2002 - Wake up (3 page)

When Dad ate he stuffed his face. He ate like a horse, our thin father, dolloping in food with his lips the way a tinker’s horse mouthed a carrot off your palm. But even that took too long, so he also shovelled his bangers and mash in with fork and spoon. Dad looked like he was force-feeding someone else’s mouth, punishing them with meat and two veg. What it did to his digestion one can only imagine, as barely-masticated mouthfuls of food were packed off to his unfortunate gut.

T
he other week I plucked up the gumption to visit my young doctor, and confess the unease I’d been feeling lately.

“About your boy?” he asked. “Surely not. Not now.”

“No, no,” I assured him. “About myself.” I said, “I get a prickling in my scalp. Also, in the skin of my thighs. Worst of all, on my back.”

“An itch?”

“I scratch at the isolated pinpricks, convinced it’s just a couple of midgey fleas. You know the sensation? Like, on my legs. You lift your trousers and give the fleshy back of your calves a good scratch. Run your fingernails up and down the shin, where the skin’s close over the bone. Or in there at the back of the knees. The relief.”

“Yes, yes, indeed.”

“Higher up, and you can scratch your legs through the material of your trousers or, in meetings, thrust hands deep into pockets and, surreptitiously…” I shrugged. “Detected, the movement could be mistaken.”

“Quite.”

“You might attempt to squeeze your hands down between waistband and underwear and give a good scratch.”

“I see.”

“Of course, if I’m on my own, there’s no problem. I undo the trousers—take them off if I care to—and give myself over to a good bout of scratching.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“But meetings, Doctor—that’s the trouble. What do I do then? Discussions, chats, with however menial a hand. Meetings happen all the time. We employ three hundred people.”

“Here? No.”

“Of course not. I meant if you add up everyone all round the country. Yes, yes, including part-timers. Yes, and the migrant workers, of course, but there aren’t many of them any more. Jobs, I mean, not migrants. More migrants than ever. More than we need. What was I saying?”

“Meetings?”

“A job interview, say, with some young applicant. I’m not one of those freaks, you know, those monsters.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“Megalomaniacs. Unlike my brother, I do try to accord every individual a certain respect. Even the lads we get.”

“Young men.”

“For washing, packing jobs. They sit there dumb. Dense. Marooned. No social skills, Doctor, I guess it’s, oh, it’s everything, isn’t it? It’s staring at a screen, it’s absent fathers, it’s that relish of ignorance in our working-class culture. Where’s the vim of youth? The girls have it. Girls no longer teach themselves to be still. They’re the ones with spunk now. Really. We recruit more women every year.”

“And in meetings?”

“What?”

“You were saying.”

“Yes, I was. Like, my hands, it’s easy, I quietly rake them. Scalp too I can scratch openly, just taking care not to do so so often it attracts attention. But the back, Doctor. This is the problem. How can I reach my spine surreptitiously? You tell me. No, of course not. I can only suffer and squirm. If it’s bad enough—and it can become unbearable—I’ve been known to excuse myself from meetings and rush to the toilet, there to wrestle jacket, tie, shirt from off my back and let myself loose in a frenzy of scratching.” I leapt up, shed garments, mimed. “With pen, or keys, or—if I remembered in my agitated state to grab one on the way out—a ruler, acting as an extension of my arm and fingers so that I can stretch, you know,
contort
, and reach that unreachable spot, the inside of the shoulder blade there, where the insect loves to lurk.”

I sat back down, having gone to some trouble to suggest the full extent of my exertions. Got my breath back.

“Of course, there are no insects, as I am forced, each time it happens, to admit; as well as the fact that the itching is not on the skin, it’s under it.”

The doctor nodded his head in that reassuring yet infuriating way of medical men.

“It’s a non-specific itch?” he asked.

I smiled. “A non-specific itch roaming around my body, Doctor.”

“Let me examine you,” he said.

T
he ring road curves ahead. I’m cruising along here and my mind turns over. My father. Me old dad: he was all nervy, a flurry of too many things to do, but he’d stop and puff himself up. Try and give an example. Think. OK. It’s a Sunday morning. I’m thirteen years old. My mother asks over breakfast how I intend to spend my day. I say I’m not sure whether I want to go to my room, to do the homework I need to do before the end of the weekend, now or this evening.

My father considers this a moment, frowns across the kitchen table, nods gravely and—though I’d not asked for any response from him at all—says, “Son. You do whichever you feel like doing.”

“Yes,” I say, “I will.” It’s not possible to say,
Of course
I’ll do what I feel like doing. I, Dad.
Me
.

And a little later a neighbour will drop by and I’ll overhear Mum tell her, “The lad’s in his room, studying. His dad told him to do his homework now instead of this evening, get it over and done with and out of the way, if that was what he
felt
like doing. So he’s in there now.”

And my father, sitting by the fire, rolling himself a thin cigarette he’ll take outside to smoke, frowns with smug sagacious modesty. The wise father.

I guess, looking back, my mother really was as stupid as him. Dad’s paternal authority was based on a weak impression of command, but it convinced Mum as well as himself. Well, he fooled me for a few years. I have a child’s image of him discarding a finished cigarette: he held it between thumb and forefinger and he had a habit of flicking it away, into the mud, with great deliberation; with a flourish. An image from the years when I still loved and respected him.

§

In my memory our mum spent all day preparing the evening meal. That’s all I see her doing: slowly washing, mixing, plucking, stringing it out like an old lag consigned to kitchen duties. Coping with the tedium by taking any excitement or creativity out of cooking, sliding into a trance.

“Always peel your potatoes in advance,” I can hear her advising her daughter. “Save time later, Melody. Cut them up and leave them to soak.” Generations of women letting the vitamins in potatoes leach out.

§

Dad and I were doomed to fight. He always considered me lazy. He lacked the imagination to see that reading, and study, could demand intense and exhausting commitment. Because he in his time had idled through school, a prison sentence to be endured, he thought scholars were just people who actually enjoyed daydreaming. Dad lived in the body, expressing himself in action, and nothing else made sense.

When I look back now, what saddens me is that a lifetime’s rumbling conflict was based on such an absurd misunderstanding. I try and tell myself that this is not possible, it’s too pathetic to be true, that there was surely a genetic, a chemical, incompatibility between us. That in fact we were too alike, two tall, thin, clumsy men desperate to achieve what we set out to in this world. We were reflections of each other, Dad and I, distorting mirrors that showed us only our flaws.

Dad made fun of my reading and I fought him, and our love was fierce and tense and fluctuating. Mum supported me, always, and all I’ve had for her has been contempt, really, for the self-imposed limits of her existence. Now I can appreciate what it took to raise three children, the years of selflessness in which Greg and I and Melody could begin to grow in our own directions. But the brutal fact is that this recognition can’t wipe away the derision that built up in my feelings towards her over so many years.

I do my best to love Mum, a dutiful middle-aged son, to play my albeit junior role to Greg and Melody in providing everything she needs in her gaping dotage, but it’s too late for me to take my mother seriously.

Greg too was mystified by his younger brother’s book-ishness. He was as sharp and jumpy as Dad on the stall: before he’d reached double figures Greg could haggle in a variety of styles, from flirtation to insult, generosity to pleading, according to what you deemed this or that customer was most likely to be seduced by. He could tot up running totals of this many strawberries and that much cabbage as he weighed them out; was able to file an interim figure on a little shelf in his brain if he needed to chat about the weather or invite the lady to give his ripe banana a prod any time she liked; and then, as soon as note or coins had changed hands, each sum was erased from Greg’s mental slate.

I tried to learn from him. “Like a teacher wiping the blackboard,” I ventured.

“No,” Greg frowned, slowly. “Like a bookie,” he said.

§

On occasional Wednesday evenings we were invited to accompany Dad on his one and only hobby. The stadium was situated a few streets away from us. As well as dog racing, it also hosted speedway which, since it didn’t interest Dad, Greg and I only ever heard: a whine, like a plague of angry motorbikes descending through the night sky, reached us in our beds.

“There’s no pleasure in gambling on machines,” our father claimed. “Think about it, boy.”

In the holidays Dad would tell Mum, as we sat around the dinner table, “The lads can come to the track with me tomorrow night,” as if good and generous news was unmanly unless filtered through a woman.

“Why can’t I come, Daddy?” Melody complained.

“You’re too young!” Greg or I would authoritatively inform her. “It’s not for girls!”

But the satisfaction gained from this confirmation of our maturity was short-lived, since none of us could bear to see Melody disappointed, so the rest of the evening was spent competing with each other to promise her the best consolation.

“I’ll take you tadpoling,” I could suggest.

“Let’s go to the pet shop,” Greg would trump me, “and watch the aquariums.”

Melody gave us her tolerant smile.

“Don’t spoil her,” Mum said, and then, “You can come shopping with me Saturday, love, and we’ll have tea at Lyons.”

“We’ll split our winnings with you,” Dad declared, which amused not only Melody but every one of us.

§

On the night of the dogs Dad would be involved in some odd-job or paperwork. The time Greg and I knew we ought to leave would come and be long gone when he’d abruptly drop what he was doing, bark, “Jump to it, lads, we’re late! On our way!” and stride out of the yard. Dad rolled and lit a cigarette as he marched, Greg and I lagging behind his brisk pace then scurrying to catch up, in children’s awkward, unfair trot-walk. In the executive lounge of the stadium fat and pallid people in synthetic clothes sat in a gruesome wash of bright light and plastic, ate scampi and chips and sipped their beer or Babycham, and gambled in a polite manner. Not us.

We were out on the concrete terraces in a nervous crowd of men, up from the bookies leaning their blackboards against the fence along the home straight. If he remembered, Dad bought himself a pint of beer, and bottles of Coca-Cola with straws in for Greg and I. The floodlights made people who strayed into their glare too realistic. Dressed in cotton coats, dog owners paraded their hounds to and fro before each race. Fragile, tight bundles of springy sinew bred for brief speed, who’d been steered to an evolutionary fulfilment in this tedious, eternal, uncomplaining circling of race-tracks after a motorised hare.

The bookies stood with one hand on their board’s shoulder, a stub of chalk and a duster in the other, and they kept stealing glances at each other’s boards like girls at a dance.

Checking his competitors—3-1 on here, on dog number three; 7-2, there—a tout erases figures and chalks up 4-1. Some of the punters were systematic gamblers who spread their bets in good time, but the ones you looked for and couldn’t take your eyes off as the tension began to build before each race were the men standing at the back of the terraces to get a wide view of all the blackboards, the gimlet-eyed men, blinking less as a race approached, watching the bookies chalking and wiping and changing the odds. Men who’d forgotten to eat, and smoked their cigarettes hungrily. On the days he felt lucky, Dad was up amongst them. Men with beaked noses and unnatural stillness who ignored the dogs being gathered behind the starting cages, watched only the bookies’ boards, the dusters and chalk, until, when the dogs were in and the gates about to be sprung, the men swooped down the terraces and swiped their wads of dosh all at the same tout, whichever one had outguessed his fellows with the best odds on offer at the last possible moment. Then the race shot off.

§

Here I am, tracing the ring road, as ridiculous as any greyhound. I’ll turn off for work next time around.

§

I loved the dogs but I was frustrated by an inability to grasp the essential nature of the event, which Greg clearly got without having to try. It took me a while to even catch on that it was not about the dogs, the sport, the racing. It wasn’t social, it wasn’t the men or the beer. “OK,” I told Greg, “it’s about the money. I can see that.” But I still couldn’t. It was right in front of my eyes. I tried to work it out, to find the logic at the heart of it. The punters didn’t care about the dogs, and neither did the bookies. They never even looked at the dogs until a race started. No one had superior knowledge of form, fitness, potential. The dogs were living dice thrown on to the track, their placings from race to race, week to week, almost entirely arbitrary.

“It’s about the odds,” Greg explained to me when finally I asked him. “Men put their money on the odds.”

Far from solving a riddle, Greg’s lucid explanation only moved it further away, because the logic of the game is one men either feel in their guts or miss altogether. “That means they’ve got no control,” I complained. I was nine or ten then, thirsting for clarity.

“I know,” Greg smiled. “Gambling, John. It’s great, isn’t it?”

No, Greg wasn’t stupid, not at all. He was a dab hand with a slide rule and he memorised half of his log tables. He did well at school, passed exams in almost every subject, but he left at sixteen to enter the family firm. For Greg, school books and other ones were entirely utilitarian objects, their value measurable by the information they stored, their status as collectible items or, yes, he would accept, the pleasure they gave. “Or insight, or understanding, or wisdom, John,” Greg would concede. “Sure.” It was just that whatever qualities you said books possessed had to be at least theoretically measurable to make any sense. Greg still sees things this way. If you tell him Lily took you to see the new film showing at the Paradise he’ll say, “Was it good? What do you give it, John? Marks out of ten?”