Absolute Beginners (20 page)

Well, I know mums and dads by now, and if there’s one thing any official person hates, it’s when they turn on him in a body – or, so far as that goes, if there’s anything
like a
fuss
. Some nosey, interfering passengers, thank goodness, took a look at Dad, and said I was quite right –
they
wanted to get rid of him too, I could soon see, because nobody likes sickness, especially on a holiday. So the skipper slowed the boat down, and pulled in near the bank there, and bellowed at an old geezer who was mending boats just beside the iron bridge (or that’s what his sign said he was doing), and the geezer rowed out in a little boat, and we got Dad down into it, and pulled off, and the pleasure boat sailed on.

By the time we landed on the slipway, Dad had fortunately recovered; which I was bloody glad of, because I did feel a bit guilty about bundling him into the little boat – and in fact, about my whole hysterical performance. The old geezer helped him into the boathouse, into the shade, and yelled at his wife to get a cup of tea, and get on the blower to the local national health representative, who turned up before long, not very pleased to be interrupted from his test tubes and hypodermics, and Dad not very pleased to see him either, because he said this was a lot of fuss about nothing, and we should have stayed up there on the boat, and what the hell: so neither of them was very cooperative with the other. And this Cookham doctor said there was nothing much wrong with Dad that he could see (I’d heard
that
one before!), and what he needed was a rest, and then get on the bus and go straight back home to bed, and slumber.

So the boat-building geezer fixed Dad in a deck-chair with a hood on it and tassels, and his wife came up with
further reviving cuppas, and I said a bus would be too slow, and cost what it would, I was going to get Dad back to London in a taxi. The geezer said he’d phone through to the local car-hire, but I said no, just to give me the address, and I’d go off and fix things personally, and that would give Dad time for a short nap to set him up again, and me a chance to have a swift dekko at this lovely beauty-spot. So off I went.

This Cookham is a real old village like you see on biscuit boxes: with a little square church, and cosy cottages, and roads made of mud, and agricultural numbers trudging about them doing whatever it is they do do. I asked one or two for the address I wanted of the car-hire, and they were very relaxed and friendly, and didn’t talk a bit like country people do in variety spots and things, and when I followed their directions, I came round a stack of corners … and wham! I saw Suze’s house there! Yes. I mean, it was the same house I’d imagined in my vision, near enough … at any rate, I didn’t ask any more directions, but just walked in through the front garden, and round the side to the lawn beside the river, and there, sitting on the grass listening to the radio, I saw Suze. And only Suze.

‘Hullo, Crêpe Suzette,’ I said.

She looked up, but didn’t
get
up, and stared at me a minute, and said, ‘Hi.’

I came up a bit nearer. ‘You all right?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Suzette.

‘Henley well?’ I asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said.

‘Can I say hullo?’

Suze had got up on her two knees, and her hands falling down between them. ‘He’s up there,’ she said.

‘In London?’

‘Yeah.’

I got down on my knees too. ‘So I’ll miss him,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Suzette.

And then – well, it was like we were shoved at each other from behind by two great enormous hands. And there we were, all mixed up in a bundle, me clinging on to Suze, she clinging on to me, and Suze sobbing like a child – I mean, great dreadful sobs more like groans, it was really awful.

Well, that went on for quite a while, and I’m not conventional, but I thought, hell! there’s windows all over the damn place, even though this is the country, so I kept saying, ‘Suze, Suze,’ and bashing her on the back, and kissing her face when I could get at it, and ‘Suze, take it easy, kid, do relax, girl, please take it easy.’

So after quite another while, she got herself straightened out, and sat back on the grass, and looked at me with her face red as a tomato, as if I was suddenly going to disappear (which you can bet I wasn’t), and I said to her, because I just couldn’t damn well resist it – you must remember what I’d been through myself, and that I loved this girl Suze with all my heart – I said, ‘And so it didn’t turn out all right, then.’

She just said, ‘No,’ and then kept on saying, ‘No.’

Now, you must realise, all this time, I had Dad’s
health, too, in my mind, and the anxiety to get him back quite safe, though God knows how I wanted to remain there, so I got a bit brisk and businesslike, which I admit must have seemed very unfeeling to her, and said, ‘Well, hon, why don’t you skip?’

‘I can’t, darl,’ she said.

‘He can’t stop you, Suze!’

‘It’s not that, I just can’t!’

They won’t give you a reason, will they! They won’t ever give you a plain reason! ‘Suzie, why not?’ I cried.

Here we had another session of those dreadful sobs, which, honestly, were ghastly. ‘Do
stop
that, Suzette!’ I cried, banging the girl quite hard. Because honest, I couldn’t take very much more of them.

‘Because it’s spoilt!’ she cried, all mixed up with hair and bits of clothes, so as I could hardly dig what she was saying. ‘I’ve spoilt what we used to be – it’s gone!’

‘Bollocks!’ I cried indignantly. She’d got me in a grip like an all-in wrestler. ‘It was a mess,’ she kept saying. It was just a mess.’

I saw this was the moment for swift action. So I yanked her away from me so as I could
see
her (which most of the time had been quite impossible, because all I could see of her was her spine), and I said I had Dad there, and a car, and we’d both run her up to London – but though I said it at least half a dozen times or more, it just didn’t register with Suze. She only kept on saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’

So I got up and stood. ‘Look, Suze,’ I cried. ‘I’m your boy – see? Your one and only. And I live up in London,
and you know exactly where. And I’m waiting for you there, this evening, tomorrow, and every day until the day I die!’ I grabbed both her shoulders, and joggled her. ‘Have you heard what I said?’ I shouted.

She said, yes.

‘And have you understood me?’

Yes, she said, she had.

‘Then I’m waiting!’ I cried, and bent over and gave her a really fierce, everlasting kiss, then said, ‘See you very soon,’ and waved, and rushed off out of that garden like Dr Roger Bannister.

There in the road, I had to stop, because suddenly
I
felt faint, just like Dad, and had to sit down on the ground, which was the only thing I could find to sit on. Then I got up, and grabbed the first cat I saw, and asked him to lead me to the car-hire number – which he did, very nicely – and the cat was fortunately in (I mean the car-hire cat), and he came round to the boat-building place, and we collected Dad, and said goodbye and thanks very much indeed to the old geezer and his wife, and made it off for London, which the driver said would cost us exactly eight-pounds-ten.

Well, on the way home, Dad perked up quite a bit: in fact, he even started singing some George Formby numbers, and older songs he’d heard from his own Dad, of Albert Chevalier and historic old veterans like that, and apparently the Cookham driver knew quite a few of them too, and they had several rousing choruses, and argued as to which old music-hall artiste first sang what. But me, need I say, I didn’t feel a bit like that, and
was car-sick as well, which I’ve always been prone to if somebody else is driving, and in fact I wanted to tell Dad about my troubles, but you can see how I couldn’t – and anyway, even at the best of times you can’t tell even your father and mother anything that really
matters
to you.

Soon we were in the outskirts, and though I’d enjoyed the country, I was so glad to be back there in the town again – it was like coming home. And before very long we were in Pimlico, and when we pulled up, Dad had to go in and get the money, as even between us we hadn’t got enough, and that brought Mum and Vern out on the pavement, and out of his second-floor window, the beefo Malt.

Nobody seemed to dig how dangerous it had been to Dad: all we got was exclamations about why had I taken him away without telling anybody, and where the hell had we both been to, and why did a taxi cost us eight-pounds-ten – even Vern chipping in with helpful observations – till I was so embarrassed, in front of that Cookham driver, and the Pimlico population, that I went up to the bunch of them in a fury, and shouted, ‘If you’re going to kill my father, don’t kill him in the streets, but let him get into his bed!’

This changed the atmosphere, we all tramped inside, and got Dad stowed away, and then Mum turned on me, and said now she wanted to know exactly what all this was about, and I said okay, I’d damn well tell her, and Vern tried to join in the party, but we turfed him out and went down into the parlour.

‘Sit down,’ said my mother.

I got hold of both her shoulders (just like I had with Suze) and shoved her in a chair – though she’s a darn sight tougher – and said, ‘Now,
you
sit down, Ma, and just you listen to me.’

Then I let her have it. I said she was the most selfish woman I knew of, that she’d made Dad’s life a torture ever since I could remember, that as for a mess like Vern he was none of my responsibility, but as for me, her son by Dad, she’s brought me up so that I just hated her, and was ashamed of her.

‘Is that all?’ she said, looking back at me as if she hated me too.

‘That’s about all,’ I said.

‘You want to go now, son?’ she said to me next.

This took me aback a bit. I said nothing, but just waited there.

‘Well,’ said my mother. ‘If you can take it, you can stay and listen to this. Your father’s been no use to me at all ever since I married him.’

‘He produced me,’ I said, staring at her very, very hard.

‘He just about managed that,’ she said. ‘That was about his lot.’

Now at that moment, I wanted to strike my mother: like she’d done me, a thousand times or more, when I couldn’t hit back, and I wanted to hit her real hard – hard, and get it over; and I took a step in her direction. She saw very clearly what was coming, and she didn’t move an inch. And I’m very glad to say that, when I saw this – though of course, all this happened in a moment
– I didn’t hit at her, but said, ‘Whatever Dad may have been, or may not have been, you married him.’

‘Yes, I married him,’ she said, sarcastically and very bitterly.

‘And whatever you feel about Dad,’ I went on, ‘if you made up your mind to have me, you were supposed to love me. Mothers are supposed to love their sons.’

‘And sons their mothers,’ my mother said.

‘If they get a chance. There’s not one that doesn’t want to, is there? But they must get a bit of it back, a little bit of encouragement.’

At this old Mum just sighed, and gave me a crooked smile, and looked very
wise
, I must say, in her way, though very nasty, too.

‘Now, you listen to me,’ she said, ‘and I don’t give a b–––r what you think. In the first place, I made you, here (and she banged her belly), and if you think that’s easy, try it yourself some time. Without me, and what I went through, you’d not be here insulting me like you are. And in the next place, although your father means nothing to me at all, in fact just the contrary, I’ve stuck by him, not thrown him out, as I could have done a hundred times if I’d wanted, and made things very much easier for me by doing so. And in the third place, as for you …’

I interrupted. ‘Just a minute, Ma,’ I said. ‘Why did you ask me, just two months ago, to come back here again, if anything went wrong with Dad?’

She didn’t answer, and I pressed it home.

‘Because you
can’t
do without a man here – I mean, a
legal
man – and you know it, don’t you. And you couldn’t
have got rid of Dad, like you say you could, because I know you, Ma, if you’d been able to, you would have, but you couldn’t help yourself.’

She looked at me. ‘You’re getting sharp, aren’t you, boy,’ she said.

‘I’m your son, Ma.’

‘Yes. Yes, I suppose you are. But let me tell you this. Since that night you turned up in the tube shelter, eighteen years ago, which I don’t suppose even you remember, I’ve seen you’re fed and clothed and brought up, best I could, till you can take care of yourself, as you seem to think you can, and that was quite an effort, sometimes!’ She put her old, fetching face on one side, and said, ‘You’re not very easy, you know. You’ve not always been very easy.’

‘I dare say not, Ma,’ I said.

‘As for
loving
you,’ my mother went on, ‘well. Listen, son. You don’t love or not love because you choose to – even your own son. You love if you do, and if you don’t, you just don’t, and there’s no good at all pretending. You’ll find out it’s true what I say when you grow older. Or I dare say you’re so clever that you’ve found it out already.’

I sat down too, three feet away from her.

‘Okay, mother,’ I said, after a while, ‘let’s leave it at that.’

‘If you say so, son,’ she said to me.

Then Ma did a thing she’d never done with me ever before, which is to get up and go to the glass cupboard with the orange lace cover on it, which I remember
so well from all our other addresses in their turn, and which we were never allowed to go within a mile of, and she got out a bottle of port, and poured two glasses in green crystal goblets, and handed me one, and said, ‘Cheerioh.’

‘I don’t drink, Ma,’ I said.

‘Don’t be a cunt,’ she said to me.

So we had a tipple.

Then Ma said, what about my father? Well, then – I hope it wasn’t betraying Dad, but I did think she ought to know – I told her all about Dr A.R. Franklyn, and how he really ought to go into hospital, and she listened without interrupting (the first time she’d ever done
that
with me in her life, either), and just shook her head, and said, ‘He’ll never go in there voluntary. But give me this doctor’s particulars, and if he’s taken really bad again, we’ll just have to put him in.’