I used to think listening was a privilege – to have another person entrust to you their darkest secrets, their vulnerabilities, the private insanities we all have. There’s an intimacy that comes with that. Love comes with that. It could be that love is not possible without it. I don’t see listening that way any more obviously. But what choice did I have? He came to me; he trusted me – what else could I do? Once he’d started, I saw the momentum gather within him like a blackening cloud. And then, my God, the words fell like rain. Slowly, then faster: a million beaded droplets in the longest, heaviest downpour.
And I took that sodden weight from him with love.
‘It’s OK,’ I told him.
But it was not. It was not OK.
I remember once he told me about how, as a boy, he used to run the hot water into the sink in the bathroom, let the steam cloud the mirror and watch himself disappear.
‘I used to stand back,’ he said, his brow furrowing at the memory. ‘I’d screw my eyes up to see if I could get myself to come into focus.’
Anxious then – though of course he’d sought his own anxiety – he would wipe the wet fog from the mirror with his pyjama sleeve, sigh with relief at the sight: him, himself, Christopher Harris.
‘A normal boy in a normal bathroom,’ he’d say. ‘In a normal semi-detached house in a normal street in a normal seaside town. And Christopher, well, that’s about as normal a name as any, isn’t it? Did I tell you I was named after St Christopher?’
He was so particular about his name. Christopher, not Chris, please, he would correct, in that quiet voice of his, anyone who attempted to abbreviate him. Not that he was the type to make a fuss, but as he always said, Names are important, aren’t they? They tell you who you are.
His hesitant smile, his brown eyes meeting mine. He was looking for himself there, I realise now. He was always looking for himself.
* * *
And then there was the rope.
That was how he described the knot he’d carried in his chest ever since he could remember – a knot that, no matter how often he picked at it, would never loosen. The knot persisted throughout his childhood, into his teens: a tight confusion of endless loops, without beginning without middle without end. Ironic, then, that as a young lad he loved to skip. He never made it into the football team, you see, and his parents weren’t ones for physical exercise for its own sake.
And so, alone on the back patio in the evenings, he would jump over the skipping rope his father had made for him, the wooden handles worn smooth by the long hours’ gripping. At night, he would unscrew those wooden handles, untie the knots within and slide the handles from the cord. In the dull yellow glow of his bedside lamp, he would make the figure of eight, the midshipman’s hitch, the fishermen’s bend – tongue out, eyes flicking every now and then to the pages of his Knots You Need to Know book, a tenth birthday present from his parents. I wonder if he thought about all this as he crossed and slid the braid through his fingers, as he pulled the cord tight. Could he almost hear the step, whip, step, whip, the whoosh of revolutions in the close air of the yard, the refrain he would repeat in breathless, half-swallowed words: salt, mustard, vinegar, pepper, salt, mustard, vinegar…?
I have so many questions and this is one: if it weren’t for the maintenance grant, would Christopher ever have untangled the rope? If it weren’t for the grant, he would never have gone to university in the first place; his parents could never have afforded it. Were it not for the grant, he would not have found the suitcase in the dark loft space at the back of his attic room.
But he did. Hidden behind the smarter cases his family used for holidays, Christopher, being Christopher, took this dilapidated, dusty old thing, not wanting to use the more decent luggage for himself. When he pulled the case towards him, the catch popped. The lid sprang open. Inside, a greyish blanket no more than a yard square and knitted in a cross-hatch design. It smelled strongly of mothballs, of dust. As he gathered it up from the case, a piece of paper flew out. He picked it up and opened it.
St Matthew’s Convent
Church Road
Railton
Liverpool L25
13 March 1959
Dear Mr and Mrs Harris,
We write to inform you of a baby boy, born only yesterday…
He dropped the torch and fell back, fingers sinking into the itchy pink insulation strips that ran between the ceiling joists. The thirteenth of March. The day after his birthday.
In the dark, cramped space, the fallen torch shone a spotlight on the brick wall: cobwebbed, damp, crumbling.
* * *
He was born on 12 March 1959 – in Morecambe, Lancashire, so he had believed. His parents had never told him otherwise. Not that Jack and Margaret Harris were bad people. They were what you’d call traditional, but like all parents, they did their best. Don’t we all? Christopher’s treatment hardly marked him out as in any way special, not at that time. I want doesn’t get. Because I say so. Don’t come back till teatime. Phrases you would hear ten times a day. And like most kids, his backside was no stranger to the palm of his father’s hand, his ears more than accustomed to irritated quips from his harried mother. Stop fidgeting, for goodness’ sake, hold your fork properly, you can’t go to Mass dressed like that.
He was an only child until the new baby came in the winter of 1967. Perry Como on the Dansette, ice on the inside of his bedroom window. Hooked over the Kodak Brownie in the lounge, his father snapped his mother’s belly, huge and round under its patchwork cheesecloth smock.
‘Don’t take any more, Jack,’ she said, shooing him away with her hand. ‘You’ll waste the film.’
Christopher thought she meant to save some for him, perhaps for the Scalextric track he’d built by himself in his room. But she didn’t come to see it, and his dad didn’t bring the camera out again until the baby was born – which happened a week or two later. That night, midnight-ish, he shivered on the bottom stair while from the front bedroom there came a cavernous lowing he could not equate with his mother. He dared not go up to see if she was all right – could not imagine what he would see if he did.
After what seemed like hours, his father came clattering down the stairs in his pyjamas. ‘I have to phone for an ambulance, son.’
From the blue Wedgwood dish on the hall table he dug pennies and ha’pennies, closed his fingers around them before grabbing his overcoat and throwing open the front door. He turned back, raised his forefinger as if in afterthought and said, ‘Wait there and don’t bloody move.’
The door slammed shut. Long minutes passed. Christopher did not bloody move. Then the key, crunching into the Yale. The front door swung open, a blast of cold air, his father’s eyes bloodshot and wild.
‘Right, lad.’ His sandy hair flew in one piece from his balding head like the top of a boiled eggshell. ‘Ambulance’ll be here in a bit.’
The ambulancemen carried his mother downstairs, one at each side of her, as if she were a chair and they were trying to keep the wallpaper from scuffing. They puffed with the effort. She was still mooing, and he thought of the Friesian cows in the field next to last year’s holiday cottage in Ffos-y-ffin. Her face was pink as raspberry jelly, her matted hair darkened to the colour of brown paper, stuck in pointed fronds to her glistening forehead.
‘Mum,’ he called out to her as they carried her into the street. ‘Mummy.’