The Cornflake House (15 page)

‘You feel an outcast?' the man guessed hopefully as Fabian pouted at him. ‘You suffer from a feeling that you don't belong?'

‘No,' Mum chipped in, ‘he's sulking because Merry,' she had the child in question clamped between her legs, ‘trod on his guitar and we can't afford to mend it. Merry does that, breaks things, he's always on the go.' What was the use? She'd been through this before, trying to describe the indescribable, and it seemed to be getting her nowhere. The last thing she needed was for someone to decide that Fabian was a problem too.

For the third visit she chose me as travelling companion and helper.

‘He won't be nearly so interested in you,' she promised. I was sitting on Merry in a crowded train compartment at the time. It was the only way to control him. Nothing daunted, he jogged his captured body to the rhythm of the train. Having suffered the motion in stereo, I was quite queasy by the time we reached Waterloo. I was fourteen, an age at which I found my family mortifying under any circumstances, and the looks on the faces of our fellow travellers are clearly imprinted on my memory. Not only were they compelled to watch a fat, tangle-haired girl sit on a weird little boy while glaring at another freakish child who appeared to have a vacuum cleaner welded to his armpit, but the conversation they overheard must have sounded obscene.

‘It's only boys like Fabian that get him going,' Mum continued, ‘that's why I've left him with the animals this time.'

Several passengers dropped their newspapers in dismay.

‘Course, by rights,' she carried on, oblivious, ‘he should have noticed Django's colour, but he's too young. Teenagers, he said, and you should have seen him, Eve, he was practically dribbling with excitement over your dark-skinned brother.'

Brothers, I thought, from rising rock stars to domestic appliance fanatics, who needs them? Only little Samik, who was tearful and insecure but otherwise fairly ‘normal', was worth bothering with.

That was my fourteen-year-old attitude. I love my brothers, I always did, just had a patch of embarrassment in my teens. You know about Fabian, I suppose? He's famous, or he was. Recently he's gone beyond famous to that tranquil place rock stars seem to seek after years of blasting music and deafening applause. He had a good time, sex, drugs – I remember the glazed eyes only too well – and rock and roll. Then suddenly it ended. One final shattering chord and he was done.

‘I'm going acoustic,' he told me and Mum the last time he came to The Cornflake House, ‘going to play in small cafés, on beaches, round camp fires, that sort of thing. Quiet, I'm into that. Soft,' and he kissed Mum's cheek goodbye. Whether he meant to, hoped to see her again I couldn't say. He'll stay away, even when my trial comes up, I'm pretty sure of that. Shan't see those cinnamon eyes, those long, talented fingers again. Unless you and I take a trip to a particularly remote Greek island and wander down, on a balmy evening, for a drink at the local bar.

Meanwhile, back at the psychiatrist's, Merry was being classified as hyperactive and educationally subnormal, while Django continued to baffle the disappointed doctor.

‘No Fabian today?' he asked unnecessarily, and Mum gave me an I-told-you-so smile.

Merry's labels made it possible for him to get special care and that freed the rest of us to an extent. He lived at home until he was sixteen, mind you. Then his libido went into overdrive and nothing was safe. I wasn't there when they drove Merry away. It happened when Bing was tiny and I was trying to bring up a baby and study Literature in a damp North London flat. I heard the stories of Merry's sexual exploits later and I had to laugh, although it wasn't funny. Not for Mum anyway. She'd always thought of Merry as her worst failure. Oh, she could subdue him for minutes, even hours at a time, and sometimes she channelled his energy from destructive to constructive, but she never managed to conjure real, long-term peace for him.

I went home for a weekend not long after Merry left and was struck by the emptiness of the living room. It seemed almost large with only Mum, Bing and me occupying it.

Samik hadn't fled the nest, of course, but he'd discovered rivers, canals and boats as ardently as Merry had discovered sex and was down in Guildford trying to get a holiday job on some narrow boat.

‘Merry didn't seem to mind,' Mum told me, ‘went off happy as a lark. They've got a trampoline and an electric organ. I went to see the place, of course. It's very bright, sliding glass doors everywhere. I told them to watch him with those and they said it was all right, the glass was toughened.' For the first time, I noticed how my mother had aged. There was grey in her ebony hair and although I saw no wrinkles, her skin lacked something, colour, elasticity. I couldn't bear it, this indication that she was mortal and fading.

‘I'd like to come home.'

‘Why don't you come back home?'

We spoke simultaneously. We often did.

Before he left The Cornflake House, Merry went to special school, but Django plodded on at the local primary and later at the comprehensive. He never was given labels. Whether that lack was a blessing or a curse I've no idea. For a while the psychiatrist thought he was autistic, a diagnosis based on Django's obsessive behaviour.

‘His need to repeat patterns, his overwhelming interest, to the exclusion of all else, in one topic, in Django's case the workings of vacuum cleaners, these are our indications,' the shrink told Mum. She wasn't convinced; and her instinct was right. Several weeks later, after Django had told the psychiatrist many truths about himself, the man changed his mind. He said it was another syndrome altogether, this time citing Django's want of social grace as the basis for his findings:

‘He has no concept of correct social behaviour, I have advised him many times that telling me I have, for example, hairs in my ears, is not a nice, friendly thing to do. But your Django is unable to see the difference between the things we should and should not say.'

‘He tells the truth,' Mum said, no doubt giving the doctor cause to wonder if Django's problems were inherited.

‘Absolutely, but he cannot distinguish between the truths most of us keep to ourselves and those we may speak out loud.'

Django lives in Chatham now, he chose it because of the docks. He has a flat within walking distance of the ships that interest him so. At school he only ever developed one talent, apart from the ability to mend the cleaners' equipment for them, and that was in geography. In those days the subject was colourful; pink blotches, yellow continents, blue oceans. Books were illustrated with drawings of tribes out hunting, crossing deserts, paddling canoes down wide green rivers. Django was brilliant at maps, spending hours with his face inches from the paper, perfecting every cove and inlet. Ultimately this passion overtook his love of vacuum cleaners. I've often considered Django's luck. If Mum and I hadn't got the order of those electrical gadgets just right in our competition, we wouldn't have had a house, let alone a Hoover. What would Django have done then? He might have become intensely withdrawn, staring into space, longing for something he couldn't name. Who knows? Fate is often a kind beast.

As I say, maps took over from cleaners, and now he works for a company who publish maps old and new. Having ruined his eyes with the close work, he wears thick glasses which, I discovered when I went to look after him one time when he was ill, he puts on at seven-ten a.m. precisely, after unbuttoning his pyjama top but before taking his arms out of this garment.

It's true that maps won the day from Hoovers, but it was an uphill struggle. I once took Django with me to a party, he was seventeen and I thought it time he met some other teenagers. He wouldn't drink because I'd forgotten to take his special cup, and I knew there was no point in offering him a snack. He only ever ate his own ‘meal', a red and green affair of peas, placed in a mound, centre plate, two whole lettuce leaves curling upwards, opposite each other, and one tomato sliced in half and laid, wounded side down, on the lettuce. But the party appeared to be going well, Django was talking to another boy, advising this lad on ways of banishing spots, when I went to dance with my boyfriend.

Then I lost him. He'd vanished. I thought he'd walked home. I wasn't that worried, he was seventeen and he knew where he lived. Several hours later there was a cry from a girl who'd gone to fetch her coat from the understairs cupboard. There was Django, bent over the party-giver's rather ancient vacuum, a tubular object that he'd taken to bits, sitting with a torch in his hands. He held his light before his face as people gathered to stare at him. The ghost of Hoovers past.

Can't see many signs of innate, genetic behaviour patterns in Django's case, can you? It's unlikely that his Gypsy dad was riveted by the workings of domestic appliances. No self-respecting Romany would admit to that hobby when they should be out catching rabbits and breaking horses:

‘Sorry, Jo, can't come down the paddock with you until I've oiled me Hoover.'

Hardly the picture of life on the road we have been taught to cherish.

When I felt close to Mum and sensed that questions about our fathers, a taboo subject in my family, might not be met with unease, it was usually Django's dad I asked about.

I found it impossible to envisage my own father, and I was scared of doing so. Much as we were filled with fascination and yearning for our dads, we Cornflake House kids lived under their shadows too. Who knows? These almost phantom men might come at any time and reclaim us, whisking us away. These scenes of abduction altered, for me, as I grew. When I was little, in Lincolnshire, my dreams were of a huge, sandy-haired man who wore sandals, so I wouldn't hear his coming I suppose. It was always night and there was a full moon in that dream landscape. He was big but agile, and he carried a sack. As he swung his way to my bedside, leaping over ditches and dikes, he plucked small animals from the ground and crushed their bones with his bare hands. His sack grew heavier as he approached. By the time he arrived, squeezing his frame through the caravan door, the sack was so full it had to be dropped by my bed as he bent to lift me.

‘You're mine,' he breathed. I shivered in my nightie, shrank from his beer and tobacco breath, but never offered any resistance as he picked me up on his shoulder. It was only when he opened his sack and I saw the mess of flesh, fur and blood, that I struggled.

‘In you go,' he said, not unkindly, it was more of a tease, but as he tipped me, head first down into the death sack I kicked and bit and screamed. I used to wake, or sometimes be woken by Zulema, a second before my head collided with the poor animals.

‘Was it your “father dream”?' she'd ask. She had her own recurring nightmare involving her own imagined father. We all did, they were so swathed in mystery, our dads, it was only to be expected. Zulema's dream involved white horses and gentle rides across plains of meadow grasses. At the same point in her journey, just when she felt she was getting to know and love her father, he would suggest a gallop and race on ahead. But her horse would rear up and throw her to the ground. Instead of rescuing her, her father would turn in the distance and gallop back to her, not stopping but letting his beast thunder closer and closer. When Zulema woke with a start I knew she had just leapt to her feet to avoid being trampled to death.

My dad shrank as I grew. The sack became a trunk, then the boot of a car, but there was always a dark place in which he wanted to throw me. Not was, is; I still dream of him. My subconscious has allowed him to age, letting his hair fade from sand to ash, but the expression on his face hasn't altered. He peers at me with greed, ‘You're mine,' he says, possessively, and I can only suppose that a part of me likes this idea of being wanted, for whatever reason.

No, I never asked about my own father, fearing the worst, perhaps even fearing the best. What if he's a wonderful man, bright, intelligent, witty? Think of how much I might have missed. Now that I'm motherless, I wish I'd been braver, more inquisitive, and found out who he is while I still had the chance. On the other hand, for all I know, he may have been in contact with Mum from the day I was born. If so the least he could do now is to get in touch, to hear my side of the story. This is one place where his agility would come in handy, the only place I've lived where being rescued, even if rescue meant being shoved in a sack, would be a treat.

The little girl in me says ‘what the hell, he wouldn't love me anyway'. Our dads; did they ever have a chance? Or were they discouraged by Mum and her magic? As I said, when I felt able, I did ask the odd question about Django's father; and I got the odd answer.

‘He was a rough one all right,' Mum once admitted.

‘Was he really a Gypsy?'

‘Oohh yes, warts and all.'

‘And was he obsessive, like Django?'

‘Only about sex,' Mum grinned. ‘Sex and sugar. He ate sweeties all the time. Humbugs.'

That was about it. Either she would drift to a world of fantasy, making up stories she thought I'd enjoy, or she'd make my head fizz until I dropped the subject and went to find the aspirin.

Ten minutes to lights out. Can you imagine what it's like to have your life regulated by somebody else? I am tired, but I shan't sleep. There is more I'd like to tell you. But it's lights out and I'm condemned to lie in the dark. Remembering. Alone. Panic struck. I've had a change of heart, Matthew. I do want to see you, I need to talk to a friend. I need to repeat, out loud, the accusations hurled by the women who attacked me in the toilet. They called me Mother Fucker, and it shocked me, but it's just an expression, an Americanism, isn't it? I could live with that. Then they called me Mother Killer. And that's what Valerie was trying to tell me earlier. Somebody somewhere has got hold of the idea that I
killed
my mother.