He lost the housekeeping money and some savings as well, and had to get a part-time job driving a van to make good the losses. He came home very crestfallen and blaming me, saying it was the last time any of us went to that hellhole. Which was very unfair, but didn’t make much difference anyway, since Palm Beach Casino was closed down very soon afterwards by the police for rigging their wheels. I didn’t grieve. I’d more or less lost interest once I’d proved my system within its limits.
With Dad being a van driver at weekends, the mood of the house lightened. Mum and I found a little hobby of our own, not as ambitious as wine-making or mushroom husbandry. We started to indulge in the gentle art of candle-making. At first Mum resisted the idea, because of the element of danger: saucepans became hot, wax could scald. Precisely what appealed to me about the whole thing. I had to convince her that I was a different person from the callow boy who had scalded a neighbour’s child. Finally she said that it would be all right so long as I read out directions and gave instructions, while she took care of the lifting and the pouring into moulds and so on. I tried to look disappointed for form’s sake, but this division of labour was exactly what I had in mind. I was delighted.
Fizzy drinks frozen in time
Soon we were ordering pounds of slab wax. We learned to hack bits off without making too much of a mess. Then we heated it gently in a bain-marie, which Mum told me was also the proper way to make custard. In another saucepan, a much smaller one, we melted a little stearin and added dye to it. The quantities were so small that Mum sometimes let me do that. I had the idea from the name that stearin must be a sort of steroid, like the ones that had done so little lasting good to my generation of Still’s Disease patients, but couldn’t find out for definite.
Mum said we couldn’t buy a wax thermometer. They cost too much. We found out the hard way that thrift can be wasteful. Our candles often developed a sort of dandruff, which is what happens when you pour your wax too cool. Other times, when we poured too hot, they became filled with small bubbles so that they looked like fizzy drinks frozen in time. Then Mum’s hatred of imperfection led her to change her mind, and we invested in a wax thermometer after all.
I was aware that candle-making was a little bit babyish, even as hobbies go, but I didn’t care. No one seemed quite sure what matur ity would mean in my particular case, and nobody made it sound in the least bit attractive. Mum had the clearest idea, I suppose — her idea was that I would depend on her every day until one of us died. Which of us? I wonder if she gave that question any thought. Some married couples manage not to, after all. If she died first then I would be well and truly helpless, any independent spark long since extinguished, but if I died first then so would she. She was prone to saying, with ominous tenderness, ‘What would you do without me, JJ? You’d be lost, it’s as simple as that.’ My needs were a handy screen for hers. I would never escape from her loving clutches. Puberty meant that she delegated certain unsavoury tasks, but apart from that there was to be no growing away from her in my growing up.
In theory Dad was all for pushing me out of the nest, that being nature’s way, but in practice he dithered, pulling me back from the brink by my tail feathers more often than not. One holiday, for instance, Peter and I heard screams and mechanical music. Our ears had detected the possibility of a funfair, and soon our noses picked up the clinching smells of ozone and candyfloss.
Peter wanted to spend all his holiday money on the dodgems. I wasn’t so ambitious. I had my heart set on the Ghost Train.
When I told Dad, he said, ‘Negative, John. I can’t allow it.’ Under pressure he agreed to go on it himself, in case the ride was smoother than it looked. At the very least he would describe exactly what went on, though we both knew that wasn’t the same thing at all.
He came out rubbing his head, looking rather pale. I begged him to tell me what had happened, and he said, ‘Well, there was all the usual stuff, screaming, cold damp gloves trailing against your face, and then some great rubber thing comes down and donks you on the head. Made me see stars — Damn good job you weren’t in there too … I couldn’t’ve protected you from something as sudden as that, Chicken. In any case, those tracks jerk really sharply inside there. They could hurt your joints and do a lot of damage. Tell you what, though …’
His idea was that it was almost as much fun watching people’s faces as they came out of the Ghost Train as it was riding it yourself. There was a place where doors were flung open and the cars clattered out, only to swerve and dash back in again, so that’s where we positioned ourselves. Dad said it would be a good way for me to become a student of human nature.
It began to seem that my speciality in life was going to be the theory of things. Theory of First Aid at Vulcan, theory of car maintenance with the BSM, and now the theory of the Ghost Train.
The main thing we learned about human nature was that courting couples, clattering into the open for a few seconds mid-snog, with their hands all over each other, don’t much like it when they find they’re being watched by a middle-aged man and a teenager in a wheelchair. One boy flashed us a V-sign (not the one that Dad was familiar with, the triumphant one from the War) and for a moment it looked as if the girl was going to throw the remains of her toffee-apple at us, before the mechanism whisked them away again into the darkness full of muffled screams. We pushed off before we found ourselves up on charges. At the time I thought Dad was being unnecessarily hasty — I couldn’t imagine ever having a criminal record. I didn’t see how I could hope to get my mugshot on the list of Most Wanted. A criminal record was just one more wonderful thing out of reach. I needn’t have worried. Karma has been kind — though of course it wasn’t all that much fun when it finally happened.
You’ve gone all cock-eyed, dear
From the start, my desire to drive had overlapped with the desire to find sex. In that respect I was a normal adolescent. The intimacies I had enjoyed in the past, at the Vulcan School, had been laid on inhouse. No travel was necessary — it was just a matter of seizing the moment, or of failing to get out of the way. But if I wasn’t planning on living in an institution then I would have to stop relying on such windfalls of pleasure. I would have to cater to my own appetites and meet pleasure half-way.
With a car I was able to seek it out, and to take myself to places where wickedness might be found. Someone mentioned that there was a disreputable pub in Windsor, ‘louche’ if not positively queer, but without further details I couldn’t find the sins I sought. I had to rely on instinct. It helped if I imagined there were three of us looking for what the world might offer, loitering and looking sidelong at promising strangers (to the extent the neck allowed) in the hope that they might look sidelong back at us. Federico García Lorca, Boyde Ashlar and me. We should really have brought Tennessee Williams along, for a bit of humour and common sense, but we didn’t think of that. There just wasn’t room enough in the Mini.
In a cartoon my two escorts would have perched on my shoulders, one with a halo on his head, the other with horns, arguing the case variously for risk-taking and the straight-and-narrow. In reality Lorca and Ashlar were both on the horny side, and they spoke with a single voice. Ashlar even had a little shoulder-perching devil-angel of his own, the effeminate friend always ready to murmur, ‘You’ve gone all cock-eyed, dear.’ Everything conspired to push me towards bravery and the outrageous.
Only a few months after I passed my test I took the Mini down a side alley in Marlow. It was the louchest place I could find, though I had only the dimmest notion of what I was looking for. I knew that there should be light but not too much of it, preferably coming from the side. There should be a suggestion of neglect or dereliction but also of waiting for something. The picture would be completed by a figure in shadow with a cigarette. Smoke swallowed and then breathed out. Weight being shifted from leg to leg with a sound that only woodland creatures, and I myself, could hear.