Sweet Sorrow(8)
But this only burnt through twelve hours of the week. The rest of my time was my own to – what? The luxury of the mid-week lie-in soon wore thin, leaving just the fidgety sadness of sunlight through curtains, the long, lazy, torpid day stretching ahead, then another and another, each day a bloated, bastard Bank Holiday. I knew from science fiction, rather than from Science lessons, that time behaves differently depending on your location, and from a sixteen-year-old’s lower bunk at the end of June in 1997, it moved more slowly than anywhere else in the cosmos.
The house we occupied was new. We’d moved out of the ‘big house’, the family house, shortly after Christmas and I missed it very much: semi-detached, all squares and triangles like a children’s drawing, with a bannister to slide down and a bedroom each, off-road parking and swings in the garden. My father had bought the big house in a misplaced fit of optimism, and I remembered him showing us round for the first time, rapping the walls to confirm the quality of the bricks, spreading his hands flat on the radiators to experience the glory of central heating. There was a bay window in which I could sit and watch the traffic like a young lord and, most impressively of all, a small square of stained glass over the front door; a sunrise in yellow, gold and red.
But the big house was gone. Now Dad and I lived on an eighties estate, The Library, each street named after a great author in a culturally fortifying way, Woolf Road leading into Tennyson Square, Mary Shelley Avenue crossing Coleridge Lane. We were in Thackeray Crescent, and though I’d not read Thackeray, I knew his influence would be hard to spot. The houses were modern, pale-brick, flat-roofed units with the distinctive feature of curved walls inside and out so that, seen from the planes circling the airport, the rows would look like fat yellow caterpillars. ‘Shitty Tatooine,’ Lloyd had called it. When we’d first moved in – there were four of us then – Dad claimed to love the curves, a more free-form, jazzy expression of our family values than the boxy rooms in our old semi-detached. It’ll be like living in a lighthouse! If The Library estate no longer felt like the future, if the table-size gardens were not as neat as they used to be, if the occasional shopping trolley drifted across the wide, silent avenues, this would still be a new chapter in our family’s story, with the added peace of mind that would come from living within our means. Yes, my sister and I would be sharing a room, but bunk beds were fun and it wouldn’t be forever.
Six months later, boxes still remained unpacked, jutting out against the curved walls or piled on my sister’s empty bunk. My friends rarely came to visit, preferring to hang out at Harper’s house, which resembled the palace of a Romanian dictator, a two-jukebox household with rowing machines and quad bikes and immense TVs, a samurai sword and enough air-rifles and pistols and flick-knives to repel a zombie invasion. My house had my mad dad and a lot of rare jazz on vinyl. Even I didn’t want to go there.
Or stay there. The great project of that summer would be to avoid Dad. I’d learnt to gauge his mental state by the noises he made, tracking him like a hunter. The walls were of a Japanese thinness and as long as he was silent, it was safe to burrow deeper into the fug beneath the duvet, the air in the room like the water in a neglected fish tank. If there was no movement by ten, then Dad was having one of his ‘stay-in-bed’ days and I could go downstairs. In our prosperous years, flush with bank loans, Dad had bought a home computer from an ad in a newspaper, a filing-cabinet-sized box made from, I’m sure, Bakelite. If Dad remained in bed, I could happily waste the morning in the corridors and airlocks of Doom and Quake, as long as I was ready to jab at the monitor button when I heard him on the stairs. Computer games in the daytime filled my father with an anger that was barely rational, as if it was him that I’d been shooting at.
But most days, I’d hear him stir at around nine and shuffle to the bathroom, positioned on the other side of my bunk. No alarm clock was as effective as the sound of my father weeing near my head, and I’d leap up, quickly pull on the previous day’s clothes and slip downstairs with ninja stealth to see if he’d left his cigarettes. As long as there were ten or more, it was safe to take one and quickly zip it into a pouch in my rucksack. I’d eat toast standing at the breakfast bar – another feature of the house that had lost its novelty, eating on stools – and leave before he made it downstairs.
But if I failed, then he’d appear, sticky-eyed and with the creases of the pillowcase still visible on his face, and we’d jostle awkwardly between kettle and toaster, slipping into our act.
‘So is this breakfast or lunch?’
‘I think of it as brunch.’
‘Sophisticated. It’s nearly ten—’
‘You can talk!’
‘I didn’t get to sleep ’til – could you use a plate?’
‘I’ve got a plate.’
‘So why are there crumbs every—?’
‘Because I’ve not had time to—’
‘Just use a plate!’
‘Here’s a plate, here it is, in my hand, a plate, my plate—’
‘And put the stuff away.’
‘I will when I’ve finished.’
‘Don’t leave it in the sink.’
‘I wasn’t going to leave it in the sink.’
‘Good. Don’t.’
And on and on, banal, witlessly sarcastic and provoking, less a conversation, more the flicking of an ear. I hated the way we spoke to each other, yet change required voices that neither of us possessed, so we lapsed into silence and Dad turned on the TV. There might once have been a delinquent pleasure in this but truancy requires that there’s somewhere else you ought to be, and neither of us had that. All I knew was that Dad didn’t like to be alone, and so I’d leave.