Paperboy (32 page)

What about locations? If you wanted to set a story in Paris, did you have to go there? The furthest we had ever ventured was Broadstairs. We hadn’t even been to Cornwall because, as my father was fond of pointing out, ‘It’s further away than France, for God’s sake.’ What about a story set on Mars? Where did you even begin to start with other planets? What would an alien look like if it lived on a planet with a million times more gravity than that of the Earth? How would he pick things up if his arms bent the other way?

And what about drama? If nothing more dramatic than a small bin fire had ever occurred in your life, could you still describe the collapse of empires? Were there perhaps laws against doing so, like the list of strange nouns governing language rules that I had discovered in the East Greenwich Public Library?

‘This obsession with plots, well, it’s not a bad thing,’ said my mother, reading over my shoulder. She had lately begun making regular checks on me. ‘But at some point you have to start using them to understand people. People shape the events of a story, not the other way round.’

‘That’s not true. Wars change people.’

‘Yes, but whether they are brave or weak in terrible circumstances is decided by their character. And people’s characters are very complicated and contradictory – far more so than you’d ever imagine.’

‘Are you saying the stories aren’t important?’

‘No, I’m saying they’re the part you can make up. But you can’t make up emotions. They have to be real.’

‘Then what do you do about stories?’

‘Oh, those can come out of your head. If you’re convincing in what you make up, it will feel real to the reader. You always liked
Hancock’s Half-Hour
, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’ The Hancock radio shows drew vast audiences. The streets had always been emptier when he was on the air. Hancock was effectively playing himself, an embittered former vaudeville artist on the downslide from fame, yet he could barely improvise a single word. He relied on two scriptwriters whom he would eventually come to resent, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, but without whom he was doomed. The pair had changed the face of radio comedy by making it sound naturalistic, even when the shows were absurd flights of fancy. There were pauses and coughs, sighs and – most feared of all on radio – passages of total silence. One episode,
A Sunday Afternoon at Home
, nailed the absolute deadliness of the English post-lunch Sunday: ‘Nowhere to go, nothing to do, just sitting here waiting for the next lot of grub to come up.’
²
Galton and Simpson even acknowledged their debt to Harold Pinter in one of the show’s episodes. ‘This isn’t a Pinter play,’ they made Hancock announce, ‘where you can say whatever you like so long as you put enough gaps in it.’

‘When you listen to those shows,’ said my mother, ‘do they tell you what Tony Hancock is like?’

‘Of course. He’s rude and pompous and insecure, and everything annoys him.’

‘So if the writers decide to put him in hospital or let him win the pools, you already know how he will react. And you think about how
you
would react in the same situation. And the gap between the two makes the comedy. To me, that’s what being a writer is really about. Words can inspire a sense of recognition, but how much more exciting to provide a revelation!’

‘I haven’t had any revelations.’

‘Never confuse the writer with what he writes – they’re two different things. Make up the circumstances, pour out the emotions and don’t care what anyone else thinks of you.’ She dried her hands absently on her apron. ‘I grew up in a time that disapproved of anyone doing anything that might mark them out as different. No wonder writers and artists were always looked upon as outsiders by people of my generation.’

‘I am a bit of an outsider,’ I admitted. ‘I’m always the last one to get picked in games except Griffiths, and he doesn’t have all his toes.’

‘Good can come out of not being included. Well, that’s all I have to say. You’ll have to work the rest out for yourself. Now come and help me lay the table.’

After that conversation, I abandoned my efforts to behave more normally than anyone else in the country, and went back to being my normal abnormal self.

1
Innovative comedy show that even the US president, Richard Nixon, appeared on.

2
Hancock continued: ‘I thought my mother was a bad cook but at least her gravy used to move about.’ Some of his finest shows were wiped by the BBC and remain lost.

31

The Naming of Fears

I LOOKED DOWN
my list of fears and realized that fearfulness came as naturally to me as breathing.

It seemed a more real state than being happy. I had not experienced anything directly tragic. The heavens had not fallen in on my life. Yet so much passed unspoken that there was a danger we might all drift along from birth to death in a state of suspended animation, never waking up and noticing the powerful undercurrents that swept us along. More and more, I understood why writers like Waugh and Woolf and Dickens and Forster treated their characters like feathers floating in fast-running gutters. Perhaps there was nothing you could do until you gathered speed and were swept down the drain.

If I could not write about being an active part of the world, I could at least write about my fear of it.

Uncapping my handsome Waterman fountain pen, a purchase made with my Star Letter gains, I began a story about a power cut, and being stranded alone in the silent darkness, only to discover that there was something else in the room with me, some great darker-than-dark
object
that could not be named without terrible consequences.

The bloody thing leaked everywhere, spreading great stains of navy-blue Quink ink. I switched to a Biro.

I tried to put a name to my fears. Then I tried to sell the story. Oddly enough, nobody at
Yachts and Yachting
wanted to publish a gloomy odyssey into a schoolboy’s dark recesses of the soul.

More oddly still, my father really seemed to hate me now. It was as though he thought I had adopted this latest persona – pretending to be a regular son – for the sole purpose of embarrassing him. I couldn’t understand why trying to be normal had made me look so weird. Surely I was just doing what everyone did in our house? After all, Bill was pretending to be a well-balanced father and husband, despite the fact that he had once again stopped speaking to Kath and went out of his way to avoid me and everyone else, even hiding behind the door when a neighbour came to call. Kath pretended to be a doting wife and mother, even though she had suffered a nervous breakdown that no one was allowed to mention, and had fled to Russia without telling anyone. We were so determined to be normal that when we came home one evening to find that the dog had gone mad, spraying blood and vomit around the walls before dropping dead in the lounge, Bill had merely dragged its carcass outside and buried it in the garden without a word. When my beloved cat Wobbles had died, he had made me carry its corpse outside in order to toughen me up. These days, I’d get trauma counselling.

Kath needed to get out of the stifling, thick-walled house that kept so much out and let nothing in. Her experience of different types of work was ten times greater than her husband’s, to the point where she had now run the entire gamut of legal employment. Her latest job involved
deploying
teams of housewives to deliver free samples of fabric softener, but they hadn’t managed to reach their targets, so the entire house was stacked with thousands of gelatinous envelopes of softener and everything reeked of sickly-sweet chemicals, a scientist’s approximation of the scent of roses. As the sachets grew warm and burst, they seeped into the wallpaper and carpets, staining everything cobalt blue.

Bill concentrated on grooming Steven to become a professional spanner-holder, and it worked because his youngest son was so gentle and well behaved that he did it with unquestioning loyalty. Steven clearly had his own anxieties, but his uncomplaining nature meant that he lost out in the battle for attention. His dyslexia and shyness went unnoticed until they were ingrained in his personality like the streaks in the faux-wood hall staircase. Even so, it would have been obvious to anyone, had they looked, that he was the only member of the family to approximate normality without consciously having to take a run at it.

Bill knew I conspired with Kath against him – he had seen the pair of us creeping down to the end of the garden together from his observation post at the window. He badly needed an ally of his own, but with no mechanism for creating one via the usual parental channels of emotional blackmail, he went spectacularly overboard on the presents. By buying Steven his own motorbike years before the poor kid could drive, we could all start considering the possibility of grotesque road accidents at the earliest available opportunity.

Bill seemed angry that I should be indulged by my mother, and especially that I might be allowed to choose my own path in life. After all, he came from a long line of men who had been set upon a track of minimal education and backbreaking work until the day their clothes were
put
in a box and given to the Salvation Army. I didn’t understand it – surely my father should have been rejoicing that times were changing enough to allow a break in tradition. He didn’t, though, because the changes were coming too late for him.

Through the passing years, Bill remained an enigma. Each time I thought we had finally reached a state of truce, the dream of an alliance slipped away once more, the warmth dissipated and my father retreated more deeply into inarticulate isolation, until there could be no more hope of a reconciliation.

When Steven met his first girlfriend and fell in love with her, the pattern was finally altered. Rather than bringing her back to spend time with the family, my brother shot from Cyril Villa to her house like a scalded cat, and was wise enough to stay there. Her parents were normal. They liked each other, and doted on their children. They didn’t pass the years locked in arcane wars of attrition. I think it came as a bit of a shock for Steven to discover that our family did not set the standard for normality.

It didn’t take Bill long to see how alone he would soon become, but he did not know how to make amends. Instead, he took out his growing anger on me. Every time I entered the room, he got himself into a state of barely suppressed fury, spoiling for a fight.

I passed my exams with good results. One day I was given a piece of advice from a retiring teacher. ‘Boys are terribly single-minded, they only do well in the subjects they care about,’ said the old man, who was permanently covered in chalk dust and whose name, appropriately enough, was Mr Scholar. ‘What subjects don’t you like?’

‘Maths, physics, chemistry,’ I told him.

‘And what are your favourites?’

‘English, art, history, economics.’

‘Then stop revising the former at once and put all your efforts into the latter. The teachers won’t care when they’ve realized that you’ve given up the ghost, I promise you. They only notice the ones who keep trying.’ As he headed off, Mr Scholar paused to hitch his raggedy gown up to his shoulders like a tired night-club hostess. ‘Remember what I said,’ he called back. ‘Nobody gets points for being a nice person. Nice makes you invisible. There’s another lot coming up behind you. To us, you’re already last year’s class. You don’t have to care about what we think.’

I followed Mr Scholar’s instructions. I intensified the focus of my studies, vanishing within the house to become a pallid, slender ghost who occasionally emerged from my bedroom to eat or wash.

Friendless and determined to be unloved, my father remained stranded at the window as if keeping an eye out for enemy battleships. He glowered at me each time I passed with a stack of books cradled in my arms. He warned me there would be no money to go to university, and told me not to even think about the idea. He took to muttering insults under his breath.

‘I think you need to look for a flat before your father ends up killing you,’ said my mother one day.

‘He’s killing
you
,’ I countered. ‘Look at yourself, all the weight you’ve lost. When was the last time you did anything just for yourself? He won’t let you out of the house unless he comes with you. You can’t cope with the job and this place and him. I could stay for a while longer …’

‘And what good would that do? You know what will happen. It will drag you down as well. Better that one of us gets away. Go and find yourself, fall in love, have some adventures, get hurt a few times. I should have taken the chance when I had it, but now …’ She twisted the thin gold band that had grown loose on her finger. ‘Some days
I
wonder what would have happened if I had gone away and stayed away.’

‘You could have gone off and had an affair. Instead you went to a Russian museum.’

‘Who would have wanted me, the wrong side of thirty-five and unable to have children? I’m not one of those dolly birds up in London. Besides, if I’d had an affair I might have got a taste for it and not come back. And I couldn’t do that, because who would have looked after you? You are my greatest hope for the future, but you must leave before he hurts you so badly that you become like him.’