Falling

I stored my first quid deal in a rectangular hole gouged out of the pages of a paperback – something obscure from my father’s crime shelf which wouldn’t be missed. The hash was black, half an inch long, wrapped in foil. I kept getting the book out of the bookcase to check it.

My father was carrying a big pane of glass in both hands when he fell down the rockery steps. It was the week after he’d come back from a medical conference in Cuba. Along with the usual gifts for us, he’d brought a black-and-white photo of himself shaking hands with Castro, Castro in fatigues, smiling broadly, my father serious-looking in his thick-rimmed black glasses, shorter than Castro, double chin showing above his tie.

I watched him through the glass door of the TV room. His knees gave way as if he were ducking beneath the branch of the little red Japanese maple. He seemed about to put the pane down on the ground. Then I heard glass smash on the stone steps, saw the newspaper he’d been using to cushion his hand against the glass flutter away, and ran out to see what was wrong.

In my dreams after he died, I would see him come down the steps, carry on across the lawn and stand outside the TV room door, waiting in the freezing wind to be let in. He looked pale. The glass door was locked and I had to try to find a key. I wanted to let out a shout of joy but my voice wouldn’t work, and I dithered in the hall. I could hear everyday sounds all over our house, my mother on the phone in the study, my brother playing with his toys upstairs, music from my sister’s room. Any moment now he would blow away on the icy wind if I didn’t let him in. And then I was inside him in his coffin under the ground, my hair soft and dark like his against the cold satin.

During those months, my mother’s eyes seemed to stare out from the bottom of dark craters. She still produced meals for us, wholesome stews with big lumps of meat and carrot and badly mashed potato, chicken, meat loaf. She still went out to the social work course she’d begun, but without enthusiasm. She kept missing lectures and dashed off her essays late at night amid a sea of paper, biting her nails to the quick.

Her attention was reserved for my father whom she nurtured like a household god, supporting him in his shuffling journeys down the hall to his armchair in the living room and then kneeling by his side, her head pressed against his as if she were trying to listen to the goings-on inside it, diagnose the fault. I barged in on them like this once – they were listening to Mozart together and the smile on her face was peaceful and his eyes were closed.

When the bell went at the end of school, I would peer in to the next-door classroom to see if Daz had left. If he had, I’d hurry down the staircase, dodging the slow movers, and bang out of the double doors at top speed – usually to find him already gone, halfway up the road with Duncan.

Duncan was tall, skinny as a rake, weird, too-short trousers flapping round his spindly ankles, long hair in a haystack. I would stop and watch them through the crowd of uniformed teenagers, stricken, as the two figures retreated in the distance with their heads together. Never had I felt such jealous anguish! I would walk home up the steep hills of Lewes, my schoolbag heavy on my shoulder.

On Saturdays, before my best friend Thomas called round, I would trudge across town to Daz’s council estate which spread over the Downs near the prison, dead quiet, neat brown-brick semis, identical front doors, very different from my road where each Victorian house stood unique behind mossy red-brick walls – a turret on one, an ornate porch on another. Our road was lined with blossoming cherry trees at that time of year, their froth of snow-white flowers so beautiful it made you smile, whereas Daz’s street was bare.

This Saturday, Daz’s pretty sister, Caroline, was coming down the garden path with her violin case under her arm. She stared straight ahead and barely gave me a nod. His mother was at the front door in fluffy slippers. “He’s still asleep,” she said, squinting at me, and I stood without moving. I noticed her dark eyebrows, her young pretty face like her daughter’s. Daz had no father – his parents had split up when he was small. He told me on one walk home that his father had been a scientist too.

“He’s still asleep,” she repeated. “Why do you boys always call so early?”

“Sorry. I won’t disturb him.”

She frowned, rubbed her eyes. “Oh, you might as well, now you’re here. Chris!” Her voice was hoarse. “Visitor!”

The steep staircase went straight up from the front door. It felt over-eager to be waking him but there was no way out. I entered the cramped bedroom covered with posters. Daz was sitting up bare-chested in his narrow bed. Above his head Hendrix posed with his black hat on, eyes glinting wisely, moustache drooping round his mouth. At night, playing Electric Ladyland full blast right next to my bed, that oaky, laid-back voice seemed to come out of my own mouth, as if Hendrix were inside me. I would be performing in the packed school hall, the sea of faces gazing at me, my older sister at the back beside her long-haired boyfriend and an array of hippy friends.

Daz had a long soft body with very white skin. I stared at the pale moles on his chest and tried to imagine what he and Duncan talked about when Duncan came round. No awkward silences. I filled the room with chatter, made Daz smile by talking about the bulge in Jill Jackson’s knickers. I began telling him about my father, but Daz’s face stiffened and I knew he didn’t want to listen because he didn’t have a dad.

My father recovered but one day he was driving home from the lab when he found he couldn’t work the clutch. It was as if his leg were made of air. He felt a fizzy sensation in his muscles, but no power. The following day his speech had become slurred, and by the evening the whole of his left side gave way and would not support him. The doctor came and referred him straightaway to the specialist neurological unit of a psychiatric hospital near Haywards Heath. There they opened my father’s skull.

Two days after the operation, my mother drove us through the Sussex lanes to visit him. The car tires crunched on the gravel drive, and we pulled up outside the building that looked like a prep school. It was late spring, and all the trees in the hospital grounds were coming into leaf. Squirrels could be seen darting here and there, birds busy in the branches.

They had shaved his head. He looked like a Buddhist monk with his sallow brown skin and brown-and-custard eyes. His head lolled like a baby’s and had a tight bandage wrapped right round it. When he tried to speak, plaf– plaffing noises came out and he dribbled.

My mother lay next to him on his narrow metal cot, caressed him and kissed the side of his face and his ear. She made way for each of us in turn. The little ones, my brother and sister, sat themselves on the bed from which protruded various tubes. A strange contortion gripped his features. He was smiling at them, nodding, but they couldn’t understand and kept looking to my mother for help. The room was painted in shiny beige paint, exactly as I’d imagined a hospital room.

When the nurse came in we sat him up higher in the bed, propped by stiff pillows to prevent him pitching sideways. It was my turn. He indicated the bed with his good hand, patted it, and I sat down gingerly, worried about squashing the tubes. There was an unpleasant, sour odour coming from him. I held his once strong, now frail, hand.

He burbled in my ear. I eventually made out that he was saying “pee” and told the nurse. My mother took the little ones out. I helped the nurse heave my father to the edge of the bed, and I took off his pyjama bottoms, but warm piss was already flowing down his thighs and forming a pool on the floor.

“Whoops, too late!” said the nurse with a sympathetic smile. The stubby penis was seeping from its single eye. I mopped his legs with paper towels which I got from beside the sink. He grunted with his head turned away.

“It’s okay, Dad,” I said. “Don’t be embarrassed.”

Later, as we walked down the corridor to the entrance, my mother couldn’t speak. The little ones brushed their hands on the old-fashioned radiators that were belting out heat.

“It was a total waste of time,” I reported to my sister who’d been sitting her mock A levels that day. The doctors had sawn open his head but they still didn’t have a clue. “That’s it now.”

“Don’t be such a doom-monger,” she said.

Everyone adored Daz, as if he had healing powers. That evening he and I lay down in the long grass above the old racecourse. He had dark hair in wavy ringlets and grey eyes that sparkled when he smiled. His teeth were white and straight.

Earlier, up in my bedroom, I’d shown him the secret book and set about the laborious task of licking the Rizlas together, breaking open one of my father’s Benson and Hedges and letting the dry tobacco fall into the paper. Daz had watched, eager to learn, sitting hunched in his grey RAF greatcoat. Then, when I went to the toilet, he’d taken something. I caught him concealing it in his pocket, a startled look on his face, as I came back in.

We lit up far above the town, which was glittering with streetlamps. Steam was rising from the brewery chimney down by the river. The castle stood on its mound like a rotten grey tooth. The paper twist at the end of the joint caught fire. I blew out the flame, drew, spluttered, handed it over. Daz held it in careful fingers, frowned at it and took a puff. We weren’t ready for more, and we watched the joint burn down. Then I tried another puff. The sharp smoke hit my throat, and I coughed again but held it in this time.

Soon I felt dizzy. Waves of heat swept up my face. I was turning white. I retched and retched, huddled in my greatcoat. Daz lay down and spat strings of saliva onto the grass. A gold packet fell out of his greatcoat pocket onto the grass, my father’s cigarettes.

We lay together like lovers. Our heads felt heavy as rocks, our limbs inert. I watched a money spider climb a blade of grass. It reached the top and paused. We were ill for an hour, and when we could lift our heads we laughed and promised to do it again.

My grandparents came down for the day, swept down the hill in their big car, honked the horn to announce their arrival, and we duly ran out to meet them. My mother cried on her father’s shoulder, her face squashed against his tweed jacket, eyes shut tight. He held her for a long time, patted her back and told her she was his brave, brave girl.

A month later, my father came home. His black hair was growing back, and there was no bandage. My brother Toby sat up on the high gatepost where he’d been watching for the car for half an hour. The rest of us stood in a line in the porch. My best friend Thomas was there. My heart was thudding wildly, but I was trying not to feel elated, in case.

It was an effort for my father just to cross the grass verge and stagger in between the gateposts. We gathered round him. “Give me a hand, boys,” he said. “I need to sit down.” Thomas and I helped him indoors, placed him like a drunkard into an armchair where he sat motionless in the overheated living room – my mother had switched the heating on specially. The little ones soon went to bed, and Rebecca went upstairs. Thomas managed to talk to him in an easy way while I came in and out with tea, pillows, slippers, asking shy questions.

Thomas set up the chessboard. They played for a long time, Thomas’s handsome head resting on his fists, my father peering down at the board from on high. I studied the maroon scar his hair was beginning to cover. Behind that rectangular door was hidden some scarlet worm, pulsing, pressing on his nerves.

When Thomas went home, I asked: “Were you scared you might die?”

He nodded, closed his eyes.

“And you don’t know why you’ve suddenly got better?”

“No one knows.”

“But you are better, aren’t you?”

“On the mend, I hope.” His shifty eyes wouldn’t hold mine. Then he said, as if in self-defence: “In fifty years we’ll have found a cure for most of these diseases.”

I remembered going with him for long walks, five, eight, ten miles, when we’d first arrived in Lewes. I would pour out my troubles, how I missed my old friends and didn’t know anyone here, how I wished we lived in a small, normal house. He would stomp along beside me in his black wellingtons and when we got back to the car, he would tell me to get out the nougat from the glove compartment, and we would chew it on the homeward drive.

My mother, holding her hands by her sides to stop herself wringing them, perched on the arm of my father’s armchair. She had gathered all of us in the living room.

My father cleared his throat deeply: “Listen,” he began, “I don’t know whether it’s a good thing to say this to you or not. Mum and I have been discussing it and we’re still not sure.” He took a deep breath. “I – I might be going to die. “

“But you were getting better!” my brother protested.

“I know, I know, pet,” said my mother.

“I want you to be prepared for the worst,” said my father.

“What will happen to us?” asked my little sister. “Will we go to an orphanage?”

“You’ll stay with Mummy.”

I sat staring at the floor, holding myself back. I could sense my older sister doing the same thing next to me. Then I heard myself ask: “How will we cope financially?” instantly regretting how calculating I sounded. My neck stiffened, my nose filled, tears poured out like hot beads down my cheeks. My sister moved closer and held me, my little sister clambered into my father’s lap, and my brother nuzzled his head into the crook of my mother’s arm. All of us were sobbing and blowing our noses.

The cellar door opened without a sound. I could hear my parents talking in the dining room, where they were eating supper as if things were back to normal. We usually queued up and took our plates back to the TV room, leaving our parents alone. There was still no diagnosis. Everyone believed in the miracle but me. I switched on the light and went down the cellar steps, holding the rope bannister. There was a strong urine smell and a scrabbling sound as our two white rats ran about their lab cages. I tipped some food into their basket, checked the water in the upturned glass bottle, like a nurse. The sawdust needed changing but I left it. In my father’s lab, the rats seemed clean and healthy, purposeful, not like these ones which never saw the light of day.

I knelt down by the drinks box. The boiler was rumbling even though it was May. A bottle of vodka went into my greatcoat lining through the specially torn pocket. Once upstairs, I replaced the little hook on the cellar door and then made a noise as if coming along the hall. “I’m going out to Daz’s!” I yelled.

My mother replied: “Okay, darling,” in that faraway voice of hers.

Although I was late, Daz was waiting on the bench. I was feeling more and more sure of him. The evening sky was light and clear, almost summer, but cold. I opened my coat and showed him the Smirnoff label.

He guffawed. “Pass it over!” he said and grabbed it. “They just let you walk out the house with it?”

I thought of the two figures in the dining room. “Didn’t exactly let me.”

“I could never get away with it,” said Daz. “Mum guards hers with her life. She’s an alkie.”

“Your mum?”

“Yep, a secret one.”

“But she looks pretty normal.”

“I’m going to get really out of it,” said Daz.

“Me too.”

He took a swig, gasped, then took another. I did the same, managed to get down three mouthfuls.

We drank half the bottle and ended up at the bus station at the bottom of the town. Dusk. Nine o’clock. A green single-decker swung into the forecourt, lights on, hissed to a halt. No one got out or in. The driver leaned his head on his arms, resting on the steering wheel. We found a couple of girls lurking in the waiting room, drinking cider. One small, skinny, pale, with a pinched face and dark greasy hair, the other taller, lank blond hair, a scowl. Sue and Lorna. Daz said: “Fucking scrubbers!” and bent over with laughter yelling: “Dogs, dogs!”

“I don’t care!”

I went up to Sue and offered her the vodka bottle. She accepted. Her big front teeth clinked on the glass. I watched her dirty neck move as she swallowed. She passed it over to Lorna. Daz let out a doggish howl which made me laugh, and I started snogging Sue, leaning against her, her back leaning in turn on the brick wall of the bus station. Her teeth kept getting in the way, clashing against mine. There seemed to be no softness in her mouth.

“Let’s go and lie down,” she said and led the way out to the little park behind the bus station. It was dark under the trees. I could see her luminous white face, her dark hair, smell the vodka on her breath. The trees sizzled in the breeze, a frying sound. My long hair kept blowing across my face, getting into my mouth.

The world began to turn. I was dissolving. Daz and Lorna were on a bench by the road. I undid Sue’s buttons easily, rubbed her squashy round breasts, which looked ghostly white in the shadow. Her ribcage was visible, her skeletal hips. Her skin was cold. I was lying on top of her and kept laughing as Daz let out one of his howls. The grass was damp and thin. My penis was out, with Sue’s wiry pubic hair against it, but it wouldn’t harden. She kept saying “Stick it in then,” but it was lifeless. She tried to stuff it in anyway, and I felt how silky she was inside for a second, but then it flopped out and I could feel the opportunity slipping away. I turned to rub myself. Daz had gone silent, bent low over Lorna.

Sue began doing up her blouse, wiggling her thin hips on the ground to get her jeans up. I needed a piss and found myself letting it out. The warmth soaked my jeans. Sue stood up to go. I crawled after her to the bench, but by the time I reached it Sue and Lorna were walking away, swearing at me and Daz. My legs wouldn’t obey me as I tried to stand up, so I crawled up the steep pavement away from the park, with Daz behind me. We reached a low wall opposite the police station and rested. “Bad place to stop,” I said, and just then a police car drew up. Footsteps approached. “Where d’you think you’re going?” said the policeman.

“Home,” I replied.

We gave him our names and addresses. I expected to be bundled into the police station but he left us. “Spastics!” he said.

“Thanks a lot, bye!” I called as we began the long crawl home.

We parted company near my house, and in the dark I heard one last howl like that of a lost soul. I felt we had done something extraordinary together, which bonded us forever. I found myself on my own stumbling and tittering up the grass verge, between the gateposts, into the echoing porch. The bottle fell from my hand, and pieces of glass crashed round my feet. I let out a sob. I fumbled for the door key in my tight pocket. My jeans felt clammy and cold as the night breeze filled the trees. I kept hearing Daz’s howls in my mind, but they sounded forlorn now, as if he really were a wolf prowling the forest. He wasn’t going to save me; he had no room for anyone but himself. I was just a source of things, dope, booze, my father’s cigarettes. I remembered that whenever he came to our house, he raided our fridge with vengeful glee.

I hoped my parents were asleep, but a shadow came to the front door behind the stained-glass panels. My father opened it. “You alright?” he asked. He had his glasses off and looked very pale. He stood with a bemused expression on his face, leaning on the door.

“I’m fine, fine,” I said, averting my gaze and keeping my mouth shut tight so he wouldn’t smell my breath.
“Thomas was here waiting for you half the evening.”

“Oh, was he?”

He let me pass and I walked to the foot of the stairs, hoping I’d fooled him. I knew I hadn’t. I was sure it must pain him; he didn’t want to have to worry now. I stumbled on the first step, but caught myself in time and went on climbing, floating, up into the darkness which kept expanding around me. I would put Hendrix on and he would be inside me. I would be him, and I would lie in my warm bed and not think of anything at all.

“Night!” he called softly.

“Night.”