‘I think I’m all right. This place is jolly mad, though. How nervy are you?’
‘Very, I think. I hope I am. I don’t want to be any more nervous than I am now. How nervy are you?’
‘Lots.’
‘It’s a thing, isn’t it.’
‘We’d better meet soon, don’t you think?’
Yes, I do think. But I’ve got no advice for you. All I’ve got to tell you is: don’t grow up, if you can possibly avoid it. Stay down there, because it’s no fun up here.
Out of habit — and out of anxiety and shame and self-dislike — I asked my foster-sister to meet me at a bus-stop on the Fulham Road. I do this to girls (or to me) because if they fail to turn up you simply hop on a bus, as if that was what you were waiting for, as if that was all you had in mind, rather than standing on an exposed and lonely corner while the streets about you go soiled and ripped and dead. She came. She jumped off a 14 on the far pavement, and, her small body canted forward intently, like a well-trained child, ran across the road. We hugged awkwardly and separated to appraise each other in the streetlight. Half-fringe, large pale eyes, her incongruously strong nose reddened in the cold, a thin but open face, without much angularity; she looked pre-pubescent — non-pubescent; I felt that if I ever slept with her (these thoughts wriggle up) it would cause some lingering and poignant hurt that would take me my whole life to nurse. (Does she fuck? I wonder suddenly, with a nauseous lurch. Nah. She probably doesn’t know about all that yet. And I hope no one ever tells her. Oh God I miss my sister. No one ever told her either. Well, that’s something. She may have got fucked up but at least she never got fucked. I’m glad.)
‘Come on, you look all right,’ said Ursula. ‘For a yob.’
We went to a noisy, conservatorial hamburger place I know some 200 yards further up the Fulham Road, a place where tall, handsome trend-setters go on as if they were your friends while they give you food and take your money. It’s popular there. We joined a short queue consisting entirely of couples, denimmed men and their far more flamboyant and varied-looking women. I don’t like couples, as you know (they’re like a personal affront), but Ursula and I pretended to be one, and within five minutes we were inside and within ten had secured two seats at an unoccupied table for four. Immediately a rangy young man with toothbrush eyebrows pulled up a chair opposite. I turned to him resentfully and he met my gaze. This guy wants a fight, I thought, until he said, ‘Hi. What would you like tonight?’ and produced a yellow pad from his top pocket.
‘Oh. Just some wine, while we think. Red. A bottle.’
‘I won’t be having any,’ said Ursula.
‘So what?’ I said.
The waiter nodded grimly and sloped off.
‘I wish they wouldn’t do that,’ I said.
‘What did he do?’
‘Sat down next to us like that. He’s a waiter, isn’t he? I don’t want waiters sitting down next to me.’
‘Come on, Ginger. He looked nice. He looked intelligent too.’
‘Oh yeah? Then why’s he dealing them off the arm in a dump like this?’
‘Chippy chippy chippy,’ said Ursula.
(Do you know what ‘chippy’ means, by the way? I think I do. It means minding being poor, ugly and common. That’s what chippy means.)
‘You bet,’ I said.
Ursula chose this moment to take off her duffle-coat; this was a thick, studently item and I knew that its removal would diminish her personal presence by about two-thirds. From her dark flower-patterned dress (clean, unironed, shapeless, not a dress for winter) now protruded thin stockingless legs and thin forearms whose shade of fluff caught the light. When she strained to hook her coat on the stand’s tall curlicue, the dress rode wispily up her Bambi thighs. See? She really is my sister and she really is about ten.
I opened my third packet of cigarettes that day and poured out the wine brought to us smartly enough by the uppity waiter. Round about us, sexy youngsters laughed and whispered.
‘Whew, Terry!’ said Ursula. ‘You are nervy tonight.’
‘I know. Look at my hands.’
Ursula had just returned from a weekend with her parents at home. We talked about it, that secure and companionable-seeming place (I used to go back there a lot. I don’t any more and neither does Gregory. I don’t like going away at all any more: I’m frightened something might happen behind my back. And home gives me the horrors, anyway). Apparently father’s ankle had healed after his celebrated fall from the barn roof; he now claimed to be fleeter of foot than at any period of his life. Recent stories about him included his heckling of — and subsequent scuffle with — the left-wing vicar of the village church, his new passion for indoor bowls, his continued refusal to eat vegetables, his second wave this year of horrendous spending sprees, his third early-morning pass at the septuagenarian cleaning-lady, and his decision to erect a wigwam in the main sitting-room.
‘Christ, everything’s falling apart these days,’ I said. ‘I suppose he really must be a bit mad, mustn’t he?’
Ursula’s expression — like mine, one of vestigial amusement — did not change. ‘Of course. He always has been. All of us lot always have been. You’re the lucky one, Ginger.’
‘Oh that’s what I am. I was wondering what I was. But you’re posh, you lot. It makes no odds if posh people go mad. They’re all mad anyway.’
‘That’s why you’re the lucky one — you’re not posh.’
‘Yes I am. I’m posh too now.’
‘No you’re not.’
‘What am I then?’
‘You’re a yob.’
No I’m not. I’m posh. I know everything there is to know about class, and about how you can locate it. I was present that historic evening five years ago when the girl sitting opposite me now came into the television room of Rivers Hall, where the family was watching a series about pre-war servants and their mistresses and masters, and unthinkingly curled up on her nanny’s lap. The nanny (since retd.) did not move as she accepted the weight of her fourteen-year-old charge. At no point did they take their eyes off the screen. I know all there is to know about class. I say sofa, what?, pepper-and-salt, lavatory, valet (I could even say behind instead of ass if I liked). When I was fourteen I did a quiz in a magazine: anyone who completed this quiz, the idea was, would know at once how posh they were. Halfway through — yes, I tipped the soup bowl away from me; no, I didn’t put the milk in first — I could tell I was going to be very posh indeed. The last question was about what you had called your children, or what you would call them if you ever had any (this was when people could still afford them). Would you call your son (a) Sebastian, Clarence, Montague, or (b) Michael, James, Robert, or … As I poised to give the (b) section an imperious tick (I hadn’t fallen for all that (a) bullshit), my eye trailed over the (c) section, which ran: (c) Norman, Keith, Terry. The biro tinkled from my hand. So my dad was a yob. So what else is new? (Do you still think any of that matters, class and so on? It doesn’t. It’s crap. It’s crap.)
‘Yobs go tonto too, you know,’ I said.
‘Oh no they don’t,’ said Ursula.
‘Oh yes they do. What’s it like?’ I asked dully, ‘ — I mean leaving home and stopping being at school and being in a town and jobs and everything? I’ve been doing it for ages now and I still can’t tell what it’s like. There’s something …’
‘Well, I wouldn’t know yet, would I? Cos I’m still at school. What do you think it is? More nerves?’
‘Yes, more of them all right. But that’s not it. Good. I’m drunk. About bloody time too. I just wonder what all the fuss was about — spend your life getting ready for this. No one has a good time after they’re ten just worrying about it. It’s, I think it’s just — ’
‘… How’s Gregory?’
‘How is he ever? A monster of conceit. And a hustler. And a faggot.’
‘Oh, come on, Ginger. Anyway, what’s a faggot?’
‘Look. Don’t ever call me Ginger again, okay
?’
‘I thought you liked being called Ginger.’
‘Well I don’t.’
‘I thought you did. I’m sorry.’
‘What made you think that? I don’t like it at all. I don’t like it one bit.’
‘I’m sorry.’
I looked round in bewilderment, at the girls, at the couples. During such moments my ugliness hangs on me like cheap heavy clothes. I looked at Ursula. What good was she to me? I didn’t even want to fuck her — I wanted to hurt her, to do her harm, to lash out at her shins with my boot, to swipe my wine glass across her face, to grind out my cigarette on her fluttering hand. Oh, what’s going on here?
‘Oh, what’s going on here? I’m sorry. Let’s go. I’m sorry.’
We walked in silence to Gloucester Road Underground. ‘I’ll see you home,’ I said. We took a train crowded with drunks to Sloane Square. We walked in silence down tapering, underlit streets.
‘This is it,’ she said. ‘I ring the bell now.’
‘Well, that’s sorted you out for life.’
‘Mm?’
‘I’m no good at all this any more. I’ve got to lock myself away until I’m fit to live.’
We kissed, in the usual style — so that the centre of my lips rested at a slight angle on the corner of hers.
‘Terry,’ she said, ‘you must stop all that. You’ll make yourself just how you pretend to be.’
‘I know I will.’
Then she held me closer, with a kind of girlish authority, and we kissed again, mildly but firmly, on the lips.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
She put her mouth to my ear. ‘I hear voices,’ she whispered. ‘In my head.’
‘What sort of voices. What do you mean?’
‘In my head.’
‘What do they say?’
‘Never mind. But I do hear them.’
‘Hey look, I’ll ring you tomorrow, all right?’
‘All right.’
‘Good night. Look after yourself.’
‘Sweet dreams,’ she called, moving up the steps to her door.
And it all peopled my mind along the moist avenues, during the vivid tube-journey, and in the rain and shadows of my own familiar streets. The rain, that kiss, those voices. Just think about it, boy, I tell myself — you can do it. Ursula-fuck, sister-fuck … foster-fuck? No, I can’t do it — I can’t even think about it. That skein of corny decadence I leave to the suburbs of Gregory’s imagination. He’s always enjoyed hystericizing the few junior touch-up sessions he had with Ursula in his teens (I had a few with her too, in a sense). But I’ve been through all that, I’ve done all that and it’s all too complicated. And I’m touchy about sisters generally. I had one who died and I’m sentimental about them. Let’s forget about sisters. I’ve had enough of sisters. Fuck sisters.
I stood on the landing outside our flat. There is a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling window there that creaks and bends when the air gets turbulent. It wobbles in the wind. It shivers in the cold. It hates stormy weather (it isn’t up to its job). I saw my reflection in the pane. Raindrops were dribbling down my face in lugubrious rivulets. I listened to the traffic; I thought of me, and all of you out there, laughing at my losses. I pressed my head against the glass. It gave an inch. I pressed harder. I felt at any moment I might hear it crack.
This is the way it began.
Whoosh. I am six — my sister is hardly there yet, a hot wad of freckles and tears in the neighbour room. Two or three times a month, in the kitchen at supper time, seven o’clock, a slight, tickling, migraine haze would envelop and gradually retard our evening meal. Uh-oh, the air was saying. My father, a tall, lumpy, sober-looking man with flat red smalltown hair, a bent little slot of a mouth and stark protuberant eyes, sits to my right, saying nothing, eating his eggs, chips, beans and tomatoes with fastidious dispatch, paying shrewd justice to every foodstuff on each forkful, so that he will be left with, say, a sliver of yolk, a stub of chip, two baked beans and the pipped crimson gook of the tomato for the final prim swallow. My mother, a lean, nervous and intelligent woman with nutcrackerish features (she lost her teeth; she never did find them again), sits tight on my left, saying nothing, mashing her skiddy eggs, beans and tomatoes into thin brothy spoonfuls. Sitting between them — and looking, I should think, about the same as I look now — is me, Terry at six, the long-ago boy. I work at my fishfingers; no one speaks, though you feel everyone is trying to, everyone would if they could, and the air gets itchier and itchier until the sound of our irons on the plates is like the alarum of advancing kettle-drums which swells up to fill the room, then dies down again, then gathers once more.
And it’s a completely normal evening — we all think it’s a completely normal evening — except for this curious, unpleasant headache haze and this strange false clarity of sound. But perhaps, too, we can all sense something else, an extra thing, activity starting to occur somewhere in my father’s brain, and maybe in my mother’s mind also a perverse, insidious reciprocity has begun.
Time for you to go to bed, Terry, says my father to the air. Don’t forget to clean your teeth, my mother adds, stacking the plates, her head bowed. I walk to the door and turn. For a moment I feel I am on the edge of their exhausted, frightening, migraine world, and feel that I could deliver them from it, tell them something quickly about the other side. But I say,
Good night.
Good night.
Good night.
And I walk softly upstairs, use the bathroom in watery porcelain silence, undress shivering and slide between the heavy blankets, crush the pillow to my head — and hear the house start to come alive like a big machine: the walls shudder and sweat, the ceiling splits, the floor bounces my bed high in the air, the cold sheets hug me in their fire.
When I was a bit older — taller, stronger, more aware that my parents were up to no good — I used to think that by simply appearing, by simply showing them I was there, that they would have to stop, and stop straight away and never do it again. (I had an absurd faith in the sacramental power of my own presence. What happened to that?) See! I’m here while you’re doing this. Can’t you tell what it must be like for me?
I stood waiting in my room. I wanted to hide, hide, but I made no move to get undressed. There had been that dizzying tingle again, and that sharp low threshold of sound, and I knew it would have to happen soon. Then the stirrings began, random and intermittent at first, like the collapse of distant breakers, harsh music over choppy water. Out on the shaken landing, the walls veering about me, down the stairs which creak by on a slowing treadle, part of the old machine the house becomes as I head for its heart, the back room, a place of dangling black pans, sooty cisterns and something I’ve never seen before. In the downstairs passage the noise is almost unbearable — and not the discrete, inanimate noise of battle and wreckage, but warm, sweaty, human sounds, as of pain and distress, of something far too intense to be seen. I enter the kitchen; I cross the room and push the half-glass scullery door; it swings open and I stare. At what? At my father’s eyes as they focus incuriously on my face. Eyes without a trace of hatred or anger or surprise or any emotion I have felt myself or seen in another, pure and abstracted eyes gazing up from some impossible task. Whoosh. The room is full of migraine and I hardly make out my mother where she bends on the plastic floor: the headache air seems to bulge up to expel me, gusting me out and cracking the door shut inches from my face. Then the world and I retreat, recede from the back room, and the soft machinery begins to stir again, again cautious and intermittent, choppy music over distant breakers.
Everything would be all right the next day, more or less. My mother would look appreciably more fucked up than usual over breakfast but visibly relieved, my father preoccupied, vague, but at peace — an air of heavy compromise. Why did it have to get so much worse? I could have taken any number of those nights of migraine, and the appeasing quiet of those mornings. But things fell apart — I suppose they had to — ending in a few
shrill seconds of panic, when my mother got killed and then it was my sister’s turn and he never hit me. Why?
Ursula was wrong. Yobs do go tonto. I’m going it a different way to my father, but I’m going it. I think everyone is going it a bit these days (I wish I knew somebody, so I could check the theory out). I’m going it, and I’m one of the people whom people like you see in the streets and think, ‘Sometimes I wouldn’t mind being like him — no joys, no pains, no soul to vex you.’ But I have got a soul (and it wants to be kissed same as any other soul). Madness is being democratized too, you know. You people can’t go on hogging it forever. We want our share too.
I finally had it out with that wastepaper-basket. I thought I’d rid myself of one bad thing. I got a whole packet of special black rubbish-bags from the supermarket (I reckoned they’d be handy for carrying my laundry in as well). I got drunk on a Saturday lunchtime and emptied the wastepaper-basket into one of these special bags. It was rough, but I handled it (it went on forever, like the strata of a Pompeian latrine). While I was in the mood I put a cache of dirty socks, underpants and shirts into another of these special black bags. I dropped the rubbish in the dustbin and went on to the launderette in Ladbroke Grove, where I left my stuff with the old woman who does it for you if you pay her (other people, most of them foreigners, are poorer than me and wash their stuff themselves. I feel quite flash, I feel like Gregory, in the launderette). When I turned up to collect my clean clothes on Monday morning, a disgusted manageress returned my special black bag to me. ‘Do you want us to wash that?’ she asked. ‘How many dries, sir?’ The bag was full of rubbish, of course. I ran back to the flat. The dustmen had been that morning. Four shirts, five pairs of underpants, six pairs of socks. Another bad thing. Thanks for that. I think I’m losing my bottle. I think I’m going tonto.
A fucked-up hippie lives in the streets near us. I see him two or three times a week. He looks more fucked-up every day. He lies wedged in the doorway of a barricaded shop in Moscow Road. He has a suitcase and some carrier-bags. His orange-peel face is scored with trickly yellow lines from crying in the cold sun. I’m going to speak to him soon and ask him what it’s like.