Authors: Jude Cook
Babs was probably the largest homo sapiens I had ever laid eyes on. Her colossal folds of flesh seemed to be somehow regenerating: the existing mass producing more pulpy cellulite by the hour. Every time I was left overnight in the cramped, sick-smelling bedroom with her two infants I expected to find her exploded over the kitchen walls come morning. The reason for this residency was that Delph had begun working nights as a security guard, and needed total quiet to get his serial killer’s shuteye. Or that was the story, anyhow. After a single night there I knew I never wanted to return. But return I would, unexpectedly and often, whenever Delph’s work required him. I hated the wretched cardboard house this strange woman laboured in—husband in the nick or at sea, I never did find out. I loathed being abandoned in the baby-smelling bedroom, juggling the two emotions of badly wanting to return to Southey Close and
never
wanting to return there, with its rows and bolt-holed Rippers. I gagged on the curdled Weetabix I was expected to eat every morning, sunk in warm milk (that I imagined had come straight from Babs’ Krakatoan breasts) and topped with barnacles of cheap white sugar. Plus, I missed my mum.
In the end, circumstances prevailed. My sojourn at Babs’s coincided with two unfortunate events: I began wetting the bed, and my mother announced she was pregnant. I don’t know which was the most harrowing, but within less than a year I had used up a department store of linen (Babs fitting a plastic incontinence sheet to my camp bed) and I had a little sister, who they named Sarah. Instead of the spawn of Satan, she turned out to be a solitary star, and—I tremble to admit it—the inaugural love of my life.
The first day at an all-boys comprehensive school is an experience that all bedwetters should undergo. It certainly put an end to one form of nocturnal emission, though happily coincided with the commencement of another. One hundred and twenty pallid First Years all gathered on a concrete playground in their starchy blue uniforms, like the trembling internees of a concentration camp. Nobody knowing where to go. Farts and burps and kicks in the balls. The awful thought you might have to play rugby. Not what a young poet needs, I can tell you … There is an inescapable air of the messdeck or the barrack hall about all-male institutions. This in itself wasn’t surprising. What was a constant source of wonder during my five years at this establishment was how many individuals (boys and teachers)
liked it,
sought it out, revelled in it. Yes, those bluff Taffy games masters and crooked-backed sadists thought there was nothing strange about spending the lion’s share of every day in the company of so much testosterone and male hormonal panic. They were in clover! Didn’t any of these perverts long for the confection of perfume, the brush of female hair in a corridor, a high voice? Something in a skirt? No, it seemed the entire staff relished this socially implausible situation. And the boys too, after a couple of years, began to fear and hate anything feminine. The conditioning had worked. Of course, there were a couple of women on the staff, but they were harassed out or grossed-out within a couple of years. Two terms of being asked for a blow-job every morning or coming in to find the board chalked with a hundred spurting erections was enough to deter even the most broad-minded French mistress or buxom P. E. beauty. And, of course, there was the obligatory paedophile for a head. Mr Cave or the Reverend Cave as he was known, since he regularly preached pious bullshit in a stentorian voice every Sunday at St Cecilia’s church was an egregiously confident boy-fiddler. This danger-to-society had a pinched nose that flared his nostrils to the width of an anteater’s. His stiff upper lip was constantly moist with a film of sweat. In retrospect, I wonder how he lasted so long in the job. Why didn’t anyone blow the whistle on him? Didn’t the parents, our supposed protectors, suspect anything? Perhaps it was his brisk and plausible manner, his advocacy of cold-shower discipline, his
dog collar,
that kept him in the job for decades. Maybe
everyone
knew about it, but the etiquette of the time forced parents to wave their hands and look the other way. It came with the territory, I suppose. The funniest thing was that Mr Cave seemed to think nobody knew he was sticking his hand down kids’ pyjamas on school excursions. What is it about the nonce that makes him imagine nobody knows what he’s up to? With the Reverend Cave it was screamingly obvious to anyone half-awake that he had a feverish and frothing interest in young boys’ bottoms.
It was at this sewer of chalk-dust and thrashings that I first encountered Rudi. A burly boy with brilliantined hair, and a dark look in the points of his pupils. He approached me in the playground on a sun-sliced morning in January. I immediately felt the need to impress him, so I said,
‘Hi. My stepdad’s the Yorkshire Ripper.’
The big boy shot back: ‘Well, mine owns British Aerospace.’
Nonplussed by this, though slightly perturbed by his garrulous Glasgow accent, I allowed a silence to develop, as many would in the years to come. But Rudi always seemed more than able to fill these lacunae. The icy rink of the playground was blue in the early light, the cries of boys mingling with the sound of inland gulls. Stretching before us both was the prospect of double maths and a cross-country run of unimaginable brutality. Rudi said,
‘Fancy a wee bunk-off this afternoon?’
‘Wee—that’s rude.’
‘No it’s not, spunker, it’s just the way I talk.’
He appeared to be slightly affronted at my suggestion. Rudi was about the same height as me, but wider and stronger; with more meat all round.
‘So is that word,’ I said, seeing how far I could push him. I had witnessed other kids rag the swarthy boy in this way. He seemed to accept a degree of this as legitimate, his family having just moved from Scotland.
‘What?’
‘You, know … spunk.’
‘D’ yuh want a burst mooth?’
But there wasn’t time to answer. In a flash we were rolling around on the diamond-hard tarmac, crowds of boys surrounding us shouting, ‘Bundle! Bundle! Bundle!’ Once we had been separated, my mouth indeed burst and bleeding, and had been forced to shake hands in the sinister presence of Mr Cave, we became buddies. Rudi and Byron—inseparable friends for the next five years.
We went through a lot, me and the hirsute Scotsman, when we were young and full of grace. Truancy, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, girls, failed exams. My first gig, first draw on a Camberwell carrot, first fumblings with the unopenable bras of pneumatic fourth-formers were all experienced with Rudi somewhere in the background, his tremendous nose throwing a shadow well worth casting in bronze. When he began wearing the knot of his school tie in a fat, insolent triangle that obscured his shirt, I followed suit. When he ditched his Adidas schoolbag for a skinny leather satchel stencilled with the logos of rock bands, I slavishly copied him. Only when he started shaving the comical bumfluff from his upper lip a year ahead of everyone else was I unable to imitate his initiative. And what did he gain from me? Cultural instruction, I suppose. A Virgil to guide him through the inferno of the third form; an advisor on the right books to read and the cool films to see. Because, when all was said and done, Rudi was not terrifically bright. He had spirit, spark, a certain entrepreneurial savvy, maybe even a devious cunning, but he was no Newton. So Rudi got to look more intellectual than he actually was when hanging around me (always a major point-scorer with girls he asserted—‘Just look at Arthur Miller’) and I had a burly Scottish bodyguard to fend off the bullies that plagued this skinny boy who was already showing signs of losing his hair.
A couple of years after this, towards the end of the long, baking O level summer, Sinead and Delph decided to move house. My kid sister Sarah was five years old, about to start school, and the house on the Poets’ Estate was getting too small. Small for what? you may ask. For a sensitive, already receding boy who loathed his volatile stepfather? For the daily rows that startled the neighbours behind the cardboard walls? For the all-engulfing aura of sadness that surrounded the project of my mother’s affair? Yes, for all these reasons. And for one other that I wasn’t informed about: Sinead and Delph were planning to get married. They wanted to move up in the world: to a bigger house, to bourgeois respectability, like people born into fuck-all always do. Only, this was doomed to failure. You can take the man out of Wakefield, but not the Wakefield, et cetera. Once we did shift our tea chests (some still not unpacked from the last move) half a mile up the road, Delph performed his usual trick of permanently disabling us from meeting the neighbours’ eyes with any degree of confidence. He achieved this by immediately causing a public scene. This time it was over my first real girlfriend, roly-poly Rhianna, who I had brought back for an hour of furtive fumbling and spliff-smoking in my bedroom. Once Rhianna had cycled off unsteadily into the summer night, Delph approached my door and knocked rapidly He was still terrifying, even at the age I was—his features atavistic and gouged with indignation, his voice suddenly loud. ‘What’s going on?’ he shouted. When I had frantically dispersed the smoke and opened up, he confronted me: ‘Did you ask if you could bring someone back here?
‘No, why should I?’ I said, fronting it out.
‘You bring back some tart to fool around under my roof, while we go out to work all the hours God sends?’ Christ, could he fit any more platitudes into a single sentence? ‘You should ask our permission.’
‘She’s not some tart, her name’s Rhianna. Now if you don’t mind—’ I went to shut the door, but he jammed his boot between it and the frame, his lips curling into that familiar sexual grimace. I knew he wouldn’t be able to let that pass. No, there was no way he could let that go unpunished. He had to have access, reach, power. A power that, in my mind, had no legitimacy.
‘Are all the girls in Hamford on bloody heat, or what? You were playing cheeky with her, weren’t you.’
‘What does that mean?’ I asked, cringing at the Yorkshire phrase. ‘Playing cheeky?’ At this point Delph’s whole anima, his verbal expressions, his rangy physique, his dullard’s soul were nauseating to me, almost to the point of implosion.
‘You know what it means. Any more lip and I’ll knock you to the end of the bloody garden.’
I pushed past him; my gorge could stand no more. But he was after me, with a heavy tread, following me out onto the front porch where … where the couple from next door, entering their house with a ton of shopping, witnessed the full fury of his vengeance. His continuing vendetta against the personal affront of my existence. The end result: a shiner the colour and texture of Jupiter’s angry puce spot.
A black eye is not an attractive facial feature to wear to a wedding. Especially not at the self-conscious age of sixteen, when the eyes of the world seem to be evaluating you with the steady scrutiny of a CCTV camera. A fortnight later I was crammed into a dusty pew witnessing the tiring sight of my mother at the altar saying vows to a man I would gladly see sent to the electric chair. On my face was the now-sallowing result of walking into a door, or so I told everyone. Little Sarah stood close in attendance, a beaming bridesmaid. It was all over. All hope of a reprieve was cast asunder. Marriage being a final thing, or so I believed then. A white wedding too, with all the trimmings: the spruced-up guests, the tottering cake, the opulent reception held under a marquee in our new back garden. Sickening. As the mournful voice of the vicar intoned their full names I imagined I saw the shade of Des, a few pews down. The displaced father with his horns polished for the ceremony. Later, I would ponder the degradation of seeing your own mother marry a man you hate, two weeks after he has beaten you up in front of your neighbours. Ah, hate … such an alien emotion to me then. I didn’t know I hated Delph until I was twenty-five. Because I tried to love him so much. But love couldn’t admit such a monster, such a Claudius.
The congregation filed out into the June glare, a tasteless vintage car bearing bunting humming in the gutter. Confetti was blowing on the deleterious wind. Ahead of my mother, Delph was the first to step into the vehicle, characteristically forgetting his manners. Back then, I had been doing a great deal of thinking about people with human qualities (warmth, empathy, insight) as opposed to those with predominantly animal or reptilian traits (lust, brutality, sadism). Delph was one of the latter: on the surface a human being, with charm and human friendliness, but motivated underneath by bestial appetites, by cunning, by savage energies. He had to have immediate gratification in every domain. He had wanted my mother and he had got her, regardless of what he had to destroy to attain his goal. He had wanted a child and he had been presented with one. So it was only natural that he should forget decorum and get into the burnished car ahead of Sinead. A selfish slip. I thought only I had noticed this faux pas, but I registered a minuscule twitch of disgust on the chauffeur s face as he held the wide door open for the galloping groom. Then I felt a tugging at my shirt sleeve. A small hand curled around the cuff of my hired suit. It was Sarah.
‘Aren’t you going with them?’ I asked her.
‘I want to stay with you,’ she smiled.
‘But you have to get in the car. They’re your mum and dad. They’re also the rules. Aren’t you happy?’
Of course she was happy. She had got to skip around all day in a bridesmaid’s dress; shy as an antelope, a bouquet of lavender in her tiny hand. She was overjoyed for them both. Delph was, after all, her biological father. I shivered for her, for what she might have to endure, for how she would feel penitent for every abuse perpetrated against her over the coming years. Because, as we all know, children blame themselves.
‘Okay, then,’ she said after a slight girlish pause, and ran towards the newly respectable couple.
Sarah climbed into the big car. She was so small she had to use her hands to hoist herself up. Once inside, the weighty black door heaved shut. Then they rattled off into the sunset.
Fast-forward four months. The fifth week of the sixth form. October. Already the new house cowered to the sound of harsh words. I remember feeling queasy when I heard Delph storming out one night shouting, ‘Why did I bloody marry you?’ Horrible to hear that sort of thing so soon after the happy day. Ho hum. And not because of the noble pathos evoked by a similar expression of the Moor’s, but because of Delph’s utter ignorance of how much this marriage—this folly—had cost everyone. The GDP of tolerance and faith that it had exacted from the family he had walked into and destroyed. But by then I didn’t give much of a fuck. Because the day after this outburst I had, in my father’s absence, begun spending nights at his bungalow. There Rhianna and I would smoke half an eighth of resin and play knackered vinyl till the small hours. The idea had been floated one night that I wouldn’t return to school. What was the point? Sinead and Delph didn’t care whether I furthered my education. They were relieved to have got shot of me. There was the strong sense that nobody was at the rudder. Except myself. Byron Easy and his small pile of unpublished and unpublishable poems. So, the next morning, I didn’t go in. And that weekend Des changed all the locks on his house in order to deny me admittance to this last sanctuary. The following Saturday, that skeletal October day of silver skies and Sisley trees, found me running across the lumpy fields to the disused railway tunnel where I sat down and I …