And then at 10:47 p.m., he crawled across the bed and turned the video camera on, saying, “So, jolly Dolly Wilde. Let’s see your dark side, then.”
Part II
13
I don’t think I’m going to tell this sex anecdote to Krissi. That’s what I’m thinking, in Dadda’s car, driving back to Wolverhampton for Christmas. Although I’m sure that, in time, this story will mature into something amusing, that I will tell at parties, to raucous laughter, right now, I don’t quite know what to make of it. I don’t know what my angle is. Every way I think about it at the moment, it feels like my “angle” is that I went and had really awful sex that was videoed by a man who has now twice been a bad night out—but that’s an unhappy thought, and I don’t like where it leads.
So my current policy is to not tell Krissi about it, and, indeed, not to think about it. I am locking this memory up in a box—like something radioactive. I am going to wait until the isotopes die down a bit, before I open it again. I feel—again, in a similar way to radioactive waste—that the technology has not yet been invented to deal with it, and so I’m going to entomb it in concrete, and wait until humanity has found a new and effective way to deal with shameful sexual memories. Whenever I have flashbacks—awful, sweaty, nightmarish flashbacks—I suspect this may take centuries. So I am not thinking about it at all.
In this endeavor, my father is being an inadvertently useful distraction, as he will not shut up.
“The thing about your mother is,” he says, rolling a ciggie with one hand, like a trucker, whilst overtaking a caravan, “is that she can’t have it both ways, yeah? You can’t shack up with the Cosmic Joker, then get huffy when he lets his freak flag fly.”
I say, mildly, “I think she was just a bit upset you bought this—admittedly very lovely—sports car,” and fiddle with the radio, to indicate I don’t care about his reply.
John’s song comes on—as it so often does, these days—halfway through the bit where he’s singing, “Well I survived this / Well I survived us!,” and the choir and orchestra come in, and drowns out my father’s reply. I have the same adrenalized stab I get whenever I unexpectedly hear him—a feeling that his ghost is in the room, and that, if I could finesse the tuning on the radio, he would suddenly manifest, wholly, next to me, roaring, “DUCHESS!,” and we would simply jump out of this moving car, and run away somewhere better.
I have not seen him for so long. The success of this song is what is getting between us. With each play, he is galloping a little farther away from me: if something doesn’t happen soon, in my career, to let me draw equal with him, I might never catch him up. I can’t wait until my first column appears in The Face. I am counting down the days. January 8th. That’s when my plan activates. Oh, wait for me! Don’t forget me! I am made of the same stuff as you! Soon, I will prove it!
I’m so bored of my father now. By “bored,” I mean “in a state of annoyance so extreme, I’ve had to crush all my emotions.” Honestly, it’s like living with a teenager. Two weeks ago, he went out to “revisit some old stomping grounds,” and just . . . didn’t come back. I didn’t really notice until 1:00 a.m., and then I was up until 6:00, envisioning him having been set upon by footpads, or finally being recruited into the IRA, which apparently happens every time he visits an Irish pub, and they clock the name, and the Guinness he’s inhaling.
“I always let them buy me a couple of pints before I say no,” he would say, returning home, shit-faced. “Good expenses, the IRA are on. Great hospitality. Good lads.”
This time, he finally comes home at midday, stinking of booze and weed, and owlishly explains he met a “cracking little dolly bird” and ended up going back to her flat.
“And you didn’t think to ring? To call?” I say, going full Maureen Lipman in the BT ads. “I’ve been up all night worrying about you!”
“Why would you worry about me, my love?” he asks, swaying from side to side, with his eyes pointing in different directions, like Nookie Bear.
I tell him to have a bath and get straight into bed, and I’m just about to tell him to give me his dirty clothes, so I can stick a darks wash on, before I realize that I am being a nineteen-year-old mother to a forty-five-year-old man who once confessed he’d beaten a man to death with a pool cue in a carpark—“Well, I presume he was dead. He wasn’t making any other wise-arse remarks about my hair. ‘Killer Hippy.’ That’s what they called me, heh heh heh”—and did what I increasingly did, in those days: left him to sleep on the sofa, in his own horrible miasma, whilst I went round to John’s house to comfort myself by folding up all his trousers, and putting them in a color-coded pile: darkest at the bottom, palest on the top. Sometimes, I kiss the fly buttons—but I want you to forget I just told you that.
When Dad and I arrive back at Mum’s for Christmas, Krissi’s already there—sitting glumly up the tree in the garden, with five-year-old David on his lap, trying to smoke “secretly” behind him.
“He’s driving me fucking mental,” I say, gesturing to the house, and Dad. “There’s no way he’s coming back with me to London. I’ve done my bit. We’ve got to get him to stay here.”
“That ain’t gonna fly, dog,” Krissi said ruefully, taking another deep drag on his fag. “Mum’s made him up a bed in the shed—by which I mean she’s just thrown a sleeping bag on the lawn mower—and she hasn’t bought a gammon.”
“She hasn’t bought a gammon?”
“She hasn’t bought a gammon.”
This is big, big news—a seismic event. For reasons that have never been made clear, for my father, Christmas is essentially a festival in celebration of gammon. Mum will buy a gammon joint, and Dad will spend days lovingly marinating it, boiling it, coating it in honey and spices, and then roasting it. It’s the one bit of cooking he does all year—the revering of the gammon. He will dote on it as one would dote on a child. Indeed, as my mother would always point out, with cheeringly festive hatred, “He’s spent more time pampering that gammon that he’s ever spent on any of you lot.”
This led to Krissi and me confessing to each other that, when she said that, we imagined her giving birth to five little gammons—all in knitted hats and booties—and that this is one of the many, many reasons we do not eat Dadda’s gammon: it would be like eating a sibling.
The main reason we do not eat the gammon is because our father will not let us eat the gammon. “It’s too orangey for crows,” he would say, lovingly wrapping it in tinfoil, and putting it in the fridge, before shouting, “No one touch my frigging gammon!”
Over the course of the festive period, my father would live almost solely on the gammon—accompanied by a variety of chutneys—and to walk into the kitchen at any point would be to find him hunched over it, carving off a slice, and looking like a dragon crouched on its pig-based horde. Given that the other mainstay of my father’s diet was a fry-up—bacon, sausage, and black pudding—we could only conclude that, in the world of pigs, he was essentially Hitler: responsible for a swine Holocaust over decades of a dedicated mono diet of pork. Oh, and pork scratchings. He loved pork scratchings, too. To him, The Three Little Pigs was not a fairy tale, but a menu. God, my father loved pork. The year I forgot to feed the dog her dinner, and she got into the kitchen and stole his gammon off the sideboard, was a brutal year indeed.
“ME GAMMON! IT’S HAD ME PIGGING GAMMON!” my father shouted, so angry, tears welled in his eyes, as he beat the dog with a broom. As it was Boxing Day, and the shops were closed, he had to drive over to my Uncle Steve’s house, and borrow some of his Christmas gammon. All the Morrigan men had Christmas gammons. That was their thing.
As you might imagine, Christmas was a desultory affair. With Mum and Dad still not talking to each other, the atmosphere is strained, and Dad is a particular liability, as he has nothing to do. Mum has requisitioned the TV—“As I’m the one who lives here, it’s my TV now”—and is watching Jules et Jim, thus preventing Dad from his usual festive watching of Das Boot with the sou
nd right up. And with no gammon to tend, either, he is entirely without occupation. I suggest to him that he take Lupin out and teach him to ride his bike, at which point he stands up, and goes to the pub.
Krissi and I try as hard as we can to make it magical for the kids—we invent a game where you have to climb out of the bedroom window, onto the porch roof, and then jump down onto the lawn, which fills a good hour or two—but the Christmas dinner is undeniably poor: my mother has overcooked the turkey by a good two hours, and it’s as tough as string—and by Boxing Day, the effort of trying to cover up the seething hatred between my mother and my father is so exhausting, we decide to bunk off down the pub, too.
“After all,” as Krissi says, sipping on his first pint, “it’s a traditional part of Christmas, as a kid—your parents rowing with each other.”
“We shouldn’t disrupt that tradition,” I agree, clinking my pint against his.
It feels exciting—being able to leave the house at Christmas, and go to the pub.
“This is a definite developmental landmark,” I say to Krissi, after our third—around the time I’m starting to think that, next time “Fairytale of New York” comes on the jukebox, I will give the room the benefit of my Kirsty MacColl. “Being able to run away from a miserable house, and go to the pub.”
“You can kind of see why the old man does it,” Krissi says.
“Except he’s the one making the house miserable in the first place,” I point out. We both think about this for a while.
“Do you think we should reverse the polarity—invite Mum to the pub?” Krissi says. We consider this.
“The first thing she’d say is, ‘Oooooh, well aren’t I the lucky one—being invited to the pub by the cool kids,’” Krissi points out.
“She’d have a go at me eating these crisps, as well,” I say, pointing to the split-open packet on the table. “‘Laying down a fat reserve for winter, like a little bear?’”
We both shudder.
“Fuck Mum, then,” Krissi says, raising his glass, in toast.
“Yeah. Fuck Mum,” I say. “Fuck this Christmas. No fun. It’s been meager.”
“Just crackers and an old, dry bird,” Krissi sighs. “Which, incidentally, is the perfect description of Mum and Dad.”
The next day, with a slight hangover, I wake up to find Lupin squatting over my sleeping bag, on the floor, staring at me.
“How long have you been there?” I ask, lying as still and flat as can be, like a run-over badger.
“Hours,” he says. “There’s nothing else to do.”
I remember these levels of boredom from when I was young—before I could go out and have sex, smoke cigarettes and listen to hot loud bands. Krissi and I used to have a game called “Staring,” where we would lie on the floor. On the count of “Three!” we would open our eyes, and stare out of the window, at the telegraph wires going into the house, unblinkingly, for as long as possible, until we cried. The point of it was to stare so long, you cried. That was the fun bit. We enjoyed the crying. It was the most exciting option available to us.
“Can I talk to you?” Lupin said, assuming a businesslike air. He was eleven now—grown so much in the time since I’d left that I started to get the first intimations of what it was like to be one of those aunts, or uncles, who comes over to your house, and can only say, “Oh my God! You’re so big now! How did that happen? Where’s the little babba I knew?” over and over again. I’m not quite at that stage. But I can almost see it, from here.
“Absolutely,” I say, continuing to lie very still. I hope that, whatever this conversation is, it doesn’t involve me having to move, at any point. The rest of the house is so cold, and I have finally built up enough body heat in this sleeping bag to make the idea of leaving it very, very unappealing.
“I don’t have any stuff,” he says, continuing to stare at me.
“What do you mean—any stuff?”
“Any. Stuff,” he says. “All the things I put on my Christmas list—I didn’t get them.”
“What did you put on your Christmas list, honey?” I ask. “Action Man? A gun?”
“A coat,” Lupin says, blankly. “I need a coat. And shoes. And a bed.”
“What do you mean—a bed?” I say. I’m lying on the floor next to his bed. He has a bed.
“It’s not a bed. Look,” he says. He takes off the duvet, and mattress—and reveals four bales of Thomson Local directories, bundled in polythene wrap, on which three planks are balanced. These are what the mattress has been laid upon.
“They keep going apart,” Lupin said, illustrating this by putting the mattress down and sitting on it. He wriggles a little, and there’s a thud, and the mattress falls between the planks, and Lupin disappears.
“What happened to your other bed?” I ask.
“It broke,” he said, flatly. “Mum said you’d get me a new one.”
I see the news of my possible job at The Face has reached my mother, and she has made some calculations. It seems there is no such thing as something that is just “good news for Johanna.”
“She said you’ve got a new job now, and you’re rolling in it. She’s got a new job, too.”
“What’s that?”
“Delivering those,” Lupin says, pointing at the undelivered Thomson directories. We stare at them for a minute. They are very much not distributed across the local area.
“It was raining,” Lupin explains. He pauses. “Are you rolling in it?”
I consider this, for a moment. The short answer is no—I am overdrawn by £158.97—but my first Face column runs in two weeks, and that will be £250.
One of my favorite bits in any book, ever, is in A Little Princess, when sad orphan Sara wakes up in her freezing garret and finds that, overnight, it has been transformed by an anonymous benefactor, and that she is lying under a luxurious quilt, with a fire burning in the fireplace, and a new coat lies on a new chair. I vaguely remember she gets given a parrot, or a monkey, as a pet, too. It’s quite the lifestyle makeover.
Imagine being able to make it true!
“Come on,” I say, getting out of my sleeping bag, and crushing Lupin’s fat little face with my hand lovingly. “Let’s go rolling.”
Three hours later, Lupin and I return to the house in a taxi. A taxi! I didn’t even know they existed in Wolverhampton, but the man in the junk shop suggested we order one, just after we bought a single pine bed frame there, for £25.
Lupin is wearing a huge Puffa jacket—“THAT ONE!” he shrieked, when he saw it in C&A—and new trainers, which we had argued over immensely. He wanted white ones, and I—with all the wisdom of my nineteen years—told him they’d get all dirty cuffy immediately, but then he looked brave, and pretended he didn’t mind getting the sensible black ones I had picked out for him, and I suddenly became overwhelmed with joy at the idea of just fucking everything, and getting him the ones he dreamed of.
I never had the shoes I dreamed of when I was eleven. Mum and Dad insisted on buying me “boy shoes”—sensible brown lace-ups, that looked like horrible pasties—which I feel were the primary source of my belief that I was an ugly girl who could never have beautiful shiny shoes, such as the ones Leanne Parry had, and very possibly contributed to the fact that, eight years later, I had such low self-esteem that I thought it was okay to have bad sex with Jerry Sharp. If you don’t think you deserve pretty shoes, you don’t think you deserve pretty boys. The world, with its ugly shoes, has marked you as “generally accepting of disappointment.”
As I looked at Lupin’s sad face, I felt like Mr. Blunden in The Amazing Mr. Blunden: suddenly able to right a terrible historic wrong. In The Amazing Mr. Blunden, the plot is that he travels in time to stop two orphans burning to death. In this day, the plot is that I bought Lupin the impractical shoes he loved. I felt the two stories to be pretty much equal.
“You will never have sex with someone who makes you feel unworthy,” I whispered to Lupin’s back, as he danced up the path, into the hou
se, buoyant with New Shoe Joy. “I have seen to that, with your Magic Shoes. You will always think you are beautiful.”
Krissi and I assembled Lupin’s new bed whilst listening to Massive Attack, and drinking some whisky Krissi had bought, “for emergencies.” “And there’s no greater emergency than furniture assembly,” as Krissi pointed out.
Halfway through—at the sweatiest stage, when all the wing nuts were insisting on jamming at awkward angles, and I was having trouble singing the high notes quite as well as Shara Nelson—our mother came in, and leant against the door frame, and said, “Oh! I see Lady Bounty has been busy!,” and then moaned about how her bed was very uncomfortable, too.
“But that’s the thing about being a mother,” she concluded, with a sigh. “No one sees you as someone with needs.”
It was around that point that I ran out of nobleness, finished assembling Lupin’s bed, packed my rucksack, and got the bus to the train station, to go back to London. Krissi came with me—“I’m not staying here without you. If it ever comes to a court case with Mum, I want reliable witnesses as to how I killed her”—in order to get the train back to Manchester.
“My friend Suzanne says that our parents don’t have any boundaries,” I tell Krissi, as we wait on the freezing train platform, for our trains.
“That’s because you haven’t bought them any,” Krissi says. “Jo, if you haven’t bought it, it’s not in this family. It’s entirely your fault.”
14
The best thing about going home early, I reflect, later, on the train, is that I’ve left Dad behind. He was in the pub when I left. I’ve stranded him. Yes!
“He’ll have to stand on his own two feet,” I tell the dog, who’s sitting at my feet, chewing on an empty crisp packet.