Paperboy (13 page)

It was the age of euphemism. Nobody died of pneumonia, diphtheria or tuberculosis, they were
peaky
, then
poorly
, then
passed over
. Some adults had to be watched because they could
turn funny
. The bloke around the corner had become
less of a man
after the War. The boy in the next street had been
interfered with
behind Greenwich Park playground. I could have done with an Enigma machine to de-code our family conversations.

I picked my way over the broken triangle of litter-strewn grass at the edge of the motorway, all that remained of what had once been our family’s back garden. Here, at the very tip where the crumbling, graffiti-plastered walls met, a small blackened patch of soil still remained, the spot where my father had burned old furniture and bits of wood. He had set fire to the librarian’s treasured poetry book, and pinned it in the flames with a poker until its
pages
were blackened, muttering through his teeth that no son of his was going to read nancy stuff.

I had been too ashamed to return to the library without it. Instead of telling her what had happened, instead of even saying I had lost it myself, I had simply stopped attending.

One evening Mrs Clarke came to the house looking for me. I heard her talking with my father at the front door and desperately wanted to speak to her, if only to explain why I hadn’t been to the library. Instead I waited behind the door, listening. My father made it plain that she was interrupting his evening. ‘I’m sure if the boy was interested in coming back, he’d have been to see you by now,’ he said, anxious to shut the door and return to his urgent rendezvous with the evening paper. ‘He’s probably found something more interesting to do.’

Mrs Clarke wasn’t angry, just saddened. She paused on the front step and peered up the stairs, hesitant. If she was about to speak her mind she must have thought better of it, because Bill closed the door and she was sent away.

I ran up to my bedroom and looked down from the window. At the corner of the street she stopped briefly and looked back at the house. That was the last time I ever saw her.

Even now the mysteries remained. My father’s fury over a book of poems, Kath’s tacit support of her husband. Unspoken fears and truths, held within the walls of the little house, that had been lost in the brickwork, and finally shattered by wrecking balls.

The biggest mystery remained my mother.

1
I know this because I still have the list. I made notes all through my childhood, as if there was going to be a test one day. Is this normal?

2
I still have no idea what this means.

12

Mother and Movies

AS ONE INDIGNITY
piled on top of another, I wondered about Kath. Why did she stay on, like Lois Lane? Why didn’t she say to Bill, ‘Shag this for a lark, Superman, I’m off.’ Although she had never been scared of him, her new-found strength did not put her on an equal footing, or persuade her to back down. She returned to work and became more independent, but obeyed him because he was her husband.

On the day I returned to visit Westerdale Road, I noticed the proximity of the neighbourhood church and realized one thing that should have been obvious from the start: my mother was Church of England, and believed in the sanctity of her wedding vows. She had attended services twice every Sunday throughout her childhood, and always made the family say Grace before a meal. Bill was a shameless atheist, so the subject of religion was never broached at the table.

I had seen grim photographs of their big day, the depleted group of relatives in demob suits and austerity dresses, the ladies’ strange fifties hats that clenched their
heads
like silken sea coral, the grinning elderly couple who had crept into the picture because they just happened to be passing St John’s, Blackheath, on their way to the shops. My father always pointed them out because he had once done something similar, arranging to meet Kath at her friend’s wedding, only to find himself in the wrong hotel suite.

‘Didn’t you notice?’ asked Kath afterwards. ‘They were celebrating Divali, you were the only non-Asian in the room.’

But Kath stayed and the marriage held, after a fashion. Presumably she found enough snippets of pleasure to keep her from burning down the house, like Mrs Danvers. ‘You were lovely boys,’ she would tell me and Steven in her later years. ‘You were always making me laugh. You gave me the strength to stay.’ It was a compliment that carried the seeds of unthinkable guilt.

Was she happy? I found it impossible to tell. She loved her children, and immersed herself in the daily running of the household, keeping too busy for rumination on such woolly concepts as happiness. Presumably she and Bill occasionally made love, even though they didn’t get on with each other – the bedroom curtains in Westerdale Road stayed shut up and down the street until late on a Sunday morning, to allow time for a certain amount of fumbling beneath marital eiderdowns.
¹
But passion remained a word you were more likely to find in a book of poetry. I supposed Kath wasn’t that bothered, in much the same way that she had admitted not being able to appreciate food because she didn’t think her taste-buds worked properly.

I had the feeling she would have liked a cuddle or an occasional word of encouragement, though.

On the nights when she wasn’t working she went to the pictures alone, returning home to seat herself on the end of my bed, where she would describe, in exhaustive detail, the plots of the films she had seen. As a consequence, I had second-hand knowledge of a great many films, filtered through my mother’s enthusiastic but somewhat subjective perception. Had she described them for me, or for herself? Perhaps she had just been starved of conversation.

It wasn’t until many years later, when I finally saw
2001
, that I realized it wasn’t really about ‘a man who uses a computer to go back in time to meet himself as a baby’. Rather, it contained the most profound surprise – that the discovery of life beyond our world would only make us feel more desperately alone than ever. Man remained at the mercy of something vast, terrifying and unknowable. The past was a puzzle, but at least it could be safely locked away. No wonder
2001
became my mother’s favourite film of all time. Mind you, her number-two spot was occupied by
South Pacific
, so you had to take her enthusiasms with a pinch of salt. And a part of me liked
2001
not because it revealed the infinite majesty of the universe, but because the space station was really clean.

Kath’s vivid descriptions of movies got me excited.
2001
opened in 1968, the same year as
Rosemary’s Baby
,
Bullitt
,
The Thomas Crown Affair
,
The Lion in Winter
and
Witchfinder General
, all of which she saw. Weren’t movies just animated versions of books? They weren’t, of course, but they could deliver an entire plot in ninety minutes, which was easier than hanging around the library knowing that I had failed the one person who had shown faith in me. In this I empathized with
Mr
Brownlow, who had trusted Oliver Twist to run an errand, only to be let down when the boy failed to return. It hadn’t been Oliver’s fault, but to me that wasn’t the point at all. The idea of disappointing others filled me with shame. I resolved never to be late for anyone, ever.
²
Looking around the neighbourhood at the people I most admired, I decided to emulate their finest qualities, which were being polite, keeping your nose clean, pulling your socks up, avoiding embarrassment, being on time, staying smart, not making a nuisance of yourself, never being in anyone’s debt and making yourself invisible wherever possible. With these rules in place, surely I would be destined for a great future.

Meanwhile, there were more stories to be discovered, but with the library now out of bounds, the cinema seemed my best option. I wanted to go there by myself, but my mother suggested I start with Saturday Morning Pictures, where I would see some good films aimed at my age group.

So that was where I went next.

1
I longed to use the word ‘carphology’ here (‘delirious fumbling under bed linen’), but my editor felt it was taking the love of words a tad too far.

2
If you are ever required to fill in a form listing essential leadership qualities, do not put ‘punctuality’.

13

In the Dark

MY NEAREST CINEMA
was the Granada Greenwich, where hunchbacked, chain-smoking pensioners whiled away their afternoons because they got cheap tickets to the early shows. When they weren’t noisily unwrapping boiled sweets in the quiet parts of the film, they were creeping around the toilets with bladder complaints.

It was here that I fell truly in love.

I had seen her before, watching the film at an absurd angle in the penumbral auditorium, and had felt a prickling warmth beneath her gaze, a confusion, a desire. I wanted to follow the warm red glow of her torch down the aisle, back to the little room where she waited between shows.

I sat fidgeting, waiting for the credits to roll, then looked around and saw her carefully making her way down to the front of the auditorium. She moved slowly because the floor was raked and she wore white high heels. Positioning herself between the aisles, she patiently waited for the house lights to go on. The bulb hidden in
her
white tray illuminated choc ices, Mivvis,
¹
wafers, tubs, ice lollies,
²
and ridged plastic cartons of fluorescent orange juice, but also shrouded her face in shadow. Her proudly raised chin and disdainful air suggested that she might have been displaying ancient Egyptian artefacts, even though the effect was slightly tarnished by the fact that she was chewing gum.

Her strapped heels, her little Grecian skirt and her illuminated tray of offerings gave her the appearance of an electric goddess. Her blonde hair was fixed with a red plastic bow to keep her fringe out of her eyes, but the sides fell to her shoulders in an old-fashioned style. She wore a glittery white patent-leather belt and a short pink nylon blouse buttoned down the front. The first two buttons were undone, so that the rise of her pale breasts shone in the overhead spotlight. When I thought about undoing the remaining buttons, I could scarcely catch my breath.

Was she aware of her own perfection? Despite the fact that she had obviously been chosen by the management to entice men from their seats, she seemed not to notice her surroundings, as if her spirit was still far away in the Nevada desert, where this week’s first film had been set. Would she travel with me to the South Seas for the second half of the double bill, and swim in the warm clear waters while the Swiss Family Robinson prepared for their beach-side ostrich race? And why were they called Robinson if they were Swiss?

The cinema was almost empty; the double bill had been playing every Sunday for a month now. I knew I could wait until she began her walk back up the aisle of the great auditorium, but there was a risk that I might fail
to
attract her attention and my opportunity would be missed. I rose a little unsteadily from my seat, checked that I had money in my pocket and made my way to the edge of the stage.

I had bought ice creams from her many times before, but she had barely noticed me. This time, though, I felt sure it would be different. It simply took an act of courage on my part to talk to her. I waited until all her customers had been served, then presented myself before her, staring down at the selection of fiercely coloured ice-cream boxes. Caught in the low light of the tray, her eyes were lost in darkness as she chewed rhythmically, awaiting my request. Her red lips sparkled with frosted gloss.

‘I’d like …’ I began. ‘I see you here every week …’ My words emerged with awkward bluntness. ‘You’re so …’ I put my money away.

‘If you wanna choc ice it might ’elp if you stop staring at my tits,’ she snapped. Her lips shone fiercely in the spotlight. She breathed out, a long slow sigh, clicked off her tray light and walked out of my life.