By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
25) Standing
Paul stands at the closed window. On the roof of the orange brick house opposite is a flock of dark blue swallows. All of the swallows are clinging to the tiles and fluttering their wings. Other swallows come down and, hovering, attempt to land. Many can't find space on the roof, fly off and come around for another try.
Their behaviour intrigues Paul. On a bright hot day like this they should be flying high, be but dots up in the blue blue sky, not be down here in Bridgwater all huddled together on the one roof. And why that one roof? Paul guesses, from their plumage, that most are first brood fledglings. But he can't understand what they're doing. They don't appear to be feeding, or collecting building materials. So far as he can make out they are just clinging to the roof with their beaks open and are fluttering their wings. If they weren't in full sunlight he'd have guessed they were trying to cool one another. If it was later in the year he would have assumed that they were massing together prior to migration.
His mother is not the least interested in the swallows. Not that she rebuffed him for drawing her attention to them. She simply said, "Oh yes," and didn't look. She mutters indistinctly now about his not having been to see her. She has never been to see him and Julie in Sydenham. He berated her once for it. She didn't bite back or come up with any alibis, simply said, "Oh yes," and carried on talking about whatever it was that had then been bothering her.
She is bothered now because she has heard that they're changing the benefit rules, and she doesn't know how they'll affect her. Paul doesn't bother saying anything: she won't take any notice of anything he might say even were he to go to the trouble of finding out in detail about the benefit changes. She has to have something to mutter about.
He tells himself that she doesn't make him angry anymore. Yet he knows that still he wants to impress and understand this muttering woman who is so indifferent to his existence.
He expects her now to forget the children's birthdays. Like he told Julie, "She always forgot mine. Why change the habit of a lifetime?" Julie's mother remembers birthdays, wants to be seen as a good mother, a good grandmother, a good wife.... and overzealously fails at them all. This muttering woman, on the other hand, wandering about in her dingy house, couldn't be bothered getting out of bed in the mornings to send him to school.
Paul finds it hard to imagine now how this cowed woman and this closed orange brick house with its squeezed-in rooms could have formed his expectations for all of life. Although the truth is she hadn't governed his expectations. His friends' houses had shown him alternatives. So too had his grandfather's. But, although Paul had stayed there most school holidays, his grandfather's was not a house to be lived in. His grandfather then had already been an old man passionate about small domestic routines, while the house itself was big and old and empty and the quiet had condensed in it, had stuffed the hallways with pillows of silence. To shout there had been unthinkable. And his childhood discomfort there had been increased by his having to defend his mother against remarks and criticisms aimed at her that he hadn't understood.
He wants to understand his mother now, to find the key to this self-centred enigma. Is she the sum of this anxious world? Or does she look for things to be anxious over?
Paul was always glad when the school holidays were over and he was returned through narrow streets to this his mother's closed brick house, where he could pull the smells comfortingly around him. And was only too pleased to dash from its claustrophobic cloying, from its twilit netherworldness, and to sample again other houses, watch himself in those new surroundings acting differently and wonder if this was his true self.
The mass of swallows lift a few feet from the roof and twittering settle. Individuals are now diving down over the roofs and darting through the orange streets. His mother takes no notice of their excitement. She grumbles about the heat, the heaviness of it. The television mutters back at her.
This is a house where the television is always on, its colours flickering in the semi-gloom. In his adolescence Paul used to turn the telly off to try to get her to take notice of him. They argued over it. Or rather he argued, she sulked.
"I'm lonely," she'd say, "It's alright for you, out all day."
Once, because it reflected on him, he would have railed against her uninterest in him this day, against even her uninterest in the swallows. Now, though, she is no part of him: he has made his own life, is not just her son. Yet, still he acknowledges her importance to him: he came here today to see how she would react to the bruises on his face, and a visit to the bathroom on arriving here showed him how visible are those bruises. The dark discoloration around his eyes has grown since this morning. His left eye is almost encircled now by a polished purplish corona. His right looks like misapplied eyeshadow.
His mother has made no comment. Once again in his life is he disappointed by her. Because this was, he recognises now, again an attempt to make an impression on her, to see if his bruises would shock her into recognition of him, if she will give him some thought other than mere acceptance of his existence, of his presence. Not that she ever did anything about him being with her. He can remember tailored women coming to this house, Health Visitors and Social Workers, his grandmother too, all of them telling his head-bowed mother, "The boy needs this...." He stood in other rooms and heard them.
They even said it standing beside him, "The boy needs to have...."
"I've got to meet Julie," he loudly tells his mother. "Go shopping."
The black mass of swallows clinging to the roof flutter their wings. He was waiting for them to leave. A single fork-tailed swallow hangs desperately onto the gutter like a peg on a washing line. From inside this dark room the sunlight makes the houses look golden. Outside is the place to be.
"Can I use your phone? See if the police have been round?"
"Don't be long. It all adds up..."
commentary.... Genetics is a lottery whose odds retreat into prehistory. Paul could only speculate on his paternal antecedents. What his self-esteem could not begin to see, however, was how any intelligent man could have been attracted to his doughy mother. Except for easy sex. Or did she once have the spark of life and some firm flesh? Although he himself had had sex with some doltish girls — their very stupidity being the reason they had allowed his spotty bumbling self to have sex with them — he wanted to credit his father with greater discernment. He didn't want a man like his self-gratifying self to have pumped sperm into his mother and produced himself.
Wiping out all paternal speculation he assumed that his genes had skipped a generation and that he owed his intelligence to his grandparents. Paul's grandfather now hailed him as an equal. Although he told Paul that his was a poorly nourished intellect, his grandfather did nevertheless welcome it as a stimulating one. Paul, however, knew that his grandfather was using his own intellect to kid himself: it didn't matter how clever people were, it was perception that counted.
He accepted their estimate of him, however, and he did view himself as his grandparents' equal. So had he joined with them in holding his ineffectual, unintelligent, unperceptive mother in contempt. Because she hadn't been a bright child, her mother and father too had held her in contempt, producing this woman who doubted her every own thought. She was perceptive enough to know, however, that, since the age of four, her son too had held her in contempt; and she knew too that she didn't understand him, where he came by all the words and ideas that eluded her.
When he was a child his mother, when asked, told Paul of his conception — her being in love, her falling pregnant, his father not wanting to settle down so young.... That love affair, so important had it been to him, had loomed large over his childhood, had been hazily ringed about with the idea of impetuous romance.
When, later, in a picking mood, he had wanted names and dates, he had discovered that his mother had known his father for only a week. It had been no glorious romance, just a single week's collection of one night stands. She hadn't even known his surname or where he had worked. If he had worked. Derek Somebody. The pregnancy had been what had mattered to her. The use she had made of it, not telling anyone until it had been too late to abort. To have a baby of her own, somebody to love, somebody to give her unconditional love....
The baby had cried, had wanted things of her. So she had locked herself inside herself again. Her mute rebellion, her articulate parents had called that locking in.
"Got the sulks," schoolboy Paul had described it.
Paul had soon learnt to insult her, that it had amused his grandparents, who had made only token noises of disapproval. He had also learnt to watch out for the deep silences that had preceded his mother's slapping screaming rages when nothing was forgotten. Most times, though, he could insult with impunity.
Neither Paul nor Julie knew their fathers, had any certain paternal ancestry they could draw upon. Nor did Julie have any direct knowledge of her maternal grandparents, her mother having been disowned when she had first become pregnant out of wedlock. Paul's grandparents would rather not talk about their other relations — not from Bridgwater. So Paul and Julie, being able only to conjecture on possible pasts, having no reference library of relations, no readily-tapped precedents to make normal some peculiarity of body or temperament, to have some odd behaviour make sense, no saying, "That's just like old Uncle Albert. Remember...." or "Your Aunt Sissy always used to do that...." Paul and Julie had only their own experience and what the adverts told them was within the bounds of normal.
Both Paul and Julie's mothers had been led to believe, by pre-War romanticism, post-War female emancipation and Sixties into Seventies permissiveness, that all life's solutions lay through sex. Paul's mother had rapidly found that such a philosophy had not applied to her. Julie's mother still couldn't understand what she had been doing wrong that it had never worked out.
Nor did Paul draw much compensation from knowing his grandfather. In his adolescence he had despised his grandfather's cleverness. Of all people Paul had then least wanted to be like that prattling opinionated man. So he had played truant from school and had completed his education in prison.
The past, though, for all of us, has to remain a mystery. We can imagine how it must have been back then, but we cannot know. Even our own unremembered infancies make us mysteries to ourselves. All those years and days and hours of the childhood that formed us and of which we have no adult recall.
Paul wanted to go even further back than his childhood. He felt that his flawed being would be redeemed if he could believe that his mother had enjoyed the sex that had resulted in his conception, if he could believe that it had truly been a communion of two impassioned strangers. He knew, however, and with a cold certainty, that his mother was one of those people who have had no passion in their life, who have known only worries. He knew of his existence that he was but a stray sperm, could as easily have ended up on a tissue.
Paul knew that he gave more thought to his creation and upbringing than his mother did, or had. Paul knew that, as he was still trying to come to terms with her, even though he now had children of his own, so was she still trying to understand where she went wrong with her own pitying mother and arrogant father, wondering still what she might do that might impress them and yet make them love her.
All family relationships are centred on the past. Yet families are people with whom we have so little in common that even our recollection of that shared past differs. If Paul's mother summed up her past, she said that neither her mother nor her father had liked her. If they looked back on her past they had pitied themselves because she had been so stupid. Her mother felt that if she been mentally handicapped they could have coped better; but how to explain one's giving issue to someone who was simply not that bright...?
Paul believed then that underlying all human transactions is a basic honesty, so that we all know all of the time who is playing what part, what lies they are telling to what purpose, even if we don't know the exact truth of what is happening. Therefore it always came as a surprise to Paul just how successful were our many pretences to one another. He could not believe that his mother didn't know that he too despised her for being so stupid and timid. He hadn't told her that. When, maudlin, she said that at least he loved her, and he reassured her that he did, he believed only that he was playing the part in her pretence and that she knew it. In any family the betrayals are many and mutual.
Like most Bridgwater people Paul's mother was unable to give expression to her emotions. This is because in Bridgwater there is a dearth of vocabulary, of experience, of examples. To give words to the emotion they are at that moment feeling they may say 'I love'. To say 'I feel joy' would have them feeling foolish. Or to say 'I am desolate' would find no sympathetic ear. So they sublimate all their emotions, turn them into obsessions, illnesses, or benders. With the result that, to give reason to their joy, they drink; and to assuage their despair, they drink. Both end in confusion and tears. But at least the drink, in Bridgwater, has given this outpouring of emotion — the tears — legitimacy.
True Stories
On March 29th 1989 Miss Suzanne Yvonne Woods, of Sommerville Way, Bridgwater, was arrested for being drunk and in charge of a child. The child was seventeen months old. 25 year old Miss Woods' speech was slurred and, although she said that she had drunk only 4 cans of lager, she was unsteady on her feet. Miss Woods had no family living locally.
On July 9th 1989, shortly after being filled with petrol, a car burst into flames in Bristol Road, Bridgwater. While Chris Anderson doused the flames with a fire extinguisher John Caddy pulled his wife, Angela, and his two children, Claire and Simon, out of the car. No-one was hurt.
From 'The Bridgwater Mercury', dated November 28th 1989.
"Comfortable bedsit, Bridgwater, employed only — Tel. 785705."
"Single bedsit, central Bridgwater, £30 per week. No DHSS, references — Tel. (0278) 424365."
On May 8th 1990 Jane Marie Groves, of Chilton Street, Bridgwater, went into a Bridgwater pub, cut the cable to a payphone, and took the payphone away. Having broken the payphone open Jane Marie Groves took the £3 inside it and dumped the phone in an old washing machine behind a house.
