Henry, one hot Saturday morning, used his usual black belt with the dye abraded off, and a favorite heavy-gauge wire coat hanger, to beat him for this. This time, Cuthbert felt he was fighting for his life. He struggled, defenseless as a skinned knee, to hide in the Handleys’ blue eggshell kitchen, with a gray-yellow light glaring through the windows and the sound of Tommy Dorsey’s “Opus No. 1” turned up loud on the phonograph to camouflage the rumpus.
“Yow’ll stop this shite, yow scallywag,” his father raged, raising the belt (which he folded into a rigid loop) again and bringing it down and kicking him, knocking him against the stove, and then against a pine kitchenette. “Yow bloody poof, yow bloody focking poof!”
Mary Handley howled at her husband to stop, but she did nothing else. With Winefride dead, there was nothing to mitigate the brutality.
“You’ll go to hell for this, Harry. You’ll go to hell,” Mary yelled, but she always stayed with him, and he often went to the dirty pub afterward, where it was hellish enough, where he would paint himself as an unappreciated mentor “’oo did wot needed done.”
Cuthbert could still recall the whistle of the coat hanger in the air, the fanging bites of the belt, the squeal after squeal of “Opus No. 1” ’s strangled trumpets.
Cuthbert completely depersonalized in such conditions. He would call for Drystan sometimes; he would unroll the ghost-child inside himself, like a shimmering emerald electric blanket. He would crawl beneath, panting for breath. His head that time took several bad knocks against the refrigerator, and he felt dizzy. He had tried to “defend” himself from the belt, but he only ended up woozy, with his calves whipped so hard that puffy welts rose up on them like secret budding fins. He’d wished he could use them to swim away from West Bromwich forever.
“Yam killin’ Drystan!” Cuthbert once screamed when he was being attacked. “Yam killin’ ’im!”
The mention of that name, in such contexts, always horrified his parents.
“Don’t say that,” cried Mary. “You bloody well stop that!”
“The boy’s ’af-baked,” Henry gasped, standing back from the boy. “He’s focking mad as a box of rabbits.”
Finally, during a similar life-or-death beating, the neighbors called the police, and Cuthbert—mildly concussed—was temporarily put under a protection order by Sandwell council, and he lived with a foster family near Birmingham City University. He made everyone call him “Dryst,” and no one questioned him about it. He was a tall boy for age fifteen, and many overestimated his age and maturity. After a week, he was sent home. The overwhelmed social worker who’d been assigned his case had failed to transfer many of the details of the abuse discovered by the police to Cuthbert’s case file. There were comments among the council authorities about how “a grown boy” had got “a bit of aggro” from his dad. In the context of Sandwell, it just wasn’t a big deal. Henry, for several weeks, seemed contrite, too. He repeatedly said he was sorry (“Something’s wrong with me ’yud, son. Yer dad’s so sorry, son.”). He even bought Cuthbert a child’s phonograph that came in a sort of red suitcase. There was a David Bowie record, too, and Cuthbert would play a song called “Joe the Lion” over and over and over and over.
In a month, Henry’s attitude (if not his fists and belt) was back to its old deportment. He felt hazily penitent, but the sense of public humiliation had been searing. He wouldn’t risk hitting the boy again, but the emotional abuse became as caustic as ever.
“Yow’m ’aff the boy your dead brother ever was,” he’d begun telling Cuthbert.
“Well, I’m not me—not anymore,” Cuthbert would respond. “I’m something no one knows.”
CUTHBERT’S PLACEMENT AT UCL never impressed Henry Handley, who still felt Cuthbert should get a trade even as he matriculated, collected his grants, and moved into Ramsay Hall.
“Yow’ll give it up like everything else,” his father kept telling his son. And the teenager did flounder badly at UCL, from the start. Mentally, he was completely off the rails. By 1978 or so, with London nearly at the peak of punk, Cuthbert spent most of his time thoroughly convinced he actually was his dead brother. He grew his dark brown hair unfashionably long and straight, parted on one side, and sometimes wore an absurd Native American wampum of yellow, white, and black shells as a hairband.
He skipped lectures, dropped blotter after blotter of LSD, guzzled grant money away at the pub, and found himself exquisitely alienated from every single soul he encountered.
AT UCL, his revisions eventually came to seem pointless, and he began to study noncourse books about esoteric religion and mysticism. He read Magick—Book 4 and Sellotaped poems by Rumi and Ted Hughes to his wall beside the bed. He came to believe that Hughes was covertly trying, through his poetry, to communicate with him. Cuthbert once wrote on the wall, right beside where his head writhed nightly on its pillow, “He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.”*
He also got into kooky altercations with other UCL students.
“You keep your fucking red thoughts off me,” he once screamed at an innocent sociology student as they reached for the same bowl of warm custard in the dining hall queue.