Night of the Animals(41)
“Yam killin’ Drystan!” Cuthbert once screamed when he was being attacked. “Yam killin’ ’im!”
The mention of that name, in such contexts, always horrified his parents.
“Don’t say that,” cried Mary. “You bloody well stop that!”
“The boy’s ’af-baked,” Henry gasped, standing back from the boy. “He’s focking mad as a box of rabbits.”
Finally, during a similar life-or-death beating, the neighbors called the police, and Cuthbert—mildly concussed—was temporarily put under a protection order by Sandwell council, and he lived with a foster family near Birmingham City University. He made everyone call him “Dryst,” and no one questioned him about it. He was a tall boy for age fifteen, and many overestimated his age and maturity. After a week, he was sent home. The overwhelmed social worker who’d been assigned his case had failed to transfer many of the details of the abuse discovered by the police to Cuthbert’s case file. There were comments among the council authorities about how “a grown boy” had got “a bit of aggro” from his dad. In the context of Sandwell, it just wasn’t a big deal. Henry, for several weeks, seemed contrite, too. He repeatedly said he was sorry (“Something’s wrong with me ’yud, son. Yer dad’s so sorry, son.”). He even bought Cuthbert a child’s phonograph that came in a sort of red suitcase. There was a David Bowie record, too, and Cuthbert would play a song called “Joe the Lion” over and over and over and over.
In a month, Henry’s attitude (if not his fists and belt) was back to its old deportment. He felt hazily penitent, but the sense of public humiliation had been searing. He wouldn’t risk hitting the boy again, but the emotional abuse became as caustic as ever.
“Yow’m ’aff the boy your dead brother ever was,” he’d begun telling Cuthbert.
“Well, I’m not me—not anymore,” Cuthbert would respond. “I’m something no one knows.”
CUTHBERT’S PLACEMENT AT UCL never impressed Henry Handley, who still felt Cuthbert should get a trade even as he matriculated, collected his grants, and moved into Ramsay Hall.
“Yow’ll give it up like everything else,” his father kept telling his son. And the teenager did flounder badly at UCL, from the start. Mentally, he was completely off the rails. By 1978 or so, with London nearly at the peak of punk, Cuthbert spent most of his time thoroughly convinced he actually was his dead brother. He grew his dark brown hair unfashionably long and straight, parted on one side, and sometimes wore an absurd Native American wampum of yellow, white, and black shells as a hairband.
He skipped lectures, dropped blotter after blotter of LSD, guzzled grant money away at the pub, and found himself exquisitely alienated from every single soul he encountered.
AT UCL, his revisions eventually came to seem pointless, and he began to study noncourse books about esoteric religion and mysticism. He read Magick—Book 4 and Sellotaped poems by Rumi and Ted Hughes to his wall beside the bed. He came to believe that Hughes was covertly trying, through his poetry, to communicate with him. Cuthbert once wrote on the wall, right beside where his head writhed nightly on its pillow, “He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.”*
He also got into kooky altercations with other UCL students.
“You keep your f*cking red thoughts off me,” he once screamed at an innocent sociology student as they reached for the same bowl of warm custard in the dining hall queue.
“I don’t know you,” the student answered.
“Arr,” he said. “And I see everything you think.”
Cuthbert/Drystan spent far more time reading about Sufism and obscure Middle Eastern hermeneutics than about organic chemistry. At one point, he started (then quickly abandoned) a summer Beginning Modern Standard Arabic class. He may never have been invited to join the Golden Dawn, but he became an incomprehensible moonchild to himself and to others.
It should have all caught someone’s attention. Something was desperately wrong, something that went beyond the usual new-to-uni breakdown or naff religious conversion. In one letter he penned (imagining himself to be Drystan and “writing” to his brother Cuthbert in Brum) a bizarre account of gazing out a Floor Nineteen window of the Senate House Library. To the west, he wrote, shone the gold dome of London Central Mosque, partly green from the reflections of huge plane trees from Regent’s Park. He described the glow at that moment as “a hostile eye of sunlight,” pouring out from a hole in England. He continued,
I started rocking back and forth, Cuddy, gently bumping my head upon the cold window, repeating the phrase “imagine me imagine you,” quite audibly, I suppose, in my crude effort at a Sufic dhikr—that’s a sort of God-consciousness, right?—I was bumping my head, bumpiebumpiebumpie imaginemeimagineyou, bump rock bump rock bump bump bump imaginemeimagineyou—until a library aide marched over and says to me, “Do you mind, sir?” This really happened, Cuddy, all down to the Eye of God!
Cuthbert carefully avoided his young, ambitious tutor, Mr. Daniels, who seemed only intellectually, and never emotionally, at ease with the boy’s deep Brum accent and up-front manner, as well as suspicious of his exuberance for animals and religious studies. When it came to Cuthbert’s signs of serious disturbance, poor Mr. Daniels, who truly stood the most chance of seeing that something was wrong, was a perfect idiot—the sort of person who liked to champion the working class as long as they did not smell up his little corner of academia a few meters from the corpse of Jeremy Bentham. Seeing in Cuthbert only a bit of sudatory kookiness, Mr. Daniels recommended the boy immerse himself in the salubrious rigors of schoolwork and contemplate his smallness in the scheme of things.