The bulbous, greasy-looking gray strollers were shaped like elephants, and seemed quite popular. The gate itself was a long brown-brick and stucco structure with dark Spanish tiles that reminded Cuthbert a bit of the entrance to the old Pentonville prison, but one with hanging baskets of orange and grape-colored auriculas, just like the ones at the Whittington Hospital, Cuthbert’s old drying-out center, at Highgate Hill. There were geraniums on the zoo entrance, too, and polyanthuses, but it was the auriculas that fascinated him—small and exact, and intensely bright, like fairy-light bulbs.
“Allo,” Cuthbert said to the little twins. He reached down for the fallen head of an auricula on the pavement. He smelled it, and he wanted to hold it out toward the girls, but he sensed that could seem creepy. “Yow ’ad some fun?” he asked them.
But the father placed a large hand on each of the twins’ heads, and turned their faces away from Cuthbert. The man turned back at Cuthbert with a strained smile, as if trying to mask his apprehension.
“Girls,” the father said. “Eyes forward.”
Cuthbert was playing with fire, and he knew it. If the Watch saw Indigents bothering citizens, they would arrest them, beat them, or worse.
Shut yowr gaubshite mouth, he silently seethed at himself. Shut it!
becoming the moonchild
AS AN ADOLESCENT, IN THE YEARS AFTER DRYSTAN’S death, Cuthbert would whisper to a ghost-brother at night as he lay in his narrow, creaky bed.
“You’re all the good that’s in our blood, Dryst—what little there is.”
Through Cuthbert’s youth, in the middle 1970s, during a period of some of the worst of the beatings, the late Drystan’s tiny empty bed had sat across from Cuthbert in the bedroom, its dark navy and brown plaid covered in stacks of automotive part boxes from their father and bags of undelivered clothes for Help the Aged. Around this same period, Cuthbert began, slowly and half-secretly, first for minutes and then for hours and days at a time, to conflate his and his dead brother’s identities. He would even call himself “Drystan” in the third person.
Drystan can’t sleep again, he might say.
Dryst just broke his shoelace.
The orange skies of Dudley are the same color as the dirt on Drystan’s hands.
Cuthbert also began to struggle to finish things as a teenager, struggle to get out of bed, struggle to live a single second more, and the idea of a ghost-Drystan somehow helped. Twice, he had given up a series of musical instruments after two or three lessons. At one point, his father had frogmarched him with a reluctantly rented viola back to a music shop and, slapping his head, forced him to admit he was a selfish, lazy child to a large Polish woman shopkeeper, who had seemed terrified by the scene.
“Mister, no,” she’d said. “Ty ?winio!”*
Henry Handley showed little tolerance for money spent on the arts and humanities, but to waste money on it openly—that killed him.
“But Drystan will help me, Daddy,” Cuthbert would tell his father. “I promise, promise, promise.”
“Leave off that gaubshite,” his father had said. “You’ll get taken away for being a nutter. Or a faker.”
Neither parent was kind or world-wise enough to steer him toward either psychological counseling, which he so needed, or a good public school, where the bright boy certainly could have won a generous bursary. So Cuthbert (often thinking of himself as Drystan) took his O-and A-levels two years earlier than usual, at the mediocre West Bromwich Grammar, and grew crazier and crazier. He achieved seven straight-A O’s and four A-grade A-levels in the sciences and maths, leading, at age fifteen, to an unconditional place reading biology at University College, London, his first choice. It had been an astounding feat. The Evening Mail published a little profile titled “West Brom Boy Boffin off to Uni.” The attention mortified Cuthbert, but another part of him, deep inside—the Drystanest part—soared.
The fragile boy seemed poised for an almost golden, if quite wounded, flight away from the Black Country, to a happier place. (As an old man, Cuthbert never remembered how clever he actually was before his addictions kicked in; his main memory of grammar school chemistry was burning his finger badly while trying to form copper oxide gas with a Bunsen burner. He and his mates had been passing around and inhaling balloons of the requisite nitrous oxide under their lab tables.)
Drystan, on the other hand, he could be allowed in Cuthbert’s blinkered mind—with its shades of dissociative disorder—to be the cleverer one, and naturally the precocious lad got into a bit of trouble at his primary and secondary schools, too, right?
In his last year of secondary school, the summer of 1977, before entering university, Cuthbert was mildly disciplined twice, by a sympathetic headmaster, Mr. Hawkes, for snogging another very lonely boy, named Ashley—Ashley had very dry, dark hands—in the school’s boiler room. They had both merely wanted to try out kissing, and neither had luck with girls. But the incident attracted special enmity from Cuthbert’s father.