Your Fault, page 7
your father’s favourite
Yet how closely yours will come to resemble the ideal family of that time: father, mother, their two children (though not a dog; not yet a little dog). The father is some years older and some inches taller than his wife, who is so pretty. Their son is a few years older and a few inches taller than his sister. The boy dresses in shorts; the girl wears a short dress. The ribbon in the girl’s hair matches the pattern in her mother’s headscarf. The boy’s hairstyle matches his father’s, cut now to collar-length, still parted on the left.
Here you are in the adverts you see on the television, and here in the schoolbooks with which you are still learning to read: Janet and John.
This is Janet.
This is John.
Janet is the favoured one.
John must not put a foot wrong.
You strive to be admired because your sister is the favoured one. Your father prefers her, that much is clear, this man who may not be your father, this girl who looks so much like him. Everyone says so. She has his eyes, his nose, his colouring, his manner, while you are dark, like your mother.
Your sister is younger and shorter than you are, and her bedtime is half an hour earlier, but if you are to be permitted a biscuit before a meal-time, then so too must she. If you are to be given a sixpence, then so too must Lorraine. If it was your turn last time, then next time it has to be hers.
In all things but bedtime, in fact, you are to be equal – and expected to share – yet still you are supposed to look after her, because you are a big boy, and still she is regarded with more affection – for being a girl, and for being less inward, more open, than you are. And not just by your father, but by other men, too – for instance Ken Coatley next door, and Tom Balconer from over the road, who catches the bus into the Works with your father, and Sidney Goldman, who also works in the Works and drives a car and comes to your house to collect Annie, his wife, now that your mother has friends.
These and other men will tease your sister, joke with her – in time they will flirt with her, as they flirt with your mother – then laugh because she responds so cheerfully, so readily and innocently. You haven’t her gift for cheerfulness, perhaps not even for innocence.
Your mother will disappear. Several afternoons each week she will take the bus into town, where she works as a cleaner in the various parts of the Civic Centre: the offices, cinema, theatre, ballroom, canteen and restaurant. Her shift lasts until five, sometimes five-thirty.
At seven and three quarters you are now in the Junior School, your sister still in the Infants, and while you wait for Mummy to come home on the bus it is Sally Clough who takes care of you, both you and Lorraine. She collects Lorraine from the school gates at three-forty, along with Andrew and Deborah, and allows you to make your own way to her house, since you are a big boy.
You let yourself in by her back door, and Sally pours you a beaker of squash and gives you a biscuit and asks you no questions about your day, since she is a housewife, and busy, and isn’t your mother. You go to sit in her living room with your sister and Andrew and Deborah, who are watching the children’s programmes on BBC1: Jackanory, Animal Magic, Blue Peter, The Magic Roundabout. These are the programmes you will remember, that everyone remembers.
Time for bed, Zebedee will say, and twirl about on his spring and twitch his moustache.
Time for tea, your mother will add, and wait for you to wake from the spell of the television.
She and Sally Clough will be smiling, standing in the doorway to Sally’s kitchen. You will not have heard her come in.
In the evenings, too, your mother will often be gone, leaving your father in sole charge of you, if his shifts mean he must be at home, sitting smoking in his corner of the settee and drinking his cans of Long Life, the beer that is good for him. She goes to Keep Fit classes in the Community Centre next to St Christopher’s. Some nights she and her friends – she calls them the girls – will be given tickets for shows at the Civic, if no one else wants them, and often she will be asked to waitress in the ballroom, if there is a function and she is available. Occasionally, too, she will babysit for Nadia, who has no husband and no longer lives with her parents: poor Nadia, who needs your mother to help her.
The reasons are explained to you. Her other absences, those nights when there is shouting, doors slamming, Mummy striding away in her heels, never will be explained, nor even mentioned.
Your mother will be gone from the house, and you will feel it; every time you will feel it. She will disappear – periodically this is what she will do – and so too, in a sense, will your sister, though she need not leave the house to be gone from your mind. For all the hours that you spend with Lorraine, siblings in these same rooms, sharing these furnishings, this wallpaper, this view to the garden, these parents, you will for long periods forget that she is there, and your older self, looking back at yourself, will frequently find that she is gone from the scene, a spectral presence in your memories, assumed by your recollections, but mostly absent, invisible.
It is in your elaborate games of make-believe that she becomes the most real to you, when you are able to invent her, as she invents you. Just pretend you are Daddy. Just pretend I am Mummy. Some days you are a doctor and she is a nurse. Some days you are a teacher and she is your pupil, or you are a shopkeeper and she is your customer. One day she is Dolores and you are called Ken, though your sister soon tires of that: so much talking is boring. But not every game requires a boy and a girl, a man and a woman. In one of your favourites you are both called Joe, the name of your father.
Let us play The Two Joes, says Peter.
Let us play.
Come on, Peter, says Lorraine.
Let us play The Two Joes.
And possibly your father is aware of this, and feels some pride or amusement, even affection towards you. Your older self – having achieved his age at last, the age at which he died – will want to believe so. Perhaps he lies upstairs in his bed and listens as he comes round from the day-long sleep that follows his night shift; perhaps your mother eavesdrops on your game and shares what she has heard with him when he returns from his day shift.
But the Joe of your imaginations is not a mere tradesman in the Works. He is someone who performs heroics such as you see in the other programmes you watch on TV: Stingray, Thunderbirds, Batman, The Saint. Then the settee will become a fire engine racing to rescue a stricken aeroplane at an airport as modern as your town centre, or a gargantuan green transporter like Thunderbird 2 – impossibly airborne – or a submarine that descends to the depths of the ocean, where the giant mechanical fish lies in wait for you, its Aquaphibian crew speaking in gurgles.
The games involve much energetic leaping to and from the settee, and rolling about on the floor, scrambling, hiding, springing back up again, and your sister is not always the junior, smaller Joe; sometimes you will forget to remind her, and she will become the senior Joe, bossing her brother around.
You play harmoniously, mostly, and for as long as your mother is gone from the room she will be gone from your thoughts. She might be pegging out washing, making dinner, changing the bedsheets. She won’t be sleeping upstairs, or sitting in the kitchen with a can of beer and a cigarette, or reading the newspaper, as your father might do. It is possible she will have enough time to slip out to the mobile shop when it calls, or into a neighbour’s house, and if she were to do this, you would not know. If Ken Coatley were to invite her next door to discuss her repayments, you would not know.
You do not know.
The afternoon you stab your sister in the eye you do not realise that your mother has left you to play in the house on your own.
The knife is the smallest in a set of five and has been missing since your father used it to peel an apple on Saturday, which is something he does expertly, removing the peel in one continuous spiral. He halved the bare apple for you to share with Lorraine, then ate the peel himself, holding it over his head and lowering it into his mouth as you stood by and watched him. He placed the paring knife on the arm of the settee and can’t have noticed when it slipped down the side of the seat cushion. It has a brown Pukkawood handle that will not chip, crack or discolour. The blade is Sheffield steel. You notice the gleam of it when you stand on the settee.
Let’s pretend the settee is a jeep, you say. Let’s pretend we’re in the jungle and I find this dagger over here in the bushes.
On Saturday you were watching Daktari, possibly Tarzan, and no doubt you have this in mind when you instruct your sister to be a crocodile and tell her to get down on the new blue Acrilan carpet. The weave is sinuous. On every map you have ever seen the rivers are depicted in blue. Your living room floor is a river.
You dive in after her, but your sister is tougher than you expect her to be, and as hard to subdue as a crocodile. Your ears become hot with the effort of holding her down as she writhes to get out from under you. At first you have her pinned to her belly, but then she thrashes, suddenly twists onto her back, and now she is facing you. The knife is between your teeth, then in your hand, and when you stab at her – this crocodile – you are careful only to pretend, even though she is making you mad. She is not playing how you want her to play; she won’t do as you tell her to do. The point of the blade stops just short of her reptilian face. But your sister clutches your arm, no longer a crocodile, and the tussle now is for the knife, as in the films you have seen on TV of cowboys and Indians, goodies and baddies. She is a baddy, and she ought to submit to you. You will stab her to death if she does not submit to you. This is how you imagine it. You cannot know what Lorraine is imagining; nor do you anticipate the moment when she lets go of your arm and attempts to lift her head from the carpet.
There is a minuscule interval, the briefest duration, in which you notice the fineness of her hair, the filaments charged with static from the carpet, after which comes her scream. Something has happened.
The knife.
The cutting edge of the blade is not very fine, but the point is sharp and has nicked her left eyeball, just to the side of her pupil. You see a pearling of blood. Then there is another brief interval, a gap in which you notice nothing, and will remember nothing, before you find that both you and your sister are standing in the kitchen, looking for your mother, who is not there.
Rain dashes the windows. The light takes on a greenish hue. You smell scouring powder and see that Mummy has been cleaning the cooker again. The stove grids have been propped up to dry.
Your sister is screaming, one hand held over her eye, and the noise is piercing: it hurts your ears. You take her free hand and lead her through to the utility room – the shed; in your house it is known as ‘the shed’ – but Mummy is not there either. Nothing is out of place, and nothing is as it ought to be. The plastic ironing basket is empty. Your shoes are lined up in their pairs. Beneath the slope of the staircase your red and blue scooter is parked next to your sister’s toy pram and her tricycle. All of this is as it ought to be, but your sister is screaming. You have stabbed her in the eye – you may have done it on purpose; you cannot be certain – and now you are frightened.
See Lorraine, Mother.
See Lorraine cry.
In the yellow-green light of the shed you hold Lorraine’s hand and yell for your mother, who must be outside, and when at last she appears – the back door swinging inwards, her face stricken with worry – you notice Ken Coatley behind her, anxiously peering in from his side of the fence that divides your two gardens. One flap of his shirt isn’t tucked in to his trousers, and lifts in the breeze. He cringes because of the rain, and pushes his hands in his pockets.
Mummy gathers your sister into her arms, and tries to pry her hand from her eye, wincing because of the noise she is making. Let me see, sweetheart, she says, let Mummy have a look. Then she too is crying, her face twisted, aghast. Your sister’s eyeball is red, entirely coated in blood. Mummy’s skirt is unzipped, her slip showing white. You see this when she turns to Ken Coatley. She shouts for him to phone for an ambulance; she tells him to use the phone-box next to the Fine Fare.
Run, Ken, run! she shouts. Run fast!
Afterwards there is a long wait. Where are they? asks your mother. What can be keeping them?
There ought to be sirens. The rain continues to fall, slashing the window, flung by the wind. Occasionally a car comes near and drives on, its tyres hissing through the wet on the road. Your father will be waiting for the Works bus, if the message has reached him. The ambulance will be racing towards you. It has to come from the next town.
Exhausted by her screaming, your sister lies curled in Mummy’s lap on the settee and whimpers. She sucks at her thumb, which she ought not to do, and you notice a purpling bruise on her thigh where her dress has rucked up. That too must be your fault; it must have come from your game. The knife has been placed on the mantelpiece for the ambulance men to examine, if that will help them, if they should ever arrive. Mummy holds a damp flannel to your sister’s eye, and kisses the top of her head. You stand and stare at them. You think you should cover Lorraine’s bruise, before anyone sees it, but you dare not go any nearer.
Mummy, is she going to be blind? you ask, and your mother says not, of course not, then looks past you and says, Thank you, Sally.
You feel a hand on your shoulder. Sally Clough is speaking kindly to you, suggesting you might like to come along to her house, where you can play with Andrew and Deborah. There’s no need to cry, she says. Don’t you worry, everything’s going to be fine, you’ll see.
It was only an accident, you say, and hope this isn’t a lie.
Yes, I know, she replies.
I didn’t mean it.
No, of course you didn’t, she says.
Tearful, docile, you let yourself be led away. Ken Coatley steps aside to let you pass, concealing a cigarette behind his back. His shirt is tucked into his trousers. Sally Clough does not look at him, and he does not speak.
You will not see him again in your house. You cannot yet know this.
The following day it is Sidney Goldman – ‘Uncle Sidney’ – who brings your mother home from the hospital. He works a different shift to your father, clocking on as your father clocks off.
Your mother is now tearful, standing with Sally on the threshold to Sally’s living room, while Uncle Sidney loiters in the kitchen behind them, jangling his car keys and looking around at the cupboards, which are identical to yours, though painted in blue. His trousers are grey Terylene, permanently pressed. His tee-shirt is Bri-Nylon, long-sleeved, soft-collared, a darker grey than his trousers, and there are two red stripes over his chest. He has a muscular chest.
When Uncle Sidney sees you watching him he pulls a funny face –boggle-eyed, pretending surprise – that forces you to smile even though you know you don’t want to. You turn away from him. Your mother is discussing your sister with Sally, their voices hushed and serious, and anxiously you ask, Is she going to be blind now? Mummy, is Lorraine going to be blind? This seems to be what they are saying, up there above your head, where the adults converse. A surgeon will be operating to put a stitch or two in her eye, and the eye must be popped out of its socket for the operation to take place; this is the detail that most concerns you. Mummy, does that mean she’s going to be blind? Mummy?
But she does not reply. It is Sally Clough who dips into your world, speaks to you directly. No, we don’t think so, she says, and that is all you need know, for now; you take away this bit of news, you allow them to continue their conversation.
Andrew is colouring in. You sit and watch him, then reach for a crayon. The colour is ‘magenta’ and the stick is broken inside its paper sleeve. Crayola. You put it back down again. Moments later you are sick, throwing up on Andrew’s colouring book, his mother’s carpet, his lap.
You wake in your mother’s bed and gaze at the ceiling, the blue-grey texture of darkness. Night-time is thicker than daytime. The texture is composed of millions of atoms, and they are tumbling towards you, falling out of the darkness. Atoms are the smallest things that exist, and they cannot hurt you, but still you cringe, sink into the pillows and close your eyes. You turn your head to one side and hear a bus moving off in the distance. You hear the raucous babble on board, the passengers yelling and laughing, a bell repeatedly ringing. But these sounds are too loud; they must be inside your head.
You open one eye and stare at the curtains. The clack of heels on the pavement will be your mother approaching. You lie still and listen, you strain to be certain. The sound of her stilettos grows larger, swells into the bedroom, and you realise you must be mistaken: the shape of the sounds is all wrong. As they continue on past your house, gradually recede into the distance, you ask yourself anxiously what becomes of these footsteps once they’ve been heard; where do they go to? Is this something you know?
Every sound falls away into silence, and is replaced by the next sound. The moments slip away, the footsteps, the sounds. Somewhere in the future, in another part of the estate, the sound of those heels will be approaching. Somewhere in the past, the sounds will have gone.
You are becoming the past, and the sounds are now like a whisper, quieter than a whisper. It is inside your head. You sit up in the bed before you are sick. You clamp your hands to your ears.
The light comes on, Mummy hurries into the bedroom. What is it? she says; why are you screaming?
Later, possibly earlier, you are woken by voices. It is morning. There is a blue plastic bucket at the side of the bed. The bucket smells of the cupboard under the sink.
You pad out to the landing and find a stranger, a black man, in a heavy grey overcoat. He is talking to your father. There has never been a black man in your house before, and you wonder if this is something your father is also surprised by, if in fact he is angry and asking him to leave.
