Sweet Sorrow(21)

We waited for a moment, tangled on the floor as if the small room were a lift that had plunged to the basement. I couldn’t quite tell which limb was mine, which my mother’s, but somewhere in the mess she found my hand, squeezed the fingertips and tried to smile. We stumbled to our feet. Rolls of fluff like fat caterpillars were clinging to her pencil skirt and she began swatting at them with the back of her hand. ‘Christ, look at me. How’s my –?’ She indicated her eyes.

‘Panda,’ I said and she grabbed a whole toilet roll from the catering pack and blotted at one eye, then the other.

‘I’ll get money to you, and you can phone anytime, and I’ll call in once a week or so, check that you’re surviving. Not just surviving, I mean check that you’re happy, you’re eating.’ She tossed the roll like a netball onto the top of the metal shelving. ‘I really don’t think it’ll be that different. It might even be better for you. Boys together! You can do your schoolwork, revise in peace. Or I’ll help you! The timing’s horrible, I know, but at least you won’t be living in a battlefield.’

‘I’ll be living in a mental hospi—’

‘Stop that!’ she snapped. ‘Stop it now!’ and, turning quickly from me, she reached high for a cylinder of towelling and, brisk now, as if I’d failed the interview, she tucked the drum under her arm.

‘You’re old enough for all this now, Charlie.’ She held the door open. ‘And if you’re not – well. Time to grow up.’





Corners


In the days immediately after their departure I had a vision, clear and inevitable, of our domestic future: the house as cave, animal bones scattered on the floor like the opening of 2001, my father and me communicating in grunts and howls. It would require effort on my part if we were to avoid this descent into total degradation, and an unexpected desire for order kicked in. Quickly, I learnt what an airing cupboard did, how a thermostat worked, how to restart the pilot light on a boiler. The first batch of pale pink school shirts taught me the importance of separating the colours from the whites, the growing pile of unopened post, still largely in my mother’s name, taught me how to forge her signature.

I wish I could say that I learnt how to cook. Rather, I learnt how to order food. A varied and balanced diet meant ensuring the strict rotation of Indian, Chinese and Italian, meaning pizza, which we ordered on a three-day cycle, the fourth day given over to ‘leftover day’, a sort of reheated global buffet. I knew the phone numbers by heart, but even the pleasures of cheap, bad food were soon beyond our means and so the great world cuisines were supplemented with something called Dad’s Pasta Bol, a great saucepan of undercooked spaghetti, stuck together in sections like the mighty cables on a suspension bridge, stirred in the saucepan with an Oxo cube and half a tube of tomato puree or sometimes, very late at night, a teaspoon of curry paste, which transformed it into Dad’s Pasta Madras. There were, I’m sure, Elizabethan sailors who ate healthier, more balanced diets and though we were never hungry – we forced food into our mouths even before our plates hit our laps, as if it were a competition – we soon developed the coated tongue and greasy, sallow complexions of those who pass off pesto as a vegetable. We were slipping into a life that was unhealthy in every respect, but I won’t deny there was a squalid pleasure in it too. ‘Use a plate,’ Dad would say if he found me eating cold curry from the foil container, ‘we’re not cavemen.’ Not yet, but we weren’t far off.

Occasionally we would rebel against this life, walk the extra mile to the superstore and throw lentils, apples, onions, celery, in amongst the white sliced loaf and economy meat. We’d stride home, full of plans for hearty soups, stews with barley, food we’d seen made on TV: tagines, paellas, risottos. Dad would put on some mad helter-skelter blast by Gene Krupa or Buddy Rich. ‘Let’s get this place ship-shape,’ he’d say, just as he used to when I was small and Mum was due home, and there’d be the same sense of collaboration and defiance as we wiped out the fruit bowl and loaded it up with pears, peaches, kiwis and pineapples. The last few cigarettes would go in the bin – I’d fish them out later – and the ashtrays were rinsed and stashed on the top shelf.

‘We do all right, don’t we?’ Dad would say. ‘Boys together. We manage,’ and he’d put another record on. Music was as clear and reliable an indication of Dad’s mood as the temperature on a thermometer. I’d be obliged to listen – no, really listen, sitting up straight, no newspaper, no distraction – to A Love Supreme or The Amazing Bud Powell, both sides, because ‘you wouldn’t watch half a great film.’ He’d stand at the stereo, bopping his head, raising a finger – ‘listen to this, here it comes!’ – and watching my face to see if I’d heard it too. And sometimes, very occasionally, as if feeling the tug of a tidal current, I’d almost, almost be carried along. Mostly, though, it was an exercise in indulgence, straining to love something that he loved too. ‘It’s really good!’ I’d say, but I couldn’t tell good from bad, could only hear the generic cymbal-wash that I thought of, secretly, as Pink Panther music.

But Dad’s optimism was a precarious state and I soon learnt that such highs were temporary and paid for with an equivalent low. Gloom rolled back in like a fog, the music replaced by great slabs of TV, watched without engagement or enjoyment. The pears would remain as hard as stones while the peaches turned to pulp. Kiwis would fizz and burst, the pineapples shrivel, an unnameable sticky black liquid pooling in the bottom of the bowl. My father would empty it into the bin, ashamed once more of another failed initiative to restore some decency to how we lived, how we moved through the world. Then he’d go out for cigarettes.