| s-101
| My mother looked vaguer than usual and kept her light on all night. |
| s-102
| We were supposed not to notice. |
| s-103
| Now that it was winter the house was dark almost all day and the frost whitened the lawn. |
| s-104
| My sisters and I played quietly in the petrified air, our breath briefly warming the frozen spaces around us. |
| s-105
| We were waiting, waiting, watching the clock. |
| s-106
| Before we left we went to see my headmaster. |
| s-107
| I had just started secondary school and was restless and inattentive. |
| s-108
| The headmaster, noting that I had every advantage life could offer, assumed that I was either a bad child or a dull one. |
| s-109
| He was too afraid of my rugger-square father to use either of those words, at least I know that now, but at the time I believed he meant what he said. |
| s-110
| For the next eight years I lived shut away in the misery of his drawer. |
| s-111
| At that second the car was rocked on every side by thousands of screaming girls. |
| s-112
| I saw their faces streaked with tears pressed in agony against the windows and windscreen of the car. |
| s-113
| It can hardly have lasted a moment; they realised their prey was elsewhere and vanished as devilishly as they had appeared. |
| s-114
| When my mother got out to talk to the policeman, the only trace of what had happened was a broken banner painted HELP! |
| s-115
| The furniture was plain: a scrubbed sycamore table, a deep enamel sink, a few unmatched chairs and an evil-smelling Rayburn that left soot on my grandmother's scones. |
| s-116
| As I was ready to go with my nightcase packed, my mother gave me a bottle of disinfectant. |
| s-117
| 'For the out-house,' she said. |
| s-118
| 'Don't tell Grandmother.' |
| s-119
| Don't tell Grandmother. |
| s-120
| My grandmother had been an honorary member of the secret police since she was born. |
| s-121
| It was impossible to hide anything from her. |
| s-122
| As I came through the back door into her kitchen she frisked me from head to foot, removed the disinfectant and gave me a pair of overalls to wear. |
| s-123
| 'Help me clean out the toilet,' she said. |
| s-124
| I was strictly forbidden to listen to the Beatles and Beatles music was strictly forbidden at the now monthly parties my parents held for anyone who would come. |
| s-125
| I began to dread the parties; the unknown women who would come upstairs to cry in a spare bedroom. |
| s-126
| The drunk and drunker men who used to talk about the war and hold each other's knees. |
| s-127
| I persuaded my parents to let me go and stay with my grandmother on party nights. |
| s-128
| My mother was reluctant because she thought my grandmother was unhygienic. |
| s-129
| There was no foundation to this, only my grandmother's absolute refusal to fit an inside toilet or to attend any of my mother's Tupperware evenings. |
| s-130
| 'Where has she gone?' |
| s-131
| 'Why?' |
| s-132
| And he would stare at me in that way of his, trying to see happiness the way he could see a business opportunity. |
| s-133
| 'Mob rule,' said my father who was thinking of moving to Southampton. |
| s-134
| Poor baby, passed from hand to hand like a pouch of tobacco, a fresh-faced narcotic promising hope, change, at least for now. |
| s-135
| My family are addicted to sentimentality. |
| s-136
| If that sounds cruel it is only the cruelty of too close observation for too long. |
| s-137
| Unable to express their feelings in the normal course of days and hours they need every legitimate excuse to do so. |
| s-138
| They cannot say 'I love you' so they say 'Isn't she lovely?' 'Well done.' |
| s-139
| They can seem like bon viveurs, always a party in the offing, my mother planning a new recipe for canapés even in the act of stuffing my relatives with the ones she has just made. |
| s-140
| When they reached the docks my father backed into a loading bay and my grandmother stepped out of the shadows. |
| s-141
| June 8 1960. Liverpool, England. Sun in Gemini. |
| s-142
| Whilst I was adjusting to this unlikely apparition, my grandmother was doing the Twist or perhaps it would be better to say the Wiggle, since the two mobile parts were her bottom and her head. |
| s-143
| Her arms, bent at the elbow, were rigid in front of her, her feet were planted apart. |
| s-144
| 'Come out,' said Grandmother. |
| s-145
| On the kitchen table was a brand-new bright blue Danette turntable. |
| s-146
| On the turntable was a 45r.p.m. of the Beatles singing 'Help!' |
| s-147
| When we had finished scooping out the dunny, and put fresh sawdust in the bottom to activate the new midden, my grandmother said she had a surprise for me. |
| s-148
| She made me stand in the corner of the kitchen behind the memorial oilskin, while she wheezed and whirred something out of the coal-hole. |
| s-149
| I could hear a crackling and a scratching and what sounded like fluff on the end of a record-player needle. |
| s-150
| I looked at the menu. |
| s-151
| FOOD TASTES BETTER IN ITALIAN. |
| s-152
| The difficulty. Something in her, something in him, something that I inherited that my sisters did not. |
| s-153
| The horse that crieth among the trumpets Aha! |
| s-154
| Why wrestle all night with an angel when the fight can only leave you lame? |
| s-155
| Why not walk away? |
| s-156
| Why not sleep? |
| s-157
| He had been taught to hold my head and to support my unfixed spine, and I seem to remember sitting solemnly on his level palm, trying to steady the out of focus vision of him, anxious, intent, gazing at me as if I could reveal to him what he was. |
| s-158
| 'No,' said Grandmother. |
| s-159
| I grew. |
| s-160
| At nine, tall and silent, I was unhappy. |
| s-161
| My father, who had given up his religion but not the superstition that accompanied it, interpreted my misery as proof positive of Original Sin. |
| s-162
| Since there could be no reason for me to be unhappy, unhappiness must be the human condition. |
| s-163
| How could he hope to escape what an innocent child could not escape? |
| s-164
| Like my grandmother, he had a Gothic disposition, but she had kept her God and therefore her mercy. |
| s-165
| My father could find no mercy for himself and offered none. |
| s-166
| 'Did he tell you that?' |
| s-167
| 'This is where I met him,' she said. |
| s-168
| 'In 1947 on the day that I was born ...' |
| s-169
| In my nightmares Time scooped up the sea in his hood and carried it away. |
| s-170
| He stood at the end of the world and poured the sea into space. |
| s-171
| 'There's no sea there is there?' |
| s-172
| No one will doubt that my father had wanted a boy. |
| s-173
| He had assumed he would have a boy. |
| s-174
| Right up to a week after my birth he continued to say, 'How is he?' |
| s-175
| My grandmother told me that he had turned me upside down in his huge hands and held me V-legged to the light, just to be sure that my genitals weren't caught inside. |
| s-176
| He didn't trust doctors. |
| s-177
| The white coat and stethoscope seemed to him to be a hide-out from the world. |
| s-178
| He resented the superiority, the authority, but of course he had never been ill. |
| s-179
| She would be greying, she would be lined, she would be overweight, she would be clothes-careless. |
| s-180
| She would be poetically besocked and sandalled, her eyes behind glass, like museum exhibits. |
| s-181
| I could see her, hair and flesh escaping, hope trapped inside. |
| s-182
| I would drain her to the sump. |
| s-183
| 'David you've got everything you wanted.' |
| s-184
| 'What did I want?' |
| s-185
| 'Didn't you want to be somebody?' |
| s-186
| 'Didn't you?' |
| s-187
| My parents' house was so clean it made me ill. |
| s-188
| Much has been aired about the benefits of sanitation but less is told about the eczema of washing powder, the asthma of fitted carpets, allergic reactions to cream cleaner, itchy fingers round the bleach bottle, drug-out on the fumes of metal polish. |
| s-189
| Worse, my mother had discovered nylon, so easy to wash, and ignored my athlete's foot and the red weals between my legs where the nylon lace of the nylon knickers warred against my non-nylon skin. |
| s-190
| Mother and daughter, secular, apart. |
| s-191
| Papa beckoning the child in unwatched moments, taking her into his secret room, showing her symbols and precious stones. |
| s-192
| She had navigated her parents' hostile waters with a child's discretion, learning to keep from one the confessions of the other. |
| s-193
| Learning to hide love. |
| s-194
| My grandmother got down a pair of kippers and broiled them for us in butter and water. |
| s-195
| She asked me about my father, watching my body not listening to what I said, what could I say? |
| s-196
| I loved him and he frightened me. |
| s-197
| 'My mistake,' she said talking to herself. 'My mistake.' |
| s-198
| They did not speak of it again. |
| s-199
| My father took his hat and scarf and walked down to the docks. |
| s-200
| There were men there he knew, idle like him, and they envied him his money and although he was not stupid enough to envy them their poverty, there was part of him that regretted all he had done. |