Gut Symmetries (7 page)

He wanted to compare us, side by side, did I look like him?

He had been taught to hold my head and to support my unfixed spine, and I seem to remember sitting solemnly on his level palm, trying to steady the out of focus vision of him, anxious, intent, gazing at me as if I could reveal to him what he was.

He slept in his dressing room for the first couple of months. After my mother had fed me, sometime around 5 a.m., she would fall into a deep sleep and my father used to creep in and pick me up in his huge hands and take me to his room where the fire glowed. Perhaps it was there, held by him, in front of the mirror, the strange room in reflection behind, that I came to imagine other places, glowing steadily, just out of reach.

'I christen this child . . .'

Poor baby, passed from hand to hand like a pouch of tobacco, a fresh-faced narcotic promising hope, change, at least for now. My family are addicted to sentimentality. If that sounds cruel it is only the cruelty of too close observation for too long. Unable to express their feelings in the normal course of days and hours they need every legitimate excuse to do so. They cannot say 'I love you' so they say 'Isn't she lovely?' 'Well done.' They can seem like bon viveurs, always a party in the offing, my mother planning a new recipe for canapés even in the act of stuffing my relatives with the ones she has just made.

It should have been fun but neither of them was happy. When I was five my father was on pills and my mother was on gin. I think I was happy, in the maddening determined way that children have of being happy, and it was that happiness that worked as a magnet on both of my parents. They were pulled by it, they wanted it, and instead of taking it for granted, they started to take it to bits.

'Are you happy, Alice?'

'Yes, Daddy.'

'Why?' And he would stare at me in that way of his, trying to see happiness the way he could see a business opportunity.

On my sixth birthday the parties started. I had a cake, presents, a new frock. The adults had what my father called a
'foie gras'.
How much can you eat and drink without vomiting over the coffee table?

Neither my mother nor my father were able to cope with the 1960s. Skirts were too short, hair was too long, and the favoured colour combination of purple and orange made my mother look like a vampire and my father a Matisse. They were peculiarly ill-placed for the general assault on the past that the Sixties represented because they lived in Liverpool. Liverpool, that should have slumbered its way through the Sixties as it had every other decade, produced the Beatles. My parents were victims of the Merseybeat. One day when my mother was taking me to school, the streets seemed very quiet. We parked, although we were the only car on the stretch of road, and we got out to walk slowly, hand in hand, through some flimsy barriers of paper and string. Far away we saw some policemen waving at us and we waved back. We heard a lorry coming up behind and my mother told me it had a television crew on board which excited me who had never seen a television. Anything that had been on the market for as little as ten years was unlikely to impress my father.

As the lorry came close to us, four young men dressed entirely in black ran past. Three of them carried guitars, one had a set of drumsticks. I had seen people dressed in black before.

'Is it a funeral?' I asked my mother.

She didn't answer. She was looking back down the road. Suddenly she picked me up and shot at full pelt back to our car. I didn't know my mother could run. I had never seen her run. She threw me in the back seat and flung herself in after me in a whirl of Dior and hairpins.

At that second the car was rocked on every side by thousands of screaming girls. I saw their faces streaked with tears pressed in agony against the windows and windscreen of the car. It can hardly have lasted a moment; they realised their prey was elsewhere and vanished as devilishly as they had appeared. When my mother got out to talk to the policeman, the only trace of what had happened was a broken banner painted HELP!

'Mob rule,' said my father who was thinking of moving to Southampton.

I was strictly forbidden to listen to the Beatles and Beatles music was strictly forbidden at the now monthly parties my parents held for anyone who would come. I began to dread the parties; the unknown women who would come upstairs to cry in a spare bedroom. The drunk and drunker men who used to talk about the war and hold each other's knees. I persuaded my parents to let me go and stay with my grandmother on party nights. My mother was reluctant because she thought that my grandmother was unhygienic. There was no foundation to this, only my grandmother's absolute refusal to fit an inside toilet or to attend any of my mother's Tupperware evenings. As I was ready to go with my nightcase packed, my mother gave me a bottle of disinfectant. 'For the out-house,' she said. 'Don't tell Grandmother.' Don't tell Grandmother. My grandmother had been an honorary member of the secret police since she was born. It was impossible to hide anything from her. As I came through the back door into her kitchen she frisked me from head to foot, removed the disinfectant and gave me a pair of overalls to wear. 'Help me clean out the toilet,' she said.

For the first time in months I felt my body slacken. I had been carrying myself like a gun, cocked, alert, ready for trouble, fearing it. My parents were rowing and when they weren't rowing they were snapping and when they weren't snapping they were planning a party, holding a party, clearing up after a party. Here, shovelling human compost out of my grandmother's cloaca, I was happy again. We stacked the rich mould around her roses and she sang me ballads from the docks, easing her voice with regular swigs from an unmarked tin-billy. 'Grog-blossom,' she said tapping her nose the colour of the roses.

Her kitchen had strings of onions and fat hams hanging in glorious torture from twisted hooks in the ceiling. She smoked her own kippers up the chimney, skewering them in pairs with discarded knitting needles. For this she kept a wood fire. The other fireplaces were fed on coal. She had a glass-fronted cabinet lined with jars of homemade preserve; pickles, tomatoes, pears, cabbage, and in the middle, a baby rabbit. This was not for eating. It was an ornament. When the wind blew and the cupboard rattled the rabbit bobbed up and down in his transparent prison, his ears buckling slightly as they hit the lid seal.

The furniture was plain: a scrubbed sycamore table, a deep enamel sink, a few unmatched chairs and an evil-smelling coal Rayburn that left soot on my grandmother's scones.

'Won't hurt,' said Grandmother. 'Look at me.'

Yes, look at her, bunioned, bulbous, hair in bulrush rolls, butt-headed, butter-hearted and tenacious as a buckaroo.

When she ate her scones she left a snail-trail of soot along her upper lip. Her neighbour called her 'Blackmouth'. My grandmother called her neighbour 'Stinkpad' but otherwise they were friendly, exchanging handkerchiefs and soap at Christmas.

My grandmother got down a pair of kippers and broiled them for us in butter and water. She asked me about my father, watching my body not listening to what I said, what could I say? I loved him and he frightened me. 'My mistake,' she said talking to herself. 'My mistake.'

And if she was thinking of the school, or his first job in a collar and tie while his mates were at the boats, or the ordinary girl who had loved him, or her own pride, she never told me, then or at any time. Like my father she could not speak what she felt. Unlike him she knew this and sat many hours with her head in her hands, I thought then, to make the words fall out. But the words did not fall out and her feelings hung inside her, preserved.

When we had finished scooping out the dunny, and put fresh sawdust in the bottom to activate the new midden, my grandmother said she had a surprise for me. She made me stand in the corner of the kitchen behind the memorial oilskin, while she wheezed and whirred something out of the coal-hole. I could hear a crackling and a scratching and what sounded like fluff on the end of a record-player needle.

'Come out,' said Grandmother.

On the kitchen table was a brand-new bright blue Dansette turntable. On the turntable was a 45r.p.m. of the Beatles singing 'Help!'

Whilst I was adjusting to this unlikely apparition, my grandmother was doing the Twist or perhaps it would be better to say the Wiggle, since the two mobile parts were her bottom and her head. Her arms, bent at the elbow, were rigid in front of her, her feet were planted apart.

'I'll teach you,' she said.

She did teach me and we did not tell my mother or my father about the privy or the scones or the dancing lessons or the unnamed grog or the teenage turntable in its vinyl zip case or the happiness that was unhygienic or the sense of peace that had the smell of buttered kippers.

'You must be bored there,' said my mother.

My parents' house was so clean it made me ill. Much has been aired about the benefits of sanitation but less is told about the eczema of washing powder, the asthma of fitted carpets, allergic reactions to cream cleaner, itchy fingers round the bleach bottle, drug-out on the fumes of metal polish. Worse, my mother had discovered nylon, so easy to wash, and ignored my athlete's foot and the red weals between my legs where the nylon lace of the nylon knickers warred against my non-nylon skin.

It would have been better if I had been made of nylon; easier then to soak out the miseries that were soaking in.

I grew. At nine, tall and silent, I was unhappy. My father, who had given up his religion but not the superstition that accompanied it, interpreted my misery as proof positive of Original Sin. Since there could be no reason for me to be unhappy, unhappiness must be the human condition. How could he hope to escape what an innocent child could not escape? Like my grandmother, he had a Gothic disposition, but she had kept her God and therefore her mercy. My father could find no mercy for himself and offered none.

As his world darkened, the shadows in our house increased. "We lived in a big light spacious well-windowed generous house, designed by Lutyens. My father had bought it for my mother in a grand gesture of love and pride. Not for her a poky terrace with a dog kennel and an outside toilet. The garden shrubbed and green had a noose of trees all round it and in the centre of the rolled lawn was a Victorian sun-dial of granite and slate. At the bottom of the dial was the hooded figure of Time scything the hours, but at the top, over the position of the twelve was an angel with a trumpet bearing the inscription
'Aliquem alium internum'.
I did not know what this meant and when I was able to translate it I did not understand it. Later it came to mean a great deal to me but that is not yet.

When the hours were golden and green it seemed as if the whole house levitated. My father pleased with his work, my mother pleased with her home and her children. I don't remember the exact moment of the eclipse, only a gradual chilliness and the golden light paling yellow-pale-yellow-yellow to fade. I do remember that my father felt cheated. His salary was insufficient, his bonus was insufficient, his challenges were puny, his achievements were not fully recognised. He said those things to my mother, I heard him, but to me he said, by the sun-dial, 'I'm forty-one and the sea is dying.' He ran his finger back and forth over the hooded Time. In my nightmares Time scooped up the sea in his hood and carried it away. He stood at the end of the world and poured the sea into space.

The glittering fish were stars.

It was inevitable that the air should fight its war with the sea. Cargo and passengers alike preferred to fly and as shipping costs increased air prices dropped. My father's company, man and boy, was suffering unsustainable losses. Trident Shipping, founded 1809, was slowly going bankrupt and taking my father with it.

He had enough money. It was his life they were draining away. His friends interpreted his resentment as a normal response to a difficult situation. My mother took the simple view that a man must have his work. My father though, was not simple and he was still aware enough to turn the mask over and over in his hands and ask what it was. Uncharacteristically, he went to visit my grandmother.

'What have I made of my life?'

'David you've got everything you wanted.'

'What did I want?'

'Didn't you want to be somebody?'

'Didn't you?'

Yes. No. The clock ticking and the smell of buttered kippers. The young man out of his mother's body and wearing his father's clothes. Be someone. Be someone. Redeem history. Make our lives not an endless sacrifice but a gathering of energy, the strength to jump, but we fall, the strength to jump, but we fall, until you who leap and do not fall. Then we see what we were for, the single stuttered words gain the momentum of narrative. This is the story of a humble family who became a name. My son David whose father grandfather and great-grandfather unto the sixth generation worked the docks. My son David, rich, respected, powerful, a man. My son David whose eyes have the shine in them. My son David pulling history home.

'Mother?'

'David.'

They did not speak of it again. My father took his hat and scarf and walked down to the docks. There were men there he knew, idle like him, and they envied him his money and although he was not stupid enough to envy them their poverty, there was part of him that regretted all he had done. They drank together. He drank alone. He wanted to go with them to the filthy Admiral Arms but what right had he to sit in his cups when they would be going home to cheap rations and unpaid bills? He desperately wanted to say, 'I am unhappy.' How could he say that to them?

He didn't come home that night, nor the night after. The telephone rang each evening at six o'clock until a week had passed. My mother looked vaguer than usual and kept her light on all night. We were supposed not to notice. Now that it was winter the house was dark almost all day and the frost whitened the lawn. My sisters and I played quietly in the petrified air, our breath briefly warming the frozen spaces around us. We were waiting, waiting, watching the clock.