Your Fault Read online

  Your games, like your drawings and daydreams, are spun from a mind that does not yet know or expect to remember itself. Every day, without realising it, you are displacing the boy you were yesterday; every day you are forgetting him.

  And just as you haven’t yet memorised the days of the week ­– and have no conception of months – so you have yet to learn how to tell the time from the clock on the wall in your kitchen. A Smith’s ‘Dubarry’ electric, the minute and hour hands progress imperceptibly, the second hand never stops circling, and the time is whatever Mummy or Daddy tell you it is.

  It is time for your bath now, or time you calmed down. It is dinner-time; tea-time. Ten o’clock. Four o’clock. It is time to get ready for school.

  When am I going to school?

  Tomorrow, I told you, says Mummy.

  She kneels by the side of the bath and presses the white rubber plug into the plughole. As a special treat, to mark the occasion of your becoming a schoolboy, she twists open a bottle of bubble bath and tips a blob of green gloop onto the point where the twin streams from the taps hit the enamel. You and your sister stand naked and watch as she swirls the water to generate a froth that soon covers most of the surface. Your sister squeals, excited, and Mummy dabs some bubbles on the tip of her nose.

  And me, you say.

  And you, she says, and deposits a scoop of white froth on top of your head. You laugh; your sister laughs too. Then Mummy pulls up one sleeve of her jersey and leans over the side of the tub. She tests the temperature by dipping her elbow through a gap in the bubbles. You are no longer too small to climb into or out of the bath, but you want Mummy to lift you over the rim. She lifts your sister in, too. You go first; your sister goes second. There can be no variation on this.

  Is Lorraine going to school?

  Your sister’s name, then, is Lorraine. Let’s settle on that.

  No, says Mummy, she is too young for school. Only big boys and big girls go to school.

  Does Keith from next door go to school?

  Yes. Keith goes to school.

  Will he play with me?

  I am sure he will play with you.

  Reassured by this, you sit in your wet cloud of bubbles while Mummy rests at the side of the tub. She lays one arm on the rim and pillows her face on her arm and sadly she watches as the bubbles melt slowly away, leaving islands of froth that you gather in close to your belly, until they too diminish and vanish.

  Mummy sighs.

  It is time now for her to wash your hair. She folds a flannel so that each of you in turn can press it to your eyes as she scoops and pours cup after cup of warm water onto your head to rinse off the suds. Your eyes are squeezed tight, since the shampoo will sting, and if either of you should feel the nip of it you will scream, and continue to scream until Mummy has doused the flannel in cold water and pressed it to the site of the calamity.

  There, she says at last, lifting you out. Nice and clean for school.

  But not Lorraine.

  No, not Lorraine, she agrees, and wraps you in a towel and pats you dry, then hugs the soft warm bundle of your body, aged four and three quarters, which will soon be lost to you, and to her, as surely as the boy who inhabits it.

  This must be why she is crying.

  Your sister, meanwhile, unobserved, still sitting in the bath, has released a poo into the water. The jobby bobs up to the surface, and she starts to wail, another calamity.

  Your town is polynucleated. In each of the housing estates there is a neighbourhood centre, a precinct of shops, a couple of churches, a cluster of schools. The schools benefit from spacious locations, broad horizons; this far from the Works, they benefit from clean air.

  For instance, Bawdeswell Infants: a single-storey, flat-roofed construction of prefabricated grey and green panels, white-painted clapboard and glass. The two-storey Junior School is situated beside it, but has a separate entrance, its own black-barred metal gate, while a third, much larger gate opens onto a walkway that leads up to the campus of Bawdeswell Comprehensive: the Seniors.

  If you are to become older – truly a big boy – you will need to progress from the first to the second to the third gate. In this way, your life has been planned for you.

  The buildings are surrounded by fields, acres of flatness that stretch as far as the main arterial road on the western edge of the town. Twin white water towers mark the horizon. Cars go by, tractors and lorries, long intervals between them. There is farmland in the distance, open countryside, woodland, a landscape you have yet to encounter, that lies further into your boyhood, your future. For now, you must enter the Infants, following your mother and your sister in her new pushchair, across an asphalt playground in which stands a white flagpole. You look up at the flag, a Union Jack. Briefly it stirs. The sky scuds with cloud.

  The date is Monday 21 September 1964. This is the day on which the island of Malta will gain its independence – not that you know this, not that your mother much cares. History happens elsewhere; it is happening always. More important to you and your mother is that today is the day on which you are to start school. This auspicious event, once contained in your future, has sped forward to meet you, and as you enter the building a kindly smiling lady, her hands on her knees, leans forwards to greet you. Her skirt is brown tweed, her cardigan green.

  This must be Peter, she says, and asks if you like trains. You smile; shyly you nod. It seems you are to be given the gift of a train-set to welcome you into school life, and eagerly you follow her down a low-ceilinged corridor to an area of coat-pegs, each one marked by a picture on a rectangle of card. Until you learn how to read, the teacher explains, your peg will be the one displaying this picture of a train, a blue and red steam engine. Will you remember that, Peter?

  The disappointment sets you to crying, and you continue to cry as you are led towards your first classroom, which is already busy with children. No one looks at you. Your mother has gone. Again she has left you, but she will come back in a little while. She always comes back in a little while. You are given some paper and crayons and invited to sit at a table.

  In this way your education begins with a let-down, abandonment, tears – a small lesson in life – but nevertheless you will discover, within a matter of days, that you are well-suited to school, its patterns, routines, the praise you receive, and each afternoon at three-forty, the bell ringing for home-time, you will spill with your classmates into the playground, eagerly seeking your mother’s face among the melee of other mothers and pushchairs and prams at the gate. You will have so much to tell her. And she will be there, staring straight back at you, her face as inevitable as your reflection. She will speak to no one until finally you come out to rejoin her, and then, as your school-friends disperse, quickly forgotten, you will begin to describe your day in the school, and she will hear you, every word, and will not speak, because your mother exists only to hear what you have to tell her.

  1965

  Upwards you grow

  Soon you will forget to say goodbye in the mornings in your hurry to find your friends and get on with the day. And soon your mother will stop walking you up to the school, or waiting at the gates to collect you.

  Aged five, in 1965, you are already a big boy. You can walk yourself to school and back on your own. There are children everywhere, on every pavement, walking to and from the Infants, Juniors and Seniors. Four times every day, dinner time included, the pavements are as busy as the streets in and out of the Works. For the rest of the day they are empty.

  The journey takes you twenty minutes and there are several possible routes, numerous combinations of streets and side-streets and shortcuts, and while much of this, the newest part of the new town, is designed to separate pedestrian from vehicular traffic, you must nevertheless cross two roads at least, or as many as five, depending on the line you find yourself following, the drift of your thoughts. Often you daydream.

  The roads are not busy. Cars at this time are few. But you must be careful and remember the code. At school you have been inducted into the Tufty Club, and have learned to recite Tufty’s road-crossing instructions. You wear a tin badge showing Tufty the fluffy-tailed squirrel, and quietly you chant to yourself at each kerbside, Look right, look left, look right again, and if nothing is coming, no need to start running, walk straight across. . . .

  You do it correctly, and you are annoyed with the children who don’t follow Tufty’s code and yet avoid being knocked down and run over. In your imagination the cars and buses and lorries do not merely collide with pedestrians, but roll smoothly over them, flattening them into the tarmac. You hope this happens to the children who do not look left and right as they ought to. It will teach them a lesson.

  Miss Whittle, it will teach them a lesson, Miss, won’t it?

  All of your teachers are female, and in time you will not remember any of them, neither their names nor their faces, with the exception of the headmistress, Miss Whittle, who is white-haired and sharp-featured, with a thin rasping voice that might, were she to shout, become a screech. But she does not shout; she does not need to, since every child in the school is afraid of her. If she were to appear in a story, such as your teacher reads aloud to your class on a Friday, she would be the witch, the stepmother, the wicked one.

  Every morning in assembly the children sit cross-legged on the parquet floor of the hall to say their prayers and sing hymns, then distractedly listen to Miss Whittle’s lectures, such as the story of the mother she observed just the previous day, who wanted to cross the road outside St Christopher’s, the Catholic church.

  This mother had come from the school next to the church, a Catholic mother with too many children to care for. There were two children holding the hem of her coat, and another two children sitting up in a pram, and she pushed the pram out ahead of her, straight into the traffic, which was so thoughtless and dangerous of her, wasn’t it, children?

  The Catholic mother ought to have found a zebra crossing, and if there wasn’t a zebra crossing to be found she ought to have looked left, looked right, looked left again, then crossed the road ahead of the pram, pulling it after her. Some of the children who sit listening this morning will have little brothers and sisters of their own, and these children are to remind their mothers how to cross the road safely, unlike the example of the poor Catholic mother.

  Will you do that, children?

  Yes, Miss!

  But you won’t. You will keep from your own Catholic mother this important information that may save your sister from being knocked down and run over, crushed flat in her pushchair.

  On Thursdays you have your weekly session of Music, Movement and Mime. The school caretaker carries a reel-to-reel tape deck into your classroom while you are at assembly. He is still there when you file back in through the door. Grunting, red-faced, he moves the desks and chairs to the edge of the room. Your teacher waits for him to leave, then shuts the door behind him and pulls down the blind.

  Good! she says, and inserts the plug in the socket and instructs you and the other children to strip to your pants and vests and pull on your plimsoles. She stands to one side of the tape deck and operates the controls while facing the class. There is music, and a woman’s voice speaking over the music, and your teacher calling out words of encouragement.

  You must pretend to be a tree in a forest. You begin life as a tiny acorn, crouched low. Then comes the sunshine, followed by rain. Upwards you grow. You stretch and reach for the sky. Your fingers are leaves, rustling in the breeze; your arms are branches, swaying in the wind.

  Well done, Natalie, calls your teacher, that is very good!

  Disheartened, your arms sinking, you look over your shoulder at Natalie, who is so much better at being a tree than you are. She is on tiptoes. Her cotton vest is white, like yours; her knickers are navy. She wears knee-length white socks and black elasticated plimsoles. Her hair is dark and short, her mouth plump and small. Her second name is Hayes.

  Concentrate now! says your teacher, clapping her hands. Peter, look to the front, please.

  You are conscientious, a good boy. Excellent work is to be rewarded with a gold or silver star and the privilege of sticking the star to the chart on the wall, which displays the progress of each child in the class. Already Natalie Hayes has more gold and silver stars than anyone else. Red stars are to be given for effort, blue for best behaviour, and already you have the most red and blue stars.

  At this age you have a predilection for modelling in plasticine, and today you are making a budgerigar in a cage, but the cage starts to sag before you can complete it, the browned plasticine softened with handling. Natalie stands by your elbow.

  It’s good, she says; I like your budgie a lot.

  Me too, you say.

  Maurice, what are you drawing? she asks in a teacherly voice.

  Across the table sits a pale, scruffy boy in a green knitted jersey. He is scribbling in crayons, furiously colouring in. A house, he replies. But each of its windows is circular. You point out to him that the windows in houses are square, and Maurice smiles as if from far away, then attacks his sheet of paper with renewed vigour, creating another swirl, another window.

  Miss, you complain, raising your arm.

  But your teacher is kinder to Maurice than he surely deserves, and confirms that windows in houses may sometimes be round, just as they are on boats, when they are called portholes. Unhappily, uncertainly, you accept the idea of round windows in houses, because she is a grown-up, and your teacher.

  I’ve seen round windows, says Natalie; I’ve seen them on holiday.

  Have you? smiles your teacher.

  You are each to bring to school a small box or a tin. In her encouraging voice your teacher says, Put up your hand if your grandad smokes a pipe or rolls his own cigarettes.

  These children, she says, are the lucky ones. If they ask their grandads nicely they may be allowed to have one of his empty tobacco tins. And if they ask him especially nicely they may be allowed to have two tins, one for themselves and one for their teacher, who can share the extra tins with the unlucky children whose grandads do not smoke a pipe or roll their own cigarettes.

  Will you do that for me? she says. Will you ask your grandads nicely?

  Yes, Miss, reply the lucky ones.

  They are smiling, but you are not one of the lucky ones, and neither is Maurice. You watch their arms come down, then leave your chair to share with your teacher the fact that one of your grandads is dead – he died before you were born, the one who lived up in Glasgow – while the other one lives far away, on the island of Malta. You are not sure if you have met him, but as you explain your situation you decide that he must be a pipe smoker, a kindly old man who would surely donate his empty tobacco tins if only he knew they were needed.

  Go back to your chair now, Peter, she says.

  The tin is to keep your words in.

  One afternoon, a week or so later, your teacher calls you to her desk and presents you with a tin that smells faintly of raisins, perhaps also of rust, the screws or nails it may once have contained. Inside you discover a selection of single-syllable starter words – cat, hat, tree, see – which she has written out on coloured card in evenly-spaced letters identical to those displayed on the charts pinned around the walls of the classroom: Aa is for apple, Bb is for bee. She has snipped the card, a single word to each small coloured rectangle, and she has done this for each of the thirty-eight children she teaches.

  In the months to come you will learn to write your own words, and to cut out your own bits of card – two syllables, three syllables – and to join them up into sentences, then into stories, but for now you are mesmerized by this gift, each word as special as if it were a sixpence.

  Eager to share the tin with your mother, you hurry down the hill from the Infants at home-time, sunlight shimmering in the chain-link fence to your right, the wind loud in your ears, and continue on past the house where Natalie Hayes lives, then up as far as the turn for Bawdeswell Avenue, which is where you step straight into the road, not thinking to pause to look left and right, your mind being so absorbed in practising your words, which scatter in the shock of the car that just misses you, its noise and suddenness, the rush of exhaust as it goes.

  You did not see it coming; you did not predict it.

  Your tin and its lid clatter on the tarmac. Your bits of card skitter away in the breeze, and helplessly you watch as two older boys chase after them, jostling each other in their duffel coats.

  One of the boys is Keith from next door. He and his friend are laughing, and they ought to be careful. They should not be messing about in the road. Cars can be deadly. But no more cars are coming, and your bewilderment is not just surprise that something so unexpected has happened, but that you have not been knocked down and run over.

  The car was bottle-green, a family saloon, and as it passes from view it takes with it a story in which you are flattened to the road and your future self does not come to exist, in which your end arrives early. You ought to have been given a lesson. Your older self will think of this often and wonder perhaps if you were.

  Keith Coatley returns the pieces of card to your tin, his friend gives you the lid, and because you are crying they stand and observe you, but no words are spoken. You wait until they decide to move on, still jostling, then you cross over the road, remembering now to look left and right, and when you reach the far pavement you break into a run, and run all the way home, overtaking Keith and his friend, who are dawdling.

  Safe in your mother’s bright yellow kitchen you don’t mention what has just happened, but thrust the tin at her as she stands at the sink, her hands submerged in a blue plastic bucket. Your sister abandons her toys and comes to see what you have brought home from the school. Mummy wrings a grey cloth and finally looks down at you, frowning.