PRAYER FOR THE DEAD
by Alastair Dandy
Smashwords Edition
Prayer for the Dead
Copyright 2010 by Alastair Dandy
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PRAYER FOR THE DEAD
Alastair Dandy
for Carrie, who believed.
Chapter One
- FACES IN CLOUDS -
"If there rise among you a prophet or a dreamer of dreams...
Thou shalt not hearken." Deuteronomy 13:1
My father took me travelling.
Standing beside him on the concrete causeway below the lighthouse while he stood guard beside his fishing rod, while the east breeze, an invisible carpet of cold salt air, rolled across the bay carrying hungry gulls on their dipping, crying journey around the mouth of the river, I could easily believe that we were one person. Father and son standing tall before the sea and the cold air, both squinting at the horizon, one looking to see what the other could see. Sharing wisdom in unequal portions.
He seldom spoke but, when he did, he delivered considered sentences, perfectly phrased and concise, ripples of carefully-constructed sound between long and thoughtful pauses, words gleaned from the hazy distance where the sea blended into the sky. He spoke without turning his gaze from the horizon, as though addressing the future or the past, and he seldom expected a reply.
I’ve been looking for thirty years, he said once. Perhaps there is nothing to see.
I was eleven years old. With determination born of desperate optimism, I studied the blurred line that separated the top of the sea from the bottom of the sky and prayed that, whatever he was trying to find, it would be revealed to me, that I could reply, in the same measured way, There it is, Father. It is there. That, then, he would look down at me and smile at himself.
I looked for a long time but I could see nothing that he could not already see and, finally, I turned away. I pushed a concrete pebble with my foot and worked up the courage to speak.
How long have you been coming here?
Since I was your age.
Thirty years.
I nudged the pebble over the edge and it dropped silently into the grateful water. I turned back and pushed my hands into my pockets. My father had his arms folded across his chest and his head tilted to one side.
You look sad, I said.
He did not look at me when he spoke. My words did not draw his attention even vaguely away from the fascination of the horizon.
Go home, he said.
Go home, he said to the sea.
My father was a teacher but, jealous or insecure of his knowledge, he kept his wisdom to himself.
The following day, I returned on my own. I placed my feet in the shadow of my father’s and I folded my arms across my chest.
The day was calm, the sea was calm. Save for the wheeling flight of the gulls, the air was still. A solemn stillness. A graveyard without graves. The ancient sea rolled ever shoreward to the beach on my right, its blue-grey swell like the ever-spreading ripples from the fall of some pre-historic pebble. Like some giant clock, the rhythm of the ripples had ticked away the seconds for countless years and would tick them away for countless more. The same waves that had come and gone when my father was a child. The same waves now as then. I was suddenly struck by how small, how small beneath the vast dome of the sky and before the huge circle of the sea, I was.
I remember a child. He was by the shore. He looked up as I passed by and he spoke to me.
People don’t build castles like they’re supposed to.
As they’re supposed to.
There’s a proper way for everything. You don’t write like you speak so that doesn’t matter. But castles are different. They should look like castles. They shouldn’t look like small mountains of sand. I build proper castles. I build castles that look like castles. They have proper corners and proper walls. I make drawbridges for my castles. Sometimes, I sit and watch the moat fill with water when the tide comes in. For a few minutes, until the castle starts to fall apart, it looks real. Grown-ups stop and watch me make castles. They say things that make it seem like they envy my skill. It’s like a game. They say these things and, at the same time, they think to themselves that I’m just a child doing childish things and it makes them feel like they’re better than me because they’re older. But they still envy my skill. I just ignore them and let them get on with it. They don’t know anything. They don’t know me.
I used to make castles when I was your age.
I know. I can tell.
He was just a boy. A small boy. Maybe six or seven but somehow older. I had stopped, just as other grown-ups had, to watch him build his castle. At first, he ignored me but then he paused in his work. He scanned the beach, a worried expression on his face, and he looked up at me as if he was expecting something from me.
When I look back, towards a time when I built castles on the beach, a crowd of frozen faces peer back at me.
The faces of the dead.
They stare towards me as ancient photographs, their dark eyes in pallid faces looking at a vision from the future they seem unsure they can see, as if I were some spectral intruder in their static world. They look back at me as if to ask me why I come to disturb their sleep. Their faces speak.
Leave us alone.
And events are encapsulated in frozen form, standing separate and defined. Some are close together and some even touch. But most are separated by the void of forgetfulness. I can immerse myself in these events and, as if in a dream, as if I were in the middle of a pivotal scene in a film, the action begins again and it flows around me. But sometimes, most times, there seems to be neither meaning nor direction to what I can see and I wonder why I ever remembered, what it was that had planted itself in my memory. I feel that the memories cannot be mine, that I must have borrowed them or invented them.
When I look back at life, few things stand out with any recognisable meaning or as recognisable parts of a coherent story. The past is mixed up and it makes no sense.
At times, I take fragments and I stand them in a line like the first row of bricks in a wall. Doing this, I hope to build. I take them a brick at a time and I place them in a line.
My grandfather went mad.
My grandmother too.
Both sides.
Four mad grandparents and they say it runs in the family.
A few bricks into the wall and the building stops because there are too few bricks and too many gaps. I leave the wall and I come back to it, armed with answers to carefully asked questions.
Dad's dad played the piano every Sunday lunchtime session. When the bell rang, he would hang on to the piano with his fingertips. Took four of them to drag him off. Then he'd be away again. They'd lose the house. No money. No food. Try the workhouse, Sonny.
Dad was only eleven.
Try the workhouse.
Eleven.
Mother's grandfather died in the workhouse. He was mad too. Into little girls, they say. Probably little boys, I think.
Grandfather used to tickle me on his lap.
But he is dead now, as are the others.
They all died, more or less together, in the space of a year. In the space of a year, I went to five funerals.
The first was the funeral of my father’s best friend and the part that I remember, I wish I no longer could. I was fifteen years old, the youngest of five brothers. It was my first funeral, it was their first funeral, and it was a very sad affair. It was a very sad affair because it was so funny that we could hardly stop ourselves from laughing out loud.
You know how it happens. You start when you're not supposed to and then you cannot stop. It is a circle that can truthfully be described as vicious.
I couldn't stop myself. We couldn’t stop ourselves.
Even now, as I view the scene again, I shake my head at the images I see.
Elevator music plays, conveyor belt jerks forward. Coffin jerks forward. Elevator music swells. Coffin slips through tasteless purple curtains on its way to hell on earth.
He noticed it first, nudged him, who nudged him, who nudged him, who nudged me. Pass the giggle along the line. Five brothers giggling, sniffing, coughing, biting lips, shaking. Standing in line behind the widow.
Jesus Christ.
The widow of my dad's best friend.
His was a tragic end and it was the beginning of another.
Death in a polythene bag. A bootlace tied around his neck. Two bottles of aspirin in his stomach.
A farmer came along and saw him sitting in his car and thought he was asleep. That was before the polythene bag. The farmer passed by again, two hours later. Dead in a bag. Shrink-wrapped for heaven.
A sudden death. A needless death. An end.
And, as with all ends, the penultimate events live on. Once meaningless occurrences destined to be forgotten, now the tragic step-by-step run-down to the final curtain. The event and its tail become one and lodge in the memory with the permanence of a brick in a wall.
I lived through that event. I was there.
Do you know how it felt?
Exciting, that's how.
His wife had telephoned and asked if he was there and that was the first I knew. No, I said. It was not important, so I didn't tell anybody. It was very important, so I should have.
Two hours later, she rang again. Father came back from the telephone and said his best friend had gone missing. He'll be on top of Huntcliffe, if you ask me, he said.
It was the way he didn't add
or at the bottom
that awoke my interest.
What's happened?
He's been gone since before nine, Father said, checking his watch. And it's after three. He glanced at me, thought I wasn't looking, and ran his forefinger, like a knife, across his throat. My eyes widened. A shiver tickled my neck. I was about to say she'd rang before but thought I might get into trouble for not saying anything then.
By now, he was asleep in his car. The farmer had already passed by once. In just under two hours, he would pass by again and there he'd be - dead in a bag.
Where does she think he is?
Father shrugged at Mother. On the moors, perhaps, somewhere on the moors.
But where? Where could he be?
Where would you go if you wanted to top yourself? Some place you'd been before? A favourite place?
It didn't seem so obvious then, but they went there nearly every Sunday. We could have got there in less than an hour, an hour before the farmer came back.
And if we had found him, what would we have found? I've asked myself that many times and, the more I think about it, the more I think we'd have simply saved the farmer a job.
But what if I'd mentioned it before?
In a world where time only runs forward, you've got no chance. People die because time runs forward. People die because other people make decisions that seem insignificant. One word said or unsaid and somebody dies.
I am one of those who, when he sees flowers, looks for the grave. Trouble is, and I can offer neither excuse nor explanation, I want to find it.
If your life depends upon my saying or not saying the right or wrong word, you are as good as dead. If I had told them about the hysteria I had detected that was tugging at her voice, he might have lived another day.
They went there nearly every Sunday, for Christ's sake.
But he wanted out, so what the fuck?
Guilty? Not guilty. I am innocent of all crime because nobody knows a crime was committed. All the blame passed to him. Those who made him do it, those who pursued him until there was nowhere left for him to run, they got away. Their only punishment was that they had to sing a sad song at his funeral.
Where is Death's sting?
He won in the end.
Where Grave thy victory?
What is a life that's not worth living?
It's amazing how many corpses one collects along the way but it's only a problem if one has to carry them. If you drop them in the gutter, you can walk away with a light step. You can leave them there for somebody else to tread on and, sooner or later, somebody else will tidy up the mess. And when somebody asks how you are, you can answer convincingly that you are fine. And you can giggle at funerals; like we giggled at the little girl who wore a wig because they'd shaved her head to save her life; like we giggled when Bobby Kennedy was blown away. And Lennon. And the shuttle, Biafran babies and the Belgrano.
I return to the wall with a few more bricks.
November 22nd 1963. Mother cried when JFK got it in the head. Nobody cried for Oswald. If you know the wrong people, if you're in the right place at the wrong time, you don't stand a chance.
I was sitting in a brick hut listening to fishermen swapping stories when the news from Dallas came on the radio. I ran all the way home to tell everybody what had happened but they already knew.
Yes Son, we know, Mother said sadly.
Is he gonna die?
He's already dead.
Father was suspicious from the start. Never trust a bloody American, he said. If your face doesn't fit, you're dead, even if you're the president. It's the American Way, he said.
We want to fuck the Gooks, they said. We want to teach them the American Way.
They get to everybody in the end, but only if they know about you. We're just passengers on the bus, so we're okay. JFK stood in its path, so the bus ran him down.
They got to Father's friend, so he stuck his head in a bag, tied a bootlace round his neck and said goodbye.
I couldn't do that. Could you?
What about pills? Sleepers, downers, throw in some paracetamol, some aspirin. Write illegible suicide notes about love. Fall asleep, get cold. Vomit in your sleep but it doesn't wake you. Just trickles through blue lips. Pulse fades.
Do you dream?
Then she finds you, panics, shakes you, cries out, telephones ambulance, telephones son, shakes you, tries to pick you up, can't, screams, calls your name, what have you done? Son comes. Dad? Oh my God. Try to wake him. Please try to wake him. Oh God, wake up. Doorbell. I'll get it. No, stay with your father. Here, in here. Is he coming round? He's so cold. Help him, please help him.
Why did you do it?
I won't do it again.
Don't die Daddy, please don't die.
Begin again, begin again.
Begin again. The first line of a readable book. But I am not Merlin. I wield no magic. I am the darkling child of a hero and his maiden. A maiden sitting on the scrubbed doorstep of a small street-house, watching, from behind a jam sandwich, the line of uniforms marching to the station. A hero going to the war.
His mother read the tea leaves. His mother read the tea leaves for her mother. Did she see?
In a small world, coincidences are not rare.
Father was born in the roaring twenties, the second son of a Bradford mill-girl with a gammy leg and a steelworks labourer who played the piano and fished the sea.
Many things happened that year.
Lenin died, MacDonald came and went, Coolidge came to the American throne and Henry Ford made his ten-millionth car. In Italy, a guy called Giacomo Matteotti got it in the head for not being a Fascist. In the British general election, the day before Father was born, Baldwin's Tories won through with promises of a brave new world.
Father's father wanted his son to be a part of it, so he marked his cross for the man in blue.
And as songs of Hope and Glory echoed around Queen's Hall, as soft, white, manicured hands in cuff-linked sleeves waved Union flags, as starry-eyed Flappers danced their way into the beds of the rich, Father lay hungry in his little cot.
Mother came five years later, the second daughter of a preacher's girl and a railway signalman with a twisted foot.
Many things happened that year.
Trotsky was expelled, MacDonald came back, Hoover started work, Yugoslavia was born and six Chicago gangsters got it in the head on Valentine's Day for being in the wrong gang. A fortnight after Mother was born, and because it was made of paper, Wall Street collapsed.
The roaring twenties gave way to the thrilling thirties and, as songs of Hope and Glory echoed around Queen's Hall, as soft, white, manicured hands in cuff-linked sleeves waved fraying Union flags, as sleepy-eyed Flappers danced their way off the stage to feed their babies, Mother sucked her thumb in her little cot.
The dice had been cast, the cards had been dealt, the last dregs swirled in the china cup and two grandmothers busily plotted knitted futures, giving their power and strength unto the beast.
When Father played in the street, kicking cans at cars, Mother slept in her cot. When Mother played in the street, swinging Maypole round the lamp-post, Father went to school. When Mother went to school, Father kicked a can around the street and looked for work. When Mother sat on her doorstep and ate a jam sandwich, Father went to war.
All roads lead to here.
Father got a job to earn pennies his younger brother could steal. He was delivering wet fish when Chamberlain was waving pieces of paper to wrap them in.
Mother got the cane for staring out of the window at the gathering clouds of war.
Then there was Uncle Bonkers.
We don't mention him because he wasn't one of us. We keep him locked in the cupboard and pretend he doesn't exist. It's easier, nowadays, than it was back then. It's easier, nowadays, because he's dead.
I would visit him every Sunday after I'd spent some time with Grandmother, trying to intrude upon her waking dreams. She knew things I didn't know, she could see things I couldn't see. Sometimes, she would see me on the very edge of her dream and she would smile and say my name.
Grandmother?
Be careful, Son. They're stealing houses, y'know.
Grandma?
Picking them up and putting them on wheels and taking them away. Nobody knows, nobody knows.
She looked at me with her glass eye and squeezed my arm. Her fingers were long and the joints were swollen, her skin was spotted with cancer. An old woman across the room with fat legs and thin arms grinned at me and softly tapped the arm of her chair, counting down the seconds to the end of her world.
I've brought you some cigarettes, Grandma.
They steal them, y'know.
I've brought you some cigarettes, Grandma.
Then she let go of my arm and pulled out her handbag which was stuffed between her and the arm of the chair. She opened it and showed me a packet of cheap cigarettes. And they swap them for these, she said.
Who does, who steals them, Grandma?
Grandmother snapped shut her handbag and stuffed it down the side of the chair again. She reached up with a long, thin arm, put her cold hand on my cheek and urged me to come closer. You were always my favourite, she said. Then she kissed me with her dry, brown lips, let me go and slipped, slowly and smiling, back into the strange world from whence she had come.
She never saw me arrive and she never saw me leave. I could be there for half an hour without her knowing but I could tell, from the seconds we shared, that she loved me.
Her youngest surviving son was the little brother my father never wanted. A little brother with sticky fingers who was destined to spend a lonely life locked in rooms with barred windows. A little brother who killed himself because he didn't want to die.
I used to visit him every Sunday and, every Sunday, he would tell me that he wasn't mad.
I knew that place like the back of my hand. They would shift him to a different ward every so often and I knew them all. Long corridors with rubbery floors, some running up, some running down. Turn left, turn left, turn right, turn left, deeper and deeper into the bin. The staff knew me. They'd nod hello, unlock the doors and ask me how I was. Visitors were a rarity on some of those wards. Solitary eleven year-old visitors were a rarity anywhere.
I never had anything to give him because he didn't exist.
Are you going to see your Grandma this week, Son?
How was your Grandma?
He was always pleased to see me arrive and he was always sad to see me go. He was always afraid.
I'm not supposed to be in here, he would say. Then he'd flick a frightened glance at the nurse reading the paper by the locked door. I'd look round too and the nurse would wink and nod. I'd look back at Uncle Bonkers.
His eyes would widen and his voice would drop to an intense whisper. Look, they're all smiles when you're here. He would clutch the thin arms of his chair with his thin, frightened fingers and stoop closer.
They hit me when you leave.
I step back and look along the line I have built. It is then that I realise that there is no order, that I have been collecting and laying bricks with no regard to their proper place. But then I ask myself a question.
If it made no sense then, does it need to make sense now?
It is the kind of thing my father would have said.
My father.
When he came back from the war the party was all over. They gave him his ticket home and a de-mob suit. Drainpipe trousers and a workhouse jacket. He and a friend met Mother and a friend on a crowded sea-front. Here, have my seat, he said and that was that. Bill went off with Dorothy, Mother and Father shared an apple.
I remember you, she said. I remember you going to the war. I was watching you from behind a jam sandwich. Every morning I see you push that barrow along Lord Street while I sort out the papers at the back of Smiths.
I remember you, he said. You were always sitting on the doorstep, watching the world go by.
It's a small town.
It's a small world.
Your mother knows my mother, she said. She reads the tea-leaves for her.
She reads the cards, too.
An image appears at the window of my mind. Two mad grandmothers cackling to each other, staring into a cracked china cup.
I can see it now, one of them is saying.
What can you see?
I can see Daddy having a shave at the kitchen sink. He is looking out of the window at something Duke cannot see.
Father looks out of the window and sees a gang of kids ripping down the fence at the bottom of his garden. Ripping it down, smashing it up, bundling it together. Father continues shaving. The kids continue ripping, smashing and bundling. Father rinses his face and turns away to get the towel. When he turns back, the kids have gone. So has the fence. I don't believe it, he says to himself. Then there is a knock on the front door. Wiping his face dry with the towel, he goes to answer it.
Standing by the doorstep are a gang of kids. They are trying to sell Father his own fence as firewood.
What do you do with kids like that?
Rip them apart, smash them up, bundle them together.
And burn them.
Father said not today, then he shut the door.
My mother.
Hail Mary, blessed art thou amongst women.
There is so much that I want to tell you.
Blessed is the fruit of thy womb.
My mother cried when JFK got it in the head.
Mother of mine, mother of all things. I am the fruit of your womb. You comforted me and bathed my scratches, you held me against you, you wiped clean my face with your moistened handkerchief, you tried to teach me to swim.
I saw you naked when you were younger than I am now. You were my mother. I saw you naked and I knew I was part of you. I knew I was flesh of your flesh. Unhidden by deceitful clothes, your body was truth. I wanted to run to you, to fall into your eternal embrace, to feel your soft flesh against my cheek, to smell your smell. Do you remember?
No. How could you? It was just another day. I was but one of five. A small boy who, at the wrong moment, walked into your room in the early morning, just as you were rising from your bed. And, in shared embarrassment, we both turned away.
Sometime later, I told a fly to fuck off and you hit me because you thought I was saying it to you.
Mrs Johnson said she came from Mars and she was my second teacher. You were my first. With your money, I bought you a manicure set. You were with me in the shop and you told me what to buy. I wrapped it in blue paper and gave it to you on Christmas morning. Smiling, you unwrapped your present. Hugging me, you told me thank you.
I owe you so much. How can I ever repay my debt?
And when he came back from the war, the party was already over. The flags had been taken down, the bunting stored in boxes. Tall, handsome and bronze, he was every girl's dream. One of them threatened to scratch out your eyes. Envy is the mother of all hate.
In the summer of forty-eight they danced the courtship dance. A bicycle made for two, a wind-up gramophone. Spam sandwiches in a picnic basket. Sex in the woods.
The tandem sped down the hill, faster and faster. Father loved the feel of speed. Mother trusted him to apply the brakes he never used.
My brother went to the wedding, curled in a foetal ball. It was a simple affair. I have the photograph on my wall. Mother, Father, two uncles, an aunt, two grandmothers and one grandfather. My brother is there too but he cannot be seen. It is the only photograph of him I have.
One day, in the Summer of Love, I had to run three miles otherwise he would have broken my arm. I was small but I was fast. I developed the skill of insulting from a safe and increasing distance. Another day, he cornered me on the beach. He had chased me along the shore and I just carried on running. Then he stopped. I slowed to a walk and looked round. Trapped. On one side the sea, on the other a long, deep pool. Pool and sea met in a rush of water. The tide was coming in and my brother stood guard over the only exit from my shrinking island.
I've got you now.
Bastard.
What are you going to do now, runt?
Fuckface.
Slowly, he walked down the narrow strip of sand towards me. Closer and closer, his hands in fists. Almost crying with fear, I flicked through the possibilities. I could let him get close, then dodge past him and run like fuck. But there was only four or five feet either side of him. I would have to let him get really close. Too risky.
I'm going to kill you, you little cunt.
Fuck you.
Then he ran at me, grabbed my jacket, caught my sleeve. I slipped out of it. Loose change fell to the ground. In the second he needed to regain his balance, I was off, splashing into the pool. Ankle deep, knee deep. I hit a stone and fell over. A wave knocked me down again. Arms and legs thrashing the water, I made it to the other side. I rolled over to look back at him, to shout one last insult, but he wasn't there.
He was standing at my feet, looking down, grinning.
He shook his head, dropped my jacket beside me, then wandered away up the beach.
I stayed out until my clothes dried.
Two years ago we shook hands.
Shake hands, clap hands, cup hands up does anybody know this word?
The word is friend.
Up goes my hand. Mrs Johnson looks sideways. Briefly. Clever little shit. My hand alone is raised.
The word is friend.
A quick sideways look again, then a peer over the top of the cards she is holding. Oh, sorry, that one's too hard. She puts the card to the back.
The new word is dog. My hand stays up.
Yes, clever little shit?
Friend, Miss.
Yes, er, no, anybody else?
Mrs Johnson, you should have known better. Don't expect me to tell you again.
It was my own fault. I shouldn't have learned to read before I went to school. Clever little shits never get anywhere.
Except nowhere.
And when he came back from the war, he had nowhere to live.
Come and lodge with us, said Mother's mother. But it didn't last. Their personalities clashed like cymbals made of glass.
If you think you are going to marry my daughter, you've got another think coming.
I wouldn't marry your daughter if she was Princess Elizabeth.
Get out of my house. Don't ever come round here again.
Door slams.
Mother, I'm pregnant.
What?
I'm pregnant Mother.
Crazy eyes stare wide at the filthiness of my mother's fornication. Hand swings back, poised for the slap.
You dirty cow. You good-for-nothing dirty cow.
Don't hit me.
I'll do more than hit you my girl. I'll bloody well kill you. And him, call himself a man? The dirty bugger. Well he's not getting away with it. He's going to marry you, you're going to get married, right now. Do you hear me? You're getting married, my girl. You're not bringing a bastard home to this house.
We were going to anyway, Mother.
Going to what? That's what they all say. Yes, well, he bloody well is going to marry you, I'll see about that you dirty little bitch. Go and get him. Tell him I want to see him.
We were going to get married anyway.
And not a bloody word to your father. He'd go bloody spare.
I have the photograph on my wall. Mother, Father, two uncles, an aunt, two grandmothers and one grandfather.
Mother's father never knew. Father's father couldn't come.
They'd taken him away in thirty-nine because he played rag-time on the piano all night long with every window in the house wide open. Nobody in the street slept a wink that night. Grandad pounded on the piano keys in possessed fury. Plinks and plunks bounced off the walls of the houses. Plinks and plunks drove everyone from their beds.
By the time the policemen came, and the doctor with his needle, Grandad had climbed out of his bedroom window and was shuffling along the wall, hanging from the guttering with his finger-tips.
Come inside, don't do anything stupid.
Don't come near me with that bloody needle.
Everybody settled down for a long wait. The policemen shared a cigarette, the doctor checked his watch and coughed up his sleeve. Half an hour later, Grandad shuffled back along the wall and swung in through the window, his aching arms too tired to resist the pounce. The needle went in, darkness came, and Grandaddy was gone again.
And the sun became black as sackcloth, and the moon as blood.
Father was fourteen and a half when they took his daddy away. His mother packed her things. I'm leaving too, she said.
Don't leave me Mother.
I'm seven and I'm sitting in a train in York station. Mother has gone to get a sandwich and she's been away a long time. People have stopped getting off the train, people have stopped getting on it. It's just sitting there, engine ticking over, while the station clock ticks away the minutes. A porter walks along the platform, slamming the doors. I stare at the spot where I last saw my mother's back. I daren't blink in case I open my eyes to see the platform slipping away, in case I see my mother chasing a train moving faster than she can run. I daren't move in case the driver takes it as a signal to go.
Come back Mother.
It's my twentieth birthday. Humming a silly song, I turn up the path to the front door. Mother is coming down it. She is crying.
I don't know what you're going to do, she says. But I can't take any more of this. I'm leaving.
Mother?
She half turns and tries a smile, then she hurries away down the street.
But Mother can't leave, Mother can't walk away.
She is back at tea-time, feeding the last of the five thousand. I can see a million words in her misty eyes but I can read none of them.
And I stood upon the sand and saw the beast rise up out of the sea.
I know it is there but I know not what it is. It rises high, passes overhead, stretches across the sky. A blue, grey, murderous cloud. It brings a wet wind that shoves and tugs, a wind that whips white froth from an inky sea. A wind that shouts questions with no answers, a wind that asks you who you are.
And the day darkens.
I would go there often - where the river meets the sea, where the sea meets the sky - but I never knew why. There was nothing to see but I would look for it anyway. I would stand for an hour, I would stand for two, looking, listening and feeling cold. And the only thing I ever brought back was nothing.
And when Daddy was fourteen and a half, his mummy left home.
That is it, she said. That is absolutely it. He's not coming back, I'll make sure of that. He needn't think he can come back, because he can't. He can't come home if there's no home to come to.
Then Grandma limped out of the door, carrying her small world in her thin arms.
When she was a young girl, Grandma worked in a Bradford mill, tending the clanking looms that wove a tapestry of days gone by. Looms that spoke of the profits they once made for their stiff-collared masters, long dead. Looms that looked down through the damp air at generation after generation of girls who came and went, who passed on into the oblivion of time but who had all taken their turn at the bobbins and frames. Frames shuttling back and forth, wheels turning, pistons pumping. Busy people everywhere, rushing to and fro, pausing with oil cans to feed the bearings, feeding the machines with bobbins of wool. A roar of machinery and shouted instructions. A roar of hissing and clanking that became a wave of silence punctuated by a scream of pain.
Grandma had slipped on a patch of oil. The machine was trying to eat her leg.
They dragged her from the hungry jaws, but the loom had stripped her left calf entirely away. The supervisor checked the cloth for spattered blood and shouted shut it down. A boy ran for help. They lifted Grandma onto a canvas stretcher and carried her to the infirmary.
You were lucky, they said.
The manager came to see her and said, we can't give you your job back but we can fix you up as a servant.
Forty years later, she was fitted with a special shoe.
Married in the twenties, half-starved in the thirties, a squatter after the war, then slowly, very slowly, she drifted out of this world and into another, where the beast gnawed at her mind and told her there were bombs beneath the floorboards and spies behind the curtains.
She would prop her jaw on her bent-back thumb and share jokes with someone we could not see.
She was a mother, a grandmother and a great-grandmother. Her smoke will rise for ever.
They lived with her mother, seven years before I was born. Father worked down a tunnel, digging a hole in this land fit for heroes. Every day, he would take two eggs to work. His mother-in-law boiled them for him but she was mean with the gas and they were always soft. Every day, he would crack open the eggs and they were always soft. Father didn't like soft-boiled eggs but soft is what they always were. One day, he cracked open an egg and it was soft. He saved the other one so he could take it home. Now she will believe me, he thought, as he opened the front door. The eggs were soft again, he said, but she didn't believe him. There, he said, cracking open the egg. It was hard. There, she said, I told you so.
Father told that story many times and every time I heard it, I wanted to ask him two questions:
Why didn't you boil your own eggs?
Did somebody secretly boil the egg before you took it home?
I already know the answer to the first. Grandmother wouldn't let anybody in her kitchen. It was hers. She never even taught her daughters how to cook. All her recipes were secret. She could make six Yorkshire puddings with half an egg and her fried bread was the best I have ever tasted. She used to collect bits of string and save them in a glass jar under the stairs. Grandmother always had a piece of string for every occasion.
Is this one long enough, she would say, or will this one do?
Then she would give you a piece of string exactly long enough for the job. Waste not want not, she always said. Perhaps she was mad, even then.
And Father would never have admitted to the possibility of the second. Nobody boiled Father's eggs without him knowing.
Before Grandmother went to bed, she would secretly count the coals on the fire. When she got up in the morning, she would secretly count the cinders. You've been wasting coal, she would say, if the numbers didn't tally.
Mother and Father had to do their cuddling in the cold.
Every night, around nine o'clock, Grandmother would put six pieces of coal on the fire. Four if she was alone. During the winter of seventy-two, she used hardly any electricity so she would still have some left for the next power-cut. If she went to bed before my grandfather, she would turn the gas fire down from three bars to one because one bar was enough for one person.
Then she started collecting the dregs of her tea-cups and saving them until she had a row of six cups on the window-sill. On the seventh day, she would pour it all into a pan, heat it up, drink it down to the last little bit and put the cup on the window-sill to start a new collection.
In the end, she was living on a diet of mouldy bread and cold tea. The doctors said she was fine but Mother disagreed. Grandmother said she was fine and Mother cried. I waited in the car while Mother dried her eyes. Then I took her home.
She's killing herself. What am I going to do with her? I can't take any more of this.
Mother has always said I'm good to talk to. Probably because I never reply.
When Baby One was born, they had to move out because the house was too small and because Father was tired of soft-boiled eggs.
His mother's house was bigger, but not big enough for Baby Two, so the Council gave them a house of their very own. When Mother saw it, she cried.
People cry for all kinds of reasons. They cry when they are sad, they cry when they are happy. They cry tired tears, cold tears, frustrated tears, strung-out tears and tears which simply say I need some attention.
When Mother cried when she saw her new house, she was crying tears which said, if I have to live here, I don't want to live.
But Baby One was eating soap, Baby Two was teething and Baby Three was on the way so Mother was always busy. Father brought home the pennies and Mother collected the milk as soon as it was delivered. There was a thief around every corner, a thief behind every hedge, a thief creeping down every alley.
There was an unexploded bomb in the back garden. Baby Two hit it with a spade then put soil in Baby Three's mouth. Baby Three yelled and Baby Two hit the bomb again. Baby One was in the bath eating soap. Mother came running, carrying Baby Four in her belly, and gathered up her children. She piled them all into the pram and pushed it round to her mother's. She left a note which said there's a bomb in the garden. Father came home and dug it up. It isn't a bomb, it's a shell and, look, the fuse is missing. Mother cooked dinner, Father threw the bomb into the alley. Ten minutes later, he went to look at it but somebody had stolen it, so they applied for a bigger house in a nicer neighbourhood.
A year passed and Baby Five died in her belly.
Mother saw the doctor and said we need a bigger house, is there anything you can do? Doctor said, your husband hangs his trousers on the end of the bed and you fall pregnant. Mother did it again to prove the point but Baby Six didn't make it either. Then came Baby Seven.
The Duke.
The seventh son, Alpha and Omega. The first and the last.
The baby whose bed was the bottom drawer of a chest.
Where have I been since then? I know I spent a lot of time being afraid of fried bananas but the rest is all mixed up.
I fell down the stairs when I was two and broke my collar bone. Father put me to bed, Mother summoned the doctor. Doctor comes and Duke is sitting up, looking at him. Put your hands up above your head, he said. Won't, said I.
There was a thief around every corner, a thief behind every hedge, a thief creeping down every alley.
They kept the coal in the coal-house. The door to the coal-house was next to the pantry and opened into the kitchen. Coal and food don't mix, so Father bought a bunker. He brought it home on a barrow and planted it in the back garden. He went for the shovel, came back and found a gang of kids looking in the bunker to see if there was any coal in it to steal and sell. Father chased them away and dragged the bunker out into the alley. He took the shovel back to the coal-house and crept back to watch what would happen next. He was too late. The bunker had already gone.
Gone, as the fence.
Gone, as the bunting, the street-parties, the apple, the war.
Gone, as the tandem and the wind-up gramophone.
Gone, as the six pieces of coal, as sinful sex, as the jam sandwich, the uniforms and the smoke of trains laden with heroes.
Chapter Two
- GENESIS -
"Behold, this dreamer cometh." Deuteronomy 13:1
When you're small, the world looks different. Trees tower.
When you're small, the world looks down at you. Nothing is too little and everything is too big.
When you're small, and you've got big brothers, you are really small. You are really small because they make you so.
Duke had four big brothers. They were called Bully, Hurt, Hit and Teach.
Duke was really small but he would look up at nothing. Bully, Hurt, Hit and Teach looked down at Duke but Duke pretended he was their size and stared back at them.
They all lived in a little house which was much bigger then than it is now. It was the Upside-down House because it was number sixty-nine. It had a blue door, small rooms and steep stairs. It had a television in the corner which went bang on Christmas morning because Father's screwdriver fixed the wrong thing. It had a cupboard under the stairs which smelled of gas and old coats. Duke could sit in there and watch. If he kept quiet, they wouldn't know he was there. If they found out, they would lock him in. Duke learned to watch without being seen, to listen without being heard.
Mother always knew where he was. She would pass by, look down, catch eyes and say not again without speaking. Duke would pull back into the shadows, certain he would not be betrayed.
There is a lot to be seen and heard from the shadows. You can know without being known, see without being seen, hear without being heard. If you come out into the light, you can't see so clearly and, besides, it's not so safe.
Sometimes, Duke would hide in the cupboard all afternoon and he wouldn't come out until it was safe or until Mother said tea was ready. Sometimes, Mother would stand in the way and let Duke creep unseen from his cupboard. Sometimes, Bully would stand with his foot against the door and not let Duke out until he cried. Then he would pretend surprise and ask what was Duke doing in there. Eventually, they took to locking it whenever they noticed the door was ajar. Eventually, Duke had to come out into the open.
But they still didn't notice him.
They still didn't notice him because Hurt invented an invisible switch which hung in the air high above Duke's head. Hurt would flick the switch and Duke would flick off like a television picture. Then they could neither see nor hear him, no matter what he did, no matter what he said. They'd turn him off for hours, sometimes days. Once in a while, they'd turn him on for just long enough to check he was still there. Duke would open his mouth to speak and they'd flick the switch off again.
Mother threw a plate at the wall because Father said he wanted dinner then changed his mind.
Father woke us at three in the morning and said get dressed. At four, he said go back to bed.
Father read a long poem about a workhouse before he let us eat Christmas dinner.
When Father was at work, we rolled back the carpet and fought on the lino.
When Father was in bed after working through the night, we kept very quiet.
When Father banged on the bedroom floor, Mother went to the bottom of the stairs and shouted what?
Father's frown frightened everybody.
Father said don't play in the street, so we didn't.
Father said don't play in the park, so we did.
Father protected us from the nasty things people said.
He said did you do this and if we said no he said stop accusing my sons of doing things they haven't done. Then they walked away, sheepish.
Nobody argued back with Father.
Nobody had the nerve.
Nobody said anything that Father didn't want to hear.
Except Mother.
Mother argued back and it made me cry because of the shouting and the bad mood and the dinner on the wall and the banging around and the stamping and slamming and I'm leaving well go then, I will.
And after the wind, an earthquake. And after the earthquake, a fire. And after the fire, a still, small voice.
Don't leave me Mother.
Don't take away from me the only thing I have. Don't take away from me the only thing I need. Kiss and make up, Mother. Kiss and make up.
Kiss and make up, Mother. Go and cook tea.
Mother can't leave. Mother can't walk away.
She is there at tea-time, feeding the five-thousand. I can see things I cannot recognise in her eyes. I follow her around the kitchen, pressing myself flat against the cupboard as her skirt brushes past my face. The pans bang, the drawers and doors slam, the plates and knives, the spoons and the forks, clatter on the table.
But the food tastes just as good.
Mother took me to the place where the river meets the sea, where the sea meets the sky. She had a green bicycle with a basket on the front. I had a blue tricycle with a tin box on the back. Mother's bike creaked and squeaked, mine rattled. I followed her for ever along a narrow, pot-holed road which weaved a wandering path across the dunes. For half an hour, we rode through a valley of sand and sharp grass, then the sea appeared on both sides of the road and, soon, we were there.
We pedalled to the lighthouse, squat and white. Mother held me as I stood on the broad, grey wall and filled my greedy eyes with the delicious view. In the far distance, away across the crescent bay, was home - unrecognisable among a mass of square dots. Mother asked could I see the church, its pencil-point spire poking high above the tiny, grey houses. I made a circle to look through with my finger and thumb and, at arms length, I could frame the whole town.
I shifted closer to the edge.
Down below, a solitary fisherman, his rod resting on a tall tripod, a haversack and flask at his feet.
Out on the sea, the wind tugged and tore at the tips of the waves, the gulls cried and circled, circled and dived, following a boat up the river, clouds of white spray exploding from beneath its bows.
And above, the infinite blue of the summer sky, an infinite number of invisible stars, invisible worlds and somewhere, a mirror, another me, looking down.
On Monday afternoons, Duke helped Mother with the ironing. Mother had to lower the board so Duke could iron the handkerchiefs, which always came last. Father had big white ones embroidered with his initial, Mother's were blue or pink and smaller with frilled edges.
You'll be starting school soon, Mother said. Then I'll have to iron these myself.
Save them up until I get home, then I'll do them.
But Mother never saved the handkerchiefs and, anyway, Duke forgot.
Mother, where does the picture on the television come from? How come it moves and why is it black and white?
Why does a light bulb get hot? Why does ice fall from the sky in summer?
Father, where's the sound on a record? Why's the back of the fridge hot and the inside cold? Why are both my arms the same length?
Father, if pictures fly through the air and into the television, how come I can't see them?
Ask no questions, tell no lies.
Mrs Johnson held aloft the card. The word was friend. Duke knew this because he learned to read before he went to school. None of the other kids did. Lessons dragged and dragged because the other kids had to start from scratch and learn the baby alphabet.
Ah, buh, curly-kuh, duh, eh, fuh, guh ...
Duke learned it too but he never used it.
I can say my twelve times table, he said.
The other kids couldn't say their two.
I can say all my tables, he said, but Mrs Johnson didn't believe him.
Okay then, she said, stand out here and say the nine-times table.
Duke slid, surly, from his seat, sauntered across, stood still and said it. Fast, automatically. He smiled, smug.
Yes, thank you, sit down now.
Duke went back to the picture he was doodling in his exercise book. The other kids tried to remember what was eight times two.
You'll be starting school soon, Mother said.
I looked up the word in Father's dictionary. It said school was an institution for educating children. I looked up institution and it said something I did not understand about the cure of souls. School is where you go to learn things, Mother said.
Like what?
Oh, reading, writing, arithmetic - that sort of thing.
Why?
Because you have to, everybody has to.
Another question hung on my lips but I sucked it back and turned away. I slid the black, leather-backed dictionary back into its place on the shelf and went outside. Hit and Teach were taking the chain off Hit's bicycle. They looked round together, looked at each other and muttered something I could not hear.
I shuffled past, pushing a leaf along the path. Hit slid his leg out behind him, trying to trip me, but I saw it coming and side-stepped. I headed for a ball which was sitting in the middle of the lawn. I bent down to pick it up.
Leave that alone, said Teach without looking round.
Why?
No answer.
I went over to the hutch, plucked a few blades of grass and poked them through the mesh.
Don't feed the rabbit, said Hit.
A disciplined line of dirty ducks marched every morning to the door to be fed. That was then. That was there.
Father told us about their ducks. Khaki Campbells, they were. They kept them on an allotment just round the corner from her mother's house. No locks, no keys, no barbed wire. Every morning, the ducks marched up the street to the front door and said quack. When Father appeared with the bucket of food and led them back to the allotment, they followed behind in a noisy line. While the ducks ate their scraps and peelings, Father searched for the eggs. It was always a race to see who could finish first and the ducks usually won. It's easier to find duck eggs when you realise that they never hide them in the same place twice.
Mother's mother boiled them for him to take to work but they were always soft.
I let fall the blades of grass and turned away from the hutch.
Here, I've got a job for you, said Teach with a smile.
I ran across, smiling too.
Hold this, he said and dumped the oily chain in my clean hands.
Hit and Teach laughed long and loud, then the tears came. I dropped the chain on the path and pushed past them.
Piss off, I said.
Hit flung his fist at my shoulder and I fell against the wall. He kicked my legs away and I was down. I scrambled to my feet and ducked into the wash-house.
Cry-baby! Run to Mother!
But I didn't. I cleaned my hands on a rag, dried my eyes, then left the house by the front door. I could still hear them laughing as I opened the gate.
Rooney was pedalling his toy car along the pavement. He paused to see what kind of mood I was in and then, when I gave him a little wave, he pedalled up to me.
It was sunny and it was hot. Mother said she would take me to the beach after dinner if the weather held out. Rooney could come too and we could go in the sea. That was good because Rooney's mother would bring the li-lo and they'd sit us on it and push us out through the waves, running alongside, splashing and laughing. Then there'd be orange squash in plastic beakers and little triangular sandwiches with spam or boiled eggs inside. There'd be sand between my toes and a big towel to wrap around me so I could take off my trunks. Then we'd walk barefoot up onto the promenade and Mother would sit me on a bench and polish the sand off my feet. I didn't like that because it always hurt. She'd put on my socks and tip the sand out of my shoes and then we'd go home for tea.