Authors: Dawn French
Dear Fatty (17 page)
My dad spoke very softly to me about how your life would have to change now. How, as the eldest son, you would probably have to grow up very quickly, prematurely, in order to support your darling mum and brothers. He also told me that I had a role in this, to support you if that’s what you wanted. He said you might attempt to live your life right, as a tribute to your dad. I could see a purpose in that. Suddenly there was some sense in the muddle.
I went back to school for another week of boarding the next morning, feeling exhausted and aimless. Everything was topsy-turvy. I didn’t want to call you because I was aware you were in the tight centre of your family and it seemed wrong, but I longed to speak to you, to know how you were. I was also a bit scared to call your home lest your mum should answer. Try as I might, I couldn’t concoct anything that felt right to say. I hadn’t been around death before and it felt massively difficult. I was 16. What does a 16-year-old say to a woman who’s just lost her husband? ‘Sorry’? ‘How are you’? ‘Hope you’re not too sad’? ‘Can I speak to Nick please’? Nothing felt right so I kept quiet and I kept my distance.
I was surprised when later that week I was told to report to the headmistress’s study, to find my mum sitting there. This was highly unusual. I didn’t normally see my mum during the school week. It transpired that
your
mum had phoned
my
mum to say that you were refusing to leave your bedroom at home and she
was
extremely worried. Mary thought it might help if I came to see you and so here was my mum to collect me. We drove to your place in Modbury and the minute I saw your mum I started to blub and stammer some kind of rubbish condolence. Mary immediately released me from that hell by saying she was so glad I had come, that I really COULD be of some use if I would go and spend time with you and see if I could persuade you to come out of your room.
So it was that I climbed up those same stairs I’d seen your dad being carted down a few days before. It felt utterly unreal, and for the first time ever, I felt nervous about seeing you. As I approached your room I heard the sound of you thumping eight kinds of hell out of the drum kit you kept in there. This wasn’t practice, this was fury. I knocked. Silence. I said it was me. A more silent silence. Then you opened the door and there you were, wide-eyed, shirtless and crazy with the madness of it all. The room was humming. It smelt of stale sweat and tears and agony. It seemed a violent and volatile place. I wasn’t sure at first whether you wanted me there. Was your grief an intensely private matter? Was I an intruder? You let me in and I shut the door behind us.
I didn’t leave that room for three days, other than trips to the loo on the landing outside. Your mum pushed trays of food in sporadically. I think we both grew up quite a lot in those three days, don’t you? It’s not for me to say what happened in there. It would be disrespectful to you. I just want you to know that I’m glad I was there, I felt privileged that you would let me weather that storm with you. I learned a lot about profound sadness and extreme hurt. It was raw and loud and honest. Then it was tender
and
careful. In the end I think we were flushed out by the sheer rankness of ourselves. We were pretty feral and strangely euphoric. You can never know, Nick, just how useful that time was for me later. It gave me permission to flex every muscle of my own grief when it came. By then I knew that anything goes when you are deranged with sorrow. Of course, I didn’t know then that my time would come all too soon …
Our relationship fizzled out naturally some months later and I remember feeling a sense of shuddering injustice for you when I heard that your mum died also. That’s not fair. That’s really not fair.
Do you remember when we met briefly on the sea tractor going over to Burgh Island? Blimey, it must have been 15 years ago or something. Len was with me and it was a bit surreal. Impossible really, to encapsulate so much, so many important memories in the briefest of moments. I’m pretty sure we were both remembering an extraordinary time together. Both the delights and the difficulties. I truly learned a lot from you, Nick.
SORRY. HERE ARE
some things I did in your houses:
1. I did drink a ‘sitter’s privilege’, which is a cocktail consisting of a tiny slurp of every single bottle in your drinks cabinet. Including Angostura bitters and advocaat. Rest assured it wasn’t really stealing, more like renting, because virtually everything ended up back in your loo.
2. I did let my boyfriend in five minutes after you left and he left five minutes before you came home. On one occasion he hid in the garden when you returned unexpectedly to collect a bottle of wine. Incidentally, he also drank a pint of ‘sitter’s privilege’.
3. I did try on quite a lot of your clothes.
4. I did try on quite a lot of your shoes.
5. I did try on quite a lot of your make-up.
6. I did smoke your Sobranie cocktail cigarettes out of your kitchen window.
7. I did read your
Joy of Sex
. I drew extra genitalia on the hairy people in it.
8. I did leaf through your photo albums, occasionally removing photos of unsavoury-looking relatives and writing ‘bum’ or ‘tit’ or ‘flaps’ on the back and replacing them with no trace.
9. I did find a sealed warehouse box of fifty Cadbury’s Dairy Milk bars in the cupboard under your stairs. I removed the staples from the bottom of the box with your carving knife. I removed four bars. I replaced the staples (considerable skill required). I ate all the chocolate. I felt no guilt whatsoever.
10. I did read some of your letters.
11. I did wash my laundry in your machine.
12. I did graze in areas of your fridge and cupboards that I wasn’t invited to graze in.
13. Sometimes bogeys did go on your carpet under the sofa. This was rare.
14. Sometimes I did take your restless children for a walk up to the local shop and we did buy flavoured milk and dunk KitKats in it, instead of the food you left out for them, which I took home for my flatmates.
15. I did rifle through your contraceptive-hiding area and study your preferred methods. During this procedure I often found other, more thrilling and sometimes sinister contraptions …
16. I did once swear at your eight-year-old son who kept running in to the room to display his frankly unimpressive erection.
17. I did once start a call on your phone when you went out at 8pm and finish it at 11.55pm just before you returned.
18. I did teach some new rude made-up words to your children, e.g. ‘arselooker’, ‘cockdandy’ and ‘boobhead’.
19. I did have a small bit of sex with my boyfriend on your sofa.
20. I did tell some people who called up that you had gone to a swingers party.
21. I did take cuttings from your plants.
22. I did do your daughter’s homework with my left hand to make it look like her writing, so that she could play.
23. I did lock your scabby old cat into a separate room for most of the evening.
24. I did accidentally let a spoon fall into your waste disposal unit which then made a terrible grinding noise and stopped working. I did
not
report this to you on your return.
25. I did let your two children get dressed and we went to the pictures instead of staying indoors.
26. I did find some money down the back of a big chair, which I kept. That was definitely stealing and I regret it, but I was a student and I was broke.
27. I did not return to your house again after your husband put his hand on my leg when he dropped me home.
28. I did lick a tub of solid home-made sorbet in your freezer.
29. I did bake a secret cake with your depressed six-year-old son to give to his estranged dad on his birthday even though you had forbidden it. We hid a small toy in the centre of the cake, which melted. The toy not the cake.
30. I did let your dog on the sofa.
Thank you all for trusting me with your kids. I always kept watch over them and they taught me heaps of good and bad things. The cash you gave me went straight to where it was most needed. Absolutely nothing was spent on administrative costs.
Cheers!
WHAT THE COCK
is happenin’? I is lookin’ at you on the tellybox cheeky teen channel, with many musics by pimps and ’hos, and here you is, poppin’ up with the new song and the new face! I is wonderin’, have you had a go at the face-tuggin’? Or have you by mistake gone to a chair-upholstery place instead? Why did you get it so tight? Is you plannin’ on playin’ the bongos on it? I think you would get a pretty good noise. Is it possible to loosen it by turning knobs behind ears? Maybe even just for sleepin’ or cryin’ purposes? The new face is good in the way that I can still see it is you inside it, but more like a you what has been ironed. With spray starch added on.
I is feelin’ annoyed about it coz up till this bit I was believin’ that the way you is lookin’ good was the jumpin’ and jiggin’ stuff for tonin’ with some extra upside-down yogurt lotus positions stuff. Plus the eatin’ of the good-for-you foods with macrobiotic wonder and fibre things in it, and the constant sexuals with the gangsta posh boy Ritchie. And, of course, the inside exercises of the soulhead with the kosher red string vests and bracelets, etc. I know that is importantin’ for you. So, on top of all that busy stuff, what in the name of fanny repossessed you to go and get your face swapped? It might look a bit tidier for a few months, but what will you be doin’ for gestures when you need people to know what mood you is in? You isn’t possible to do the angry (which you will need when the teen Lady of Lourdes does bad
homework
) or the surprised (for when the baby David poos in the bath by mistake) or joy (for when the Rocco Forte asks if he can have a pair of kitten heels) or even the loved-up mama (for when the husband Lionel Ritchie is in horn). What a big fat sorry you is gonna be then.
Did you know you is 50? Or is it a secret? You was one of the best 50s I ever saw, and now you’ve gone and messed on it. Is there any way you could get the old face back? Is the upholsterer keeping it in a jar with vinegar to preserve? Could I help? I is quite nifty with the needle and wool and have done plenty of lettin’ out on all slacks I buy since I was ten. Could I bring
my
face round to your house to show you the other option, with flaps and neck gobble? It doesn’t look so clean in pictures but it does do movin’ and smilin’ and grumpy looks. No one has been too scared of it yet in my knowin’.
On a high note, good to see you back in the slutty bosoms basque separatists again. That underpantie look is good on you, specially since you is allergic to clothes. I like the bit where we can see your arms what is so muscly and veiny like a drawing of a body with no skin on like you get on the side of headache tablets boxes. Is you tryin’ to wear your limbs inside out like an octopus so we can see all the lovely, raw tendons? If so, it is workin’. And also, I need to give you respec’ for the teeth what is shinin’ brighter than a nuclear blast from a toxic bomb. Are they painted on, or your originals with facades? I want to copy it myself please, if you don’t mind. Perhaps you can send me one to give as a sample to my builder for comparin’ to a wall chart? I love the Dulux old-fashioned sheepdog puppy, don’t you? He gets all the toilet roll round his neck, it’s so sweet.
Anyway, let me know if you is needin’ my help with any new renovations, interior or exterior. No job too small.
Lard buckets of love.
THE SIX YEARS
I spent at St Dunstan’s were very important, and remain tinging clear in my memory, and I couldn’t move on from thinking about that time without writing to you, my beloved school friends, who I still know and still love. Perhaps because I was a boarder, school chums became as close as family, more like sisters than friends really. It’s impossible to chart those years in detail in one letter, so I want to try and concoct a sort of mnemonic scrapbook to celebrate our time there together. I’m looking at a photo of us all, and I’m going to pluck moments as they occur to me. Here goes:
First of all, it was always unjust to label Nikki R as ‘big’ Nikki. She wasn’t at all big in the lumbering sense of that word – it’s just there was the other Nicky to distinguish her from, who was about an inch and a half shorter. Ironically, Big Nikki drew the short straw … I’m going to refer to her as Nikki R instead, as we always
should
have done.
Like many other ‘belated’ occasions in my life, I arrived at school a bit after everyone else, in the second rather than the first year. Yet again, I had to navigate my way carefully through the treacherous waters of the established friendship groups. Again, I had to put on quite a display of personality fireworks in a desperate attempt to attract your attention, and be accepted. Look how funny I can be! I can fall over! I can pull faces! I can dance! I can
clown!
I can mimic! Roll up, roll up! Book early for disappointment! It worked. I was in. Phew! Another audition over, I could relax. In actual fact, all of you were incredibly welcoming to me straight away, and for that – cheers!
I remember dormitories, with huge, high arched windows, iron beds and one little locker in between. There were about ten or twelve beds in each big dorm and as we grew older, we shared smaller rooms in twos and threes and then finally in the sixth form we had our own hallowed room. Mine was between the chemistry and physics lab and smelt of Bunsen burner gas. I didn’t care that it was potentially lethal. It was
my own
potentially lethal room.
A regular entertainment in our dorm was to leave a mysterious object, a note or a piece of jewellery perhaps, on someone’s bed, then hide under your own bed till that person came in and discovered it. The utter joy of eavesdropping on their confusion and being invisible was bliss. I found it
so
funny (much funnier than it actually ever was) that I would often wet my pants with the effort of keeping my hysterical laughter as silent as possible. I would sometimes be under the bed for
ages
, having failed to note that my intended eavesdroppee was, say, taking part in an ‘away’ hockey match. It wasn’t unusual for me to be stranded under the bed, motionless and soundless, for three hours! Meanwhile, I enjoyed the general comings and goings of a dorm full of people who didn’t know I was there – hidden, secret and naughty.
