Chapter three
My love unbound
‘Don’t you want me’ – The Human League – Christmas number one for five weeks – 1981.
They were all at it. Every last sodding one of them. Since Le Frog I had added a further twenty five pathetic minutes to my relationship portfolio consisting of me man handling Katy Crabtree after social club down a pitch dark private road. I was good. I mean really good. The truth was I only touched Katy Crabtree on the outside of her pants, well alright, on the outside of her dungarees which were on the outside of her pants. The fact that she had on a parka, over her dungarees, which were over her pants shouldn’t concern you. Look, it was a step up from Gill in accounts and endless hours of self-gratification immersed in the shower section of Mother's Argos catalogue.
Father came home from work, an antiquated Roberts radio held together with a roll of fabric sticking plaster and the long wave button permanently depressed; his only companion along with his beloved Park Drive and the odd second, third and fourth hand novella borrowed from the mobile libraries badly thumbed section. They must have been happy, once. Why would they have bought me from my other Mother if they didn’t love each other, just a little? I saw Father smile once, back in 1942, a sun faded and crumpled photograph. A Sergeant and two Corporals, sitting in a bar in downtown Cairo, his trade mark Park Drive limply attached to his cracked lips, a bottle of beer raised in silent salutation to some unknown hero. The three of them smiling, fighting for their country, ready to die at any moment, yet all three, smiling.
‘Tell your Father his pillows and blankets are at the bottom of the stairs’
They couldn’t even be in the same room as each other. If one accidentally stepped into an already occupied room, out went the current incumbent, unless of course it was a Saturday night and Mother was watching Dixon of Dock Green. Then and only then would she remain steadfast and resolutely swallowed up by the green sofa, a glare that told Father he better retreat if he knew what was good for him.
‘Did I tell you I never wanted children?’
‘You didn’t Father, sorry to have inconvenienced you’
‘It’s just that she wanted them, so I gave in’
‘Gave in’
‘Well you know, conceded to her demands’
‘In a good way?’
‘In a different way’
‘But what about me?’
‘You’re different’
‘I don’t understand’
‘Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody’
Father went back to radio Luxembourg and his fourth hand copy of ‘Catcher in the Rye’.
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