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I had always worried. At six years old I heard a teacher in my class say to another teacher that I was a nervous boy. She may have gone on to say something like ‘be gentle with him’, but if she did, I didn’t hear it because she whispered. School was frightening and smelt of sick while home was OK and didn’t smell of anything. I worried just the same, though; even on my eighth Christmas morning.
In my pyjamas and my blue felt dressing gown, I felt pretty safe and snug. Our Parkray stove was lit (a Christmas treat), and we had a tree with a dozen lights, but it was rainy and grey and the biggest parcel in the pile was disappointingly light. I only liked heavy toys, toys made of metal with gears and engines. I liked to think they were not really toys at all. This toy was cream plastic and felt tinny. A length of skinny, plaited wire and two small boxes with gold grills buried in some crumbly polystyrene. It looked like the sort of thing other boys might want to get as a Christmas present – and those were always the presents I pretended to like but didn’t. I squeaked the bits out of the packaging and read the instructions.
Talk secretly with your friends in another room or even outside. The ‘Realistic’ intercom. Range 50 yards. Battery included.
This was quite a bit better than it looked. It was a toy that did something that toys weren’t supposed to do: it worked. It was real. My dad looked pleased because I looked pleased and my mum looked relieved that whatever it was, I understood it and seemed to like it.
The Realistic was transistorized. In order to connect the battery, you needed to flip off the back cover with a coin and expose its works: brown drilled breadboard with lots of individually-coloured components soldered in place. The battery had to be connected to a push-on pair of press studs and then precariously wedged in place with foam. A rotating numbered switch turned it on and adjusted the volume. The skinny plaited wire plugged into the top of each box with a miniature jack plug. A lever on the top made the intercom buzz so
that you could call someone. If they wanted to, they could buzz you using the lever on their box. The effect of the whole thing was cheap, like a seaside souvenir, but when I switched it on it crackled and hissed like a proper machine. I must have played with it that morning.
Probably with my dad, but, as I have said, it wasn’t for playing with.
The worry was another gift from Mum and Dad. It was always in them and nearly everywhere nearly all the time. When it wasn’t there, I was OK – nothing special. When it was there, I was special and ill. Special meant running down the stairs two or three at a time to get from the upstairs landing toilet back to the scratchy black and white television in the living room before the landing light went out. It must have been on a timer. It meant stuffing bits of a stinking school dinner into my blazer pocket – gristle, gravy and all – so I didn’t get forced to eat it or get shouted at in front of the others. It meant feeling ashamed and weak and unpopular. Most of all it meant waiting and listening in case my parents disappeared.
I thought that nobody knew about my big worry. But they must have done. I don’t remember ever telling anyone or writing a story about it. It was just a fact. One day they would both disappear, and I would not know where they had gone or why. I never got any further than that. There was no ‘then’ or ‘later on’. The thought ended with the vacant sitting room settee, or a perfectly flat and empty bed, or garage doors left open Any further was too dark. I didn’t think of looking. I didn’t dare.
The evenings were too short. Children’s television would be allowed from 5.00, but at 5.45 the rule was that it was switched off, and we had dinner at 6.00. At around 7.30, the TV might be turned on for Dad’s Army or Are You Being Served, but by 8.30 it was pronounced night, and I would have to go to bed ‘to get a good night’s sleep’. The stairs, the toilet, and the 16-watt light on the landing prodded my big worry awake, but the blue bedroom, the rattly metal curtain rail, and the door half ajar so that the 16 watts could define the door crack without illuminating the room pushed the worry up from my tummy to my neck. Lying with my ear pressed into the dark, I could hear my heart beating in my head. It was counting the time it was taking me to get to sleep, while over the TV banter I was struggling to hear my mum or my dad moving or, even better, speaking. If there was a comedy on and he liked it, they would laugh. That was fantastic, a double helping of reassurance. Not only were they still there; they were happy. I knew the schedule. World in Action at 8.30 on Tuesdays, The Good Life, The Sweeney. Noisy programmes that were not funny were the worst and would lock my head and my hearing into a cramp. News at Ten – Big Ben – bong, bong, bong – announced another thirty agonising minutes of silence. But the weather forecast promised that most precious of sounds: the kitchen door opening and my dad going to the outside toilet, taps running, doors closing, lights being turned out, and finally my mum creeping up the stairs so as not to wake me. Within seconds I could sleep.
Unbeknown to Mum and Dad, the Realistic promised to end my big worry.
After Christmas dinner I carefully positioned one of the plastic boxes on the table in the front room, grille turned toward the settee, next to the pot of paper clips and the raffia coaster.
Then I meticulously laid the skinny wire up the stairs against the banister so no one would trip. I couldn’t Sellotape it because that would pull off the paint, but it could be tucked and wound round things. I was engineering, playing with my new toy, having fun they thought. Mum and Dad would not be ashamed of my babyishness. They would never know that, tonight, I would be suckling on their barely audible sniffs and sighs, the creaks and puffs of the settee cushions as they fidgeted during this week’s episode of Kenneth Clark’s
Civilisation or got comfy for the Golden Shot. They were pleased with me wanting to get it all set up so tidily. The plan was that, from now on, anytime they needed me – say, to ask about a school report, or have a banana sandwich – they would press the lever and buzz me. No need even to say anything; just buzz and I would know that they wanted something. That way, there was no need to keep the intercom switched on all the time and waste batteries; I could pop down in a trice. It took most of the afternoon to get it all just right, but I was so pleased I showed them what I had done even though it was really just being tidy.
For the first time ever, I looked forward to bed. I felt grown-up and strong and happy. That made the evening feel longer than usual. Whereas before the gap between dinner at 6 o’clock (still evening) and bed at 8 o’clock (night-time) felt so short and dark and frightening it made swallowing macaroni cheese without being sick difficult, tonight, this Christmas Day night, the evening actually felt long and light and funny. When the instruction came – ‘time for bed, don’t you think?’ – I kissed them both and strode in my snug blue felt to the living room door and up the stairs to the toilet. Into bed, stretch out to full length (something that felt quite new), reach over, gently rotate the switch of the Realistic. Keep the volume as low as possible and lie under an eiderdown of sonic reassurance with a golden grill smiling me to sleep. And so I did.
I didn’t have a clock in my bedroom, so I did not know the time when I woke up. I had put the Realistic right next to my ear and it had rolled over face down with its gold grille kissing the pillow while I slept. For a moment, I thought the battery might have run down, but I set the box right way up and it purred back at me reassuringly. Then I noticed that the light on the landing was out. This never happened at bedtime. The dull glow cast by the landing light was a constant melancholy reminder of night, and the rule was that it was allowed to be on all the time. Probably for me. On the other hand, I almost never woke up in the night so perhaps this was a new rule, or the timer had turned it off. After all, even a 16-watt bulb switched on all night for nothing was still a waste. I wondered if I was brave enough to ignore it. There was enough light coming through the curtains for the room to be bathed in grey. I lay back in bed and tried stretching out again. It didn’t work. The flow of big worry I had stemmed so successfully with the Realistic now surged toward my bladder, and it became urgent for me to get to the toilet at the end of the landing. I got up and crossed to the bedroom door quite quickly, sucking in any sense of alarm. I switched the light on. It clicked emptily. No light came on. I panicked and sprung through the door to the light switch on the landing. I punched it down. Darkness.
I wondered whether this had really happened before or whether I had dreamt it. It seemed familiar. When I was four, I had whooping cough and my temperature had rocketed. In this state I remember sleepwalking along the landing in the dark crying out for my mother.
Whatever might have been, I instinctively cried out the same cry again: ‘Mum, please, the lights have broken.’ I wanted an immediate response and to see my mother worried and in her nightie coming out of their bedroom to see what was wrong. Of course, the lights would be on and the low voice of my dad would say that it was late and ask what was going on at this time of the night. On this occasion my cry was followed by nothing. No Mum, no light, no comfort. Barely able to breathe, I sprung at the next hope. It’s still early; they are still downstairs watching the television, sat on the settee together, sniffing and fidgeting, laughing and yawning. They can’t hear me; the TV is too loud. I felt back through the door and listened for the Realistic. It was still on. The hiss seemed more insistent; it was loud, shouting but empty, breathless. No TV. The Realistic must be unplugged. Even unplugged, I knew it would still hiss. The plugs were weedy and easily tugged out. I reached for the skinny wire,
located it easily and ran it through my finger and thumb as I felt my way down the stairs, faster than was safe in the blackness. Still no light anywhere, but I didn’t notice or care. The dark was nothing compared to the ending that was taking shape in my head. I opened the living room door. There was just enough light from the embers of the Parkray to see that the settee was bare and that nobody was sitting there. That was it.
I had arrived. It had arrived. After years tucked up in a corner of some stinking green room, the point of my big worry had slid in. And now it was going to kill me. Or I would have to kill me. The fear engulfed me, buried and chocked me down. They had disappeared. The plot that had framed every day of my life up until that day was finally closing in and finishing.
Dark, silent, empty, alone it was over. I felt like I had when I had whooping cough and I had wet the bed. It drained down my pyjama bottoms and my stomach gulped and farted.
Instinctively, I strained to hold it back, tugging on the closed curtain for support, preventing myself from squatting. The curtain opened and I saw through the window.
I saw the two garden loungers stretched out open to the full, elastic and taut. They were side by side, absurdly symmetrically arranged to catch the sun, silhouetted against the black. I noticed the warmth from the Parkray on the backs of my wet, sticky legs. The bright, sunless night was outside. The tree inside with its dozen Christmas lights now lit up and reflected back from the window. My white mum and dad lying on a lounger each. Perfect bookends, still and sculptural. Short sleeves, slacks and sandals. Silent.
Behind me a buzz.
June 4, 2014
