Your Father Sends His Love (16 page)

The boy was light in the hand, his legs pedalling air –
getoffgetoffgetoffgetoffgetoff –
until he was arcing through the air onto the small bed. Simon was crying. Bob slapped him across his eight-year-old face.

‘Now you listen, you nasty piece of work,' Bob said. ‘Listen to your father and stop your crying.'

He wanted to say: ‘Or I shall give you something to cry about.' This was how it had gone with his father. Bob sat down on the bed. The boy was howling, a stuck animal, grunting.

‘Now look,' Bob said, calming voice, calming, a hand on the boy's arm, then an arm around him. ‘You look at me,' Bob said. ‘Shhh and look at me.'

Bob combed back the boy's hair, his unruly natural quiff.

‘When your brother was born,' Bob said, ‘when your brother was born, he wasn't very well. We didn't know what was wrong with him. The doctors they did their tests. And we waited for the results. The results came back and it was cerebral palsy. They told us to see a specialist. And the specialist, she told us Gary was a spastic. That's what she said. And I'd never heard that word before. Now, Simon, I've been called some bad names in my time, and I'd never heard such a bad word before. And I haven't heard a worse one since. So when I heard you call Gary that, when I heard you use that awful word, I couldn't believe my ears. I couldn't believe my own son would be able to use that word to taunt his own brother. So I want you to apologize to Gary and I want you to swear you'll never use that word again. Not now, not ever. Do you understand?'

Simon nodded.

‘And you promise? Promise on your life?'

Simon nodded.

‘Because I can send you away if you do. Don't think I can't, because you know I can.'

Simon leaned in to his father and cried as he was held. Bob took him to his brother's room. Bob watched him, red-eyed, say sorry to his brother; kiss his brother on his
handsome face. On his handsome cheek. And the handsome boy seemed to smile and Bob smiled too and it was all smiles. Neither Simon nor his father mentioned it again.

It was a week before Simon was alone again with his brother. That week the word had become a mantra: secret and silent. Finally alone together he seethed the word through clenched jaw and teeth, up close, right in his handsome face, right in his well-turned ear. Called him spastic until the word was just sound, was as violent as a blow.

2

He has a single bag, all other belongings back in the cold of his Lambeth flat, unwatched, perhaps already robbed. He can hardly remember now whether he even Chubb-locked the door. Sure he did. A home invader's welcome to it all. Squatters will have to clean it up first. Take bleach to the toilet. Remove all his boxes and papers. Fumigate the sofa and bed. Weeks now. Should have given someone a key. Rented it out. Some time he will have to go back. Yes. Yolanda next door will keep a look out. He will go back some time and open the door and all will be the same. No power. No heat or light. But the same.

He sits on the edge of the bed. His is the cheapest room he could find. The junkies live here. The local junkies, not even the tourists. Thai rent boys. Thai hookers. Off shift, somewhere to crash. It is a place without conversation: just corridor nods, the meeting of tired eyes. There is a kind of cafeteria next door and his room backs onto its kitchen. He hears voices and the clank of pans all day and all night. He likes the percussion. He likes the simple, plain room. A mattress. His bag. Putty-coloured walls. A dim swinging bulb that jumps when people walk above. He preps the works, ties off, shoots and lies down on the slender bed.

His days have been the same since arriving. A routine. Picks up cash, walks the streets to the bar, has a beer, scores and heads back to the small plain room. An hour maximum. Perhaps not even forty minutes some days. How long, he forgets. It is not important.

Until the Christmas term he had been teaching at a primary school. Kids without English. Unable to read. Kids who looked blankly when you asked them a simple question. He liked to work with them. Their eventual comprehension. The slow, slow grasp of what was required. He tries now to stay away from those speaking English. Tries to be without understanding. Pointing, miming, shaking his head. He wants words to become useless, like his dead brother's limbs. Pointing, miming,
shaking his head. Even the dealer says nothing now. Just palms the cash and passes the baggie. Simon orders his beer from the owner who doesn't speak a word of English. A routine.

At the primary school he'd met Anya. Underarm hair, dark crew-cut. Younger, somehow drawn to him. She invited him to her bare-boarded apartment, rag rugs, books and candles, and they talked all night. The next night they were naked together. He smoked some of her draw, did not tell her why he shouldn't. Smoked her draw and listened as she explained the way the world really worked. They did this many times, many nights. They lay in her narrow bed and he put his hand on her flat stomach as she raged.

‘All the establishment needs is someone who doesn't realize the incredible hatred he inspires when on television. All the establishment needs is a stooge like that on the television and there's no unrest or upheaval. It's why game-show hosts move channels so often. They're making sure the hate never goes cold! They're making sure that just when you think you've got rid of one fucking prick, another one crops up in his place. One even more vacuous, even more slick, even more talentless than the one before.'

Simon had laughed then, and again now, remembering.
How I love you for this, how I love your overthinking
mind. And how I love how you hate. You are talking about my father. You probably have him in your mind now.
He wanted to say this. He wanted her to know. But he just laughed.

‘You might find it funny,' Anya said and turned from him, picked up the joint. ‘But give it a decade, give it two, and the only assassinations will be of television stars. The so-called personalities will be terrified. Politicians will be safe. They will be able to do as they wish.'

Two decades and just the one assassination. A female presenter shot on her doorstep, a loner, stalker, caught: not what Anya had in mind. It changed the shape of his fantasies. He no longer imagined punching his father, shooting him, but dreamt instead of elaborate assassination. A snowplough accident. A dog attack in the middle of Hyde Park. A bomb placed in the annexe, timed to go off at the end of a playback of one of his game shows. Simon's preferred method was a piano pushed off the top of a tall building, crushing Bob below. Bob loves those old slapstick routines: let him die the way he has lived.

Anya has been on his mind since arriving in Thailand. Ghosts of her carrying a backpack, ghosts of her drinking beer in bars, ghosts of her rolling joints, scribbling in notebooks. She'd stayed at this same guest house. Cheap but fine. Cheap and close to everything. A
higgle-piggle – when he thinks of her, he thinks of her saying those words – place with dank rooms and additions, enlargements and extensions leading into a garden courtyard where the chalets are. The chalets he'd looked at. They were not what he wanted. He liked the clatter of the next-door cafeteria, the low honk of voices, the pouring of liquid; the flames and fire.

‘We'll go,' she'd said once, after a long description of Bangkok. ‘You and I, we'll go together. Take the whole summer. Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia. The grand tour. Temples. Meditation. Fresh seafood. The best hash in the world. A cabin by the beach.'

Anya, long limbed, naked, kissed him and he saw this would not happen. It did not. Years later, now perhaps, she would mention him in passing, at a dinner table, at work. With a father like that, she'd say – because now she knew, now she knew who he was – you can almost excuse it.

There is a photograph taken of the family. Not quite of the family. A photocall for the press. Father playing a miniature trumpet, mother with an admonishing, amused look that says
stop larking about
. Simon looking off with distracted eyes. His hair will not be tamed flat and his solemn look is directed at his off-camera brother.
The handsome spastic is behind the photographer, no make-up applied, perhaps asleep, perhaps not.

‘But why can't Gary be in the photo?' Simon asked. His father shot him a look and Simon said nothing more. He imagined killing Gary. Stabbing him with a kitchen knife, slitting his throat. Their father coming into the dining room to find Simon over the corpse of his brother, blood-drenched and smiling. Nine years old and thinking such thoughts. No wonder, when you think about it. No wonder.

He was a slight boy, but he managed to tip the chair just enough. Enough for Gary to fall, to dump the body onto the parquet floor. The noise was loud, like glass-shatter, and he paused over his brother waiting for footsteps on the stairs. There were none. He prodded his brother with the miniature trumpet. He pulled down his brother's trousers. He kicked his brother in the arse. He called his brother a spastic, a stupid bloody spastic. And his father and mother arrived then.

He wore his best clothes, the very best ones, the bow tie and shirt, the same he wore when important people came to the house. The nanny took him. A car drove them to a row of Georgian townhouses, brass plaques outside, steps up to shellac-dark doors, silver knockers and mother-of-pearl doorbells. He remembers the streets and the cars, the nanny waiting with him to be admitted.
But his memory of the sessions, even of the psychiatrist, is hazy: a book-lined room, a woolly headed man in tweed, horn-rimmed spectacles and a couch he assumed he was not allowed to sit on. Did he even ask to sit on it? This was a punishment, was it not? A punishment would not allow such comfort as sitting on its brown leather; he would not have asked, no.

And the questions. Have you ever wished to harm your brother? Have you ever harmed your brother? Have you ever wished to harm yourself? Have you ever tried to harm yourself? Give me three words to describe your father? What do you see in this picture? Can you tell me the first thing that comes into your head when I say these words: spastic, home, kiss, fear, anger . . .

They have the quality of a televised memory, shaped by dramas, documentaries he's seen. Did the doctor really ask whether he had hurt himself? Would a real doctor really ask about his father in such a way? Simon no longer knows. He cannot be certain. There were sessions; he's sure of that; and he remembers coming home to the quiet house, slipping in through the kitchen, hoping no one had noticed his absence.

For two months he didn't hear from or see his father. Not uncommon. But. Bob was touring, or writing for someone, or filming. Simon went to his psychiatrist appointments; did not call his brother a spastic. He did
not kick his brother in the arse. He did his schoolwork and kept quiet, concentrated on his breathing as his counsellor had taught him. He ate his dinner, every last mouthful, and said please and thank you. He played well with others and he talked to Gary. He did not cry when the lights went out.

He was washing his hands, soap and water, water, soap and water, water. Washing his hands and his father was at the door. His father's face in the mirror, tired and lined. Simon dried his hands and his father stood with his arms outstretched.

‘Come give me a hug, Simon,' he said. ‘I've missed you my boy. Missed you so much.'

His father smelled of whisky and hair oil, his arms strong around him.

‘You've been such a good boy,' Bob said. ‘You've been such a good boy, Simon. That's what I've been told. I've been told you've been a good boy and every good boy deserves a treat. Come, come, Simon, I've a surprise for you.'

His father carried him to the study. In his arms and in the fervour of imagination, Simon seeing the surprises unfold, the sheer size of them, their frantic colours, their unknown, untold excitements. His father put him in the wing-backed chair. His father was smiling the way he did on the television when someone wins the big prize. His
father handed him the brochure. A castle, something like a castle, green grass and turrets, but no moat or flags. In that moment, he is caught. This he thinks now amid the next-door voices and clanking. Caught in the moment of incomprehension. He is still there. Bob's face looking at him, the wrong face though; the eyebrows too arched, what looks like dried make-up on his chin and cheek. The smile dropped for an instant, then turned back on. The explanation. What he has won. A place at a boarding school. A permanent holiday from the family. Bob mentioned the sporting facilities many times, the cinema club every third Friday of the month. Your new school: didn't you do well?

The clank and voices.
Tak tak tak.
He picks up a bottle of lukewarm water. He is hotcold and sweating. The sheets are damp in places, wet elsewhere. He pissed the bed the first night of the boarding school. Pissed it so much the dormitory staff had to flip the mattress in full view of the others. Nine others laughing and calling him pisspants. Calling him pisspants though six of them had themselves been called pisspants before. He pissed the bed the second night too. The same routine.