Just ignore him
We were all duly silenced.
Least said, soonest mended.
Hospitals are not new. They go back about two and a half thousand years, often established by the prevailing religion of a place. Many of these institutions still bear the names of saints, like St Margarets where Mum died. Universal free health care was only established in Britain in the form of the National Health Service in 1948, with the unforeseen consequence that now anyone could pass a dying relative over to a state-funded institution. In some parts of the world, the family home has to accommodate the terminally ill, as was once the case in all countries. In the past, before the NHS at least, it would be difficult to avoid seeing dead people, usually your own relations, but now no one has to see a corpse, never mind tend to someone as they rot from the inside out. Despite a history of quarantine for the carriers of known contagions, only recently has the desire to pass on the ailing and afflicted become an achievable reality for all. Now the sick can die with their own thoughts, rather than their own family.
This began with improvements in diagnosis (leukaemia was named by a German physician, Rudolf Virchow, who was among those making advances in pathology in the mid-nineteenth century). Knowing how a person is going to die, and exactly what is happening to them while they do, is something to which families have only recently had to adapt. That knowledge can seem an unnecessary burden for the patient, presumably thats what they thought when they were discussing Mum. That it was best not to let her know for her sake.
If you were dying, would you want to know?
I would. Id then prefer to donate all usable organs, before being dismembered for medical science, with whats left minced, sautéed and served to zoo animals in a tin bowl.
Ask yourself the question and share your answer, at the first symptom of something bad, because you may end up in the hands of people who decide for you. Its difficult to consider it when youre healthy as the mind provides little space for death planning. My own thoughts turn flippantly to the horror of checking out during the football season without seeing the final table. I hope my close of play comes during the cricket season, though not halfway through a Test Match, of course. Perhaps imminent oblivion might cure me of the sports fixation that has often provided a distraction from harsh realities.
Nowadays, with people living longer and an increase in dementia sufferers, caring for loved ones at home is common again. For cancer patients the painful decline is often best managed in a hospice but dying at home is an option preferred by many. Once that choice has been made the herbalists and homeopaths begin to circle, juice diets and prayer are deployed, before death arrives, possibly followed by a psychic or two offering to contact the deceased for a fraudulent consideration.
Dying among your close family, with their care being your last human contact, is not a twenty-first-century development born of more progressive times, but a return to the norm of human existence.
What happened to my mum was not normal.
What if you were dying and you didnt know? But everyone else knew. They had colluded not to tell you. Your three children are kept away. There is no telephone. Youre in a room not knowing you are dying and youre just wondering why all the treatments arent working. You dont feel any better, you feel worse. Eventually youre barely able to drag your withering frame out of bed and to the toilet. Perhaps you wonder if youre dying. You miss your children so much every minute of every day. They are all you can think about. No one appears to understand this.
Your husband comes to see you. He knows you are dying. Then he goes away again. Your father comes to see you. He knows you are dying. He goes away again. Two doctors come to see you, they know you are dying, one of them is of the view that you shouldnt know you are dying, the other keeps quiet. They dont tell you because youre a mother of three and, as a woman, emotional. Palliative care is easier if the patient can be guided into the dark without any awkward displays of hysterical grief. They think it best you dont know. You might not be able to cope. They decide to keep you there and deceive you until your body gives out. Just die, please, without anyone having to see anyone crying. No one wants that.
Your husbands mother knows you are dying and she feels that not only should you not know that you are dying but your children shouldnt either. They are never told you are going to be leaving them for ever. They are in a house a little over six miles away. They are brought to see you in hospital, but not often. When you die no one will talk to them about you. Your picture will be taken down. They will be told you are in heaven and to be brave. They will have no keepsake from you.
With all the lies and deceit already in place how can your death be anything but a relief? For days now they have been waiting for you to die but instead you keep writing little letters to your husband, which he will never read to his children.
Luckily your only sibling lives in South Australia. Out of sight, out of mind. If she was here shed want to see you all the time, shed possibly be of the opinion that you have the right to know what is happening to you. What a mess she would create; its better for everyone if she is kept out of this. So you never say goodbye to her either. She never says goodbye to you. You never have a conversation about all the times you spent together. She doesnt come to see you.
Instead, you are confronted every visiting time by the peculiar twitching eyes of those who know you are dying but prefer to keep that to themselves. Leaving you with no chance to organise some aftermath, write journals, letters, little notes, to preserve and express the love you feel in a way that will nourish those you leave behind, so that at the very least they know it was not their fault. No letter. No goodbye. You fall asleep and never wake up. You die.
Everyone is relieved that they dont have to keep up the performance any longer. Thank goodness for that. It was so difficult for them, pretending to you that you were going to go home. It was so difficult for them to tell the children, who were eight, six and three, that they couldnt go to see Mummy today, when they really meant: ever see Mummy again.
You are dead but the secrets can continue. As if it is the secrets that sustain these fucking people.
The new secret is that your little girl mustnt be told that you have died. So her brothers are told not to tell her. Dont tell your sister that Mummy has gone to heaven. Yes, that means your little six-year-old boy who has lost his mummy will share this secret with the grown-ups. He has crossed some age threshold, old enough both to know you are dead and to learn that death is secret. The thing he will remember about you dying is his three-year-old sister asking when they can go to visit you and the pleasant feeling of the power hed been granted in being able to say:
Not today.
When can we go? she said.
Maybe tomorrow.
And she asked again and again.
Of course they all had power over you. They preferred to keep you there in ignorance; they had all the cards, your husband and his little mother. They had you penned in, they had control; the children wont know, the sister wont know, you wont know. You are powerless, you are silenced, you are theirs. And your husband will look sad and you, in your final days, will try to lift him with encouraging and supportive words, and you will be hoping to go home as soon as you can, because it must be difficult for him, coping without you. You feel terrible that you are ill, just look at him, its so hard for him. Im sorry, you say.
Phew. Finally you died. That went on for ages.
NO MOURNING. Your children will go away for a few days when the funeral is happening. You will be burned and the forgetting will begin. They will be told separately of their mothers death. They will never see each others grief, which will be limited to a few minutes individually with your husband. They wont be told where you are laid to rest. They wont know where to go to speak to you, to ask you anything, to remember you.
But you will never be forgotten. Because the middle one, the six-year-old, will write about you, hell say that he remembers your kindness and your warmth and how much you laughed together when you put him in the bath while he still had his socks on.
For years I wondered where Mums grave was. I had an idea, possibly from something said, that it was in Harlow, Essex. I had a friend, when I was sixteen, who lived there and he said there was a crematorium and cemetery at the end of his road, past the famous footballer Glenn Hoddles house. We went up there and he helped me to look for her, and I should have thanked him for that kindness. We buzzed in on noisy 50cc motorbikes, turned off the engines, and were immediately quietened by the absolute silence of the place. There were scores of white headstones on lawns sloping down away from the car park. With barely a word, we split up and searched for her. There was no sign of a grave with her name on it and I was beginning to think we were in the wrong place. We walked up to the single-storey modern crematorium and were greeted by a caretaker who told us that everything was closed as it was a Sunday. I told him I thought my mum was there and he fetched some keys and unlocked a small hexagonal building that contained the leather-bound book of remembrance. He asked me if I knew the date of her death so I told him and he turned the large, nearly square pages to the one for August 22nd and there was her name, Shirley Margaret Davies, in elegant calligraphy. We told him she wasnt in the graveyard and he directed us to where urns containing ashes were buried, an area of woodland divided into the twelve months. In the section for August there were some plaques, flower holders or photographs, but there was nothing for Mum. We left, and as the years go by sometimes I remember August 22nd and sometimes I dont. I went there in 1992, on the twentieth anniversary, with my then girlfriend, who had a shaved head with a grown-out Mohican on top that tumbled down the back of her leather jacket, and ripped jeans patched underneath with floral fabrics. She was older than me, only five years younger than Mum when she died, and she consoled me tenderly as I sobbed, as Id never done on any anniversary before, kneeling on the earth dropping tears among the buried urns. She stroked my back and I asked her to stop and she sat with me in silence, for which kindness I should have thanked her.
I asked my father about the lack of a plaque for Mum when his brother, my Uncle Pat, died and was taken to the same crematorium in 2011. We were standing only yards from her hidden resting place. He told me hed wanted to scatter Mums ashes in Epping Forest since shed loved it so much, but the crematorium had buried the urn and there was no record of the exact spot. Once again it was as if this had happened to him, not that he had neglected to provide any kind of memorial for his childrens mother. It was unclear how long the crematorium had held the ashes for collection before they decided to bury them in an unmarked spot.
It was the first conversation wed had about her dying since he came in to my bedroom in 1972, and sat down with me on the end of my bed, and put his arm around me and looked serious and told me to be brave, and said that Mummy had gone to heaven, and I began to cry because I loved her so much and she was my friend, and he said be brave, and I cried and he said be brave and I knew to stop crying, and he said be brave, and I knew that crying was not the thing to do, since he was not crying and I had seen no one crying over Mummys death. She was in heaven now and there wouldnt be any further conversations, and he didnt mention my brother and then he told me not to tell my sister and then he went out and shut the door behind him and I had stopped crying and I was on my own. I felt that loneliness for many years, really, until I had children of my own.


Gardens
I was at the top of the garden, sulking, moping about and waving a bamboo cane around. Everyone else was indoors. I must have done something that led to my being alone up there, outside when everyone else went inside. Perhaps some flash of contrariness or intransigence that ruined a game and led to a closing of ranks around our dad.
Mum used to grow tomatoes and runner beans in the greenhouse at the far end of the garden, next to the rhubarb patch and the blackberry brambles on the back fence, and she used bamboo to support her plants, which explains how I came to be swinging a cane around one afternoon a few years after she died, swishing it vigorously through the air so it made a sound. I whacked it hard against the badminton net post, hoping to be seen from the house, petulantly demonstrating how upset and isolated I felt.
I was doing it partly for attention and partly because its enjoyable to hit things with sticks. When my Auntie Hazel had Alzheimers she memorably said, as she walked slowly along aided by her daughter: I wish I had a stick, followed after a pause with, and someone to hit.
The top half of my bamboo cane broke off, spun thirty feet up the garden and decapitated one of Mums roses beyond the goal net. Pale yellow petals burst out and fell to the ground. I looked down the garden to the big kitchen window, which offered an uninterrupted view, its wisteria border pruned around the edge of the frame. Dad was there and hed seen me. He was already on the move.
In later years when a football went through a window into the greenhouse it would disturb only weeds. The broken glass would join other similar shards and Dad would express his lack of surprise that his sons were so inept with their Brazilian banana kicks. He spiced his exasperation with a detectable measure of sadness over this besmirching of Mums memory, so his offspring would know theyd caused him pain. This offspring noticed that, anyway. It felt opportunistic on his part, since none of the panes were ever repaired.
Behind the goal net was a wall about three feet high, so that the garden sloped from the back fence and then became a bed of around a dozen mature rose bushes, before it dropped vertically at the wall, becoming flat for fifty feet or so. The rest of the lawn sloped down to the patio. The rose prickles punctured many plastic footballs, but their blooms in all their various colours were to remain as a memorial to Mum.
It was therefore best not to be seen hacking any of them to pieces.
The flat area became a football pitch and after turning to mud in the winter it was turfed in the summer and carefully whitewashed into a badminton court by my dad. Hed pop the caps off two holes in the ground and insert green metal net posts, the standard 5 feet 1 inch tall (the net must be five feet high in the centre). I swung on one of those once and snapped it. My dad took me with him to the local Back Garden Sporting Supplies Emporium, where, to my relief, it was ingeniously repaired by the insertion of a broom handle to connect the two halves of tube.
The whitewashing was done with a little truck that was pushed along, with a wide wheel in the middle laying down the lines. Wooden posts, bashed in with a wooden mallet and with string tied around, gave a guideline to follow. A badminton court is forty-four feet long and twenty feet wide and the flattened part of our garden could just contain it. Its hard to believe the dimensions were anything but exact.
The marking of borders, which he would then police keenly during play, was important to Dad. Games had rules and boundaries and lines. Sports clubs had fixtures in which there was accurate scoring and an indisputable outcome and time spent in such a game could be seen as socialising and all of it served as an opportunity to be a decent chap by playing fair and shaking hands afterwards. The etiquette was everything: dont return serve if the ball lands out, take a bit of pace off when serving to a lady, dont dispute the opponents line call. On and on went the myriad rules, written and unwritten: pay your subs, dont park in the Captains space, the ladies make the cakes.
All of it now seems at odds with Dads latent reservoir of desire, which was not cold and still, but hot, and threatening to bubble over. Of course all that order appealed to him, those lines and rules and agreed limits and outcomes, an imposed structure of acceptable behaviour at a club where you had to be the right sort of fellow to become a member in the first place. In accountancy, too, his profession, the numbers, the columns, adding up correctly not incorrectly, with restrictions imposed from the outside in the form of rules and laws. Order, order and more order, all complied with, all helping to conceal what lies within him, but at what cost? Where could the pressure be released? Perhaps at home, where there were no outsiders to determine boundaries. But even there he marked out some of his own in whitewash.
Unfortunately, it was difficult to control the direction of a shuttlecock in the breeze at the top of the garden, and to be strict about service boxes and tramlines when playing in the wind with children was hopeless, so eventually our not being able to do it right meant we ended up not doing it at all.
Each summer I watched Dad mark those lines. I might be allowed a little go on the whitewash truck but my memory is of a man keen to mark out the perfect court, not someone whod give his unreliable son the chance to paint a line that looked like a failed lie-detector test. He made it look difficult and part of me felt that he needed relieving of his duty. Maybe Id have rushed the job, gone a bit wrong here and there in trying to take pleasure from the experience, but really, who gives a fuck?
Everything had to be done properly. We once played pitch and putt on holiday. There were nine holes. At the first tee, I took a swipe at the ball (wed never done this before) and knocked it about two inches. My sister thought this hilarious, and laughed even more when I did it again. So I did it again and again, and now she was really laughing, I was laughing too, and eventually on the eighth try I belted the thing in the direction of the hole. Dad had not been laughing, he was irritated, so the rest of the round was solemn, apart from when he managed a hole-in-one. At the end, he totted up the scores. I knew Id beaten them all, but Dad included all of my silly swings at the first tee in my total, so I lost to my brother. Not that it bothered me, as you can tell.
On a hot day hed mark out the badminton court wearing only his old blue swimming trunks and no deodorant. Sweat would drip like dew from his nose while his Brilliantine hair stayed in place and the sagging rear of his little bathers gathered high in the crack between his cheeks.
Id usually be wearing a football shirt: an Arsenal one bought when I was five (number five sewn on the back by Mum) or a stylish red and black Manchester City away top. There is a photo from 1971 of my brother in the Arsenal shirt and me in the City one, grinning happily on a bench together, with him showing off a plastic football marked Arsenal Double Champs, which must have pained Dad as a Tottenham Hotspur fan. After Mum died I wisely continued to support Arsenal, and my brother followed Dads beloved Spurs, which didnt help sibling relations.
I still have those little shirts. I treasure them, knowing that Mum saw me in them, watched me play, put them in the wash and handed them back clean, with the little badges and numbers sewn on by her hand.
After she died Dad never bought me another football shirt. His mantra was:
Take your shirt off!
This could come from anywhere in the garden, he wasnt always in sight, so it would sometimes make me start, this instruction to expose myself to the sun. Sometimes hed open the kitchen window to yell it, and Id sheepishly unveil my spindly torso, until he wasnt looking, then Id put my shirt back on.
Dad used to comment on how unsightly it was for me to have brown arms only up to my short sleeves, beneath which I was typically English (which in all other respects would be seen as a plus). He started to look for cap-sleeved T-shirts for me to wear so my arms would be a uniform brown and not so unattractive.
On beach holidays hed apply a coin-sized dab of sun-cream to my shoulders. Every summer the skin would burn and peel off. He would claim that brown skin would appear underneath once the dead skin had peeled away, which was nonsense but it was widely believed, and no one had heard of cancerous melanomas. He applied calamine lotion to my sunburnt back, a job he took his time over.
Dads own efforts to tan included rolling the top down on his trunks and smiling as his pubes popped out. Going brown was a national obsession. People would say: Whats the point of going on holiday if you dont go brown?
Despite being a hopeless footballer, Dad always encouraged games on the beach and in the garden, particularly cricket. I struggled with batting since I hated getting out, often denying that a ball had hit the stumps behind me, or Id be in trouble for smashing it as hard as I could, clearing the laurel bushes and nearly killing Mrs Newby next door. I once set off the Newbys burglar alarm by hitting a window with a plastic boomerang that Auntie Hazel had sent from Australia. I had expected it to come back. Dad told us that Mr Newby had climbed the Matterhorn with his sons, a staggering achievement that he hoped to emulate. I felt a disappointment to him, since that plainly was not on the cards for our family, who couldnt get round a pitch and putt course without falling out. Perhaps he imagined scaling the peak with his two sons while his young daughter stayed at base camp with his wife. But she died so that was scuppered.
We played with a real cricket ball and protective batting gloves. My brother once told me to take them off because they were getting dirty, and then the ball trapped my thumb against the bat handle. A blood blister the size of my eye appeared, though I couldnt see it properly since my actual eyes were bucketing tears. Dad was forced to rebuke my brother, a rare and pleasing event that gave me an insight into how nice it must have felt for him, all those times I was told off.
When I was sent to secondary school a year early Dad was disappointed that I couldnt get into the cricket team. In my second year he told me to mention that I was still young enough to play with the first years. The master in charge looked perplexed but gave me a chance. My teammates couldnt understand what I was doing there since I was in the year above. I remember arguing about fielding positions with an enormous idiot from East House who inexplicably thought he was a faster runner than me. To them my dropping down a year marked me out as a hopeless case. I had no desire to be in their year even though I didnt feel at home in mine.
Did you get any runs? said Dad.
One, I said.
Fail.
One? Where did you bat?
Eleven, I said.
Eleven is the last man in.
Eleven! he said.
Fail.
Yes.
Did you get any wickets?
They wouldnt let me bowl.
Wouldnt let you bowl?
No.
Fail.
Why not?
They just didnt.
He didnt ask if Id enjoyed it. I knew he wanted to be proud of my sporting prowess, but that was my only game of any kind for the school. I never earned a special tie for sport.
At home most warm days were spent in the garden, playing cricket or on the swing, or climbing the ash tree. In the autumn wed pick apples and wrap them in pages of the Sunday Times Magazine before storing them in the shed. In the winter my brother and I would take shots at each other in goal, in all weathers, until it went dark. Wed have to peel off our muddy jeans and leave them to soak in the bath, before eating Bovril on toast, tea cakes with jam, and slices of Battenberg (named after the German town of Battenberg from where a German Prince came to marry an English Princess leading to the creation of the name Mountbatten). We called it church window cake, as Dad had probably done when he was a boy, during the war, when the windows of his home in Chingford were blown in by a German bomb as the family sheltered under a table.
At teatime, somewhat disregarding our little sister, Dad would put on Two Little Boys, by the popular childrens entertainer Rolf Harris, a song about sibling love by a now convicted sex offender. Im not sure if there is irony at work here, or serendipity, or if its just that circumstances have revealed the horrific double-hindsight that brotherly love is not inevitable, and that bad men will spend a lifetime constructing a charming façade.
The roses were all in bloom the day I whacked the badminton post with bamboo, as were all Mums other flowerbeds and the rockery shed built. Had she been in the garden, trowel in hand, kneeling on an old floor mat from a car, maybe shed have seen that I hadnt meant to do it. At the time I thought it must have looked deliberate to Dad in the kitchen, as if Id thrown the cane directly at the roses rather than hitting the post causing the end to break off. He strode towards me. I couldnt move. We used to say I was petrified at school to mean really frightened. My eyes filled with tears, and there was no one on their knees nearby, looking up, peeling off a glove and saying:
Whats going on? He didnt mean to do it. It was an accident.
She might have said that, and he might have said, as he sometimes did:
Theres no such thing as an accident.
If you hit him I will come for you with these secateurs and cut your rotting swimming trunks off before I set about your grim little todger, you sadistic bastard.
She wouldnt have said that. Its just one of the violent fantasies I have largely left out of these pages. In one chapter now discarded, I metamorphosed into a mountain-lion-beast, and peeled my fathers skin off in strips before pulping it with my conical fangs and sharp papillae. His remains then dissolved into the grass beneath my paws and disappeared for ever, while my siblings were nearby looking for him and not recognising me.
As he approached me in the garden Im not going to say I split his skull with a giant claw. Ill just say what I remember so clearly. I knew he wasnt going to inspect the roses, gather the fallen petals and implore me to take more care, or tell me about each plant and which was Mums favourite. I knew that he wasnt going to let me explain and that he wasnt going to yell at me, the neighbours might hear that. I knew he was going to hit me. I didnt run. Ive always found crying and running difficult, however dramatic it looks in the cinema. My cheeks were awash. He was now standing over me. My cowering seemed to annoy him as it made me a difficult target. I was saying that it was an accident. He wore a look that said: Dont tell lies. Gripping my arm with his left hand, he swung for my legs with his right. Three good contacts later he was back down the garden. He never mentioned it again. He didnt go to look at the roses. I was left crying. One of the lessons of my childhood I have yet to unlearn is that crying is something you do alone.


Lanterns
I walk out of the school gates and turn left. Im not going with Luke today. I often walk home with him. Hes in the same class as me at Staples Road. Hes not very chatty but we live near each other so hes my best friend.
The other day Luke was carrying a Chelsea bag. It had a shoulder strap. We dont normally have bags at school, unless we are going swimming. I asked him why he supported Chelsea and he said he liked blue. Then I asked him what was in his bag and he opened it to show me a Police Range Rover. I asked him why he only had that in there and what was the point of the bag when he could just carry the car in his hand? He looked down and then he wasnt very chatty, as usual. He must like the bag and the Range Rover, though it seems annoying to have to carry a bag, and no one plays with toy cars at school anyway.
There is another boy who lives nearer to me but were not really friends, even though hes only two doors down. We live in detached houses so two doors is quite far. There are driveways and steps up to our front doors. You dont often see people. This boys dad has long hair, some of it is blond, some of it is fair, the rest is brown. He wears plimsolls.
My dad isnt friendly with him, or anyone on our road. No one comes to our house. When Mum was alive people sometimes came. There was one friend she had who had been to Ecuador and who gave me my stuffed frog. If you sit it in your palm you cant see the stitches, which go up its tummy. I think she worked for Shell (Mums friend, not the frog).
The dyed-hair man two doors down has a Range Rover, a real one, its massive; I had a lift in it once, you have to climb up on to the big leather seats but from inside you can see over all the other cars. The dad was chatty and so was the boy. I didnt say much but I really liked the car. One day my dad was driving along in our Austin and I said that the Spanish boy who lived next door had told me that the neighbour with the Range Rover had overtaken five cars at once on Loughton High Road. Dad sort of made a sound but without properly making one. It was an unsmiling noise. He did it quite often. Then I asked if we could get a Range Rover and he laughed:
Ha ha HA HA!
He still wasnt smiling, just making laughing sounds. It seemed like Dad couldnt stand Mr Next-Door-But-One, even though he lived on the same road, and was a dad, and had a good car. Normally Dad loves cars; he gets every issue of Autocar magazine.
The Spanish boy next door tells fibs. An RAF jet flew over the playground once and he said: Thats my uncle, and then he said he had another uncle who played for Barcelona, though that might have been because I had taken a Johan Cruyff card into school. It was a moving card, so if you tilted it he volleyed a ball.
As I walk along I stay close to the school fence and look down at my black Tuf school shoes, sticking out from beneath my itchy black school trousers. My grey school shirt is tucked in. I dont have to wear a tie. I dont have to wear any of these things, in fact, as the school doesnt have a uniform and most kids wear jeans and trainers, but Dad wanted me and my brother to wear uniforms, even though it actually makes us stand out instead of being the same as everyone else. My brother has left now and gone to secondary school. He didnt talk to me in the playground anyway.
It feels safer to have the fence close to me. My shoulder is brushing against it. I can see the waste-patch on the other side, which is the end of the playground where we are allowed to go when its not raining. There are bushes and a fallen tree, some long grass and bits of stony clay. Its a great place to play war as there is a low wall down the middle, which is good for cover when you want to machine gun someone. Its also where you go to have a fight, as its a bit further from the school than the rest of the playground. I once had to meet a fat kid there three playtimes in a row to fight him. He was in the year below but he was enormous. I didnt even know him but he wanted to fight me for some reason. It was horrible. In the end it was a draw, since neither of us was crying.
When the fence ends a row of houses begins. The front doors of these are close to the pavement; you can reach out and touch them without even stepping on to their little paths. On the other side of the road is Epping Forest.
I can feel loose chips of tarmac under my feet as I walk. Its nice to crunch them. I dont want to see Luke or anyone else. Coming up on the left is the steep alleyway that goes down to The Drive, which is quite a long street that comes out on Loughton High Road. Normally I would walk down there so I could go home past the shops but today I keep going. It makes me wonder if anyone has seen me take a different route. Is someone going to be suspicious? Its a hot day. The forest is bright green and there isnt much water in the brook at the bottom of Staples Road.
At the crossroads I could go straight over to go home along Nursery Road and past the big house called Dragons but I turn left into Forest Road, which will bring me out on to the High Road close to St Marys, where the Cubs meet in the hall, and where we have our Church Parade every month, which Granny Price always comes to. I am not allowed to carry a flag on parade yet, as Im not old enough. You have to wear a leather belt with a round flag holder that the pole sits in. I hate Cubs but I would like to have that job.
Its quiet on Forest Road. The houses here are small. There are two pubs near the top with the same car park. Before I reach the High Road I pass The Lantern Room Bistro. Its owned by the mum and dad of a boy in my class and is the only restaurant in Loughton, apart from the Wimpy and the Eastern Eye. Ive never been in any of them.
When we put on Alice in Wonderland at school I thought Id get a big part as I was top of the class but I had to play the cook and had no lines. I was told I could throw some pots and pans around, but there was only one pot and I had to pretend to stir it. It had SOUP written on it in big letters but I didnt have it facing the right way so you could only see that it was soup if you were at the side. Dad came to the performance.
I thought you were going to throw pots and pans around, he said.
I wished I hadnt told him that. Colin from The Lantern Room had a really good part. He shouted all his lines standing with his feet together and his arms by his sides. You could hear him at the back.
I look into the empty restaurant through its little windows with the criss-cross lead on them like a Christmas card house, then I cross the road. Its only a bit further now to the police station.
There is an old blue lantern outside like the one on Dixon of Dock Green but the building is new. I have butterflies in my tummy as I walk up three steps to the door. Its made of glass and heavier than the doors at school. I manage to pull it open and go in. Its quiet, with grey walls and a light brown floor. There is a counter with a policeman behind it.
Hello, he says, are you lost?
No, I say.
How old are you?
Nine.
Wheres your mum?
Shes not here.
I can see that, where is she, though?
She died.
He looks a bit annoyed that Ive said that.
Did she now?
Yes.
You sure about that?
Does he think Im making it up? No ones ever been like this before. But now I realise that Ive never said out loud that Mum is dead. Everyone just knows. I think my class at school found out when Mrs Baker said: Just because your mothers died, theres no need to be spiteful. That was on the stairs in the last year of infants.
Why arent you at school? he says.
Its finished.
Has it? What time is it?
He looks up at a clock on the wall that shows its half past three.
Right, well, why have you wandered in here?
I want to tell you about my dad.
What about him?
I look through the door behind him but I cant see anyone else. The policeman is resting his hands on the counter; I look down and push at the base of it with my shoe.
One day he came into my room and made me take all my clothes off, then he got on the bed with me. He was only wearing his pants. We were on there for ages and he kept stroking me. His face was right up close to mine, it was rough and prickly, he was breathing in my ear. He was rubbing my bottom. I stayed still the whole time. Then he said this was our special cuddle and I must never tell anyone about this cuddle.
I look up and hes staring at me.
Hang on a minute, hang on, wait there, he says.
He turns round to see if there is anyone else through the open door behind him but there isnt, so he moves to look for someone. Hes saying something about a WPC. I look at a poster on the wall about men stealing car radios. Then an older policeman appears at the counter. He seems to be in charge.
Tell the sergeant what youve just told me, says the first one.
The sergeant has three stripes on his arm and a moustache, on his face.
My dad came into my bedroom. It was the daytime. I dont know where my brother and sister were. He made me get undressed. Then he got on the bed with me. He was only wearing his pants. Then we lay on there for ages while he stroked me up and down. His face was scratchy and he was breathing on me. He kept rubbing my bottom. I couldnt move. He didnt say anything until the end when he said this was our special cuddle and I must never tell anyone about it.
But youre telling us? says the sergeant.
Yes.
Why?
I didnt like it, but I didnt want to tell my teacher.
Why not?
Because I like her.
Is your dad at home?
No, hes at work.
Do you know where he works?
Yes.
Well, tell us and well look up his phone number.
I know the number.
Do you?
Yes.
Youre a clever boy, arent you?
Its true, I am clever, my nickname in class is Brainbox. Im best at everything, apart from acting.
I tell him the number and he goes into the back room. I can hear the dial of a phone being turned. Then he comes back to ask my name and my dads name. The first policeman offers me a packet of Garibaldi from behind the counter and I break off a piece. Then he has to get on with something. Two other policemen walk through. They look at me. I eat my biscuit. A man comes in to ask the policeman a question, I dont know what about, and he goes out again. Then the sergeant comes back.
Hell be here to collect you in three-quarters of an hour.
I look at him. The other policeman is looking at the clock as if he cant tell the time. I go towards the door.
Hey, where do you think youre going? You wait there. Your dad is picking you up, and hes coming all the way from Liverpool Street so I shouldnt think hell be too happy if youre not here when he gets here, do you?
I turn to face him, my back to the door.
You can sit over there.
There is an orange plastic chair.
He bangs the packet of Garibaldi on top of the counter.
Have another biscuit.
He goes back through the door. I look at a poster about street crime. Once I saw a picture in the Evening Standard of a man in a grey suit being mugged in London. When Dad came home from work in his grey suit I started to cry. He asked me what the matter was and I told him about the man in the paper. He smiled and told me not to worry, no one was going to get Daddy.
The policeman at the counter is still pretending to be busy. I reach behind me to push open the heavy door and then I walk backwards outside. I go down the three steps, still backwards, and then walk backwards up Forest Road. I can see the police station going away from me as I make steady progress. The first policeman comes out of the door and looks around. I walk backwards behind a telegraph pole and stay still. After a moment I peek around the pole to see him but hes gone back inside.
I walk backwards past The Lantern Room and up to the crossroads, where I turn right, though its on my left now, and continue to walk backwards up Staples Road.
I dont bump into anyone or anything. Its as if Im walking in a private version of the world where only I exist. I am all on my own and I dont mind. I know there is no one else here, so I dont feel lost or that there is someone I should be looking for.
I walk backwards up to the alleyway leading to The Drive and look at my Timex watch. Its almost half past three. I go home the normal way. I dont go to Forest Road. I dont go to the police station, I dont tell them anything, and they dont ring my dad at work.
When Im nearly home I pass Lukes house. The front door is open. I can see Luke and his mum in the hall. They dont notice me. He is saying something to her and she says:
Oh, leave me be, will you? Just leave me be.