, y’know, nothing to write home about.’
She gives a little chuckle. ‘But nothing to be ashamed of. I assume one of your As was in English?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’re doing English at A level.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you expect to get an A in that.’
‘. . .Yeah, I do actually.’
‘And you could manage one more A grade? Another A and a B, possibly?’
My confidence evaporates and suddenly this is ridiculous. AAB? I haven’t finished an essay in five weeks.
‘Well, that might be . . . it’s been a bit tricky lately.’
She leans forward with her chin in her hands, looking down at the desk. ‘If it’s any consolation, many of my students tell me that they found A-level study and preparation more pressured than the degrees they are taking now and I quite believe them. It’s not easy, as you know. It’s not really supposed to be easy.’
I feel like calling it a day, but luckily that last comment has made me slightly cross. I say, ‘I know it’s not supposed to be easy and I don’t mind doing it while I’m doing it. It’s just sometimes hard to get started, what with . . . I mean, like this morning, it’s not as if . . .’ I can hear my voice start to wobble.
She’s frowning in concern and puts her palms flat on the table. ‘What was it about this morning? Sometimes if we can identify a particular barrier to . . .’
‘Well, this morning doesn’t really count because it was my mum’s funeral. But generally, I’ve just found it . . .’
‘I’m sorry, did you say that this morning was your mother’s funeral?’
‘Yeah.’
‘This morning?’
‘That’s right. So it’s all gone a bit . . . I feel stupid for even thinking about . . . your . . . university.’ She’s looking at me with a level of compassion that makes me want to tell her to cheer the fuck up. I blink at the wall behind her, feeling dizzy, and put a hand on my edge of the table to steady myself, even though I’m sitting down.
She says, ‘I’m very sorry to hear that news. May I at least offer you some reassurance, erm . . .?’
‘Robert.’
‘Let me at least say this, Robert. I’m Catherine, by the way. You’re sitting in the right chair, talking to the right person. It’s not stupid in the slightest for you to think of us.’
Catherine talks briefly about open days and how I ought to come and have a look around at least two colleges. Then she reaches across and gives my hand a quick squeeze. ‘Good luck.’
I take a prospectus – a little booklet with pictures and information about all the different colleges – and quickly drop it into my bag. Well, I suppose that could have gone worse, I think, ambling unsteadily back to my friends. Although why she had to make such a fuss about the funeral, I don’t know.
*
May 6th 1990
Some good news! Well, Isabel and me have been getting on really well recently. She finished with hairy Edmund. I’d been flirting a bit and to my delight she seemed to be doing the same – quite blatantly in fact! Well, today we were talking all lunchtime and well, we seem to be ‘going out’ with each other. I like and fancy her loads. How many times have I written ‘this is it’ or ‘could she be the one’ or some other such crap? I don’t know but something is different this time. Something is different.
Well spotted. This one actually fancies you.
May 9th 1990
Saw Isabel on Sunday. We met at 2 o’clock, went for a walk. Nice chat, no tension. Then we went to hers where her parents were doing a barbeque. So then, well yes, we went upstairs. I’m not sure if I should include EVERYTHING in this diary, just in case one day I’m ever dumb enough to show it to someone. But yes, we massively got off with each other. Then we came back here. By that time it was dark and the moon was shining really prettily through the blinds of the bedroom window. Maybe even my body looked OK in that light. Hers bloody well did. It was amazing. I am amazed. Condoms are quite crap, though, aren’t they?
Given the song and dance, or rather the five-act tragedy, that I’d turned my virginity into recently, you might find this diary entry a touch underpowered. I think I was just being discreet. After all, when it came to the diary, I had every intention of being, one day, exactly ‘dumb enough to show it to someone’. More Fame Than Sense – that’s pretty much what I was aiming for.
Still, I’m going to follow 17’s admirable restraint. When it comes to sex – as opposed to imaginary encounters with Nyssa – we’re suddenly talking about someone else’s sexual experience as well as mine. I can’t track down this quotation but maybe you know it: ‘Sex is vital to the novel. Fucking is not.’ Not for the first time, what’s good for a novel will do nicely here too. There’s going to be plenty of sex from now on (hooray!). Just no fucking (boo!).
Isabel came along just in time and obviously my next move was to start treating her like crap. After about two golden weeks following Super Sunday, I find out what kind of boyfriend I am.
I ignore her at school. I tell her in some detail why I don’t like her friends and refuse to go to the pub they prefer. I only laugh at her jokes when they’re funny, which would be fine given a funny person but rude in this particular case. I don’t ask her a single question about what it’s like to be Isabel. She’s quite ‘artsy’, doing A-level Art, and one day in the common room I notice that she’s embroidered pretty ribbons on her bag. ‘If I loved her,’ I think, ‘I’d love those ribbons.’ I think the ribbons look weird.
Like me, she’s nobody’s fool until she runs into someone who’s willing to make a fool of her. She writes me a letter which is full of loving details and saucy compliments, but which includes, dropped casually into a middle paragraph, ‘Do you see our relationship as anything more than a regular three-hour shag session every Sunday afternoon? Just wondering.’
If I was capable of an honest answer, it would have been: ‘I haven’t given it much thought. The three-hour shag session is certainly a highlight. Given that one of us is in love and the other one is enthusiastically making up for what he perceives to be lost sex-hours, Sunday afternoons are definitely more fun than they used to be. Does our “relationship” add up to more than that? Erm. Ask me an easier one.’ What I do instead is write back with a torrent of false emotion and bad poetry. Incredibly, that seems to work.
That and the fact that, compared to most of her ex-lovers (her tally is impressive, but I don’t care as long as she likes me best), she thinks I’m kind. You can get away with some amazingly bad behaviour, it turns out, as long as your predecessors were complete shits. And no matter how bad the poetry is, she now has a boyfriend who writes her love poems, and becomes silly when drunk instead of physically threatening. The bar on teenage boyfriends is so astoundingly low, she puts up with my version of boyfriend bullshit for six months. It’s only when I don’t turn up to her eighteenth birthday party that I finally manage to get myself dumped.
Actually doing the dumping myself, you understand, is completely out of the question. That would require all kinds of things that I haven’t got to spare – tact, courage and a willingness to go back to Sunday afternoons with no sex. Sunday was best because Anna-Beth would be at John and Trudy’s house and Derek would be in the living room preoccupied with Bullseye.
The locks on all the internal doors of the bungalow are identical, but there’s only a couple of keys. One day I notice that Derek has discreetly transferred the key in his door to mine. It’s a touching gesture but I wasn’t expecting to receive some kind of sex-baton from Derek of all people, and to be honest it makes me a bit queasy.
Why did I want to get dumped? Because she was too much trouble. She was some kind of actual human being with actual needs of her own. That was fine when they coincided with mine, but not fine when they didn’t. What are we going to do about that? ‘Discuss it’? ‘Talk it through’? Did you ever see Michael Knight ‘really try and thrash this stuff out’? Does Dick Turpin ‘have an honest but non-judgemental discussion’? No.
Also, I wasn’t in love with her, something I found difficult to forgive. I found it frankly rather thoughtless and selfish of her. She was a friend. She was fine.
I held her, according to one of the tortured Isabel-justifying diary passages, ‘ . . . in really quite high esteem. No, it’s better than that: I’m really very, very fond of her indeed.’ Christ.
Compared to the mad-cat-on-a-wall-of-death infatuations with Tiffany, Jill, Tess, Will, Marina and about three other girls and a boy that I haven’t troubled you with, Isabel was someone to whom I could sing ‘I’m Not in Love’ without irony and to her face. I just about managed not to do that.
Her mistake was to be real and reality wasn’t my thing. I could try to invent a story for her – ‘She Rescued Me From Loneliness’ or ‘She Is Important To My Important and Ongoing Important Growth’ – but that didn’t really wash when she was trying to get me to go out to the Community Centre on a Friday night, a place literally five minutes’ walk from the bungalow but twat-packed with her ex-idiots: the Deans, Darrens and Jasons. Real men, proper boys, ‘those others’. They scared the hell out of me, so I chose to be aloof. Essentially, I wanted a girlfriend but I couldn’t be bothered to deserve one.
*
To be fair to myself, I was really very unhappy.
I registered Mum’s absence from the bungalow as a daily assault. I would dream of her all night and wake up to a punch in the face. The absence was more like a presence – about as small, harmless and unnoticeable as your average black hole. She was everywhere I looked. She was also dead.
The sound of Derek trying to bring up a three-year-old on his own, with zero previous experience, was also deeply unrelaxing. The poor bloke didn’t have a clue and neither did I. And then the pressure of A levels and internal exams, always real but now with a self-imposed fantasy of Big Screen Escape welded to them – that was distinctly problematic. Eventually I just got ill.
Derek had his hands full, but one of the things we might have expected him to do was dispose of the Tupperware box of Mum’s medication that was still next to the toaster in the kitchen seven weeks after she’d died. You know, the box containing the kind of painkillers you give to people with stage-four cancer. That box. It was safely out of Anna-Beth’s reach, but not out of mine.
I should have got rid of it myself but I didn’t think that was my job. And anyway, people in this kind of danger don’t always tend to notice that they’re in danger at all.
I know some people think ‘trigger warnings’ are silly, but it seems only polite to mention that there follows a diary entry of someone trying to talk himself into suicide. So look, if you’re having a particularly rough time and you feel like skipping this next bit, go ahead. You won’t be missing much that you don’t already know about. Suffice it to say that you’re not alone.
The entry goes on for three pages, with the handwriting getting wilder by the line. I’ll give you the first bit.
June 12th 1990
It’s 11.33 pm. I’ve got an English exam in the morning, History on Thursday and Economics on Friday. I don’t know any of it. None. I’ve been ill for the last 3 weeks and I’m so tired and so fucking sick of it. I’m never going to see her again and everything is pressure. I suddenly thought I could make it all stop and I cried for about an hour and wrote the note. I looked at the box and then I came back and looked at the box and then brought it in here with a pint of water. It’s all just a painful march towards death so why prolong it and all that stopped me was what it would do to everyone else. Tru and Dada and all of them. So I’m still here but I don’t want to be I don’t want to be I don’t want to be leave me alone God just let me drift forever where no one can touch or reach me I think ‘this is it, just fucking do it’ but there’s no escape and I can’t do that to them and just someone give her back to me and let me be her little boy that she’s proud of . . .
All right then, mate, that’ll do.
But then you remember what I said about young people and bouncing, right? The next morning:
June 13th 1990
Christ, what was all that about? I’m off to school to fuck up an Economics exam – who gives a fuck? I’m trying not to regret being honest last night but feel like scribbling all that shit out. I’m ashamed of the hand that wrote it. I’ll leave it for now, in case it’s useful one day but God knows why. The note’s in the bin in a million pieces. It’s a fucking disgrace. Get a grip, boy. Get a fucking grip.
Boiiingg! Yes, there’s a self-dramatising element to both entries which won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who’s ever met a teenager or an actor. But the impulse was real enough. It was a peek over the cliff edge and it wouldn’t be the last. And obviously, you don’t have to be a teenager or an actor. Three-quarters of the people who kill themselves in the UK are men.
Anyway, I was alive, which is always a good start if you want to get better.
And I had friends.
*
Two seventeen-year-old boys are holding hands in bed. One of them is Will; the other one has just stopped crying.
Will is wondering how long this is going to take. It was likely that being best mates with someone whose mum has just died was going to involve some kind of emotional doobly-woobly, but he wasn’t expecting it here and now, at 5 a.m. in a double bed in a rented holiday house in Torquay. There again, there’s never a good time for this sort of thing. I feel an urge to get up and put some clothes on. But then – not so fast – because Will is holding my hand. He never holds my hand.
‘I thought,’ he ventures, ‘I wondered when it was gonna . . . hit you. Y’know, when it was going to sink in.’ In the dark, my breathing has returned to desultory after-gulps and I can half smile at this. ‘Sink in’ is a sporting metaphor, as in: ‘Gary Lineker, you just shat yourself in front of a World Cup TV audience of 700 million people. Has it sunk in?’
We listen to the hiss of the cassette player as the tape reaches the end of its side. It’s a mix-tape and the last track was a song by Prince called ‘Sometimes It Snows in April’. That’s what triggered this particular bit of sinking-in. It’s August.
Lamely, I say, ‘I suppose I’ve had plenty of time to get used to it.’ This is the best I can do given that I’m now talking to him long-distance from the Land of the Recently Bereaved. I’m in a new state. We do things differently here – we know things that people in the old country, the Land of Everything Is Still Normal, do not know. It’s already obvious to me that Mum’s death is not going to Sink In and neither will I ever be Over It. The best I can do is coexist with it. Grief has to talk to normality, normality has to talk to grief, and they both have to listen. It’s an ongoing peace deal, a two-state solution.
I’m not thinking about this in bed. Instead, I’m thinking the thing that I usually think in the company of Will – ‘I wonder what Will is thinking?’
He shifts his weight slightly. ‘I didn’t hear Ralph come in. D’you think he’s sleeping on the beach again?’
Oh, OK – that’s that then. Gently, I let go of Will’s hand.
Ralph is one of the five other school friends we’re sharing the house and the holiday with. Yesterday he wouldn’t shut up about how amazing it was to sleep on the flat, warm rocks, and the day before that he wouldn’t shut up about his distaste for under-arm deodorant because, ‘I don’t like putting chemicals on my body.’
I say, ‘I don’t care as long as he has a bloody shower when he gets back.’ This gets a bigger chuckle than it deserves and Will’s relief makes me glad. Still, the emotional temperature is only just returning to normal and he leaves what he imagines to be a tactful pause before checking his watch with his now free hand. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to found a minor religion in his honour.
It’s a hot summer and neither of us can be bothered any more with that extra bit of admin to do with special night clothes. Practical enough – and I guess there must be plenty of other male friends who would be happy to share a double bed naked. I just don’t know any. Something is clearly going on, although neither of us could quite say what. Will patrols his heterosexuality like a prison guard who has recently lost faith in the penal system. Or maybe one who favours reform of the penile system (thanks and sorry . . .). It’s unthinkable that Will is secretly gay or even secretly bisexual, but his curiosity – maybe his sympathy – allow him to be secretly something-or-other with me. And as for me, I don’t know what I am, but I know what I like, and what I like is Will. What happens exactly? I touch him; he doesn’t mind; I’m grateful. And repeat. It’s not exactly Torvill and Dean. A few years later, he touches me. I’m even more grateful. Frankly, the sex is pathetic.
But the love . . . my goodness me. You don’t choose your first love. I was lucky with Will.
Whatever’s going on, it’s only the eye-catching headline of the real-life story of everyday teenagers titting around. We drive to Boston and walk into River Island, hearing En Vogue’s ‘Hold On’ playing through the speakers and suddenly notice we’re striding down parallel aisles to the beat. We get to the end of the shop, turn round and stride straight out again, like idiotic dudes.
And all the rest – the hysterical argument about whether Oliver Reed was in Castaway or The Blue Lagoon, the underage piss-ups in fields before barn-dances, the joint love for all things Prince, Robin Williams, and Fry and Laurie, the competitive impressions of friends and teachers, the pound-a-pint games of pool, my attempts to teach him the moonwalk, his attempts to teach me the chords of A and D, the many splendid parties and the fun, the honest-to-God fun of it. And there he is, holding my hand in the dark because he’s friend enough and man enough.
The friendship will last. But soon, he’ll have a girlfriend, one he’ll be crazy about. The sense that he’s crossed the boundaries of his masculinity will catch up with him and he’ll become colder towards me for a while. And he’ll remember that he should care, as he currently does not care – now, in August 1990 – as he gets out of bed and saunters from the room towards the loo, that I am watching the lean, easy movement of his body in the breaking dawn light.
As things are, he looks straight back at me with a tarty smirk as he goes through the door. In the window the closed drapes have begun to glow with the last day of the holiday. Gentle beams of light pierce the cracks and tears in the fabric as if a benign alien power were probing the room for signs of intelligent life. I notice the moment, and because I am seventeen, I notice myself noticing. I marvel that something so present will soon become real only in memory. This moment, a happy one, will vanish. But it will be there to be recreated another time, any time – just as I daily reconstruct the sound of my mother’s voice.
*
I’m sitting outside Room 9 at school with Mrs Slater. It’s a sunny day and she’s opened the fire exit which gives onto a patch of grass. We’ve got two chairs and two copies of Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’.
I’d been off with glandular fever but that had subsided by the time I finally hauled my ass to the doctor’s. ‘Tintern Abbey’ wasn’t on the syllabus and this wasn’t an English lesson. Heather Slater just collared me during a free period and sat me down outside. Ostensibly, we were looking at it to catch up on practical criticism.
‘I was talking about you with Bob Edwards,’ she says, ‘and he said something which might be useful. “He needs to be a friend to himself.”’
‘Right. Thanks,’ I say.
Ah, so all these years Mr Edwards was a Bob. Fancy that. Absurdly, I want to giggle – I’m still holding on to the childish notion that teachers shouldn’t really have first names; it only humanises them and we can’t have that. I read the poem aloud and for the first time; slowly and without much interest at first, but then something starts to happen. By the time I get to this passage, it’s as if I can feel my soul being stitched back together.
For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
. . . and on it goes, the writer reflecting on his youth, his memories flickering backwards and forwards across the present, the love for his sister all the more powerful because it already contains grief, his simple acceptance that one of them will one day lose the other, but that the memory of this present joy is a future consolation. And the Abbey, never referred to directly, standing for a subtle spirituality located in nature – Wordsworth’s own rhododendron bush, his leafy cathedral.
‘Just take plenty of fluids,’ was what the doctor ordered.
What the teacher ordered was Wordsworth. I’d known Mrs Slater’s first name for years, and saw now I would have to start using it, what with her being my friend.
I lower the book and squint at the barley fields beyond the edges of the school, just managing to say in her general direction, ‘Thank you, Heather.’
*
‘The One and Only’ must be on everybody’s list of top ten favourite songs by Chesney Hawkes. But this defiant memorial to the recent downfall of Margaret Thatcher (I assume that’s what it’s about) was actually written by Nik Kershaw who, here in 1991, already seems like a wizened survivor from a lost world of pop.
I mention Chesney because I borrowed his name for my first car. Four seasons (with the length of four short decades) have gone by since Heather Slater provided a break in the clouds via ‘Tintern Abbey’. All told, that included: the rest of that horrible summer, a melancholy autumn, a pitilessly Mum-free Christmas, and a spring where every diary entry begins with something like: ‘I shouldn’t be writing this, I ought to be doing some revision. I haven’t done any revision.’ I have a timetable for A-level revision which itself becomes much revised, a fixed amount of work slowly corrugating under the pressure of time . . .
But never mind because I’ve bought a car! It’s a second-hand Nissan Cherry – ‘Chesney’. Mum’s ‘estate’, such as it is, has gone to Derek and Anna-Beth, but she had a life insurance policy which is split three ways between the boys. This gives me a windfall of £615 and I blow £500 of it on Chesney. It’s a sporty-looking two-tone blue coupé with a curvy back windscreen and a five-speed gearbox which belies its tiny engine. It beeps when you put it in reverse. I love it.
Despite this, when it comes to important visits or interviews, I don’t trust myself to navigate the two-hour hop down the A1 to Cambridge, and, if I’m honest, I don’t quite trust Chesney to make it there and back either. That car proves itself to be a two-tone rock of dependability unless it happens to be raining. If it’s raining, Chesney won’t start. Derek shows me how to spray WD-40 under the distributor cap, but that doesn’t always work. One day soon, as with my beloved Grifter, Chesney’s chain will slip in the most spectacular way.
Carole, my mum’s top friend and increasingly one of my own, steps in with the offer of a lift, which becomes the offer of three lifts. We visit King’s College, then Robinson College and then finally she drives me to my interview – at Robinson College.
Although colleges weren’t formally allowed to discriminate on any basis except academic merit, I looked around at the students at Robinson and was encouraged to see eighteen-to twenty-three-year-olds who didn’t necessarily scare the daylights out of me. They were all quite badly dressed and normal-looking. Outside, a couple of male undergraduates were dicking about with water-pistols and some female students walked by and told them to grow the fuck up. All very familiar – I could almost imagine a game of Ball Death.
I didn’t think the interview went well, but it didn’t feel like a disaster. I’d been expecting a certain amount of the fabled Oxbridge Don Bullshit – you know, an old man who looks like J. R. R. Tolkien staring at you in silence and then shouting ‘Surprise me!’ And then you’re supposed to set fire to his beard or something – to show independence of thought or whatnot.
What I actually got was a couple of lightning-fast teachers asking me straightforward questions about books. Since Heather Slater herself was no slouch, this, like Ball Death, was familiar enough.
Carole drops me off back at the bungalow. I thank her and then, as I’m unclicking my seatbelt, she says, ‘I know you’d rather your mother had taken you, Robert – I hope you don’t think I’m overly interfering.’
The idea that such a close friend of Mum’s and such a proper grown-up is now slightly fishing for reassurance from the likes of me is in itself a compliment, albeit an alarming one. But then, I think, it’s her friendship with Mum that’s doing this. Carole doesn’t have any children and she’s genuinely wondering if Pat would approve of this help. She’s wondering if she shouldn’t just have said, ‘Get on the bloody train, Robert.’
My instinct is to say, ‘Noo, noo, Carole – you went to the LSE and worked in the City! Only you could help me in this academic way!’ But while those facts would be true, the sentiment would be quite false. Of course I wished I was doing this with Mum. I wanted Cambridge to turn her head the way it turned mine. But then, if Mum had been healthy and alive, I’d have probably insisted on taking the train. What I partly miss about having a mum is the teenager’s God-given right to refuse her help.
I say, truthfully, ‘Well, if it can’t be her, there’s no one I’d rather it was than you.’
The woman who kept it together while nursing her great friend keeps it together still. But for once, she blinks away a couple of tears. She squeezes my hand. People keep squeezing my hand and I like it.
‘Thank you, dear.’
Robinson sends me an offer of a place if I get AAB. My second choice, Leeds, offers ABC. It ought to be amazing news. I ought to find it inspirational.
I almost completely seize up. I love English and I’m good at it, so I do the very least work that I can get away with. In History and Economics, I’m nowhere near so diligent. At forty-three, I still dream about those History and Economics exams. Unlike the bike crash, they were so completely swervable if I’d done some work. Here come the essay questions on the exam papers, one after another: ‘No, I can’t do that one. No, I can’t quite do that one. No, I definitely can’t do that one at all. That one I could at least . . . no, I can’t do that one.’
My results, when I drive into school to collect them one morning in August, shouldn’t have come as any surprise, but they take my head off anyway. In the common room, we all form a silent gaggle around Bob Edwards, who hands us pieces of folded paper.
Tiffany is there and notices my expression. She’s got what she needs for Durham and I’m pleased for her. She does her best when I hand her my own piece of paper.
‘Wow, an A in English, you brainy bastard! And . . . yeah . . .’ She looks again at the other results, crinkling the paper between her turquoise fingernails, ‘. . . two Cs. Oh, fuck. Probably enough for Leeds, though!?’
‘No.’
‘Or a poly?’
‘Didn’t apply.’
‘Right,’ she mutters quickly, ‘neither did I. Or . . . Clearing? Or you can retake?’
‘Yeah. Something like that.’
She gives me a hug. We were going our separate ways anyway, but this is much worse. She is instantly, before my very eyes, a university undergraduate. I am confirmed as a geriatric Lincolnshire schoolboy. Unlike the guys from Boston and Lincoln College, she won’t need to pop back to tell us she’s cool. She was always going to disappear without giving the rest of us a backwards glance.
That had been my plan too. In my head I’d become a ruthless bastard. I’d just forgotten the bit where ruthless bastards actually put the hours in.
The next morning, a letter arrives from the Senior Tutor at Robinson. I read as far as ‘I regret to inform you . . .’ before screwing it up. I make a half-hearted attempt to ring around some admissions departments, but English is massively oversubscribed and ACC isn’t going to do it for anyone. Anyway, Derek is appalled by the implications for the phone bill, which is a good excuse to stop. The bill is quarterly and I can’t wait till he finds out I called Aberystwyth.
I numbly fill in a clearing form in the certain knowledge that if I get an offer from De Montfort University (last year’s Leicester Polytechnic) I’m going to turn it down. The Leicester Footlights? The De Montfort Players? It’s intellectual snobbery as well as comedy snobbery. Probably some normal snobbery in the mix there too. I liked a couple of the people in the year above who went to Leicester, but generally the place seems to be a Dean-magnet and Darren-trap. They come home in the holidays and laugh about it being ‘pointless’ and ‘a total doss’. In my head, and no doubt unfairly, poly equals Gartree. It’s a boys’ place. Little Lord Reject won’t be having that.
Resits then, in November.
But that’s impossible. How do you turn two Cs into As when you’re living with Derek?
My step-dad was a gentle chap and kind in many ways. Mindful of Anna-Beth, if I were the sort of writer who puts Post-it notes around the edges of his computer screen, I’d now be looking at a really big one that said, ‘Try not to be too much of an arsehole about Derek in 1991.’ The diary is surprisingly fair, up to a point. I acknowledge that this is my very own balls-up. Yes, there’s an emotional context to the exam bike-crash. But I also get that I could have done much better and I take ownership of most of the failure.
But wait a second, because when I start contemplating resits – doing it all over again – I can’t help thinking of the other context: the bungalow.
Many years later, when she was about sixteen, Anna-Beth came to stay with me for a couple of days in the flat I was renting in Kilburn. One night she asked, simply enough, ‘Why did you leave?’ I’m not sure I did a very good job of explaining. I think 31 said something groovy like, ‘I just needed a change of scene.’
Mm-hmm. Let me take another swing at that.
The bungalow was a slow-motion nightmare of almost total dysfunction. Frankly, it’s amazing nobody else died. Two men in grief, two men who can’t cook and don’t know how to work the washing machine, two men who don’t know how to talk to each other and who haven’t got the first clue about bringing up a child. One man who is still a boy, who thinks his exams are the most important thing in the universe, but who can’t or won’t do any work. One man who left school at fifteen, but goes along with the idea of education while finding it faintly ridiculous.
If this were a heart-warming TV drama, the characters of Rob and Derek would find a way to communicate about their shared loss and form some kind of madcap team. A younger Martin Freeman and an older, larger Craig Cash would invent a crazy system for doing the washing-up and drying the dishes in an upbeat montage to a soundtrack by Right Said Fred.
But no, it was even shitter than that. Which is saying REALLY QUITE A LOT about how shit it was. There was no team and no system.
The Robert and Derek Do Emotional Articulacy Summertime Special gets off to a cracking start when he gives me the bill for my eighteenth birthday party. I’d hired the Community Centre. It was £20, which represents two nights and a full Saturday at Gateway. He hands it over.
‘Oh, right. Are you not going to pay this, then?’ I ask.
‘Well, y’mum would’ve paid it and she gave some of her money to you.’
I see. I wonder if he’s going to invoice me for the flowers and the hearse. Clearly, having someone else pay for my eighteenth birthday party is the kind of outrageous treat that I can now expect a lot less of around here.
One evening he puts his head around my bedroom door while I’m revising for an exam and asks me, not for the first time, to ‘nip down the shops on your bike and get a pint of milk’. It’s a twenty-minute round trip and, for once, I refuse. Derek protests, ‘But I do everything!’
It’s true – he does do everything, which is a tough beat for a man who previously did nothing. I continue to do nothing while he does everything . . . badly.
And then there was Chesney’s chain-slipping finest hour. When I have morning exams, I try and cram at home and then drive to school, instead of doing the sensible thing and taking the school bus. On the morning of my first English paper, I don’t notice that it’s been raining all night. You already know how Chesney feels about rain.
‘Des, mate, the car won’t start and I’ve got an exam. Can you drive me to school?’
My index finger is bleeding from Chesney’s crappy little ignition key digging into it as I tried to get the stupid fucker to start. It’s a Monday and Anna-Beth is still at John and Trudy’s house. There’s nothing to stop Derek giving me a lift, except his habits. He’s always been a creature of habit, a monster of habit. He looks at me like I’ve just asked him to go pearl-diving off the coast of Antigua.
‘But I’ve not had me Mellow Birds, n’nothing!’
‘Yeah, but I’ve got an exam. I’ve got an exam!’
‘But I’m not even dressed and I’ve not had me coffee!’
I run the half mile to John and Trudy’s house. John, who is also in his pyjamas, and who also left school at fifteen, gives me his car keys in a heartbeat, despite the fact that I’m half hysterical and fully uninsured.
But the really tough stuff was with Anna-Beth. She ruled Derek with a rod of iron. She was, of course, only doing what small children do when they don’t know the rules – mainly because they’re being raised by a parent who keeps asking them what the rules might be.
‘D’you think it might be time for bed, ducky?’
‘No.’
‘Right. I mean, it’s half past ten now, so it might . . .’
‘No.’
‘Shall I get y’milk? Eh? I’ll get y’milk, shall I?’
‘NO, I DON’T WANT M’MILK YET!’
‘Right.’
One night, she was climbing onto a kitchen chair and obviously about to fall off. I asked her to get down and she wouldn’t. So I lifted her down. She grabbed a tea-towel and threw it at me with that ineffectual toddler fury that makes them even more furious. I’m sorry to say that I shouted at her: ‘You DON’T throw things at people!’ She stood there, bamboozled for a moment because this wasn’t like Robert, in fact it wasn’t like anything she’d ever heard. And then her face crumpled and she ran from the kitchen.
She had to run to the main bedroom, of course. Great. She went round Mum’s side of the bed, buried her face in the carpet and howled. Maybe she chose that room at random, but my teenage, storytelling mind wouldn’t hear of it. No, she ran to Mummy to protect her from the scary man, just as I did. And now I was the scary man, and there was no Mummy to run to. It’s just us. I lifted her up and cuddled her and said, ‘Sorry, I’m so sorry.’ Presently, she made a funny face and tried to dry my eyes with the sleeve of her cardigan.
It was too much, far too much for me. I had to resit those exams, but not from here. The thought of staying in the bungalow with the same unbearable absence hanging around the place . . . the black hole present in every room, every smell, every sound, from the squeak of the sofa to the hum of the fridge . . . this place was a tomb and not even a quiet one.
Forgive me, little A-B. I can’t look after you; maybe in the future I can look out for you. First, though, I need to be stronger. Much stronger than this. I’m sorry, my love, I have to run away.
It’s not just the exams. In his romantic, grief-stricken brain, something is calling to Luke Skywalker – some unfinished business. Somebody must be to blame for all this. Somebody’s going to get this in the neck and it’s not Uncle Owen. Not the surrogate dad who thwarts our hero’s quest for adventure. The other one, the hidden dad, the Dark Lord of the Carling Black Label.
Where does a Mummy’s Boy go when he’s got no Mummy? Where do you turn when you’ve run out of space?
You turn around. You run at the thing you’ve been running from.