There’s no addiction to chaos here, no love of the fire. Maybe I can’t read them, maybe they go home at night, switch off the TVs and radios and tear at each other, mentally and physically. I stand in the pub with Mum and Dad sometimes and wonder: there’s an open-faced bluster, a beer-bolstered glow, that you don’t see in London, that maybe is what good health used to look like. Mum’s healthy, she looks fresh and happy and shiny, like an apple, firm, somehow recharged by having a baby – but she works out, my mother, she’s a leotard childbearer, city-fit.
Anyway, I did a deal. I saw it coming, I saw the inevitability of it, this was no whim, this was going to happen. I could sense a new will in the air, as if my little embryonic brother was dictating his terms from the darkness of the womb. They were already committed to Devon, Mum and Dad, even while they were going through the motions of discussing it with us. Jessie was no problem, she could shack up in London with her friend Kate (and who knows who else?) under the supposedly watchful eye of Kate’s parents. Which makes me think – when did it start? If Dad and Jessie are really going at one another, when did it start? Dad wanted to move down here, yet he knew Jessie would be going back to London to art school. Was that a factor? Did he want her alone up there, or did he even think about that? Is this Jessie’s madness? I don’t know anything any more. Nothing is simple, nothing is ever what it seems. It’s like the level of life we all think we live on only scratches the surface. We’re blind to the rest, except when violence or anguish or some other kind of pain or beauty makes us break through, forces us to glimpse a larger world. The nightmare is that I can’t see any connection between that larger world and our little one that isn’t a lie.
I could fight Devon, I realized when it all started, the talk of the move, but I’d already blown my best argument – my education – by battling through three schools in two years. I don’t hate school, it’s not worth the effort, it just seems such a sham, so very far away from anything to do with real life, that the only sensible response is to pit your will against theirs and see who breaks first. In the first two cases, they did – and I left. The jury’s still out on the last one. I had a Math teacher there who saw that I got a sort of buzz off the patterns numbers make and who not only pushed me but protected me when I fucked up elsewhere. I got into trouble and he got me out of it – mostly – I think because he respected my spirit, he thought the system was shit himself.
It taught me something useful, really useful, not just how to fake effort or skim successfully. It taught me that natural allegiances come in handy, don’t waste them, they can buy you a lot of space. Anyway, it came down to schooling, my love of London and my friends. Those were my three arguments against Devon, and I’d as good as blown the first one because even while my Math teacher was calming the waters, I was pissing on them again. My complaints about school were like a religious dirge over the breakfast table at home each morning, so that when the prospect of Devon was raised, my father would offer various alternatives:
‘We could move further, to Cornwall. They’ve still got tin mines down there. Perhaps you could leave school altogether and they could reinstitute child labor?’
‘Couldn’t be worse.’
‘There must be religious seminaries in the area. Maybe you’d like to be beaten by monks, daily?’
‘Jessie would go for that.’ A kick under the table from her. So then I’d come back: ‘Why don’t I just board somewhere up here? It’s London I’m going to miss.’
‘I’d give him three days,’ Mum would remark.
‘I’d give him three hours,’ from Dad.
‘I wouldn’t give him anything.’ Jessie.
And my mother would look at me, knowing my answer as well as I did: ‘Do you want to?’
‘What?’
‘Board.’
‘Not a chance. Forget it.’ So I’d wail on. ‘I’m going to lose all my friends. I’m never going to see them.’
‘These are the kids you referred to as “mindless scum” only a few days ago.’ A sharp look from Dad.
‘Yeah, well they are. But at least they’re the mindless scum I know. The kids in Devon all have giant foreheads and fingers sprouting from their shoulders. They’re all Thalidomide kids down there. They lack social graces.’
‘That’s a sick remark.’ Mum.
‘It’s a sick world. Why do we have to move?’
So Dad would come down to my level. ‘I don’t know why you’re so hooked on London. You want medical allusions? Well, London is brain dead, it’s on drips – it’s got aggression pumping in one arm and money in the other, and neither can make it work. It’s a lousy place for a baby. Anyway, it’s depressing as hell all winter.’
‘You think Devon will be better? The people in Devon probably forget how to speak English between the time the last tourist leaves and the first of the year arrives.’
And on like that.
So I set fire to the art department stockroom. I went into school one morning and my mate Luke and I torched the stacks of paper, each vertically arranged in neat compartments. It’s a bastard of a job, getting a good blaze going, but we managed it just as the rest of the school was going through the attendance registers. Couldn’t have been me, could it – I wasn’t there?
It wasn’t a real fire, I mean the school didn’t burn down or anything, but the art department didn’t look the same again. There’s something beautiful about what a lick of flame can do to wood, the charring effect, little bits of black carbon spiraling up to touch the ceiling – makes a place look lived-in. And oil paints have their own excitement when they blaze. This was performance art on a grand scale, but Luke and I didn’t get any points for it. In fact, we chickened out. I wanted everyone to know we’d done it deliberately, but maybe that would have been a bit heavy-duty, so we opted for the having-a-quick-smoke-ohdear-look-what-happened line. We got a bollocking, suspension and all that, the threat of expulsion, but it could have been worse. I mean that. Someone could have been hurt.
That did it for Dad, though. As far as Devon went, that took me out of the contest. I think he knew it was no accident. Schools don’t really know you, but parents have a good idea.
I knew he was angry, because his face changed, as if the tension was wrestling through a forest of muscles and veins in his forehead in an attempt to get out.
‘There’s a school nine miles from the village with a good record in math,’ he told me. ‘There’s a school bus. It takes about forty-five minutes each way. You just gave up your right to choose.’
I wanted to ask, ‘How far is the nearest fire station?’ but it was too easy.
7
The deal came later. I knew I’d get something. Dad suffers terrible guilt when he loses his temper, and he must have already been feeling bad about this one, because he did everything to make the move bearable for me. It was Mum I had to watch. The little incident over the fire had severely dampened her faith in me, and while I could cope with Dad’s brief outburst of anger, Mum’s disappointment was harder to live with.
‘This is probably a big mistake.’ Dad’s voice comes to me with an undisguisable edge of love and concern, despite his determination still to sound pissed-off as he hands me the video camera. A moment accompanies the giving of a gift like this, it happens outside considerations of value or acquisition, beyond the emotional range of a TV commercial. There’s magic attached, we both know that: it can do things, this camera, it can steal little bits of life. This is a key fatherson experience (he wants it as much as I do, it’s higher resolution than anything he has and he’s a technology freak, that’s part of it – and Mum, too, with the baby due: home-video time), but it comes with a lecture.