John

YEARS LATER HE WAS to tell people that he became a barrister because without law there can be no civil society, but actually it was to please his mother.

His mother’s love, though great, was of the tearful variety. When John was little she would fold him in her arms with a grip that was surprisingly strong for such a fragile-looking woman and then she would cry. She cried when he made his prep school’s first fifteen at rugby and when he passed grade eight on the trumpet. She cried when he got his twelve O levels and her pretty squirrel-brown eyes were red-rimmed for days after he received his offer to study law at Cambridge. Three years later, on the morning of his graduation, he knew when he returned to his rooms from breakfast that his mother had already arrived because of the trail of coloured Kleenex on the stairs.

John’s very first memory was rising to the sky on a friend’s garden swing. His second was of his mother pulling him down off the swing, shaking him one moment and hugging him the next, and saying, ‘Never forget, my darling, that you’re Mummy’s everything. Always remember you are my world.’

Mostly she chose not to notice the rituals her darling boy was beginning to develop, such as pulling a door shut behind him and not letting go until he had counted to a hundred and having to start again if he got into a muddle, or swimming out to the furthest buoy in the sea every day on holiday even when the temperature of the water was no more than 13 centigrade and it had dropped to 15 outside. Even when she had the evidence thrust before her, a skinny eight-year-old trembling with cold and with lips the colour of blueberries refusing to get out of the steel-grey sea, she shook her head and smiled at his ‘perfectionism’ and ‘funny little ways’. He was crying out for help, in need of it as surely as if he were drowning in that cold sea, but to his doting mother he was just waving.

And then there was the time a year or so later when he fell in love with the stories about Biggies, the fearless flying ace. He had cycled to the library to return the first volume in the series, heady with the knowledge that there was an entire shelf of further thrills waiting for him. But he knew it was all over when, scanning the shelves, a thought so quick it was more of an impression shot through his mind. It went something like this: unless he wanted something terrible to happen to his mother he would have to read his way through the alphabet, an author for each letter, before he could finally settle on J for W.E. John, his hero’s creator. The elation from just a few minutes ago drained from him leaving him cold with despair. He was trapped. Helpless. A small yelp of distress escaped his lips and an elderly man lifted his gaze from the tome in front of him to glare. John tried to retrieve the thought in order to unthink it. But it was too late. The challenge had been issued and the smile of anticipation had been replaced by the anxious set to his jaw his mother saw as determination. Nine books would take him the rest of the holiday to read. And he was only allowed to take three out at a time. The cycle ride alone took half an hour each way. But he had a choice: either he read his way through those nine books or he did not get to read about Biggies again, ever. He squared his shoulders. At least he could pick the shortest ones.

‘Darling, you have to go outside. It’s not healthy to stay inside with your nose stuck in a book all day. And what’s that you’re reading? Nora’s Ballet Shoes? Oh.’

At the progressive co-educational school his mother had picked for him, John walked the whole way along the narrow wall enclosing the stairwell at the back of the school gym block, continuing even when the drop down to the concrete got to ten feet. He was the only one in his year to dive from the highest diving board, and he alone tracked the Dirty Old Man all the way to his lair in the woods, when the rest of his friends were too scared, yet nothing would have made him skip straight to J on that library shelf.

As he grew older it was lucky he was such a handsome boy, or the girls would have fallen about laughing when they saw his lanky figure striding towards them in the corridor, his eyes fixed on the floor, his feet side-stepping, nimble as a boxer’s. Instead they sighed and swooned and forgave him everything and not even a titter passed their eager lips the time he walked into the open locker-door. No, as he looked up through his one good eye the other was bleeding, from inside or just above no one could tell at first; all he saw was a flock of anxious gazes boring down on him and strong small hands wiping and dabbing, accompanied by high soft voices clucking.

The boys too accepted his odd ways on account of his undoubted, though somewhat unreliable, skill on the sports field. And though he had only a few really close friends, most of his peers, if asked, would refer to him as ‘an OK bloke’.

He read a book by a psychologist, Roger W. Pointer. Pointer equated laziness with evil. It was a variation on the theme of ‘the devil makes work for idle hands’, but whereas homespun wisdom barely registered, the argument put forward by Roger W. Pointer, that there were few evils in this world, mental or physical, that could not be put down to laziness of the body or spirit, resonated with the truth of a perfectly pitched note. So John got to work at being busy. Not because he always wished to be, not because he was not so tired at times that putting one foot before the other seemed like a trek to the moon but because it was the best way he knew to keep from falling off the edge of reason.

He made treaties and he bargained. If I cut my time over a mile by twenty seconds then I’m allowed to pass the school noticeboard without reading every single sentence of every notice posted. If I do ten one-handed press-ups I won’t cock up my exams. Two nights without once falling asleep and my mother won’t get cancer. If I happen to read a sentence containing the word ‘cancer’, touching wood seven times will prove I don’t wish it on anyone.

On and on his busy brain laboured, wheeling and dealing, bribing and bartering as if it were a politician or a hawker in some Middle Eastern bazaar. It was exhausting. This boy, although strong and fit, was always tired. But he couldn’t stop because the alternative to all this activity was a slow drowning in the quagmire of his mind.

*     *     *

On New Year’s Eve he had stayed to have dinner with his mother but had told her that he would have to leave by eleven at the latest in order to make the party. When that time came his mother, eyes welling up with the inevitable tears, had thanked him for caring about a lonely old woman and reassured him, unasked, that he was not to worry about her being left to see in the New Year on her own as she was very happy with her wireless.

‘At least watch the goddamn TV,’ John snapped.

‘Oh darling, don’t get cross.’ His mother reached for her lace handkerchief. ‘I’m grateful, you know I am.’

‘I don’t want you to be grateful.’ He put his arm around her shoulders and winced at how slight she felt. ‘I’ve enjoyed our evening. And it wasn’t a sacrifice. I wanted to have dinner with you. I just get... oh I don’t know. I’m sorry I upset you.’ He sighed, raking his long-fingered hands through his fair hair until it stood up at the front like plumage. ‘But I have to go now, though, I really do. The others are expecting me. I’ll call you at midnight, or just after anyway.’

His mother dabbed at her eyes and gave him the kind of smile you might put on when you’re about to go Over the Top.

‘Of course you mustn’t keep your friends waiting.’ She raised a paper-dry hand. ‘No, I mean it. There’s a girl, isn’t there? How could your old mother possibly compete?’

‘No girl,’ he said. And he thought nor will there be the way things were panning out. It was gone half-past eleven before he made it out through the front door and into his car.

His mother had given him a five-year-old Volvo 343 when he got his place at Cambridge. A Volvo was so uncool, but she trusted it to keep her darling boy safe. He knew that beggars could not be choosers, he knew not to look a gift-horse in the mouth and he also knew that a car was a car; and it could have been worse, it could have been new. Anyway, by now he was too old to worry about peer-pressure.

‘You, of all people,’ his mother had said at the time of giving it to him, ‘do not have to worry about image. She might have been pronouncing the word ‘image’ as if tasting a newfangled dish, but she was right. This boy had been blessed by the gods: tall, athletic, with wheat-blond hair and dark-lashed velvet-brown eyes. His square chin even had a dimple. And he was bright and kind and strong: truly, he was a golden boy. And he knew it and tried his best to level the odds. Inside his lovely head ran a train loaded with junk. Unlike those of British Rail, this train ran night and day and it was always on time. It did not stop other than to refuel and take on more junk: count to three five times and shake your head – but careful so no one sees – and the bad thing might never happen; wipe your feet twenty times on the left foot, always the left foot first, then twenty for the right and then ten on each again and your bad thoughts are rendered harmless; ask forgiveness to that judge and jury in your head for the thought that flew through your mind so swiftly you did not know your wilful brain had fired it; plead and whisper over and over again that you did not mean it, you did not mean to think the thought you could barely remember thinking. Plead that it won’t shoot through the membranes of your brain and reach God the creator up on high. God, who might (because such is the hubris of this poor boy’s mind) hear his inadvertent prayers and act upon them. ‘Sorry never, sorry never, sorry never.’ Three times, always three times, for each bad thought.

He had not driven more than two hundred yards when he began feeling guilty. Why could he not have been nicer to his mother when he was home? She had made such an effort over dinner. ‘All your favourites.’ Of course even that had irritated him: these were dishes that had been his favourites when he was twelve.

As he drove through the snow-silenced countryside the thought went through his mind that if his mother was dead he would be free, free of guilt, free to go, free to be. He regretted it immediately. He loved his mother. He would never wish her any harm. Sorry never, sorry never, sorry never.

In response, his unruly mind conjured up a picture of his mother at the top of the stairs taking a tearful step down towards him, arms outstretched and then falling, falling.

Sorry never, sorry never, sorry never.

The country lane wound round to the right before it started the climb. The girl with long fairy-tale hair was running down the hill track, unsteady on her feet, her red knitted hat pulled down low. As the church bells started to chime midnight she tilted her head right back, lifting her eyes to the star-stained night sky. Then she wobbled, clutching at her chest as if in pain.

He, far away in his land of private nightmares, had come close to running her down. Something brought him back just in time to slam on the brakes, sending him skidding to a halt in front of her. He felt a sudden pain in his chest making him think he must have hurt himself on the steering wheel but he was more concerned for the girl. He opened the car door and called out to her, asking if she was all right, but she was heading down the dirt track, tall, slender, a flight of hair under a red knitted hat.

He got out of the car and called after her again.

She didn’t turn round but raised two defiant fingers to the starry night sky. Her voice was high and clear.

‘And a Happy fucking New Year to you too!’