But she was panting and moaning, and she did not look at him.
The next morning, his mother was not at home. There were no fresh socks, so he put on yesterday’s, and at breakfast his father did not put butter or jam on Christopher’s toast.
‘You’re eight, aren’t you?’ he said, eyeing Christopher’s knife stilled in mid-air. ‘Should know how to put butter on toast by now.’
That afternoon, Mrs Whiteside, the lady from next door, picked him up from school along with her own little boy, whose name he had forgotten by the time he came to tell me all this. She gave them both a jam sandwich and a glass of milk in her back kitchen.
‘Do you know where my mum is?’ he asked her.
‘Your dad’s with her,’ she said, taking his plate before he’d finished his sandwich. ‘Now off you go, the two of you – get out from under my feet while I peel these spuds. I suppose I’ll have to do extra.’
He was playing marbles with the neighbour’s son after tea when the long shadow of his father darkened the rungs of their filthy doormat pitch.
‘A boy.’ His father’s silhouette, so much stockier than the shadow, eclipsed the light. His face was invisible. ‘Do you hear me, Christopher? You’ve a brother now. He’s called Jack.’
‘OK.’ Christopher returned to his game, pressing his knuckle to a cat’s eye the size of a gobstopper, a silver and blue ripple frozen inside its heavy glass. An important shot this. They were playing keepsies.
It would be years before he thought about the fact that his brother’s Christian name was the same as his father’s.
* * *
Louise came a year later. She and Jack Junior were their own unit: Irish twins, his dad called them. Their fair hair and bright, freckled faces did not match Christopher’s own black locks, his pale skin.
‘I was the blank canvas,’ he said to me once. ‘They were the works of art.’
‘No, no,’ I remember replying. ‘Don’t say that. You’re my work of art. We’re all a work of art for someone who loves us.’
But his siblings’ easy way with their mother – the way they climbed onto her lap if she ever sat down, hid under her skirt while she gossiped with the neighbours on the street, laughed when she scolded them – served only to remind him of his own stiff stance, his inability simply to hold, or be held by, another human being.
‘No one is born unable to hug,’ I told him. ‘It can be learnt, and I’ll teach you.’
I thought I could teach him everything. Confidence, that was all he needed, I thought. A sense of his place in the world. But I could not give him that.
* * *
At ten years old, Christopher was moved into the loft, into a room made by his father.
‘Your brother needs his own space,’ his mother said, by way of explanation. ‘He’s gone two.’
Fine by Christopher. Jack Junior was a pain in the neck, a whinger. The sooner they stopped sharing, the better.
The box room became a nursery for Louise, who was getting on for fourteen months by then. Christopher, already taller than his mother by this point, wasn’t far off being taller than his father. He could not straighten up to full height in his new bedroom without banging his head on the eaves, but the floor space was bigger than the one downstairs.
His father built the windows for the loft room, put the electrics in and lined the walls with fresh woodchip, which he painted cream. His mother ran up curtains from fabric she’d found at Lancaster market, made him a valance sheet with what was spare. His parents bought him a new pine wardrobe from MFI on hire purchase.
The trapdoor was left as it was – with a U-shaped handle. Whenever Christopher went up to his room, he would take the long hook from its holder on the landing wall, loop it through the handle on the trapdoor and pull. With a heavy metallic clatter, the stepladder would come shuddering down like a magic staircase summoned from tin clouds. At ten, this made the room feel like a den; later, like a temporary guest room.
And later, when he did start to look at it in that way – that is, with the seed of bitterness he wished were no part of him – he would think about how nothing had ever truly belonged to him. Nothing had really been his. To and from school, he would tread as lightly as he could so as not to wear out the soles of the shoes that would be Jack’s – try not to suck thin the grey cuffs of his school blazer.
‘Try and keep it nice for your brother, can’t you?’ His mother, Margaret, shaking out his father’s work shirts over the kitchen table. ‘We can’t be buying new blazers every five minutes.’
It seemed to Christopher sometimes that his life was spent trying not to ruin anything, trying not to bite his nails, not to put his elbows on the table, not to pull out clumps of his own dark hair. By the time he was twelve, his eyebrows were no more than black tufts where he had plucked out patches along the length. They never grew back, not completely.
And always the knot, always the rope.
I will say this: things were different then. People had different ideas. People went to church every week, went most places on foot, often came home from work to eat at midday. No exception, Christopher walked the half-mile from St Luke’s Primary home for his dinner at 12.15 p.m. sharp: something like boiled potatoes, mince or battered fish, peas, carrots followed by steamed pudding with custard or white sauce. His mother, flushed from battle with the twin tub, muttered: ‘I feel like I’ve been through the ruddy wringer…’ unwrapping her pinny from her thin waist – ‘Don’t have time to be running a restaurant…’ pulling the turban from her forehead – ‘Call that hand washed? Go and get some soap on it now before I give you a thick ear…’ fixing her hair in time for the stomp of his father’s boots on the path.
Five around the table, heads bowed, the smell of carbolic on his praying hands. For what we are about to receive… After dinner, or lunch as they call it now, his father grabbed his tool bag and returned to work. Christopher wandered back to school, while his mother pushed the pram from the butcher’s to the grocer’s and on to the baker’s. There was no rest for the wicked.
In 1972, the black-and-white television was replaced by a colour set. By then he was at Morecambe Grammar. Lemon-curd crust and a glass of milk in hand, he sat cross-legged on the floor after school and watched the Clangers or Blue Peter or Bewitched. Then he would go up to his loft and study to the soundtrack of the week’s Top 40, which he taped without fail every Sunday night on his radio cassette player. Homework complete, he would climb back through the hatch – the clank, clank of those metal steps – and watch the news with his parents.