9

Men are Organised

‘You live and learn. At any rate, you live.’

Douglas Adams

He’s chewing gum, which is odd because it’s the kind of thing which, in others, he would describe as ‘a bit yobbish if you ask me, but anyway’. He sees my surprise.

‘You’ll have to excuse the gum, boy, I’m trying to stop smoking.’

‘Righto.’

He’s grinning at me through the chewing. A few seconds ago I said, ‘Dad, can we have a quick word?’ This is the first time I’ve actually asked to talk to him about anything. We’re outside the kitchen of the Dower House where Carole has given me a job washing dishes and painting window frames. He’d stopped by to deliver some chillies which he grows and sells to local businesses – one of his various hobbies and sidelines.

‘Erm, you know you said that I could come and live with you if . . .’

‘Yes?!’

‘Well, if the offer’s still open, I think I’d like –’

‘Oh, YES mate! Good old boy! You don’t need to ask, bo – Rob. It’s your home, Rob. Good!’

‘It’s just I’ve got to retake these exams and . . .’

‘You can have your old room, mate. Now, it’s mucky as hell at the minute because I’m propagating marigolds in it, but I know exactly where to put them. I can soon get that sorted, no problem. When are you thinking of moving in, so to speak?’

‘Well, I need to tell Derek. It’s really only for a few months, what with these exams and . . .’

‘Derek been driving you up the bloody wall. Poor old boy, he’ll never change. And little Anna-Beth, bless ’er. It’s not what you NEED, is it, boy? You need some bloody PEACE, mate. For your exams!’

‘Well, this is it . . . mate.’

‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

‘You are, yep.’

‘I know I am, mate. Now my lady-friend Delia comes to stay with us a few days a week, but we won’t mind her. You remember Delia, boy?’ Ah yes, Delilah.

‘Yep.’

‘She’ll not bother you, mate, you do your own thing.’ He takes his gum out and looks around, but can’t see a bin so puts it back in his mouth. He’s frowning with concentration now – there’s a lot to think about.

‘I’m not saying the place is spotless, but it’s clean, boy, that’s the main thing. I have this woman come on a Thursday and she . . .’

‘Josie?’

‘That’s right! Oh, d’you know Josie?’

‘You must have mentioned her.’

‘Bloody good cleaner, boy, bloody good. Hard worker. Real grafter.’ There’s a brief lull while we both stand there nodding and considering Josie and her tireless dedication. I say, ‘So I’ll tell Derek tonight and p’haps move in at the weekend.’

‘Righto, boy. Poor old Derek. He’ll never change.’

I break the news to Derek that night over tea and he makes it easier for me by saying all the wrong things. ‘Well, y’poor old mum wanted you to stay here with us.’

This is how he’s been referring to Mum for the last sixteen months – ‘y’poor old mum’. I suppose it’s meant with love, but the condescension of it drives me nuts. In my memory, she’s alive and well, not poor and old. Any year now, I might have to say something. Actually no, easier just to move house.

What I do say, as calmly as possible, is: ‘Well, she didn’t quite say that, did she? She said I didn’t have to live with Fred if I didn’t want to. But now I sort of want to. And she didn’t know I was going to have to retake my exams, did she?’

‘Anna-Beth’s gonna miss yer.’

I take another breath. In 1991 the phrase ‘guilt-trip’ isn’t yet in common usage, but somebody needs to invent it and quickly. I feel terrible about A-B. It doesn’t occur to me that when he says she’s going to miss me, he’s actually saying that he’s going to miss me. If he liked me that much, why had he been so bloody annoying? In fact, why was he still being so bloody annoying now?

The priority now in the masculine mind of the boy who claims he doesn’t like masculinity is to become angry with Derek. Obviously I’m still heartbroken about Mum, so I’m angry with Derek. I feel guilty about abandoning Anna-Beth, so I’m angry with Derek. I feel sorry for Derek, so I’m angry with Derek. I’m anxious about what it’s going to be like living with Dad and scared of screwing my exams up again, so I’m already angry with Dad but equally angry with Derek. There again, even if I noticed any of this, I wouldn’t share it with Derek because I’m obviously afraid of upsetting Derek, which itself makes me angry with Derek.

Now that I am a Man, I have graduated to an advanced level of blaming other people for unwanted feelings. Luckily I’m handling this brilliantly. It’s not as if I’m going to nurse that grievance about the bill for my birthday party into my mid-forties, is it? No, I’ll just pretend that all I need is a change of scene.

Derek says, with touching innocence, ‘It’s nothing that I’ve done wrong, is it?’

I give an involuntary yelp of laughter, but try to turn it into a ‘the very idea!’ kind of chuckle. He smiles along with me. ‘No, Des, it’s nothing like that.’

‘Oh . . . good.’

‘I just need a change of scene.’

‘Yeah . . .’ I can see that he doesn’t really buy it, but I haven’t given him a choice. It turns out I am a ruthless bastard after all.

Except, that’s not how it feels when I’ve finished packing the car the next day and say goodbye. I tell him I’ll see him on Sunday, which is true enough, and with Tru and John around I’ll see plenty of them all. But there’s no point pretending that this isn’t a big deal. The bungalow was home for fourteen years. Then Mum died; then I moved out. I’m closing the front door when I hear his voice calling from the kitchen. ‘We’ll miss yer!’

I hear the catch in my throat as I call back, truthfully, ‘I’ll miss you too.’

I close the door as gently as I can.

*

He’s at pains to avoid calling them ‘rules’; instead, he mentions ‘just a few guidelines, so to speak, so we don’t drive each other crackers’. This is very welcome – I’m extremely keen not to annoy Dad. Really very keen indeed. Obviously, if I think too hard about how he used to treat Mum, there’s always the chance I might kill him. Otherwise I’m just scared of him. It’s the perfect domestic arrangement.

The deal is that he cooks and I do the washing-up, including the milk bottles. They need to be thoroughly clean so that the milkman doesn’t get milky fingers when he picks them up from the porch outside. Dad seems very confident that the milkman’s preferred technique when he picks up a pair of empty milk bottles is to insert his fingers into the bottle necks. I can hear the contempt in Dad’s voice for those other, thoughtless wankers who don’t wash their milk bottles. Not only would the milkman get all milky, but the milk would make the bottles slippery and they might get dropped and smashed. And that, as Dad points out, ‘is the last fucking thing we need’. I privately wonder what might be the second-to-last fucking thing we need and I suspect the list thereafter is quite long. But this is the honeymoon period and I try to admire his consideration for a fellow working man.

There again, I had no idea that in the last fourteen years he had grown so fastidious. I note with alarm that the items on the table in the front room – telephone, pens, notepad, place mats, wallet – are all arranged at perfect right-angles to each other.

He tells me that he understands that teenagers find it a bit of a struggle to get up in the morning, but he would appreciate it if my bedroom curtains were open by 8 a.m. – even if I subsequently go back to bed – so that the neighbours opposite don’t think I’m a sloven and a layabout. I’m about to say that I don’t really mind what they think of me when I realise it’s not my reputation that’s at stake here, it’s his. He won’t have it whispered darkly that his son is a layabout or, indeed, that he’s the sort of man who could possibly tolerate living with one. So . . . what I now do reflects directly on him. A feeling of unease begins to take hold.

Could I please park my car exactly here? It’s not much to ask, is it? There’s a public track running past the side of Slieve Moyne which splinters off to curl around the back of the house. At that point it becomes private and what we might grandly call a driveway. There’s plenty of room but, merely as a guideline, it’s worth showing me to the nearest square inch where Chesney’s front right tyre will need to land before it ‘starts to make the place look untidy’.

It’s 10.30 a.m. and he’s got a can of Carling on the go as he takes me through all this. That’s quite a departure from Derek, but I figure it’s a Sunday and what the hell. Still, he’s now boring himself and so speeds up.

‘D’you know how to work a washing machine, boy?’

‘Well . . .’

‘Didn’t think so. Here.’ He puts his can down and shows me the washing powder under the sink. ‘Powder. Expensive. Goes in ’ere.’ He yanks open the powder drawer on the washing machine. He then teaches me very badly about what the various dials do. I’m nodding along in my best impression of taking in complicated information with surprising ease. At the same time I rack my brain for a memory of Woodhall Spa ever having a launderette. Like the one in the Levi’s advert with the soundtrack of ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’ and that beautiful model taking his clothes off. No, don’t think about the model. Anyway, to use a launderette in Woodhall would surely invite censure and ridicule, as if you’re letting the side down. I’ve still got a hundred pounds of my inheritance left, plus what I earn at Gateway – maybe I could just carry on buying underwear until I move out? I now regret turning down the offer of a lager.

‘I think that’s it, boy. Obviously use the loo brush properly and don’t leave any crap round the pan, especially when Delia stays. You know what women are like.’

‘Yeah,’ I say, trying to communicate a worldly tolerance of these fussy women and their quirky aversion to human shit. He rattles his empty can and thrusts it in the kitchen bin before moving to the fridge. ‘You sure you won’t have a beer, boy?’

‘I will actually, mate, yes please.’

It’ll be fine.

As long as he doesn’t know I’m still thinking about Nick Kamen in his boxer shorts, it’ll be fine.

*

There’s another interview at Cambridge and another offer. My headmaster, Thomas Beaker, tells me that a second offer is extremely rare and that ‘You’ve got a good chance now.’ I have to turn the two Cs into two As. The resits are in November, so I’ve got two clear months and a quiet house to revise in. Great.

You’d think I’d do some work at this point, wouldn’t you? You’d think I’d want to get this A-level stuff out of the way, if for no better reason than to avoid boring the patient readers of my future memoir. Sadly, some of us really are slow learners.

I do the washing-up at home; I do the washing-up at the Dower House; I hang out with Will, mending and spraying over bits of rust on our cars. I go out most nights, without much enthusiasm. I give meticulous attention to my revision timetable, using different coloured pens to outline exactly when in the future I’m going to open a book. I open a book and look at diagrams of Supply and Demand. I think of the bungalow. I close the book. I quit Gateway, saying I need to concentrate on my studies and then ask the manager for my job back the following week. It occurs to me while listlessly taking in the teatime repeat of Neighbours that I’d already watched four hours earlier, that something is up. But then, self-awareness is not the same thing as wisdom, nor wisdom the same thing as action.

I spend September imagining how hard I’m going to work in October. I spend October wishing I’d done some work in September.

By November, I speculate with almost out-of-body detachment that it’s quite likely I’m about to turn my Cs into Ds, Es, or just ‘We’re sorry you spent all that money on pens.’

It’s four days until my first exam. I’ve done nothing.

The moment calls for a decisive gesture – I give up. Or rather, I attempt what ‘Stormin’ Norman’ Schwarzkopf – much in the news earlier that year – might call the ‘Mother of All Tactical Deadline Adjustments’. I drive Chesney slowly into school and ask to see Mr Beaker. He enquires how my revision is going and whether I’m excited about the upcoming ‘simple task’. I tell him about Neighbours and ask if I can return to school, sit in the classes of the year below and retake the exams next summer.

It’s always difficult to tell with a man with a beard, but I’m pretty sure I’ve just ruined his week. The look on his face as he calibrates his answer is increasingly familiar. It’s that ‘I knew we were going to have to cut this guy some slack but this is ridiculous’ look.

He agrees to take me back but concludes that this sends a terrible message to Cambridge and it’s probably ‘curtains’ as far as they are concerned. He doesn’t put it in exactly these terms, but it’s quite clear that I’ve royally bollocksed everything to arse.

I go home to tell Dad that I’m going to be living with him for another seven months. I’ll do my ‘straight-talking’ – short, concise sentences, fairly loud. He appreciates that.

I wait till after tea. Half an enormous marrow each (from the garden), stuffed with mince and onion. With potatoes, carrots and broad beans – also from the garden – and bacon and Lincolnshire sausages on the side. Also beer. He does something like this most days. We live like kings. Or, at least, Hobbits of the Shire.

‘Dad, I haven’t been very honest with you about the amount of work I’ve been doing.’

‘Righto, boy.’

‘I’ve actually done fuck-all.’

‘OK.’

‘I’ve found it really hard to concentrate. I don’t know why – maybe I . . .’

‘Y’mum just died, mate.’

He says it like it’s the most obvious reason in the world, which it suddenly is. So much for my straight-talking. I wasn’t expecting this.

I say, quietly, ‘Yeah, but that was over a year ago.’

‘It was yesterday, boy. Might as well have been yesterday.’ He lights a cigarette and looks down at his knackered hands. His comment was a flash of brilliance and I think for a second that we’re going to stay in its warmth, but he’s already embarrassed by it and looking for some shade. He’s still grieving too. I had no idea.

‘It’s ’ard, Rob, what you’re doing. I couldn’t bloody do it. I was a dead loss at school. Apart from gymnastics. I enjoyed gymnastics – old Gerry Leighton used to teach me.’

‘He’s still there.’

‘Is he still there?’

‘I think I told you before.’

‘Is he really?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fancy that. Anyway, I’m sure you’re doing your best, boy, in your own way, bless your old heart.’

He seems pleased that we’ve had this frank discussion, but now, rubbing what’s left of one chain-sawed thumb over the other, he’s visibly cheering himself up by reliving his achievements on the trampoline or parallel bars or whatever it was. I’m tempted to leave him there, but want yet more reassurance and I know how to get it. Sorry, Headmaster.

‘Beaker says it’s curtains for Cambridge.’

He looks up. ‘Cunt! What does he know?’

‘Well . . . he knows quite a lot, but . . . we’ll see.’

‘We will bloody see, boy. We will. “Curtains,” he says. Bugger Beaker.’

*

So then, Back to Skool. I put on my sixth-form uniform in the bedroom that used to have Rupert the Bear wallpaper and a poster of Steve Austin. Everything is too small. It’s wrong to sleep in this bed now that I’ve got armpit hair. It’s also wrong to put a school tie on when all your friends are taking a degree. I feel like a giant – over-developed and stupid, walking into doorframes, clumsily doing up his buttons.

I keep thinking of what John said when I was trying to help him in the Golf Club garden: ‘Yeh – you’re getting in your own way, mate.’

I really have got spectacularly in my own way this time. At least the curtain people have gone – the ones who used to organise the bad dreams. My dreams are fine now. Whatever I failed to do over the last three months, there’s one thing I did manage by accident – I had a rest. ‘He needs to be a friend to himself,’ said Mr Edwards. I’m not sure that this – what is euphemistically known as a Third-Year Sixth – is quite the self-care he had in mind.

One Sunday in the pub, Andrew asks me if Dad makes me a packed lunch for school and gives me a kiss as he waves me off. I tell him that’s exactly what happens and I also tell him to fuck off. I’m just relieved that the situation merits a joke. It’s when the jokes dry up that you know you’re in trouble.

I’m sharing the sixth form with people that Pete, Will and I used to refer to as ‘winkies’. The little kids. They’re not so little any more – they’re my History and Economics A-level co-winkies. Pete has got himself a job and so has Will, although the latter is bound for a two-year course in Preston that he’s obviously going to hate. Accountancy, for crying out loud. To me, Will is destined to be an accountant the way Jay Gatsby was always going to end up selling pet insurance. But I suppose the way I see Will isn’t the way he sees himself, so I try to look encouraging.

Tiffany writes to me from Durham and has given me her incomprehensible History notes. Ex-girlfriend Isabel is doing an Art course in Lincoln.

My only available tactic for coping with this level of self-inflicted humiliation is to get the jokes in first. Otherwise, I roam the corridors quietly. My edges are being planed off with a power tool. I’m gagging on humble pie. I tread softly like one who has just performed an eighteen-month tap dance on his own dreams.

The present Upper Sixth treat me with a sort of fascinated horror, but also a weird respect. I am, after all, the school superstar, the one who does all the funny plays and sketches. Most of them also know my mum died and that I’m here because I’m hell-bent on Cambridge – all rather glamorous, intentionally or not. It’s the glances I get from younger pupils that give me the fear. I’m a cautionary tale. I’m the scary story you tell your children to get them to do their homework – ‘Once upon a time, there was a nineteen-year-old man in a school blazer . . .’

It’s not like I don’t know anyone. Daisy, Will’s ex-girlfriend, is as friendly as ever. I even forgive her for shagging Will, though not out loud. And, incredibly, Marina seems to have forgiven me. She’s in the Lower Sixth, but crosses the invisible border in the common room to say hi.

I notice that there are rumours about me and Will which I do nothing to discourage. In fact, I start to cultivate a deliberate sexual ambiguity. In a common-room chat about Thelma & Louise, I casually mention that Brad Pitt is ‘obviously some beautiful model they’ve given a few lines to’ and my co-winkies seem to appreciate my bullshit insights into Hollywood while going a bit quiet at that use of the word ‘beautiful’. It doesn’t take much.

Similarly, when our Economics teacher describes (bisexual) John Maynard Keynes as ‘certainly very confused about his sexuality’, I ask him what could possibly be confusing about it. At this point, there are posters of key economic graphs and diagrams that suddenly fall to the floor all around us because I’ve created a level of embarrassment in that classroom that melts Blu-Tack. To his credit, the teacher good-naturedly corrects himself, but I seem to be on a kind of mission.

Some of this is a demand for attention just to liven things up around here. Mainly, it’s a growing exasperation with Dad and the peculiar opinions he shares with me every evening. For example, there’s an amiable couple of middle-aged men, Tim and Frank, who run a local fish and chip shop. Dad admires their fish and chips. He says one night, ‘The thing about shirt-lifters, they’ve always got something extra. It’s true, isn’t it? I know you like your Stephen Fry, boy, and he’s clever, in’t he? I can’t be doing with Boy George, the dirty bastard, but you can see he knows his business. Same with Tim and Frank. Bloody good chips. And fish. They’ve always got something. Not just Tim and Frank – I mean arse-bandits in the round.’

I briefly promise myself to one day write a play called Arse-Bandits in the Round, but otherwise nod quietly through this, tucking in to my massive mixed grill with cheesy mash.

I get lazy in my observance of Dad’s ‘guidelines’ and he occasionally throws a wobbly. His technique is to store up about a fortnight’s worth of tiny resentments and then let them all flood out in a noisy mini-bollocking.

‘You do the washing-up IN THE MORNING, boy! Not when you feel like it. D’YOU ’EAR? And don’t think I haven’t noticed that you never bother on a Thursday so you can leave it to Josie – because I have.’

‘Right, well, sorry about that but . . .’

‘There’s no need to be sorry! This is your home! And another thing – you need to wash the bath out after you’ve been in it.’

‘I do!’

‘Not yesterday you didn’t.’

‘OK, well, that is embarrassing because I thought . . .’

‘It’s not embarrassing! You live here. Mark was just the same when he first came here and by the time he left he knew how to live with someone without being a twat.’

I start to walk upstairs.

‘Where you going?’

‘I’m a twat, apparently. So I won’t keep you.’

Walking away is the only reply that actually gets to him. I hear him swearing and banging a few doors downstairs for a couple of minutes and then he pulls himself together. He calls up, ‘I’m only hard on people I care about, boy!’

I don’t answer. He goes to the pub.

The diary becomes a storage vessel of angry denunciations along the ‘who the hell gave him permission to talk to me like that?’ lines. On paper, I’m a fearless warrior. In the house, I hardly speak. For obvious reasons, I particularly hate it when he loses his temper. I start to dread teatime when he’ll put on Channel 4 News to have an excited rant at whatever queer, leftie, bleeding-heart or woman is currently failing to support the status quo. His only area of self-censorship is in the matter of race: I never hear him use the n-word, for example, but this level of self-restraint costs him dearly and everyone else will pick up the tab. He reserves particular contempt for Jon Snow, whose blue eyes and brightly coloured socks and ties present Dad with some kind of primal challenge. ‘Who’s a pretty boy, then!?’ he yells at the television one night when Snow is giving some Anglican bishop an averagely hard time.

He rightly suspects that I disagree with him about basically everything and is always keen for us to have a lively debate and a frank exchange of views. So obviously I give him nothing. I go for whichever tack will close the conversation down fastest: I shrug, mumble, dissemble, falsely agree with him, allow him to think I find his views unworthy of my important consideration – whatever it takes.

I do this a) because I’m a lousy debater and hate arguments; b) because there’s no arguing with him anyway so what’s the point; and c) because I’m still scared of him.

I start to pray. Earnestly and properly, every night, on my knees by the side of the bed. I recite the Lord’s Prayer as a sort of gateway prayer. Then I chat to Mum for a while, telling her about my day and complaining about Dad, trying for her to make it funny. Finally I try to barter with God or Jesus, or whoever – I don’t know how it’s supposed to work – and promise him that I’ll lead a decent and useful life if he just gives me this one thing. If he just lets me go to Cambridge, I swear I’ll be a kind man and a good servant. Just this one thing, Lord. Just get me the fuck out of here. Sorry about the swearing, Lord. Hope you don’t mind.

By the spring of 1992 I’m so sick of Lincolnshire I’m almost struck dumb. I can’t say anything in the staffroom at Gateway without someone two years younger than me going, ‘Ooh! Someone’s swallowed a dictionary!’ So I don’t say anything. At school, the novelty value of having me around has worn off and the sixth form seem to have concluded that I’m a freak and a weirdo. I keep out of their way. With Mark and Andrew, the family dynamic takes hold and I have no confidence in their boisterous company. And I certainly say as little as possible at home. All my friends have gone, apart from Will and he’s utterly wrapped up in his new girlfriend. Everyone I fancy isn’t interested because I’m too old or too strange.

From April, the diary goes quiet. I stop writing about how I need to do some work and actually do some work. I still pray for two As but also start to try and make them happen. One Saturday, a few days before the exams, Dad invites me into the garden, where he and Delia are having a beer and a barbeque. I say no thanks. He can scarcely believe such incredible willpower. I’ve won his highest praise – I am now officially ‘a grafter’. It’s now or never. Prince Hal is either going to leap onto his horse in a single bound or carry on getting pissed with Falstaff. Luke is either going to leave Tatooine forever, or go to work as a rent boy in the Mos Eisley cantina.

Delia kindly makes me a cooked breakfast on exam mornings, which I manage to find traumatic because that’s what Mum used to do for my GCSEs. It feels like I’ve sold her out.

On the morning of the results, Will picks me up to drive me to school. He laughs and gives me a hug when he sees the sick-looking bastard that greets him at the door. On the way, he swerves the car around to try and cheer me up, which makes me want to strangle him. Mr Edwards is there in the sixth-form common room, standing exactly where he did a year ago, with the same poker face, giving me another carefully folded piece of paper. I take it to a far corner and sit down. Oh well, fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke. I open it.

History	A (a)
Economics	A (a)

Well now, would you look at that? Me, I can’t take my eyes off it. Uncomplicated joy doesn’t get much less complicated or much more joyful. There again, these days even the best news comes fully loaded. Daisy approaches, concerned. ‘Bloody hell, Rob, are you OK?’

‘Yeah, Daisy, yeah. Very OK, thanks. This is good crying. Very good crying.’

*

That evening, if the sun had known of the pub-crawl to follow, it would have set with a shudder.

I’m sitting at the top of the stairs when Dad comes home. ‘Boy? Rob?’ he shouts as soon as he gets through the door. I come down the stairs, shakily and being careful not to trip. These bloody stairs.

‘How d’you get on, son?!’ he shouts.

I smile at him, wishing I was cool enough to pause. I’m nowhere near that cool.

‘I’ve got three As and I’m going to Cambridge University.’

He throws a fist in the air and says, at the very, very top of his voice, which is quite a loud place, ‘YEEEEEAAAAAHHH!!!’ He then comes at me with frightening speed and gives me a hug that I think might snap me in half. He seems pleased.

We start at the outskirts of the village and steadily work our way in. At every pub, he starts chatting to me or to the people he knows and then suddenly remembers what just happened and randomly gives another full-volume victory-roar. Much as we’ve had a tough year, I’m inordinately proud to have made him so happy. He takes special pleasure in the fact that his friend Neil’s two privately educated sons didn’t (for whatever reason) apply to Oxford or Cambridge. He translates that into my having more, or larger, ‘balls’. Well, whatever – let him enjoy it in his own way, I think, magnanimously. Of course, I’m also secretly fucking delighted that I was the first in my family to go anywhere and that I did it from a state school. The fact that I took three years over it will be, in the future, a detail which I tend to glide over.

Never mind. Here are six pubs.

I’m already asleep when he wanders into my room by accident and falls on his face. ‘Dad, mate. I think you’ve got the wrong bedroom.’

‘Righto, boy,’ he says, getting up. ‘Comfy!’ He wobbles out and I hear him collapse into his own bed. ‘YEEEAAAHHH!’

I wake up the next morning with the kind of headache only a nineteen-year-old should seriously be expected to deal with. But instead of sawing my own head off, I check the post. Robinson College’s Senior Tutor has sent me another letter. ‘It is with great pleasure . . .’ This time, I read the whole thing – but only about thirty times over.

*

Two months later, Dad is driving his Vauxhall Cavalier with Mark in the passenger seat. I’m crammed in the back, along with the massive suitcase John gave me and a new but artfully battered rucksack. Normal service has been resumed: Dad completely lost it trying to take the front wheel off my bike before stuffing both parts into the boot. Anyway, he doesn’t call me lazy any more. He sees the stack of books I’ve bought from Robinson’s English reading list and stops mentioning the 8 a.m. curtains. He knows I read all night.

It’s drizzling on the A1 and Dad offers an ongoing commentary about how the interval – when his windscreen wipers are on ‘interval wipe’ – is either too short to merit the wipe or too long for him to see where he’s going. Mark is not enjoying the ride. If it was him, he’d be driving at twice the speed with four times the competence, so he distracts himself by asking me questions.

‘What do you think the bird situation will be like at Cambridge then, Bobs?’

It’s not as if I’m indifferent to the bird situation, although I’m fairly sure I won’t be calling them birds. I expect the female undergraduates to be exactly like all the other girls and women I’ve ever met, except that these birds will surely want to fuck me. What with me being so clever and imaginative and everything.

I reply, ‘Yeah . . .’

Luckily, I’ve never called them birds out loud, so I won’t have to adjust that bit of vocabulary. I’ve been practising for years talking the way I think a Cambridge student talks, but only to a selected audience – Isabel, Carole, Heather Slater and a couple of other teachers. I’m currently under the impression that it’s all to do with irony and detachment. I think that whatever they say, clever people don’t mean it. I expect in the next hour to be in the exclusive company of people who would never dream of calling a spade a spade. The very idea! Surely, it’s all going to be rather camp. And by the time we pass Huntingdon, my accent is finally in line with the geography of England. It was a good four years ago that I started to say ‘carstle’ instead of ‘caastle’ and ‘ahp’ instead of ‘oop’. All the affectations are coming home, I think. To the place where they won’t be affectations any more. No more pretending.

We find my room at Robinson and Mark and Dad nearly piss themselves when they see a note on the bed, reading ‘YOUR BEDMAKER’S NAME IS ALISON’. Finally, Little Lord Fauntleroy has staff.

I walk them back to the car. Mark now has business cards and he gives one to me. On the back, he’s written, ‘Whatever the time, day or night, if you need me, give me a call.’ It occurs to me for the very first time that he’s worried about me being here on my own in this new place where he can’t keep an eye out for me. I thank him, even though the guilty truth is that I’ve been at Robinson for ten minutes and haven’t felt safer or more at home since Mum died.

‘Right then, boy,’ Dad says. ‘See you at Christmas. Try not to get VD. Good luck with it all, me old beauty.’ He’s looking emotional too, but mainly he’s already annoyed about the drive home, as is poor Mark. We shake hands. They get in the Cavalier and I wave them off until the car is out of sight.

*

It’s a pity I’m wearing trainers because I have no heel to turn on. I turn anyway, put my hands in my pockets and saunter up the brick walkway of the main college gate. I didn’t give Darth much of a battle. This will be different. I can stop worrying about how to be a boy. I can stop showing off about how not to be a boy. I’ll just be myself.

That shouldn’t be too difficult, should it?