Gut Symmetries (6 page)

Past? Present? Future? The language of the dead. Totality of time.

PAGE OF SWORDS

June 8 1960. Liverpool, England. Sun in Gemini.

I was born in a tug-boat. My mother whelped me in a mess of blankets while my noctivagant father towed in the big ships.

His was the night vessel, the vessel on oily waters, his was the light shining in the darkness, come home, come home.

He worked for a shipping company and had done so since he was fifteen. He had started at the end of the war as an office boy and fourteen years later was to be made a director of the line. To celebrate he made love to my mother and I was conceived.

By day my father was a smart and increasingly smarter man. By night, or to be truthful, by three nights a week, he manned a tugboat. There he is in a greasy donkey jacket and seaman's balaclava. Spinning the thick cable from the windlass and bringing in the banana boats, the grain boats, the boats of Turkish silver, and the boats full of Irish, shamrocks round their hearts.

When I was born the waters were still alive. My father too, was still alive, strong and burly, as wide as he was tall, with an enormous chest that looked as though it could tow the cargo boats itself.

His own family were Liverpool limeys; had always worked the docks, the boats, in the Navy or as Merchant seamen. The women had worked in the clutter of cargo offices up and down the quays. His mother, my grandmother, had been the Official Polisher of Brass Plaques and some said that when she had finished her Friday round the shine of it was so bright that it tipped the waves like a skimming stone and could still be seen in the harbour of New York.

His father, my grandfather, was killed in a war farce when an American torpedo scuppered the wrong boat. As a result, my grandmother was paid a sizeable pension and was able to have her wild strong son privately educated. She poured her money into him as though he were a treasure chest. He learned well, looked well, and if anyone questioned him about his Mersey terrace two up two down he simply knocked them out. Throughout his life my father has dealt with difficult questions by knocking them out. What is unconscious does not speak and that included the hidden part of himself.

In 1947, certificated and handsome at eighteen, he was given a lowly job-with-prospects at Trident Shipping (Progress,Tradition, Integrity). All of his family had worn clean clothes to work, that was their pride, but none had ever worn clean clothes home. For them it had been mother with a boiling hip-bath and a packet of soap flakes. My father went to work clean and he came home clean. This was an endless source of satisfaction to my grandmother who never lost her own whiff of elbow grease but delighted in the sweet smell of success.

My father loved the sea and should have been an active seaman but there were more opportunities indoors for a bright boy who had a way about him. He compensated by wheedling his way onto the tugs, and because there was still an apprenticeship mentality about the Company, his oddity was tolerated. What harm could it do and wasn't all experience useful? Besides, he did it in his own time and it made him popular with the men.

In 1957 he married my mother. She was Irish, nearly well-to-do, the daughter of a partner in the firm who was based in Cork. My father had seen her at the Annual Dinner and Dance and vowed that he would marry her. For two years they exchanged letters and gifts until romance, persistence and a promotion won the day. On their wedding night, at the Hotel Ra-Ra (décor: Merseyside-Egypt), my father took off his pyjamas so that his wife could see him man
qua
man, then told her that he would not make love to her until he had been made a director of the line. He put on his pyjamas again and after a moment or two of violent shuddering, fell asleep.

My mother lay awake pondering the matter and applied with some urgency to her father next morning. What could be done? Nothing. The young man had only recently been promoted in charge of the Atlantic crossings. He would have to prove himself there. Unfortunately he resisted all attempts by my mother to prove himself elsewhere. In despair my mother consulted my grandmother who suggested they try the Navy Position. This down-to-earth advice was not well received by my father who had already added a veneer of conventional morality to his conventional respectability.

He would not sodomise his own wife. Instead he went to New York. There he is, built like King Kong, as ambitious as the EmpireStateBuilding, as wide-eyed as Fay Wray, and as much a dream, an invention, as the movies and America itself. He was a giant projection on the blank screen of other people and that was his success. He was not a ruthless man but he believed in himself. That marked him out from the many others who believed in nothing at all.

The dream: to pan the living clay that you are and find gold in it. Perhaps my father was a treasure chest because he seemed to be able to lay up for himself inexhaustible riches. Whatever he tried succeeded. He should have been a Venetian merchant pacing the Rialto. He should have been Marco Polo winning furs out of Muscovy. Is that him, on the log rafts in Quebec? Is that him riding rapids with the snow mantling his shoulders? He was a man who belonged with an elk, with a moose. A whale man, a bear man. Instead he wore a loose suit and a trilby and learned how to net a profit. His hauls were the biggest in the Company and he turned them in like a little boy. In those days his true self was still fighting with his assumed self, and winning. Person and persona, the man and his mask had separate identities then, he knew which was which. Later, the man my mother married died before his death and the man who had come to be his counterfeit wore his clothes.

But that was in the future, and in 1959 my father was in the fullness of his present, he could do no wrong.

It was a shining morning, he was leaning on the harbourside rail, watching the cranes load the ships. The world poured through his fingers; spices, wine, tea, green bananas, coconuts, American golf clubs, blankets made of wool with satin hemmed round the edges. Today they were loading nylon stockings, Monroe look-alikes stamped all over the cardboard boxes.

The wind was warm, trade wind with generosity and travel in it, a wind to scatter the ships to the four corners of the earth and although my father was too young for ships with sails, like other water-men, the wind still excited him. A fair wind. A new world. The recklessness of the sailor that my father loved.

These were his happiest times, the times when his paperwork was done, when he could hear his secretary rattling at the upright Remington as though it were a church piano. He worked evenings and early mornings so that he could make a gap to slip through, a private space after coffee and before lunch, when the piers were busy with every kind of activity, legitimate and not.

He knew the gangmen and the loaders and the truck drivers and the harbour pilots, and as he leaned on his rail, watching, sometimes waving, other men joined him, lit a cigarette, told him the news and with a slap on the back, moved on. The easy fraternity of working men was comfortable to him. No one here asked him what school he had attended.

As he gossiped and lounged the noise of the Remington stopped. His secretary came out from the low line of offices that huddled to the waterfront. There was an urgent call for him. Would he step inside at once?

Sighing, he threw down his cigarette and went inside, straightening his tie. He listened briefly. 'Yes. Yes.' Then he threw down the receiver and threw his secretary up into the air.

He had been made a Director of the Line.

He left his desk with its four black telephones and filing tray, and without stopping to collect any luggage, bought an aeroplane ticket for the evening flight. In 1959 flying was odd, glamorous, expensive and blissful. There was a fifteen-minute check-in time and my father walked across the tarmac and boarded the twin-propeller plane with only his toothbrush to declare.

He had risen in the world and now he was going to prove it.

When he arrived home my mother was not expecting him. His secretary had not made the instructed call. Mother was in the bath, with bubbles up to her neck, and my grandmother, on the bath-stool, was reading out loud from the Bible. This was their regular Sunday visiting hour, and having little in common and less to say, they had hit on the happy idea of spiritual elevation. My mother never listened to what my grandmother read, but she felt she was doing her duty by her family and by God, and it saved her the trouble of going to church. My grandmother, who was firmly convinced by the Word of the Lord, took more pleasure in that hour than in any other of the week, including 2 p.m. Thursday when she drew her pension.

They had begun with Genesis and were now at the Book of Job, with whose trials my grandmother sympathised, especially since she had recently developed a boil.

As she read 'Who will avail me in my tribulation?' the door flew open and my father reached down into the bath and scooped out my mother whole and carried her off into the bedroom.

My grandmother, who was not a nervous type, said to herself, 'David must have got his promotion.' Nodding, she finished the chapter, let out the bath water and trudged home.

Meanwhile, in a maze of soggy sheets and copies of
Woman's Weekly,
my father speared my mother on his manhood.

'I should have tidied up first,' she said.

'Harpoon Ahoy!' said my father. And somewhere in all this I was.

On the night of my birth my father got the madness on him and told my mother he had to go tugging.

'I'll come with you,' she said. 'I feel well.'

Accordingly, my father put on his Jolly Jack Tars and my mother wrapped herself up in her mink coat. In those days their car was a three-litre Rover, really, a leather three-piece suite and cocktail cabinet on wheels. My father purred down to the docks looking like a criminal, while my mother fixed herself a strictly forbidden gin and tonic in the back.

When they reached the docks my father backed into a loading bay and my grandmother stepped out of the shadows.

'David,' she said.

She was wearing a black oilskin that had been her husband's. It hung on her from head to foot, so much so that she seemed less to be wearing a rainproof than to be in the grip of a monster from the Deep.

'Is something wrong?' said my father.

'Tha wife's to give birth.'

'Oh not yet,' said my mother.

'Yet,' said the Oilskin.

And so the three of them climbed aboard the
Godspeed
and chugged into the dark.

On board my grandmother unpacked her carpet bag. She set out a pile of clean rags, the ones she used for polishing the brass plaques, a bottle of cooking brandy, a bottle of iodine, a primus stove, a cylinder of water, a kitchen knife, a packet of sandwiches, a little blanket from the dog's box, her spectacles and the Bible, now open towards the end of the Psalms. This done, she took off her oilskin and pegged it over the hatch.

'David shan't like it,' she said.

'I'm quite sure that it will be at least a week before the birth,' said my mother who immediately went into labour.

My mother. Miss 1950s. The perfect post-war wife. She was pretty, she was charming, she was clever enough but not too, she smiled at the men and gave the women that quizzical bewildered look, as if to say,'What, am I not the only one then?'

Her stocking seams were straight, her hair was curled, her back was upright, her waist was curved, her legs were long, her breasts round, her stomach was flat, her bottom was not. Black hair, blue eyes, red mouth, pale skin, and all this packed as neatly as picnic Tupperware. There was nothing of the whore about her and this my father liked.

She had been well educated and taught to conceal it. She never gave up singing and playing the piano and she never gave up her watercolours. The rest of the mind she disposed of at marriage and did not think to ask my father what he had done with it.

She was not resourceful; her class did not allow it, and I know it worried my grandmother that her son had found a wife who did not know how to make a soup out of herrings' heads.

My father no longer wanted herring heads. He wanted mink and pearls and he got them. Like most men he was a transvestite at one remove; if his wife was part of him so were her clothes. She was his rib and as such he too wore a silk shift. He loved her clothes, loved to see her dressed up, it satisfied a part of him that was deeper than vanity. It was a part of himself. She completed him. She manifested him at another level. He absorbed her while she failed to absorb him. This was so normal that nobody noticed it. At least not until later, much later, when things began to change.

Husband and wife. Man and rib. What could be more normal than that? And now they were having a baby. That is, my mother was bearing my father's child. It was different when my sisters were born but I was Athene.

Athene born fully formed from the head of Zeus.

The legend says that Zeus lusted after a Titan called Metis and eventually got her with child. An oracle told Zeus that the baby would be a girl but that if Metis ever conceived again, she would bear a boy who would overthrow Zeus, just as Zeus had deposed his own father, Kronos. In fear, Zeus stroked and flattered Metis until she came close enough to kiss him of her own free will. He swallowed her.

Months later, proud complacent Zeus had a headache and yowled his way over the earth, threatening to split the firmament with pain. It was Hermes who told him the source of his trouble, and Hephaestus, the lame god of the smithy who took a hammer and wedge and split open Lord Zeus's skull. Out came Athene tall strong beautiful and her father's own.

No one will doubt that my father had wanted a boy. He had assumed he would have a boy. Right up to a week after my birth he continued to say,'How is he?' My grandmother told me that he had turned me upside down in his huge hands and held me V-legged to the light, just to be sure that my genitals weren't caught inside. He didn't trust doctors. The white coat and stethoscope seemed to him to be a hide-out from the world. He resented the superiority, the authority, but of course he had never been ill. When he stopped holding me up to the light he began to hold me up to the mirror.