The A-Z of Us (6 page)

‘Oh no. Are you in it?' replied my mother, a little panicked. I breathed out.

‘No. I thought I was going to be, but I'm not.'

I was safe. They didn't know. My father, as a committed liberal, was a
Guardian
reader, and only bought the more conservative
Daily Times
when I called him to say one of my articles was going to be in it (to the delight of the local Muslim newsagent, Mr Gupta, who looked forward to such Saturdays when he could murmur ‘closet fascist!' as he handed the change to his old friend, the Vicar of St Phillips).

There was still an outside chance that one of his parishioners might show my father the page at Sunday Communion, but I was prepared to take that risk. Most of
them were more than a little scared of the Reverend John Thompson and his strict edicts about ‘casting the first stone', so it was unlikely that they would openly accuse his son of being a fraud and a liar, at least not on the Sabbath.

‘We read your last article, about that statue and festival in Venezuela. It was so good, I sent copies to the Joneses and the McGuires,' my mother chirped proudly from the back seat. ‘When's your next trip?'

‘I don't know, Mum,' I replied, a little too tersely.

‘Your mother was just asking, Ian,' my father reproached me as he turned onto the North Circular.

‘I don't understand why they don't publish you more often,' continued my mother. ‘You're a good writer.'

‘Thanks Mum,' I muttered, pretending to be fascinated by the passing trees.

We ate at six-thirty, as my parents have done as long as I can remember.

‘No nuts,' joked my mother as she passed me a plate of stringy rust-coloured lamb and vegetables that oozed liquid as if wounded. My father rolled his eyes; I winced and my mother laughed quickly, the triangular ritual that has been mapped out between us over twenty-five years or more.

I hate my allergy, as some people hate their nose, bottom or bald spot. I hate the way I've been given it, without any reason, without having any control over it. It's bad enough that there are a thousand things out there that can kill you, from falling trees to anthrax in your Christmas card, without having to fight a constant and
wary battle against nuts. It's crazy. It is, as Gemma used to joke, nuts.

Because of a quirk of genetics, a defect installed at conception, whereby my body reacts in a spectacularly adverse way to proteins in all nut oils, any nut – from pecan to peanut – can dispatch me to my maker. Walnuts are the worst. Just a crumb of this innocent, friendly round husk, so prized for its nutrients and healthy fatty acids, causes my lips and mouth to swell, my throat to close and my body to go into anaphylactic shock – the blood pressure plummets suddenly, you can't breathe, you pass out and bingo… the end of the journey.

So far I've come out on top. I carry lists, carefully laminated, of the words for different nuts in the world's ten most common languages. It's difficult, abroad, to avoid them. Only twice have I suffered badly, once in Italy (chocolate ice-cream, cunningly laced with hazelnuts), once in Boston, (ravioli with ground walnuts not mentioned on the menu). I never told mum and dad – they worry about me enough, every time I go anywhere they've never been to themselves, which is just about everywhere.

Ever since the Boston attack, I've carried an epi-pen (a syringe pen that you jab into your thigh, releasing an immediate dose of adrenalin into the system). I've never had to use it ‘in the field', but I've practised occasionally, on innocent oranges, as the doctors showed me; jab, jab.

Dinner passed quickly, with my parents chatting about their routines and asking vague and unobtrusive questions about my future projects. By the amorphous egg-suet-sultana pudding, I was beginning to wonder, for the first
time in several years, whether I might actually be able to spend more time with them.

‘So do you think there's a chance Molly might come for Christmas this year?' my mother asked abruptly, breaking a short silence. I choked on a sultana.

‘It's August, Mum.'

‘We've only met her once. I know she has a high-flying job with the bank, but it would be nice to get to know her a little bit better…'

‘Come on, Mum…' I groaned.

‘How's Gemma doing?' asked my father hurriedly, aware of his wife's reddening face. ‘Is the new house finished?'

‘Er… I don't think so. I haven't seen her since I got back.'

‘Her husband must be wealthy,' my mother chirped, as she rearmed for another assault on the ‘Molly Situation'.

‘Well, he's a lawyer in the City.'

‘Indian, isn't he?' continued my mother, scraping the discarded Spotted Dick back into the bowl from whence it came.

‘He's British, Mum. He was born here. His parents are from India.'

My mother nodded, as if understanding this concept for the first time. She stood, pushing back her chair.

‘I still don't know why you didn't ask Gemma to marry you. Really, sometimes Ian, I think you're too introverted for your own good.'

I glanced at my father, who was busy studying the label on the back of the Sainsbury's claret bottle. My mother disappeared into the kitchen, from where clanking noises
announced she was no longer in a good mood. My father looked up, sudden concern on his face.

‘We'll do the dishes, Margaret!' cried the Reverend John Thompson, standing to his full six-feet-three and shoving the chair so firmly under the table that it struck a leg and vibrated with shock for a moment. ‘Leave it to the men!'

I eased my own chair gently under the oak table, irritation bubbling through me. They both angered me in their own unique way. I wished my mother didn't have friends whose children had all got married before they were thirty and were popping out offspring at a rate that should have the World Health Organization on their doorsteps with free condoms and leaflets about population control. And I wished my father didn't treat my mother like one of his congregation, someone for whom all things could be assuaged, reordered and generally fixed.

As a child I had always clamoured for the responsibility of dish-washing, lording in the raised height of the plastic footstool, deciding which piece of crockery would be washed when; speeding up, slowing down, like a General marching troops. But now I was happy to be a lowly conscript and sit wiping away the soapy water, rubbing the glasses clean.

As I watched the Reverend Thompson pull on the yellow rubber gloves, one finger at a time, a surgeon preparing, I was surprised to see my father's hands tremble, just a shiver. I thought about asking him if anything was wrong, but our habitual stance when alone in a small room together was silence.

This was my father's routine. Glassware first. Then
cutlery. Then crockery. Then pans. You could not deviate, nor alter the divine pattern.

It didn't take long. Soon we had got to the plates, and then finally to saucepans that hadn't changed since I was old enough to turn on the hot tap, the dearth of words between us punctuated by tough little ticks of the plastic wall clock.

After I'd counted twenty-one clicks of the clock, I asked, finally:

‘Looking forward to retirement?'

‘It's not for another eight months,' my father replied, without looking round.

‘Really? Eight months. That's, what, thirty-two more sermons?'

‘Thirty-eight. I've written most of them already.'

‘Wow. Prolific.'

‘Not like you. I don't know how you can churn out those articles like you do.'

‘I don't exactly churn them out, Dad.'

‘I know, I know. It was just a figure of speech.'

When I was a teenager I used to daydream that my father was a farmer and that I, the son, would return from college to take over the family smallholding, treading in my father's muddy Wellington boot steps. As a boy, I tried to imagine being a Vicar, sneaking into my father's office on several occasions and pulling on the giant cassock that seemed like a parachute (in later years, this image served to fuel my contempt for the Revered Thompson, a man who needed a parachute, a safety net in life, who peddled this need to others). But I never felt comfortable, pretending to stand at the lectern delivering my Christmas
sermon. I was like a cattle farmer's son who was allergic to cows, or a teacher's offspring who loathed children.

‘So, everything's looking okay?' I found myself stumbling over the words. ‘The pension's all in place?'

My father placed the dripping dessert bowl on the table in front of me, and swiped his brow with the back of his bright yellow hand.

‘We'll make do. You don't have to worry, Ian.'

I nodded, with a smile I hoped was sympathetic. My parents were the poorest sixty-year-olds I knew. Molly and Gemma's mum had made a couple of hundred thousand selling her Tesco shares. Her house in Surrey was worth at least a million. But the Thompsons claimed they didn't care about wealth. Unlike every other sixty-something couple, they had no real savings, no big house to sell, no investments to cash in. As long as I'd been conscious of their attitudes, my parents had made a virtue of their relative poverty.

‘The sparrows of the hedgerows possess nought yet want for nought.'

Heaven makes most sense to bankrupt saints.

‘Make sure you rub them hard, Ian, I don't want any stains,' my father intoned as I took the knives and forks. Suddenly, my big toe at the end of the plaster cast started to itch. I tried to lean forward, the chair creaking, to scratch it.

‘What's the matter, Ian?' my father asked, turning, soap suds dripping to the floor.

‘Just an itch. It's hard to reach sometimes, with the plaster.'

I wondered, just for a moment, whether my father
might lean over and scratch my toes for me, healing the afflicted. Instead he nodded, turning back to the sink once more.

‘I remember when I broke my arm falling off that ladder when you were little. Very inconvenient.'

I rubbed my toe, breathed out, and finished wiping the bowl. I looked to place it in the cupboard above the kettle, where it had lived for the last twenty years.

‘It doesn't go there any more.'

My father took the bowl from me, his hand quivering gently, and placed it on a shelf below the boiler.

I couldn't sleep. I watched television late into the night, flicking through the channels in a half-thrilled attempt to find some female nudity. An infant longing to be somewhere else, far, far away, invaded me once more. I needed to escape. Any feelings of comfort and solace that had come from returning to the bosom and care of my family had vanished. I felt the walls of the darkened house closing in, as they had done so often in my childhood.

In my mid-twenties I began to wonder if my desire to travel, to escape to places where I was a complete stranger, had something to do with the pressure I'd felt as a child, being the Vicar's son. From an early age I'd loved the anonymity of transport, the places of departure and arrival, and the grimy, neutral way-stations in between.

One of my earliest memories of being completely happy was of sitting at a grease-stained table in a Little Chef restaurant, at a service station somewhere up the Mr. The bright fluorescent light which cast no shadows seemed to wash away the diners, granting each complete anonymity.
No one looked at each other, everyone was caught up in thoughts of where they'd come from and where they were going to. I loved this state of limbo, of flux and uncertainty. It seemed so far from the stark certainties of Right and Wrong at the 1960s concrete manse in Cambridge.

‘Bollocks!' I said, a little more loudly than I intended.

I was thirty-one and back with my parents.

I woke at ten the next morning. I lay, eyes closed, listening to silence. I couldn't remember a time when the small box house had ever been this peaceful. During my childhood there were always people coming and going – parishioners, bishops, local business leaders, schizophrenics, teenage mothers, Alzheimer widows, the good, the bad and the lonely. There were times when I felt like I was an intruder in my own house, with my atheist tendencies and my lack of personal tragedy to merit my father's soft advice and my mother's glutinous Shepherd's Pie. I would creep away to my bedroom and hide in my bed, reading tales of travel and derring-do, from The Hardy Boys to Jules Verne. Under my bedclothes at least, in the midst of a High Seas Adventure, I felt important and worthy.

At once, the bell in the church tower opposite began to chime, as if admonishing me. I wondered, for a moment, whether I could get out of bed and hobble over to the Church, but there were people there who still knew me as the Vicar's son, who would judge me whilst they cooed over my broken ankle. They had long mistrusted me, ever since I stopped going to services at the age of sixteen. They reproached me for breaking my father's heart.

It wasn't that I hated Christianity. I understood why
people adhered to such forms of organized religion. And Christianity was, give or take a few yearly massacres in Northern Ireland and India, a fairly peaceable faith, at least in its contemporary incarnation. In fact I quite liked the buildings that Christians excelled in – the lofty intricate architecture, the spacious tranquillity, the way light shone through stained glass. It was just that I didn't really believe in God. Unlike my mother, I watched the news, I read the papers. From the age of six, I'd been aware of the terrible, horrible things that happened in the world. I'd seen proof of man's ultimate power over the divine, the street beggars, the prostitutes, the drug addicts.

Holding a universal, unseen and omnipotent force responsible for everything might appear easier in the short-term, but the long-term implications are too terrifying to imagine.

Once again, I was caught by an overwhelming urge to call Molly. My reference point. My Greenwich Meridian. What else did I have? Some savings, my friendship (faltering) with Gemma, a few university friends, all married, who increasingly reminded me of my parents. Molly was different. She was like me.