Learning to Talk Read online

  ‘He may be dead, for all I know,’ she said. ‘He may be in purgatory, where they don’t have postage stamps.’

  The year I took my exam for the grammar school Bobby was growing cress in pots. He stood at the front gate, trying to sell it to his neighbours, pressing it upon them as very nutritious. Myra, now, had not even the status of the scrag from the slum carvery; she became like one of the shrivelled pods or husks, from dusty glass jars, on which Bob eked out his existence.

  The priest came, for the annual Religious Examination; the last time for me. He sat on the headmistress’s high chair, his broad feet in their brogues set deliberately on the wooden step. He was old, and his breath laboured; there was a faint smell about him, of damp wool, of poultices, of cough linctus and piety. The priest liked trick questions. Draw me a soul, he said. A dim-witted child took the proffered chalk, and marked out on the blackboard a vague kidney shape, or perhaps the sole of a shoe. Ah no, Father said, wheezing gently; ah no, little one, that is the heart.

  That year, when I was ten years old, our situation changed. My mother had been right to bank on the choleric lodger; he was an upwardly mobile man. We departed with him to a neat town where spring came early and cloyed with cherry blossom, and thrushes darted softly on trim lawns. When it rained, these people said, lovely for the gardens; in the village they had taken it as one more bleak affront in the series life offered them. I never doubted that Bob had dwindled away entirely among his mauled lettuce rows, out of grief and bewilderment and iron deficiency, his bones rattled by our departing laughter. About Philip I never thought at all. I wiped him from my mind, as if he had never been. ‘You must never tell anyone we are not married,’ my mother said, blithe in her double life. ‘You must never talk to anyone about your family. It’s not their business.’ You must not taunt over the garden fence, I thought. And the word phobos you must never say.

  It was only later, when I left home, that I understood the blithe carelessness of the average life – how freely people speak, how freely they live. There are no secrets in their lives, there is no poison at the root. People I met had an innocence, an openness, that was quite foreign to my own nature; or if once it had been native to me, then I had lost it long ago in the evening fogs, in the four o’clock darks, abandoned it in the gardens between the straggling fences and tussocks of grass.

  I became a lawyer; one must live, as they say. The whole decade of the sixties went by, and my childhood seemed to belong to some much earlier, greyer world. It was my inner country, visited sometimes in dreams that shadowed my day. The troubles in Northern Ireland began, and my family fell to quarrelling about them, and the newspapers were full of pictures of burned-out shopkeepers, with faces like ours.

  I was grown up, qualified, long gone from home, when Philip came back into my life. It was Easter, a sunny morning. The windows were open in the dining room, which overlooked the garden with its striped lawn and rockery; and I was a visitor in my own home, eating breakfast, the toast put into a rack and the marmalade into a dish. How life had altered, altered beyond the power of imagination! Even the lodger had become civilised, in his fashion; he wore a suit, and attended the meetings of the Rotary Club.

  My mother, who had grown plump, sat down opposite me and handed me the local newspaper, folded to display a photograph.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘that Suzy’s got married.’

  I took the newspaper and put down my piece of toast. I examined this face and figure from my childhood. There she stood, a brassy girl with a bouquet that she held like a cosh. Her big jaw was set in a smile. At her side stood her new husband; a little behind, like tricks of the light, were the bowed, insubstantial forms of her parents. I searched behind them, for a shape I would know: Philip slouching, vaguely menacing, half out of the frame. ‘Where’s her brother?’ I said. ‘Was he there?’

  ‘Philip?’ My mother looked up. She sat for a moment with her lips parted, a picture of uncertainty, crumbling a bit of toast under her fingers. ‘Did nobody tell you? About the accident? I thought I told you. Did I not write to you and let you know?’ She pushed her small breakfast aside, and sat frowning at me, as if I had disappointed her. ‘He died,’ she said.

  ‘Died? How?’

  She dabbed a crumb from the corner of her mouth. ‘Killed himself.’ She got up, went to the sideboard, opened a drawer, rummaged under tablemats and photographs. ‘I kept the paper. I thought I’d sent it you.’

  I knew I had been pulling away; I knew I had been extracting myself bodily, piece by piece, from my early life. I had missed so much, naturally, and yet I thought I had missed nothing of consequence. But Philip, dead. I thought of the stones he threw, of the puzzled squint of his eye, of the bruises on his gangling legs below his short trousers.

  ‘It’s years now,’ my mother said.

  She sat down again, opposite me at the table, and handed me the paper she had preserved. How quickly newsprint goes yellow; it might have come from a Victorian public library. I turned to read, and read how Philip had blown himself up. All the details from the coroner’s court: and the verdict, death by misadventure.

  Philip had constructed, in Bobby’s garden shed, a sugar and weedkiller bomb. It was a fad of the time, making bombs at home; it had been popularised by events in Belfast. Philip’s bomb – the use he had for it was unknown – had blown up in his face. I wondered what he had taken with him in the blast: I pictured the shed splintered, the stacked flowerpots reduced to dust, even the cows in their field lifting bemused heads at the noise. An irrelevant thought slid into my mind, that Ireland had undone him at last; and here I was still alive, one of life’s Provisionals, one of the men in the black berets. Philip was the first of my contemporaries to die. I think about him often now. Weedkiller, my brain says back to me: as if it needed replication. I am burning on a slower fuse.

  Destroyed

  When I was very small, small enough to trip every time on the raised kerbstone outside the back door, the dog Victor used to take me for a walk. We would proceed at caution across the yard, my hand plunged deep into the ruff of bristly fur at the back of his neck. He was an elderly dog, and the leather of his collar had worn supple and thin. My fingers curled around it, while sunlight struck stone and slate, dandelions opened in the cracks between flags, and old ladies aired themselves in doorways, nodding on kitchen chairs and smoothing their skirts over their knees. Somewhere else, in factories, fields and coal mines, England went dully on.

  My mother always said that there is no such thing as a substitute. Everything is intrinsically itself, and unlike any other thing. Everything is just once, and happiness can’t be repeated. Children should be named for themselves. They shouldn’t be named after other people. I don’t agree with that, she said.

  Then why did she do it, why did she break her own law? I’m trying to work it out, so meanwhile I have a different story, about some dogs, which perhaps relates to it. If I offer some evidence, will you be the judge?

  My mother held her strong views, there’s no doubt, because she herself was named after her cousin Clara, who died in a boating accident. If Clara had lived she would have been 107 now. It wasn’t anything in her character that made my mother angry about the substitution, because Clara was not known to have had any character. No, what upset her was the way the name was pronounced by the people in our village. Cl-air-air-ra: it came sticky and prolonged out of their mouths, like an extruded rope of glue.

  In those days we were all cousins and aunts and great-aunts who lived in rows of houses. We went in and out of each other’s doors the whole time. My mother said that in the civilised world people would knock, but though she made this observation over and over, people just gave her a glassy-eyed stare and went on the way they always had. There was a great disjunction between the effect she thought she had on the world, and the effect she actually achieved. I only thought this later. When I was seven I thought she was Sun and Moon. That she was like God, everywhere and always. That she was readi
ng your thoughts, when you were still a poor reader yourself, because you were only up to Far & Wide Readers, Green Book III.

  Next door to us in the row lived my aunt Connie. She was really my cousin, but I called her aunt because of her age. All the relationships were mixed up, and you don’t need to know about them; only that the dog Victor lived with Connie, and mostly under her kitchen table. He ate a meat pie every day, which Connie bought him specially, walking up the street to buy it. He ate fruit, anything he could get. My mother said dogs should have proper food, in tins.

  Victor had died by the time I was seven. I don’t remember the day of his death, just a dull sense of cataclysm. Connie was a widow. I thought she always had been. Until I was older I didn’t know widow meant a husband had once been there. Poor Connie, people said, the loss of her faithful dog is another blow to her.

  When I was seven I was given a watch, but for my eighth birthday I had a puppy. When the idea of getting a dog was first proposed, my mother said that she wanted a Pekinese. People gave her the look that they gave her when she suggested that civilised people would knock at the door. The idea of anyone in our village owning a Pekinese was simply preposterous; I knew this already. The inhabitants would have plucked and roasted it.

  I said, ‘It’s my birthday, and I would like a dog like Victor.’

  She said, ‘Victor was just a mongrel.’

  ‘Then I’ll have just a mongrel,’ I said.

  I thought, you see, that a mongrel was a breed. Aunt Connie had told me, ‘Mongrels are very faithful.’

  I liked the idea of fidelity. Though I had no idea what it implied.

  A mongrel, after all, was the cheap option. When the morning of my birthday came I suppose I felt excitement, I don’t know. A young boy fetched the puppy from Godber’s Farm. It stood blinking and shivering on the rug before the fire. Its tiny legs were like chicken bones. I am a winter-born person and there was frost on the roads that day. The puppy was white, like Victor, and had a curly tail like Victor, and a brown saddle on his back which made him look useful and domestic. I put my hand into the fur at the back of his neck and I judged that one day it would be strong enough to hang on to.

  The boy from Godber’s Farm was in the kitchen, talking to my stepfather, who I was told to call Dad these days. I heard the boy say it was a right shame, but I didn’t listen to find out what the shame was. The boy went out, my stepfather with him. They were chatting as if they were familiar.

  I didn’t understand in those days how people knew each other. They’d say, you know her, her who married him. Constant was her name before she married him, or, her name was Reilly. There was a time when I didn’t understand how names got changed, or how anything happened, really. When somebody went out of the door I always wondered who or what they’d come back as, and whether they’d come back at all. I don’t mean to make me sound simple, my infant self. I could pick out reasons for everything I did. I thought it was other people who were the sport of fortune, and the children of whim. I was the sole heir to the logic in my head: sole heir and beneficiary.

  When my stepfather had gone out, I found myself alone in our front room, before the slumbering and low-burning fire; and so I started talking to the puppy Victor. I had read manuals of dog training in preparation for his arrival. They said that dogs liked a low, calm, soothing tone, but they didn’t suggest what to say in it. He didn’t look as if he had many interests yet, so I told him about the things that interested me. I squatted on the floor next to him, so my great size wouldn’t intimidate him. I looked into his face. Know my face, I prayed. After a certain amount of boredom from me, Victor fell to the floor as if his legs had been snapped, and slept like the dead. I sat down beside him to watch him. I had a book open on my knees but I didn’t read it. I watched him, and I had never been so still. I knew that fidgeting was a vice, and I had tried to combat it, but I did now know stillness like that was in me, or calm like in the half-hour I first watched Victor.

  When my stepfather came back, he had a worried frown on his face, and something under his overcoat. A foxy muzzle poked out, noisily snuffling the air. ‘This is Mike,’ my stepfather said. ‘He was going to be destroyed.’ He put the new puppy on the ground. It was a bouncing skewbald made of rubber. It ran to the fire. It ran to Victor and sniffed him. It raced in a circle and bit chunks out of the air. Its tongue panted. It jumped on Victor and began to pulverise him.

  Mike – let it be understood – was not an extra present for me. Victor was my dog and my responsibility. Mike was the other dog: he was everyone’s, and no one’s, responsibility. Victor, as it proved, was of sedate, genteel character. When he was first put on his lead, he walked daintily, at heel, as if he had been trained in a former life.

  But when the lead was first clipped on to Mike’s collar, he panicked. He ran to the end of it and yelped and spun into the air, and hurtled out into space, and turned head over heels. Then he flopped down on his side, and thrashed around as if he were in danger of a heart attack. I fumbled at his collar, desperate to set him free; his eye rolled, the fur of his throat was damp.

  Try him again, when he’s a bit older, my mother suggested.

  Everybody said that it was nice that Victor had got his brother with him, that they would be faithful to each other, etc. I didn’t think so, but what I didn’t think I kept to myself.

  The puppies had a pretty good life, except at night when the ghosts that lived in our house came out of the stone-floored pantry, and down from the big cupboard to the left of the chimney breast. Depend upon it, they were not dripping or ladies or genteel; they were nothing like the ghost of drowned Clara, her sodden blouse frilled to the neck. These were ghosts with filed teeth. You couldn’t see them, but you could sense their presence when you saw the dogs’ bristling necks, and saw the shudders run down their backbones. The ruff on Victor’s neck was growing long now. Despite everything my mother had vowed, the dogs did not get food out of tins. They got scraps of anything that was going. Substitutions were constantly made, in our house. Though it was said that no one thing was like any other.

  ‘Try the dog on his lead again,’ my mother said. If a person said, ‘the dog,’ you knew Mike was the dog meant. Victor sat in the corner. He did not impose his presence. His brown eyes blinked.

  I tried the dog on his lead again. He bolted across the room, taking me with him. I borrowed a book from the public library, 101 Hints on Dog Care. Mike took it in the night and chewed it up, all but the last four hints. Mike would pull you in a hedge, he would pull you in a canal, he would pull you in a boating lake so you drowned like cousin Clara, when her careless beau tipped her out of the rowing boat. When I was nine I used to think quite a lot about Clara, her straw hat skimming among the lily pads.

  It was when my brother P.G. Pig was born that my mother broke her own rule. I heard the cousins and aunts talking in lowered voices about the choice of name. They didn’t take my views into account – no doubt they thought I’d recommend, Oh, call him Victor. Robert was mooted but my mother said Bob she could not abide. All those names were at first to be ruled out, that people naturally make into something else. But this left too few to draw on. At last my mother made up her mind on Peter, both syllables to be rigidly enforced. How did she think she would enforce them when he was a schoolboy, when he went to the football field, when he grew to be a weaver or a soldier in a khaki blouson? I asked myself these things. And, mentally, I shrugged. I saw myself in my mind. ‘Just asking!’ I said. My fingers were spread and my eyes were round.

  But there was something else about the baby’s name, something that was going to be hidden. By listening at doors, by pasting myself against the wall and listening at doors, I found it was this; that the baby was to be given a second name, and it was to be George, which was the name of my aunt Connie’s dead husband. Oh, had Connie a husband, I said to myself. I still thought that widow, like mongrel, was a category of its own.

  Peter George, I said to myself, PG, Peegee, P.
G. Pig. He would have a name, and it would not be Peter, nor would it be Pete. But why so hushed? Why the averted shoulders and the voices dropped? Because Connie was not to be told. It was going to be too much for her altogether, it would send her into a fit of the hysterics if she found out. It was my own mother’s personal tribute to the long-destroyed George, who to my knowledge she had not mentioned before: a tribute which, to pay, she was prepared to throw over one of her most characteristic notions. So strong, she said, were her feelings on the matter.

  But wait. Wait a minute. Let logic peep in at the window here. This was Connie, was it not? Aunt Connie who lived next door? It was Connie, who in three weeks’ time would attend the christening? As Catholics we christen early, being very aware of the devil. I pictured the awful word ‘George’ weighting the priest’s tongue, making him clutch his upper chest, reducing him to groans until it rolled out, crashing on the flags and processing down the aisle; and Connie’s arm flung up, the word ‘Aa…gh!’ flashing from her gaping mouth as she was mown down. What an awful death, I said to myself. Smirking, I said, what a destruction.

  In the event, Connie found out about the naming in good time. My mother said – and thunder was on her brow – ‘They told her in the butcher’s. And she’d only gone in, bless her, for her little bit of a slice of –’