Gentlemen & Players (18 page)

2

I suppose I should have guessed. It was my mother. Three months ago she had begun to write to him again, in vague terms at first, then in more and more detail. My father had not told me of her letters, but in retrospect, their arrival must have coincided more or less with my first meeting with Leon and the beginning of my father’s decline.

“I didn’t want to tell you, kid. I didn’t want to think about it. I thought that if I just ignored it, it might just go away. Leave us both alone.”

“Tell me what?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Tell me
what
?”

He told me then, still sobbing, as I wiped my mouth and listened to the idiot birds. For three months he had tried to hide it from me; at a single blow I understood his rages, his renewed drinking, his sullenness, his irrational, homicidal changes of mood. Now he told me everything; still holding his head in his hands, as if it might break open with the effort, and I listened with increasing horror as he staggered through his tale.

Life, it seemed, had been kinder to Sharon Snyde than it had to the rest of the family. She had married young, giving birth to me only a few weeks before her seventeenth birthday, and she had been just twenty-five when she left us for good. Like my father, Sharon was fond of clichés, and I gathered that there had been a great deal of hand-wringing psychobabble in her letters; apparently she
needed to find out who she was,
conceded that there were
faults on both sides,
that she had been in
a bad place emotionally
and claimed a number of similar excuses for her desertion.

But she had changed, she said; finally, she had grown up. It made us sound like a toy she had outgrown, a tricycle perhaps, once loved, but now rather ridiculous. I wondered if she still wore Cinnabar, or whether she had grown out of that too.

In any case she had remarried, to a foreign student she had met in a bar in London, and had moved to Paris to be with him. Xavier was a wonderful man, and both of us would really like him. In fact she would love us to meet him; he was an English teacher in a
lycée
in Marne-la-Vallée; was keen on sports; adored children.

And that brought her to her next point; although she and Xavier had tried and tried, they had never been able to have a child. And although Sharon had not had the courage to write to me herself, she had never forgotten her Munchkin, her sweetheart, or let a single day go by without thinking of me.

Finally, Xavier had been convinced. There was plenty of room in their apartment for three; I was a bright kid and would pick up the language with no difficulty; best of all I would have a family again, a family that cared, and money to make up for everything the years had denied me.

I was appalled. Almost five years had passed; and in that time the desperate longing I had once felt for my mother had moved toward indifference and beyond. The thought of seeing her again—of the reconciliation for which she apparently dreamed—now filled me with a dull and cringing embarrassment. I could see her now, with my altered perspective; Sharon Snyde, now with a new, cheap lacquer coating of sophistication, offering me a new, cheap, ready-made life in exchange for my years of suffering. The only problem was, I no longer wanted it.

“You do, kid,” said my father. His violence had given way to a mawkish self-pity that offended me almost as much. I was not fooled. It was the banal sentimentality of the hooligan with MUM and DAD tattooed across his bleeding knuckles; the thug’s indignation over some child molester in the news; the tears of the tyrant at a run-over dog. “Ah, kid, you do. It’s a chance, see, another chance. Me? I’d take her back tomorrow if I could. I’d take her back today.”

“Well I wouldn’t,” I said. “I’m happy here.”

“Yeah. Happy. When you could have all that—”

“All what?”

“Paris, and that. Money. A life.”

“I’ve got a life,” I said.

“And money.”

“She can keep her money. We’ve got enough.”

“Yeah. All right.”

“I mean it, Dad. Don’t let her win. I want to stay here. You can’t
make
me—”

“I said all right.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

But I noticed then that he would not meet my eye, and that night when I took out the rubbish I found the kitchen bin filled with scratch card stubs—twenty of them, maybe more; Lotto and Striker and
Winner Takes All!
—shining like Christmas trimmings among the tea leaves and spent tin cans.

3

The Sharon Snyde problem was the culmination of all the blows that summer had dealt me. From her letters, which my father had kept from me but which I now read with growing horror, her plans were well advanced. In principle Xavier had agreed to an adoption; Sharon had done some research into schools; she had even been in touch with our local social services, who had relayed such information—concerning my school attendance, academic progress, and general attitude to life—as would strengthen her case against my father.

Not that she needed it; after years of struggling, John Snyde had finally given in. He rarely washed; rarely went out except to the chip shop or the Chinese takeaway; spent most of our money on scratch cards and booze; and during the next couple of weeks, became increasingly withdrawn.

At any other time I might have welcomed the freedom his depression gave me. Suddenly I could go out as late as I wanted, and no one questioned where I had been. I could go to the cinema; to the pub. I could take my keys (I’d finally had a set of duplicates made after that last disastrous episode) and roam St. Oswald’s whenever I wanted. Not that I did much of that, however. Without my friend, most of the usual pastimes had lost their appeal, and I rapidly abandoned them in favor of hanging out (if you could call it that) with Leon and Francesca.

Every pair of lovers needs a stooge. Someone to keep watch; a convenient third party; an occasional chaperone. I was sickened, but I was necessary; and I nursed my breaking heart in the knowledge that for once, for however brief a time, Leon needed me.

We had a shack (a “clubhouse,” Leon called it) in the wood beyond St. Oswald’s playing fields. We had built it off the path, on the remains of someone else’s long-abandoned den, and it was a neat little place, well camouflaged, with half-log walls and a roof of thick pine branches. It was there that we went, I keeping watch, smoking and trying not to listen to the sounds that came from the little shack behind me.

At home, Leon played it cool. Every morning I would call for them on my bike, Mrs. Mitchell would pack us a picnic, and we would make for the woods. It looked quite innocent—my presence made it so—and no one guessed at those languid hours under the leaf-canopy, the muted laughter from inside the shack, the glimpses I had of them together, of his naked rye-brown back and sweetly dappled buttocks in the shadows.

Those were the good days; on bad days Leon and Francesca simply slipped away, laughing, into the woods, leaving me feeling stupid and useless as they ran. We were never a threesome. There was Leon-and-Francesca; an exotic hybrid, subject to violent mood swings, to fierce enthusiasms, to astonishing cruelty; and then there was me; the dumb, the adoring, the eternally dependable stooge.

Francesca was never entirely happy at my presence. She was older than I was—maybe fifteen. No virgin, from what I could tell—that’s what Catholic school does to you—and already she was besotted with Leon. He played on that; spoke gently; made her laugh. It was all a pose; she knew nothing about him. She had never seen him throw Peggy Johnsen’s trainers across the telegraph wire, or steal records from the shop in town, or pitch ink-bombs over the playground wall onto some Sunnybanker’s clean shirt. But he told her things he’d never told me; talked about music and Nietzsche and his passion for astronomy, while I walked unseen behind them with the picnic basket, hating them both but unable to leave.

Well of course I hated
her
. There was no justification. She was polite enough to me—the real nastiness always came from Leon himself. But I hated their whispers; that shared heads-together laughter that excluded me and ringed them with intimacy.

Then it was the touching. They were always touching. Not just kissing, not making love, but a thousand little touches; a hand on the shoulder; a brush of knee against knee; her hair on his cheek like silk snagging Velcro. And I could
feel
them, every one; like static in the air; stinging me, making me electric, making me combustible.

It was a delight worse than any torture. After a week of playing gooseberry to Leon and Francesca, I was ready to scream with boredom, and yet at the same time my heart pounded with a desperate rhythm. I dreaded our outings but lay awake every night, going over every small detail with agonizing care. It was like a disease. I smoked more than I wanted to; I bit my nails until they bled. I stopped eating; my face developed an ugly rash; every step I took felt like walking on glass.

The worst was that Leon knew. He couldn’t have failed to see it; played me like a tomcat showing off his mouse, with the same carefree cruelty.

Look! Look what I got! Watch me!

“So what d’you think?” A brief moment out of earshot—Francesca behind us, picking flowers or having a pee, I can’t remember which.

“What about?”

“
Frankie
, you moron. What do you think?”

Early days; still stunned by developments. I flushed. “She’s nice.”

“Nice.” Leon grinned.

“Yeah.”

“
You
‘d have some, wouldn’t you? You’d have some, given half a chance?” His eyes were gleaming with malice.

I shook my head. “Dunno,” I said, not meeting his gaze.

“
Dunno?
What are you, Pinchbeck, a queer or something?”

“Fuck off, Leon.” The flush deepened. I looked away.

Leon watched me, still grinning. “Come on, I’ve seen you. I’ve seen you watching when we were in the clubhouse. You never talk to her. Never say a word. But you do look, don’t you? Look and learn, right?”

He thought
I
wanted her, I realized with a jolt; he thought I wanted her for myself. I almost laughed. He was so wrong, so cosmically, hilariously
wrong
. “Look, she’s okay,” I said. “Just—not my type, that’s all.”

“Your
type
?” But the edge had gone from his voice now. His laughter was infectious. He yelled, “Hey, Frankie! Pinchbeck says you’re not his type!” then he turned to me and touched my face, almost intimately, with the tips of his fingers. “Give it five years, mate,” he said with mocking sincerity. “If they haven’t dropped by then, see me.”

And then he was off, running through the wood with his hair flying out behind him and the grass whipping crazily against his bare ankles. Not to escape me, not this time; but simply running for the sheer exuberance of being alive, and fourteen, and randy as hell. To me he looked almost insubstantial, half-disintegrated in the light-and-shade from the leaf-canopy, a boy of air and sunshine, an immortal, beautiful boy. I could not keep up; I followed at a distance with Francesca protesting behind and Leon running ahead, shouting and running in great impossible bounds across the white hemlock-mist into the darkness.

I remember that
moment so very clearly. A fragment of pure joy, like a shard of dream, untouched by logic or events. In that moment I could believe we would live forever. Nothing mattered; not my mother; not my father; not even Francesca. I had glimpsed something, there in the woods, and though I could never hope to keep up with it, I knew it would stay with me forever.

“I love you, Leon,” I whispered as I struggled through the weeds. And that, for the moment, was more than enough.

4

It was hopeless, I knew. Leon would never see me as I saw him, or feel anything for me but kindly contempt. And yet I was happy, in my way, with the crumbs of his affection; a slap on the arm, a grin, a few words—
You’re all right, Pinchbeck—
were enough to lift me, sometimes for hours. I was not Francesca; but soon, I knew, Francesca would be back at her convent school, and I—I—

Well, that was the big question, wasn’t it? In the fortnight that had followed my father’s revelation, Sharon Snyde had phoned every other night. I had refused to talk to her, locking myself in my room. Her letters too remained unanswered, her presents unacknowledged.

But the adult world cannot be shut out forever. However high I turned up my radio, however many hours I spent away from home, I could not escape Sharon’s machinations.

My father, who could perhaps have saved me, was a spent force; drinking beers and shoveling pizza in front of the television while his duties remained undone and my time—my precious time—ran out.

Dear Munchkin,

Did you like the clothes I sent you? I wasn’t sure what size to buy, but your father says you’re small for your age. I hope I got it right. I do so want things to be perfect when we meet again. I can’t believe you’re going to be thirteen. It won’t be long, now, will it, darling? Your plane ticket should arrive in the next few days. Are you looking forward to your visit as much as I am? Xavier is very excited to be meeting you at last, even though he’s a bit nervous too. I expect he’s afraid of being left out, while we catch up on the last five years!

Your loving mother,Sharon

It was impossible. She believed it, you see; really believed that nothing had changed, that she could pick up our life where she had left it; that I could be her Munchkin, her darling, her little dress-up doll. Worse still, my father believed it. Wanted it, encouraged it in some perverse way, as if by letting me go he might somehow alter his own course, like ballast thrown from a sinking ship.

“Give it a chance.” Conciliatory now, an indulgent parent with a recalcitrant child. He had not raised his voice since the day he struck me. “Give it a chance, kid. You might even enjoy yourself.”

“I’m not going. I won’t see her.”

“I tell you. You’ll like Paris.”

“I won’t.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“I fucking won’t. Anyway, it’s just a visit. I’m not going to
live
there or anything.”

Silence.

“I
said
it’s just a visit.”

Silence.

“Dad?”

Oh, I tried to encourage him. But something in him was broken. Aggression and violence had given way to indifference. His weight increased still further; he was careless with his keys; the lawns grew ragged with neglect; the cricket pitch, denied its daily dose of the sprinklers, grew brown and bare. His lethargy—his failure—seemed designed to ensure to remove any choice I might still have had between remaining in England and embracing the new life Sharon and Xavier had planned so carefully on my behalf.

And so I was torn between my loyalty to Leon and the increasing need to cover for my father. I took to watering the cricket pitch at night; I even tried to mow the lawns. But the Mean Machine had ideas of its own, and I only succeeded in scalping the grass, which made it worse than ever, whilst the cricket pitch, despite my best efforts, refused to flourish.

It was inevitable that sooner or later, someone would notice. One Sunday I came home from the woods to find Pat Bishop in our living room, sitting uncomfortably on one of the good chairs, and my father, on the sofa, facing him. I could almost feel the static in the air. He turned as I came in; I was about to apologize and leave at once, but the look on Bishop’s face stopped me dead. I saw guilt there—and pity, and anger—but most of all I saw profound relief. It was the look of a man willing to seize upon any diversion to get away from an unpleasant scene, and though his smile was as broad as ever and his cheeks were just as pink as he greeted me, I was not fooled for a moment.

I wondered who had made the complaint. A neighbor; a passerby; a member of staff. A parent, perhaps, wanting his money’s worth. There were certainly plenty of things to complain about. The school itself has always attracted attention. It must be beyond reproach at all times. Its servants too must be beyond reproach; there is enough resentment between St. Oswald’s and the rest of the town without giving extra grist to the rumor mill. A Porter knows this; that is why St. Oswald’s has Porters.

I turned to my father. He would not look at me but kept his eyes on Bishop, who was already halfway to the door. “It wasn’t my fault,” he said. “I—we’ve been going through a bit of a rough patch, me and the kid. You tell them, sir. They’ll listen to you.”

Bishop’s smile—quite humorless now—could have spanned an acre. “I don’t know, John. You’re on a final warning. After that other business—hitting a lad, John—”

My father tried to stand. It took an effort; I saw his face, soft with distress, and felt my insides crawl with shame. “Please, sir—”

Bishop saw it too. His big frame filled the doorway. For a second his eyes rested on me and I saw pity in them, but not a glimmer of recognition, though he must have seen me at St. Oswald’s more than a dozen times. Somehow, that—his failure to see—was worse than anything else. I wanted to speak up, to say:
Sir, don’t your ecognize me? It’s me, Pinchbeck. You gave me two House points once, remember, and told me to report for the cross-country team!

But it was impossible. I had fooled him too well. I had thought them so superior, the St. Oswald’s Masters; but here was Bishop looking flushed and sheepish, just as Mr. Bray had looked, the day I brought him down. What help could he give us? We were alone; and only I knew it.

“Sit tight, John. I’ll do what I can.”

“Thank you, sir.” He was shaking now. “You’re a friend.”

Bishop put a large hand on my father’s shoulder. He was good; his voice was warm and hearty, and he was still smiling. “Chin up, man. You can do it. With a bit of luck you’ll have it all in order by September, and no one need know any better. But no more messing about, eh? And John”—he swatted my father, in friendly fashion, on the arm, as if he were patting an overweight Labrador—“stay off the juice, won’t you? One more strike, and even I won’t be able to help you.”

To some extent,
Bishop kept his word. The complaint was dropped—or at least shelved for the present. Bishop dropped by every few days to ask him how he was, and my father seemed to rally a little in response. More importantly, the Bursar had hired a handyman of sorts; a problem case called Jimmy Watt, who was supposed to take over some of the more irksome of the Porter’s duties, leaving John Snyde free to cope with the real work.

It was our last hope. Without his Porter’s job, I knew he had no chance against Sharon and Xavier. But he had to
want
to keep me, I thought; and for that, I had to be what he wanted me to be. And so, in my turn, I worked on my father. I watched football on television; ate fish-and-chips from newspaper; jettisoned my books; volunteered for every household chore. At first he watched me with suspicion, then bemusement, and finally, a sullen kind of approval. The fatalism that had first afflicted him when he learned of my mother’s situation seemed to erode a little; he spoke with bitter sarcasm of her Paris lifestyle, her fancy college-boy husband, her assumption that she could re-enter his life on whatever terms she damn well pleased.

Emboldened, I fed him the notion of thwarting her plans; of showing her who was boss; of playing along with her pathetic ambitions only to frustrate her with his final, decisive master stroke. It appealed to his nature; it gave him direction; he had always been a man’s man, with a sour distrust of the machinations of women.

“They’re all at it,” he told me one time, forgetting who I was as he launched into one of his frequent rants. “The bitches. All smiles one minute, and the next they’re reaching for the kitchen knife to stab you in the back. Get away with it too—it’s in the papers every day. I mean, what can you do? Big strong man—poor little girlie—I mean it stands to reason he must’ve
done
something to her, right? Spousal abuse or whatever the fuck—and the next thing you know there she is, in court, fluttering her eyelashes, getting custody of kids and cash and God knows what else—”

“Not this kid,” I said.

“Ah, come on,” said John Snyde. “You can’t mean it. Paris, a good school, a new life—”

“I told you,” I said. “I want to stay here.”

“But
why
?” He stared at me befuddled, like a dog denied a walk. “You could have anything you wanted. Clothes, records—”

I shook my head. “I don’t want them,” I said. “She can’t just come back here after five bloody years and try to buy me with that French bloke’s money.” He was watching me now, a crease between his blue eyes. “I mean, you’ve been there all the time,” I said. “Looking out for me. Doing your best.” He nodded then, a tiny movement, and I could tell he was paying attention. “We’ve been all right, haven’t we, Dad? What do we need them for anyway?”

There was a silence. I could tell that my words had struck a chord. “You’ve been all right,” he said. I wasn’t sure whether or not he meant it as a question.

“We’ll manage,” I said. “We always have. Hit first and hit fast. Never give up, eh, Dad? Never let the bastards grind you down?”

Another pause, long enough to drown in. Then he laughed, a startling, sunny, young laugh that took me by surprise. “All right, kid,” he said. “We’ll give it a try.”

And so, in
hope, we entered August. My birthday was in three weeks’ time; term started in four. Ample time for my father to restore the grounds to their original perfection, to complete the maintenance work, to set traps for the mice, and to repaint the Games Pavilion in time for September. My optimism returned. There was some justification; my father had not forgotten our conversation in the lounge, and this time he really seemed to be making an effort.

It made me hopeful, even a little ashamed at how I’d treated him in the past. I’d had my problems with John Snyde, I thought; but at least he was honest. He’d done his best. He hadn’t abandoned me, then tried to bribe me back to his side. In the light of my mother’s actions, even the football matches and the karate lessons seemed less ridiculous to me now, and more like clumsy but sincere overtures of friendship.

And so I helped him as best I could; I cleaned the house; I washed his clothes; I even forced him to shave. I was obedient, almost affectionate. I
needed
him to keep this job; it was my only weapon against Sharon; my ticket to St. Oswald’s, and to Leon.

Leon. Strange, isn’t it, how one obsession grows from another? At first it was St. Oswald’s; the challenge; joy of subterfuge; the need to belong; to be someone more than the child of John and Sharon Snyde. Now it was just Leon; to be with Leon; to know him, possess him in ways I could not yet understand. There was no single reason for my choice. Yes, he was attractive. He had been kind too in his careless way; he had included me; he had given me the means of revenge against Bray, my tormentor. And I had been lonely; vulnerable; desperate; weak.

But I knew it was none of that. From the moment I first saw him, standing in the Middle Corridor with his hair in his eyes and the end of his scissored tie poking out like an impudent tongue, I had already known. A filter had lifted from the world. Time had separated into
before-Leon
and
after-Leon
; and now nothing could ever be the same.

Most adults assume that the feelings of adolescence don’t count, somehow, and that those searing passions of rage and hate and embarrassment and horror and hopeless, abject love are something you grow out of, something hormonal, a practice run for the Real Thing. It wasn’t. At thirteen,
everything
counts; there are sharp edges on everything, and all of them cut. Some drugs can re-create that intensity of feeling, but adulthood blunts the edges, dims the colors and taints everything with reason, rationalization, or fear. At thirteen I had no use for any of those. I knew what I wanted; and I was ready, with the single-mindedness of adolescence, to fight for it to the death. I would not go to Paris. Whatever it took, I would not leave.