Your Fault Read online

Where is Mummy? asks the doll.

  She won’t be gone long, says Looby.

  Where is Daddy?

  He is at work.

  You lay the doll on its back, and she closes her eyes. You lay Looby beside her, and her eyes do not close. Then you return to the other toys on the floor and choose a small wiry teddy with articulated shoulders and hips, and a floppy knitted kitten called Flopsy, whose eyes are black buttons. You sit them side by side on the arm of the settee, but a monster is coming and they must get away, go quickly, go now.

  It is Daddy; watch out!

  The teddy and Flopsy make aeroplane noises as they take off, and noises like missiles as they descend. They collide with the chair-back and explode. You let go of them, and watch as they tumble to the carpet. The teddy lands face down, his legs and arms stiff. One of Flopsy’s legs is folded beneath her. You sweep Looby Loo to the carpet as well, where she too explodes, then you propel the doll after her.

  You crouch down beside them. You take the dolls and the teddy in your hands and bring them crashing together. You grind them into each other. But you are not hurting them; they are hurting each other and they must stop it. You tell them to stop it at once – do you hear me? – and throw them apart. They are making you mad.

  You shake the knitted kitten and Looby Loo so their heads flop wildly back and forth. Then you bite Looby’s shoulder. You clamp the padded fabric hard in your mouth and feel the meeting of your milk teeth through the padding. She has not been a good girl. She is a bad girl. You bite harder, as hard as you can, until you feel the pain that she must be feeling, then you discard Looby Loo and climb onto the chair that is nearest the front window.

  You stand on the chair-arm, high up in the air, dangerously high – Peter, get down from there! – and stare into the street through the white Venetian blinds. You are crying. The street is empty. Daddy is at work; Mummy has gone. Your sister is sleeping, and you are alone.

  Your town is a new town, designed for the future, and the Bawdes­well estate is the newest part of the new town. In fact, it is barely older than you are, and has no history, no memory. You will hear this said many times, until it becomes part of the history of the town, a thing that people remember about it.

  You live at number 78 Bawdeswell Avenue, in the house where you were born, upstairs in Mummy and Daddy’s bedroom. The house is spacious and semi-detached, and as familiar to you as your parents’ faces, or the sound of their voices.

  On the other side of the wall live Peggy and Bill, whose grown-up sons have already left home. Sometimes you hear them: Peggy’s screechy complaints, Bill’s grumbling replies. And no doubt they can hear you. Peggy hears you crying now, for instance – both you and your sister. Your cries for Mummy have disturbed your sister’s afternoon nap, and they have disturbed Peggy, too. She has come outside to see what is the matter. She is standing in the middle of the front lawn.

  On your estate there are fourteen houses to the acre, and on Bawdeswell Avenue the houses are laid out so that none must confront another square-on. No housewife need open her curtains to find a neighbour staring straight back in at her. The street is arranged so that neighbourliness is encouraged and privacy respected. Short terraces of four and six houses are oriented at a thirty degree angle to the road; others are grouped around irregular lawns, grassy knolls. Rows of semi-detacheds progress in echelon fashion, each frontage recessed from its neighbour. Modest blocks of flats are surrounded by shrubberies and tidy greens in which are planted saplings. There is unity and variety. In scale and style, the houses are not unalike, but there is diversity too. Some have pebble-dash rendering, others timber boarding, and many are clad in hanging tiles, slate-grey or terracotta. Your tiles are slate-grey.

  How many thousands of times will you look out on this scene? How many thousands of times will it return to you?

  The pavement in front of your house is three and a half slabs wide to the kerb, a distance of six feet. The road is sixteen feet wide, and curves directly opposite your house into a side-street that climbs a short incline, then opens out to a playing field. The field is called Seething Green, and it seems to you as a child to be vast. Lengthily it descends to a swing park, beyond which begins another incline, and another snaking avenue, leading to the shopping precinct: the Lingwood Road shops.

  From the vantage of your chair-arm you can see the flat-roofed flats above the shops that mark your furthest horizon, a quarter of a mile in the distance. Mummy must have gone to the shops; this is what you believe. And here in her absence is Peggy, angling to see into your house.

  No hedge or rail encloses the lawn. Nothing distinguishes your side of the grass from next-door’s, but Peggy is poised as though there were a dividing line, over which she must not step. She wears a floral pinarette and matching headscarf in yellow and green, white ‘shortie’ jeans and white leather casuals, and she is leaning across to her left, almost on tiptoes, straining to see into your living room. Her painted-on eyebrows are raised as if in surprise.

  Of course she would not be standing on the lawn if Mummy were here. You realise this, and the realisation makes you cry louder because you have been abandoned. You cry so loudly you fail to hear the back door, your mother returning.

  She hurries into the living room. Hush, hush, she says, and lifts you away from the chair-arm, hoiks you onto her hip. Why are you crying? You are a big boy, you should not be crying like this. She is annoyed, but she is Mummy. You wrap your arms around her neck as she carries you across to the window. Look at poor Peggy, she says; you have made her so worried.

  Slyly you look out at poor Peggy, who is still standing on the lawn. Mummy nuzzles the top of your head and waves through the blinds and Peggy waves back, a cigarette between two of her fingers. Upstairs your sister continues to cry but Peggy is no longer so worried. She returns to her own house and your mother sighs and puts you down, because you are so heavy, such a very big boy. She does not say where she has been, and you do not ask her: she cannot have gone far.

  Your older self, looking back, will come to certain conclusions, but for now, Mummy has not gone away, and all will be well. She goes upstairs to attend to your sister, and you kneel on the carpet, your sister’s toys strewn around you. You select a small plastic doll. You wrench its arms from their sockets.

  Ever since your sister was born you have been told that you are a big boy. At three and a half you are already a big boy, and you understand that you are to feel proud of this. But still you cannot help wishing that your sister might die or be returned to the hospital or given away so that you can go back to being your mother’s sole treasure.

  A great deal is expected of you. A big boy must not cry, and ought to eat all his food, and help to look after his sister, and know when he needs to go to the toilet, then take himself there, and remember to flush the toilet and wash his hands afterwards. But sometimes you do not realize in time that you need to go to the toilet. The first indication might be the sensation of dampness and warmth, then the dark spreading stain on your crotch and the inside of your thighs. What you should have anticipated has already occurred. Your body, which belongs to you but also to Mummy, has caused an accident to happen.

  Mummy calls them accidents, even when she is cross with you.

  Here is an example: you are kneeling on the carpet at the foot of your bed, playing alone in your bedroom with your clip-together fort, which is manned by six polythene knights and two bowmen and has four crenelated towers and a fully functioning drawbridge, portcullis and flagstaff. The flag of St George is flying, always flying, and the fort is being assailed by seven American soldiers in a variety of operational postures, one of them carrying a bazooka. That one is Daddy. Perhaps he will die. In your games, your father does often die.

  The wetness spreads quickly, darkening your blue rayon shorts. They are probably rayon.

  At once you abandon the game you are playing – you have a
lready forgotten it – and descend the staircase to the living room, where Mummy is seated on the settee with a friend, another woman, whose round face is familiar, though she is not one of your neighbours. At this time it is rare for your house to have visitors, but this woman has been here before, and you sense that you like her. Their postures mirror each other, their knees looming so large beneath the taut hem of their skirts, their legs identically crossed at the ankle, cups of coffee balanced on the saucers in their laps.

  They turn their heads to look at you, smiling. They are both wearing lipstick – coral pink, poppy red – and white pointy shoes with high heels. You ought not to let Mummy see you, but you do not know what else you should do. It is a conundrum, and your only solution is to parade stiffly past her, but not to admit to what has occurred.

  I’m being a soldier, you announce, like my daddy.

  Oh are you? says Mummy, I see; and watches as you march into the kitchen, your legs and arms straight, your shorts chafing where they have soaked through to your thighs.

  In the kitchen you are surrounded by yellow, everything yellow: curtains, cupboards and drawers, two vinyl-covered stools, two vinyl-backed chairs, a table laminated in ‘wonderful Warerite’. This is the Sixties.

  The back door is open. Birds are calling. From here you might go out to play in the garden, despite your sodden underpants and shorts, which will in time become dry, and will not smell. Or you might hide your wet clothes in the shed – the utility room that is known in your house as ‘the shed’ – and select some other clothes from the pile of ironing that sits beneath the boxed-in slope of the staircase. Or you might continue to be a soldier and make the return journey past your mother and her friend on the settee and climb back up to your bedroom.

  Unable to decide, you remain in the kitchen, surrounded by yellow, your head inclined to the living room, waiting for Mummy, who will surely know what to do with you.

  And then she is there, kneeling on the linoleum and gripping your arm. She turns you around. Come on, she sighs, let me get you out of these clothes.

  You dare not complain about the tightness of her grip. There has been an accident, for which you are to blame. But when her friend appears in the doorway, still smiling, still holding her saucer and cup, you attempt to twist the other way. Her face may be familiar, and friendly, but she must not be allowed to look at your peter, this woman who is not your mother, not even a neighbour.

  He is so grown! she marvels.

  Stand still, snaps your mother, and peels down your underpants, revealing your peter. Then: Yes, she says; yes, he is becoming a big boy.

  Your penis is called your ‘peter’, and if ever you dwell on this fact you will suppose that everyone’s private parts must be named after the person who owns them. Your father must have a ‘joe’. If your mother has anything, it must be known as her ‘dolores’, perhaps even her ‘dolly’.

  Naturally your peter is smaller and softer than your father’s joe, which you will see many times as he hurries from the bedroom to the toilet, or lies soaking in the bath, or wanders out from the bathroom, still towelling himself dry, his dyed wavy hair all tousled, awry.

  Daddy’s joe is large and meaty, a thick dangling tube, and his body is pelted all over in hair, including his shoulders and back, his fat tummy and thighs, the tops of his arms. He has sideburns too, and always a shadow of stubble. Sometimes he will shave twice in one day.

  These are two of the things that distinguish him from your mother, his private parts and his hair, while a third is the stench that remains after he has taken his newspaper – his Daily Mirror, his People, his Pink’Un – into the toilet, where he will close the door and fasten the bolt, which you must not do. Peter, are you listening? The bolt will slide across, and for a long time then your father will remain concealed behind the door, so long you might forget that he is in there.

  You must not forget that he is in there.

  Time will pass, and always afterwards there will be a cigarette stub left floating in the bowl, seeping a yellowish stain from the filter, and though the stink is partly the cigarette – the acrid smell of damp ash and the taint of the smoke – mainly it is excrement, the sharp fetid reek of his poo, which is so different from the creamier, sweeter smell that lingers after your mother has been.

  Mums and dads have different smells, and mums must also sit down to wee, as you have seen, since your mother does not bolt the door, or even close it. She does not like to be shut in. She does not live in a prison.

  You are aware of these things, aged three and a half, and often when you wake in the morning you will listen as Mummy goes to the toilet – the clatter as the seat drops, the thunderous cascade into the bowl, the rattle of the toilet roll, the flush and the surge in the pipes – then quickly you will slip out from under your sheets and hurry in after her, releasing your peter from your pyjamas. Look at me, you will say, and stand at the bowl, aiming into the water.

  Very good, she will reply; but watch what you are doing.

  Another difference between them: your father will keep the bath an hour or more, and leave the towels about the floor, despite the instructions on the plaque on the wall, which you believe you can read, since Mummy has intoned them so often.

  Please remember, don’t forget, never leave the bathroom wet.

  Peter? Can you say it?

  Nor leave the soap still in the water, that’s a thing we never ought’er.

  Daddy’s bathwater is deeper and greener than Mummy’s, and much hotter, less clouded with suds. You must not put your hand in, or it will scald you. Peter, are you listening? It will burn you, says Mummy.

  But at the Works Recreation Club, where Daddy takes you sometimes on Saturdays, you will be allowed to crouch beside the gargantuan taps of the men’s communal baths and watch as the searing hot water surges onto the white tiles, the noise cacophonous, the steam damply warming your face. If you look over your shoulder you will find him, folding the towels. He will still have his eye on you; don’t you worry about that.

  Perhaps he takes you to the club to allow your mother some respite from you. Perhaps he derives some pleasure from being in your company, aged three and three quarters. Your older self, considering this, may never be sure. But these are happy excursions. At the Works Recreation Club your father is cheerful, more cheerful than you will ever see him at home. Sometimes he laughs.

  It is his job at the Club to inflate the brown leather footballs for the Works’ first eleven before they get changed, then make their half-time tea in two giant tea-pots, and slice some oranges into quarters, and fill the baths before the men clatter back in from the cold, spattered all over in mud and smelling sourly of grass and sweat and embrocation.

  You are too young to distinguish one man’s face from another; only your neighbours have faces you recognise. But these men also have peters, or joes, and in the vaporous, echoing chamber of the bathroom you will look at their joes as they sink into the green-tinted water, then retreat behind your father’s legs and watch as he jokes with them, these men who are his friends; he calls them his pals.

  How’s that young wife of yours? they will ask him. Keeping you busy? Keeping you up nights?

  They are his pals, and at one time he would have played football with them; he would have sat here in this bath full of men. That was before he injured his knee. He had to go to a hospital, where he had to have an operation. His leg was in plaster. Poor Daddy. It happened when you were a baby, before your earliest memory, and you are sorry not to have seen it, your father on crutches, in pain.

  Mummy’s pal is called Nadia and she does not have any children, not yet. Nor is she married. Like Mummy, she used to live far away, in a different country, though not the same one, not an island surrounded by the sea. She tells you these things as she kneels in front of you, her hands holding yours. Later you will remember staring at the gap between her front teeth,
the silver cross at her throat. You will remember her dancing.

  There is a wireless set, leatherette-covered in black and pink, which sits on a glass side-table in your living room. The table has a scalloped edge trimmed in gilt and ruby red, and fits into the recess to the left of the chimney breast. Beneath it lies Mummy’s wicker basket of numbered knitting needles, which are not toys and not for playing with. Peter, do you hear me?

  Aligned at an angle to the table is an armchair, which is not for climbing on, and not for jumping on. But you are bouncing up and down on the seat cushion, and Nadia is holding your hand to keep you from falling. She makes swivelling movements on the balls of her stockinged feet, dancing along to the Yeah Yeahs, which is your name for the Beatles. They are singing She Loves You. It is the autumn of 1963, probably the autumn. It could not be any earlier.

  The wireless has push-button controls for selecting the waveband and setting the tone, and two notched perspex dials for tuning and volume. Nadia has turned up the volume, and she is laughing because you are joining in with the chorus, yelling yeah yeah yeah! as you bounce up and down on the armchair. You are gleeful. You may be over-excited. When the Yeah Yeahs sing ooooooooh! Nadia sings with them, and shakes her head, which you find very funny. Her dark lacquered hair is becoming dishevelled.

  Nadia’s dress on this occasion has a wide pleated skirt which tucks and swirls as she turns, and in her free hand she is holding a cigarette. She inhales, and drops the cigarette into your father’s ashtray on the mantelpiece, then exhales to the ceiling.

  You have forgotten your father; you ought not to have forgotten him.

  Anxious, still bouncing, you look around for your mother and find her standing by the kitchen. She is cradling your sister – who is wearing a bib, her face smeared orange with food – and she appears to be swaying, quietly dancing. Mummy likes to listen to music. Daddy does not.

  And the next thing: the door from the hallway swings open. It slams into the wall and your father comes into the room. He has been woken from his sleep and he is naked. Your father often sleeps naked. With one hand cupped over his joe he attempts to turn off the radio, but turns the wrong dial. Static replaces the end of the Yeah Yeahs, and then there are voices. Impatient, he picks up the set and angles it towards the light from the window, his penis uncovered, now fully revealed. He turns off the wireless, and tosses it across to the empty settee, and glowers at Nadia. Get him off the fucking furniture, he says, then goes back upstairs, slamming the door after him.