The Deadly Space Between (3 page)

‘Nonsense. If somebody’s dead we can read all about it tomorrow. Look at your salmon. It’s much more important to eat well than to watch fights.’

Reluctantly, I attacked the fish.

‘Listen,’ she said, addressing my lust for the sensational directly, ‘I’d go on eating – no matter what. Even if History was passing in the street.’

I immediately envisaged History as a giant chariot, covered in garlands, with a mob trailing behind.

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She taught part-time at the local art college. This was not a particularly distinguished institution, her colleagues were much given to espousing passing fads. One year everyone had to work with bricks and cardboard boxes. But a year later the apotheosis of modernity was sculptures in concrete. A group of Easter Island look-alikes on the same scale as the originals won the end-of-year award. They proved impossible to transport and became a permanent fixture outside the sculpture studio. Then they went out of fashion, and like much civic art, became an awesome and indestructible warning against temporary enthusiasms. They attracted graffiti, red rubber noses and giant penises during the festive season.

My mother was in charge of the painting studio. She was convinced by the ideology of art in the community, and even organized a live paint-in, which anyone could attend. The deeply courageous, a happy few among the public, actually took part. Much against the better judgement of her immediate boss, she set up several huge wall-painting projects along the motorway and in the shopping centre with her students. One of them caused a public scandal. It was a giant frieze of dancing, copulating couples, all uncannily alike. The design was censored for overt eroticism, rather than androgyny, quite unsuitable for a car-park wall overlooking the main entrance at Safeway, and had to be withdrawn. She reworked the plan, excising the frolicking nudes and including portraits of the local drug pushers in their silver Mitsubishis. The car park was one of their night haunts. There was a public phone box, which they used in the early days when they began to frequent the suburb. Later on, when they all had their own mobile phones, they still parked by the phone box, talking into their receivers. Thus the fresco became a surreal public icon, a tribute to the men selling death beneath their own warning images. Neither the public arts committee on the Tory council nor the dealers ever noticed. But her students knew. They were converts to her ideology. Her students loved her. She had a talent for subversion.

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Aunt Luce told her, in my hearing, that if she was serious about being heterosexual, then she ought to find herself a man.

She had two affairs which I could remember, or knew about for certain. One man was a younger colleague at the college called Jo, who was there on a one-year teaching assistantship. He was tall, with spiky hair cut close, and rows of vicious-looking earrings rising up the side of his reddening lobes. He was her immediate junior colleague. She was supposed to be showing him the ropes. When she promoted him, very shortly after his arrival, to the official position of lover there was a muted frisson of scandal in the staff common room. He took to staying over on Friday and Saturday nights. I liked the new lover, who was cheerful, offhand and made the Weetabix lorry off the back of the packet to amuse me. Then Jo came home with a DIY kite in a box and we stitched it up so that it floated like a dragon over the bracken and horseshit on the common, with the three of us rushing after it, far below, tugging the invisible floating wire and shrieking. As a sexual presence Jo was good-natured, irresponsible. He walked about the house stark naked, to my astonished delight, referred to his penis as his ‘donger’ and played two of her reggae records,
Black Uhuru
and
The Harder They Come
, until they wore out. He helped me with my homework, and promised to take me to a punk concert, where the band pissed on the stage and then into the audience, but never did. I was bitterly disappointed.

Liberty liked him and Aunt Luce didn’t. He was never allowed to share the studio. He moved on to another college at the end of the year and rang once to say that he loathed it and that he missed us. Then we never heard from him again. She seemed a little sad for a week or so after his departure. There was more muttering in the staff common room. The scandal blew over, although, like all scandals, it was never quite forgotten.

The other lover was a more sinister affair. I can only just remember him. I must have been about four years old. Aunt Luce was never even allowed to know of his existence. He was never named, never mentioned. Sometimes I wondered if he had ever been there. He was an older man with a large car and a butterfly tattoo on his forearm. I caught sight of the tattoo on the first morning that the man was still there when I woke up. The man is shaving, with the bathroom door ajar. The bathroom is at the top of the stairs; a long, thin, converted corner of a much larger room. The moulded leaves of the cornice circle three sides of the walls, nuzzling the ceiling and nurturing cobwebs, then vanish suddenly into the blank, undecorated fourth wall. I stand, gazing at the light wavering across the walls, splintering against the cornice, guttering on the water in the bath. This is a very early memory. His mouth gapes as he draws the razor carefully across his upper lip. His forearms are dense with black hair and there, in the midst of the foliage, as if struggling free, is a butterfly, a dark blue butterfly with a touch of darkening red, thick lines, larger than life, shimmering in the watery light. This is what I remember, the man’s gaping mouth and the fluttering, extraordinary tattoo.

But I know, I have always known, that neither of these men is my father.

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When you live, always, in the same house, with the same suburban landscape cradling your memories, one year becomes another. It is hard to remember whether it was that year, the same year I bought my first bicycle, the year the willow tree blew down and the men came to cut it up with chainsaws, and it was rotten inside, crumbling, yellow dust, and how extraordinary that it hadn’t blown down before. I measured out my life not in years, but in events. That was the year of the art teacher lover and the dragon kite. That was the year she bought a new car, with a handout from Aunt Luce, second-hand, but new really. When I was five the neighbour’s daughter asked me to lick that suggestive pink slit between her legs. And further back, that was the year of the man with the butterfly tattoo, the year my mother sold three of the giant blood-red monoliths and I drank a whole half-glass of champagne. I remember that year.

That was how I remembered things.

There were some things to which I could attach a precise date, a date like a luminous marker, an orange buoy on a grey sea. Some dates I planned in advance. I made a pact with myself. I would ask her when I was twelve. I would ask her on her birthday. She was born on August 1st. We were always on holiday for her birthday. And because we were never at home, but in exceptional circumstances, it was easier to make exceptional demands. And to the mysterious Oedipal question – who was my father? – when I had no birthmarks, no memories, no purple swaddling to identify my origins, the reply was bound to be exceptional. But she responded by breaking all the classical rules. She laughed. She shouted with laughter. She hugged me. She unsteadied my dignity while I wobbled in red shorts: pompous, egotistical, righteous, white-faced, demanding my rights, the right to know, the right to identity, the birthright, my inheritance.

But she laughed and laughed, her straight gold hair, her breasts, laughing, shaking.

Then she declared that she had often wondered if I was ever going to ask directly and had considered proposing the Archangel Gabriel. No, my father was quite real. She giggled a little more. I felt utterly ridiculous.

‘He was much older than I was, very sexy, rich and married. I never met his wife. But I noticed his wedding ring.’

‘Do I resemble my father?’

‘No, mercifully, not at all. You look like me.’

‘Have I ever met my father?’

‘No, not to my knowledge. You never have.’

‘Do you still see him?’

‘No. Never.’

This was an astute question because it brought my father into the present and she looked at me, surprised, no longer laughing.

‘Were you very, very young at the time?’

‘Yes, fifteen. Three years older than you are now.’

‘Did you really truly love him? As much as you do Aunt Luce?’

‘That’s my business.’

‘Did he ask you to marry him?’

‘How could he, twit? He was already married. And I was under age.’

And here she closed the conversation by sidling off to the kitchen, that stranger’s kitchen in the beach house, where we could never find the cutlery, the salad servers, the bottle opener, the plug for the TV aerial, the pump for the lilo. And I didn’t ask again.

But she made it up to me. We spent all the days and all the nights together at the beach house. By day we scoured the beaches, whatever the weather, searching for unusual stones, skulls, driftwood, shells, bones picked clean by the sea. We took huge collections home in boxes and the smell of the sea dawdled in her studio for weeks. By night we slept together in the huge sagging bed, curled around one another like sunburned clams.

I had her full attention. I needed no one else.

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She was careless with her own money. She was generous with my pocket money. If she saw something she liked or wanted, she bought it: a food processor, a new CD system, a Kelim rug, in a sale, but it was still £700 and she paid in cash, an old smuggler’s trunk with a broken iron lock, which she repaired herself and used to store her rolls of canvas, a naturalist’s cabinet in which she amassed objects for still life studies, flints, bird’s bones, crystals, a thirteen-speed mountain bike I had coveted, a pair of Indian cushions with tiny mirrors, thick, stitched threads and tassels at each corner. She never hesitated. She spent money as if she was a rich woman.

But she never bothered with the everyday things. The light in the hall was never mended. Every new bulb fused at once. She never rang the electrician. The white shed in the garden had rotted, leaving the croquet hoops and mallets rusting and exposed. She didn’t bring them inside. The neighbours said it was a shame, to have such nice things and to allow them to deteriorate. The hedges were never clipped and grew to fabulous heights. The neighbours complained. They were deprived of light. She climbed up a stepladder, cut back the hedge and shaped the top. I heard her singing as she did it. When the neighbours came home they were faced with a large prick and balls and two suggestive green breasts, carved in privet all along the top of the hedge. The penis blew over in October and she lopped it off. She never employed a gardener. But she never did the garden. The windows needed repainting. The sills on the south side were crumbling with damp rot. In every room one of the sash cords hung frayed like an unsuccessful hangman’s rope. She didn’t bother. She didn’t care. And it wasn’t that she couldn’t afford it. Although sometimes she said that she couldn’t. If it was a lean time Aunt Luce would have paid. She couldn’t be bothered to ring up the builder, the plumber, the electrician. Yet the one thing she always had mended at once was the telephone.

She never looked into the stack of free daily papers which accumulated in a pile of woolly dust behind the door. But she wouldn’t throw them out and she wouldn’t let me do so. She hardly ever hoovered and whenever I did the housework she told me I was wonderful: that I was a thoughtful man, a man who noticed dirt, scoured worktops, plumped up cushions. But I could feel her smirking, sensed her smothered laughter when she said those things. Somewhere, in some other place, there was another kind of man. One I wasn’t like. One she liked better.

When I was very young I suffered from appalling, violent jealousies and made scenes. I hated it when she settled down with the phone, sinking into the big smelly sofa, pulling the rugs round her legs, shutting herself off from me to listen, to talk. She gossiped about people I didn’t know, had never seen. Her voice rose and echoed. She laughed; there was a gurgle humming in her throat. I loitered in the kitchen with the door ajar, an inefficient spy, hearing every third or fourth word, bitter and angry. She had a secret life that was not mine, about which I knew nothing.

Yet she was always aware of me. She read my face like a landscape. I saw my shadowed surfaces and animated planes reflected in her own. You should get out on your bike more often, go to the club at the pool, make more friends. You can bring them home if you like. Why don’t you bring them home? I survived at school by resisting the pack, never answering in class, getting the top marks silently, secretly. They only picked on me once. A group of them, in the lavatory. I knew who the ringleader was. I never answered their taunts. I just waited, waited for him to make his move. Then I stabbed his hand with a compass. After that they called me Sparafucile, after the assassin in the comic. But they left me alone.

What filled my life was books, books, books. I read my way across great plains of irrelevant trivia, occasionally striking gold. I preferred fantastic Empire Stories to Tolkien or
Star Wars
. I wanted to read about the adventures of brave English heroes, in khaki shorts, pushing through undergrowth filled with snakes, followed by lines of native bearers, uncovering secret caves with gleaming, precious seams of stone. I liked suspense. I also liked the big-breasted black women, who had magic knowledge and unbounded power at their fingertips, but who were always left regretfully in Africa to inherit their father’s kingdoms. The English heroes of Empire returned to the quiet, damp lawns, pale sunshine, croquet and daisies, to houses smelling of roses and lavender, to quiet women in white dresses and the discreet clink of crockery in the distance. The huge black breasts of the lost African queens were an initiation ritual, a ravine traversed in the mind and only dimly remembered in all their uneventful lives to come.