The lawns were his responsibility, of course; and it was one of his duties to maintain them. He set up sprinklers to water the grass, but the area to be covered was too large to be dealt with in this way, and he was obliged to restrict his attentions to the cricket pitch only, while the remainder of the lawns grew bald under the sun’s hot and lidless eye. But that was only one of my father’s concerns. The graffiti artist had struck again, this time in Technicolor; a mural, fully six feet square, on the side of the Games Pavilion.
My father spent two days scrubbing it off, then another week repainting the pavilion, and swore that next time, he’d give the little bastard the thrashing of his life. Still the culprit eluded him; twice more, spray-paintings appeared in and around St. Oswald’s, crudely colorful, artistic in their way, both of them featuring caricatures of Masters. My father began to watch the school at night, lying in wait behind the pavilion with a twelve-pack of beers, but still there was no sign of the guilty party, although how he managed to avoid detection was a mystery to John Snyde.
Then there were the mice. Every large building has vermin—St. Oswald’s more than most—but since the end of the summer term, mice had infested the corridors in unusually large numbers. Even I saw them occasionally, especially around the Bell Tower, and I knew that their breeding would have to be checked; poison laid down and the dead mice removed before the new term began and the parents had chance to complain.
It incensed my father. He was convinced that boys had left food in their lockers; blamed the carelessness of the school cleaners; spent days opening and checking every locker in the school with mounting rage—but no success.
Then there were the dogs. The hot weather affected them as it did my father, making them lethargic by day and aggressive in the evenings. By night their owners—who had usually omitted to walk them in the sweltering daytime—now loosed them on the waste ground at the back of St. Oswald’s, and they ran in packs there, barking and tearing up the grass. They had no respect for boundaries; despite my father’s attempts to keep them out, they would squeeze through the fence into St. Oswald’s playing fields and shit on the newly sprinkled cricket pitch. They seemed to have an instinct for choosing the spot that would annoy my father most; and in the mornings he would have to drag himself around the fields with his pooper-scooper, arguing furiously with himself and chugging at a can of flat beer.
Infatuated as I was with Leon, it took me some time to understand—and even longer to care—that John Snyde was losing his mind. I had never been very close to my father, nor had I ever found him easy to read. Now his face was a perpetual slab, its most common expression one of bewildered rage. Once, perhaps, I had expected something more. But this was the man who had thought to solve my social problems with karate lessons. Faced with this infinitely more delicate situation, what could I possibly hope from him now?
Dad, I’m in love with a boy called Leon.
I didn’t think so.
All the same, I tried. He’d been young once, I told myself. He’d been in love, in lust, whatever. I brought him beer from the fridge; made tea; sat for hours in front of his favorite TV shows (Knight Rider, The Dukes of Hazzard) in the hope of something other than blankness. But John Snyde was sinking fast. Depression enfolded him like a crazy quilt; his eyes reflected nothing but the colors from the screen. Like the rest of them, he barely saw me; at home, as at St. Oswald’s, I had become the Invisible Man.
Then, two weeks into that hot summer holiday, a double catastrophe struck. The first was my own fault; opening a window onto the roof of the school I managed to trip the burglar alarm, and it sounded. My father reacted with unexpected speed, and I was nearly caught in the act. As it was, I got back to the house and was just about to replace the passkeys, when along came my father, and saw me with the keys in my hand.
I tried to bluff my way out of it. I’d heard the alarm, I said; and noticing that he had forgotten the keys, had been on my way to deliver them. He didn’t believe me. He had been jumpy that day, and he’d already suspected the keys were missing. I had no doubt I was in for it now. There was no way out of the house except past my father, and from the expression on his face, I knew I didn’t have a chance.
It wasn’t the first time he’d hit me, of course. John Snyde was the champion of the roundhouse punch, a blow which connected maybe three times out of ten and which felt like being hit with a petrified log. Usually I dodged, and by the time he saw me again he had sobered up, or forgotten why I had angered him in the first place.
This time was different. First, he was sober. Second, I had committed the unforgivable offense, a trespass against St. Oswald’s; an open challenge to the Head Porter. For a moment I saw it in his eyes; his trapped rage; his frustration; it was the dogs, the graffiti, the bald patches on the lawn; it was the kids who pointed at him and called him names; it was the monkey-faced boy; it was the unspoken contempt of people like the Bursar and the New Head. I don’t know how many times he punched me, but by the end of it my nose was bleeding, my face was bruised, I was crouching in a corner with my arms over my head, and he was standing over me with a dazed expression on his big face, his hands outspread like a stage murderer’s.
“My God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”
He was talking to himself, and I was too preoccupied with my busted nose to care, but at last I finally dared to lower my arms. My stomach hurt, and I felt as if I was about to be sick, but I managed to keep the feeling at bay.
My father had moved away and was sitting at the table, his head in his hands. “Oh God. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he repeated, though whether this was addressed to me or to the Almighty, I could not tell. He did not look at me as I slowly stood up. Instead he spoke into his hands, and although I kept my distance, knowing how volatile he could be, I sensed that something had broken in him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, now shaken by sobs. “I can’t take it, kid. I just can’t—fucking—take it.” And with that he finally brought it out, the last and most terrible blow of that miserable afternoon, and as I listened, first in astonishment, then in growing horror, I realized that I was going to be sick after all, and rushed out into the sunlight, where St. Oswald’s marched interminably across the blue horizon and the sun trepanned my forehead and the scorched grass smelled like Cinnabar and all the time the stupid birds sang and sang and would not stop singing.
2
I suppose I should have guessed. It was my mother. Three months ago she had begun to write to him again, in vague terms at first, then in more and more detail. My father had not told me of her letters, but in retrospect, their arrival must have coincided more or less with my first meeting with Leon and the beginning of my father’s decline.
“I didn’t want to tell you, kid. I didn’t want to think about it. I thought that if I just ignored it, it might just go away. Leave us both alone.”
“Tell me what?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Tell me what?”
He told me then, still sobbing, as I wiped my mouth and listened to the idiot birds. For three months he had tried to hide it from me; at a single blow I understood his rages, his renewed drinking, his sullenness, his irrational, homicidal changes of mood. Now he told me everything; still holding his head in his hands, as if it might break open with the effort, and I listened with increasing horror as he staggered through his tale.
Life, it seemed, had been kinder to Sharon Snyde than it had to the rest of the family. She had married young, giving birth to me only a few weeks before her seventeenth birthday, and she had been just twenty-five when she left us for good. Like my father, Sharon was fond of clichés, and I gathered that there had been a great deal of hand-wringing psychobabble in her letters; apparently she needed to find out who she was, conceded that there were faults on both sides, that she had been in a bad place emotionally and claimed a number of similar excuses for her desertion.
But she had changed, she said; finally, she had grown up. It made us sound like a toy she
had outgrown, a tricycle perhaps, once loved, but now rather ridiculous. I wondered if she still wore Cinnabar, or whether she had grown out of that too.
In any case she had remarried, to a foreign student she had met in a bar in London, and had moved to Paris to be with him. Xavier was a wonderful man, and both of us would really like him. In fact she would love us to meet him; he was an English teacher in a lycée in Marne-la-Vallée; was keen on sports; adored children.
And that brought her to her next point; although she and Xavier had tried and tried, they had never been able to have a child. And although Sharon had not had the courage to write to me herself, she had never forgotten her Munchkin, her sweetheart, or let a single day go by without thinking of me.
Finally, Xavier had been convinced. There was plenty of room in their apartment for three; I was a bright kid and would pick up the language with no difficulty; best of all I would have a family again, a family that cared, and money to make up for everything the years had denied me.
I was appalled. Almost five years had passed; and in that time the desperate longing I had once felt for my mother had moved toward indifference and beyond. The thought of seeing her again—of the reconciliation for which she apparently dreamed—now filled me with a dull and cringing embarrassment. I could see her now, with my altered perspective; Sharon Snyde, now with a new, cheap lacquer coating of sophistication, offering me a new, cheap, ready-made life in exchange for my years of suffering. The only problem was, I no longer wanted it.
“You do, kid,” said my father. His violence had given way to a mawkish self-pity that offended me almost as much. I was not fooled. It was the banal sentimentality of the hooligan with MUM and DAD tattooed across his bleeding knuckles; the thug’s indignation over some child molester in the news; the tears of the tyrant at a run-over dog. “Ah, kid, you do. It’s a chance, see, another chance. Me? I’d take her back tomorrow if I could. I’d take her back today.”
“Well I wouldn’t,” I said. “I’m happy here.”
“Yeah. Happy. When you could have all that—”
“All what?”
“Paris, and that. Money. A life.”
“I’ve got a life,” I said.
“And money.”
“She can keep her money. We’ve got enough.”
“Yeah. All right.”
“I mean it, Dad. Don’t let her win. I want to stay here. You can’t make me—”
“I said all right.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
But I noticed then that he would not meet my eye, and that night when I took out the rubbish I found the kitchen bin filled with scratch card stubs—twenty of them, maybe more; Lotto and Striker and Winner Takes All!—shining like Christmas trimmings among the tea leaves and spent tin cans.
3
The Sharon Snyde problem was the culmination of all the blows that summer had dealt me. From her letters, which my father had kept from me but which I now read with growing horror, her plans were well advanced. In principle Xavier had agreed to an adoption; Sharon had done some research into schools; she had even been in touch with our local social services, who had relayed such information—concerning my school attendance, academic progress, and general attitude to life—as would strengthen her case against my father.
Not that she needed it; after years of struggling, John Snyde had finally given in. He rarely washed; rarely went out except to the chip shop or the Chinese takeaway; spent most of our money on scratch cards and booze; and during the next couple of weeks, became increasingly withdrawn.
At any other time I might have welcomed the freedom his depression gave me. Suddenly I could go out as late as I wanted, and no one questioned where I had been. I could go to the cinema; to the pub. I could take my keys (I’d finally had a set of duplicates made after that last disastrous episode) and roam St. Oswald’s whenever I wanted. Not that I did much of that, however. Without my friend, most of the usual pastimes had lost their appeal, and I rapidly abandoned them in favor of hanging out (if you could call it that) with Leon and Francesca.
Every pair of lovers needs a stooge. Someone to keep watch; a convenient third party; an occasional chaperone. I was sickened, but I was necessary; and I nursed my breaking heart in the knowledge that for once, for however brief a time, Leon needed me.
We had a shack (a “clubhouse,” Leon called it) in the wood beyond St. Oswald’s playing fields. We had built it off the path, on the remains of someone else’s long-abandoned den, and it was a neat little place, well camouflaged, with half-log walls and a roof of thick pine branches. It was there that we went, I keeping watch, smoking and trying not to listen to the sounds that came from the little shack behind me.
At home, Leon played it cool. Every morning I would call for them on my bike, Mrs. Mitchell would pack us a picnic, and we would make for the woods. It looked quite innocent—my presence made it so—and no one guessed at those languid hours under the leaf-canopy, the muted laughter from inside the shack, the glimpses I had of them together, of his naked rye-brown back and sweetly dappled buttocks in the shadows.
Those were the good days; on bad days Leon and Francesca simply slipped away, laughing, into the woods, leaving me feeling stupid and useless as they ran. We were never a threesome. There was Leon-and-Francesca; an exotic hybrid, subject to violent mood swings, to fierce enthusiasms, to astonishing cruelty; and then there was me; the dumb, the adoring, the eternally dependable stooge.
Francesca was never entirely happy at my presence. She was older than I was—maybe fifteen. No virgin, from what I could tell—that’s what Catholic school does to you—and already she was besotted with Leon. He played on that; spoke gently; made her laugh. It was all a pose; she knew nothing about him. She had never seen him throw Peggy Johnsen’s trainers across the telegraph wire, or steal records from the shop in town, or pitch ink-bombs over the playground wall onto some Sunnybanker’s clean shirt. But he told her things he’d never told me; talked about music and Nietzsche and his passion for astronomy, while I walked unseen behind them with the picnic basket, hating them both but unable to leave.
Well of course I hated her. There was no justification. She was polite enough to me—the real nastiness always came from Leon himself. But I hated their whispers; that shared heads-together laughter that excluded me and ringed them with intimacy.
Then it was the touching. They were always touching. Not just kissing, not making love, but a thousand little touches; a hand on the shoulder; a brush of knee against knee; her hair on his cheek like silk snagging Velcro. And I could feel them, every one; like static in the air; stinging me, making me electric, making me combustible.
It was a delight worse than any torture. After a week of playing gooseberry to Leon and Francesca, I was ready to scream with boredom, and yet at the same time my heart pounded with a desperate rhythm. I dreaded our outings but lay awake every night, going over every small detail with agonizing care. It was like a disease. I smoked more than I wanted to; I bit my nails until they bled. I stopped eating; my face developed an ugly rash; every step I took felt like walking on glass.
The worst was that Leon knew. He couldn’t have failed to see it; played me like a tomcat showing off his mouse, with the same carefree cruelty.
Look! Look what I got! Watch me!
“So what d’you think?” A brief moment out of earshot—Francesca behind us, picking flowers or having a pee, I can’t remember which.
“What about?”
“Frankie, you moron. What do you think?”
Early days; still stunned by developments. I flushed. “She’s nice.”
“Nice.” Leon grinned.
“Yeah.”
“You‘d have some, wouldn’t you? You’d have some, given half a chance?” His eyes were gleaming with malice.
I shook my head. “Dunno,” I said, not meeting his gaze.
“Dunno? What are you, Pinchbeck
, a queer or something?”
“Fuck off, Leon.” The flush deepened. I looked away.
Leon watched me, still grinning. “Come on, I’ve seen you. I’ve seen you watching when we were in the clubhouse. You never talk to her. Never say a word. But you do look, don’t you? Look and learn, right?”
He thought I wanted her, I realized with a jolt; he thought I wanted her for myself. I almost laughed. He was so wrong, so cosmically, hilariously wrong. “Look, she’s okay,” I said. “Just—not my type, that’s all.”
“Your type?” But the edge had gone from his voice now. His laughter was infectious. He yelled, “Hey, Frankie! Pinchbeck says you’re not his type!” then he turned to me and touched my face, almost intimately, with the tips of his fingers. “Give it five years, mate,” he said with mocking sincerity. “If they haven’t dropped by then, see me.”
And then he was off, running through the wood with his hair flying out behind him and the grass whipping crazily against his bare ankles. Not to escape me, not this time; but simply running for the sheer exuberance of being alive, and fourteen, and randy as hell. To me he looked almost insubstantial, half-disintegrated in the light-and-shade from the leaf-canopy, a boy of air and sunshine, an immortal, beautiful boy. I could not keep up; I followed at a distance with Francesca protesting behind and Leon running ahead, shouting and running in great impossible bounds across the white hemlock-mist into the darkness.
I remember that moment so very clearly. A fragment of pure joy, like a shard of dream, untouched by logic or events. In that moment I could believe we would live forever. Nothing mattered; not my mother; not my father; not even Francesca. I had glimpsed something, there in the woods, and though I could never hope to keep up with it, I knew it would stay with me forever.