Sweet Sorrow(17)
Mum left Dad in the spring of 1997, though I suspect that she’d been planning her departure for some time. My father’s business – a small chain of record shops – had finally succumbed and in the miserable winter that had followed the final closure, we’d found ourselves increasingly reliant on her determination and resilience and powers of persuasion. How would we manage without her? Thinking about leaving must have felt like choosing the moment to leap from a runaway train: no sense in staying on board, no way of jumping without pain.
And so she hung on. I remember the brisk, unsentimental energy she brought to clearing out the salvageable remnants of Dad’s last shop, boxing up the remaining stock, pulling up the carpet, like the footage of families inspecting the damage after a disastrous flood. I remember, too, the smile she’d summoned up in the carefully phrased presentation, telling us that we would be moving out of the family home. Selling would release some equity, whatever that was, to pay off some debts. The new house, smaller, different but perfectly nice, would give us all a chance to start again. Catch our breath, get back on our feet: it was the language of the boxing ring, and Mum was the coach, dedicated and unshakeable as Dad slumped, bruised and beaten, on the stool in the corner.
Late that night, unable to sleep, I came down and found her in the kitchen, going through paperwork. Longing for reassurance, I forced myself to say the word.
‘So are we … bankrupt?’
I saw her shoulders stiffen. ‘Where did you hear that?’
‘You and Dad talking.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t eavesdrop.’
‘You were shouting, so …’
She’d reached out with her hand over the back of the chair and beckoned me over. ‘Well, yes, technically. Not us, certainly not you, but Dad because the business was in his name, but actually – it’s not a disaster!’ I let her reassurances wash over me. ‘Bankruptcy’s just a legal term, it’s a way of settling debts when something fails, not fails, ceases to trade. It’s a clean slate; it means we don’t have people knocking on our door. We just … liquidate everything and give everyone their share.’
‘Their share of what?’
‘The assets, whatever we’ve got left to sell.’
I thought of the ripped-up carpet, the shelves, the box of CDs labelled ‘World Music’. I did not hold out much hope for the debtors and yet I knew my father was pathologically honourable about money. He had borrowed heavily to save the business and as each shop had closed in turn, the necessity of paying back the debt had required further debt on secret credit cards, personal savings transferred to business accounts until there was nowhere left to hide. As a kid, I used to sneak unwanted vegetables off my plate and simply drop them on the floor, and my father’s strategy was scarcely more sophisticated. He was the architect of a pyramid scheme in which he was both the scammer and scammed, and when the whole thing inevitably collapsed he was left standing, stunned by unpaid bills, unpaid rent, unpaid wages. To fail to buy his round of drinks in the pub was a kind of agony to him, and so to not pay his staff … irrespective of the clean slate offered by bankruptcy, the failure had turned him into a criminal, a thief.
Still Mum hung on. ‘Really, it’s an opportunity in disguise. All things considered, it’s actually a good thing,’ which made me wonder, how might we manage if something bad were to happen?
So Thackeray Crescent was a kind of penance, and that’s how it felt. With the first heavy rain, great grey rosettes of damp appeared on our bedroom ceilings. The cost-effective storage heaters left us writhing and sweaty at three in the morning, shivering and blue-nosed at four in the afternoon. When we’d been shown the house for the first time, Dad had explained how submariners, crammed together on long tours of duty, overcame claustrophobia by taking just a few possessions, stored away immediately after use and always in the right place. But instead of living a life of efficient minimalism, we were perpetually struggling to find places to put stuff. We’d viewed the house unfurnished, and now the curved walls meant that the furniture, the washing machine and TV all intruded into the rooms as if advancing on us. Nothing was flush and nothing looked right. One hundred little irritations – cupboard doors that didn’t close, a sink too shallow to fill the kettle, a bath too small for Mum to straighten even her short legs. ‘I just want a flat wall to put a picture on! A corner, a corner I can put a chair in!’ She had always possessed the ability to laugh at adversity, huddling in a tent on windswept Exmoor or waiting for a car mechanic on the hard shoulder of a motorway, but now that gift was failing her, and she was slamming doors, kicking walls, throwing shoes: ‘Why are these here? This is not where we put shoes!’ Das Boot, Mum called it. No wonder submariners went insane. It wasn’t the fault of the house but even so, I wonder how many otherwise stable families fracture because of the faulty double-glazing, the trauma of underpinning, the little twist of rage that starts each day.
Our parents became strangers to us, abducted and reprogrammed as adversaries. From the ages of, say, twenty-one to sixty-five when they officially became old, I had always assumed that adults stayed pretty much the same, and parents in particular. Wasn’t this the definition of adulthood, an end to change? Wasn’t it their job to remain constant? Now my father, known for his amused, baffled mildness, became increasingly angry, an emotion that we’d barely witnessed before now. With too much time on his hands, he became obsessed with ‘home improvements’, struggling to replace the fogged bathroom mirror, the leaky skylights, the collapsing shower rail. He’d screw shelves into the plasterboard walls with the end of a teaspoon, fix the resulting cracks with filler mixed in a cereal bowl, applied with the butter knife, then block the sink with leftover filler and there’d be more doors slammed, more screaming through the fragile walls.