What happened to the two days since I did stagger away, my footsteps ringing down an empty street, I have no idea. It’s not the first or the last segment of my life that I have lost: over the years, I’ve mislaid whole months, one way or another. Even then, when I was seventeen, this kind of thing happened fairly often and, when it did, it seemed to come out of the blue. One minute I’d be sitting in the bar of the George, the next I’d be picking myself up off cold concrete, or some long-dead sailmaker’s grave, my body wreathed in grime and the stale smell of liquor. I would be cold, usually, but more often than not I was clad in a thin vapour of sweat, and I would always be struck by the smell of it, as if I had been translated in the night to another world, where malevolent spirits bathed me in some strange humour, denaturing me, making me alien to myself.
To begin with, this was as far as it went. When I was in my late teens, working in factories over the summer vacation, or on the post at Christmas, a lunchtime drink might end three days later on the strip of waste ground behind a row of shops, or on the floor of some dingy squat, five, or three hundred, miles from where I’d started. Or I would go with somebody to some poky little flat, and it would carry on from there, long and hard into the night, then desperately into the next day, on a train to wherever it came into my head to go, or a bus, or a lift to some mythical party in Northampton, say, or some place out in the country that I’d never even heard of and wasn’t quite convinced was real. Once, when I was looking after my parents’ house during the holidays, I met a taciturn Glaswegian who said he was on the run from the army, and invited him back to the house. He had money, he’d bought a carry-out and, for a while at least, he must have amused me. The next evening, I got a lift from a guy in a pink and blue van on the Kettering road: I had left the former squaddie unconscious on my parents’ leatherette sofa, where he had passed out an hour before. It seems that I didn’t stop to worry about what he might do when he woke and found himself alone in a strange house, the back door wide open, his whisky bottle empty. If my mother had known, she would have died. If my father had found out, he would have killed me. Maybe that was why I did it. The only thing I remembered about the soldier was a thick, purplish scar – or rather, not a scar so much as a recently stitched seam that started at his chin and disappeared into the collar of his newly-pressed shirt. Maybe it was the shirt that convinced me he wouldn’t do any damage to the house, the fact that it was newly laundered and pressed, the fact that it had short sleeves. I’m not sure why, but I found those short sleeves oddly genteel. Maybe I just wasn’t sufficiently self-aware to bother. When these pilgrimages happened, they happened according to their own mysterious logic, a logic I not only didn’t understand, but had no part in. Perhaps it was the same logic that suggested, one fine day, that I really could do something about my father. After all, I’d had the knife in my hand, and I’d been ready to use it. All I had to do was see the logic through to its conclusion.
Bert McKain came round every Hogmanay, doing his best to sound like Elvis, though he was only really convincing when he sang the King’s worst song, ‘Wooden Heart’. Not that this was a problem at our house: my mother loved that song, and my father was reminded of his time in Germany. For once, everybody was happy. The turn of the year was, at times, even pleasurable: formidable lumps of Dundee cake washed down with beer or port and lemon, the whisky waiting in the bottle till the bells rang (ours was one of those houses where the drinking of whisky was
verboten
before midnight, which didn’t stop my father sneaking a few rums around ten o’clock). Ten minutes into the new year, we would hear Bert coming along the road, his cheery, confident, not quite regal voice ringing out some old Elvis ballad or movie song. Bert was the only man I ever met who loved Dundee cake, and he didn’t mind what he washed it down with. Unlike the other men who roamed the streets on Hogmanay, he drank for as long as he enjoyed it, then he stopped. He knew his limit; he never did anything stupid or embarrassing. The women liked having him around – a steadying influence – and the kids adored him. I liked him too. Whenever I saw him, I caught myself smiling.
Maybe it was Bert who prevented me from killing my father. Maybe it was just plain fear. Men like my father, or the Scandura gang, could do whatever they liked, because they had such a weak sense of the consequences. I wasn’t like that. When I came to execute my plan, I was angry, but I wasn’t resolute. I’d found out that my father had gone back on his word and told my mother that I was on ‘heavy drugs’, and I knew he could be heard, late on a Friday night, announcing to all and sundry that he didn’t have a son, that he and my mother had found me under a hedge, and had taken me in. Ironic, given what I later discovered about him (though maybe not). None of this was new, of course. My father had been telling me for years that I wasn’t his son. Over time, he’d conjured up various explanations for my existence: I was adopted, I was a baby someone had left under a hedge on his road to work, I was the child of a secret lover my mother had known before he married her. He never repeated these stories when my mother was there, or when he was sober, and he rarely said the same thing twice: there would be slight changes, little details he would alter, from forgetfulness, or perhaps just to keep me interested. Once upon a time, I’d believed what he said – and this was why I’d come to the point of making plans, of thinking through the possibility of killing him. It was a cumulative thing, the result of years of hurt. I didn’t really have a plan at all, but I had a scheme, and that scheme was in me, part of what I was, a spell written into the fabric of my being.
After the incident with the carving knife, war had been waged on a purely verbal basis, a war of slow attrition, of casual contempt and everyday hatred, a war that I knew would last until I could get away, once and for all. Our arguments were ugly and demeaning; every time I got into one, I felt as much contempt for myself as I did for him, but I couldn’t let it go, I had to keep at him, just as he had to keep going at me. We had dropped all pretence of father and son, of drinks and crib games and half-playful disagreement; now, we were bound together only by rage and hatred. Sometimes we skirted around one another, sullen and careful, too tired or disgusted to get into anything. Most of the time, though, the smallest thing would set us off: an ill-chosen word or gesture, something somebody said on television, any of the day’s hundred casual misunderstandings. Yet no matter where it all started, those arguments always came down to the same things: drugs versus alcohol, my wasted future, what I was going to do with my life, how I was killing my mother with my selfishness.
It had to end. It surprises me to think it now but, at the time, I would have had no scruple about killing him. To be honest, I have to admit that, in those days, I
felt
that I could have killed anyone. Yet, even though I’d been thinking about it for a while, it seemed an idle notion, a fantasy, something I would never pluck up the courage to do. After all, I’d had a knife to his throat, and I’d let it go, so it was obvious that I didn’t have the heart to do it. Then something came into my mind that made me think again. It was a minor thing, an incident that had happened a few months before, but it was also a sign, when I came to think about it.
I had been walking through the town centre on a Saturday afternoon, with my friend Russell, when I spotted my father coming towards us, a faraway look on his face, as if he were dreaming, or not altogether there. It was a look I recognised: most of the time, when he was out of the house, he would take his glasses off and slip them into the inside pocket of his jacket, presumably because they detracted from his supposed resemblance to Robert Mitchum. Without them, he was blind as a bat, though he could see movement, and he had a basic-level sense of what was happening around him that was more to do with instinct than vision. Still, what I knew for sure was that he couldn’t make out details. ‘Look at the fool,’ I said. ‘He can’t see a thing without his glasses.’
Russell grinned. ‘Is that so?’ he said; then before I could stop him, he sang out, ‘
Hiya, Tommy
.’
My father turned to us. What he sensed was a mass, no doubt, that was neither obviously threatening nor particularly interesting. ‘All right?’ he said, his voice non-committal.
‘Aye,’ Russell said. ‘Yourself?’
‘No sae bad,’ my father replied, ready to go on. He didn’t know who the hell we were.
‘Haven’t seen you for a while,’ Russell threw in. ‘You keeping all right?’
My father looked puzzled, but remained non-committal. ‘Well, ye ken how it is,’ he said.
Russell began laughing. ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ he asked.
I’ll give it to the old man, he covered up well. ‘I ken your face,’ he said. He cast around for a name he remembered. ‘I’m no sae good with names –’
‘Russell.’
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Russell. The milk boy.’
‘But you know this man here,’ Russell went on quickly, turning to me. I was already tired of the game.
‘Oh, aye.’ My father peered at me. ‘How’s it going, son?’ He’d probably got me down as one of Russell’s brothers. I didn’t say anything.
Russell laughed. ‘This is John,’ he said. ‘Your son.’
My father grimaced. He was only about six feet away from me. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘So. What are you boys up to?’
I didn’t want the game to go on, then. It didn’t seem funny any more. But months later, as I sat in one of the disused garages on the Beanfield, soused on cheap wine, this memory was like a gift. A gift; or an omen. A challenge. If I hated my father – and that afternoon, for reasons I can’t even remember now, I hated him utterly – I could solve the problem with one decisive action. I couldn’t stand face to face with him, when he was sober, able to look into my eyes, able to fend me off. But what about when he was drunk, coming home through the court late at night, no glasses, unaware of who was waiting for him in the dark? If I could pull that off, it would be like any other Saturday night: two strangers meet; one of them walks away. Why not? This wasn’t a sober thought – I’d had quite a bit of wine, some speed, other stuff too, I imagine – but that made it all the more compelling. It wouldn’t be easy, of course. Even drunk, I knew that. But I knew what to do, and I knew I could get away with it. My father had so many enemies, nobody would think to suspect his own son.
I never really intended to carry it through. I know that, now, and I think I knew it then. What matters, though, is the fact that I worked it all out: the best place to wait for him, as he walked home (a narrow alley at the foot of Handcross Court, just at the point where the footpath forked between the lower side of the square and the upper); the choice and disposal of the weapon (single-blade, nine-inch knife, to be tossed into a pool in the woods afterwards); the cover I would need to provide an alibi, if I was ever suspected (I would be in my room all the time, listening to music: my mother could testify to this, as she’d have brought me a cup of tea before she went to bed, as an excuse to check that I wasn’t up to any
mischief
). Convinced I had everything covered, I placed myself where I needed to be, able to see him coming, but out of sight myself, and I waited. I didn’t believe it, not for a moment, but there I was standing in the shadows, clutching a knife, on the darkest part of my father’s walk home from the pub. It was almost eleven o’clock. He would soon be on his way.
As it happened, he was not alone. Bert McKain was with him. This shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise – Bert was an occasional at the Hazel Tree, and his house was just a hundred yards from ours. If anything, I suppose that was a relief. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do, if my father had been alone: if I’d been serious, I could have waited for the next chance to ambush him, and I wouldn’t have had long to wait. But I wasn’t serious. I was acting out a script, a fantasy. The very fact that I could stand there, waiting, in the shadows, was enough for me, really. To know that I wanted to do it, even if I couldn’t see it through – that mattered. I knew I hated him, and I knew I was too sensible, or too much of a coward to act. But it still mattered. It was a piece of knowledge that I needed to possess. When I heard Bert McKain’s familiar, mock-Elvis voice singing out through the night, I was relieved, sure I was. They were walking straight towards me, Bert talking and joking, my father – who was nowhere near as drunk as I’d expected – walking along quietly beside him. He seemed preoccupied, wrapped up in his own thoughts, though I could see, as they passed through a hoop of street light, that he was smiling. He liked Bert. In an odd, detached way, he liked most of the men he knew. I kept to the shadows and waited till they passed; then I ditched the knife, cut through the court on the lower side – I knew I’d still be home first, that my father would stand blethering with Bert for a while – and climbed through the window of my room, where Country Joe was still singing quietly to the bedside lamp.
The next morning, as soon as I woke, I knew I had to get away. I was certain that my father would see something in my face – or, worse, that my mother would. I was sure you couldn’t think about killing a man without it showing. Even if I had never had the nerve to do it, I’d had the thought – and now I had the knowledge. I wasn’t a Catholic for nothing.
Thought, word and deed
. There was a truth in the idea that I could understand – and, by mid-morning, my exit strategy was already in motion. I had friends in Kettering; I knew they would offer me refuge, for a while at least, until I could decide what I wanted to do with myself. Not that it mattered what I did, or didn’t do. There was no long-term plan; I just knew it was time to be gone. I’d been running away half-heartedly all my life; now it was time to be gone for good. There would be some explaining to do, especially to my mother, but that could wait for later. For now, all that mattered was to be somewhere else.