Just Ignore Him Read online

The pictures piled up, all naked boys together. My stepmother said that they were ‘vile’, but they just seemed sad, with nothing tender to be seen, no warmth or affection. There were occasional shy smiles in some but in others no faces at all, just limbs, buttocks and cavities, a smear of something here and there, and graphics in the corner saying ‘teen’ or ‘twink’ or ‘boy’ in various bright and breezy type-faces usually reserved for children’s television channels.

  I looked down at the PG Tips monkey on the seat next to me and its eyes met mine as if to say: ‘Do not implicate Unilever, my parent company, in this. They are a litigious multinational and will not take kindly to being depicted as the bearers of boy-cock action snaps, unknowing or otherwise, capiche, mister?’

  His face bore no such warnings. Blank, expressionless, regarding everything and nothing, just like mine. Stuck fast in a new phase of my existence, no idea what to do. Inert.

  There was movement outside the car. A farmer was striding towards me. There was a tractor waiting to go through the gate I was in front of. He looked amazed that anyone could be so adrift that they wouldn’t notice his chugging power plant, his throbbing pipes, his flashing lamps.

  ‘I’ll move,’ I said.

  I didn’t want him to come any closer.

  ‘You can put it over there,’ he said.

  ‘It’s okay, I’ll move it!’

  We were both shouting.

  ‘You can park in that one!’

  He was pointing at the entrance on the other side of the road. He had two cars behind him. I could see the faces of the drivers. I was clearly visible but I’d managed to hide the porn I’d been staring at, by an empty field, in the middle of the day.

  I started the engine and surged alarmingly across the lane into the other entrance and then reversed without coming to a stop, before setting off the way I’d come, fighting the urge to accelerate up to eighty or ninety miles an hour. My dad liked to drive fast, he got me into cars. I could speed along until no one was behind me and then unseal the electric sunroof and lift the pictures clear of the opening into the wind before releasing them like a vapour trail of depravity, followed by the monkey.

  But I didn’t eject the evidence, because among all those images of boys, presumably taken by men, there were four photographs of a long-legged man in his forties. He was posing, not quite proudly, in tiny red briefs, as close to nude as he dared, given that the photos would have had to be developed at the chemist. In two of them he was standing, in a third he was on his haunches in a bathroom, trying to grin, now in tight blue undies, and in the fourth he was sitting on a sunny balcony, smiling happily, his pants now off and placed on his genitals, a turquoise blob of fabric.

  Who had taken these holiday snaps? Or were they self-portraits done on a timer? Not that last one, I’d have thought. Who can run back into position before the viewfinder, casually cross their legs in a spontaneous display of giddy relaxation, and then balance a screwed-up posing pouch atop their middle-aged cock and balls, all in ten seconds?

  That turquoise was familiar, our windowsills were painted that colour at home when I was growing up, and I recognised the holidaymaker in the pictures too.

  I’d seen him only recently, on his way to fill a birdbath.

  Tables

  Maybe my mother thought I was dead, since I wasn’t responding to her cries. She came barrelling into the living room at top speed, wearing an anxious look I hadn’t seen before. Crawling about beneath the table in the bay window, I’d become tangled among the gate-legs that pulled out either side to support a pair of drop leaves. As I bumped about, the vase on top fell over. A big, white, Art Deco thing, with bulging sides in sections, creating the impression of wavy lines going from top to bottom. Mum had put some flowers in it, yellow ones.

  I was frozen in fear and looking at the doorway before she arrived, expecting to be in trouble, since she’d shouted and then come running. She was going to be cross about the vase, though I don’t remember it being broken or even any water from the flowers dripping down. That I expected her concern to be the china, not me, might say something about how I saw myself in the household pecking order, aged three. Or it might mean I broke a lot of stuff and was used to people, not me, picking up the pieces. I do remember breaking a light fitting once, years later, but she was dead by then so I just lied about it to my dad, since he would be livid either way.

  Maybe I had seen that anxious look on Mum’s face before, I don’t remember, but it was an unexpected delight that she coaxed me out from under the table and hugged me, not even looking at the vase, comforting me when she realised I was frightened by the crash and the shout and the running and the thought that I’d broken something. Her relief flooded over me and, in the mysterious world of emotional alchemy, transformed inside me to joy.

  That is a memory of love, I know what love feels like, it feels like that.

  The main table in our house was not that gate-leg one in the window, with flowers from our garden sitting on top in a nice old vase, it was the dining table at the other end of our knocked-through downstairs rooms. The house was built in the thirties, a detached suburban home we’d moved to in 1968, in time for my sister to be born in the back bedroom that November. I don’t know if she was there at the time of gate-leg-table-gate, if she wasn’t then Mum might have been pregnant.

  You could release a catch on either side of the dining table and pull the ends apart. A middle section would rise up, and unfold into the gap to make the table bigger if you had visitors. I don’t remember the visitors.

  It was an impressive sight, the emerging slab of timber, and there was an element of risk as a small child might stray underneath during the lifting. ‘Mind your fingers’ was a frequent cry in our house, usually in doorways but at the table too.

  I have no memory of my mum at the dining-room table. This seems inconceivable. Where did she sit when we ate? I do remember her in her bedroom, attaching stockings to a girdle that looked like a parachute harness. Sitting at her dressing table, being called ‘Darl’ by my dad. I remember her in the kitchen, making jam, and then jam tarts, and letting me bang saucepan lids together like the man on the cymbals in Trumpton. I remember her putting me in the bath when I still had socks on, and how my laughing made her laugh. I remember a blue plastic bucket with a lid and before you got in the bath she would hold the lid upside down so you could do a little wee into it, which she would tip into the basin. Better that than weeing in the bath. I remember her reversing her black Morris Minor Traveller into a ditch outside infants’ school and being inside the car while men pushed us back up on to Staples Road, which had Epping Forest running all down one side, and if we hadn’t stopped we might have rolled all the way to Dick Turpin’s old hideout, I imagined.

  But I don’t remember her at the dining table, though we must have had so many meals together, Sunday roasts and teatimes.

  I don’t remember a single breakfast with her.

  All the times she tucked me in, all the stories she must have read, but I don’t remember her in my bedroom.

  I was nearly six and a half when she died. Six years, five months and sixteen days, in fact, or six years one hundred and sixty-nine days, or two thousand three hundred and sixty-one days (including the leap years of 1968 and 1972). She was born on February 5th 1934 and was thirty-eight when the leukaemia finished with her, so she would have been a white-haired old lady by now, if she’d lived, but she might have died another way, of course, a vase falling on her head or something.

  I don’t see the point of leukaemia. Some diseases are using you as the host for a time and then they transfer to someone else, they survive that way, those pathogens, airborne or waterborne, jumping from person to person or cow to cow or rabbit to rabbit. But leukaemia just sets up a malfunction in you that you can’t survive. Nothing grows or thrives except tiny cell-size tumours inside your bones. No one knows what causes it. It’s a genetic mutation that occurs when you’re making jam or putting your kids in the bath.
The advice is: don’t smoke and eat more vegetables. That’s the best they can offer, even now in 2020, never mind 1972. My mother did not smoke and was in the greengrocer’s almost daily. What a pointless thing it is. And people say they don’t understand why there are wasps.

  It is thought that 90sr can cause that genetic mutation. It’s a radioactive isotope of strontium produced by nuclear fission and is of concern in the event of nuclear fallout or leaks. 90sr is known as a Bone Seeker. As far as I know, the nearest nuclear power station to us was Sizewell on the Suffolk coast, eighty-eight miles away. It opened in April 1967, thirteen months after I was born. They have nearly had leaks, and some radioactive material has been found on Southwold beach, but I don’t think we ever went there. Mum wasn’t caught out by a Bone Seeker, she just mutated by herself, like the X-Men, and her white blood cells went on the rampage.

  I do remember my dad at the dining-room table.

  ‘Lay me half a table, would you?’

  This meant putting a tablecloth halfway across, with a place mat (we had a set of six with cars on from the early twentieth century) and cutlery from the sideboard. He would then sit down with a boil in the bag chicken and mushroom casserole sloshed up next to some boiled (to submission) potatoes and frozen veg. If it was early enough he might watch MASH, and laugh at Hawkeye and Frank Burns, but usually he sat down in time for the Nine O’Clock News on the BBC. This meant it was time for bed, from where you could hear him copying the impressionist Mike Yarwood’s voice to mock the Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan:

  ‘I’m going to be perfectly blunt,’ and the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey:

  ‘What a silly billy.’

  Dad venerated Sir Winston Churchill and purred reverently every time we passed his statue, in the neighbouring constituency that he used to represent.

  The television was on a trolley so it could join us kids at the table at our earlier teatime, like the fourth sibling we all loved the most. We watched Crackerjack, Rentaghost, Blue Peter and Grange Hill, and just before the early news a final short children’s programme like The Magic Roundabout or Paddington.

  Then my brother would do his homework at the dining table. He wrote left-handed but curved his arm all the way around the top of the paper so his hand didn’t smudge or obscure what he was writing. With his right hand he held a clear six-inch plastic ruler in his mouth. The end was mangled and coated in saliva. There were constant sucking and chewing sounds that went on all through Nationwide and were often still a distraction during Terry and June at seven o’clock.

  During one session of bickering in the dining room my brother stood behind where I was sitting and held a glass ketchup bottle high up at arm’s length, as if he were about to smash it on the back of my head. We agreed that if he did I would probably die. I told him I’d rather be dead than in prison, which was where he would be going. Then I waited for him to do it. I actually thought he might, but I wasn’t going to move. I wondered if the glass would break and there would be red sauce everywhere. He said that it was ‘so tempting’, and I said, ‘Go on then.’

  It was a relief when he put the bottle down. I behaved like the victor for a while, as I was not dead, though in our house whether it was best to be dead or undead could be considered a moot point.

  After Mum was gone Dad put a half-size snooker table next to the dining table, a competition-standard dartboard on the wall, and then, in a new extension at the back, a full-size table tennis table. On the other side of new plate-glass sliding doors was a paved area with a wall you could hit balls against, and up the garden, past the swing, was a badminton court marked out in whitewash on the lawn and finally a wooden goal net he’d had made, standing in front of Mum’s rose bed.

  He liked sport.

  Despite his love of ballgames and motor racing, he did not download and print pictures of John Newcombe or Jimmy Greaves, or Denis Compton or Mike Hailwood, or any of his other heroes. I conclude that sport is his second favourite pastime.

  When we played Trivial Pursuit at the dining table and he landed on Art & Literature, he’d groan and say: ‘Oh no, Aaarrt and Litch-ra-chure’, in a voice that told you that art or literature alone were boring but together they were so life-threateningly tedious he couldn’t even speak properly.

  In a glazed bookcase in my dad’s bedroom were my mum’s souvenir books from Shakespeare productions at the Old Vic, dating from the fifties. Large hardbacks in dust jackets, filled with black-and-white photos of the actors, among them the dreamy Richard Burton who had turned down a Hollywood contract in order to play Hamlet at the Old Vic in 1953, when he was twenty-seven and Mum was nineteen. He also played Henry V, Othello, Caliban and Coriolanus, as well as Sir Toby Belch and Philip the Bastard. I’m not sure how many of those performances Mum saw but I remember my dad saying she went there, in his version of events, just to ogle Burton. I assume they didn’t go together, given that he used to say ‘Wich-ud Buurrdon’ in the same droning voice he used for Art & Literature.

  Perhaps she went with her younger sister or friends from home or from work. Typing-pool girls and secretaries who would go into London by train, work all day and then stay on to see a show. Nowadays Mum might have gone to university, but I learned from her cousin Michael that she was told by my grandparents that she had to go out to work, to bring money in. Eventually these young women would marry, from home, and go straight to live with their husbands. They weren’t so welcome in the workplace after that, and certainly once they’d had a baby they were never employed in a typing pool again. Mum could have gone somewhere to study Shakespeare, but maybe the sacrifices necessary for her parents to send her would have weighed too heavily, so she accepted her lot. Or perhaps it hurt her, to know that her intelligence and curiosity were to be curtailed before she even started.

  She’d have been good at Art & Literature, and given short shrift to Dad’s moaning. She loved Shakespeare, she loved Richard Burton and she loved me as well. So he hated Shakespeare, and Burton, and maybe he hated me sometimes, with my jaunty ways learned in her company as her little friend.

  Perhaps Mum loving me bothered my brother, too. There’s nothing to suggest she didn’t love him, but one day, when he was two, he pulled my pram over when I was asleep in it. Another time, long after she was gone, I was sitting at the dining table while my brother was playing darts, and I managed to become so irritating that he threw a dart at me. He deliberately missed, opting for a shot across my bows, and the dart stuck in the carpet in front of the sofa. Foolishly, given he still had two darts in his hand, I mocked his aim and his inability to go through with his threat.

  There were no darts thrown or bottles wielded over heads when Dad was at the table with us. When I was being annoying (not sure how, it just came naturally) he would turn to my brother and sister and say:

  ‘Just ignore him.’

  And they did. Dad chewed his food, with his cutlery resting on his plate and a solemn expression on his face, as the whole family watched Grandstand on a Saturday lunchtime. I would look at him, as he masticated faultlessly, knowing he could feel my gaze but wouldn’t acknowledge it, and my brother and sister tuned in to his wavelength and so I learned that I was to blame for all the sadness, all the pain, all the aching emptiness everyone felt. It was down to me mucking about, not Mum dying, not the mutation.

  It was tough to be ignored. I had to pretend that it wasn’t so hurtful that I’d still be thinking about it forty years later. I’d chirrup away a bit longer to keep the silence at bay until my dad ended that with:

  ‘If you haven’t got anything nice to say, just say nothing.’

  On one occasion I said:

  ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, n
othing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, (turn the page, there’s nothing to see here), nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.’

  And they still ignored me, no one cracked, they sat at the table and stared at the television.

  Could those bleak recollections of our dining table have overlaid memories of my mum, like the ash from Vesuvius that covered Pompeii?

  I have fonder memories of the gate-leg table because of the love I felt under there, and I can bring those memories back because I’m writing this in my own house, sitting at that same table.

  Fingers

  Mum must have felt she couldn’t turn her back on me, couldn’t leave me alone for two minutes. If I wasn’t bumping into furniture and knocking over vases then I was drinking detergent in the kitchen.