an extract from nowhere near an angel
One
I was sixteen and a half years old when I decided to kill myself.
I don't know if you remember that summer, the summer of '76. I don't suppose some of you were even born back then. But let me tell you, that summer was hot. No, not just hot, but hot. For those three months between June and September, England was no longer a green and pleasant land, but a parched, brown, shrivelled desert. Riverbeds were dried-up clay hollows, criss-crossed with black, cartoon-like cracks; reservoirs were vast craters, echoing with emptiness. Householders were urged to share bath water and to flush their toilets only when necessary. A hose-pipe ban was so regimentally implemented that the owners of flourishing gardens or clean cars were liable to be questioned by the police.
It's strange how, when you talk to people who were there, they recall that summer with a nostalgic smile. They look back in the same wistful way on power cuts and strikes and snowfalls deep enough to bring the country to a grinding halt. Maybe part of the reason is simply that they were younger then, though I don't think that fully explains it. What I really think this demonstrates is the English propensity to thrive on crisis. I mean, just listen to old men going on about the war as if it was the best time they ever had. As a nation we like nothing better than to be thrown together into the jaws of hardship and inconvenience.
Certainly, for those of us born on the cusp of the previous decade, the drought of ‘76 provided us with a chance to witness the Dunkirk spirit first hand. When water supplies were eventually cut off altogether and stand-pipes erected in the streets, I remember queuing on the baking pavement with my sweaty, red-faced neighbours, and being astonished at their giddy cheerfulness. Most of those who were older than me by twenty or thirty years acted not as if the country was sliding towards a Third World-style disaster, but as if they were preparing for a street party or about to head off on a community picnic.
I wished in a way I could share their levity, but nothing – not even a nuclear attack – could have cheered me up back then. It wasn't growing pains or teenage angst that had made my life up to that point so miserable, though. It was my dad.
I was seven when the penny finally dropped that Dad was an evil cunt. Or at least, the way I remember it, I was (I'll come to that in a minute). Until that age I'd assumed that all fathers acted like mine, and I suppose I even took it vaguely for granted that I'd be the same as him one day. Because of the way he terrorised us, my sister Sarah and I spent our childhood treading on eggshells. Not antagonising Dad became second nature, but he was such a bastard that we could have been the sodding Waltons and he would still have found fault with us, as a result of which barely a day passed from which we emerged unscathed.
It was Mum who bore the brunt of his violence, though. However much grief he gave us kids, he gave it to Mum ten-fold. His attacks on her were brutal and sustained. The horrible thing is, I'd see him punching and kicking her, dragging her around by the hair, once pouring boiling water on her from the kettle, and I'd think of it as normal. I mean, I didn't like to hear her screaming and crying, begging for him to stop, but neither did I think it was a particularly serious situation. That was partly down to Mum and her protective instincts, I suppose, because no matter how bruised she was or how much blood she'd shed, she would still hug Sarah and I afterwards and assure us that she was fine, that everything was all right.
Among the catalogue of assaults I suffered at Dad's hands, a couple really stand out. One time I remember Dad grabbing my arm at the breakfast table and grinding his cigarette out on it. I can't remember the reason why; I'd probably put too much sugar on my Weetabix, or sneezed or something. It's not the physical sensation I remember so much (though I still have the scar, now all but lost among my many, many others), but the look on his face, the savage enjoyment he got from inflicting pain.
The second incident was more significant, and brings me back to what I mentioned earlier, about realising Dad was an evil cunt. I'm pretty sure I was seven at the time, though whether it was before or after the cigarette incident I don't recall. What happened was that I went to the toilet one day and forgot to flush it, as kids with heads full of dinosaurs and robots and spaceships sometimes do. I was sitting on my bedroom floor, building a Tyrannosaurus out of Lego, when the door crashed open.
"Come here, you little fucker!" Dad bellowed, by which time he'd crossed the room. I barely had time to focus my startled eyes on him before he scooped me up and tucked me under his arm like a parcel.
He was strong, my dad - abnormally so, in fact. Although he never missed a night in the pub, and was rarely seen without a cigarette between his lips, he was (and at the age of sixty-six still remains) lithe and sinewy, a natural athlete.
He was the sort of man who could run ten miles without any training, or pick up heavy boxes that most other men would have trouble shifting even an inch across the floor. If he had had the drive and dedication, I reckon he could have jacked in his job at the foundry and been a professional footballer or a boxing champion, or at the very least a PE teacher or fitness instructor.
Who knows, if he had followed his true vocation, he might have become an entirely different person. A sporting career would have given him an outlet for his aggression and his dangerous energy. It might have given him a sense of pride and decency too, might even have made me proud of him.
Instead of which, I hated his guts. Not at the moment he scooped me up from the floor, trampling Lego beneath his steel toe-capped size nines, but pretty soon after. By the time I got to my teens, I would happily have seen him dead. What sickened me at that time was the fact that I was forever being unfavourably compared to him. He was regarded by his cronies as a loveable rogue, as the life and soul, forever getting into scrapes from which he invariably emerged with a cocky grin. He was envied by other blokes and fancied by women. And he was good-looking, albeit in a mean, raddled, slightly psychotic sort of way.
I, by contrast, was sullen and withdrawn, and whereas by my teens I was showing signs of developing my father's build, I unconsciously disguised the fact by carrying myself in a completely different way. Whilst Dad strutted arrogantly, I stooped and cowered. Whilst Dad was confident and quick, I was uncertain and fumbling. Of course, what people didn't realise was that it was him who had made me like this. It astounds me now that no one had the perspicacity to recognise that, and enrages me that instead of condemning him, they sympathised with him, made excuses for him – even the women.
Especially the women.
What angers me now, looking back, was not what people thought of me in comparison to my dad, but the way in which Mum was perceived. The general consensus among Dad's cronies and the women who draped themselves around them was that Mum was such a dowdy, miserable old cow that Dad's philandering was not only understandable, but actively encouraged.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, veering off at too much of a tangent. I have a tendency to do this, as no doubt you'll discover if you persevere with my story. The thing is, there's so much to tell that it's hard to condense the constant, crushing fear of my early life into a collection of neat and pithy sound-bites. I want to rant, to pour it all out, to tear my dad apart retrospectively, if only because I was too close to it all to see how much he was fucking me up at the time.
I won't, though. I'll stay focused. Or at least, as focused as I can. I warn you now, though, there'll be contradictions along the way, vague areas, bits that don't quite seem to fit. All I've got to go on is my memory, you see, and for reasons that will become clear it's a memory that's more selective and less reliable than most.
So yes, my dad burst into my room and scooped me up under one arm. He carried me back to the scene of my crime and pointed into the toilet bowl with a finger encrusted with foundry grime.
"What the fucking hell is that?" he yelled at me, and thrust me forward so that my face was encircled by the black plastic O of the seat.
I felt a familiar debilitating panic clamping my thoughts. From past experience I knew that it was important to give my dad the right answer. Anything else and he'd assume I was being cheeky or deliberately obtuse, and the beating I'd receive (for that was a given, there was no way of avoiding that) would increase exponentially as a result.
But, stupid me, on this occasion I honestly didn't know what he was getting at. I looked into the toilet bowl and saw nothing but a couple of brown turds floating in a few inches of oily, piss-yellow water.
I remember thinking that maybe there was something in the turds, or underneath them, that this was what had enraged him. I wondered whether Sarah had accidentally (or deliberately) dropped something of his in the toilet, and strained to catch sight of the glint of a coin or a cufflink or... well, I don't know what.
And then, as if my own brain was determined to seal my fate, I could suddenly think of nothing but a rude song that Lucy Barker had been singing at school the day before. Accompanied by actions that involved Lucy pointing at her fanny, her arse and her non-existent tits, she had chanted, "Milk, milk, lemonade, round the corner chocolate's made."
Lemonade and chocolate. Chocolate and lemonade. All at once all possible responses had been snatched from my flustered brain except this one. It was akin to drawing the worst forfeit, the shortest straw.
Lemonade and chocolate. Chocolate and lemonade.
"Well?"
I tried desperately to think of something that would save me, but in vain.
(Lemonade and chocolate. Chocolate and lemonade.)
"I don't know," I muttered miserably.
"You don't know?" Dad snarled. "You don't know what you're looking at? Well, perhaps you ought to take a closer fucking look then."
Before I could react he rammed me head-first into the toilet bowl.
If I hadn't cracked the side of my skull on the curve of porcelain as he thrust me forward, I might have managed to use the split-second before my face met the water to close my eyes and mouth. However, I instinctively cried out, and thus ended up swallowing about half a pint of my own bodily waste. I can't even begin to describe how horrible that was. All I can say is that I'll never forget the sensation of a non-too-solid turd bumping against my teeth.
I retched violently. So violently, in fact, that I bashed my head twice more on the loose porcelain helmet of the toilet bowl. By some miracle, however, I managed to prevent the contents of my stomach joining those of my bowel and bladder. I knew it was both pointless and inadvisable to offer any sort of resistance to Dad when he was exercising the vicious cur of his violence, but on this occasion I couldn't help it. Revulsion and panic were causing me to thrash and squirm in his arms like a worm on a fish-hook.
When he pulled the chain, I thought for far too many seconds that I was going to drown. I had barely managed to gasp after swallowing a mouthful of what my body had recently expelled when my senses were overwhelmed by a seething, rushing maelstrom of water. My panicked struggles intensified, but I was unable to move my arms or legs. As a result my frantic, useless energy seemed to be pushed inward, into my heart, which felt as though it was swelling with pain.
I was seven years old. I had no real concept of death, of how irreversible, how final it was. And yet, in that instant, for the first time in my life, I believe I experienced mortal terror. I knew that this was it, that if my circumstances didn't change in the next minute or so I was going to die, and that if I died I would be gone forever.
And then, almost during the same erratic, oxygen-starved heartbeat, I acknowledged that there was nothing I could do, that the situation was out of my hands, and, accepting this, felt a great sense of peace wash over me.
Please understand that I'm applying an adult's perspective to the naive perceptions and raw emotions of a child here, and yet for all that I swear that what I'm telling you is true. Maybe at the last I was simply losing consciousness, shutting down... I don't know. In the end it didn't really change anything, except for making me less scared to die than some people are. Not less scared of pain or suffering, let's get this clear – but less scared to die.
Death is easy. It's the bit before that's hard. Believe me, I know. I may not be dead yet, but I've been through the process that leads up to it more times than I care to remember.
By the time Dad yanked me out of the toilet (and I have an image, almost certainly erroneous, of my head coming out with a kind of thock, like a stopper from a bottle) I was semi-conscious. My hair was flecked with shit, and my lungs were little more than half-filled bags of watered-down piss. As soon as my body began to take in air, which it did greedily and instantly, I retched again, and this time a torrent of foul-smelling stuff gushed out of my open mouth.
"Little fucker!" Dad cried, with such venom that he sounded as if he was hawking up phlegm. He dropped me like someone might drop a cat that had taken a sudden slash at them with its claws. Still puking, I fell to the ground, which wouldn't have been so bad if my old friend the toilet hadn't been in the way. I smacked my face on the seat going down, the pain of which, though sickening, was immediately superseded by a jolt of agony in my left hand.
It felt as though something with red hot fangs had at first bitten off my thumb and had then proceeded to gnaw on the bleeding stump. Instantly I was aware of cold, greasy sweat bursting out all over me, of black specks that might have been stars or insects swarming across my vision. From so far away that it seemed like a distant, distorted channel on an ancient radio, I heard Dad say, "So flush the fucking toilet next time."
Then he stood over me, took a piss into the toilet bowl that my bleeding head was resting against (no doubt unconcernedly splashing me as he did so), zipped himself up and left not only the room, but – I later discovered – the house, to which he did not return until much later that night, when I was asleep.