|
Today
was the day I was to meet Harry Sydney Richards.
I’d had no contact with Harry for thirty-two
years. Had never even seen his picture. Had even
questioned whether Harry was less fact than fiction.
His name I had scarce recollection of, the letters
and the sound strange in my mouth. We had not
met since half of me left his pulsing testicles
on his mother’s flea bitten couch.
My mother had often warned me since what not to
expect, so many times before of course; even before
bailing out her self and heading south, what seems
now a life time ago. She felt it was a mother’s
prerogative rather than privilege to protect her
bastard first born.
But ever since deduction began in my brain I’d
tried to picture Harry’s face, chart his
features in my own. Wondered much later how many
of my actions, my many fuck-ups, implied his flawed
nature, rather than simply mine alone. Mused on
the possibility that he wasn’t real. I,
a form without a father.
Perhaps I was something from a tube: a clinically
weaned laboratory experiment? Or maybe I was one
of God’s botched attempts at Immaculate
Conception. Whether scientific intention or divine
invention had brought me here, I wanted answers
from the responsible parties to questions that
had been building up over thirty years.
The
threat
I’d threatened this attempt at reconnecting
with the lost waters of my genetic pool before.
The romantic historian in me needed to know his
source. Like a river running to its sea, the journey
seemed a natural course, all the lost and found
clichés teased the believer in me…
what a fool. Mum had warned me it was a dirty
pool… one she’d wished often enough
that she hadn’t swam in. Like the Nile it’d
looked exotic, it’d looked fun. But Harry’s
dirty currents ran deeper than all the commitments
he’d so expertly shunned.
She’d been fourteen when she first met Harry.
One foot in to her adolescent genes. A girl barely
literate. He pissed and twenty-one. In his left
pocket hid cannabis, in his right lived barbiturates.
She was little more than a hasty kid, pie-eyed
and school shy; ready to drop pills and panties
in an instant for someone as tasty as Harry Sydney
Richards. He was loose and fit, almost Byronic
- a sixties made comet, in my Ma’s wild
delinquent eyes. Back then she considered him
a gleaming demigod, now...? A no-good paedophile.
So, this time, my mum and I, along with my little
brother Jo, visited family up north: Blackburn
in Lancashire, a town of ugliness and racial contempt,
a truly regrettable tour. Here I put my threat
to the test, despite past warnings and grave head
shakes from my ma. Her face stony, her tone sore.
Ok, just how bad is this guy? I asked, irritated,
forehead furrowed, expansive sighs. But my mother’s
eyes were distant Isles, fully focussed and evasive;
her throat a buttoned up land hiding memories
like missiles, her tongue anchored and unharried.
I added a gauge we’d both understand: Worse
than say… er Battersby ya know? The one
in Coronation Street. The worst possible grain
in a handful of sand.
Much,
she replied, her eyes on the road as we bypassed
Manchester in her car, but you do what ya gotta
do, sweetheart… She knew too, after the
life she’d gone through, she partly understood
my search for my roots, how my soul was like a
voice without a language. And it was a language
that I was searching for, one that only comes
with blood.
I
stuck to the task
This would have floored the most adventurous and
intrepid of gene-pool explorers. But not I. My
birth falling under Taurus made me pig headed
by design. Born with a stubborn streak on a par
with Hitler and Henry the fucking eighth, I stuck
to the task. I wanted Harry to know the progress
of his ill timed mistake. I wanted more than a
mere name for my past, a real face, instead of
a mask. For many years I’d been putting
it off, extending my extensions: pretending one
minute he was no great loss, the next re-inventing
him as someone worthy of my deepest love.
I’d told myself that if he didn’t
try to find me by the age of thirty I’d
have to go find him. I was now thirty-two. Running
out of time, my reasons running out of excuses.
Then things changed. A voice guided me to Harry
out of the blue. A voice down the phone that assured
me he was still alive. Here where answers I’d
always hoped for, answers that came casually and
by complete surprise. The voice was not interstellar,
illusory or divine; rather a soft Lancashire accent
that trilled down the line. It was a voice driven
in swerves; a voice blurred and slurred on a surf
of wine.
It was Karen, one of my mum’s best friends’
and confidents. Karen was adept at playing both
shrewd psychologist and misery-magnet-fool. Karen
the costumeless clown. I could just picture her
on the other end: tongue challenged after two
more bottles of Anjou, her body clumsy, her gates
all down.
I was simply anybody to talk to at a time when
anybody would do, a convenient fill: the soft
and adhering alcoholic’s quilt. And Karen
knew all about the heartache of lost fathers,
hers dying suddenly when she was two. She’d
seen my da weekly, usually on a packed bus was
how, she vowed; both Karen and Harry, it seemed,
lived near Blackburn’s district of Sheer
Brow.
Dad:
Jimmy. Reality on permanent detour
Mum had met Karen when she was nineteen and Karen
thirteen, back in 1974. She’d run away from
home. From a step-father who abused her, and a
mother she adored, but one that didn’t choose
to believe her… until step-father molested
more: this time Karen’s sister Steph, whose
reality then went on permanent detour.
They’d
stuck together through men, abortions, addictions
and too much gin. When Karen no longer had a home
to go to, she stayed at ours slumped on sofas,
floors, once propped up against the bin. When
they’d both had enough of the small town
limitations of Lancashire and its predictable
kin, Karen planned a trip picking berries in France
one summer. My mum six stones thin and on the
edge, instantly approved. Up for an adventure,
more importantly needy of a necessary escape route.
Mum had her heartache too. A man she and Karen
called the animal, a man more befitting of a Zoo,
than one who walked the earth free. He curly headed,
short-legged and short fused. Spent his life breaking
court orders, spent his life in pursuit.
If it wasn’t my mother it would be another
unfortunate muse. He just couldn’t leave
her alone. Still remember his voice through the
letterbox, his crying down the phone. Jimmy Roberts,
the animal, bi-polar and confused; Jimmy Roberts
with fists for females when his paranoia was on
the loose.
Mum had cracked one day. One punch too much, one
more open wound. She knew Jimmy’s deep love
was never one she’d choose: a love due to
bring more than stitches given time, given room.
It was a love of the darkest kind.
A love that never listened, was unhinged and corrupt,
and part of a broken mind. She’d gone to
meet the animal on Thwaites road bridge. In her
mind lived no doubt, this was the night after
he’d knocked her clean out in her kitchen.
The Billy goat fate
She’d gone to give him the Billy goat fate,
her brother’s flick-knife neatly concealed,
in leather pockets sealed, on a moody mid-October
eve. Those desperate fingers shaking, her heart
leaping, racing, under a cloud obscured moon.
She could only think of how he would be out of
her life… this time for sure and not a moment
too soon.
But she allowed the animal escape, slashing at
him wildly. Never adept at assassinating, she
killed his shirt completely, but not he. Death
not yet the animal’s fate, nor prison for
she.
My mum knew he’d never give up. Knew the
persistence and ugliness of this mad fuck. On
the verge of a breakdown, Karen came up with her
guilt-edged idea.
One that hinged on personal sacrifice - meeting
her mum again: the mentally weird. Her mum now
lived in Norwich. Presently with another man and
with him came another fear. Though this time Karen
had my mum with her, ready and waiting for any
sinister signs or signals, ready and aware.
Then, when they got stuck and in love in Norwich,
things changed. My mum fell in love with a Viking
throwback, fifties crafted, but still an ancient
Dane rearranged.
Terry was a quiet thing - intense yet somehow
serene. He liked a drink and a smoke, sometimes
a bit of speed, though only if they were celebratin’.
All occasions need their feed.
He was blonde, blue-eyed and beautiful. Worked
like a slave and was predisposed to stay that
way. Karen met Gibbo. He too was an impressive
animal. A hunter. Face tan and oddly puritanical.
Eyes layered brown hiding a mystic thunder. Gibbo
was much older than Karen and he looked like an
Indian chief with his long black, sleek and silvering
hair.
Despite his noble appearance Gibbo was a leech,
a man of cunning, well mannered and debonair.
Karen, lonely of one father and betrayed by another
was attracted by this man who she thought could
be both her lover and her dad.
Attracted to the cruel
She was attracted to those that were cruel. Those
driven by dark mischief. Getting lost in his beech
brown eyes, locked by those malign magnets; his
heart colder than a Neptune moon. Karen lacking
an inner self, a bigger lead, resorted to Gibbo
thoughts, Gibbo beliefs, a life of bogus mimicry.
So if Gibbo was a smack addict, it followed that
she had to be too.
It was at this point that my mum and Karen parted
company for awhile; best mates adrift; best mates
that missed. Karen a drifting isle of self denial,
tested the limits of my mother’s friendship:
she self righteous and didactic, could stick anything
but a smack addict.
She’d found one swinging on a length of
a rope once behind a bathroom door, eyes locked
and bloodshot, face some grey grotesque thing.
Another she’d discovered amidst their own
vomit on her living room floor. The thought of
Karen meeting a similar fate filled her with terror,
terror and revulsion at what delusion and careless
error would turn her in to.
But, a born survivor, Karen ditched her leech,
cleaned up and out, back to her old world, her
small mean minded town in Lancashire.
Replaced Gibbo love with an acceptance of low
quality and responsibility. Yet deep inside her
grew an ugly self loathing - the worst kind of
vanity.
Starting over with a new man she never loved and
a job that tinkered with her sanity. She was first
a Psychiatric Nurse. Soon after she was promoted
to a Management position no less: a bigger, fatter
purse.
Legal
and quiet is the alcoholic's thirst
She was well qualified, had a good degree - almost
a first. Had progressed in life in steady leaps;
had fought life’s frequent disappointments
with a bottle of wine after work… then two;
on a bad day would consider a third. One addiction
exchanged for another far worse. Legal and quiet
is the alcoholic's thirst.
It was simply Karen’s destiny, a lifelong
hindrance, her personality a paradox, always too
attached to substances that had such huge costs,
lovers that could only offer her indifference.
Neither brought her happiness, neither deliverance.
Life was a bewildering eternity stumbling through
an indicative fog. Waking one big onus, as if
carrying a perpetual crisis, a perpetual cross.
The time of my mum and Karen’s great escape
was back in 1978. I was dispatched to my nan and
granddad’s: circumstances opening stability's
perfect gate. But my younger brother, Jan, the
seed of animal and a contraceptive mistake, was
leased to my mum’s mate, Denise. Jan, not
yet two, seemed like a cuckoo son: blonde curly
hair, eyes hazel and grainy, like endless macadam.
Jan forever whiney and petulant whenever our mum
picked him up - to remove him from Denise’s
embrace was all it would take, tears would bubble
and quake, then flood his tiny pink face.
Dad: Jan. Mother and son once removed
My mum, confused and afraid would have to give
him back. Mother and son once removed. Jan it
seemed had chosen his mum, mine simply babysat,
a biological conduit for Denise’s sake.
Though when our mum moved to Norwich, and it came
to taking Jan back, a year later, she found she
couldn’t do it; Denise and Jan were like
fused kernels, bonded suns. My mum’s guilt
was my mum’s purgatory - she knew she’d
fuelled this outcome with her wavering uncertainty.
While Jan, named ironically after his granddad,
bonded with those that did not share his blood,
I bonded with those that did. Our granddad, Jan
Krywiczniak, a blue eyed Pole and beauty enthusiast,
was my first real dad. Not by convention, conversion
nor tradition, but just by being there, by making
the positive decision.
My mum had been a mere sixteen when she bore me,
breaking her father’s heart instantly. He
feared what life would have in store for his little
girl, no woman yet for sure… and what would
become of a bastard son or daughter? He figured
with this type of pregnancy there was only one
cure. But huge credit to him, for when my mum
stayed obstinate and decided to carry me, he did
eventually give in. Though he promised her just
as determinedly:
You marry that man Richards, you just watch me!
I will cross the street from you and never speak.
You hear me Helana Maria? Mark my words girl,
cross me and see.
She realised it was a promise he would keep, and
her stubbornness did have its limit. She dumped
Harry, realising, after eighteen months, he was
a no good waster and a bar room bum.
Long haired Harry Richards, my da, my progenitor.
A man marked with weakness, like a curse, a man
marked with the word ‘later’. Mum
dug his love, his stance, when he left her to
walk four miles home whilst seven months pregnant.
Page
two. A twisted midnight fantasist >>
|
