2002 - Wake up (2 page)

But certainly our dad’s approach contributed to the chaos in the yard at home around the trailer. Crates of browning, mouldy veg brought back still unsold were simply dragged out of the van and abandoned—in contrast to the care with which he built unstable pyramids of fruit on the stall and arranged colours like a florist.

Our father never emptied or hosed down the earthen yard; he just moved what was near to our nominally mobile but actually stationary home further away, to some half-vacant spot in a corner where it could rot into the ground. No clearout, only this turgid movement around the compound.

§

Dad didn’t get it. Growth is necessary. Growth is not some contrived sub-clause in the laws of capitalism. It’s the primal force that capitalism springs from, reflects, is sustained by.

§

Greg and I shared a room, and he always woke up a few minutes after me, and in the same way: less like someone who’d fallen asleep the previous evening than one who’d been punched into unconsciousness. A radio-alarm clock Greg had saved up weeks of pocket money for flipped pop music in the air. My brother looked groggily around, blinked a few times, then closed his eyes and jiggled his head like a dog to shake loose the last drops of his dreams. Sometimes he ran his open palm down over his face. Until, having ascertained whose body he inhabited and where it was he happened to find himself on this earth, that morning, Greg swept aside the covers and sprang into action without a backward glance, making for the bathroom or kitchen at a trot.

§

We can almost see the old place in a minute. There was no ring road then. It’s coming up—there, somewhere between the two high rises. I can’t say where exactly. All built over now. They were building all through our childhood, one of the largest municipal projects in the country; our plot a final gap filled in. A council house or two must sit on squidgy foundations. I wonder whether the smell still rises?

Greg and I—and Melody when she joined us—played with Dad’s empty crates and pallets and boxes. Construction. We built our own dolls’ houses. We saw how it was done, after all, this vast council estate going up around us and a few other trailer families. Greg was the builder, I was more the architect. We devised streets, blocks, we put whole shanty towns together, Greg’s remote-control racing car crashing around corners.

In summer, the smell was truly terrible. Even we could tell that, habituated to it as we were. People would stop to yell, “There’s something wrong with your drains.” It was the stink of rotting vegetables.

Mum was inside, harassing fresh ones. For our mother and most of her generation, cooking meant subjecting food to varied forms of assault that drained it of taste. Roast potatoes soggy with cooking oil. Baked potatoes, leathery hand grenades. Boiled potatoes falling apart on the plate.

§

Our mobile home hadn’t moved an inch on its platform of breeze blocks since the day it was delivered, direct from the factory, and positioned atop a concrete base. As if the word ‘mobile’ denoted neither unwanted transience nor dream of upwards, downwards, sideways mobility, but boasted only of its beginnings: our home’s materialisation in an empty spot, on a vacant stage.

Not that I myself saw this act of sorcery: it occurred shortly before I was born, when Greg was a year old. But it’s not hard to imagine, since I saw the magic repeated on a couple of nearby plots, before the houses began to go up. These occasions have coalesced to form a single early memory. Men shuttering off a plot with planks of wood; covering the ground with old bricks, stones, broken china; filling a concrete mixer with shovelfuls of sand, cement, pebbles and water; pouring the resultant grey gloop on to the ground.

A man, kneeling on a plank, tamped down the wet concrete with a wide strip of wood that jutted out over each side of shuttering. He shuffled forward, scraping the excess off the top and away from himself. The pebbles disappeared into the grey swamp.

I can picture Dad performing this task, even though I know I couldn’t have seen him doing ours. Maybe he helped one of our neighbours. Whether this is a fake memory or a real one, I see Dad working twice as fast as any other layer of concrete ever did, because that’s how he was. Tilting wheelbarrows of broken bricks with a dusty roar. Hurling shovelfuls of sand into the mixer like a torpedo loader in a black and white wartime sub. Tamping down the concrete so fast the seesaw tap of wood on wood hammers out a staccato percussion.

To each expectant plot would come, early one subsequent morning, a leviathan of the roads: a huge low-loader, flashing lights and festooned with red flags like bunting, bearing the WIDE LOAD of a mobile home. A crowd gathered: the event was carnivalesque. Like the appearance of a battleship in the harbour of our neighbourhood, the vehicle drew to a slow rest with self-important grunts and sighs and groans, and from it a new home was lifted on to breeze blocks dragged and shuffled into position by half a dozen scuttling men.

§

We were a blue-eyed, plug-ugly Anglo-Saxon family. Yes, we were. White and skinny or white and lumpy: that was the choice our genes offered us. My father had a childish kind of face, without depth; small eyes, nose, mouth popped on a spherical head. He was balding, yet instead of ageing him this merely exacerbated the infantile roundness of his cranium. He was like a cartoon character whose creator refused to allow him to age, to mature, to learn more. Our mother had a fine-boned, delicate, feeble face, that of an anxious bird, but her body was short and bulging, low bosom and tubular waist persuading clothes out of their manufactured shape and into hers. My brother too was stocky and his features were squashed and pugnacious, while myself, I was stringy like Dad and plain, neither noticed nor remembered. A friend once told me I had a Photofit face.

“Steer clear of crime, John,” he advised me.

And out of the midst of this bunch, this unpromising thicket of genes, rose a pretty, slender girl who appeared to share not a single trait with any one of us. Almond-eyed, brown-skinned, poised. Melody. She made my blood hum.

Four of our family formed a proud praetorian guard around the fifth, this adopted young princess. I understood that was what we looked like. My parents, my brother and I guarding a young member of foreign royalty, temporarily fostered with as humdrum an English household as possible. Melody gave our family a fairy tale dimension.

§

My brother liked to frighten Mum. He used to imitate birds. No, not birds, it wasn’t birds, it was flying pterodactyls, made of Plasticine and filmed in stuttering animation gobbling up semi-clothed actors. They cawed like hoarse ravens when they, i.e. he, crouched on sideboards and windowsills and swooped down on Mum’s shoulders as she passed by.

Do all small boys zigzag through a period of insanity around the age of six or seven? When they make funny sounds explicable only to themselves, jump up in the air, dash in and out of rooms for no apparent reason?

Greg regularly brought home from primary school a thick ear or black eye that he explained reluctantly. “I had to sort X out,” he would say sadly. “Y was asking for it,” he’d sigh. After the jealousy of his first years Greg never fought with me or any other member of the family. It could have been that he’d flushed such antagonistic behaviour from his system, but I think it more likely that a mental shift took place: you faced out from your circle, and fought the world. It became unconscionable for Greg to turn his violence inward upon those close to him, it would have meant turning his moral radar inside out.

He was a wonderful older brother. Because of Greg, no one bothered me. “Call me on this walkie-talkie if you’re in trouble, John.” He afforded me space to work out for myself who I wanted as friends, allies, enemies. To make my own calculations. No one wanted to mix it with Greg. He wasn’t tall, by the time I was ten or eleven I’d caught him up. But Greg was not merely bullish, he was unstoppable. Other boys could overcome him, but they could never subdue him. If they put Greg on the floor, he’d get up again. If they hurt him badly he’d nurse wound and grudge together: he’d recuperate and come back for more. No one wants to fight that kind of relentless aggravation, the kind they’ll never be rid of.

My first calculation was that I should keep close to my older brother. Or perhaps I should say, keep him close to me.

§

From the moment the world came into her focus, a smile was rarely absent from Melody’s countenance. The baby we coddled, the toddler we jostled each other to spoil, Mum admonishing, “She’ll get ideas above her station,” this baby smiled indulgently up at a crescent of fools’ faces. These games, these songs, these peek-a-boos, Melody responded to more like a benevolent judge of some talent contest than the audience of one for whom the show was put on. She was a self-composed child.

It was the same with her friends. Other girls schemed for intimacy with the prettiest girl in school. They prowled the playground in shifting packs, allegiances sworn in blood and broken in spite, tears spilt over snide, precise cruelties. I caught glimpses of such female strategy even in Melody’s class, two years below me and across the gender divide, of which Melody herself appeared quite unaware.

The friends she brought home were unpredictable. There might be one of the other glamorous figures in her class, but they could just as well be misfits and oddballs. Like Jimmy Green, a boy who had to stare at people or objects or his own thoughts before responding to them. As if he had to peer into the essence of a thing, had to have a long hard look at you before knowing how to address you. Melody let Jimmy hang around our place for a few months, spooking Mum in the kitchen whenever she turned round to find this wide-eyed silent kid staring at her.

Or there was Sally something, her surname’s gone, who liked to pretend that she was disabled in some way. That she lacked one of her senses. I once came across Melody and Sally in the warehouse, as Dad called his wooden storage shed, with their eyes closed, opening boxes and identifying contents by shape, texture, smell. Describing them.

“It’s smoother than a peach,” said Melody. “It’s not as waxy as an apple. It’s a pear. But it’s not shaped like a pear.”

“So what variety is it?” Sally demanded.

“I don’t know,” Melody admitted, eyes screwed tight shut as if by an exaggerated frown of ignorance. “I forget that stuff.”

The last to open their eyes was the winner of this game, and Sally and Melody were able to play it for hours, being equally honest and incurious people. I tried to join them but couldn’t restrain myself from peeking. Another time they built a wobbly tower of fruit and a vegetable dome with their eyes placidly closed. I grew instantly impatient watching them, although funnily enough they inspired a habit I retain today: when checking a batch of potatoes I close my eyes and concentrate on the way they feel, and smell.

§

I’m reminded of one occasion. I wasn’t much of a disobedient child, but one lunchtime I got it into my head to throw my food on the floor. No toddler, mind, I was six or seven years old. I have no excuse, I knew what I was doing. The idea surged into my head to throw food on the floor and I did so, methodically, a spoonful at a time.

“John!” Mum said. “What do you think you’re…? Stop that.” I continued.

“Pick that up, John. Stop it at once.”

Greg and Melody just stared, as if waiting for some sense in what I was doing to reveal itself.

I remember looking up at Mum with what I knew to be insolence and defiance. She crumbled, whisked away my plate and began clearing the mess off the floor herself, saying, “Wait till your father gets home, young man. We’ll see what Dad thinks of this.”

Sure, Dad came home, took me to their bedroom, gave me a good belt across my bare backside. We danced that duet a few times. But it’s Mum I’m thinking of. What was I doing? I don’t know, asserting myself, of course, that’s easy to say. But it looks to me now rather as if I was bullying her.

§

Greg was and is Mum’s favourite, it was an open secret. Melody was too perfect and different from her to give Mum that wrench of love in her stomach. Greg spent his infancy beating Mum up and she adores him. Adored Dad too in her way. I remember she used to say of our father, “He’s the sort of man who sweeps leaves in the wind.” Not said aggressively, no, she was timidly teasing him. With pride, indeed. Accompanied by a shake of the head, and a frail laugh. “My husband, he’s the sort of man who sweeps leaves in the wind.” As if to say, Yes, he’s stubborn, my old man, he doesn’t give a monkey’s what people think of him; he’s eccentric, he’s an individualist. He’s individually mine.

Though she was right in another sense: our father only thought of sweeping leaves, it only occurred to him to do so, when presented with the sight of them being blown around our yard. And then he couldn’t wait. He’d go and grab a rake or a broom and condemn himself to a mighty Canute-like encounter. He was unable to put off such a task to a more suitable time. Dad lived in an always now or never.

Our father had a way of adding certain words to the end of sentences that implied that what he’d just said contained depth one might have missed on first hearing. “Council’s taxing traders off the street. Carry on like this there won’t be any markets,” he’d say, and then: “You see what I’m saying?”

Or, “Your grandmother was born while Queen Victoria was still alive. She’s seen two centuries. Haven’t you, Nan? Think about it, boy. See what I’m driving at?”

By the age of nine or ten I already wanted to yell at my father, “Of course we can see what you’re driving at, Dad! It’s a straight bloody line!”

His customers were more indulgent than me, his son. Or no more intelligent than him, perhaps. It’s a confusing moment when a boy begins to apprehend that he’s brighter than his father. Not to mention an irritation. Nor an embarrassment.

I mustn’t draw an inaccurate picture. Our father was excitable, tense, too busy for solemnity. He was a workaholic, a bony, blurred figure lifting sacks of spuds and boxes of apples and crates of caulis in and out of the van.
Sharpe’s Fresh Produce
. Juddering out of the yard with a fart of putrid exhaust smoke. Dad was like a child, that’s what it was, he jumped with excitement. He often got hiccups. He drank milk when he came home, went straight to the fridge and poured himself a glass, like a boy, and downed it breathlessly, adorning himself with a milk moustache. And when our father was tired he’d just flop on the sofa, sigh, his eyelids fluttered, and there he was fast asleep.