Paperboy (29 page)

Next, Mrs Fowler started on the lounge, dangling crocheted antimacassars from the backs of the armchairs and placing yellowed doilies under anything in the room that didn’t move. Chalk and china knick-knacks began to appear: poodles, windmills, fishing boats, a giant fly made of brass that held pins. I realized what she was doing: she was turning our house into her house. Already crepuscular, the gloomy rooms sank into senescence. Once she was satisfied, she would march from the room with a mutter of ‘That’s
much
better.’

There are men who will do anything to avoid an argument with women. Bill meekly ate what was set before him, refusing to be drawn into the complex question of his preferences. I dug out my old notebooks, or retreated to the cinema. My mother chewed her nails, sensing defeat. Even the dog hid in the back room, developing a zoo-cage mentality that would eventually drive it to compulsive pacing, insanity and an early death.

There had to be some way out. Our family had never been close, but now it was quickly falling to bits. Like stress fractures appearing in the sixties concrete motorway that cut through East Greenwich, something had to crack. Eventually it did.

Kath put up with being relegated to an ever-smaller corner of the kitchen for three weeks, then fled to my room, where she sat biting her nails and peering from the window in abject misery.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ she confided. ‘Your father hates me more each day. You’re the only one who understands that I’m not the villain in this, and you’re just a child.’

I wasn’t thrilled to be considered a child. I had started thinking of myself as an adult at the age of twelve. ‘You’re always telling me to act on what I feel,’ I told her. ‘Why don’t
you
do it? Go in to the kitchen and throw her out. Chuck her into the street, and her suitcase after her.’

‘She’s his mother,’ Kath said in awe.

‘She’s not just his mother,’ I told her. ‘She’s a rude word.’

‘You’re right,’ Kath agreed, the truth dawning. ‘She’s a horrible old bitch.’ Shocked, she threw her hand over her mouth. ‘Goodness.’

‘And you have to throw her out.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Then she’ll continue to act like she’s Dad’s wife instead of his mother, and turn you into her daughter, and make this family into something really, really strange.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Go on,’ I goaded. ‘Go down there. Put your foot down. Let her know who’s boss.’

But she didn’t. Kath went back to the kitchen and waited patiently while her mother-in-law took over the sink, the draining board, the counter. Finally, when Mrs Fowler realized that Kath was not going to move any further, she snatched a saucepan away from her. ‘For God’s sake,’ she shouted, ‘don’t you know anything about the preparation of decent food?’

There was a small silence, then an explosion of pots, pans and crockery as my mother threw my grandmother out of the kitchen. Mrs Fowler burst forth, her navy-blue coat covered in flour and eggs. ‘That’s it!’ she wailed. ‘I won’t stay in this house for another second, not if you
paid
me! I’ll not remain in a house where all my goodwill and hard work is ignored and thrown back in my face!’

She stumped upstairs, packed her leather suitcase and returned to stand dramatically in the hall doorway. ‘You can be sure that I’ll let my son know it was you who drove me out on to the street!’ She raised a hand, pointing a forefinger to the sky, preparing to issue a proper Victorian curse. ‘And I swear that if I should die this very night,’ she intoned solemnly, ‘my death will be on your conscience until the day you die. Probably longer.’

And with that, the front door slammed, the wind dropped, the house fell silent and she was gone. After an hour the dog came out from behind the couch.

My mother should have been jubilant, but she wasn’t. She felt she had committed a terrible sin, when all she had done was stand up for herself. She wondered what on earth she could tell Bill when he returned home from work. He would be furious, he would blame her for everything, he would not talk to her for months, years, possibly the rest of his life.

That night, Mrs Fowler went to her sister Carrie’s to stay. After setting down her leather suitcase and asking for a nice cup of hot, strong tea, she sat down on the sofa, closed her eyes and died.

Kath took the phone call and listened with growing numbness. She had only just mastered the art of answering the phone, and now she was about to be put off it for life. By the time she replaced the receiver, she was distraught.

‘What am I going to do when Bill finds out?’ she asked. ‘This is worse than before. I threw her out, and she cursed me. She willed herself to die, just to spite me. She’s turned me into a cold-blooded killer. He’s going to blame me for murdering his mother.’

But oddly, Bill didn’t. He let himself in quietly and
stood
at the window, watching the boats make their serene passage down to the wide silver reaches of the Thames. A thin pink mist had settled on the lowlands by the riverbank. The last remaining tatters of cloud disappeared, as if fleeing over the edge of the world. He stood there until the street lights came on and the sky to the North had turned a clear navy blue. Even then he did not move.

Bill remained quiet and thoughtful in the days that led up to the funeral. Mrs Fowler was placed in an urn beside her husband, where she could continue to have a go at him. Quite a few of the neighbours from Reynold’s Place turned up and stayed timidly in the background, like Munchkins making sure the witch was dead.

Neither I nor my mother could understand Bill’s mood. After a while, his taciturn demeanour slowly lifted and he became almost chatty. He seemed strangely free, happy even. And as the old woman’s shadow slowly faded, he finally started to notice his wife. It was as if he had found something that had been there all along, waiting patiently for discovery, only it had been too small and quiet to see.

‘Can I ask you something?’ I said to Kath. My mother and I had taken the dog for a walk. The Alsatian was trying to claw its way ahead, spraying spittle and making strangled retching noises on its lead. ‘When we were in Westerdale Road, I saw him hit you. Why didn’t you just leave?’

‘Oh you did, did you? I wondered if you had.’ She fell silent. We walked on. The dog sounded as if it was choking to death, its pink tongue protruding obscenely from its mouth. She slipped it from its lead and it shot off into the woods to take a dump and chase a rabbit.

‘Well, he only hit me a couple of times,’ said Kath finally. ‘You’re talking about that evening you saw us
through
the banisters. He came at me again and I fell backwards.’

‘But—’

‘Then he hit himself. Over and over again. I sat there watching him while he did it. You can’t imagine how I felt. I wanted to reach out and hold him, but he just wouldn’t let me. He wanted to hurt himself. Well, you’re the only other person who knows about it. It has to be our secret.’

‘But I still don’t understand. Were you ever in love with him?’

‘No. Nor with anyone else, before you ask. It would have been nice, and I thought it might happen, but that wasn’t the way things turned out. There are different kinds of love; I had you and Steven.’

‘Then why have you stayed with him all this time?’

‘Oh, there are things you don’t know about your father. He grew up in that tiny dark house listening to his mother destroy the reputations of everyone around her. I try not to believe that there are bad people, but she really tested my patience. I suppose she was a product of her time, and the time before that, when a strong woman could rule the street she had been born in. He finally got away from her by taking a job in the city. But he’d picked up her habit of saying terrible, untruthful things about people behind their backs, and one day it got him fired from his job.’

I remembered the whispered mystery of my father’s lost job.

‘He was out of work, but stayed up at his mother’s house so often that you probably thought he was still going to the office. After a long time he eventually landed a new job and his career finally took off. He started doing well – he’s smarter than he seems, your father – and he rose quickly through the ranks. He worked very hard and was heading for the top of his profession, but the
company
decided to relocate to Toronto, and it broke his heart not to go with them.’

‘Why didn’t he go?’ I asked. ‘Why would he choose to end up in a horrible run-down gas showroom in the Elephant and Castle instead?’

‘Why didn’t he go?’ She stopped and studied me, as if amazed that I could be so stupid. ‘You know the answer to that, Christopher. He stayed because of you. He could see that you were clever. He didn’t want to take you out of your school. You were so happy there. He gave it all up for you.’

I felt deeply ashamed. In my heart I had always known the answer, but I had given my father nothing back. Secret emotions, hidden feelings, pretending everything was fine: this was what we were best at. Why did adults have to bury everything? Our family problems, Bill had always told us, were a private thing. And he was determined to keep them that way, even if it sent us all mad in the process.

1
Playboy
ran cutting-edge fiction in its pages and was a good friend to upcoming authors. It recently published an article on pubic hair-styling, so obviously the tradition continues.

28

Rebel Rebel

THE POPULAR MUSIC
of my mid to late teenage years was truly terrible: Marc Bolan
¹
whining about golden-haired fairies and stardust, Groundhogs and Iron Butterfly sounding like someone panicking in a roomful of dustbin lids, Jethro Tull playing the flute while hopping about on one leg like Worzel Gummidge. The only bands I could bear to listen to were Mott the Hoople and Led Zeppelin, although, if truth be told, I preferred
Die Fledermaus
. ‘Whole Lotta Love’ received some major suburban-bedroom turntable time, and was an antidote to the local disco, where everyone sat in the corners of the room, nodding their heads and grooving along with little spastic hand gestures. The girls wore maroon floor-length crushed-velour dresses and had long kinked hair tied back with ribbons, Pre-Raphaelite virgins on cider and joints. Their idea of a good time was getting smashed while listening to the screaming bit from Pink Floyd’s ‘Careful With That Axe, Eugene’.

For the weaker members of the school pack, it’s always a strange, cocooned existence on the sidelines of the action. I enviously watched the other kids as they honed their social skills, getting their hands into drunk girls’ shirts while they danced to ‘Ride A White Swan’. The other geeks and I were still making Aurora model kits of mummies and werewolves. None of us were rebels.

The school had a good name. The head and his staff, stiff and imperious in their chalk-stained black gowns, flapped through the corridors like adrenalin-charged vampires. They were grudgingly respected because they did not try to be our friends, but kept their distance and occasionally maimed us when we went too far. We saw the movie
If
, in which Malcolm McDowell machine-gunned his teachers, and it simply wasn’t us.

That was before our relief art teacher Mike Branch arrived. He was about thirty years younger than any other member of staff, and came for the summer term. Everyone fell in love with him. He was handsome and funny and a bit mad. He let you smoke in the kiln room, his long blond hair hung over his collar, and he
wore jeans
. To boys who were actually expected to wear school regulation underpants, this was amazing. He asked us to call him Mike, and explained that his classes would be very different from what we were used to.

The first time I saw him, he was lounging with his brown suede boots on the desktop, reaching an arm up to the blackboard to wipe away the masters of the Florentine renaissance. ‘Forget the heavy stuff,’ he told us. ‘We’ll be studying the Dadaist
²
movement, OK?’ Then he wrote
REBELLION IN ART
in red and threw the chalk out of the window.

Suddenly art became the hot class to take.

Mike’s lessons were unpredictable, and actually interesting. We created anti-meat art and self-destructing art and death-to-the-ruling-class art. The other teachers tolerated our displays because technically speaking they weren’t very good, which made them less of a threat. Besides, as pupils we were Showing An Interest, thus achieving a prime educational directive. The fact that we would have donated our kidneys for transplant if Mike had asked us hadn’t escaped their notice, either. The more ignored and hopeless teachers realized they could learn something from watching the art class.

One day Mike placed a single on the turntable of his record player. I was fist-deep in a gore-sprayed papiermâché duck when ‘Paint It Black’ by the Rolling Stones came on. I had never liked the dirge-like song, but it transpired that Mike had a purpose for playing it.

‘For the climax to our season of anti-art,’ he said, strolling between my paint-spattered classmates, ‘we are going to paint it black.’