Your Fault Page 3

  You saw his bottom, too.

  There is silence. You hear his footsteps on the ceiling, the creak of the bed. Nadia’s face is flushed. She looks at your mother, then lets out a yelp of a laugh. Daddy has told her off, but you know that you are also to blame. And now there has been another accident. The dampness is sudden, the warmth is familiar. Quickly you climb down from the chair and run to your mother. You wrap your arms around her legs and press your face to her thigh. Her pinny smells of outdoors, as if she has just come in from the garden. She touches your head. She hasn’t yet noticed.

  He is on night shift, she says.

  My father also, says Nadia.

  It is okay. He must wake up anyway. It is almost time.

  I think I must go now.

  Yes, I am sorry.

  Your mother is twenty-two years old. Nadia is younger. And your father, who was once a soldier, is many years older than either of them –twice as old as your mother, old enough to be her father too – which means they must do as he tells them to. Everyone must do as he tells them to.

  1964

  you could be anyone

  In the clutch of photographs that survive from the time that precedes you, there are so few of your father in uniform. Your favourite shows him at forty-one years old. He has achieved this age before you have yet begun. Your future self, contemplating your father, will often conjure this man, forever a soldier, squinting into the sunshine, unable to see you.

  The photograph is small and monochrome and creased across its middle. It presents him dressed in khaki drill: a pale shirt and shorts, knee-high ribbed socks, beetle-black shoes and soft cap. Three stripes. And there is another just like it, similarly creased, showing your mother. The backdrop is the same: a sunlit wall, a cypress tree, a harbour behind her. But she is a girl, soon to be seventeen, with thick unruly hair and thick eyebrows. The date is written on the reverse: June ’58. Her dress is sleeveless and collared, with a narrow belted waistline and a wide pleated skirt that reaches down to her shins. She is wearing white socks and strappy sandals. The socks are called bobby socks. Your future self, contemplating your mother, will often picture this girl.

  At four years old, few of the facts are known to you. At this age you do not yet know that your parents met on the island of Malta, a British colony, where your father saw out his final few years in the army. He was a Royal Engineer, a sapper, a sergeant, who served all through the Second World War. Aged ­twenty-one, he was conscripted into the catering corps, having first completed his apprenticeship as a fitter in a factory in Scotland. Being in the catering corps does not mean he can cook. His time with the caterers will not last long, though he will find that soldiering suits him. He will remain for twenty more years – a regular – and once his term in Malta is over he will return not to Scotland but to your new town in England, where he will start work in the Works, earning thirteen pounds and ten shillings a week.

  He will return with your mother, his wife.

  As a legal minor, not yet eighteen, she will require the consent of her father, a widower, a shopkeeper, a churchgoing Catholic. An army chaplain will conduct the ceremony at Mtarfa barracks in Malta. Only one of your mother’s four older sisters will be there, and none of her brothers. Your father’s mother, a widow, a churchgoing Presbyterian, will not attend either.

  The Maltese government will assist your mother’s passage to England. It will assist the passage of four thousand others that year, to Britain and elsewhere.

  There will be more to it than this, and the dates will bear further scrutiny. But for now you are content in the knowledge that Daddy was once a soldier, and that Mummy came from far away, and that their lives before you arrived were lived in black and white.

  After your birth there comes colour, the buttery shades of the Sixties, a new beginning to things.

  But how much there is to remember.

  The sequence of doors in your stretch of the street runs burgundy and green; burgundy and green; burgundy and green. Your front door is a green one. The concrete canopy over the porch is supported by a metal pole, and to the right of the door are two panes of glass, one above the other. The glass is bubbled. Coloured shapes move behind it.

  Peggy and Bill’s house is the same, but the other way round. Their door is burgundy, with the glass to the left, the pole to the right. Their house is number 80, and in time you will sneak into their garden and cup your hands to their windows, perturbed by the sameness, but also the differences. Sometimes you will peer through their letter box at the Toby jugs on their staircase, red-cheeked and chortling, two fat men on each step. You should not be looking. Peter, come away from there now.

  The front door of your house opens into the hallway and the foot of the staircase. Another door – turn right – leads into the living room, which is as long as the house. The window at the back of the house is the same size as the window facing into the street. With the blinds fully open someone taller than you could see straight through from the street to your garden. They could wave to Mummy as she pegs out the washing. Smiling, Mummy could wave back at them.

  The sun would be shining.

  The living room leads into the kitchen – turn left past the fireplace – and the kitchen leads into the shed – turn left at the fridge – which is where the back door is to be found. The back door is at the side of your house and faces across to the Coatleys’, who live at number 76. There’s a narrow gap in the fence. Mummy could slip through it quite easily, if ever she needed to call on Ken Coatley.

  She often needs to call on Ken Coatley.

  Your house has a modern, straightforward appearance. The lines are clean, the surfaces plain. None of the doors, interior or exterior, is panelled and beaded. Six identical doors – Peter, can you count them? – lead off the landing at the top of the staircase: three bedrooms, a bathroom, a toilet, an airing cupboard. It disturbs you when all of these doors are closed; their blankness is troubling.

  Each of the bedrooms contains a suite of matching furniture, a different suite in each room, all of it new and bought on hire purchase or with the help of the Provident. Ken Coatley works for the Provident. He calls from house to house, arranging terms, collecting repayments. He is known as the Provy Man. He is also known as a ladies man, though you would not know this, or yet know what it means.

  Your sister sleeps in a cot in the smallest of the rooms, just above your front door. Her room has two matching items of furniture. Your room has three. In addition to your bed, your room contains a white wicker chair and a suite comprising a wardrobe, a dressing table, a chest of five drawers. The veneer is mahogany, so glossy and dark it reflects you, the ghostly impression of you.

  In the dressing table you will find your clothes, only yours, but the chest and the wardrobe belong to your father and are not to be messed with. Peter, are you listening? They are private.

  Most nights when your father is home he will come into your bedroom, the light from the landing illuminating the curls of blue smoke from his cigarette. Always he will be smoking a cigarette, which he will place on the edge of the chest and allow to burn down, become a fragile column of ash, as he changes into or out of his clothes. Mummy will not allow him an ashtray upstairs, though this won’t deter him. He will tap his ash wherever he can, including her pot-plants, his teacup, the palm of his hand.

  You will watch him as he undresses, the meticulousness with which he folds his jumpers, trousers and shirts, and should he see that you are awake he will come and tuck your bedclothes more tightly around you, folding the corners as neatly as his clothes, just as he was taught to in the army.

  It is comforting, the tightness of the enclosure; so too his insistence that your arms should be inside the covers, your chin on the outside.

  N’night, pal, he will say then, the warmest of his endearments.

  Don’t forget your cigarette, you might say.

  I won’t, he’ll reply, and retrieve it from the rim of the chest as he leaves.

  The door will remain ajar to the landing, at least until you are asleep, should you be able to sleep. But sometimes he will forget about his cigarette, since you are not always awake and cannot always remind him. Then it will burn back to the stub, leaving a scorch mark in the wood. There is already a row of black grooves along the rim of the chest, and one afternoon your mother discovers a new one. She is upstairs, doing the dusting. Your father is changing for his back shift.

  You will set the house on fire! she screams at him. The boy will burn in his bed!

  You hear this as you sit cross-legged on the tufted rug in front of the fireplace, looking up at The Woodentops. Your sister is sitting nearby, playing with her coloured bricks, which used to be yours.

  The television is rented from B.T.S. Radio in the town centre, a Ferguson 17-inch in a polished walnut laminate cabinet, and if The Woodentops is showing it must be a Friday. Your favourites are Flower Pot Men, which airs on a Wednesday, and Andy Pandy, which you watch on a Tuesday. Of course, you haven’t yet learned the days of the week.

  The Woodentops have a larger family than yours. There is Mummy Woodentop and the baby, then Daddy Woodentop, and Willy and Jenny the twins. There is also Mrs Scrubbit, who comes to help Mummy Woodentop, and Sam who helps Daddy Woodentop, and the very biggest spotty dog you ever did see. Spotty waves with his ears. Mummy Woodentop is busy with housework. Spotty and the children walk as if they are dancing.

  No nostalgia attaches to this, to any of this.

  There is a scuffle, a slap, another slap, then Daddy shouting, followed by the noise of his footsteps coming down the stairs. The front door opens and slams; the Venetian blinds ripple. Upstairs your mother is crying; she is wailing. But Mummy cries often, and you remain where you are, sitting with your sister in front of the television. The bricks are wooden and make clacking noises. They stack inside a tray with red metal wheels and a blue metal push-bar. Tri-ang is printed on the side. Mummy did not call you Peter, or your son. She called you the boy. You may be absorbed in The Woodentops, but this is surely not lost on you. Your older self, recalling this scene, will decide that nothing here should be lost on you. You are the boy. It means you could be anyone. And the next thing: it seems you have struck your sister with one of the bricks, and now she too is crying; she is wailing, and you know you ought not to have done this.

  For her birthday, or perhaps to make amends to her, your father buys Mummy a Fidelity radiogram. Equipped with separate treble and bass controls, push-button wave selection, and a record-changer capable of playing ten records in all sizes, at each of four speeds, the radiogram is placed in the far corner of the living room. The wood-veneer cabinet matches the television and stands on angled, ebonied legs that match the settee and chairs. The volume is ample. It boasts excellent tone.

  In the stowage compartment for discs your father deposits his meagre collection of records, which he has brought downstairs from the attic. Until now, you have not been aware of the attic. He stood on a chair and hauled himself up and disappeared through a hatch in the ceiling. Be careful, called Mummy. He entered the attic, and the attic entered your imagination. One day, you decide, you too will disappear through this hatch in the ceiling. It is high up, but you are not afraid of high places, and neither is Daddy.

  His record collection comprises Count Basie, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Ted Heath and his Music, Jack Parnell and his Orchestra. It seems your father is attached to the styles and stars of an earlier era – the rat pack, the big band sound – having failed to catch on to Elvis, far less the Beatles. Mummy likes the Beatles, of course, and Herman’s Hermits, the Tremeloes, Cliff Richard, all of those. Mummy likes new things, Daddy does not. But she will have to listen to her favourites on the radio, because she cannot afford to buy any records.

  She is smiling as she says this, admiring the radiogram, and your father laughs, his big hand shaped to her bottom. Mummy is wearing red trousers. Slacks; on a lady they are called slacks.

  Christmas, he says, squeezing her bottom. I’ll get you some records then. How about Shirley Bassey?

  Still smiling, Mummy pushes him away with her hip. It is a joke that they share. Mummy reminds him of Shirley Bassey, another of his favourites: not just her duskiness, also her temper. She is fiery, he says.

  You press yourself between them, embracing one of Mummy’s legs, inhaling her perfume, and sulkily stare at the radiogram. You do not like to see him touching her.

  Mummy does not like you hanging on to her.

  Peter, let go now, she sighs.

  Years later, as you examine your father in the photographs, the nicotine stains on his fingers will become very clear to you; so too will the bruises under his nails.

  In some of the photos he is dressed in his best clothes – a blazing white shirt, a tie with a tie-pin, a made-to-measure suit – yet still pinching a cigarette between his forefinger and thumb. Given the occasion, your father likes to be dapper, a smart fellow, nicely turned out. He adopts a Frankie Vaughan sort of style, with Frankie Vaughan sort of hair. But his hands give him away. Industrial hands. They hurt when he hits you.

  Do what your mother tells you, he says.

  If your mother has just celebrated her twenty-third birthday, then you must be four years and seven months old, your father forty-six. It is July 1964, and he must now work extra hours to pay for the radiogram, whether or not she will have any use for it. Overtime is always available. It seems there will always be work in the Works.

  On twelve hour nights he is required to clock-on at ten in the evening and finish at ten the next morning, after which he will sleep until tea-time. The day shift begins at six in the morning and ends at six in the evening, giving him the rest of the evening to sit in front of the television. But a twelve-hour back shift runs from two in the afternoon until two in the morning and means he must return home on the night bus, which tours most of the town and does not deliver him to the end of your street until some time after three – so late, or so early, that you are permitted to sleep all that week with your mother, allowing him to change out of his work-clothes without disturbing you, and climb into your bed without waking her.

  At seven-thirty each evening Mummy settles you into her bed, in the room where you were born. She draws the curtains on the brightness outside and wishes you goodnight and leaves the door a few inches open. You listen to her slippers descending the stairs. Smiling, you roll onto your side and close your eyes, and at seven or so the next morning you wake to find her sleeping beside you.

  Snug in the yeasty, warm fug of her, and conscious of the size of her comforting bottom, you conceive on one of these mornings the idea that you might place your hand where your father placed his.

  Mummy is facing away from you. Her nightdress is white, dully luminous in the tented half-light of the sheets, a sheer nylon ‘shortie’ that has ridden up over her panties, which are Bri-Nylon and blue. You match your hand to the curve of one buttock, and she does not rebuke you; she does not move or make any noise, and you must suppose that she is asleep, entirely unconscious of what you are doing. For a minute or more you explore with your fingertips the shape of her bottom, its softness and scale. Babies come from ladies’ bottoms. You shuffle closer and touch your peter against her. If it is possible for a child of your age to gain an erection, then you must be erect. If it is possible for you to know how babies are made, then you are making a baby. The tip of your tiny penis is touching Mummy’s bottom through her Bri-Nylon panties, and still she does not stir.

  You listen to her breathing; you listen to the milk-float in your street. The bottles rattle in their crates. They clink as the milkman sets them down. The motor whirrs as the float pulls away.

  Eventually, satisfied, now fully awake, you slip from Mummy’s bed and take yourself through to the toilet. You wee for a long time, and remember to pull the flush when you have finished. Then you go from there to your own bedroom so that you may look in on this man who may or may not be your father: his hairy shoulders and arms, the incongruous bulk of him under your bedclothes.

  He might be a dead man, dumped in your bed. Despite the rush of water in the pipes, he is oblivious. You step closer. Your bedroom is rank with the smell of the Works, and when you prod him he does not open his eyes. He does not appear to be breathing. In your imagination you will have killed him. This thought may never leave you.

  Peter! Come out of there! whispers Mummy, now wearing her dressing gown and holding your sister. Gladly you comply. Quietly she closes the door. She shuts your father into your bedroom, and allows you to lead her downstairs to the living room. Swinging your arms like a soldier, you take her through to the kitchen, where you sit on your stool at the yellow-topped table and wait with hands clasped to be given your Weetabix, your Quaker Oats or Rice Krispies, your Frosted Flakes or Sugar Pops.

  At this age, your life is lived in the present. You do not think ‘what next?’ but ‘what now?’ You haven’t yet acquired any sense of the shape or length of a life, and cannot look back on yourself from some imagined place in the future, when these days in your life will have passed. You cannot think of your present as a story yet to be told.