Well, gentlemen. I would.
CHECK
1
The summer of my father’s breakdown was the hottest in remembered history. At first it cheered him, as if this were a return to the legendary summers of his childhood, during which, if I was to believe him, he spent the happiest days of his life. Then, as the sun continued remorseless and the grass on St. Oswald’s lawns veered from yellow to brown, he soured and began to fret.
The lawns were his responsibility, of course; and it was one of his duties to maintain them. He set up sprinklers to water the grass, but the area to be covered was too large to be dealt with in this way, and he was obliged to restrict his attentions to the cricket pitch only, while the remainder of the lawns grew bald under the sun’s hot and lidless eye. But that was only one of my father’s concerns. The graffiti artist had struck again, this time in Technicolor; a mural, fully six feet square, on the side of the Games Pavilion.
My father spent two days scrubbing it off, then another week repainting the pavilion, and swore that next time, he’d give the little bastard the thrashing of his life. Still the culprit eluded him; twice more, spray-paintings appeared in and around St. Oswald’s, crudely colorful, artistic in their way, both of them featuring caricatures of Masters. My father began to watch the school at night, lying in wait behind the pavilion with a twelve-pack of beers, but still there was no sign of the guilty party, although how he managed to avoid detection was a mystery to John Snyde.
Then there were the mice. Every large building has vermin—St. Oswald’s more than most—but since the end of the summer term, mice had infested the corridors in unusually large numbers. Even I saw them occasionally, especially around the Bell Tower, and I knew that their breeding would have to be checked; poison laid down and the dead mice removed before the new term began and the parents had chance to complain.
It incensed my father. He was convinced that boys had left food in their lockers; blamed the carelessness of the school cleaners; spent days opening and checking every locker in the school with mounting rage—but no success.
Then there were the dogs. The hot weather affected them as it did my father, making them lethargic by day and aggressive in the evenings. By night their owners—who had usually omitted to walk them in the sweltering daytime—now loosed them on the waste ground at the back of St. Oswald’s, and they ran in packs there, barking and tearing up the grass. They had no respect for boundaries; despite my father’s attempts to keep them out, they would squeeze through the fence into St. Oswald’s playing fields and shit on the newly sprinkled cricket pitch. They seemed to have an instinct for choosing the spot that would annoy my father most; and in the mornings he would have to drag himself around the fields with his pooper-scooper, arguing furiously with himself and chugging at a can of flat beer.
Infatuated as I was with Leon, it took me some time to understand—and even longer to care—that John Snyde was losing his mind. I had never been very close to my father, nor had I ever found him easy to read. Now his face was a perpetual slab, its most common expression one of bewildered rage. Once, perhaps, I had expected something more. But this was the man who had thought to solve my social problems with karate lessons. Faced with this infinitely more delicate situation, what could I possibly hope from him now?
Dad, I’m in love with a boy called Leon.
I didn’t think so.
All the same, I tried. He’d been young once, I told myself. He’d been in love, in lust, whatever. I brought him beer from the fridge; made tea; sat for hours in front of his favorite TV shows (Knight Rider, The Dukes of Hazzard) in the hope of something other than blankness. But John Snyde was sinking fast. Depression enfolded him like a crazy quilt; his eyes reflected nothing but the colors from the screen. Like the rest of them, he barely saw me; at home, as at St. Oswald’s, I had become the Invisible Man.
Then, two weeks into that hot summer holiday, a double catastrophe struck. The first was my own fault; opening a window onto the roof of the school I managed to trip the burglar alarm, and it sounded. My father reacted with unexpected speed, and I was nearly caught in the act. As it was, I got back to the house and was just about to replace the passkeys, when along came my father, and saw me with the keys in my hand.
I tried to bluff my way out of it. I’d heard the alarm, I said; and noticing that he had forgotten the keys, had been on my way to deliver them. He didn’t believe me. He had been jumpy that day, and he’d already suspected the keys were missing. I had no doubt I was in for it now. There was no way out of the house except past my father, and from the expression on his face, I knew I didn’t have a chance.
It wasn’t the first time he’d hit me, of course. John Snyde was the champion of the roundhouse punch, a blow which connected maybe three times out of ten and which felt like being hit with a petrified log. Usually I dodged, and by the time he saw me again he had sobered up, or forgotten why I had angered him in the first place.
This time was different. First, he was sober. Second, I had committed the unforgivable offense, a trespass against St. Oswald’s; an open challenge to the Head Porter. For a moment I saw it in his eyes; his trapped rage; his frustration; it was the dogs, the graffiti, the bald patches on the lawn; it was the kids who pointed at him and called him names; it was the monkey-faced boy; it was the unspoken contempt of people like the Bursar and the New Head. I don’t know how many times he punched me, but by the end of it my nose was bleeding, my face was bruised, I was crouching in a corner with my arms over my head, and he was standing over me with a dazed expression on his big face, his hands outspread like a stage murderer’s.
“My God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”
He was talking to himself, and I was too preoccupied with my busted nose to care, but at last I finally dared to lower my arms. My stomach hurt, and I felt as if I was about to be sick, but I managed to keep the feeling at bay.
My father had moved away and was sitting at the table, his head in his hands. “Oh God. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he repeated, though whether this was addressed to me or to the Almighty, I could not tell. He did not look at me as I slowly stood up. Instead he spoke into his hands, and although I kept my distance, knowing how volatile he could be, I sensed that something had broken in him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, now shaken by sobs. “I can’t take it, kid. I just can’t—fucking—take it.” And with that he finally brought it out, the last and most terrible blow of that miserable afternoon, and as I listened, first in astonishment, then in growing horror, I realized that I was going to be sick after all, and rushed out into the sunlight, where St. Oswald’s marched interminably across the blue horizon and the sun trepanned my forehead and the scorched grass smelled like Cinnabar and all the time the stupid birds sang and sang and would not stop singing.
2
I suppose I should have guessed. It was my mother. Three months ago she had begun to write to him again, in vague terms at first, then in more and more detail. My father had not told me of her letters, but in retrospect, their arrival must have coincided more or less with my first meeting with Leon and the beginning of my father’s decline.