Gut Symmetries Read online

  My mother lay awake pondering the matter and applied with some urgency to her father next morning. What could be done? Nothing. The young man had only recently been promoted in charge of the Atlantic crossings. He would have to prove himself there. Unfortunately he resisted all attempts by my mother to prove himself elsewhere. In despair my mother consulted my grandmother who suggested they try the Navy Position. This down-to-earth advice was not well received by my father who had already added a veneer of conventional morality to his conventional respectability.

  He would not sodomise his own wife. Instead he went to New York.

  There he is, built like King Kong, as ambitious as the Empire State Building, as wide-eyed as Fay Wray, and as much a dream, an invention, as the movies and America itself. He was a giant projection on the blank screen of other people and that was his success. He was not a ruthless man but he believed in himself. That marked him out from the many others who believed in nothing at all.

  The dream: to pan the living clay that you are and find gold in it. Perhaps my father was a treasure chest because he seemed to be able to lay up for himself inexhaustible riches. Whatever he tried succeeded. He should have been a Venetian merchant pacing the Rialto. He should have been Marco Polo winning furs out of Muscovy. Is that him, on the log rafts in Quebec? Is that him riding rapids with the snow mantling his shoulders? He was a man who belonged with an elk, with a moose. A whale man, a bear man. Instead he wore a loose suit and a trilby and learned how to net a profit. His hauls were the biggest in the Company and he turned them in like a little boy. In those days his true self was still fighting with his assumed self, and winning. Person and persona, the man and his mask had separate identities then, he knew which was which. Later, the man my mother married died before his death and the man who had come to be his counterfeit wore his clothes.

  But that was in the future, and in 1959 my father was in the fullness of his present, he could do no wrong.

  It was a shining morning, he was leaning on the harbourside rail, watching the cranes load the ships. The world poured through his fingers; spices, wine, tea, green bananas, coconuts, American golf clubs, blankets made of wool with satin hemmed round the edges. Today they were loading nylon stockings, Monroe look-alikes stamped all over the cardboard boxes.

  The wind was warm, trade wind with generosity and travel in it, a wind to scatter the ships to the four corners of the earth and although my father was too young for ships with sails, like other water-men, the wind still excited him. A fair wind. A new world. The recklessness of the sailor that my father loved.

  These were his happiest times, the times when his paperwork was done, when he could hear his secretary rattling at the upright Remington as though it were a church piano. He worked evenings and early mornings so that he could make a gap to slip through, a private space after coffee and before lunch, when the piers were busy with every kind of activity, legitimate and not.

  He knew the gangmen and the loaders and the truck drivers and the harbour pilots, and as he leaned on his rail, watching, sometimes waving, other men joined him, lit a cigarette, told him the news and with a slap on the back, moved on. The easy fraternity of working men was comfortable to him. No one here asked him what school he had attended.

  As he gossiped and lounged the noise of the Remington stopped. His secretary came out from the low line of offices that huddled to the waterfront. There was an urgent call for him. Would he step inside at once?

  Sighing, he threw down his cigarette and went inside, straightening his tie. He listened briefly. ‘Yes. Yes.’ Then he threw down the receiver and threw his secretary up into the air.

  He had been made a Director of the Line.

  He left his desk with its four black telephones and filing tray, and without stopping to collect any luggage, bought an aeroplane ticket for the evening flight. In 1959 flying was odd, glamorous, expensive and blissful. There was a fifteen-minute check-in time and my father walked across the tarmac and boarded the twin-propeller plane with only his toothbrush to declare.

  He had risen in the world and now he was going to prove it.

  When he arrived home my mother was not expecting him. His secretary had not made the instructed call. Mother was in the bath, with bubbles up to her neck, and my grandmother, on the bath-stool, was reading out loud from the Bible. This was their regular Sunday visiting hour, and having little in common and less to say, they had hit on the happy idea of spiritual elevation. My mother never listened to what my grandmother read, but she felt she was doing her duty by her family and by God, and it saved her the trouble of going to church. My grandmother, who was firmly convinced by the Word of the Lord, took more pleasure in that hour than in any other of the week, including 2 p.m. Thursday when she drew her pension.

  They had begun with Genesis and were now at the Book of Job, with whose trials my grandmother sympathised, especially since she had recently developed a boil.

  As she read ‘Who will avail me in my tribulation?’ the door flew open and my father reached down into the bath and scooped out my mother whole and carried her off into the bedroom.

  My grandmother, who was not a nervous type, said to herself, ‘David must have got his promotion.’ Nodding, she finished the chapter, let out the bath water and trudged home.

  Meanwhile, in a maze of soggy sheets and copies of Woman’s Weekly, my father speared my mother on his manhood.

  ‘I should have tidied up first,’ she said.

  ‘Harpoon Ahoy!’ said my father.

  And somewhere in all this I was.

  On the night of my birth my father got the madness on him and told my mother he had to go tugging.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘I feel well.’

  Accordingly, my father put on his Jolly Jack Tars and my mother wrapped herself up in her mink coat. In those days their car was a three-litre Rover, really, a leather three-piece suite and cocktail cabinet on wheels. My father purred down to the docks looking like a criminal, while my mother fixed herself a strictly forbidden gin and tonic in the back.

  When they reached the docks my father backed into a loading bay and my grandmother stepped out of the shadows.

  ‘David,’ she said.

  She was wearing a black oilskin that had been her husband’s. It hung on her from head to foot, so much so that she seemed less to be wearing a rainproof than to be in the grip of a monster from the Deep.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ said my father.

  ‘Tha wife’s to give birth.’

  ‘Oh not yet,’ said my mother.

  ‘Yet,’ said the Oilskin.

  And so the three of them climbed aboard the Godspeed and chugged into the dark.

  On board my grandmother unpacked her carpet bag. She set out a pile of clean rags, the ones she used for polishing the brass plaques, a bottle of cooking brandy, a bottle of iodine, a primus stove, a cylinder of water, a kitchen knife, a packet of sandwiches, a little blanket from the dog’s box, her spectacles and the Bible, now open towards the end of the Psalms. This done, she took off her oilskin and pegged it over the hatch.

  ‘David shan’t like it,’ she said.

  ‘I’m quite sure that it will be at least a week before the birth,’ said my mother who immediately went into labour.

  My mother. Miss 1950s. The perfect post-war wife. She was pretty, she was charming, she was clever enough but not too, she smiled at the men and gave the women that quizzical bewildered look, as if to say, ‘What, am I not the only one then?’

  Her stocking seams were straight, her hair was curled, her back was upright, her waist was curved, her legs were long, her breasts round, her stomach was flat, her bottom was not. Black hair, blue eyes, red mouth, pale skin, and all this packed as neatly as picnic Tupperware. There was nothing of the whore about her and this my father liked.

  She had been well educated and taught to conceal it. She never gave up singing and playing the piano and she never gave up her watercolours. The rest of the min
d she disposed of at marriage and did not think to ask my father what he had done with it.

  She was not resourceful; her class did not allow it, and I know it worried my grandmother that her son had found a wife who did not know how to make a soup out of herrings’ heads.

  My father no longer wanted herring heads. He wanted mink and pearls and he got them. Like most men he was a transvestite at one remove; if his wife was part of him so were her clothes. She was his rib and as such he too wore a silk shift. He loved her clothes, loved to see her dressed up, it satisfied a part of him that was deeper than vanity. It was a part of himself. She completed him. She manifested him at another level. He absorbed her while she failed to absorb him. This was so normal that nobody noticed it. At least not until later, much later, when things began to change.

  Husband and wife. Man and rib. What could be more normal than that? And now they were having a baby. That is, my mother was bearing my father’s child. It was different when my sisters were born but I was Athene.

  Athene born fully formed from the head of Zeus.

  The legend says that Zeus lusted after a Titan called Metis and eventually got her with child. An oracle told Zeus that the baby would be a girl but that if Metis ever conceived again, she would bear a boy who would overthrow Zeus, just as Zeus had deposed his own father, Kronos. In fear, Zeus stroked and flattered Metis until she came close enough to kiss him of her own free will. He swallowed her.

  Months later, proud complacent Zeus had a headache and yowled his way over the earth, threatening to split the firmament with pain. It was Hermes who told him the source of his trouble, and Hephaestus, the lame god of the smithy who took a hammer and wedge and split open Lord Zeus’s skull. Out came Athene tall strong beautiful and her father’s own.

  · · ·

  No one will doubt that my father had wanted a boy. He had assumed he would have a boy. Right up to a week after my birth he continued to say, ‘How is he?’ 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. He didn’t trust doctors. The white coat and stethoscope seemed to him to be a hide-out from the world. He resented the superiority, the authority, but of course he had never been ill.

  When he stopped holding me up to the light he began to hold me up to the mirror.

  He wanted to compare us, side by side, did I look like him?

  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.

  He slept in his dressing room for the first couple of months. After my mother had fed me, sometime around 5 a.m., she would fall into a deep sleep and my father used to creep in and pick me up in his huge hands and take me to his room where the fire glowed. Perhaps it was there, held by him, in front of the mirror, the strange room in reflection behind, that I came to imagine other places, glowing steadily, just out of reach.

  ‘I christen this child …’

  Poor baby, passed from hand to hand like a pouch of tobacco, a fresh-faced narcotic promising hope, change, at least for now. My family are addicted to sentimentality. If that sounds cruel it is only the cruelty of too close observation for too long. Unable to express their feelings in the normal course of days and hours they need every legitimate excuse to do so. They cannot say ‘I love you’ so they say ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ ‘Well done.’ 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.

  It should have been fun but neither of them was happy. When I was five my father was on pills and my mother was on gin. I think I was happy, in the maddening determined way that children have of being happy, and it was that happiness that worked as a magnet on both of my parents. They were pulled by it, they wanted it, and instead of taking it for granted, they started to take it to bits.

  ‘Are you happy, Alice?’

  ‘Yes, Daddy.’

  ‘Why?’ And he would stare at me in that way of his, trying to see happiness the way he could see a business opportunity.

  On my sixth birthday the parties started. I had a cake, presents, a new frock. The adults had what my father called a ‘foie gras’. How much can you eat and drink without vomiting over the coffee table?

  Neither my mother nor my father were able to cope with the 1960s. Skirts were too short, hair was too long, and the favoured colour combination of purple and orange made my mother look like a vampire and my father a Matisse. They were peculiarly ill-placed for the general assault on the past that the Sixties represented because they lived in Liverpool. Liverpool, that should have slumbered its way through the Sixties as it had every other decade, produced the Beatles. My parents were victims of the Merseybeat.

  One day when my mother was taking me to school, the streets seemed very quiet. We parked, although we were the only car on the stretch of road, and we got out to walk slowly, hand in hand, through some flimsy barriers of paper and string. Far away we saw some policemen waving at us and we waved back. We heard a lorry coming up behind and my mother told me it had a television crew on board which excited me who had never seen a television. Anything that had been on the market for as little as ten years was unlikely to impress my father.

  As the lorry came close to us, four young men dressed entirely in black ran past. Three of them carried guitars, one had a set of drumsticks. I had seen people dressed in black before.

  ‘Is it a funeral?’ I asked my mother.

  She didn’t answer. She was looking back down the road. Suddenly she picked me up and shot at full pelt back to our car. I didn’t know my mother could run. I had never seen her run. She threw me in the back seat and flung herself in after me in a whirl of Dior and hairpins.

  At that second the car was rocked on every side by thousands of screaming girls. I saw their faces streaked with tears pressed in agony against the windows and windscreen of the car. It can hardly have lasted a moment; they realised their prey was elsewhere and vanished as devilishly as they had appeared. When my mother got out to talk to the policeman, the only trace of what had happened was a broken banner painted HELP!

  ‘Mob rule,’ said my father who was thinking of moving to Southampton.

  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. I began to dread the parties; the unknown women who would come upstairs to cry in a spare bedroom. The drunk and drunker men who used to talk about the war and hold each other’s knees. I persuaded my parents to let me go and stay with my grandmother on party nights. My mother was reluctant because she thought that my grandmother was unhygienic. 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.

  As I was ready to go with my nightcase packed, my mother gave me a bottle of disinfectant. ‘For the out-house,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell Grandmother.’ Don’t tell Grandmother. My grandmother had been an honorary member of the secret police since she was born. It was impossible to hide anything from her. 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. ‘Help me clean out the toilet,’ she said.

  For the first time in months I felt my body slacken. I had been carrying myself like a gun, cocked, alert, ready for trouble, fearing it. My parents were rowing and when they weren’t rowing they were snapping and when they weren’t snapping they were planning a party, holding a party, clearing up after a party. Here, shovelling human compost out of my grandmother’s cloaca, I was happy again. We stacked the rich mould around her roses and she sang me ballads from the docks, easing her voice with regular swigs from an unmarked tin-billy. ‘Grog-blosso
m,’ she said tapping her nose the colour of the roses.

  Her kitchen had strings of onions and fat hams hanging in glorious torture from twisted hooks in the ceiling. She smoked her own kippers up the chimney, skewering them in pairs with discarded knitting needles. For this she kept a wood fire. The other fireplaces were fed on coal. She had a glass-fronted cabinet lined with jars of homemade preserve; pickles, tomatoes, pears, cabbage, and in the middle, a baby rabbit. This was not for eating. It was an ornament. When the wind blew and the cupboard rattled the rabbit bobbed up and down in his transparent prison, his ears buckling slightly as they hit the lid seal.

  The furniture was plain: a scrubbed sycamore table, a deep enamel sink, a few unmatched chairs and an evil-smelling coal Rayburn that left soot on my grandmother’s scones.

  ‘Won’t hurt,’ said Grandmother. ‘Look at me.’

  Yes, look at her, bunioned, bulbous, hair in bulrush rolls, butt-headed, butter-hearted and tenacious as a buckaroo.

  When she ate her scones she left a snail-trail of soot along her upper lip. Her neighbour called her ‘Blackmouth’. My grandmother called her neighbour ‘Stinkpad’ but otherwise they were friendly, exchanging handkerchiefs and soap at Christmas.

  My grandmother got down a pair of kippers and broiled them for us in butter and water. She asked me about my father, watching my body not listening to what I said, what could I say? I loved him and he frightened me. ‘My mistake,’ she said talking to herself. ‘My mistake.’

  And if she was thinking of the school, or his first job in a collar and tie while his mates were at the boats, or the ordinary girl who had loved him, or her own pride, she never told me, then or at any time. Like my father she could not speak what she felt. Unlike him she knew this and sat many hours with her head in her hands, I thought then, to make the words fall out. But the words did not fall out and her feelings hung inside her, preserved.