Authors: Jude Cook
Enough! Enough about
her
. I had better tell you about me first while there’s still time, while it’s still light. We’ll get to
her
later. To understand me you’d better know something about my mum and dad. Yes, that David Copperfield crap. Because these are confessions, right? You might have already identified the slightly hysterical tone, rich with grievances. St Augustine, Rousseau, Philip Roth—those whinging bastards all had a record to set straight. It will come as no surprise, then, to learn that I am an only child, the only child of Sinead and Desmond Easy (Des for short). I have a half-sister, born when I was eleven, but she can wait. My father, who also suffered the trauma of early baldness always—to my mind at least—had a strange way of looking at me. He would stare under the heavy, shrouded lids of his eyes, as if squinting, or trying to figure out a particularly tricky equation. Apparently, I just didn’t add up. Or balance out. In fact, he had a brilliant mathematical, or rather scientific, mind. Unfortunately, he instilled in me a hatred of the sciences by his very proselytising of them as academic subjects. ‘God is dead,’ he would proclaim while burning lamb chops under the grill in the white house where I grew up. ‘And science will prove it—probably in your lifetime. So stop wasting your eyesight on poetry.’ Precociously, I would answer that, for God to be dead, he must once have been alive. My father’s squint would then become even warier. His path in life, his golden route to the threadbare carpet of
his
early thirties and beyond, was as unsystematic, as unscientific, as could be. Evacuated from the blighted terraces and V2 craters of Barnet during the war, he grew up on the Isle of Wight. I’ve often wondered whether those years on an island, surrounded by incurious sheep and paedophiles, weren’t the crucible for his strangely insular and reactionary views later in life. I can still hear his pedagogic voice holding forth to a schoolfriend who had just discovered Marxism: ‘There are either winners or losers in this life, and giving your money away is the sure route to becoming the latter!’ I remember asking him whether he considered Gandhi a loser, only for him to reply that Gandhi didn’t count on the Isle of Wight after the war: the only things that did were the price of butter and the availability of primitive condoms. He certainly made me never want to visit the place, the Isle of off-White—a chunk of Great Britain that, once detached, should have just sunk quietly into the Channel, volunteering, as it were, its own superfluousness. At seventeen, and very pleased with himself (with an ingenuous self-confidence that never left him his whole life), he won a scholarship to Cambridge to study chemistry. The old grammar-school boy-at-sea-in-an-ocean-of-toffs scenario. From this pinnacle, it was downhill all the way—on graduating he found a post as a rank-and-file research chemist for a French laxative and cosmetics company based in Bedfordshire called Diatrix, where he remained until … You may have noticed I’m talking about my father in the past tense, as if he had already joined the Dead, those watchers and hand-wringers on their plinths of stone. But he’s not dead. I just haven’t spoken to him for ten years. Or rather, we haven’t spoken to
each other
for ten years. The feeling, and it makes me short of breath and bewildered to admit it here, is woundingly mutual. I know where to find him. He knows where to find me. But neither of us
have
found the other, for over a decade.
A psychiatrist could probably make much of this, along with the head-blowing-off daydream(which isn’t my only persistent hallucination, I should stress. I have another—of solvency and spiritual calm—involving a spacious timber-floored flat, its bookshelves rich in reference works, its walls punctuated by framed charcoal sketches; a piano, upright or grand, I don’t have a preference; and the faint smell of lavender pot-pourri in the immaculate, startling can). Although psychoanalysis, it has to be said, so often misses the point—the subtext to many of its questions about parents seems to go something like:
What were you doing hanging around with a father like that in the first place?
As if anyone ever had a choice.
But my father was, is, an intelligent man. After his emigration to Sydney, Australia, with a new wife, I began to miss the stimulation of his bookshelves (not him, you note, but his bookshelves—why, why, why? What am I that I can be so frigidly monstrous when it comes to the central relationship of my life?). My formative memory is of an entire ranged wall in our living room bearing texts on at least twenty runnered shelves. An odyssey, a magical orange-grove for a child; a gift. As I grew older I could see that some of the erudite works looked suspiciously unread, their spines pristine and uncreased; also that his taste, in his fifties, had come to rest on dry historical accounts, political philosophy, along with biographies of prominent chemists and right-wing politicians. The roman candles of literature (the Lawrence, the Joyce, the Kerouac, the Yeats) had been consigned to the dustbin marked ‘deluded youth’. (Though you had to search for this dustbin. The exciting books were often hidden
behind
the volumes of European history, in piles or stacks—concealed like pornography.) But he
did
have books. Books that are probably the cause of all my present heartache and pain; though one doesn’t choose the inviolable facts of one’s upbringing, good or bad.
Yes, an intelligent man, and sure proof that you can read all the great works of literature and still be as confused about your moral and spiritual life as the dustman who devours the
Sun
every day as if it were
The Book of Common Prayer
. And maybe this is at the core, the rotten root, of why we haven’t communicated since I ceased to be a teenager. You see, at that age, Desmond Easy personified the perils, the folly, of the man who has made firm metaphysical conclusions one way or the other (there being no persuasive evidence in either direction, as any fule kno). A lot depends on what you believe, of course; where you stand vis-à-vis the afterlife. In his case, two thousand years of philosophical debate could be distilled into a simple sentence: there was no God. A committed atheist probably from before birth, I would feel corroded, soul-contaminated, every time I endured another spleen-filled rant about how our only destination was the avid soil and its gleeful worms; or about getting and spending and the greasy world of commerce; or the importance of chemistry as an A-level subject. That’s not where my head was at, not in the least. I was all for keeping my options open. When the bullet enters my brain (as it most certainly will), I’d like to believe in the slimmest possibility that the Big Man Upstairs will be there, shaking his fist, cursing that I’d arrived too early. And when I engaged my father in argument, I would witness his divorce-injured spirit cowering as I expounded (ludicrously, at that age!) the doctrines of Platonic transmigration, of Lawrence’s soaring and solipsistic life-belief and the lyric (largely stolen from the French Symbolists, I was later disappointed to discover) to The Doors’ ‘Break on Through to the Other Side’. So we agreed to leave it. We agreed to differ. For ten years thus far. The bond cracked twixt son and father.
My mother, however, was a different kettle of ballgames—a free spirit, but most tangibly different in her physical characteristics. While my altitudinally challenged father was always fighting a tendency to flab in the upper arms and was bald as an acorn by the time he reached thirty-five, Sinead Mary Maguire (to use her stunningly beautiful and evocative maiden name) was an elegant raven-haired head above the crowd. Literally. By seventeen she was a giraffe-like five foot eleven. The daughter of an Irish miner displaced to Leeds in the 1930s scramble for work; early photographs demonstrate just why half of male North Yorkshire spent much of its spare time in garages repairing cars they’d crashed while straining to catch a glimpse of her on the street. In one, taken when she was just eighteen, her mathematically perfect legs curl from under a pleated schoolgirl skirt and end in those juvenilely-buckled court shoes that young women wore in the fifties. Atop this, her tiny waist is overfolded by thin but capable hands, which for some time now have tragically borne the distorting tree-branch knobbles of arthritis. Then her face: an oval of health and intuition divided by a long fluted nose; bearing a mouth so heavily lipsticked that it appears black in the creased monochrome of the picture. The only disappointment, in the photo, are her grey eyes—smudged and indistinct, in real life they were the colour of rain. Finally, her hair: a straight burnished cascade of witch-like ebony, mirroring the hue of her permanently raised, questioning eyebrows. A dark beauty, then: someone in whom life’s vital appetites vibrated strongly—one of those rare Southern Irish women who seemed to have bypassed the gene pool of freckles and carroty hair and been awarded the full set of night-black attributes reserved for Gothic heroines.
So why did she end up with Des Easy? Well, that’s simple. My mother was, for a long while, a terrible judge of men. After the dismal, rationed privations of her teenage years (bananas something seen only in films until the age of sixteen), and a tragic accident in which a faulty gas main killed her mother and much-younger brother at a Butlin’s holiday camp, she found herself teaching nursery-school children the alphabet using colourful wooden representations of letters. A brief affair later with the married headmaster, which scandalised the entire Leeds suburb where the school was undistinguishedly situated, and she found herself with the same primary-hued wooden letters at a school in Lewisham, with slightly older, but infinitely more vicious, more worldly, more feral children. She stayed for ten years.
It was in this demolition-scarred no-man’s-land of south London that, one night, she attended a party thrown by graduate teachers in a Habitat-infested flat. That providential evening she arrived late, finding the hashish-demented revelry in full swing. Twenty minutes in, and her gaze fell on a shortish, balding man wearing square clothes, grappling with a 45 rpm single held by the host, himself resplendent in beatnik black. The two were face to face, eyes bulging.
‘I don’t care if they’re the latest thing,’ the shortish, balding man protested, ‘it’s those unbearable voices and that thud, thud, thud—the tyranny of the beat!’
A foreign female voice (of the erotic type always present at parties) offered, ‘It ish only rocks schmoosic. Don’t ve so anal!’
‘Yes, Des,’ said the host, now slightly calmer, ‘this ain’t your party—and we’ll have the bastard Beatles if I say so.’
A cheer went up from the few interested souls who had overheard this deeply embarrassing exchange between two men in their late twenties.
‘Here. Vivaldi.
The Four Seasons
!’ said Des, desperately. ‘I’m sure if we did a quick poll of the room, if we put it to the vote, then Vivaldi would come out on top.’ A sweat—for it was a broiling summer night in the mid 1960s, with all the sash windows thrown open to the static, dust-flavoured air—had appeared on the unappetising dome of Desmond Easy’s head. ‘Think of your neighbours! You’ve come close to being slung out already …’
At this point, the single over which the two men were still tussling snapped crisply down the middle and a disapproving groan could be heard around the room. This seemed to decide the matter. And so the old Venetian had his way. Soon the cramped quarters swelled with the rarefied pizzicatos and tiptoeing melodies of ‘Summer’. The cackles and chatter resumed, escaping out to the bewildered street below.
It also decided something in the vertiginous Goyaesque beauty holding a lonely glass of Cinzano that was Sinead Mary Maguire. Here was a man, she mused, with whom she could fall in love; a man of sensibility, intellect (‘slung out’—she loved that! And, over the years, it would become a phrase she would grow to hate more than any other on earth). Here was a man not afraid to give his opinion, to fight for it (again, a quality that would eventually drive her to paroxysms of Irish distraction). Above all, he sported leather patches on the elbows of his diseasedly brown corduroy jacket. This, for her, denoted adulthood. She had finally arrived. Sure, he was almost shoulder-height to her and she had seen newborn babies possessed of more hair, but in that split-second … (that manful struggle over the record, representing the battle between two extremes; of high culture with low, of black rollnecks with professorial corduroy, of Ringo Starr with Vivaldi—plus the sexy ‘snap!’ made by the vinyl in the stultifying night) … in that split-second something had been decided: here was the man who would father her child.
And that child was me.
They married within the year and moved first to the blighted satellite town of Luton, then to neighbouring Hamford on realising that a concrete post-nuclear wasteland of piss-filled underpasses (and where, indeed, most of the buildings resembled public urinals) was no place to bring up a child. Hamford, with its broad avenues of deciduous trees, placid, murky river and Norman church, its outlying estates that promised (and delivered) unimaginable violence, would soon become a mythical place for me; but for newly-wed regular hardworking Desmond and his attractive wife it was just a place to send a kid to nursery school that wasn’t Lewisham. Things were good in Hamford for a couple of years. After I appeared, Sinead took eighteen-months’ leave from the local junior school where she was again making fast progress with the magic wooden letters. And Des, tired from a day analysing a new commando-strength laxative, would appear every evening with his tie askance, hungry for the phenomenal Irish stews that had played such a vital role in Sinead’s wooing of him. Every night at six p.m. she would hear his key in the lock and there he’d be—every night (if that were possible) slightly balder and ready to rest his head where it most naturally fell due to their height difference: on her sternum.
Yes, things were good for a couple of years in Hamford, if not a little … well, boring. In retrospect, this could have been the end-of-life-as-she-knew-it for Sinead Easy (the atrophying of those vital energies) if it wasn’t for what happened when she returned to the school. She met a man. She met a man who would eventually (and literally) sweep her off her feet—that most destructive of female aspirations. To quote my namesake, maidens, like moths, are ever caught by glare. His name was Delph. Delph Tongue. Scandinavian in origin, so I’m told. And he was (very Lady Chatterley’s this) the assistant caretaker, the man who painted the glutinous, supernaturally straight pure white lines on the football field every summer. And also a man who had watched her—married, unavailable Sinead Easy—walk through the low gates every day like a galleon-tall, devil-black vision of erotic invitation.