Life: An Exploded Diagram

  Ruth and George had fled the shameful display in the square and gone home. They’d stopped answering the phone, unable to face any more calls about Win. Just before five o’clock, a police car stopped outside the house and two officers knocked at the front door. Ruth assumed their business concerned her humiliated mother, and it took her some time to grasp what they were telling her. When it sank in, she sank with it. She fainted and fell backward against George, who was unable to take her weight. He also fell backward and was pinned to the floor by his stout wife. After an ungainly struggle, he was freed by the policemen.

  During that Sunday afternoon, the square had filled with people. Must have been all of Borstead there, Goz said, and more besides. The piss-taking and joking gradually died out, and it got very quiet. It was like everyone was listening to mad Enoch Hoseason reading out that crazy stuff about plagues and earthquakes and Beast number 666 and all of that. But you could see that the Brethren were suffering, getting knackered. Fighting off doubt. Now and again some of them would start to moan, “Let it come, Lord; let it come.”

  Goz said that the atmosphere got weird. Some of the onlookers started encouraging the Brethren to stick at it. Like they’d started wanting the Bomb to drop, too. Two carloads of police arrived to reinforce P.C. Newby, but they didn’t interfere. The Reverend Underwood had a heated discussion with them, then stormed off, waving his arms about.

  Come evening, with the light going and a thin drizzle falling, the crowd started to dissipate. Goz went home and had his tea and returned to the square. There was still a good number of people there. Hoseason was still reciting, but some of his followers were clearly in a bad way. Doreen Pullen, who ran the Cosy Tea Shop, unlocked her premises and carried chairs out and persuaded some of the Chosen — including Win — to sit. She also brought cups of tea and rather dry slices of cake, but these were refused. Someone draped a coat over Win’s shoulders, and she didn’t cast it off. Goz was puzzled that none of us — Ruth, me, George — were there. He went to the phone box at the top of the square and called our house. (He got no reply, of course. By then, my parents were arriving at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital.) Newby and one of the police cars had disappeared; the remaining three officers were enjoying Doreen’s hospitality.

  There was muted talk of an explosion — another one of them mines — on Hazeborough beach.

  By the time the church clock struck eleven, the Brethren were wet, wilted, and dejected. Hoseason and his brother were the only two left standing. Enoch was now on his twelfth recitation of the book of Revelation, and his voice was as coarse as the rasp of a file on a horse’s hoof.

  At the last stroke of midnight he fell silent and lifted his face to the rain. Some of the few remaining onlookers applauded, self-consciously. Most of the Brethren were now asleep or semiconscious on chairs or the ground. Enoch and Amos went around the circle, shaking them vigorously. Some responded; some did not. Then the two brothers, alone and caring not who followed, walked away in the direction of Angel Yard. Halfway there, on the pavement outside the Star Supply Stores, Enoch stopped dead and fell on his knees and cried brokenly, “‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’”

  Amos helped him to his feet, and they went on.

  Win was left slumped on one of the Cosy Tea Shop’s bentwood chairs. Goz was by now very perturbed that we were not there to get her home. Then Chrissie Slender and the poacher, Bert Emery — with whom she lived in sin — stepped out of the darkness and helped her into Bert’s van.

  Some weeks later, Goz reported that Enoch Hoseason had disappeared from Borstead. The rumor was that he’d moved to the West Country, presumably to found another sect in preparation for the next end of the world.

  It was during that same visit that Goz told me he’d heard that Frankie had gone to America for treatment at some special clinic. He didn’t know where.

  I progressed from bed to wheelchair (Goz whizzing me along the hospital corridors in defiance of all protocol) to crutches.

  I went back to Newgate at the end of September 1963. By then I needed only a walking stick. My new nickname was Frankenstein, and I answered to it, causing embarrassment. (Although, one day a Maggot burst into tears when he looked at me, and that hurt.) Tash Harmsworth and Jiffy and Poke Wilkins gave me extra tutoring. My right hand was undamaged. Writing and drawing were okay. Painting was more difficult then. Too much color mixing, too much changing hands.

  I was solitary, dislocated. My few school friends had left at the end of the summer term. Goz was at Cambridge, the first person from Millfields to go to university. And thus getting higher Above Himself than anyone from the estate had ever been before: a working-class Icarus.

  The months in the hospital, the surgery, the physiotherapy, the obsession with physical and mechanical functions, had left me emotionally numb. Clumsily robotic. It was as if the last general anesthetic hadn’t worn off. But, slowly and surprisingly, school woke me up. I started to feel again, to reassemble myself. Often I wished that I hadn’t. At the core of the wreck of who or what I was, there was a vacancy, an absence whose name was Frankie. My rediscovered feelings had nothing to attach themselves to, no purpose. They were like a wardrobe full of a dead man’s clothes. My parents treated me with careful circumspection, as if I were a delicate and rather embarrassing alien visitor from a remote star entrusted to their care.

  Because I found it difficult to paint, I was not going to do very well at the A-level exam. My portfolio of drawings (many of which featured a stylized girl’s body in dark imaginary settings) was good, though. Jiffy had a word with his old art college, and they gave me a place.

  I left Norfolk for London without a backward glance, with my paltry possessions in a suitcase that looked like leather but was made of pressed and laminated cardboard. I had fifteen pounds, cash, in my pocket and a council grant worth ten pounds and ten shillings a week. George was quietly outraged. It was pretty much half what he earned, and he didn’t get to look at girls with no clothes on.

  I loved the late 1960s. We all did. It was like stepping out of a black-and-white movie to find yourself standing on sunlit uplands full of color. But for me, personally, the crucial and life-changing thing was that it became compulsory for young men to have long hair. I gratefully hid most of my face behind Cavalier-style black locks and peered out at the world from between these curtains with greater confidence. In 1969 I was working as a designer for an early “style” magazine near Covent Garden. One of the writers was a very pretty girl who sometimes wore thigh-length maroon suede boots below her miniskirt. Her name was Julie. I was, it seemed, invisible to her, but one day we happened to be leaving work at the same time and she said, “Coffee bar or pub?” It was a hot July evening. The day before, an American called Neil Armstrong had stepped — well, sort of hopped backwards — onto the surface of the moon. This was only slightly less amazing than the fact that Julie Hendry had spoken to me. It was a great deal less amazing than the fact that after a couple of drinks and a meal at an Indian restaurant, she came back to my flat with me.

  She was amused that I kept my dope inside the hinged hump of a wooden camel.

  “Where’d you get this? Morocco?”

  “Yeah,” I lied.

  The following summer, word spread of a free music festival near Glastonbury, in Somerset. Julie and I traveled down there with a couple of friends in their wagon, an old post office van painted all over with rainbows and BAN THE BOMB signs. The festival site was on a farm. It was a strange scene; “far out,” in the parlance of the times. A rural landscape a bit like Norfolk: long low hedges, willow and chestnut trees, gently rolling fields, cows. And winding through it an erratic parade of longhairs: guys in headbands and pastel-colored bell-bottoms and stack-heeled boots, barefoot girls in minis or translucent cheesecloth skirts, their faces decorated with stars and flowers. The mingled odors of dung and hashish, the sound of the Grateful Dead on the wind. As we neared the field where the stage had been set up, we saw, just ahead of
us, a merry mob gathered around a bald but bearded man dressed in black. I assumed he was some sort of performer because he was attracting a great deal of laughter and applause. Then I recognized him. He was standing on a sort of dais with a densely lettered signboard in front of it.

  “Turn away!” he shouted. “Turn ye away from inebriation and fornication!”

  “No way, man,” someone called out. “We’ve come all the way from Birmingham for some of that!”

  Laughter.

  “Turn ye away, for ye stand at the very gates of Babylon, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth! She who sitteth upon the scarlet-colored Beast with seven heads and ten horns!”

  Cries of “Whooo!” and “Yeah!”

  A blond boy wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and a top hat turned to the gathering and said, “He’s got to be tripping, man.”

  A girl who was clearly not wearing a brassiere beneath her lace dress reached up to offer Hoseason a drag on her spliff. Someone else tried to tempt him with cider.

  I pulled Julie away.

  Apart from the reappearance of the Apocalypse Man, it was a great weekend.

  Julie and I married two months later at Camberwell Registry Office. Neither of us invited our parents. We were very happy for the first six years and not very happy for the next two and a half. She left me in May 1979, the day after Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister. It was a pretty rough week all around. I don’t blame her. (Julie, that is.) I’d always felt grateful to her for loving me, and gratitude isn’t a good basis for a marriage. Feeling grateful all the time will make you bitter eventually. She left me for a charming (and handsome) property developer called Martin. They’re still together. We exchange Christmas cards.

  I’d gone freelance by then. I was hardly ever out of work. At first I did anything and everything: graphics for newspapers and magazines, cookbooks, album covers, travel guides. Then I started to concentrate on book illustration and eventually started writing, too. Nonfiction. I don’t have much time for novels. Two of my books were taken up by an American publisher, and in 1990 I flew to New York to do promotional stuff. I fell in love with the city. By the simple trick of overwhelming me, it relieved me of my emotional luggage, like one of those superb hotel doormen pushing a cheap and careworn suitcase toward the gutter with his toe. In 1992 I sold my London flat and my studio, and I’ve lived in Upper Manhattan ever since. I have no regrets. I am content.

  I don’t know whether to call it courage or stubbornness or what, but Win went back to work at the laundry three days after the world had failed to end. I imagine she endured a great deal of mockery as well as pain in her gnarled old feet, although the white hat would have covered the shame of her cropped head. She served out her six months to retirement. When she left, she was given an elaborately written certificate confirming her forty years’ devotion to soiled clothes and sheets, a fancy teapot, and a pension of two pounds and twelve shillings a week. She devoted her remaining years to making my parents’ life a misery, by means of prayer and eccentricity and a calculated indifference to personal hygiene. She died, at home, in her sleep, in 1978.

  A week after Frankie and I were blown up and apart on Hazeborough beach, my father came face-to-face (or maybe side to side) with Gerard Mortimer in the toilets between the men’s and women’s wards of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital. Now, you’d think, wouldn’t you, that here were two men united in grief who might console each other. Might even defy male convention and embrace each other. Oh, no. They had a bitter, foulmouthed, and furious row that attracted the attention of the nursing staff. They were ushered out of the building onto the forecourt (I’d like to think they both still had their flies undone), where they continued their altercation until the police were summoned.

  George got his notice, and his outstanding wages, through the post two days later.

  When it was decided that I was unlikely to die, he went looking for work. Eventually he was employed by a small factory in Norwich that produced metal-alloy models of tanks and aircraft and soldiers. He bought a secondhand Ford Popular to travel back and forth in. It was an absolute pig to start in the winter. Ruth had to go out in her dressing gown and Wellies and shove the damn thing, with George pumping at its pedals, until it fired and farted off up the road, leaving her shapeless and breathless inside a small cloud of exhaust.

  In 1983, two months before he was due to retire, George had a heart attack in the factory storeroom, where he’d gone for a quiet smoke. Falling to the floor, he dragged a number of boxes from the shelves and died under a scattering of samurai warriors and Prussian cavalry.

  Ruth never quite recovered from the double blow that she’d suffered on October 28, 1962. Both Win and I had shamed her. Photographs of our different embarrassments had appeared in the Eastern Daily Press and the North Norfolk News. Smaller reports found their way onto the inside pages of the more vulgar national newspapers. Illicit sex and spectacular religious mania: not the kind of activities that would enhance your status on the Millfields estate. Especially if you were a family with a reputation for getting Above Itself. So Ruth became more and more reclusive. Conveniently — because she was looking after her mother — it became increasingly difficult for her to leave the house. Fortunately, it was still the age of the delivery van. Butchers and fishmongers and greengrocers and coal merchants and milkmen cheerfully supplied her and took the money she proffered through the half-opened back door. When such tradesmen disappeared from the streets, she came to rely on her neighbors and the telephone. She ordered clothes and shoes from the Littlewoods mail-order catalog.

  She spent the last twelve years of her life alone, never venturing farther from the house than the end of the garden. The telly increasingly obsessed and satisfied her. She planned her week from the TVTimes and grew very fat on sweets and biscuits. In 1995, halfway through Countdown, her brain choked on an anagram and she fell sideways onto the sofa. Two hours later, a neighbor who’d failed to get an answer from Ruth’s phone came to the house and found her unconscious.

  I flew back from New York the following day. I was sitting by her hospital bed, drawing her, when she died.

  Goz surprised us all by becoming an actor. And surprised me even more by becoming a bit of a star. At Cambridge, he’d performed with the Footlights, then joined a repertory company as a do-anything dogsbody. “Assistant stage manager” is the correct term, I believe. He wrote to me now and again during my years with Julie. I may have replied once or twice; then we lost touch. Years later I went with friends to see a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Twelfth Night at the Aldwych. Goz was playing Malvolio. He’d changed his name, and it was well into the second act before I recognized his body language, saw through his beard, remembered his voice, and realized that it was him. I almost got to my feet and yelled, “Goz! What the hell are you doing up there?” He’s rather famous because in middle age he got to play, on TV, the part of a melancholic and alcoholic detective who always gets his man but never gets the girl. He has the perfect face for it, a slumped face you couldn’t lift into a smile with the help of a crane. Actually, he’s just about the happiest man I know. His show is in its sixth series, it’s an international hit, and he’s loaded. He writes and directs plays, too. Last year he was here in New York, directing and performing in an off-Broadway production of his play Brethren. We had dinner at Le Bernardin. He slupped the oysters like an expert. On my increasingly rare visits to England, I stay with him and his partner, David, at their home in Surrey.

  And the Cuban Missile Crisis?

  Well, it petered out. The truth is that Nikita Khrushchev was not the reckless and brutal barbarian that Kennedy had taken him for. He’d lived through the Second World War, in which more than twenty-five million Russians had died, one of them his son. He was no more eager for Armageddon than Kennedy was. It’s clear, now, that he never intended to hand control of the Soviet missiles over to that wild boy Fidel Castro. And, despite all his bluster and huffing and puffing, the
fact is that as soon as Kennedy announced the sea blockade, Khrushchev gave orders that no Russian ship was to cross it. He knew the game was up. He argued, of course, that he’d won. He’d given the Americans a taste of their own medicine. Taught them what it felt like to have enemy missiles parked on your doorstep. He’d frightened them. He’d put the hedgehog down Kennedy’s shorts. Plus, he’d got Kennedy’s word to take the Yankee missiles out of Turkey. All in all, a good result. So, on Sunday, October 28, 1962, Khrushchev ordered the Cuban missiles to be dismantled, crated up, and sent home. When this decision was announced on Radio Moscow, the newsreader made it sound like a moral and military victory for the peace-loving Soviet people. (As he was speaking, two bloodied bundles of rags, previously known as Frankie Mortimer and Clem Ackroyd, were being wheeled through the doors of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital.)

  If the Russians had won, the Americans had won even better. The Soviet Union had backed down. The unwavering determination of the United States and the cool nerve of its young president had banished the Red Menace from the neighborhood. The brave frontiersman had stared down the grizzly bear and dispatched it, shuffling and grunting, back to its lair. So everyone was happy, and the cold war continued on its merry way.

  Actually, not everyone was happy. When Fidel Castro learned of the Russian “betrayal,” he kicked the walls and roared and trashed a mirror. And the hawkish U.S. military men were livid. On that Sunday, the air inside the Pentagon was thick and foul with curses. The generals were psyched up, erect, ready to go. The invasion of Cuba was scheduled for the following Tuesday, for Christ’s sake! And the goddamn politicians had screwed it all up.

  “This is the greatest defeat in our history,” crazy Curtis LeMay said. “We should invade Cuba today.”

  Much time has passed since then. A lot of blood has flowed under the bridge.