Tomorrow afternoon his mother will arrive and sit next to his bed with a new copy of The Beano and The Dandy and, in a paper bag, the Oor Wullie annual he was not allowed for Christmas, because it is full of rough talk and ways in which nobody decent should behave. His father will not visit, but will sit in the parked car outside and listen to football reports on the radio — this will be because the smell of hospitals makes him sick. He will send his best. If he knew about the Oor Wullie annual then he would not.
The boy will take his comics and his mother’s kiss on his forehead and on the one of his cheeks that is nearest to her. He will think he doesn’t want to read, because he suspects reading might be difficult, but he won’t say that, for fear of being rude. He will not know what to do when he sees that she is very sad about him, and so he will pretend that his head hurts more than it does and she will nod a lot and put a bottle of Lucozade wrapped in crinkling yellow stuff on the bedside cabinet which is his while he is here and then she will stand up and he will suddenly regret that she is leaving.
Once he is alone he will still have the scent of her against his skin. And he will catch the only true hint he’ll ever get from his future — that there will be times when that exact perfume strikes him, makes him open like a book and ask to be hurt by strangers until he cannot think. This doesn’t unsettle him, is merely strange. He assumes it is the first of many insights and, sitting up in bed — little boy, little mickey — he is happy. The crack to his skull has left him brilliant with wishes, unsteadied by apparently too many opening paths towards glories. He has been thoroughly punished in advance and this means that his powers will be remarkable.
All the Rage
MARK HAD NEVER thought he’d consider throwing himself under a train. Turned out he was wrong.
Not for the first time.
Cheap shot, I realise, but I always do take the cheap shot. I wouldn’t really be me without it.
But I am me and I have been — with assistance — very badly wrong. Repeatedly.
At least the weather was okay. Hot, in fact: the light bleaching and withering down at everyone while they waited on a platform which wasn’t their platform at a station they shouldn’t have reached. This was not on the way to anywhere anybody had meant to be and apparently no services ever stopped here. It didn’t even seem to be a place for people, rather for goods, repairs in sidings, arcane mechanical processes. Mark could smell ageing oil and traces of coal dust. There was a sense beyond that of gap sites, bomb sites, failed reconstructions after the war.
The last world war, not the current succession of little wash-and-goes.
He found himself reminded of his childhood, the shoddy old home town and his lovingly rehearsed escapes therefrom.
And he had escaped, of course, quite quickly. Clever youngsters still could then and he was clever: full grant to go and play at studying in a mediocre, but blessedly far-removed university. He didn’t look back.
And as for going back, turning up again — nobody would have thanked me for trying that. Best to do all concerned the big, merciful favour and disappear.
He now had a presentable London postcode, loft extension, Polish au pair with a marine-biology degree — or zoology, something like that — and the ability to amplify his griefs at the hands of a rail network in crisis by writing about them — yet more suffering imposed on blameless middle classes — for a national daily paper. But none of his life’s securities meant that he wasn’t still ready to doubt the station signs. His current home and circumstances felt immediately unconvincing when he got stressed. There’d be this creep of ridiculous suspicion: maybe he wasn’t where he thought, maybe over the bridge would be that other, original shithole and his place in it waiting for him, irrevocable. He’d spin on his heel and here would be Mum in the loud-walled sitting room catching a breather before tea, hands worried nonetheless with knitting, or sewing, or Christ knew what — and odd, sweet ham for sandwiches, stuff you got out of a tin — and his dad back from the garage — and smoking on buses and trains, and ciggies being advertised on telly — ciggies everywhere — and cheap pullovers that sparked up blue with static when you peeled them off fast in the dark. You’d never get girls with a pullover like that.
Not with a pullover at all. Not to a satisfactory degree.
He was out, though, truly long gone and free and he hadn’t even once been forced, for professional reasons, to offer deferential and trustworthy smiles to strangers with broken cars and he didn’t need a girl, he had a wife.
I’m just stuck here at the moment, where nothing stops. It really does — nothing stays here and you have to breathe it in. I am inhaling the stink of nothing.
His imagination bridled before it could fully recall the scent of his own skin on Sunday mornings: shifting the covers and catching that mustiness, tiredness. He smelled of nothing. It was on him.
A long lie and a touch of sweat and Pauline already virtuously about in the garden, or the kitchen, or her church.
I always do think of it as her personal church, because she does, and who am I to disagree?
But there he would be, stagnant and upstairs and holding on around an hour, or maybe two, of peace.
Mark was very fond of peace. Increasingly.
Pauline was less inclined towards the tranquil.
Mercurial. Why I married her. I’m sure. At least partly that.
That and she thought she was pregnant. Turned out she was wrong. It’s a trait we share, our fondness for the wrong.
But I did also love the way she could kick off and stay off, generate these heartfelt torrents of fury. She has retained the capacity to be magnificent in that area and I continue to admire it.
I truly do.
It was plain that she wanted a row at the moment, was quietly and almost sexily brooding on the words she might say, were she not surrounded by a mass of other non-travelling travellers. She’d ask him again — rhetorical question — why he couldn’t have driven them over from London and right to the arse-end of Wales for no very good reason, other than to let her see her friends. She got this urge, once a year or so, to wear spotless wellingtons and padded faux-country coats with her friends, to drink red wine until it stained her mouth to an injury, also with her friends, to exert a vague authority over a herd of pye-dog children — long-haired and ill-mannered and airily illiterate — with her continual bloody friends who had produced said children without considering that parenthood would mean being broke and staying in the arse-end of Wales, while acting as if it was Italy and wandering hunch-backed streets in a migraine of drizzle.
He couldn’t have driven. It would have made him tired. Correction, it would have made him exhausted — there and back would have made him dead. This last week had wiped him out. He’d been a wreck by Wednesday, Kempson ranting and condemning them to additional white nights, threatening more redundancies while they sorted out urgent copy to go with urgent tits.
This week’s tits were wronged and glazed with anguish, always a favourite. They were classy tits, married to a Special Adviser tits, the prime minister’s full confidence still placed in their husband tits, late of Cheltenham Ladies’ College and rumours of early spliffs and precocious rapacities tits. They’d probably got an opinion on Gypsies, too. Or tax-avoidance. Austerity. The future of the euro. Frankly tragic that they had no power of speech. Infinitely disappointing that their owner did.