Just Ignore Him Read online

  Copyright

  Published by Little, Brown

  ISBN: 978-1-4087-1329-7

  Copyright © Alan Davies 2020

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Lyrics from ‘Back In My Childhood Days’ written by Max Bygraves, copyright © Sony Music Entertainment Australia Pty Ltd 2009. Lyrics from ‘Needle In A Haystack’ written by Stevenson-Whitfield, 1999 Universal Motown Records, a division of UMG Recordings, Inc. © 1999 Motown Records, a Division of UMG Recordings, Inc

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

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  CONTENTS

  Copyright

  Foundations

  Pictures

  Tables

  Fingers

  Hands

  Ashes

  Gardens

  Lanterns

  Scales

  Cigarettes

  Animals

  Pants

  Exams

  Beds

  Housekeepers

  Coins

  Stamps

  Songs

  Holes

  Buses

  Magazines

  Jokes

  Submissions

  Doctors

  Cards

  Acknowledgements

  An Introduction

  Foundations

  At Sunday School as a boy I saw a demonstration of the parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders from the Gospel of Matthew, in which one house is built on sand, and another on rock. This lesson came to mind when I was asked to write this introduction, and again each time I considered it. When one thought follows another there might be significance in the connection, but why this particular Sabbath from the early seventies?

  Two large trays were set on a table before a downbeat huddle of children in misshapen home-knitted jumpers, ill-fitting dungarees, and flared corduroys, all sat on the wooden floor of St Mary’s Church Hall in the collective fug of a community that bathed once a week and washed their hair in the bath water. We could see that one tray held a mound of sand, and that each supported an identical doll’s house. It was basic but good enough for an audience raised on the rudimentary ingenuity of BBC television’s Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set and Go Out and Do Something Less Boring Instead?.

  The telling of the parable began and a watering can was soon tipped out over the house on sand. Sadly, our teacher had no sidekick to play the Fool. They could have taken it in turns to drench each other’s houses, with the Fool having the worst foundations but all the best jokes. Such is life, we might have learned.

  Gravity took hold as the house sank on one side and then slid to the edge of the tray. The one on rock, or possibly breezeblock, withstood its downpour and the lesson was complete. A warning about the perils of subsidence had sunk in, so to speak.

  The forces of gravity are omitted from the Gospels so I hope it isn’t disrespectful to mention their role here. I missed the metaphor that this extreme weather event represented the trials and tribulations of life, examples of which may include false accusations, bereavement, and the vexations of strangers, as specified by St John Chrysostom, the fourth century Archbishop of Constantinople. Here was an influential Christian orator who considered homosexuality a sin worse than murder, practised only by the insane, and as such bears some responsibility for untold vexation upon strangers for centuries to come.

  The rock represented the strength that faith in the teachings of Jesus Christ might provide, but that was also lost on me. I took it as straightforward testimony to the importance of what we now call Risk Assessment. Still, I apply the parable, when pitching tents or laying down a picnic blanket, always alert to the lie of the land, if not to ant nests and cowpats.

  When I sat down to write this I still couldn’t understand what caused me to recall that Sunday, even though my early years were not ideal, and I was exposed to changeable meteorological conditions (a metaphor, you understand, for the trials and tribulations etc., etc.).

  Perhaps it’s that simple. The parable has stayed with me because I knew that my own foundations were unstable. Now we’re here, together, I’m inclined to point out the sand between our toes.

  Writing this book became a process of continual revelation as I realised that recollections set firmly in my mind were often wrong, such as the years in which my grandparents died. I carried on, because I felt there was something in me that was blocked up, or buried, and if I could scalpel it out I’d be free of it. Forever. It became more of an archaeological dig in the memory than surgery, because the growth was not operable. The condition was diffuse. I carried it in every molecule of my flesh and bones and in every thought and action, in my hunched, splay-footed walk, my lisping Essex accent, and my lack of belief in a God who might have sustained me if I’d listened to the teachings, instead of those wretchedly boring hymns.

  I could not purify the events of my early years, only organise this facsimile of them. If I were a stately home (intriguing enough to catch the eye, but in need of maintenance with many hidden parts beyond repair) this would be the guidebook, telling you a bit about what you are looking at and how it arrived at the condition it’s in. If I were an electrical appliance, this is the troubleshooting section of the manual.

  It’s your book to use as you see fit; prop up a table leg, soak up a spillage, start a bonfire, but I hope you’ll want to know what happens in the end, before you find other uses for the paper it’s written on. We can only be certain, after all, that we have each other’s stories and just in case there is no Kingdom of Heaven we best make sure we don’t carry too many burdens while we are here, and share our tales among ourselves.

  Alan Davies

  March 2020

  Pictures

  I’d been driving along country lanes for an hour. The area felt both familiar and unfamiliar. As if I’d forgotten it completely and yet could remember it all. I hadn’t been out here since I was a boy, when I was concerned only about the next corner and the one after that, as if the future was something you could rush towards and the past could be left behind. Later, I imagined that the past is not behind us at all, but unseen beneath our feet. We are supported by it as we walk, sometimes balanced, sometimes not, and if we tried we could reach below to grasp the person we once were. It might even be possible to pull them up to join us. Now I wonder if our past is always nearby, and our future too, and if we look carefully we can see both. But who wants to look carefully? There’s certainly no time for that when you’re racing along and there are trees rushing past that you could reach out and touch.

  Gripping the wheel with both hands, leaning forward in my seat, I’d expected to find a discreet place to pull over in five minutes. Lying next to me on the passenger seat was my father’s porn collection in a cloth carrier bag. The face of the PG Tips monkey, printed on its outside, looked up at me, giving nothing away.

  If I crashed into a tree and was trapped, needing to be cut free, lifted clear and laid on a stretcher, spark out or even dead, then this bag’s contents could change my life for ever, posthumously or otherwise. Was it too much to hope that the monkey would somehow seal the bag before the emergency services arrived, or that he could switch the contents, by sleight of knitted paw? He always seemed to have more about him than a real chimp in his
TV ads. But that would just be a fantasy to cling to, while being shoved into an ambulance by an underpaid paramedic (is it possible to overpay one, has that been tried?).

  There was more farmland out here when I was a teenager in the early eighties, tearing around in my Mini, looking for places to do handbrake turns. Now most of the openings on the side of the road led to private residences, with cameras at the gate to scrutinise the postman, the Pilates instructor, the pool cleaner and the minicab driver bringing domestic staff from the station (on account). If I pulled into an entrance my face might appear on a wall-mounted hi-def screen, in a box-fresh kitchen full of chef’s knives, as I rifled through old pornography like a furtive, greying pervert:

  ‘There’s a car blocking the gate. He’s just sitting there. He hasn’t pressed the buzzer … What’s he looking at? He’s got piles of pictures … OH MY GOD, the sick bastard. Are the kids upstairs? Dave, where are the kids? Get your cricket bat. DAVID?’

  I found an empty field and stopped parallel to a five-bar gate, with another similar opening across the road, and the car settled into silence. The interior warmed rapidly, the cold air turned off with the engine. All the roadside bushes were in leaf and insects flew about chaotically, looking for wild flowers, or aphids, or whatever they look for. Some have a single month of life, just one sight of the moon. Perhaps it feels like our three score and ten, their thirty-day turd-hunt, that’s if they’re not eaten by a blackbird on day one, or splatted by a motorcyclist’s visor on day two.

  The sky was blue, dotted with white fluffy clouds. It would be nice to come back as a cloud, in the so-called next life. People go on about returning as cats, or lobsters, or Golden Eagles, no one ever says a cloud. Drifting along on the breeze, watching the cars, and the cows, and the crop circles, before falling exhilaratingly to earth, rushing together into a stream and then being spirited up again. That’s a nice life, if you can avoid cisterns and urinals. It might even be pleasant to evaporate, a good way out. Maybe some water never disappears, stuck for ever in one existence. How awful.

  I thought about walking across the field, leaving the gate and the car door hanging open, all the way to the other side, hopefully days away, mile after mile of dry, brown, knee-high grass, then pushing through a hedgerow into an unburdened life replete with new memories, no bad ones, and somehow knowing the way home.

  Or the bad memories have sunk into a dank peat bog at the bottom of the brain where it’s always night, the sun can’t reach, and the learned lessons of life dissipate throughout the unwitting mind, into future behaviours, guiding us away from repeating errors, extinguishing the half-thrill that was part of a terrible time, so nothing appeals about returning, not even familiarity, and we learn but can’t recall how. This better, evolved brain can filter memory, detect remnants of rage or trauma, and sink them in the brain-bog where they are only echoes of what to avoid.

  I stayed in the car. The gate looked heavy and the cloud I envied had gone. I was in P for park. If there was no other life, before, during or after this, I needed to be ert not inert. I didn’t want to check out.

  A pristine white Range Rover Evoque appeared in my rear-view mirror, a fast-moving reminder that other people were out here, and this was not going to remain a private place. I sank into my second-hand car seat as this engineering marvel approached; it was over-equipped for this B road, but just the sort of vehicle you’d expect to see among all these large properties. Buying one is thriftless and I felt a pang of jealousy at the fearless spending it represented. The chucking away of money is beyond me, handicapped as I am by the pitiable passed-on characteristics of poor taste and bean-counting.

  This is the true inheritance tax of life. Behaviours and habits, ingrained, your own but not your own, a duty on your existence, a tariff to be levied on those who try to love you.

  As I waited for the Range Rover’s windblast I held on to the monkey bag, with its envelope full of my dad’s favourite photos. This was not an inheritance. It was contraband from a theft carried out by my stepmother. Dad had accrued this latest portfolio only after she had found one such image stuck fast in their home printer. He then admitted he had some similar items hidden in his built-in wardrobe. It turned out there were hundreds of pictures, which they had secretly burned in their back garden eight or nine years ago, when they were both in their seventies, shuffling about curiously in the night-time with a box of matches, making a pensioners’ Pact of Fire, blackening the lawn beyond the crazy paving where a magnolia tree once stood, all in lieu of the torching of their suburban reputation.

  Scorching that earth was an attempt to destroy clues to my father’s hidden nature, a side of him that I did not know about, and that she made him promise would be discontinued as he begged her not to tell anyone. But Dad spoke with forked tongue in the powwow before the flames, when he said his downloading days were done, and he continued to press print whenever his wife was out of the house, print, print, print, print, print (repeat).

  It wouldn’t be long before he noticed that this folder of pictures was missing. When I’d smuggled it out into my car he was carrying a jug across the patio, slowly, like a koala poisoned by eucalyptus, his old legs on show in old shorts, in order to pour water into a birdbath.

  My stepmother had already described to me, over the phone, some of the people in the pictures, with safe-for-work descriptions of their activities, and chosen to confide that many of them looked like me. I’d insisted I wanted to see all of it, and told her not to burn anything else. My siblings already knew about this collection, but they hadn’t seen it and wanted everything disposed of without looking. Their own status quo was good enough for them, and my stepmother too claimed she wanted it gone, but she had passed it on to me, so did she actually want everyone to know about it? Was I the sacrificial messenger?

  She put the folder into the monkey bag to minimise the risk of the contents blowing all over the neighbours’ block paving, as she played out a confused double game of revealing a hidden truth while trying to keep it a secret.

  Now that the Evoque had gone and I was in peaceful solitude, among the birds and the bees, I didn’t want to look in the bag. ‘I don’t think you’ll like it,’ my stepmother had said, but that wasn’t what was stopping me. Taking this step might shift too many supporting pillars in my emotional infrastructure, which already resembled a makeshift shanty town put together after a hurricane, with psychological corrugated sheeting and unbalanced blue tarpaulins. It lacked stability but it held, some new life had grown up around it, there hadn’t been a storm for a while and I didn’t want my shack of feelings blown down, like a little pig’s in a fairy tale.

  I looked at the face of the knitted monkey, took a breath, reached across and pulled out … my phone.

  I typed PG Tips into the search bar.

  Launched by the Brooke Bond Tea Company in 1930, PG Tips was marketed as Pre-Gest-Tea, to be drunk before meals to aid digestion. Such claims were subsequently outlawed but the PG brand remained and Tips was added in reference to the part of the plant used. Dad loves tea, he makes a sound of approval with every sip, but if he doesn’t have a teaspoon he’ll say: ‘I haven’t got a teaspoon,’ and my stepmother will hurry in from the kitchen to find him one in the sideboard, a few feet from his chair.

  I put my phone down and looked in the bag. There was a large manila envelope inside the folder and, having checked my wing mirrors several times for dog walkers, I slid out the contents. Now they were available to view, I stared through the windscreen, down the long straight road ahead, where some cyclists had appeared, four grown men in colourful skin-tight outfits. It seemed unlikely that they were in a race, more that they were pretending to be. They edged nearer in their garish amateur peloton, but they were a long way off, so I looked down at the first picture.

  It featured a boy of about fifteen, wearing an unsmiling expression and nothing else, kneeling on a bed looking straight at the camera, playing up a little with a manufactured sneer. He was a pinki
sh white colour, his dark hair cut short, his chest pale, with little muscle definition or body fat, not skeletal but not yet full-grown. He was at rest. There was no fake tan or waxed skin, just moles and blotches. I looked around the edges of the image for any sign of the website it had come from. There was no clue as to who this kid was, or where the picture was taken, or whether the law would consider him a child.

  Or whether his parents would.

  I realised that the cyclists were seconds away. I’d forgotten them, and everything else, as I looked at the picture. They were fast, could it be the Essex Police Road Racing team on a training ride?

  My window was down so I held the envelope and the photos against my chest, in case the slipstream from the peloton drew the pictures out to flutter across the countryside, some settling in hedges for schoolboys to find, others being snatched up by the gloved hand of a wannabe Bradley Wiggins. He’d look down at me across his handlebars, and I’d gaze up over his ventilated helmet, longing to be a cloud.

  I turned away to avoid eye contact. They went past. A fly bonked into my windscreen. I looked at the next picture.

  Two teenage boys this time, also naked and concentrating intently as they stared at the glans (from the Latin for acorn) of one as if it were independent of them both, in between them and readying to dock, like a shuttle nearing a space station.

  This was not a well-lit photo and there was evidently no art department on hand to choose bedclothes. Again there was no indication of where or who they were, or whether they should have been at school that day. But this one bore a logo in the corner, Teens, a word now made ugly, a mask of everyday normality thrown over a private peepshow. The font was swirly and colourful as on a child’s birthday card, with puffed-up letters squidging against one another.

  Does my father become excited when he looks at these joyless images created in squalid polyester bedrooms for secretive voyeurs? What a misstep in life for all concerned.