Flesh Wounds Page 3

  What followed was a period of constant disputation. It was obvious there was something going on between my mother and Mr Phillipps. My father, always an enthusiastic drinker, started hitting the stuff pretty hard and my mother rewarded him with ever larger servings of contempt. My father was never physically violent towards my mother, but he did take out his anger on the household’s doors, slamming them repeatedly. Our otherwise presentable home ended up with dramatic cracks around the architrave of each doorway, as if the whole place had suddenly been shifted into an earthquake zone.

  A month or two after the dinner, the argument, and my ill-considered punch, Mr Phillipps and my mother ran away together. I’ll say that again, just so you can savour my humiliation: My mother ran off with my English teacher. In term two, my mother disappeared, and so did Mr Phillipps. Presumably, he’d fallen for her at parent–teacher night, which somehow made it worse. My fellow students were so flabbergasted they couldn’t bring themselves to tease me. The situation was clearly so hilarious and embarrassing and awful that even a group of rowdy Australian schoolboys thought: ‘Nah, too easy.’

  The day before she left, my mother came into my room to tell me of her decision. I was sitting on my bed and she stood in front of me. She and Mr Phillipps intended to go first to Sydney and then to a country town about ten hours north. She said she loved him. My mother reached out and held both my hands. She looked into my eyes. She said: ‘Thank you for finding him for me.’ It was as if the whole thing was my idea.

  Going through my father’s papers years later, I found the note she left that next day:

  Dear Teddy

  Have left everything as tidy as possible. Please be everything Richard wants of you. Let him be able to admire your strength, please the boy needs this. Keep your chin up + help Rich. Give Marie the gloves left on the table.

  PS: As an afterthought I have taken the sherry decanter.

  I’m sure, by this point, you are ahead of me in terms of Mr Phillipps and the private English lessons he’d been giving me every Saturday morning. In retrospect, it seems so terribly obvious: the way Shakespeare led to Pepys and then Pepys led to my own diary, and how Mr Phillipps would take away my diary for ‘marking’, examining these jottings about my life at home, my parents, my mother . . .

  The private lessons, of course, were a way of finding out more about my mother; a method of gaining access and knowledge. They were a trail of sugar cubes leading to a trap. What’s strange is that I didn’t work this out at the time. It actually took me years. I still can remember the moment decades later, idly thinking about those lessons, and the sudden flash of revelation: ‘Hey, hang on a minute . . .’

  The lessons made me feel special at the time, but Mr Phillipps had been striding eagerly towards my mother, and I was his gangplank.

  Chapter Three

  My mother having left, things turned ever more chaotic. My father spent his nights sobbing with rage. He was drinking without mercy for himself or anyone else. He’d run the shop by day and then return home. Often he’d give me the same speech over dinner: ‘In there, everyone thinks I’m great, everyone thinks I do a wonderful job, but as soon as I get home everyone’s at me.’ Actually, no one was there to be ‘at him’, only me, and I don’t think I minded him so much. Of course, there was also a difference between the apparently much-praised ‘Work Ted’ and the apparently much-maligned ‘Home Ted’. ‘Home Ted’ had, by about 6.30pm, drunk so much he could hardly stand.

  I’m sure my father had really loved my mother, despite their strange, sexless marriage. He was certainly sent sprawling by her departure. Gregarious and sometimes ebullient, he also had a shaft of depression and self-pity. He’d never been the man to fulfil her lofty ambitions. For a few months after my mother’s departure he staggered on, but his mood seemed to increasingly darken. Maybe he’d expected her to maintain some contact; perhaps he’d hoped that she’d visit the two of us. Instead, she vanished. In the end, my father decided to return to Britain for a break. As an attempt to shake off his misery, he booked himself a three-month trip during which he’d stay with his mother and sister.

  As luck would have it, one of my father’s friends was moving to Canberra and it was arranged that this old mate would look after me. The only catch was that he wouldn’t arrive for a while. So here was the deal: I would live on my own for three weeks and would then be joined by a temporary parent. We’d ‘batch it’, as was the expression for two chaps sharing a house. Looking back, this seems a peculiar decision: why didn’t my father just delay his trip until his friend was ready to move in? Still, I don’t remember being troubled by it. I didn’t write a diary at the time, despite my familiarity with the work of Mr Pepys, but if I had, I imagine it would have been filled with observations about potential girlfriends and the pretentious books I was pretending to read, rather than the departure of either my mother or father.

  My friends, of course, were keen to make the most of a house without parents, especially one with a freezer full of food and a pool. I’d like to claim it also had a well-stocked bar, but as the child of any alcoholic knows, though many bottles come to visit, few hang around. I have a half-memory of one of my friends trying to get the sticky dregs out of one of my father’s bottles of Blue Curaçao before realising he’d been bested by a professional. And so my friends would visit every night and we’d sit drinking tea, talking bullshit philosophy, awaiting the arrival of my fill-in father.

  Occasionally, I admit, I became a little maudlin and would whine to my friends, hoping to drum up some sympathy: ‘It’s so unfair, my mother’s run away and now my father’s gone.’

  Years later one of them remembered the scene with unnecessary accuracy: ‘Yes, yes, Richard never really left home. Home left him.’

  A few weeks on, my father’s friend arrived. His name was Steve Stephens. All those years before, he’d helped my father set up the newspaper in New Guinea and they’d stayed in touch. Separate to the drama in our household, Steve had seen the financial success of my father’s business and decided that he, too, would buy a newsagency in Canberra. That $200 suit had a lot to answer for.

  By the time Steve knocked on the door, the fridge was empty and the pool had turned green. He fixed both problems with immediate good cheer. I realised, almost instantly, that I’d been sent a gift.

  Steve Stephens was a craggy-faced Australian bloke. His hobbies were shooting and fishing. He always had a cigarette poked into his mouth and a talent for the Australian vernacular. He also wrote poetry, loved his wife and was fiercely loyal to my father. He was very masculine in a traditional way, as well as being reflective and generous. This sort of expansive masculinity turned out to be just what I needed.

  By the time Steve arrived, events had conspired to make me a little confused about what it meant to be an Australian man. My father, for all his good points, didn’t really embody what you could call masculine virtues. Selfless, forthright, practical, strong: none of these words really sprang to mind. And Mr Phillipps didn’t measure up, either: he was pompous and vain, even aside from the way he’d made off with my mother. Outside these two men, there was the more general perception of the Australian man as some sort of unfeeling Ocker – a definition which involved attitudes to sport I didn’t share, attitudes to women I didn’t understand, and attitudes to alcohol which, well, I’ve been working on ever since.

  My confusion wasn’t particularly helped by my passion for Canberra Youth Theatre, in which I was now spending all my free time. There were some admirable young men there, but they shared a view of masculinity as extreme as that of the Ockers. The Youth Theatre group-think went something like this: that maleness is associated with violence, insensitivity and the oppression of women, and that the best thing is to hide any masculine attributes under a fluffy layer of hippydom. We would do plays about rape in war, and other light entertainment topics. Masculinity, according to this view, was a disease which could only be treated through the constant application of patchouli o
il.

  Me at fifteen: a confused mix of pretensions and patchouli oil.

  Steve Stephens was an antidote to this mess of competing stereotypes. During the couple of months my father was away, Steve did his best to make a man of me, in his own broad sense of that word. He took me trout fishing, the two of us standing freezing in a rushing creek in the snow country, neither of us catching anything, probably because I was talking all the time. (I hadn’t previously found many adults willing to listen.) He taught me how to cook a trout, just in case I ever managed to hook one. You set a fire, heat a frypan with butter, then slip in the fish. If you lit a cigarette at the point you began cooking, the trout would be ready to turn when you finished the smoke. You’d then light another cigarette in order to accurately time the cooking of the other side.

  He also showed me his poetry and made me read other people’s verse. He talked to me about life. He pointed out sunsets. And he took me hunting.

  On the day we went hunting, I lay on my stomach and pulled the trigger. On the tenth or twelfth attempt I shot a rabbit. All these years later I can see its death, the small spring upwards when the bullet hit. Steve, being Steve, said the only reason to shoot another creature was for food, so it was my responsibility to skin the rabbit for eating. In the end he volunteered to do the eating, but I remember skinning the poor tiny thing, standing in the gathering dusk and pushing my hand into the warm glove between the skin and the body. That day in the bush is sharp in my mind, with a mix of gratitude and nausea.

  Steve was generous with his time. If I had to go somewhere he would offer to drive me. I’d feel guilty and decline. Sometimes he’d insist and I would thank him profusely as we drove along. He’d just shrug and flash me his lopsided smile: ‘It’s just turning a wheel, son.’ Years later, when someone thanks me for giving them a lift, I repeat Steve’s phrase: ‘It’s just turning a wheel,’ but rarely explain the reference. For me, it’s a nod across time to thank Steve for his kindness.

  My father eventually returned from his break in Britain and took up the reins of the household. Steve moved into his own place. I missed him, although it’s important to say that Ted put some effort into looking after me. He was certainly consistent when it came to dinner – with a never-ending supply of lamb chops and potatoes, a dish we’d enjoy on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday nights. (On Saturday, he’d add half a grilled tomato just to mark the festive mood.) His efforts were marred only by an inability to leave alcohol in the bottom of any bottle within reach. By early evening, every evening, he’d be one gin short of a Hogarth etching.

  With each week, he seemed to slip deeper into a slough of despond. His newsagency backed onto a car-park, on the other side of which was a French restaurant of the 1970s kind called Charlie’s, all snails, pâté and Steak Diane. He took to lunching there every day, polishing off a bottle of red along with the Steak Diane, then retreating to his office at the back of the newsagency. At night, he’d come home at six or seven and cook dinner as he got stuck into the Scotch and soda, producing the soda with the assistance of a brushed-aluminium siphon. It was a device that was seen as sophisticated for reasons that now seem unclear, producing soda that was either entirely flat or so fizzy it would explode and drive all the Scotch out of the glass onto the floor. It was a wonder that, thus impeded, my father managed to get so much of the Scotch into himself.

  After a year or two, my father met a woman – a widow of similar years to his own. They married and his new wife moved into the house. I liked her a lot. Almost from the start, the marriage didn’t work. My father was still besotted with my mother and, given half a chance, would weep and rage, screaming about ‘that bastard Phillipps’, the word ‘bastard’ always appended to the ‘Phillipps’ as if it would be a grammatical error to have one without the other. As for me, I was having adventures and misadventures, and both were probably the product of negotiating an adolescence unencumbered by parenting. Some of the experiences were great and some quite awful. I don’t need to recount them all, but to summarise: when a young person is unprotected and needy, paedophiles from miles around seem to instantly know, like they are on some sort of text alert. I remember at age sixteen, having been invited to stay at some older man’s flat in Sydney, opening a cupboard door to see a swill of child pornography on the floor and thinking: ‘How did I get myself into this? And how do I get myself out of it?’

  On another occasion, a man convinced me and one of my school friends that he was a filmmaker. He had a script. It was set in Weimar Germany and was about the adventures of two young sailor boys. Yes, really: Weimar sailor boys. If there’s one thing I can’t stand about small-town paedophiles it’s their lack of originality. I was keen to be a film star, but then my friend showed his father the script. My mate’s dad, in a scene of some fury, descended on the project and chased the old creep away, saving me in the process. I suppose, all these years on, I should thank that father. In fact, we can all take pleasure in the non-existence of a film showing me rouged, mascara-ed and dressed as a sailor.

  I finished school and found a job in Queensland. After my years of devotion to Canberra Youth Theatre, I passed an audition to become part of a theatre-in-education troupe touring schools in the outback. We’d often drive a hundred kilometres between schools each day, across vast plains of scrub, staying each night in a different country pub. Some audiences were made up of indigenous kids; more commonly they were the children of white cattle-farmers. On one occasion we met a Greek bloke who proudly told us, ‘I’m the only bloody ethnic in 800 bloody miles.’ Hardly anyone in our audiences had ever seen a play. This was highly useful, as they lacked a point of comparison by which to assess my truly awful acting.

  I had long thought of myself as independent, needing neither parents nor anybody else. Here, on the broad plains of outback Queensland, I could test that resilience. We were a crew of three performers – me and Peter, both straight from school, and a slightly older guy with the unlikely name of Rock. We tolerated each other fairly well, despite some tension between Peter and Rock – mostly over Peter’s enthusiasm for the complete product range of the Brut cosmetics company. Peter had Brut aftershave, Brut antiperspirant, Brut shampoo and Brut soap. If Brut had produced a toothpaste or a range of condoms he’d have been an early adopter. Every morning we’d jump into the enclosed space of the car, ready for the long trip, with Rock and I gagging against the Brut which oozed from Peter’s every pore. In Bundaberg, where we shared a house on the coast for a few days, Rock finally snapped, gathering armfuls of Brut products from the bathroom and running out the front door, Peter in hot pursuit, and me following behind, worried they might physically attack each other. Along the beach they went, then up onto the grassy headland, Rock laughing maniacally, Peter yelling for him to give back the Brut, out towards the point, the sky huge, the mighty Pacific stretching to infinity – and then the moment: Rock’s arms flung wide, an evil cackle . . . and a whole cabinet of Brut flying up and outwards, into the sea.

  The next day Peter purchased a new set of Brut products. Being fresh off the shelf, they made him even more pungent than before. His revenge was sweet, yet also musky.

  The towns were rough. Our bush adventure was halfway between Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Wake in Fright. In many places, when we walked into the pub everything would go quiet, and every head would turn. Presumably someone had whispered the unlikely truth: ‘Apparently they’re from the Arts Council.’ I have a sharp memory of ordering a round of drinks in a pub in some cattle town. Perhaps due to my father’s example, I wasn’t much of a drinker and so I loudly requested two beers for my fellow actors while, sotto voce, asking for ‘a shandy as well’. Naturally, the bartender, encountering his first ever order for a shandy, announced it to the room: ‘What did you say? You want a shandy?’ Despite his lack of contact with the world of acting, the barman possessed the sort of vocal projection that Gielgud would have used to reach the back stalls of the London Palladium. Fifty catt
lemen turned their hatted heads towards the loudly advertised outrage at the bar.

  I stood there while he poured the thing, fifty cattlemen giving me a good hard look.

  I did the outback job for about a year, achingly lonely and frankly bored. Theatre can be creative but doing the same hour-long play ten or twelve times a week became tedious, at least to me. Lines from the play were filed in my head as markers: when this line was said, we were halfway through; another line meant we were ten minutes from the end; a third meant ‘nearly bloody finished’. My boredom – my inability to be lost in the plot and the character I was supposed to be inhabiting – was more proof that I’d signed up for the wrong career. Sitting miserably in my pub bedroom one night, I decided to change direction: I would work my way up on the production side of TV drama. If I worked really hard, I said to myself, I might one day rise to become a junior stage manager working on a TV soap opera. It was an ambition that reflected a somewhat limited self-esteem. And one that, in my mind, involved moving to London.

  It was at this point, aged nineteen, that I rang my mother – by this time settled down with Mr Phillipps in a distant country town – and requested contact details for her parents. As described earlier, she refused and delivered her speech about how they were posh but neglectful, and really she’d rather I didn’t bother. She did, however, have one point of assistance. She told me she’d write to Lionel Harris, a man for whom she’d worked in 1970 when he tried to set up a film studio in Australia. He’d even taken a photo of me aged twelve, perched in a tree, which had once enjoyed pride of place on my parents’ hallway table. Harris had been an actor in the 1950s and then a relatively important TV director in the 1960s and early 1970s, making episodes of shows such as Upstairs Downstairs and even directing a TV play by Dennis Potter. He lived in London’s Belsize Park, an upmarket suburb down the hill from Hampstead. My mother was enormously keen for me to make contact. Perhaps she saw this as a chance for her son to rejoin British society at a somewhat higher point than the one on which she’d left it, some thirty-three years before.