Night of the Animals(40)
Shut yowr gaubshite mouth, he silently seethed at himself. Shut it!
becoming the moonchild
AS AN ADOLESCENT, IN THE YEARS AFTER DRYSTAN’S death, Cuthbert would whisper to a ghost-brother at night as he lay in his narrow, creaky bed.
“You’re all the good that’s in our blood, Dryst—what little there is.”
Through Cuthbert’s youth, in the middle 1970s, during a period of some of the worst of the beatings, the late Drystan’s tiny empty bed had sat across from Cuthbert in the bedroom, its dark navy and brown plaid covered in stacks of automotive part boxes from their father and bags of undelivered clothes for Help the Aged. Around this same period, Cuthbert began, slowly and half-secretly, first for minutes and then for hours and days at a time, to conflate his and his dead brother’s identities. He would even call himself “Drystan” in the third person.
Drystan can’t sleep again, he might say.
Dryst just broke his shoelace.
The orange skies of Dudley are the same color as the dirt on Drystan’s hands.
Cuthbert also began to struggle to finish things as a teenager, struggle to get out of bed, struggle to live a single second more, and the idea of a ghost-Drystan somehow helped. Twice, he had given up a series of musical instruments after two or three lessons. At one point, his father had frogmarched him with a reluctantly rented viola back to a music shop and, slapping his head, forced him to admit he was a selfish, lazy child to a large Polish woman shopkeeper, who had seemed terrified by the scene.
“Mister, no,” she’d said. “Ty ?winio!”*
Henry Handley showed little tolerance for money spent on the arts and humanities, but to waste money on it openly—that killed him.
“But Drystan will help me, Daddy,” Cuthbert would tell his father. “I promise, promise, promise.”
“Leave off that gaubshite,” his father had said. “You’ll get taken away for being a nutter. Or a faker.”
Neither parent was kind or world-wise enough to steer him toward either psychological counseling, which he so needed, or a good public school, where the bright boy certainly could have won a generous bursary. So Cuthbert (often thinking of himself as Drystan) took his O-and A-levels two years earlier than usual, at the mediocre West Bromwich Grammar, and grew crazier and crazier. He achieved seven straight-A O’s and four A-grade A-levels in the sciences and maths, leading, at age fifteen, to an unconditional place reading biology at University College, London, his first choice. It had been an astounding feat. The Evening Mail published a little profile titled “West Brom Boy Boffin off to Uni.” The attention mortified Cuthbert, but another part of him, deep inside—the Drystanest part—soared.
The fragile boy seemed poised for an almost golden, if quite wounded, flight away from the Black Country, to a happier place. (As an old man, Cuthbert never remembered how clever he actually was before his addictions kicked in; his main memory of grammar school chemistry was burning his finger badly while trying to form copper oxide gas with a Bunsen burner. He and his mates had been passing around and inhaling balloons of the requisite nitrous oxide under their lab tables.)
Drystan, on the other hand, he could be allowed in Cuthbert’s blinkered mind—with its shades of dissociative disorder—to be the cleverer one, and naturally the precocious lad got into a bit of trouble at his primary and secondary schools, too, right?
In his last year of secondary school, the summer of 1977, before entering university, Cuthbert was mildly disciplined twice, by a sympathetic headmaster, Mr. Hawkes, for snogging another very lonely boy, named Ashley—Ashley had very dry, dark hands—in the school’s boiler room. They had both merely wanted to try out kissing, and neither had luck with girls. But the incident attracted special enmity from Cuthbert’s father.
Henry, one hot Saturday morning, used his usual black belt with the dye abraded off, and a favorite heavy-gauge wire coat hanger, to beat him for this. This time, Cuthbert felt he was fighting for his life. He struggled, defenseless as a skinned knee, to hide in the Handleys’ blue eggshell kitchen, with a gray-yellow light glaring through the windows and the sound of Tommy Dorsey’s “Opus No. 1” turned up loud on the phonograph to camouflage the rumpus.
“Yow’ll stop this shite, yow scallywag,” his father raged, raising the belt (which he folded into a rigid loop) again and bringing it down and kicking him, knocking him against the stove, and then against a pine kitchenette. “Yow bloody poof, yow bloody focking poof!”
Mary Handley howled at her husband to stop, but she did nothing else. With Winefride dead, there was nothing to mitigate the brutality.
“You’ll go to hell for this, Harry. You’ll go to hell,” Mary yelled, but she always stayed with him, and he often went to the dirty pub afterward, where it was hellish enough, where he would paint himself as an unappreciated mentor “’oo did wot needed done.”
Cuthbert could still recall the whistle of the coat hanger in the air, the fanging bites of the belt, the squeal after squeal of “Opus No. 1” ’s strangled trumpets.
Cuthbert completely depersonalized in such conditions. He would call for Drystan sometimes; he would unroll the ghost-child inside himself, like a shimmering emerald electric blanket. He would crawl beneath, panting for breath. His head that time took several bad knocks against the refrigerator, and he felt dizzy. He had tried to “defend” himself from the belt, but he only ended up woozy, with his calves whipped so hard that puffy welts rose up on them like secret budding fins. He’d wished he could use them to swim away from West Bromwich forever.