Pilcrow (18 page)

My mind had only two gears, and one of them was idling, though ‘instinctive rudimentary meditation’ sounds more flattering. The other gear was overdrive. My brain raced wildly when there wasn’t enough to tax it. There were things on the wireless which set off chains of thought that flailed and skidded, giving my mind no
traction
. There was one song that came up every now and then on the Light Programme which I loved to pieces, though it was so strange on first hearing that I struggled to make sense of it. A man and a lady were singing together, but they weren’t being sweet to each other. They weren’t being what Mum called ‘lovey-dovey’ (something she didn’t like). They were singing and fighting at the same time. It
wasn’t
the singing that was beautiful – the lady was really only shouting in tune. So it was a quarrel as well as a song. They were being rude, in a way, but they sounded happy at the same time, and they sang in turn, waiting for the other person to sing the next bit, so in another way they were being polite even while they were fighting. It was a real puzzle.

The song didn’t come along on the radio every day, it didn’t even come along every week, but sooner or later I would hear ‘Anything you can do I can do better’, and then Mum would know to turn the wireless up right away, without being asked, even before the song got as far as ‘Sooner or later I’m greater than you’.

I concentrated as hard as I could. There was a bit in the middle of the song which I found particularly baffling, though being baffled was all part of the thrill of the song. ‘Can you make a pie?’ the lady asks the man, but when he says, ‘No,’ she says ‘– neither can I.’ I couldn’t stop giggling. It was heavenly.

It was so terribly funny, but why, exactly? First of all because of the singing and fighting, which made it different from any other song. Then because they sang so fast. That was clever and it was fun for me to try to copy them.

The whole song was quick. But the bit that I learned to listen out for was very
very
quick. It was so quick that ‘quick’ wasn’t really a quick enough word for it, whatever it was they were doing. There would be a word for being more quick than quick, but I didn’t know it.

It was dazzling. I was following the quick argument in my mind, wondering who would be the winner. Then when the lady asked, ‘Can you make a pie?’ I applauded her in my mind. I didn’t really mind who won, but I had a lot of sympathy for the lady. She couldn’t win a physical fight with the man, so it would only be fair if she won this one. Ladies have different ways of winning. When she mentioned pies I gave her the crown in my mind.

The line that went ‘Can you make a pie?’ was obviously the clincher. Everyone knew that ladies knew how to make pies (Mum specialised in cakes but she could certainly make a pie), and so I applauded her silently, saying, ‘Bravo, Madam! You’ve won fair and square!’ to myself. The matter was all settled and jellified when the man said, ‘No,’ and I thought that now the argument must be over for good.

Except that I wondered how the song could go on if the argument was over? It couldn’t just stop in the middle, but I didn’t see how it could go on either, with the pie question settled so conclusively.

So when she said, ‘Neither can I,’ it was a total opposite surprise. It took me completely aback, and I couldn’t stop giggling. I was
laughing
and also a little sorry for her, thinking to myself, ‘Oh you poor lady! You’re supposed to be winning this argument, oh dear! Yes I know it was very fast, and you had to think of all those things quickly, I really don’t know how you sing so fast and so clearly – I wish I could do that! – but surely, surely you’re supposed to think of something you
can
do if you want to win the argument? I suppose, like me, you thought you were a general sort of lady, and that as a general lady you could make pies because that’s what ladies generally do. So you asked the pie question without thinking about it properly first.

‘Then as soon as you had asked it, you realised that whereas most ladies could make pies, you for some reason could not. That was sad, and also a little dangerous. If you weren’t a general sort of lady and couldn’t make pies, he might not be a general sort of man and maybe he
could
, and then the argument would go right the other way and then you’d be well and truly dished. But once he’d given his answer, and it turned out he was a general sort of man and clueless about pies, don’t you think that under the circumstances you could have told a very small lie? The man would never know, and wouldn’t be likely to want to come and watch you cook one, and even if he did, he would have to make an appointment like we all do when we go to hospital or the doctor, and if that happened you could learn to make a pie in an hour or two, couldn’t you? Someone like my mum could give you a lesson. So if you had lied, nobody would ever have known!

‘But you were a very honest lady, weren’t you? Like an angel, you couldn’t tell
any
sort of lie, however small it was…’

All this convoluted reasoning took place in a flash. It can’t have been conducted in words, because so much verbalisation wouldn’t fit into the second or two it took the people to sing that bit of the song. In my imprisoned and restricted body, I was having an intense session of mental gymnastics, and hearing the clever-quick-fighting song made me feel on top of the world.

I tried to explain all this to Mum, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t make her see what I saw or hear what I heard in the song. I was a chatty enough chap, but my tongue lagged far behind my thoughts. Each thought seemed to come faster than the last one, but each word arrived with more and more of a delay. What was going on in my head was like a disembodied squash game, with the balls having minds of their own. It was like a chain reaction of mental particles. The way each ricochet had more pace and spin than the last one would have been frightening if it hadn’t also been exhilarating.

Of course I had entirely missed the point that if the lady hadn’t told the truth the song wouldn’t have been funny, so perhaps I wasn’t being that clever after all.

There was something else I got from the song, other than the
experience
of having my thoughts bounce so nimbly from lobe to lobe of my brain. The lady said, ‘Neether can I,’ not ‘Nigh-ther’. And nobody scolded
her
. Mum smiled along with the song, as if that was perfectly all right. If anything, the lady was the one doing the scolding. She had the last word and won the argument.

The knowledge that some proper people said ‘Neether’ was bound to come in handy for a later argument of my own. I didn’t make the mistake of coming out with it right away. Patience is a virtue, virtue is a grace. I was learning to have a few tactics, and to keep my powder dry. So all in all I got a lot of ammunition from
Annie Get Your Gun
. I’m sure I learned more from Irving Berlin than I ever did from the Collie Boy.

Two things happened towards the end of my years of bed rest which had a knock-on effect on my future, although I wasn’t really party to their importance at the time. One was that my dad sat down on the bed, and the other was that Mum picked up a magazine while she was waiting her turn at the dentist.

Sitting on the bed wasn’t done. Granny didn’t do it because it suited her sense of formality to sit elegantly on a chair facing me. After the failure of simulated horse-play Mum only did it very rarely, and when she did she was careful not to rest her full weight on it. She would perch on the very edge instead, with her legs braced, so that she almost hovered.

Dad wasn’t so careful. To some extent he thought I was putting it on. Well, he did and he didn’t. I could hear him saying to Mum that I had everyone running around me in small circles, and when were they going to stop letting me have my own way about everything? It didn’t help that he had lost his own invalid privileges from the time I became ill. Mum would no longer make him tempting little dishes when he was under the weather. I monopolised the nurse in her, so that there was no one left over to fuss over him. I hogged her
help-meet
side. It didn’t help that with her rather perverse sense of family drama, Mum sometimes used me against him in their marital
quarrels
.

One awful morning, after a row which had culminated in Dad throwing the marmalade pot at her (the crock and the preserve it
contained
hit the wall with a double impact I could hear and interpret very easily), she came in and coached me with reproaches to make on her behalf. It wasn’t a job I wanted, it wasn’t a game I was eager to play, but I couldn’t stand against her for long. I put up a small fight, and then I was parroting to my father, ‘I’m really quite cross with you, Daddy. You mustn’t make my mummy cry.’

Disgraceful. Shirley Temple stuff, really, to which I wasn’t suited, and to which Dad responded, quite rightly, with a look of disgust. His wife was hysterical and his son was a malingering ventriloquist’s dummy.

Even then he didn’t turn against me. Another day I was looking at my old
What I Want To Be
book, and went through doctor, scientist, priest as usual, but this time on impulse I added actor. Mum was busy pouring cold water on this fourth crazed ambition when Dad pitched in to back me up.

‘I say let the lad be an actor if that’s what he wants.’

‘Oh Dennis,
please
!’ she said. ‘As if things aren’t difficult enough already. Can’t you act responsibly for a change? Surely you can see he worships you? Now I’ll never get the idea out of his head.’ I think Dad and I were both taken aback by the idea of me worshipping him, but certainly I was full of adoration in that moment when he stood up against her and defended me. ‘Be realistic, Dennis … what part could he possibly play?’

‘Well,’ said Dad, ‘he could be an old lady sitting in an upright wing chair in the corner.’

‘But what sort of part is that?’ she pleaded.

‘Oh, I would say it’s quite a good one!’ he shot back. ‘For one thing, he could direct operations, like a general in a battle. He gets it straight from his Great-aunt Molly, of course. Anyway, it’s really only a slight twist on what he’s doing now. There would be nothing for him to learn. Being thoroughly selfish is what he knows best, and I must admit he does it quite superbly. Even better than your mother, m’dear.’

I was beginning to see the less enjoyable side of being championed by my father.

‘The only snag is that he couldn’t sit in a wing chair because his hips don’t bend, but I dare say that’ll all be sorted out by the time he’s grown up.’ He may only have been using me as a weapon to get back at Mum, as she had used me to make him feel guilty about throwing the marmalade, but at least my father was holding a possibility open, while everyone else was busy shutting up shop on any bearable future I might possibly have.

So when he sat down on the bed one cold night there may have been a hint of hostility in the heaviness of his movements. In any case I had learned to over-ride the reflex of tensing up in such situations, which only brought the pain-spasm on, and to relax whether I felt like it or not. There was no real ill will driving his body weight down onto the bed. Nothing bad need have come of it.

It’s just that he sat down on the hot-water bottle, and it burst. It was an old item, which had come through the War (I expect) and was at the very end of its useful life. People of a less thrifty generation would have replaced it long since. It was entitled to fatigue, to
perishing
. Still, if only Collie Boy had sat down so squarely on the whoopee cushion lying in wait for her! Surely then it would have sung its vulgar song.

Dad leapt to his feet as if he was scalded, though of course it was me he was worried about. The water wasn’t close to boiling, I doubt if it was even very hot. He yanked the bedclothes off me and threw the leaking hot-water bottle into the corner. Then he must have started to lean over me, reaching for me with his hands, signalling his intentions. His course of emergency action was to scoop up the entire disaster area, the boy in his steaming pyjamas, and carry it to Mum for her to sort out. That’s when I must have said what so wounded him, to discourage him from bringing so much movement and
excitement
  to a body that had been insulated from events for such a long time. I said, ‘Please fetch my mother.’

It was the formality of the request that was so wounding, the implication that he might not know instinctively who my mother was, and apparently I made it with a hideous sort of grin on my face. As if he was nothing to me. So Mum was duly fetched to sort things out, to soothe me, to peel the pyjamas gently from me, to dry me, to change the sheets and bedclothes without disturbing me too much, so that the whole alarming incident ended as a sort of accidental
bed-bath
. Very little water had reached the mattress. It really wasn’t
serious
.

Except for what I said to Dad, and the nasty grin I wore while I said it. Dad’s great love was biology on a small scale, dealing with
miniature
organisms that revealed themselves under the microscope. He wasn’t much of a mammal man. I don’t imagine he had read Darwin on facial expression in the animal kingdom (which would certainly have been a set text if he had gone to university as planned), and he interpreted my grin as a sardonic rejection of him and his attempts to remedy the small disaster he had caused.

What he saw on my face was a changeling expression, something looking out of a child’s face that was not the child. Of course the
primate
grin can express a number of things, submission sometimes, aggression when the lips are lifted defiantly off the teeth. In my case the rictus had a simple cause, physical pain, as my brain filled up with signals from spinal joints inflamed and in spasm. I suppose I had the option of screaming, which might have been more reassuring to Dad (though that could go either way), but filling my lungs to scream would have jarred my back more and made the pain worse, so all I could think to do was grin and bear it. Unwittingly I offered him a grinning fox mask of pain.

I’m reconstructing my part in all this. I have no memories of that evening, I who memorised so much. You’d think that after so much inactivity my mind would seize on something as dramatic as a scald. Life was visiting my sick-bed with a vengeance. But I think the events of that evening didn’t stay with me for exactly the same reason. My idea of a major event had been re-calibrated since the days of my mobility. By now it was a big thing if two wet leaves of different colours, one red, one yellow, happened to be plastered against the
window
, just like that, one two, by a gust of rain, while I was watching in the mirror. Like the paw-prints of some window-walking animal.

It was headline news if Dad hung up his trousers in the bedroom upstairs without taking the change out of his pockets, so that coins rained down on the floorboards. After years of becoming accustomed to the rhythms of the day-to-day, fragments of gossip about people I hardly knew, scrupulously neutral lessons, excitement banished, a real event flashing its teeth and barrelling towards me from the cloud of plankton would simply burst the fine mesh of my attention. There is a fuse-box in the brain, and under the impact of such charged events I think a traumatised filament blew in mine, saving the rest of the organism from shock.

It would have been better, though, if it had happened the other way round, if I had remembered and he had forgotten.

As for Dad’s changeling idea, I have to say that he wasn’t altogether wrong. The look that he saw on my face, the construction he put on my words, neither of these expressed actual rejection on my part, but there’s no doubt I was leaving his world. I was being changed away from him, and I could no longer be expected to carry the weight of his hopes. For Dad the fantasy aspect of parenthood collapsed early. It became clear before I reached school age that my life would be no sort of extension of his, and he went into an angry mourning.

Usually parents have the feeling that their children are stolen from them when they’re bigger, almost grown. The current word that has something of the flavour of ‘changeling’ is ‘adolescent’. It carries that sense of malign substitution. Nowadays children are abducted not by fairies but by their peers. Only a poor copy of what was taken is left behind.

I was already a poor copy. Dad forfeited his due as a father – the knife box brought home from carpentry class, the girl-friend brought to dinner who would look at him slyly and tell him she could see where I got my looks. The thing which happens between fathers and sons happened early in our case. He never stopped being the father who threw a red ball to me from his æroplane – whatever the reasons he had for that – but I soon stopped having anything in common with the son who had caught it.