Chapman's Odyssey (7 page)

— My folks were sure sore at that last grade you gave me, Harry.

— It was a C plus, wasn’t it?

— Minus, Harry.

— If you work a bit harder this semester and take care over your spelling and grammar, then things are bound to improve, he heard himself lying.

— Easier said than done.

— Do it for your parents, Duane.

— Where’s the bathroom, Harry?

— Second door on the left.

Duane was a proud pisser, to judge by the noise he made. Harry went into the kitchen area and began to put the plates, the knives and forks, the dessert and salad bowls into the dishwasher. He rinsed each object under the tap first, as was his pernickety custom. When he had finished, he returned to the sitting room. The television was still on, but there was no sign of his guest.

— Duane?

The bathroom door was open; his bedroom door closed.

— Duane? Are you in there?

— Uh-huh.

— Are you all right?

— Hunky-dory. Come and see.

What he saw ought to have made him delirious, for Duane was spread out on his bed – naked, except for a pair of blue shorts carefully lowered to reveal brownish pubic hair and a would-be enticing fraction of his penis. His tanned body was truly a marvel of symmetry, worthy to be sculpted by Michelangelo or Donatello. Dr Chapman stared at the grinning Duane with obvious approval.

— You like what you see, Harry?

— Yes, David.

— Who the fuck’s David? It’s Duane.

— I’m sorry, Duane. You remind me of someone I knew long ago.

Duane sat up and slipped out of his shorts. Harry Chapman ought to have been ecstatic, overcome with lust, but he couldn’t be, he simply couldn’t be.

— Have you had enough to eat, Harry?

— Yes.

— The answer’s no. You fags – no disrespect – are always hungry.

He ate what Duane plunged into his mouth, and oh, it was an interminable, uncomfortable meal. He feared for his new fillings. The boisterous Duane let out cries of ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’ and ‘Oh God’ and ‘This is great head’ and Harry, aware that the prey he was feeding on was in the early stages of drunkenness, knew that the inevitable explosion would happen later rather than sooner. He munched and munched and licked and licked and prayed for Duane to emit the yelp of pleasure that usually accompanied the moment of bliss, and then he was swallowing Duane’s seed – biblically speaking – and almost choked but coughed and spluttered instead.

After a silence, Duane said quietly:

— You just had what hundreds of chicks would die for.

— Thank you, Duane.

But no expression of gratitude came from the baseball titan, who dressed quickly.

— That deserves a higher grade, wouldn’t you say, Harry?

Harry, unable to answer in the affirmative, nodded.

— Think about it.

He thought about it for most of the night, accounting himself a colossal fool. He should have told Duane he wasn’t remotely attracted to him, except in a purely aesthetic sense. Aesthetic? It was unlikely that Duane was acquainted with the term. He cursed his idiocy, but wisdom after the event was no consolation.

— That was disgusting, Harry Chapman – what little I could make of it, which wasn’t very much, I thank my lucky stars. To think a son of mine could stoop to such things beggars belief. You need to wash your filthy mind out with soap and water.

— Oh, I’ve done worse things, Mother.

— Are you awake, Harry?

— Nancy?

— The same. You’ll be having your endoscopy at three thirty. Mr Russell will be in charge. He’s an expert.

— What time is it?

— Just after two.

— Will this expert discover what’s wrong with me?

— Yes. Yes, Harry, he will. I’m confident.

That’s what he wanted to hear from his soft-spoken Virgil.

— If you’re confident, Nancy Driver, I am.

— Well said, Harry.

His mother, so incurious about the important concerns in her Harry’s life while she was living, invited him now to tell her of those worse things he had done.

— Go on, Harry. Shock me.

— You’re dead.

— So what? I’m still shockable.

He begged her not to stray out of character, but even as he did so he recalled with what disdainful pleasure she consumed the contents of the Sunday newspaper referred to by his father as either
The Barmaids’ Bible
or
The Whores’ Gazette
. She would click her tongue to indicate disapproval, and mouth the word ‘disgusting’ as she went on reading. The news item that shocked her most involved a Chinese hypnotist employed in a bacon factory who used his ‘diabolical skills’ the better to seduce the female slicer operators under his command. He would send the unwary girls into a deep sleep and then take ‘evil liberties’ in his private office. Alice Chapman said she was appalled by his cunning, and cut out the lengthy report of his antics to show to her friends over tea and walnut cake.

— You can’t trust a Chink, she declared as a matter of undeniable fact.

— Why is that, Mother?

— It’s the eyes.

— What about them?

— They look sideways, not straight ahead.

— Sideways or not, he managed to hypnotise six women.

— He wouldn’t have put a spell on me, however hard he tried. I’d have sent him packing the moment he cast his slitty eyes on me. Which is what those women should have done.

— Yes, Mother.

— The silly cows.

In March 1950, David Cooke was somewhere else – in Korea, perhaps – serving his country. There was no one left in the school who could be deemed an Adonis or a Greek athlete. On a blustery day that March, Harry Chapman and ten other thirteen-year-olds ran a mile race, which necessitated circling the school playground eight times. He finished a creditable fourth, and loved long-distance running thereafter. The afternoon ended with the sweaty contestants taking a shower, amid accusations of ‘Jew boys’. Harry Chapman, who had been circumcised on the very day of his birth for entirely medical reasons, was only a pretend Jew, but Leo Duggan was genuinely and unashamedly Jewish.

Their mockers each had a ‘Coliseum curtain’ (as Christopher insisted on labelling the foreskin) which had to be pulled back to reveal what Harry and Leo kept on permanent display. They were different, and it showed.

— Harry’s no Yid, but Leo Duggan is, said Ralph Edmunds, who had established himself already as an intimidating bully.

Leo made no response, continuing to lather himself with the coarse soap that was considered good for the complexion.

— It’s not just his prick, it’s his conk as well. It’s like a bleeding hook. You could open a tin with it.

Harry Chapman wanted to speak up for the still-silent Leo, to defend him from the taunts of Ralph Edmunds and his gang, but the words of rebuke stayed in his head. The hirsute Ralph looked older than his years, and Harry, watching him assert his brutish authority, experienced a sensation that shocked and frightened the platonic worshipper of David Cooke. His blood raced, his heart quickened, and he recognised what he had only read about or seen in films at the Super Palace. He imagined his whole miserable body – not just his face, which he could sense was blushing – turning red with lust. This was shocking enough, but it was the ache of hunger, an ache deep in the pit of his stomach, that terrified him. It was a new kind of pain to him, and he suspected that it might be the prelude to a new kind of pleasure, too.

— Why are you shaking, Harry? Do I scare you, skinny boy?

— No, Ralph.

— Liar. I scare you. Yes, I do.

He moved close to Harry Chapman, the swot of the class, and took the wet, shaking, lust-inflamed creature into his own wet, hairy arms. He gave the boy from the brain department a bear hug, and Ralph’s eight cronies laughed and whooped their approval. Harry struggled to be free, while hoping that the clutch would contain him always. He was damned now, he thought; he was among the lost.

— Let me go.

— Let you go, Harry?

— You’re hurting me.

— That’s my way.

And then Harry Chapman was cast aside, discarded, and left to wonder why it was that Ralph Edmunds had squeezed him so tightly. His tormentor was smiling, showing teeth slightly stained with nicotine, and Harry, the weakling, reached for a towel to cover himself. His pretend-Jew’s manhood had stiffened, much to Ralph’s amusement.

— Mine’s twice the size and it’s soft.

— So that’s what you did at school when you should have been educating yourself, said the voice that only Harry Chapman’s death could silence. You filthy little sod.

He was wretched on the evening of the day of the race and for several months afterwards. He knew little of sexual matters, and that little told him his desire for the school’s principal bully was unnatural and perverted. He should be chasing girls – as Ralph was, and as Leo and Bobby and all the other boys of his acquaintance were. He would wake in the middle of the night and think of being squeezed to happy breathlessness in the shower and then he had to ease his longing with his increasingly skilled right hand. The moment of blissful ejaculation achieved, there followed self-contempt and its accompaniment shame. He crawled out of bed once and went down on his knees and prayed to the God of Milton and George Herbert and John Donne to purify his soul, to erase the flesh of Ralph Edmunds from his thoughts, and to ensure that he would grow into a man who loved women.

For his was a literary God, the loving – if absent – father of Christ rather than the vengeful tyrant of the Old Testament. He was the kindly spirit encountered in Sunday services at the church in which William Blake married his illiterate young bride. Harry Chapman came out of St Mary’s early one summer afternoon and lingered in the churchyard. Some of the blackened graves dated back two centuries, and he had to look hard to decipher the names of the persons buried beneath. ‘Sacred to the memory of –’ was a familiar refrain, but the memorialists were gone too. Thinking of this harvesting of humanity, of the good and the bad and the moderately sinful rotting together, of the invisible worms feasting, he felt a chill creep over him despite the noontide heat. Was there nothing else to expect but lasting nothingness? It would become the primary question of his life and he first asked it of himself in June 1950 and was asking it again now as he opened his eyes in the hospital ward.

— We’re taking you for your endoscopy, Harry.

And now he was returned to the dull surroundings he had known for – how long was it? – two or three or, perhaps, more days. An eternity ago, he had heard the expert, Mr Russell, a stocky figure with cropped blond hair like some German general, inform his assistants that Mr Chapman needed to be anaesthetised. The patient was old and would probably resist having the instrument forced down his throat. He had to be treated gently.

That much Harry Chapman remembered, before succumbing to sleep.

— Harry? Can you hear me?

— Is that you, Dad?

— As sure as God made little apples.

— Your voice is very faint.

— I was never a loudmouth. Was I?

— No.

— I hadn’t much to say to anyone after what I’d seen in the trenches.

— Tell me what you saw.

— I can’t, my son.

— It’s ancient history.

— Then let it be.

— You won two medals, Dad. For bravery, was it?

— It wasn’t for sitting on my arse.

— You were in France for three years.

— Who told you?

— The Ministry of Defence. I wrote to them. In 1992.

— Why did you do that?

— Because you’re a mystery.

— I was just an ordinary man, going about his ordinary life. There’s no mystery where Frank Alfred Chapman’s concerned. I was Private Number 36319. That’s how important I was.

Harry Chapman had memorised the number his father was allotted after being enlisted into the Army Service Corps Regular Army on 8 December 1915. Why had he done so?

— Yes, why, Harry?

— To bring you closer, I suppose.

— What rubbish you come out with. Closer? I’ve been dead nigh on sixty years.

Harry begged 36319 Chapman not to be unkind to him, especially now they were reunited. They were walking on grass and surrounded by trees and bushes and the sun was warming them.

— Dad, I have to tell you something.

— You’ve left it late in the day.

He followed Frank’s cliché with another:

— Better late than never.

— Well, son, what is it?

— Dad, I’m gay.

— I’m pleased to hear it. I’m glad you’re still happy at the age you are. Seventy, isn’t it?

Ah, yes. ‘Gay’ in the 1940s, when last they talked, had not taken on its current, widely used meaning. And besides, Harry had not known he was different in the November of 1948 when Frank ran out of breath for ever.