Authors: Jude Cook
A shrouded sign gives two alternatives: Town Centre and Station. But I don’t need the Town Centre because I am the centre, the emotional centre, the locus of memory. Achieved at last. And just as I left it ten years ago. The palimpsest of the past, strangely altered, with its new trudgers through the December mist, new shopfronts and chain bakeries. This dump was what I used to call home, this random collection of dormitory estates, schools, shopping arcades, bleak footbridges.
The station now guzzled down the throat of Advancing Time, I can see the dagger of St Cecilia’s again over the market palisades. I have a sudden sinking sensation caused by the knowledge I am halfway there; halfway towards my destination, like the moment in the cinema when one realises the long-anticipated film must end, just like everything else.
A quick flash of the station approach and its puddles of blinking neon, the lights like exotic fish in an aquarium. The same road where I took my first bedsit with its folding camping table and gunged mini-oven. Its bath on the top landing shared with a mysterious Caribbean gentleman who always left a barber’s shop of afro curls and a London Particular after his three-hour soaks. The two-drum laundrette where I washed black jeans till they frayed to a white nothingness. Then the curve of the road that led to my landlady’s bungalow at the top, where I made my monthly pilgrimages. Mrs Pincer. That crooked black widow! I remember her manicured front lawn and childless kitchen. The need to make a good impression, to be polite, well-thought-of, non-threatening or rent-dodging, always high in my mind. I hated myself for this dog-like deference, but it came over me automatically.
Going, going, going … Soon the dark stage curtain will call time on these memories. St Cecilia’s disappears, replaced by a junkyard of rail spares and exhausted rolling stock. Get it down! Quick, before it goes.
Mrs Pincer’s. Not so far from the Poets’ Estate. Why does my mind always stray back to that rabbit run? As if directed by some Global Positioning Device of the psyche. Because so little happened there? Or because so much was reckoned there, in spite of this? It is all behind me now, in the big December darkness, somewhere down the line. I have no choice but to locate it in the interior … Adieu, adieu, my native shore!
Going.
Going.
Gone.
After Dovecote Lane, we lived for five years at number nine Southey Close. On moving in, shades of the prison house immediately darkened its walls. What ghosts must haunt it now? It was situated on a satellite estate, its dismal vistas ludicrously at odds with the ambrosial waft of high culture conjured by the street names. Yeats Drive. Tennyson Avenue. Vaughan View. Imagine if you will, agile reader, a provincial Los Angeles of featureless Barratt hutches, all constructed to house the shoddier end of the commuter market. Concrete walkways overlooked by the sentinels of sad saplings in mesh cages. Busted Ford Cortinas on tarmac and quartz driveways. No shops for a mile and a half. Each house with the same comfortless layout: kitchen and living room downstairs, two box bedrooms upstairs. Okay, so not the privations of a Rio slum, but a world away from the White House and its cramped Victorian cosiness, its orange grove of books and secretive corners. There was nowhere to play, either. Gone was the Lane and its towering silver birches, allotments and concealed gardens. Gone the rich compost odour of November bonfires, replaced with the constant stink of someone burning plastic and the endlessly depressing tinkle of an ice-cream van. And, behind the flimsy windows with their winding-sheet nets, the rooms were always cold. With no double-glazing or central heating (a system of storage heaters had been installed at all three hundred and fifty addresses), the sleep-deprived poet would find himself braving a nippy bathroom every morning only to douse himself in a chill that lingered till evening. One moment we were at the White House, with Delph hugely, inappropriately, presidentially resident, the next we were at Southey Close watching moustachioed mechanics waxing bonnets every Sunday. The move was just another decision that was never explained: bewildering to a child, completely unacceptable. Why did they have to inflict this orgy of ugliness on me? And for how long would it last? Was it permanent? I felt confused, disrupted, undermined. After all, Des was still living at Dovecote Lane. I would be ferried over there every fortnight when he returned from Lille, then ferried back to the estate every Sunday night in time for school. But somehow this made it all worse. Why couldn’t I live at one address or the other? To see the childhood house in juxtaposition with that gaudy dump was unbearable. The adult reasons for moving were never shared with me. It was just the next thing. Another stop on the great general movement away from the Centre.
The new place showed pitiful evidence of an attempt at cultural betterment. This was the satanic work of Delph, pathologically insecure that my mother would miss her weekly dose of Mozart and Radio 4. Though, in Des’s absence, this was always doomed to failure. One day I braved the Arctic bathroom to find myself pissing in front of a mini Michelangelo’s
David.
Worse still, next to it was a ten-quid repro of Rodin’s
Lovers,
a vile token of Delph’s affection for my mother, no doubt. I shuddered at the muscular hand of Paolo on her thigh, the awful submission in the curve of Francesca’s back. Not only this, he had invested in a set of leather-bound classics (Mrs Trollope, Gaskell, Fanny Burney, G. B. Shaw’s plays), cassettes of classical music and a Matisse throw. But Delph had got it all wrong, as people with no innate cultural bearings always will. The books (ordered from a coupon on the back of a Sunday tabloid) were mainly stodgy nineteenth-century melodrama at its worst—all destined to remain unread during his tenure; the classical tapes were monstrous low-fi compilations of marching-band staples; and the Matisse throw was—to anyone with a pair of eyes—gruesomely at odds with mother’s delicate William Morris cushion covers, then back in fashion. How I remember my father guffawing at this very definition of vulgarity when I described it to him. He was sitting in front of his log fire at Dovecote Lane, listening to the Winter adagio from
The Four Seasons.
In full petit-bourgeois effect. Often at these times his hooded eyes and lunar pate would look profoundly solemn, until I began to relate the arrival of each new grossly tasteless
objet d’art.
‘Last week, they got a poster of two people kissing. It was sickening.’
Des looked up absentmindedly from his toilet of despond and asked, ‘Who was it by?’
‘I don’t know, but it was kind of like wallpaper—like a pattern made of gold. And he was holding her head at a funny angle, like he was trying to break her neck. It didn’t look comfortable at all.’
‘Klimt?’
‘Yeah, that’s the bloke. But it wasn’t signed by him, it was signed by someone called Athena.’
At this Des took off his glasses and exploded into hoarse laughter. His tearful shaking had a strange effect on me—it made my heart leap to see him smile, but it also bequeathed a lifetime of cultural confusion. As much as I despised Delph’s cack-handed attempts to embrace Art, to breathe higher air, to imbibe a beaker of something other than Dr Pepper, I hated my old man’s easy, self-satisfied, lower-middle-class elitism. It is a legacy I still feel today when reading a tabloid: hatred and guilty pleasure combined. Hatred at their salacious reporting of the latest nonce trial at the Old Bailey, replete with gym-knicker snapshots intended only for a jury, but joy over a liberating editorial attacking the funding of a nobs’ opera house ‘when people are dying from want of a hospital bed’. Still, these cultural faux pas of Delph’s raised a chuckle from Dad, and that’s all an eleven-year-old wants when he thinks his father doesn’t give a shit whether he lives or dies on a distant housing estate. Eventually, my fortnightly visits would bring forth a tissue of lies and exaggerations. I started making things up just to see him in a mood that wasn’t irritable or clinically depressed. In fact, marital separation and moving house didn’t seem to have made either Des or Sinead any happier. Often, I would finish the three-mile walk from school to find Mum sitting alone in the darkening kitchen, staring off into space. When I asked her what she was up to she would reply, ‘Thinking’. If I put the light on, she would rise to turn it off, then continue sitting until the yellow beaks of the streetlamps threw sad paths of sulphur over her face and the cheap linoleum.
All this struck me as quite odd, because two events at the White House the previous year had led me to believe that her liaison with Delph and the subsequent move would make her deliriously happy. The first occasion I will never forget. I was sitting on the cushions in front of the black-and-white set, watching
Jackanory
when she crouched down before me, obscuring the view as she uttered the immortal words, ‘There’s something I have to tell you …’ I remember the shock of seeing her eyes full of strangled compassion, or something approaching the difficulty of explaining an adult and complex fact to a simple and childish mind. Besides which, she had been crying: the tropical-lime seventies eye-shadow was smudged into the dark pits of her eye sockets; her peacock headscarf loose over its cargo of ebony hair. She went on: ‘Your father and I don’t love each other any more.’ I felt a burst of adrenalin at this statement of the absolute obvious. O my prophetic soul! She had been seeing Delph for five years, for Christ’s sake! The man had been a permanent fixture of the house for the last two. But to hear her articulate it, in an unusually gentle voice (a voice which excluded the harsh tones of ‘Get down here at once and finish your greens!’ or ‘Right! Bedtime, young man!’) was indescribably stirring. I knew I would remember this for the rest of my days. The official announcement. I hesitated before finally saying,
‘That’s pretty obvious, Mum.’
She straightened slightly at this, allowing me to catch a glimpse of the TV screen. She was spoiling
Jackanory,
after all.
‘Well, it means we’ll be moving to another house.’
‘With Uncle Delph?’
‘Yes, with Uncle Delph.’
Something like panic or anguish or shame appeared in her face now, emotions I hadn’t seen before and didn’t want to see again in a hurry.
‘What about Dad?’
‘Your father is going to stay here. You can see him whenever you like.’
She paused slightly after this statement, as we both knew it was inaccurate. I would not be seeing him ‘whenever I liked’ because he was never around. Filling the room now were her imploring, tear-ruined, green-rimmed eyes. The million objections I had to this plan, this caper of hers, seemed to lodge in my larynx. They remained there without the extra aid of effort needed to make thought into audible speech. Instead, I just said,
‘Okay’
And went back to watching the patient storyteller on the screen. To me, not loving someone was not a good enough reason for upping sticks and enduring the stultifying boredom of a Starter Home estate for the rest of your life. Hating someone, perhaps. Hating someone, and loving someone else—however erroneously—yes. But not just the absence of something. Love then, for me, became merely an abstract noun. After all, what was love? I didn’t feel it. I just felt kind of in the way. So I simply said, ‘Okay.’ It wasn’t as if my opinion on the matter would have made any difference. The decision had been taken. They just wanted to run it past me before the removal van crunched and wobbled down the unmade lane, and the tea-drinking men in their tea-brown overalls entered the familiar white house to dismantle my childhood.
Like I said, always too easy.
The second bombshell arrived when I had just turned eleven, in the back of Sinead’s Mini, ferrying a bootful of rubber plants to the new address. A bright morning in early September, the birch trees on Dovecote Lane resembling a New England fall. Apropos of nothing, my mother said to me from the driving seat, ‘Now, how would you feel if you had a little brother or sister?’
Ooh, I don’t know, how about …
Horrified? Scandalised? Sick to the very pit of my stomach?
I knew at once with childish intuition (and the weary tone of her voice) that this wasn’t her idea. It was Delph’s. This Caliban, this pig with no talent for his lover s existing child, wanted one of his own, and sought to coerce my mother-the unfortunate owner of a womb—into bearing it. I would have felt better if she had admitted, on that pellucid morning of falling leaves, to be carrying the very progeny of Satan himself. Because any nipper of Delph’s would surely have the number of the beast tattooed somewhere on its cranium. If the child were a boy, it would have to be named Damian; if a girl, Rosemary, after its mother. How could she contemplate carrying the devil’s own spawn for nine months? Let’s look at the facts. Delph was almost certainly a confused latent homosexual. His family were white trash gargoyles who spoke in funny accents with an archaic vocabulary of ‘thees’ and ‘thous’. The man himself was a glorified handyman with no prospects this side of the circus. What’s more, this being the late seventies, all the evidence pointed firmly to the fact that Delph Tongue was the Yorkshire Ripper.
Now, fragile reader, you are probably sighing that this reaction marked what Portnoy termed the culmination of my Oedipal drama, but the suspicion that Delph was in fact the most wanted man in England had firm roots in reality. For the simple reason that, after the wrenching move to number nine Southey Close, he was never around. He deposited his horrid droppings of cheap repro sculpture in our bathroom, then fucked off into the night. For months at a time. ‘Up north’, apparently. I was never sure where, or when, if ever, he would return. And Sinead didn’t know either, unless she was keeping facts from me, which was always a possibility in those turbulent days. And ‘up north’ was where the eyes of the country’s many police forces were focused. Inevitably, it was the tape recording of the suspect’s voice that confirmed my worst fears. At that tender age, I somehow confused the glottal Geordie tones of this hoaxer with the soft wide gormless vowels of Wakefied. A northern accent was a northern accent, after all. Too scared to phone the police, I would tremble with anxiety as I made my way home after school, expecting to find Delph in the kitchen, ineradicable bloodstains on his hands, the now familiar look of feigned innocence on his murderous chops. It also occurred to me that Delph might have murdered Gemma Fernandez, and that I might be sitting on important evidence … So my mother was to bear the child of the most wanted pervert and killer in the country. Oh, how I wished I had stayed in that womb! But this wasn’t the worst aspect of those dark days. The worst thing was a place I started to think of as my third house, the Stevenage council slum owned by an obese friend of my mother’s called Barbara, or Babs as she was hideously abbreviated.