In the coldly echoing, diesel-stinking, corporately liverish coach
station, they’ll be standing with their ironed-brown-paper-bag
hands folded. Coldly they stand, in the diesel-engine-echoing coach
station – and they stink. If you were to unfold their brown-paper
clothes they’d release the exhausted reek of … parsimony: Would
you like the parson’s nose, Camilla? Said with the only genuine feeling
they possessed … as if, as if … a greasy blob of chicken arse
could make for … any of it. There’s obviously no room for them
in the Mowbray Road flat – even if there had been, they’d never
sleep under my immoral and Semitic roof. Not that the Pettigrew-Whitehouses
are especially pious or bigoted – it’s more that they’re
creatures of habit: for years regular attendees at the local See-of-Ee
church, Saint Alphege’s, a millennium-old aircraft hangar, they
have, in recent years, transferred their loyalty to the evangelical potting
shed, which opened for business at the end of their road. Here
they stand, Sunday-after-Sunday, listening to the rasping of their
fellow worshippers, as they speak in sandpapery tongues. They’ll be
at it now, Camilla thinks as she moves towards the exit, buttoned-up
tight beside charismatics who wave … one wooden arm aloft.
Then, tomorrow, they’ll take the bus into Birmingham to catch
the coach – yet another thrifty feat, that, if unacknowledged by
her, will summon from her father … Aren’t I clever, Milla, darling?
This, perhaps the most deranging of Mister Pettigrew-Whitehouse’s
many foibles: his self-referential endearments – and his hand-me-down
vocabulary: the darlings, awfullys, beastlys and napkins of his
genteel upbringing, all of which Camilla carried with her to school
and … flushed down the lavatory – NEVER the toilet! How exactly
her father came down in the world, while her mother rose, Camilla
had never found out. For a while, in her Milla Tant teens, she’d torn
at their weedy gentility, trying to expose the rusting social seesaw
they’d sat on – but then it happened inna rape field, and happened
again inna squat, after which Camilla’s origins seemed a lot
less important to her than the shit I was in … Twice-yearly for two
days. They put up at the Kerry Guesthouse on Mapesbury Road,
run by that Whore of Babylon, Missus Donleavy, who, besides being
endlessly obliging, hadn’t increased her rates for years. Four days
per annum – two of which were Sundays. A break in routine for
the Pettigrew-Whitehouses, who, instead of receiving communion,
ate dry, tasteless and wafer-thin chips at the Golden Spoon on the
High Road. Joyless meals they paid for with coins slid out, one by
one, from the recesses of her father’s horseshoe-shaped leather
purse. A break in Camilla’s routine as well: twice a year she got to
sit in silence across from her parents, instead of having to share the
long one, which, every other Sunday, stretched from pole to pole all
the way from Solihull to Kilburn. Camilla made these calls sat on
the crocheted blanket she’d thrown over the squashy old divan she
and Mark had dragged back from the People’s Dispensary for Sick
Animals’ furniture repository in Cricklewood. Camilla prodded
the buttons, and waited until one or other of them stirred. Then
waited some more. News of their grandson or Mark – which was
seldom jolly, although occasionally amusing inna bleak kinduva
way – left them as it found them: cold … It was understood by all
three – although, in common with so much else, never spoken of –
that it was Camilla’s responsibility to call them, never the reverse.
After all, it’d been her who’d run away – dashing along dirty verges,
scampering through the spaghetti of arterial roads, to a rendezvous
with a man from the motor trade … Lucas Industries in Shirley, to
be precise, which ran a restart programme for youngsters who’d
dropped out of secondary education. Camilla sat in an office block
beside the EmmFortytwo construction site, itching her bare feet on
nylon carpet tiles and watching as the whiteboard filled up with
the restart programme, and gone with her to Warwick University,
where Camilla lasted only a year. Zack says supportive things such
as, You’ve got a good mind, Milla, and, I really think you do yourself
down … Yes! Down! Down-down, deeper and down … to where
greasy locks toss between denim thighs. No – she’d lasted only a
year, and she doubted her father-in-law’s estimation, because the
thick syllables and crusted consonants of Middle English … stuck
in my craw al stuned at his steven and stansil seten … In a swoghe
sylence through the sale richei. She hadn’t done anything as dramatic
as dropping out – only drifted away … behind the whitewashed
window of a defunct sub-post office in Leamington Spa … rubber
stamps and rubber bands scattered on the parquet where she writhed
with an unsuitable boyfriend. The following year saw her in a squat
in Ipswich, with one still more so – which was why … inna rape
field – I won’t … ever again … think his name … Last night Mona
had sat up on the couch and Ark-Ark! asked, Did you get through?
Then Ben – who can hear with spooky acuity when he wants to –
looked up from his Game Boy and said, Numbers of confirmed
autism cases increased significantly in the eighties – long before the
introduction of the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine
… long before the introduction of the combined measles, mumps and
rubella vaccine … That’d been it: Ben’s first and last words on the
subject of himself. His mother took them to be his way of reassuring
me. Yet how much better it would’ve been if he’d put his arms
around her – if only for a moment – and said something like, It’s
okay, Mum, it’s not your fault – ‘sides, I’m happy with the way
I am. If I weren’t like this I wouldn’t be … me … I wouldn’t be …
me … But this is, she thinks, all bollocky-bullshitty-wishfully
thinking on her part. Pacing up and down under the portico of
the Where-there-bee Tesco’s, staring with mounting anxiety into the
Perspex dome of the gumball dispenser, then at the multicoloured
scraps of foil beneath her sandalled feet – the scrabbled shells of
Cadbury’s Creme Eggs. Because it’s Easter – and a time of rebirth,
when fluffly little lesions grow new nerves, and start to peck-peck-peck
at your underparts. Reaching the end of the glassy portico, Camilla
hears shtooms! and peeeowws! and k’tannngs! On the far side of the
road, she sees scraped out of the black paint slapped across a shopfront,
the letters H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D-A-R-C-A-D-E pulsing with
the lights flashing within. Inside the noises are far louder – and
there’s also the clackattack of air hockey and the whip-clop!-rumble
of pool. Gormless Northern lads loiter, just this minute hatched
from their cracked shell suits – be
cause it’s Easter and a time of
rebirth … when you spend your child-support on cheap booze. She finds
her own chicks in the far corner, between Maximum Force and
Licence to Kill. They’re in profile: cradling their plastic machine-guns,
and she sees the family resemblance which otherwise eludes
her: bulbous tips to noses big and small – the froggy lips they share
with wide-mouthed Zack. Mark’s smoking one of his toothpick-thin
roll-ups, while his son sucks on an actual tootmhpick – of which he
has a score about him at any time, available to be twirled in front
of his startling eyes for yet more stimming. Both are furiously concentrating
– trigger-fingers twitching out cheeowww! cheeowww!
cheeowww! until a deep American voice bellows: RELOAD! and
they pivot neatly to the right and the left, POINTing THE CONTROLLER
OUTSIDE THE SCREEN TO RELOAD!
then pivoting neatly back to resume their carnage. They are, Camilla
realises, utterly unaware of me – I could collapse on to this grubby
carpet and they’d never notice … She peers closer, trying to make
out what it is they’re killing so concertedly, and sees cartooned
body-builders with bandanas wrapped round their fat heads leap
from helicopters and tumble from tanks – RELOAD! and her
menfolk carry on dutifully culling the beefcake … Yesterday afternoon
the boatman landed them all at Seahouses and they’d plodded
along the beach back to the cottage, Mona and Camilla arm in arm,
the three males in their party … not really with us at all: Mona’s
bloke way ahead – Ben far behind, and Mark slopping in and out
of the wavelets, his wellies crunching a wrack of mermaid’s purses
and mineral-water bottles, his plainchant borne to them on the
breeze: And this little piggy’s brain rotted ‘cause it’s tummy was fulluv
roast beef, whee-whee-whee … or words to that dismal effect. Her
arm tightening in Camilla’s, Mona had said: He picks up on things,
doesn’t he – I’ve noticed that. What he just said then – pigs eating
beef … We bought the cottage the year of the bee-essee crisis …
mind you, that was beef eating itself. Anyway, when we were walking
along this beach late that summer, inland there must’ve been,
ooh, I dunno – twenty, maybe thirty … Loads of big fires – or
pyres. Locals were pretty cynical – said farmers were loading their
cattle on to transporters and driving them from farm to farm,
hoping to pick up the virus. Said there was more to be gained from
government compensation than at market … Camilla had looked
at her friend – the only one she’s managed to hang on to from her
youth: was Mona making some sort of elliptical comparison? Saying
Camilla, by analogy, was also a farmer, driving her diseased beefcake
from hospital to therapist, and in the process picking up … Zack’s
compensation, which was what Mark’s dour and darkly beautiful
mother, Miriam, insinuated when she deigned to visit the Kilburn
flat? But no, all this had simply been a preamble, because Mona
had then blurted out: I just don’t know how you cope with it, Milla.
I honestly think I’d have a breakdown if I had to deal with a fraction
of the stuff you do … And Camilla, her eyes on the fantasia
of Bamburgh Castle, shimmering through the sea fret, had gasped
romantically: I-I love him – and I hate him … She wonders now,
as she watches the surreal slaughter, if she could ever explain to
anyone – even Mark’s father – how, as she bent and shaped her
affection to match the distortions of his psychosis, so it had become
two-sided: love and hatred were now inseparable … just like us.
RELOAD! The plastic muzzles swing away from the screen then
back in … perfect harmony. They find each other, Camilla thinks,
in this neon jungle – they’re content so long as they don’t have to be
themselves at all, only fellow Rambos – RELOAD! But this time,
as he swings Ben sees his mother and the spell’s broken. He carries on
slaughtering but his actions are mechanical, as is his speech: Dad’s
pretty good, but I always beat him … I always beat him … ‘cause he
doesn’t understand how the machine’s been programmed … how
the machine’s been programmed … The attackers come from different
places, but they always end up in the same bit of the screen … in
the same bit of the screen … All you gotta do is keep moving the gun
like this as you fire it … like this as you fire it … You don’t have to
aim it at all … have to aim it at all … But you get just as many …
just as many … GAME OVER! Camilla says, C’mon, you two,
we’ve still got a long drive ahead of us. Back in the Vauxhall, with
Ben inserted into the envelope of his laptop and his ears plugged to
it, Camilla begins to ask Mark: D’you think that –? then stops,
because her question would require him to think about now and
then, and at the moment there’s nothing more aggravating to Mark’s
condition than … time. He howls at any reference to the past or the
future, for as far as he’s concerned … they don’t exist. It’s always
now! he screeches, curling into a ball and rocking on his bony
fulcrum. It’s always nooooow! The alarm call of the wild is what she
privately calls it – and it’s a near-daily occurrence, yanking her
forcibly back from past regrets and future anxieties to this: the
groan of the car’s engine … the moan of her own troubled guts –
and the flickety-click of her lost boy … fimbling around in virtual
space. The motorway ahead darkens – onrushing cars and lorries in
the other carriageway shrink to small, white dots. The screensaver
on the first computer Camilla ever used – in an architect’s office
where she was temping – returns to her now: Interstellar Voyage,
it was called – but, planted at a mushroom-coloured workstation
as she bored into outer space, Camilla – then, as now – had been
boldly going … fucking nowhere. What is it she wants to ask Mark?
Yes … Can he remember – even roughly – when it was their
son had got to third base with his beloved computers? No longer
simply touching them up, but shoving his grubby fingers right inside.
Friends – well, Mona – say there’s virtually unlimited pornography
out there … in there? Camilla’s eyes slide to the rear-view mirror,
which frames Ben’s square face and straight blond fringe. He’s
ripening, perhaps … but isn’t oily yet, not yet matted-shatted, shit-heel
– yeah, yeah, inna rape field shit-heel – You lookin’ at me, shit-heel?
Walking in through my eyes, shit-heel – dragging in with you all the shit
you picked up in that rotten rape field … Christ, Camilla concedes,
I feel rotten. But no, it wasn’t some Botty Venus Ben slammed the
clamshell shut on when she sidled up behind him, but the numerals
and digits striping its screen. What’re you doing? she asks him, and
every time his answer is the same curt, Coding, Mum. His mother
remembers boys putting little plastic pegs into little plastic peg-boards
– Mastermind or Mindmaster they called it. And what about
the girls? We skipped it and skipped away … They played all sorts of
code-breaking games back then – spying was sorta sexy: secret
agent running across the fields with a girl … pulling her down …
down to the ground … inna rape field … No, no – not sexy at all,
with his wiry chest-pelt and grease-painted-brows – but no commie
toff, that one – not numbered third, fourth or fifth man, nor letter-designated
– Colonels A and B, Informants C and D like Ben’s
First Word Book, Dee-dee-dee we bang the drum! Dee-dee-dee!
It’d been more than ten years since the Wall crumbled … a victory
for the spooks but no retirement plan. Ha-ha, turns out his Dee-BeeFour
was on the aitchpee – he’s no vee-eyepee status any more,
so he’s shaken the shit-stirrer – the shit-heel, onna crushed cardboard
box, flap in hand, FORMER SPY. I HAVE NO HOME AND
NO SHELTER. PLEASE HELP. Fat chance – evil fucks. Anyway,
that’s not what Ben’s up to – he’s only fimbling about in there,
fimbling about with strings of letters, piles of digits … lifting
them … sifting them … through his … digits. Harmless, really.
When he was very small boy it was sharks, Star Wars, birds-of-prey,
all normal – perfectly normal. True, he was a bit obsessional –
had to know every last thing about his chosen subject. Had to
take him up to the Charing Cross Road. Foyles. Had to buy him a
book on ospreys. Specialist book costing thirty-four pounds and
seventy pence. Had to. To the credit of his customised brain, he got it
down pat, and pattered along beside her for weeks – weeks! She’d
had a smock dress at the time. Quite nice. With frogging at the
breast – he hung on to the hem. Never got the shape back. Seen in
flight from below the osprey has white or mottled underparts …
white or mottled underparts … Which was how, aged four, he
must’ve seen me, staring up from below at my face, mottled with
angry red patches. He was a junior spy forever birdwatching – So it
goes on, the acid-yellow rape fields sweeping past the Vauxhall’s
mottled windows, then the lardy-arse cooling towers of the power
stations clustered around the Humber … And then, not exactly
nothing, but an increasingly maddening confusion of signs and