Close Your Eyes (8 page)

Pathetic, self-serving bullshit! Nothing absolves. Nothing exonerates. My father taught me that. He beat it into me, cursing my mother’s name.

‘Put your hands through the stair railings,’ he’d say. ‘Hold your elbows.’ He unbuckled his belt and pulled it from his trouser loops. Doubling the leather in his fist, he swung it from behind his back in the widest possible arc so that it whistled through the air before it landed.

If you saw my father now you wouldn’t recognise the monster that once lived behind his watery blue eyes, not when you see him flirting with the nurses, making cheeky comments about their sex-lives, acting as though he’s in with a chance.

He shows them his old tattoos, which seem to be melting and leaking down his arms. He used to works as docker for the Bristol Port Company at Avonmouth. Tough work. Man’s work. But most of his thirty-five years were spent as a union rep, avoiding each round of redundancies and telling his ‘comrades’ that he had fought the good fight, but now it was about ‘limiting the losses’ and ‘protecting as many jobs as possible’ – most notably his own.

Meanwhile he propped up the bar of the Three Kings on the waterfront, preaching about the evils of capitalism and Margaret Thatcher, who he called the wicked witch and vowed he would ‘piss on her grave’. Now he’s doesn’t even know she’s dead. How ironic! My old man and Margaret Thatcher, both afflicted by dementia – a disease with no regard for class or fairness or old hatreds.

Most days he doesn’t recognise me. He calls me Stevie and thinks I’m his best mate from fifty years ago. He keeps telling me the same story – how he and Stevie stowed away on a ship to America, but it was only going as far as Glasgow.

I visit him after work and take him out of the nursing home for long walks. He can power along for miles, following the coastal footpath with his odd, shuffling gait, until I tell him to turn back. Sometimes I think I might let him keep going. He’d walk all the way to John O’Groats if nobody stopped him. Some dementia patients get anxious, but my old man’s emotions are blunted and stultified. Children fascinate him – they’re like mini-people – and tears are just water leaking from a person’s eyes.

I should hate him. I should want to punish him, but he wouldn’t understand why. Instead I feel a peculiar kind of loneliness – as though someone who should love me has forgotten my birthday.

Sometimes I write letters to him in my head – not the man he is now but the one he was then. I tell him that I’ve tried to understand why he did those things and quite honestly, given what’s happened since, I think I do. He was an alcoholic, but his addiction wasn’t an addiction – it was a hobby or a pastime. He was being sociable. He was being a man. He couldn’t let his mates drink alone, could he? Many of these same mates also drank too much and beat their wives, but didn’t see their behaviour as a compulsion or something beyond their control. Drinking was just drinking, never addiction.

It wasn’t until my mother died that my father lost himself completely in the bottle – and it wasn’t her dying so much as the circumstances of her death. And it wasn’t the car accident so much as the man behind the wheel. And it wasn’t so much the man driving as the fact that his severed penis was found in my mother’s mouth.

That’s tough to swallow (and I use that sentence with no pun intended). The
Sunday Sport
ran the story on the front page. You can imagine the quips. My father didn’t go to the pub so much after that. He drank at home, lecturing his children just as he once lectured his mates. A new sort of anger burned in him, a cold hard gemlike flame, and it felt as though a line had been crossed and he’d lost even the faintest spark of paternal love.

When he wasn’t drinking, he pumped iron. He made himself a weight bench in the garage, welding a cradle to take the bar. He made me spot for him. I was only eight and couldn’t have lifted the bar off him had it slipped. All I could do was steer it to the cradle when it rose on his rubbery ink-stained arms, his eyes bulging and veins popping. I know what he was doing – punishing himself, enjoying the pain.

Afterwards he would make me lift. ‘See if you can beat your old man,’ he’d say, grinning maliciously.

I couldn’t hope to lift the same weight. It crushed my chest and he bleated in my ear about being a pansy and a ‘nancy boy’. Twice he cracked my ribs, which was before my broken arm and dislocated elbow; before I was taken into care.

The first few drinks seemed to mellow him and clear his head, but soon he’d be looking to pick a fight with someone – usually my brother, or sister, or me. The slightest thing would set him off: a knife scraping on a plate or a tap left dripping. I felt sorriest for Agatha, my sister. She didn’t get physically abused. I didn’t see my father touch her once – to hug her or hit her – but he punished her in hundreds of other ways.

‘Are you on the rag?’ he’d say. ‘I can smell you. Have another shower … You get any fatter I’ll have to widen the doors … If that skirt was any shorter you’d be arrested for selling crack.’

My father believed that women were to blame for the first sin and all that followed. With shaking hands and drool drying on his chin, he would lecture me about adultery, sitting in his armchair, his penis resembling a turtle’s head, poking from his yellowing Y-fronts. Women were sluts and witches and devious betrayers. A vagina was like a Venus flytrap that could snap shut and trap a man.

The first time I sat next to a girl at school I was surprised at how sweet she smelled. Her shampoo. Her breath. Her skin. Her name was Sandra Martin and I followed her home that day because she made me feel light-headed and strange. Sandra was one of the popular girls who knew she was pretty and didn’t need to try hard to make friends or turn heads. Other girls who were less attractive seemed to crave affection almost as much as I did. One of them, Karen Basing, who had greasy hair and a runny nose, would pull her knickers down and show boys her slot, but only if they bought her a Mars Bar. That’s what it reminded me of, her vagina, the pink slot in a piggybank.

We were caught one day by one of the nuns. Nothing happened to Karen Basing, but I was sent to the priest, who said he was very disappointed. ‘How would you feel if that was your mother?’ he said. ‘Or your sister?’

I wanted to tell him that my mother died with a penis in her mouth and that my sister had left home by then and could do what she damn well pleased. They could all go to hell. My family. The Church. Karen Basing.

Normally when children go missing people rally around and search, fanning out across the fields and vacant ground from where the bicycle or schoolbag was found. Emotionally they adopt the child, saying prayers for his safe return and wondering what sort of sick pervert would snatch an innocent from their midst. Meanwhile, they eye their neighbours suspiciously, the drifters and single men and midlife pensioners.

That didn’t happen to me. Nobody bothered to search or to pray for me because I’d been taken by one of my own. I’d gone missing in my own family.

Awake. Bleary. Trembling. For a moment I wonder if I’m dreaming. Emma has climbed on to the sofa bed next to me, dressed in her pyjamas, which are covered in cartoon polar bears.

‘When did you come?’ she asks excitedly. ‘Why didn’t you wake me? Did you bring me something? Are you staying? Can we go to the cinema? Will you make me pancakes for breakfast? Do you like my new pyjamas? Mummy bought them when we went to London. We saw
Matilda
. The little girl who played
Matilda
was the spitting image of Maddie Hayes, a girl in my class, only Maddie has darker hair and she can’t sing. Not even a note. You should take your pills. Your arm has gone all jerky.’

This is how Emma talks, barely pausing to inhale. Sometimes I think she must cycle breathe like a didgeridoo player. Either that or she streams her thoughts directly from her brain without any filter. I take my medication and wait for the tremors to stop. Emma flits around me, a skinny little thing with a mop of curly hair and an oversized mouth with two rabbit-like front teeth.

‘I’ll stay home today,’ she says.

‘But you have school.’

‘It’s my last day. We can go for a bike ride. You’ll have to pump up my tyres and fix my bell. Justin Barclay broke it when he rode my bike into the river.’

‘Why did he do that?’

‘I dared him.’

She makes it sound so obvious.

‘I have work today. You should go to school.’

‘OK, but you’ll be here when I get home. Mummy said you weren’t coming till the weekend. You’re sleeping in my room, so don’t make any bad smells. You’ll have to look after Oscar.’

‘Who’s Oscar?’

‘My goldfish. Charlie doesn’t want him in her room because he sucks rocks and spits them out, but he’s a goldfish, right, he’s supposed to suck rocks.’

‘Right.’

Julianne rescues me and tells Emma to get ready for school. Grudgingly she obeys, stomping noisily up the stairs. She yells over the banister, ‘I know you’re talking about me.’

Julianne rolls her eyes. ‘Tell me she’s not a narcissist.’

‘What ten-year-old isn’t?’

My wife –
can I call her my wife?
– is wearing a two-piece business suit and heels, with her hair pinned up. She looks great, like some fashion editor’s idea of a career woman. She speaks four languages and works part-time as a court-appointed interpreter in Bristol.

‘Do you have a trial today?’ I ask.

‘No.’

‘Meetings?’ I ask.

‘A doctor’s appointment.’

‘Is everything all right?’

‘Under control.’

What sort of answer is that? I want to press her on the details, but she hates me meddling. That privilege was lost to me when we separated. She’s already gone to collect two bottles of milk from the doorstep, along with the local newspaper, the
Somerset Guardian –
an august organ of record for locals interested in births, deaths, marriages and bicycle thefts.

Charlie is the last to arrive downstairs, her hair wet and half-brushed, wearing black jeans and her Doc Martens. She grabs the newspaper and begins turning pages.

‘You’re up early,’ I say.

‘Job hunting.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘Part-time. Pays a fortune. No experience necessary.’

‘Good luck with that.’

‘Thanks.’

‘How about some cereal?’ Julianne asks.

‘Not hungry,’ says Charlie.

‘At least take a banana.’

Emma interrupts. ‘Can Daddy walk me to school?’

‘You can walk to school by yourself,’ says Julianne.

‘I can do it,’ I say.

Charlie has stopped turning pages. ‘Hey, that’s you!’

The headline reads:
RIPPER WILL KILL AGAIN
. Underneath is a sub-heading:
Profiler Accuses Police of Incompetence.

The photograph shows Milo on stage, arms spread, face raised to the lights, looking every inch the evangelist. I’m visible in the background at the side of the stage.

‘So he’s your competition,’ says Julianne. ‘He’s rather handsome.’

‘Very tasty,’ choruses Charlie. ‘Who is he?’

‘One of your father’s old students,’ replies Julianne.

Charlie bites into a banana. ‘I’m going to enjoy university.’

‘You have to be careful of the good-looking ones,’ says Julianne.

‘Why?’

‘Other girls will try to steal them away.’

‘What about Daddy? Did girls try to steal him?’

‘I had to beat them off with a stick.’

Emma looks up from her cereal bowl. ‘Who did you hit with a stick?’

‘Nobody.’

‘But you said you beat someone with a stick.’

‘It’s just a turn of phrase,’ explains Julianne, but Emma has already launched into another story.

‘Casey Finster hit Beau Pringle with a stick and knocked out his tooth and Mrs Herbert made him write a letter to Beau’s parents, who said Casey had to pay for the orthodontist, but Casey’s father said Beau started the fight by throwing a rock, only it wasn’t a rock, it was a clod of dirt with a rock inside it but Casey didn’t know that so it wasn’t really his fault.’

The entire sentence is delivered without her drawing breath.

Charlie rolls her eyes and grabs her car keys. ‘Will you be here tonight?’

‘That depends,’ I say, glancing at Julianne. ‘Would that be OK?’

‘Sure.’

Charlie kisses us both on the cheek. ‘Later, losers.’ And then she’s gone, throwing open the front door with a flourish and confronting the day like an actor walking on to a stage.

Emma takes my hand as we climb Mill Hill Lane, heading for St Julian’s Primary School, which is opposite the church. Her questions, observations and statements become the background noise, which I occasionally punctuate with ‘uh-huh’ and ‘really’ to make her think I’m listening. Emma knows this but seems happy to leave her thoughts drifting like dandelion seeds, perhaps hoping one might germinate into a conversation. From somewhere in the hum and whirr I hear the words ‘hospital’ and ‘mummy’.

‘Pardon?’

‘Will you be looking after us?’

‘When?’

‘When Mummy goes to hospital.’

‘Why would Mummy be going into hospital?’

‘For her historicalectomy.’

‘Do you mean hysterectomy?’

‘That’s what I said.’

I don’t argue with her. ‘When is she going into hospital?’

Emma shrugs. ‘Nobody tells me anything.’

The windscreen wipers pause between each sweep across the glass. Rain, a summer shower, warm rather than cold, makes the villages blur and streak. Having passed through the southern outskirts of Bristol, I reach the coast road and follow the shoreline where the trees are stunted and bent by the prevailing winds.

Across the Severn Estuary I can make out the mauve mountains of the Brecon Beacons. I grew up on the border of Snowdonia, a very similar landscape to this, where low islands, cliffs and shingle beaches were punctuated by wetlands. It was an idyllic childhood until I was sent away to boarding school at the age of twelve. I missed my sisters. I missed my mother. I even missed my father – God’s personal physician-in-waiting – an imposing yet compelling presence, quick to criticise and slow to praise. Every summer I would ride my bike to Abersoch and watch the teenage girls run shrieking into the waves, imagining that one day I might have the courage to sit down beside one of them. I fell in love with a girl called Carise who had a friend called Tessa; they would rub coconut oil on each other’s backs and lie on their stomachs, casually lifting their legs to kick at the sunshine.