Authors: Caryl Phillips
After she gave me the silent treatment at the hospital, I didn’t hear from Mam for a while, and Mr. Gilpin must have sensed that things hadn’t gone that well, for he didn’t ask me anything, or suggest a return trip to see her. The truth is, Mam’s silence made me feel as though I’d done something wrong, as though it was me who had to explain myself, and the only way I could forget this whole hurtful nightmare was by concentrating on my schoolwork. At night I used to tell myself that maybe one day she’d be better and we could work everything out, but sometimes the feelings got so upsetting that I seriously thought about changing my name. And then Mam started with the phone calls and letters and postcards, and it must have been Mrs. Gilpin who said something to social services, for a posh woman in a fancy twinset came to see me and told me that Mam was disrupting the Gilpins’ household. I didn’t say anything, but the social worker woman gave me a fake smile and said that she’d be bringing Mam on Christmas Day, but Mam never showed up, and I spent most of the day by myself feeling dismal in my bedroom. Things got worse when Mam turned up outside of school, and the teachers wouldn’t let me out until she’d gone, and I just wanted the whole thing to end. Why couldn’t she just go somewhere and get better instead of all this? Why was she embarrassing me?
“Life on Mars?”—David Bowie
After a while I decided that Helen, the older one, wasn’t so bad. She was thirteen, and her little sister, Louise, was nearly eleven, but of late I’d noticed that Helen had lost a lot of weight and started to fill out upstairs. She’d also started to buy the
New Musical Express
, and every week she’d Sellotape the double-page posters up on her bedroom wall. It was mainly David Cassidy, and the Osmonds, and even the Bay City Rollers, but she also liked some okay music. After school she’d sometimes ask if she could borrow my records, and I told her that was alright as long as she didn’t scratch them. She’d started to write the names of her favourite singers on the covers of her exercise books in all sorts of psychedelic patterns, and it was Helen who brought up the idea that we go to the Rollarena, where David Bowie was doing his final tour as Ziggy Stardust. If you agree to come with me, then Dad will let me go; otherwise you know he’s just going to say that it’s crackers to waste your spending money on a bloke dressed up in aluminum foil, with a bog brush hairdo, and who looks like he’s good to his mam. Do you remember? That’s what Dad said when he saw him on
Top of the Pops.
He wanted to know if this David Bowie fellar was doing it for a dare. Although I was two years older than her, Helen talked to me like we were the same age. We’ll have to queue for tickets, I said. She shrugged her shoulders as though this was obvious, and so I agreed. Okay then, let’s go.
The concert was on a Thursday night, and I came back early from school to get changed, not that I had any glam gear to get into. Since I’d started studying really hard, I’d kind of lost all interest in clothes, which was just as well since even the hard cases and suedeheads were now starting to wear tie-dyed scoop-neck tee-shirts and glitter, and I didn’t want to be associated with them in any way. However, I knew that Helen would be going in for something flashy, and I was more than a bit curious about what she’d be wearing. She wasn’t back from school yet, so I nipped across the landing and snuck into her room. She had a smart dressing table mirror with three panels so you could adjust them and see what you looked like from the sides as well as the front. Before I knew what I was doing, I was fingering her cuddly toys, and then I started pulling open the drawers and touching her clothes. Steve Pamphlet was always boasting about going all the way with slags late at night in the shop doorways in town, but I’d never even touched a bra. Her underwear felt so soft and comfortable, and so I picked some up and smelled them and rubbed them against me a little, and then I could sense somebody standing behind me. I put the pile of panties back into the drawer and turned around and saw Mrs. Gilpin staring at me. She had on a headscarf, but I could see that her hair was in rollers, and I guessed that she must have been out in the back garden for she’d never be seen in the street with her hair in such a state. I’ll never forget that look on her face. She was glaring at me like she’d finally sized me up and found out who I really was and there was no hiding it now. I knew that we’d never recover from this moment, and I just wanted it to end, but Mrs. Gilpin seemed to glare at me forever. Then, as though nothing had ever happened, she slowly turned and walked out of the room, but she left the door wide open so I’d know that I was expected to follow. Immediately.
“Dat”—Pluto Shervington
I don’t take a good photograph, and as if to prove it, there’s a picture of me that was taken at one of those photo booths not long before I left the Gilpins’ house for university. After Mam died, it was my history teacher who kept chucking compliments in my direction, and I liked the attention, so I started to do extra lessons after school. That’s when he put me on the list for Oxford and Cambridge, but I could tell that he didn’t have much faith that I would do the work necessary to give myself a chance, although I was determined to prove him wrong. In the photograph I’m seventeen and staring into the camera, with my big, unshapely hair and my bulky black-rimmed specs, and I’m not smiling at all. I’m focused, and there’s not even a little hint of a smile. I’ve also got on the worst jumper in the world: a blue, round-necked polyester number, with two white hooped stripes. The truth is I look downcast, which is pretty much how I remember my time as a foster child in the Gilpins’ house. In my own mind, I reckoned that once Mam died the social services people must have told the Gilpins that the decent thing to do would be to see it through until I went off to university. It must have been agony for them because it was undeniable that Mrs. Gilpin hated me, and I didn’t exactly think much of her either. Right from the off, whenever she spoke to me, she’d always been a little abrupt, and then after the thing with Helen’s clothes she never stopped looking at me as though I’d somehow interfered with her precious daughter.
In the end I was there for nearly four years, during which time I continued to be interested in pop music, but I also began to watch a lot of films. Once I’d done enough work to pretty much guarantee high grades in my exams, I started to skive off school and go to the so-called independent cinema near the polytechnic, where I’d watch themed seasons of films by mainly American and French directors. I even bought a paperback book called
The Film Director as Artist
and decided that this is what I wanted to be—a film director—but only after I’d finished university. However, first of all, I had to get out of the Gilpins’ house, and the sooner the better, for the whole family more or less ignored me. Helen never asked to borrow any more records, and Louise made sure that she was never alone with me. Even Mr. Gilpin stopped trying to be friendly; he occasionally smiled in a kind of pitiful way, but his wife must have told him that I was some kind of deviant because, aside from the driving lessons that he got me as a seventeenth birthday present, he went out of his way to avoid me.
When I wasn’t watching films I went to concerts by myself. Elton John, the Faces, Supertramp, Emerson Lake & Palmer: I saw loads of gigs. Even Joan Armatrading, which felt odd. A kid at school called Patrick wanted to see her, and I suppose she was okay, but there wasn’t much in the way of a drum solo. It just wasn’t my type of music, and I had a feeling that I shouldn’t have gone with somebody as I much preferred going by myself, so the next time Patrick asked me to go with him to a gig I just made up some pathetic excuse. Patrick wanted to do law at university because his dad was a solicitor and his grandfather had been a barrister. He said he didn’t have any choice in the matter. I applied to university to do history, and was soon asked to attend two interviews. The first one was a joke. I took the bus to Durham and walked around a bit until I found the university history department, only to be told that the interview was the following week. I’d got the date wrong.
I was surprised when Mr. Gilpin said he’d drive me to the second interview, but I said I didn’t mind taking the bus or the train to Oxford. Which? he asked. I said the train, and he opened his wallet and handed me a fiver. He did so in a way that made me realize that we were to keep quiet about this. The night before the interview I was watching telly and Helen and her boyfriend came in from the pictures and told me to budge up on the settee as they plonked themselves down next to me. Lester Nisbett had on tragically unpolished brown platform shoes that were even bigger than hers, and a whisper of hair where he hoped a moustache might one day grow. He also had that “some bird’s gonna get lucky tonight” kind of cockiness about him, and judging by the fresh love bites on Helen’s neck, he had every reason to be confident. He asked me if could I tell him what the lyrics of that Pluto Shervington song meant. No, I said, I couldn’t. I hadn’t got a clue. Come on, Benny boy, of course you do. He winked at Helen and started to laugh, and suddenly it was clear that they’d both been on the lager and limes. He’s not telling the truth, you know. You know that, don’t you? Helen tried to suppress her giggles, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes. Tell me something, why are your lips so fat? And it’s like you’ve got wool on your head instead of hair. And what’s that white stuff on your skin? By your elbows. It’s all ashylike. Jesus, you look like a fucking burned sausage. Helen burst out laughing, but she still wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Bohemian Rhapsody”—Queen
I had to stay overnight at the college as they did two interviews for candidates, one in the afternoon and then another one the next morning. I was told that dinner would be served in the dining hall at seven precisely. The first interview had gone badly. In fact, I was sure that the three lecturers could see that I was out of my depth, and I decided they were basically taking the piss out of me and couldn’t wait for me to leave the room so they could collapse into heaps of laughter. The main one of them had on a cravat, and everything about him suggested swellhead, especially the way he was twirling his propelling pencil in between his fingers like it was the simplest thing in the world. Why shouldn’t one walk naked in the streets on a hot day? Any thoughts on that, young man? What kind of question was that? You shouldn’t walk naked in the streets because you’ll look like an arsehole and offend people. I didn’t say that, but whatever it was that I said in response obviously didn’t impress them. All of them did that thing where you nod and make some notes and kind of hum like you’re really thinking about what was said, but it’s transparent that you’re not. And then I got the next question. To whom does a member of Parliament owe his loyalty: his party, his constituents, or his conscience? Depends, I said. Depends on what the issue is. I waited, but their silence let me know that I was supposed to expand on my answer, which was when I started to waffle and get all confused.
There was no way I was going into the dining hall, so although it had changed from spitting rain to a downpour, I went wandering up the High Street until I found a fish-and-chips shop. The wind was brutal, and the cold was cutting right through me as all I had was a thin jacket and my old United scarf. Fish and chips once, please. With scraps. But I didn’t say the part about scraps because I knew they wouldn’t get it. By the time I got back to the room I was drenched to the skin, and so I turned on the two-bar electric fire and sat and ate the fish and chips right out of the paper and listened to the tranny I’d brought with me. The song went on for ages and sounded more like a piece of classical music than a pop song. When it was over, I screwed up the fish-and-chips paper and rammed it into the bin and then thought of our Tommy, which I did pretty much every day.
I also thought about Mam and the business of her not showing up that Christmas and then waiting outside the school for me. The posh social worker woman had come around a second time in order to explain about Mam’s behaviour and she said that in time she thought that things would probably be alright between the two of us, but she reckoned it best if Mam just gave me some space. I remember I didn’t say anything, so she went on and told me that Mam had been going through a rough patch, but she was getting better and onto the right track. And then later, the same woman came to the Gilpin’s a third time, and told me that apparently Mam was planning on leaving the library and going down to London to try and start to put her life back together, whatever that meant. I listened to the woman but there was only one thing I wanted to ask Mam and that was, What about our Tommy? But I knew Mam wouldn’t want to deal with this, and so I looked blankly at this posh woman perched on the Gilpins’ settee in her familiar fancy twinset and decided that until Mam did want to deal with this, then there really wasn’t anything to say as far as I was concerned. I’d be concentrating on my school work, and hopefully one day getting a place at university, and then clearing off out of the Gilpins’ house.
“Dancing Queen”—Abba
The summer before I went to university was the hottest on record, and Abba were at number one for nearly two months. Even now when I hear the song, I start to sweat. Every morning was a scorcher, and there was no need to check the weather or wonder when it was going to break. It wasn’t going to change. It was like Spain. Or what I imagined Spain to be like. I was still living with the Gilpins as I didn’t have anywhere else to go until university started. I had no money for a flat, and so I just tried to stay out of their way. I’d sneak in from the pictures long after everyone had gone to bed, and I’d hide out in my room until they’d all gone out in the morning. Eventually I got a job in a dingy backstreet garage, pumping petrol and checking water and oil levels. It wasn’t a summer job, so I had to tell the bloke who interviewed me that I had ambitions in the auto trade and one day I hoped to own a petrol station; otherwise he’d have never given me the time of day. He made a steeple of his hands and asked me if I had a driving licence, and I said yes, I did, for I’d passed my test first time. My would-be boss nodded approvingly and made a cat’s cradle of his fingers as he stood up from behind his desk. I looked at him, then back down at the desk, where I couldn’t credit the state of his blackened ashtray; it was a dirty metal contraption with a button on top that you plunged and two little trapdoors that flapped open and prompted the ash to drop inside. How could anybody run a business with something that filthy on his desk?