Kitabı oku: «The House is Full of Yogis»

1
The First Party

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Mum.

She was scratching at two cables of ancient wire sticking out of a dusty hole in the brickwork next to the peeling green paint of the front door, after the Volvo had wobbled over the rubble-strewn drive and come to a shaky halt. ‘They’ve even taken the bloody doorbell.’

A year before our father had his Damascene moment, we moved into our first big home.

99, Queens Road was a semi-detached, four-bedroom house on the edge of Richmond, Surrey, which our parents bought for £30,000 from an older couple called the Philpotts. There was no central heating in 99, Queens Road, nor was there a kitchen to speak of; just a Baby Belling cooker, a rattling old fridge and a twin-tub washing machine stranded in the centre of the room like a maiden aunt who had turned up two decades earlier and never left. There was a milk hatch cut into the outside wall that had come free of its hinges.

The Philpotts, who called their 42-year-old son’s room The Nursery and who claimed to speak Ancient Greek on Sundays, had ripped out pretty much everything but the bricks. The carpets had gone. There were no light bulbs. If you opened cupboards you found only empty spaces, suggesting the Philpotts had even filched the shelves.

‘Come on Sturch,’ said my father Nev, using a nickname with a derivation long forgotten. It might have had something to do with Lurch, the monstrously ugly butler from The Addams Family. ‘Let’s go and explore upstairs.’

In our old house, my brother Tom and I shared a bedroom, which was less than ideal because of our very different approaches to being children. One Christmas Eve, I came upstairs after kissing our parents goodnight, fully intending to obey Nev’s gentle command to go to sleep and wait until the morning to see what Santa Claus had brought, knowing I would wake up at three and feel around in the dark for the happy weight of a stocking at the end of my bed. Tom was in there already, constructing an elaborate arrangement of strings and levers. When I asked him what he was doing he told me not to question things I wouldn’t understand.

All was revealed around midnight. When Nev walked in, stockings laden with toys, a hammer hit the light switch, pulling a network of strings running up the wall and activating a camera next to Tom’s bed. Nev’s hair turned into a wild frizz at the shock of it. Satisfied with having disproven the existence of Santa Claus once and for all, Tom dozed off until eight o’clock. He was nine years old.

That was four years ago. ‘Out of the way, Scum,’ said Tom, pushing me aside as he hunched up the stairs of the new house. He looked at the bedroom facing the street, lay down on the single bed the removal men had put in there half an hour earlier, pulled out of his pocket a copy of George Orwell’s 1984, and said without looking up, ‘Oh, do get out of my room.’

There is a photograph in our family album of Tom, an insouciant four-year-old, kicking back in a rusty toy car while I, only two and already so outraged at life’s unfairness that my nappy is exploding out of my shorts, try in vain to push him along. It says it all, really.

Nev and I went to explore the room at the back of the house, which Nev suggested could be my bedroom.

‘Look at this place!’ I said, clomping across squeaking, uneven floorboards. ‘It’s got a window and everything.’ I tried to open it but it just made a juddering sound. ‘And wow, a cupboard with double doors.’ At first they appeared to be jammed, but after giving them a good yank they came open – and flew off their hinges. ‘Oh well. Now the room is even bigger.’

I looked out of the window. The garden was long and thin, with a scrappy strip of lawn, a collapsing shed on the left and a vegetable patch along the right. There was a hole in the ground near the end of the garden, which was surrounded by rotting apples. (The Philpotts had taken the apple tree with them.) There was also a late-middle-aged woman with a helmet of frosted hair, bent over and hurriedly collecting something into a plastic bag.

‘Isn’t that Mrs Philpott?’ I said.

Nev came over and peered through the dirty glass. ‘I believe it is. What on earth is she doing here?’

Mum rushed out of the back door. Mrs Philpott stood up and, arching her eyebrows, said: ‘I’m collecting jasmine.’

Mum took root before her, hands on hips. ‘You do realize that we own this house now.’

Mrs Philpott stared at the younger woman and tilted her head forward, smiled slightly as if dealing with a simpleton, and explained: ‘It costs two pounds at the garden centre.’

Mum smiled back. ‘That may be so. But now you have sold this house to us, so you’re going to have to find somewhere else to snip it.’

Mrs Philpott looked at our mother imperiously. She marched down the garden with her cuttings of jasmine, sensible shoes clipping along the cracked paving stones of the garden path and out of our lives forever. So began life at 99, Queens Road.

Tom and I had baked beans on toast that night, eating sitting on the tea chests that filled the kitchen while our parents had an Indian takeaway from silver foil containers. After he finished, Tom poked a finger deep into a nostril, stared at what he found up there, rolled it into a ball, and flicked it at me.

‘Tom just threw a bogey at my face.’

‘Is this true?’ said Nev.

‘Guess so.’

‘Right, Tom. I’m going to fine you 50p. Until you learn to treat people with a bit more respect I’m going to have to hit you where it hurts – the wallet.’

Tom dug around in his pocket, pulled out a 50p coin, and flicked it at Nev. He grabbed wildly for it, missed, and the coin clattered off before coming to a halt somewhere underneath one of the boxes.

‘Butterfingers,’ said Tom, with a yawn.

In a few days’ time, Tom would start at Westminster School. He had won a scholarship, leaving me to fester at a private boys’ school our parents had moved me to a year earlier. That was around the time the serious money for Mum’s tabloid articles with titles like How to Turn Your Tubby Hubby into a Slim Jim began to kick in. I protested that I had been perfectly happy at the local primary school, but this change, along with getting rid of a beautiful car called a Morgan that had the minor disadvantage of breaking down on most journeys, was an inevitability of our new, prosperous, aspirant life. Once the house was cleared of any remaining Philpottian traces and transformed into a temple of soft furnishings and comfort befitting a young modern family on the up, our new life was to unfold here.

‘I want the front room for my study,’ announced Mum. ‘You’re going to have to put shelves up in there, Nev. And I can’t live with this kitchen a minute longer. What we need is a high-end, top-quality fitted kitchen from John Lewis, with a nice cooker.’

‘But you never do any cooking,’ said Tom.

‘That’s not the point,’ said Mum. As she turned her Cleopatra-like nose towards the mouldy ceiling she added, ‘I shall also need a microwave.’

For the next few months, the house underwent its metamorphosis. Beige carpets ran up and down the stairs and hallways. Florid Edwardian Coca-Cola posters and reproductions of Pre-Raphaelite scenes of medieval romance filled freshly painted walls. Nev replaced the doors of my cupboard. We had a drawing room – I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a drawing room before then – complete with chaise longue, real fake fire and a three-piece suite upholstered in green linen by GP & J Baker. At least the Philpotts had left the built-in bookcase that ran along two walls of the drawing room, which meant Your Erroneous Zones, Fear of Flying, Our Bodies, Ourselves and the complete works of Jackie Collins now took up spaces once filled with dusty books on Greek history and Latin grammar. We also had a TV room with beanbags, an Atari games console and a pinball machine, which was a present to Nev from Mum from around the time I was born. An oak dresser found space between the microwave and the new fridge-freezer and gave the kitchen a hint of rusticity. A sweet tin with scenes from ancient Chinese life on its four sides took up occupancy too, on a shelf alongside boxes of Shreddies, Corn Flakes and, in a nod towards healthy eating, Alpen.

Nev worked long hours at the Daily Mail, which, from the way he described it, sounded like a cross between a newspaper office, a prison and a lunatic asylum. There was a woman who was paid to not write anything, a man called Barry with a severe and very public flatulence problem, rats in the basement, a section editor who pinned journalists up against the wall and printers who threatened strike action if anyone so much as suggested they stop at two pints at lunchtime. Despite all this, Nev seemed to be doing well. As the medical correspondent he was breaking big stories: he had the scoop on the first test-tube baby a few years earlier, and now he was one of the first British journalists to cover DNA sequencing and stem cell research. One evening he came back home and announced that an exposé he had written about American petrochemical companies illegally dumping waste into city water supplies had earned him an award from the San Francisco Sewage Department.

‘That’s what you get for writing a load of shit,’ said Mum.

Whatever he achieved, however, never seemed to be enough. The more his star rose, the worse his mood grew. We became used to Nev getting the splash – the front page – and the good cheer that briefly followed, which could result in anything from being allowed to stay up and watch an episode of Hammer House of Horror (and creep up the stairs in sickening terror afterwards), to going on what he called a Magical Mystery Tour, which was a trip to the fun fair on Putney Heath. But it didn’t last. A day or so after Nev broke a major story on a campaign against fluoride in drinking water, or even after winning an award from the San Francisco Sewage Department, he would come back home late, sink into a chair, and scan the day’s papers with a mounting air of defeat.

‘Well,’ he said one evening, ‘there go my plans for a feature on Prince Charles’s new interest in alternative medicine.’

‘How do you think I feel?’ said Mum, clearing our plates a few minutes after putting them on the table. ‘Eve Pollard beat me on the interview with the world’s first man-to-woman-and-back-to-man-again sex change. And she can’t write to save her life!’

Nev and Mum sat at our round pine table, eating takeaway and talking about work. Sweat beads gathered on Nev’s furrowed brow as he bent over a tin foil carton of pilau rice and went through the stack of newspapers that were delivered to our house each morning. One evening, two weeks after we moved into 99, Queens Road, he had just taken off his crumpled beige mackintosh as we sat down for dinner. The phone went. Mum told him it was the office. He rubbed his head as he said, ‘Yes … OK … Is there really nobody else available?’, and when he put the phone down, his shoulders dropped, his head shook, his eyes clenched, and he screamed, ‘Fuck!’ He stood up and shrugged on his mackintosh.

‘I’ve got to go back to the office.’

‘Oh, Nev, you can’t,’ said Mum, with the wounded look of a loving wife and mother seeing all her efforts go to waste. ‘I’ve just put the frozen pizzas in the microwave.’

Another night, I got Nev to help me with my mathematics homework. It involved fractions. Maths seemed at best a pointless abstraction and at worst a cold-blooded form of mental torture, particularly as my maths teacher was an eagle-like man with a beaky nose and talons for fingers who smelt of stale alcohol. ‘On the morrow we shall attempt t’other question, which shall be fiendishly difficult,’ he told us, before dozing off in the corner.

Nev understood mathematics. His parents had wanted him to be an accountant. Tom was a mathematics genius, but asking him anything only got snorts of derision. Mum’s inability to understand even the simplest sums rendered her close to disabled. Nev was the one with the magic combination of patience and skill. That night, though, my ineptitude got the better of him. The entire concept of algebra appeared nonsensical, particularly as the numbers and letters kept jumping about on the page. Eventually, after I had frozen entirely at the prospect of a minus number times a minus number somehow equaling twenty, Nev screamed ‘The answer’s right there in front of you!’ and hammered his finger down on a page of my homework until it left an angry grey blur. His face looked like a balloon about to pop. He wiped his brow, muttered something about being too tired to think straight, and walked out, clutching his head.

The following morning before assembly, I managed to filch all the answers for the maths homework from a boy in the class in exchange for a fun-size Mars Bar. I assumed that would be the last of it but unfortunately the boy, a normally reliable Iranian called Bobby Sultanpur, had just found out that his father had been named by the Ayatollah Khomeini as an enemy of the people, hence his including the words ‘Please let us see a return to glorious Persia in our lifetime’ as part of the answer to an algebraic formula. And I had copied everything out so diligently, too.

‘Hodgkinson!’ growled our teacher, his fetid, whiskery breath a few inches from my face, ‘Your sudden concern for the plight of the Persian aristocracy strikes me as devilishly suspicious. You shall be detained at the conclusion of the school day when fresh horrors, in the form of a combination of long division and trigonometry, shall await you.’

The next Sunday, Tom had some of his new Westminster friends over. They silently trooped up the stairs and into his room like angle-poise lamps on a production line. I followed them. Tom slammed the door before I could get in. Some sort of strange new music, definitely different to Teaser and the Firecat by Cat Stevens, our favourite family album, which Nev described as ‘deep’, seeped underneath the door. I knocked. A boy I had never seen before answered.

‘It’s, uh, your little brother,’ said the boy, arching his head over to Tom, who was sitting with two other boys by a small table, dealing cards. He was wearing a baseball cap and chewing gum in an open-mouthed way, like a ruminating cow.

‘Tell him to get lost,’ he said. ‘No, wait. Gambling is thirsty work. Scum, be a good kid and get us some Coca-Cola, will you?’

‘Fold. Man, I’m out. I’m on a one-way ticket to the poorhouse,’ said a boy, who I discovered later had a father who owned around half of Fitzrovia.

‘I’m folding too,’ said another one. ‘These high stakes give you the sweats.’

I looked down at the table. The boys were gambling away their setsquares, compasses, protractors and rubbers.

‘What are you playing?’ I asked Tom. ‘Can I have a go?’

‘Sort out the brewskis and I’ll think about it.’

Mum was in the TV room, singing along to Songs of Praise in a high-pitched falsetto. Nev was at the kitchen table, hunched over a stack of papers, muttering. I crept past both of them with a bottle of Coca-Cola from the fridge. Neither noticed.

‘I’ve got the drinks,’ I said to Tom. ‘Now can I play?’

Shuffling the cards, Tom said, ‘Shall we deal him in?’

‘Does that mean we have to explain the rules?’ said someone.

Tom sighed and nodded. Then he looked at me and said: ‘The thing is, we haven’t really got the time to “hang out”.’ He made the inverted commas sign. ‘We’re kind of in the middle of a serious situation here. Haven’t you got any of your own friends to annoy?’

As it happened, I did have a friend. A small, sandy-haired child. Will Lee was terrified of water, had a teddy bear called Tipper-Topper, and lived a few streets away in a house as old and as tasteful as ours was new and brash. We had met as four-year-olds at the house of two sisters called the Webbers, during The Lone Ranger of Knickertown. To put the labyrinthine complexity of this role-playing game in simple terms it involved The Lone Ranger (me) and Tonto (Will Lee) riding into a forsaken place called Knickertown (Becky and Elaine Webber’s bedroom) where the piratical inhabitants (the girls) robbed us of all our clothes before casting us naked into the desert (the landing) at the mercy of unspeakable dangers (Mrs Webber). It proved a bonding experience. Becky and Elaine are lost to memory but Will and I have remained inseparable ever since.

I rang the doorbell to Will Lee’s tall, terraced house. A hundred-year-old wisteria clung to the Victorian brickwork and the car, a crumbling estate, rarely washed, gave evidence of the highborn provenance of its owners. Will’s father answered. Hugh Lee was a tall, bald man in his sixties with narrowed eyes and pointed ears. He wore tweeds. He peered down.

‘Hm.’

He turned his head upwards and bellowed ‘Willerrrgh’, before shuffling off to his studio underneath the stairs.

I bounded upstairs, past the three-dimensional paintings of muted, abstract shapes the house was filled with, and which Hugh Lee had been working on every day but never putting on sale since he retired from the Civil Service two years earlier. Will was in his room. I rattled on the glass-framed door and heard a startled yelp come from within.

‘Oh. It’s you. I was reclassifying my fossils.’

Will’s room was not like mine. There were no cheap plastic toys or stacks of comics. There were microscopes, atlases, posters of star formations and glass trays containing the stones Will had collected on the shores of Dorset. ‘Look at this,’ he said, holding up a grey pebble with a few indistinct lines along its smooth surface. ‘What do you think of that?’

‘It’s a pebble. What am I meant to think about it?’

Will closed his eyes. ‘It’s a trilobite. It’s 300 million years old.’

‘Let’s go up to the attic.’

The attic was the best room in the house. Hugh Lee had only semi-converted it, putting in windows and laying down a hessian carpet but leaving the spindly retractable staircase and sloping roof, turning it into a den-like space which Will’s much older half brothers and half sister, now all living elsewhere, had used throughout their teenage years. Next to a record player and a stack of records was a book with a plain brown cover and the words Les Demoiselles D’Hamilton etched in gold down the spine.

‘You have to see this,’ said Will, sitting cross-legged and opening the book on his lap with slow reverence. ‘This guy has an amazing ability to convince women to take their clothes off.’

I looked through the sepia-tinted, dreamy photographs of young women in French country houses, stepping out of tin bathtubs, riding bicycles through the woods in flowing white dresses, and admiring each other’s semi-nude bodies, breasts falling out of thin white blouses. Years later I discovered that the photographer, David Hamilton, had used nymph-like teens as his models, but to me, an eleven-year-old, they seemed sophisticated, fully grown, untouchable. The pictures reminded me of a holiday in the South of France where the women on the beach had gone topless and there was a photographer’s studio in the local town with nudes, posed and artful, in the windows. ‘He’s a lover of the human form,’ said our father, awkwardly, as we passed the studio, before pushing us away from the window and towards the nearest ice-cream stand. Even then, Nev appeared to view the body like other men might view an affair: guilt inducing.

I looked at a David Hamilton image of two girls, their hair in loose, messy buns, sitting on a bed and admiring themselves and each other in an oval mirror. The girls wore dresses, but one of them had pulled the dress up to her waist. She was kneeling. You could see the tan line around her pale white bottom. The photographs were as confusing as they were fascinating. I was used to the sight of breasts because we got the Sun and Mum had told me not to expect all girls to look like Page Three girls, but this was something else entirely: exotic and romantic, otherworldly.

‘I wonder where you meet women like this,’ I said.

‘France,’ Will replied, authoritatively.

I wasn’t sure whether looking at David Hamilton’s girls, and what we called the FF (Faint Feeling) it inspired, should make me feel guilty or not. A few years earlier, Nev had suggested there was nothing wrong with sex. When I asked him about the basics of reproduction he explained that a man put his willy inside something a woman had called a vagina. ‘It sounds horrible,’ I said, but he told me people liked it. On his rather more official talk on the subject two weeks after we moved into 99, Queens Road he sat me down at the kitchen table, took out a textbook, sweated even more than usual, and, as he pointed shakily to an anatomical drawing of the male reproductive system said, in a faltering voice, ‘And here we have the vas deferens.’ The talk was high on technical detail but it left me none the wiser about what you were actually meant to do when the time came.

School wasn’t helping matters. Mine was boys only, which meant girls were less a different sex and more a whole different race. I might have got to meet a few local examples of their kind on weekends had not our parents enrolled me in Saturday Club, a school-run activities service featuring judo, chess, photography and other off-curriculum subjects. There was a way of avoiding the lot of them, however. All you had to do was accompany a certain teacher to the store cupboard and allow him to whack you on the bottom with an exercise book every now and then. Three or four of us sat in there each week, wedged into the narrow space between the metal shelves and the wall. If you hit him back he would say, ‘Ooh, you devil you!’ and pinch your cheek excitedly, but he asked for nothing more. That’s why I felt it was unfair when this teacher was hounded out of the school by an angry mob of outraged parents. Some idiot had told his mother about the store cupboard scene, thereby ruining a perfectly good way of bunking off Saturday Club. From then on I only ever saw the teacher in the changing rooms at the local swimming pool.

The official sex education talk came from Mr Mott, our Rhodesian science teacher with tiny red eyes and a sandy white beard who threatened to whack us with his ‘paddle stick’ should we do so much as snigger at the mention of a spermatozoa. The science room, a poky basement that stank of ammonia and chlorine, was always hot, and he decided to give us the lesson on an unseasonably close autumn morning.

‘Your bodies will be goin’ through many changes,’ he shouted, marching up and down the room and intermittently bashing a pre-adolescent head with the paddle stick. ‘You will be gittin’ pubic hair. You will find your pinnis goin’ hard at inappropriate moments. You will develop fillings for a gil, or, in some cases, a led.’

‘Yeah, Sultanpur,’ said Christopher Tobias.

Mr Mott allowed himself a little smile. ‘Settle down, you bunch of jissies. Right then. We will now be looking it the female initomy.’

It was so hot, and it had been such a long time since I had had anything to drink, that I began to feel faint. I dared not ask Mr Mott to be excused; that would be asking for trouble. Instead, I tried to concentrate on the matter at hand. ‘Look at this vigina,’ Mr Mott barked, tapping the diagram projected above his head with his paddle stick. Hodgkinson, you little creep, git up here and blerry well locate the clitoris.’

My head was swimming with the heat, but to ignore an order from Mr Mott was to sign your schoolboy death warrant. I stood up quickly. And that’s when the blackout must have happened. The next thing I knew I was lying on the floor while the school nurse, a young blonde woman with large lips and a concerned but accommodating manner, fanned me with a copy of It’s OK to Say No.

It was left to the adult world, the world of parents, to provide clues about what went on between men and women, and the real evidence came at our first party at 99, Queens Road. It was on Bonfire Night, a tradition that brought out the best in Nev because of his deep and profound love for blowing things up, fireworks, fire, destruction and chaos in general. And he really outdid himself that year. Alongside getting a huge box of Chinese fireworks with deceptively delicate names like ‘Lotus Blossom in Spring’ and ‘Floating Stars in the Night Sky’, he took us to Hamley’s to find something special. He found it. The Flying Pigeon was an enormous construction that looked like five sticks of strung-together dynamite. It came with a long rope on which it zipped backwards and forwards.