Your Fault Read online

  YOUR FAULT

  by

  ANDREW COWAN

  SYNOPSIS

  Set in a 1960s English new town, Your Fault charts one boy’s childhood from first memory to first love. A year older in each chapter, Peter’s story is told to him by his future self as he attempts to recreate the optimism and futurism of the 1960s, and to reveal how that utopianism fares as it emerges into the Seventies. It’s an untold story of British working class experience, written with extraordinary precision and tenderness.

  PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK

  ‘Beautifully crafted, unsettling and vivid, this book perfectly highlights the subtleties and mysteries of everyday life, creating a world which seems ordinary even while something ominous bubbles just beneath the surface. The narrative balances between a kind of universality and an arresting specificity, exploring the relationship between memory and guilt, as it builds towards its electrifying ending.’ —EMMA HEALEY

  ‘Cowan’s writing is observant and unsentimental, wryly funny and tragic, and his portrait of post-war Britain finds humour and heart in the most unlikely details.’ —D. W. WILSON

  ‘Andrew Cowan’s latest novel is a brilliant guided tour of a childhood, full of his typically sharp insights into family tenderness and regret. Technically daring, emotionally rewarding, I haven’t read anything quite like it.’ —RICHARD BEARD

  ‘This is an exceptional work of fiction.’ —NAOMI WOOD

  REVIEWS OF THIS BOOK

  ‘Your Fault is a novel written under the microscope. Both unnerving and witty, it manages to embrace every little detail of childhood in the sixties. From England’s World Cup win, to pavements littered with moulding dog dirt, Matchbox replica cars and digging for worms in the flower bed. Plus, some truly tender moments, like his mother pressing a flannel to Peter’s eyes as she pours cup after cup of warm water onto his head to rinse off the bath suds, before seeing him off for his first day at school. Andrew Cowan scrutinises each of these memories in an act of extraordinary craft.’ —LEE WRIGHT, Head Stuff

  Your Fault

  ANDREW COWAN was born in Corby and educated at the University of East Anglia. His first novel, Pig, was the winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, a Betty Trask Award, the Ruth Hadden Memorial Prize, the Authors’ Club First Novel Award and a Scottish Council Book Award, and was shortlisted for five other literary prizes. He is also the author of the writing guidebook The Art of Writing Fiction and four other novels: Common Ground, Crustaceans, What I Know and Worthless Men. He is the Director of the Creative Writing programme at UEA.

  Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

  12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © Andrew Cowan, 2019

  The right of Andrew Cowan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

  Salt Publishing 2019

  Created by Salt Publishing Ltd

  This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 978-1-78463-181-9 electronic

  For Lynne and Rose

  1962

  your earliest memory

  This, then, is your earliest memory.

  You are no older than three because your sister is still in her pram, a Leeway ‘Lugano’ with chromium-plated chassis and white pneumatic wheels. The day is sunny and warm, so perhaps it is summer, which means your likeliest age is two and two thirds. Let’s settle on that: August 1962. You were born on the first day of the decade, which means you are now two and two thirds.

  The sky is very high and there is space all around you, hurtling away from you. It reaches your mother, who is striding into the distance in her strappy high heels, pushing your sister in her blue canvas stroller. The sun sparks in the chromium. Her heels clip on the pavement.

  At this age your mother is Mummy, and Mummy is taking you somewhere, you would not know where. In fact, she has no choice but to take you ­– both you and your sister – since she is a housewife and mother. She can leave the house whenever she wants to – no one is stopping her; it isn’t a prison – but she cannot stop being your mother. Perhaps that is why she is so cross.

  You are not being taken on a trip, then. It is not for your sake that she is taking you with her. You are old enough to understand this. Your future self, looking back at yourself, will decide that you are old enough to understand this, aged two years and eight months.

  You are coming towards the end of your long curving street. You have already followed your mother around the last bend, which means your house is now lost to you. Should you dare to look back you would not be able to see it. But you do not dare to look back, because then you would lose sight of Mummy, who is striding away from you, as though to escape from you.

  She cannot escape you.

  The concrete pavement between you and Mummy is grey, a grey so pale it is almost white. The road beside you is a different grey, a grey so dark it is almost black. There are no motor cars to be seen, but on the far side of the junction there is a row of Corporation-let garages, six alternately-coloured metal doors beneath a low corrugated roof. The sequence runs red, blue and green; red, blue and green. Throughout your estate you will find other such patterns, for instance in the doors of the houses to your left, which are set back twenty feet from the road and fronted by freshly mown lawns. The sequence of these doors runs mustard and blue; mustard and blue; mustard and blue.

  The open-plan lawns belong to the Corporation, and are mown by the Corporation. The tenants are required to trim the edges with shears or clippers, and are encouraged to plant flowers appropriate to the seasons, but they are not permitted to alter the style or colour of their doors. The sycamore tree that towers over the garages has been left there to provide scenic interest, vegetative variety in the built environment. It terminates the prospect. The curvilinear road layout is intended to obviate the impression of monotony. Naturally you won’t know this, or even know that you don’t yet know it. The tenant’s handbook will help you, years later. Also the internet, books.

  This is your earliest memory and it has no end or beginning, no afterwards and before. You are stranded in this moment, snatched from an immediate past you did not wish to be snatched from, and led towards a future you do not wish to be led to. Such is a life. Your mother has quickened her stride to get away from you, to make you feel left behind, and you have refused to hurry after her. Instead you have come to a halt on the white pavement, beneath this blue summer sky, and you are bawling, abandoned and furious. You stamp your sandalled feet, and when Mummy stops at the junction and turns and angrily shouts for you to come along now, you do not come along.

  Peter! she shouts. I am warning you!

  Your name, then, is Peter ­– let’s settle on that – and Mummy is becoming impatient. Time is now pressing.

  And the next thing: there is nothing but the inevitability that she will come back and you will be spanked. This much you understand. But you have no resources. You do not want to keep walking, to go where they are going – your sister and Mummy – but neither do you wish to be abandoned, left alo
ne on this pavement, and so you stamp your feet and refuse.

  You bawl at your mother and wait for your future to reach you, a future you do not want but cannot prevent. This may be your inciting incident, the point at which your story begins. For now, let us suppose so. Here comes fury. Here comes a spanking.

  Many times you will come back here; you may not want to but you will. Many times you will remember this moment, these pavements, these lawns, your mother striding towards you, her fury, and when finally you reach your father’s age – the age at which he died – you will remember it all, as much as there is, as much as you are able to.

  Obviously you cannot yet know this. Unwittingly, as you stand and stamp your sandalled feet, you are anticipating your future recollection of this moment, when all of this will have happened, which will cause you to recall another such moment, another tantrum, in which your sister’s stroller is parked outside the Fine Fare and the pavement is damp, dully gleaming in the murk of November; probably November, still in 1962. You are in the shopping precinct and you have flopped to the pavement beside the Spastics Society girl and you are refusing to cooperate; you will not do as Mummy tells you to do.

  At this age, the Spastics Society girl is taller than you are. All through your childhood she will stand outside the supermarket. She is cast in metal and flatly resounds if you strike her. She has blond hair and a short blue dress and a brown metal teddy tucked under her right arm. She wears a caliper on her right leg and stands on a heavy black plinth that means you need help to reach the slot in her collection box: please help your local spastics.

  Perhaps Mummy has grown tired of lifting you up; perhaps she has no more coppers to spare. It is not a toy, she will say in her accent, as if repeating a line from a phrasebook. Money does not grow on trees, she will add, and refuse to let you drop any more coins in the slot. Whatever the reason, you are once again bawling, only this time Mummy is holding your arm, gripping your wrist through your winter coat as she attempts to yank you upright so that she can once again spank you.

  Of course you try to evade her, but you cannot escape, just as she cannot escape you, or land a clean blow, and you sense her frustration, also her embarrassment. The shopping precinct is busy, and even in the midst of your misery, as you writhe about on the damp pavement, becoming clammy with refusal, you notice the passers-by and recognize their disapproval, whether of you or your mother you never will know, not even in recollection.

  Possibly they disapprove of your mother because of her accent, her foreign complexion. There is that; there will always be that. But if they were to follow your mother and her two children home, these strangers, might they also disapprove of the readiness with which she loses her temper, or the persistence with which you test it, forever trying her patience? Might they suspect you of seeking her anger because you enjoy the tussle that follows, her ineffectual slaps hitting your thighs as she attempts to find your bottom and you refuse to allow her? Do you sometimes laugh? In your recollection you will sometimes laugh, and so will she. But sometimes too her exasperation will bring her to tears, and her grip will tighten on your arm and she will hurt you.

  Stop, you’re hurting me! you will complain.

  Then stand still! she will scream at you. Peter, stand still! You are making me mad!

  Your father’s anger is colder, and his blows are much harder, more sudden. But he isn’t your real father, you will come to believe. That must be why.

  Even at two years and eight months there is much that is lost to you, already forgotten, if indeed it was ever known to you. Most of your life to this point might never have happened.

  At one time, for instance, you too were a baby, just as your sister is now. There is a Kodacolor booklet of photographs to prove this. The cover of the booklet is primrose yellow, and each of its stiff pages has four perforations, curved like thumbnails, one slit in each corner. The photographs tuck into the slits. For now, these slits are as interesting to you as anything contained in the photographs, which present a bland little baby in a white lacy gown.

  In some of the photos the baby appears in your mother’s arms. She wears a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and a red cardigan, which suits her colouring, everyone says so. The glasses make her seem older. In another of the photos the baby rests in the crook of your father’s left arm. He has a cigarette in his right hand – it will be an Embassy Tipped – and the knot in his tie is tugged loose. There is grey at his temples already. But in most of the photos the baby is alone, propped against the living room cushions, or laid on its back. Evidently, you are this baby. It is a boy.

  Congratulations.

  There are other photographs of yourself as a small child, two dozen or so, which will surprise you by revealing an image of yourself as you have never known yourself: sweetly wide-eyed and cheerful, eager and trusting. But after the birth of your sister, it seems, a great change comes about: your gaze betrays glumness, calculation, awareness. Your older self, poring over these pictures, will see this and wish that it were otherwise. Your sister may wish it were otherwise, too.

  You did not ask for a sister.

  For much of your childhood a favourite family story will describe the moment your father emerged from the telephone kiosk across the road from the Fine Fare, having just called the maternity hospital and received the news of her arrival. You have a baby sister, he announced, crouching down. Are you going to help Mummy look after her?

  No, you said. I don’t want a baby sister. I want a bunny rabbit or a baa lamb or a woof woof.

  Several times over several years you will hear this story, and you will adopt it as a story that you yourself tell, since it allows you to reveal your true feelings towards your sister in a way that is more endearing than shaming. But not only will you have no memory of having said such a thing, or of your father delivering the news of her birth, in time you will come to doubt the truth of the story. A woof woof? Would you ever have said such a thing? Was there ever a time in your life when you would have used such an expression?

  There was.

  But then, it isn’t always necessary to remember an event or a period in your life for its after-effects to be felt. The details may be lost to you, but that time before your sister’s arrival, those two and a half years of being the only child – your mother’s sole treasure – have survived and will continue to survive as the absence of something, a lack you may never identify, a loss you may never make good; another one.

  1963

  It is Daddy; watch out!

  The estate where you live is for children and mums.

  The dads must go off to work, and most of them work in the Works, your own father included. Let us call him your father. Daily he leaves his family behind, sometimes before you have woken, sometimes after your bedtime, and often his absence will not be noticed until he returns, bringing with him the stench of the Works – that stale male industrial smell of sweat and grease and machines – into the home you share with your mother and sister, which is fragranced with Pledge and Persil and Palmolive soap, your mother’s perfume, her cooking.

  Of course your father will sometimes be home ­– sleeping after a night shift, smoking after a day shift, getting ready to leave for his back shift – and usually you will know he is there in a way that is never the case with your mother, whose constant presence is taken for granted. If Mummy is away you will feel it; if Daddy is at home you will feel it. This is one difference between them, and is in the nature of things, at least until you learn that Mummy cannot be relied on, that she too can abandon you – for hours, even days at a time.

  This may be the earliest instance: she says she will not be gone long, you must stay in the living room and play. You must not play in the kitchen, do you hear me? Peter, do you hear me? You must not go upstairs either, not unless you need to go to the toilet. Do you need to go to the toilet? Your sister is having her afternoon nap. You must be a good boy and t
ry not to wake her.

  And your reward for being a good boy? Mummy allows you to play with your sister’s collection of toys, which your father forbids you from touching. She lifts out the cardboard box from under the sideboard, and a little while later the back door clicks shut. If a key turns in the lock you do not hear it. You are kneeling on the carpet, emptying the box of its toys.

  You have not yet started in school: that remains in your future. You are now three and a half, at an age when the backs of the settee and the chairs are still some way above the height of your head. The furniture is the same age as the house, which means it is the same age as yourself: a matching settee and two armchairs from the Sarno New Idea Collection, bought on hire purchase from the Co-operative Department Store, which is next to the bus station in the town centre.

  You do not yet know these things.

  The backs of the chairs and the arms of the settee provide landing stages for your sister’s toys as you fly them in your hands through the air, from one chair-back and arm-rest to another. Softly you hum as they fly. This is what you do in the moments after Mummy leaves you, when you play nicely with your sister’s toys in the living room on your own.

  There is Looby Loo and a Rosebud Sleeping Doll that resembles a baby, with black nylon hair and hard plastic eyelids that close when she is tilted. It does not matter that she is a doll. Boys can play with dolls too if they want to. You give the toys voices, and they speak to each other quietly, nicely, as they leap from chair-back to chair-back then pause to look around.