Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, page 20
‘I am going out to The Bar,’ Boy said. ‘I think you’d better stay in and read these.’
When Boy got back, at three in the morning, O was still sitting in the middle of the living-room floor, surrounded by the letters. He had spread them into a circle right round him, and was still trying to sort them into some kind of order or sequence, but looked as if he had given up, had been overwhelmed by the sheer number of them. He started talking as soon as Boy walked in the door: ‘This “Father” as you call him… ’
But Boy had obviously been thinking too, Boy too was right ready with something he had to say, and he cut O off with: ‘That’s my secret and don’t you ever ask me. I never asked you to explain all the things you said during the night.’
Boy went into the kitchen to put on the kettle, then came and stood in the doorway while it was boiling, and said to O: I love him in my own kind of way.’
‘You can’t love a man who talks like that.’
‘You’ve never met him.’
‘You can’t love a man who writes letters like he writes letters.’
Boy was silent; O tried again: ‘What does he think about me? He never mentions me. Haven’t you told him?’
‘I never told him anything. I never write back, you know. He makes it all up, all of it. All of it.’
Boy went to make the tea.
And while he was in the kitchen he must have changed his mind about something, because he came into the living room with the pot of tea and two mugs and sat down with O in the midst of the papers, and started to explain as best he could: ‘I think you ought to know about him if we’re going to live together. For a start, I just call him Father from habit. I mean we all call Madame “Mother”, don’t we… ’
O interrupted him and said, ‘What did he do to you?’
And Boy paused, and then said, very quietly, not looking at O: ‘I don’t know exactly. I’ve been trying to forget for so long … and now I can’t remember.’
By way of continuing his explanation or account, Boy picked out two particular letters from the pile and read them out loud to O. They were not picked out at random; he spent nearly ten minutes looking for the right ones. It seemed that he almost knew them off by heart. O wondered if this was what Boy had been doing in the long, angry silences that always came just after he had received the letters; memorising them. He read them in a voice which could have been either close to tears or choked with rage; O couldn’t tell.
I feel like a Father to you, you know. You know that I would have died for you. You know I would have laid down my life for you if anybody had ever asked me to.
And then (this was a paragraph from a long letter, ten pages at least, on blue paper; this seemed harder to read than the first, because Boy kept on stopping and re-starting when he read it):
We went through a lot of things together at that time, as a lot of men did, and I still cannot forget those times, and the promise that I made him to look after you as if my own is one that I have not forgotten either and is one that I intend to keep.
From the way that Boy read these two extracts it seemed that they were very important to him, almost as if they were the two vital clues to an interpretation or reading of the whole pile and as if he now expected O to understand everything, to have worked out the whole story. But O said: ‘I still don’t understand.’
And Boy said: ‘Don’t interrupt me, and I’ll tell you everything I know.’
Then he paused and said, quietly again: ‘I have never told anyone else about this.’
And when he said that, O wanted to take him in his arms, or at least hold his hand, for he thought of all the other men, young men often, who had said that to him, I never told anyone about this before, or, I never said this to a man before, or, I have something I want to tell you.
Then Boy began his explanation; he illustrated it with further readings from the letters, and it took him the rest of the night, until dawn, in fact. But as he explained the story of the letters and the man who sent them he sounded like someone who was explaining a dream, trying to explain it while still half asleep. The more he explained, the more his explanation seemed unconvincing. You wake from a dream that overwhelms you with its power, but then you say, I dreamt about a horse, that must mean 1 was thinking about your body; and I dreamt about a river, because I’m getting older; and I dreamt about riding a white horse through a river, and that means that I’ll love you for ever, and as you hear yourself making this explanation you know that it sounds ridiculous.
Of course O knew that the idea behind the story was not impossible; and he knew that it was not that unlikely that a man like this should know nothing of Boy’s life but still fill his letters with references to well-built young men, young men working in the garden, neighbour’s children growing up to be fine young men. And he had heard from Mother several variations on this story of being some man’s ‘Best friend’ during the war, and then not knowing how to live once the war was over. He’d heard stories about couples she’d given her bed to for the night because one of them was leaving in the morning and they had nowhere else to go; stories about the ones who got through the whole thing safely and kept in touch, the ones whose mates never said anything, but then when the letter came and he went white and almost wept in front of all of them they took him to his bunk and sat with him and didn’t ask too many questions and didn’t laugh, not even when he called out a man’s name in the night and they all heard. But this story he was hearing now O did not believe. The meeting on the emergency stairs of a tube station on a Saturday afternoon; the desperate pledge made in darkness at the height of an air-raid; it was all too like a film. The explanation that this ‘Father’ was no parent at all, but had assumed that name in honour of a pledge made to a stranger. And this story of a lonely childhood, a boy brought up by an incompetent and often absent man, or rather not brought up by him but placed in care. And then the weekly letters, every week for years, and every single letter claiming that he felt like a Father to him. It was unconvincing; something was missing. O had heard many different stories about fathers; this was not the strangest. But it did not make any sense. As he listened to Boy, O rewrote the story for himself, deciding that the real parent and this so-called ‘Father’ had been lovers, and that the whole story had been invented to excuse the dumping of an unwanted child, the two men abandoning the child of a mistaken marriage so that they could pursue their own affair more freely.
Certainly the wartime setting of the story was false, O knew that, since Boy not only said he was, but clearly was, nineteen, and so could not have been a helpless infant in 1945.
Or was the story something Boy had made up? Was the fear in his voice fear of a real father? Were the letters an extraordinary, obsessive act of forgery?
This last explanation began to seriously frighten O as he thought of it; then he remembered that this could not possibly be the case, since the letters were not in Boy’s handwriting or anything like it. This ‘Father’, whoever he was, was a real person; and whatever the actual history of their relationship, the man clearly was in every respect a father figure to Boy, and had been for a long time and since an early age; and that is what mattered to O. He knew that the clumsiness with which you explain your dreams doesn’t make them go away or mean that you never had them.
It was dawn now, and Boy was still talking, still explaining.
‘First he signed himself “Father”,’ he said, ‘and now he signs himself Father. And he isn’t. And he doesn’t live in a small town with neighbours and roses, and he doesn’t live on his own. He’s old, he’s badly ill and he’s in a home. And it isn’t in the country, it’s here in the city, it’s right here, it’s only an hour away on the bus, an hour away, and he has no house, and he has no garden, and he never has. And all this talk of things being wrecked in the storm and the big trees being down is just talk. Talk. I never answer the letters, I never have, but I had to give them my address so that they can notify me in an emergency. They said, One day he might need you?
In the end, when there was indeed an emergency, and Father did indeed need a son (which does happen eventually, although you always do think it’s boys who need fathers and not the other way round), it finally came out that this man definitely wasn’t the real Father, and so in the end we knew nothing about where Boy came from. But that wasn’t unusual. It’s like all the men in The Bar; you see them all the time and you think you know everything about them, but you know nothing about all that part of their lives; you see them go home for Christmas and that’s all you see, or you hear about Hugh Hapsley, that awful Hugh, who had to sell the pearls and go and live in the country, returning seven years later after his mother’s death, older and quieter and chastened. You remember Gary’s story about sleeping in his childhood bedroom and lying sleepless all night and then not knowing what to say at breakfast. Sometimes I think we’re all parentless, and that The Bar is just one big orphans’ home anyway, and that’s why we use all those words all the time to each other, Mother, Daddy, Baby, Sister.
And what about all those father and son fantasies that no one ever admits to but that everybody has, though some people do get as far as dressing up and calling him ‘Daddy’ for the night, or for the darkest part of the night anyway.
But I know of course that it’s not always like that. I am letting my own bitterness get to this part of the story, I know. There was once a couple who regularly brought their mother into The Bar in the early evening – they both called her Mother, although of course she was really only a Mother-in-law to Terry. Mother, our Mother, would always come over and greet her very formally, which she liked, and then she would sit at her regular table slowly drinking her single half pint of what she used to call milk stout, always making the same decision about what to have every time they brought her. One by one almost all the regulars in The Bar would come up and ask her how she was and say it was nice to see her; and she never remembered anyone’s name, but was so happy that her sons (or rather I should say her son and her son-in-law) had so many friends. And she would smile at everyone. She’d talk about the television (which of course we were good at talking about) and how she was keeping; and at seven, her half pint sipped away, they would take her home. And then often they’d be back at midnight, rather differently dressed I must say. When the affair was over, she used to come in with just Terry. I wanted to tell you this because the point was that everyone was very happy to have her there, there was no mystery or oddity to it, but at the same time I was always a bit shocked by her, a bit shocked by seeing her there. I found it extraordinary, even though I was watching it happen, and always used to go up and say good evening to her along with everyone else. What I mean is that for me I could never imagine this happening though I often wanted it to somehow.
I have tried to imagine how I could have made the invitation.
I have watched Terry and Bobby and Bobby’s mother together and I have thought, well, times are changing, but then when I think of my own situation I cannot think that times have changed at all or if they have then it’s too late for me. Not for you maybe, but for me. And then also I think of everything that Boy went through, and people said he should just have refused to get involved, that he owed the man nothing, but I always said I understood. I understood that you can’t choose whether you owe them anything.
Listen to me, excuse me, I know, I do try not to be bitter, and so does everyone I know. You spend a long time feeling that you are gradually leaving, leaving home, gradually distancing yourself, getting to a distance. A distance from which you can see the view properly. A point from which you can now write a letter home, make a call home, send them a photograph of the way you look now, tell them about just as much of your life as you want them to know about (I think this is why Boy kept all of those letters; he was trying to measure the distance, to see how far he’d come, laying them out on the bedroom floor as if they were signposts or as if they somehow made up a map. Every deliberately unanswered letter a crumb laid on the forest floor, like in the story, a way of finding your path back home should you ever need to; but also each one a milestone, another step taken on the journey, something that you put behind you). And then there comes a time, years later, when you realise that you do finally live another kind of life and that you are, finally, living it in quite another city, a very different place from the one that you were born in. That you have, finally, left home.
But still, even though it’s taken you so long, you still feel like you ran away at night taking only what you needed, only what you could carry in the one small bag. And now you know that that one small bag is all you have with you, and now here you are in the cold morning at a railway station, a bus station maybe, and you realise that all your skills and your memories and your phone numbers are all in that one bag, and of course there is the one address, and that one photo of you, with them, always there at the bottom of the bag; they are all that you have in a way, your bag and your jacket that you wear everywhere and your shoes that you wear everywhere. And sometimes then you want to cry, cry, cry, you wish they’d have you back, you wish there was somewhere to go back to or some home to go back to, a way back or more exactly a way that you need never have left… and at other times, well, you pick up that bag, you pick up that bag smiling to yourself and you get on that train.
I don’t know exactly when in the period of their setting up home this happened, but sometime between their becoming a couple and their becoming a family there was another attack, another face cut open.
I know there’s not always blood, it’s just that each time I hear this, that’s what I see, a knife coming down. Sometimes it’s not that at all, but a metal bar across the legs. Or a single word thrown out of a car window, tossed at you like a bottle, so like a bottle that you even involuntarily duck to avoid it, or look down to see the broken glass at your feet. Listen to me, what am I saying.
Living together
Although this is a short chapter, this was in fact the longest chapter in the period of their lives that I’m telling you about. The reason for its brevity is that this part of their story, which I call The Domestic Life, had no public climaxes, no emblematic scenes, nothing much really for us to talk about.
Of course we still saw them, in The Bar, but they were now one couple amongst many. And we did see O carrying the shopping, working his way through the supermarket with a list, but this was not considered an heroic or an erotic activity. It was not worthy of dramatisation or comment. Every week the list was the same. On the top of the trolley were six bottles of water, because O liked to drink this particular brand of water which came in plastic bottles, but also came, way back, from the mountains of ice shown on the labels. This was water that had never been through a city, that had been filtered only through ice and glacial gravel, water that (O explained one night) had come straight to them, almost, from the pure and driven snow.
And, if we were passing, we saw O at work. He was happy to go out and work in the video shop, because it gave him time to think. When he was in the same room or the same building as Boy (or even if he was ten tube stops away, on his way to him) he found it hard to think about anything else. This had not yet worn off.
I expect you want to know how they managed. Shall I describe the arrangements of their home life at this time? What do you want to know – what they ate, whether the sex remained the same or changed now they were living together? I often wonder about that. Passion without novelty. If it is true that sex always changes, does it change every night? And are those changes dramatic (No, let me do it…) or gradual, so slight that an observer would miss them, so slight that the actors themselves don’t notice that the script is changing from performance to performance, from night to night. Small gestures can be great pleasures, they can mean a great deal, when you get to know somebody else’s body and its reactions as well as your own.
Do you think that ever really actually happens?
Do you think this whole thing that I am describing ever really happens?
Do you want to see their bank statements? Shall I keep O working at the video shop, or shall I give him a new job now, something better paid, or shall I lie to you and say they got lucky, shall I have them find a newspaper parcel of used notes in the street? Shall I document for you just how cheaply two men can live if they really try, because then that way you will be able to believe me when I tell you that yes, they did manage to live on the one income, with Mother paying half their rent. And that they were not hurt by it and did not hurt each other, never hit each other. Not even when the cigarette packet was empty by eight o’clock in the evening.
Do you believe me? Do you?
Shall I tell you what they were wearing then?
It was the autumn by now, which is relevant, because it marks the passing of time, and also it reminds us that this year is like last year and will be like next year. You see what O and Boy had to do now was not start, but continue. They had to make their happiness routine.
Part of the routine was their nights in The Bar; they were still a feature. They held hands and stayed together all night: they would especially hold hands during Mother’s song. Once I saw them slow-dancing in the middle of an uptempo number, everyone else was sweating, but they were just holding tight and dancing slowly, ignoring the music, O had his head on Boy’s shoulder, and Boy was singing quietly into his ear, inaudible with all that noise but I could read his lips, shaping the words, All of me, why not take all of me, can’t you see …
One night when they were in, just a routine night, Mother made a point of refusing to sing for them (that’s right; it did seem to me that it was their song now, not just hers). She.put on a whole new act, which was so elaborate that she must have rehearsed it for some time. I mention it because I think it was for O and Boy’s benefit that she did it. It seemed to me she was saying, You’ve done that, all of yourself, you’ve given all of yourself, your lips, your arms, now think about the problem this way.
