Just Ignore Him Read online

  We still had an outside toilet and perhaps she’d just disappeared in there for a moment, out of the back door from the kitchen into the sideway, where a high fence of upright wooden planks separated us from the neighbours, then through a door in the side of the house with gaps at top and bottom. A string hung down to operate a bare light bulb. It was cold in there and three growths of fungus lived in the angle between the wall and the ceiling, curving out like the edges of different coloured dinner plates. I was told not to touch the fungi, even though I could never have stretched my little fingers right up there. We were also told not to touch any fungus in Epping Forest. A fear of poisoning had been instilled.

  Where I could reach, aged about three, was up above my head to a green plastic cup on the draining board in our kitchen. I could only just hook two of my fingers through the handle. It wasn’t my usual drinking cup, mine was orange, but it was identical otherwise and I lifted it down. There was a small amount of fluid in the bottom, not enough but I drank it all the same, expecting orange squash. It tasted wrong, I thought at first it was just undiluted, but then it was stinging and hostile and Mum was there, horrified, taking the cup away and asking me if I was all right and had I drunk any of it, as the detergent coated the inside of my throat. Perhaps she’d been washing something in the sink, out of my sight, and was using the cup to keep some sort of liquid soap in. It can’t have been bleach, which would have stripped the taste buds off my tongue in seconds; it was more like washing-up liquid. Maybe she’d gone to a neighbour for a squirt of theirs, as she’d run out.

  Should I drink water? Would I start to bubble and foam? Or was it better to rinse out, slosh around and spit, gargle, and spit some more? I looked at her with my mouth hanging open, tears everywhere, snot, panic, fear, a look that said:

  ‘Will I ever be all right? Will I ever be the same again?’

  And she looked at me, and her face said:

  ‘Will you ever be all right? Will you ever be the same again?’

  After more sluicing with tap water, my throat began to feel better. I stopped crying, she was looking at me; how nice to have the undivided attention of my mother. I don’t think that’s why I did it, although I had a baby sister to contend with by then so we can’t rule it out. I think I was just thirsty. There was no ulterior motive at work, at least not consciously. It’s an effective tactic for attention, drinking a domestic solvent, the house could have been flooding around us and Mum would still have been concerned about burns to my epiglottis, my soft palate, my trachea.

  Afterwards I had some squash, in my own cup. I watched her fingers turn the cold tap, and we were relieved that I hadn’t died and a tiny bit of distance opened up between us, to be closed again at the next crisis.

  If you wanted something to drink or to eat, or clothes to wear, or if you wanted to be put in the bath or helped on with your shoes, or if your homemade rabbit’s ears needed fastening (very tight under the chin since they were too small), then it was Mum’s fingers you needed. I watched those fingers all day long, her kneading and rolling of pastry, her peeling of potatoes, her donning of the oven gloves or the washing-up gloves or the gardening gloves. Those fingers were never in repose. They came at you with a hankie damp with saliva and cleaned round your mouth, they brushed your hair, rubbed a wet flannel over your face, pulled your mittens on string through your coat sleeves. They were snapping open the clasp on a handbag, snapping shut the clasp on a purse, twisting a lipstick, flipping open a compact and patting the inside with a pad, the wafting sweet smell of which is an olfactory memory I’d be afraid to be reminded of now, for fear of it being too sad to bear.

  Her fingers lifted the lids on her Wedgwood pots, threaded needles and sewed name-tags into clothes. They pushed giant safety pins through terry-towelling nappies (am I remembering my own or my sister’s?) and smaller pins into a pin cushion.

  They filled shopping baskets, with meat wrapped in paper, a long tin loaf from the baker’s and brown paper bags full of carrots and sprouts. They never boiled rice or stirred pasta, which Dad would not eat, they poured tea through a strainer, squeezed boiled fruit through muslin, whipped up egg whites for lemon meringue pie, lined cake tins, greased pans, stewed blackberries and apples, diced kidney into casseroles, chopped the fat off meat, chipped and fried or boiled and mashed potatoes, and placed fairy cakes in a line on a rack to cool before pulling the washing out of a top-loader with big wooden tongs.

  They sliced bread, buttered crumpets, stirred soup and pulled the skin off rice puddings. They pushed the middle of the silver top down on the milk bottle to make a lid, then set the dial on the milk carrier to let the milkman know how many pints, please. They swept and wiped and wrung out, they ironed and folded and carried to the airing cupboard, they lowered boys one at a time into a bath a touch below scalding before bringing them out pink and scrubbed to be dried by those fingers cloaked in coloured towels, ready for clean white sheets, to be tucked in and to sleep soundly in a way that would never be possible when those fingers were gone.

  Outside they snipped and pruned and tied back, they burrowed into the earth and settled new plants into beds, they eased weeds out by the root and held sweet peas to my nose so I could smile wide-eyed at their lovely scent. All the vulnerable little life forms she wanted to flourish and thrive did exactly that, prodded and pushed and watered and shown the sun, and when she was done she’d reach down and I’d reach up, my little fingers taking hold of one or two of hers instinctively, my arm rising as if gravity had let it go and our hands docking in silence, holding tightly, without thinking, fingers that belonged together.

  And then indoors again those fingers would take my hand and two of them would walk on my palm, ‘Round and round the garden like a teddy bear, one step’, up my arm, ‘two step’, further up, ‘and tickle you under there’, and I would giggle and laugh and she might do it again, or tell me which little piggy went to market and which little piggy ran all the way home.

  Ready to work, to do hundreds of things every day, those fingers, against their will, shrivel, weaken, can just place a pill on a tongue, slowly lift a glass to lips, they rest on the bed sheets, stilled by the body’s effort to save strength, to stave off frailty, to last a little longer, waiting to reach out and touch her children, who she never slapped or smacked or gripped too firmly or shook or grabbed, and who won’t now be brought to see her again, no more little fingers to reach out and marvel at, no scent of children, no stickiness, no grasping, nothing to hold as life slips out and poisoned blood rests still beneath those nails that plucked out tiny splinters. Then removed secretly by strangers to a wooden box and burned, not for fuel, not for warmth, only for convenience, scraped up and poured into a pot, put in the ground without a witness to mark the spot, never to be found, my ten little friends all gone.

  Hands

  My dad towered over me when I was a boy. He had a long and narrow trunk, topped with black foliage that was brushed down, parted, and held fast with Brylcreem. His hands were seemingly always by his sides, close to my head height. His tummy (never a stomach or a belly in our house) protruded, so he looked as though he was leaning back, giving an impression of arboreal hesitancy. I was a human epiphyte, a tolerated clinging dependant of no benefit to the host.

  He was oddly flat-handed. Not in palms-up supplication, and not with unusually shaped hands like pancakes. They were lifeless, with the fingers extended, hanging down, not curled in. He looked un-strong, as if he might struggle to hold on. Unlike my Action Man, who not only had gripping hands but also realistic hair.

  When driving, my dad rested the flat hands on the crossbar of the two-spoke steering wheel of his Austin Princess, a tinny piece of British engineering regression that was built (as if to symbolise national decline) by the next generation after the Spitfire and bouncing-bomb makers. He steered by calmly pushing this way and that on the wheel. He named all the cars we ever had Mo, short for motor, I suppose. ‘Come on, Mo’, when accelerating. ‘A nice run for Mo’, when belting down any straight road at an alarming rate. If we ever passed that white disc with a black line across, which The Highway Code tells you means the National Speed Limit applies, it was spotted with the cry: ‘Fast as you like!’ Not so much a cry, it was more a mimic of a yell, at spoken-voice level. He could never really be noisy; he was always constrained, unless he was whistling along to Max Bygraves songs in the kitchen, when he forgot himself. Despite his evident attachment to each car, Mo was always gone after two years to be replaced by a new Mo, in an effort to fend off the costs of depreciation. All costs pained him. It was in observing this bonding and casting aside that I could have learned not to trust my father’s expressions of affection. I missed that indicator, though.

  On a family outing, whether it was a short run to Epping or all the way to Venice via the Brenner Pass, I was always in the front passenger seat alongside him, perched up on a square of foam rubber, so the seatbelt wouldn’t run across my neck. The foam had been covered neatly by my mother using spare fabric she had stitched together. She could have stitched her children together too, perhaps, in another life. My older brother and younger sister were in the back because they could co-exist peacefully whereas I could not, with either of them.

  Sometimes I had to hold an Ordnance Survey map and I learned to identify churches, bridges, hospitals and railway lines. I was assigned to write in Dad’s red notebook when he bought petrol. The number of gallons and the mileage:

  ‘4 at—’

  Then when the petrol gauge reached the halfway point:

  ‘½ at—’

  He showed me how to work out the car’s fuel consumption in miles per gallon and I was delegated to write that in as well, ‘33’, perhaps, or ‘34½’. I forget now how he made that calculation.

  On a longer journey he’d have a homemade clipboard (with a bulldog clip at the top and a stubby pencil tied on with string) and he’d appoint me to write the time and distance covered at various points. The first always seemed to be:

  ‘Chingford – 3.’

  Chingford was consistently three miles from our house. We didn’t move and neither did it. But I dutifully noted its existence every time we passed through on the way to the North Circular. He preferred me to quietly scribble down already known information, rather than perhaps be in charge of finding some good music on the radio. Not that he was ever going to shout, ‘Turn it up!’ when ‘Brown Sugar’ came on.

  On one holiday drive up a mountain road, steering round his favoured hairpin bends, he asked something I didn’t properly hear so I said:

  ‘Pardon?’

  Since I was twelve and not yet sullen.

  He let out an exasperated breath as he glanced down to see which gear the car was in, and then repeated the question:

  ‘Am I in two?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, falling into the trap of issuing redundant information.

  ‘That wasn’t very good rally navigating.’

  That parental cosh was always close at hand.

  ‘Ask me again,’ I pleaded, giving him the chance to follow up with a scoffing noise. I’d failed a task and cruelly spoiled his enjoyment of the hairpin. He had never asked what gear he was in before and he never did again.

  He’d been an amateur Car Club navigator in the fifties and early sixties, often taking part in all-night rally events on deserted public roads. If we were going down a country lane, he’d say: ‘This is a good rally road,’ and I’d imagine him hurtling along in the passenger seat of a souped-up Ford Anglia or Mini Cooper, flat-handedly folding OS maps in the dark with a tiny torch between his teeth. His trophies from those days rested only briefly in the flat hands before being exhibited in a glass cabinet at home, where they have remained for over fifty years.

  He switched off his little torch, presumably at my mother’s request (instruction?), when she had babies. It seemed he could never muster the enthusiasm for his children that he once had for the rallying that had been terminated by their arrival. That he might be killed, and Mum left on her own with us, was her concern, though there could have been an upside to that outcome, provided she didn’t then go on to contract leukaemia. Instead, we were left with him and his surges of flat-handed rage.

  When he hit me, he’d do it with the palm and the fingers. At the time, the unwritten rule was that parents could hit, but not with a clenched fist and only in a target area below the belt, around the legs. It wasn’t the mild pain of the smack that was memorable, though, it was the grimacing ferocity on his face, the tightened-up sadness. The speed of his approach was his tell. He tried to make it noiseless but you knew when he was coming up the stairs three at a time instead of two, like a dog that has stopped barking and is readying to bite. He wasn’t really like a dog, though; he was not playful, not loyal and not brave. He just had a free hand; the witness for the defence had died from blood cancer.

  Whether he was advancing up the stairs or up the garden I was stilled by fear, tears brimming my eyes at the first swing and spilling down my cheeks before a follow-up harder palm came along, which it did if the sound of the first strike hadn’t sated him.

  He never apologised for anything, he’d just stride away and not mention it again. He slapped happiness out of me, like dust out of a carpet.

  My siblings didn’t comfort me. They only had one parent too and the wrong side of him was a bleak place to be. They were habitually allied to him and apparently complicit in a view of our family life that judged it would all be better without me. I never saw him hit either of them, his acolytes, his cowed minions.

  I didn’t believe Mum could see what was happening, despite being told by my shrinking set of grandparents that she was in heaven, with the vague implication that she was looking down. No one really seemed to believe this. It was unimaginable that her hand would descend from above to turn the flat-hand away, putting the fear of Mum in him.

  The grandparents were diminishing both individually and collectively. They grew increasingly frail and began to expire one by one soon after Mum died.

  But those flat hands. What prompts me to recall them now are wooden table tops. If I’m sitting at a wooden table that hasn’t been polished to a shine, so it has a dry surface, with no oil in it, an absence of moisture, the kind of table that is almost papery to the touch, so you could easily brush crumbs from it, the texture of that unpolished wood, to me, is that of my father’s hands. Arid and sapless, neither hot nor cold, with no clammy dampness or residue, I can imagine him not leaving a fingerprint, even on a cold glass, nothing left behind, no trace that he was ever there. And without the evidence, the mark, the tangible proof, how can you show where he’s been? No prints, no witnesses, case dismissed.

  For a while I shared a bedroom with my brother, who couldn’t keep his hands off my toys, especially my teddy, which he would rough up in vigorous games played alone under his bedclothes. I’d ask him to return my teddy to me, but I’d have to wait for it to come back, battered, worn and smelling repellently of him. He’d crumple up my comics too, saying, ‘You can still read them’, but I wanted them in mint condition for ever. I was always unhappy when we were in that room together. I would often go to sleep in my dad’s bed after Mum died, preferring to be put into my own bed only when my brother was asleep. I’d wake up the next morning not remembering the journey.

  When our bickering became too much for my father to tolerate, my brother decamped to the box room at the top of the stairs, so I now had the back bedroom to myself. I still struggled to sleep, in the dark with the morning so far away, and continued on occasion to begin the night in Dad’s room.

  Sometimes I would fall out of bed and he would hear the impact from his seat in front of the television downstairs. He was usually sympathetic to the fallen, and the flat hands were ideal for tucking in sheets; he’d slide them between the mattress and the bed to cocoon me in a cotton–nylon mix. One night I fell out repeatedly, trying to land on a particular loose floorboard that made a good sound, in the hope that he would come up to reinstate me in the bed with a show of kindness. Instead, every bump overhead was driving him mad and when he eventually arrived he was furious.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I fell out.’

  ‘Twenty times?’

  ‘Not twenty …’

  ‘For goodness’ sake.’

  He pushed the sheets under the mattress with such flat-handed force that I couldn’t roll on to my side, and he went back downstairs knowing I wouldn’t dare do it again. Still, that interaction was better than nothing, though I knew that the falling-out-of-bed option was now exhausted.

  One day my flat-handed father wandered unannounced into my bedroom. The door never had a lock on it and there was no convention of knocking. It was broad daylight. Where was everyone? Why were we alone in the house? My sister may have been over the road visiting her friends, whose mother had become a surrogate for her. My brother? Who knows? My mother was dead.

  My dad pushed the door to behind him, with his flat straight hand. There was a big window in my bedroom that looked out over the back garden. I had my back to this window, and there was a second, narrower, window to my left, which overlooked the sideway between our house and next door. In front of me were two single beds, mine was on my right nearest the doorway, which cut the corner of the room, and a spare bed was against the wall on my left. It was a bright room with astronaut wallpaper on one wall and footballers on the others.

  My father was wearing only his white Y-fronts with their elasticated waistband. He was often in his underpants, there was nothing too unusual in that; he’d also mow the lawn in small blue swimming trunks. He seemed to like being partially dressed. He spent no money on clothes, wearing the same ones for years, or none at all.

  I may have been getting changed when he came in. Maybe it was opportunistic on his part, maybe it wasn’t premeditated, maybe he surprised himself.