Night of the Animals(48)

A few months before she died, Winefride had started setting food out for a brindled mog named Sally who lived in their neighborhood. She was always feeding local cats, but she especially loved this mog, and eventually, Sally grew enormous. Soon, Winefride found a clowder of kittens with Sally in the back garden, behind a plastic bucket. Winefride seemed especially captivated by the lot, but she warned Cuthbert to stay away from them and let Sally tend to them and, above all, not allow her son-in-law to find out about them.

When Henry Handley finally did find out about the kittens, they and Sally disappeared.

Almost anything could set Henry off, but petty acts of rebellion or inattention—slamming a door too hard, loudly slurping at tea, kicking a football into the kitchen—seemed especially to goad him.

A few weeks later, this time on Sunday, after the pub’s afternoon closing, Cuthbert’s gran was plastering the leg of a new tuxedo moggy kitten she’d found limping in the garden. She expertly wrapped its paw onto an ice-lolly stick that still smelled of black currant.

Cuthbert watched closely for a while, but he grew bored, and just as his father stumbled into the kitchen, drunk, Cuthbert flicked another lolly stick across the kitchen table.

“What the fock is that then? ’Oos brought this dirty thing into the kitchen, and why did yow throw that stick?”

“It’s just a kitten, Daddy.”

“We’re almost done here,” said his gran sternly. “This kit will be gone soon enough.”

“Why did yow throw that focking stick?”

“You’re drunk as a mop,” said Gran. “Let us be. Please, Hank.”

“I day mean to, Daddy.”

“Yow useless focking yam-yam*!” he screamed. He started kicking at his son, then unhitched his belt and began whipping him. “Yow’re focking off your focking chump!”

His grandmother set the kitten aside and tried, pathetically, to soothe her son-in-law, as a diversion, placing her fat hands on his shoulders, but Henry simply stepped around her and continued.

It was, of course, perfectly legal for a father to whip his children. Before the Children Act of 1989, abusers more easily slipped detection. Winefride had rung the police seven times, and each time was told no crime had occurred, but if someone was injured she should call back.

“I’m calling the police again,” she said. She did, once again, but this time the authorities sent a very young social worker who wore a brown suit and a white shirt with a stained collar. That Monday afternoon, he talked to Henry for about twenty minutes. Henry, badly hungover, made a show of apologizing to everyone. But nothing seemed likely to change soon, partly because Cuthbert was too terrified to tell the truth. And he even defended Henry.

“My dad’s alroight,” he said to the man from the council. “And I ain’t the best.”

The next night, on a Tuesday, Winefride Wenlock died in her sleep of a massive ruptured aneurysm.

THE MOST EVIL beatings came after his gran died, in the years before Cuthbert left home for uni. He endured criminal abuse. (The timing of everything had become unclear as Cuthbert aged, and at age ninety with a brain half-pickled, what he remembered most was his own shame and self-hatred—and his undying worship of his dead brother.)

Cuthbert became just as spiteful as all the Black Country boys he knew. His worst injuries, of course, weren’t visible; but his mind was gradually being thrashed into the early stages of a dark syndrome that had no name.

He grew to loathe himself and the world and everything in it, and an almost continual guilt assaulted his heart. Eventually, the guilt turned outward. In agony, he would throw stones at old men and smack small children who supported the Baggies or Wolves.* (Cuthbert supported Aston Villa.) He once threw a baby gerbil into a goldfish bowl and watched it drown. He helped a small gang of boys kill a stray spaniel under a canal bridge he came to call Otter Bridge. He and the boys buried the animal under a blanket of gorse yanked from the canalside.

When he was twelve, he put his hand into one of these boys’ pants, and he invited him to put his mouth on his thing, but the boy only punched him in the stomach and began laughing at him. “I don’t want your ugly cock,” he said, squealing. Once, Cuthbert tore an electric blanket apart in his bedroom and spread the curly, cotton-stuck wires over his bedroom floor, trying to work out a system to electrocute himself. But he got scared. It seemed too industrial a way to top yourself. It would be like getting snagged on his father’s metal lathe and spun to death. Later, there was a phase of vexed strolling near an old iron bridge along the Birmingham Canal near Rotten Park, a sad walk up from his parents’ neighborhood, and toward the heart of the Black Country. He would spit on the bridge’s walkway and attempt to summon the icy will to kick one leg, then another, over the rails. The wrought handrails groaned and screeched and cars shoomed past. In the distance, grassy fields and lawns were still broken here and there with the black patches of scoria, which used to cover the region. Emptied of its natural resources, the land was still recovering. He could look down into the dark water and dream of death. However, even in this most deserving place, he could not kill himself.

Like so many abused children, his fundamental frame of mind was one of ghastly shame and self-contempt. At one point, he gave the canal beneath this bridge of his failed suicides a new name, the Otter River. Trying to work up the nerve to kill himself became compulsive; he would also try, when he remembered, to “beg forgiveness” from a Christ of Otters. He forced himself to picture this robed messiah of all murdered animals, a gimlet-eyed and long-whiskered Jesus with a long pearly claw upon each soft finger. He made himself say, “My sin has offended you.” Once, praying the words Christ forgive me, over and over without stop, he had walked far up the canal walks, away from West Brom, out toward Dudley, then beyond, eventually reaching branches of the disused canal system he had never seen. Once beyond the brownfields and blighted elm trees and ruined foundries near West Brom, the dark motor-oil water of the canal became more and more green, bright as grass and greener still. As he had walked, Cuthbert kept thinking that if he prayed hard enough and long enough, he would see another otter, as he had seen at the Wyre Forest after he and Drystan went into Dowles Brook. This otter would uncurl itself from the mossy water, turn a few spirals, and, with St. Cuthbert’s blessing, save him from drowning, this time from despair.