It was, of course, perfectly legal for a father to whip his children. Before the Children Act of 1989, abusers more easily slipped detection. Winefride had rung the police seven times, and each time was told no crime had occurred, but if someone was injured she should call back.
“I’m calling the police again,” she said. She did, once again, but this time the authorities sent a very young social worker who wore a brown suit and a white shirt with a stained collar. That Monday afternoon, he talked to Henry for about twenty minutes. Henry, badly hungover, made a show of apologizing to everyone. But nothing seemed likely to change soon, partly because Cuthbert was too terrified to tell the truth. And he even defended Henry.
“My dad’s alroight,” he said to the man from the council. “And I ain’t the best.”
The next night, on a Tuesday, Winefride Wenlock died in her sleep of a massive ruptured aneurysm.
THE MOST EVIL beatings came after his gran died, in the years before Cuthbert left home for uni. He endured criminal abuse. (The timing of everything had become unclear as Cuthbert aged, and at age ninety with a brain half-pickled, what he remembered most was his own shame and self-hatred—and his undying worship of his dead brother.)
Cuthbert became just as spiteful as all the Black Country boys he knew. His worst injuries, of course, weren’t visible; but his mind was gradually being thrashed into the early stages of a dark syndrome that had no name.
He grew to loathe himself and the world and everything in it, and an almost continual guilt assaulted his heart. Eventually, the guilt turned outward. In agony, he would throw stones at old men and smack small children who supported the Baggies or Wolves.* (Cuthbert supported Aston Villa.) He once threw a baby gerbil into a goldfish bowl and watched it drown. He helped a small gang of boys kill a stray spaniel under a canal bridge he came to call Otter Bridge. He and the boys buried the animal under a blanket of gorse yanked from the canalside.
When he was twelve, he put his hand into one of these boys’ pants, and he invited him to put his mouth on his thing, but the boy only punched him in the stomach and began laughing at him. “I don’t want your ugly cock,” he said, squealing. Once, Cuthbert tore an electric blanket apart in his bedroom and spread the curly, cotton-stuck wires over his bedroom floor, trying to work out a system to electrocute himself. But he got scared. It seemed too industrial a way to top yourself. It would be like getting snagged on his father’s metal lathe and spun to death. Later, there was a phase of vexed strolling near an old iron bridge along the Birmingham Canal near Rotten Park, a sad walk up from his parents’ neighborhood, and toward the heart of the Black Country. He would spit on the bridge’s walkway and attempt to summon the icy will to kick one leg, then another, over the rails. The wrought handrails groaned and screeched and cars shoomed past. In the distance, grassy fields and lawns were still broken here and there with the black patches of scoria, which used to cover the region. Emptied of its natural resources, the land was still recovering. He could look down into the dark water and dream of death. However, even in this most deserving place, he could not kill himself.
Like so many abused children, his fundamental frame of mind was one of ghastly shame and self-contempt. At one point, he gave the canal beneath this bridge of his failed suicides a new name, the Otter River. Trying to work up the nerve to kill himself became compulsive; he would also try, when he remembered, to “beg forgiveness” from a Christ of Otters. He forced himself to picture this robed messiah of all murdered animals, a gimlet-eyed and long-whiskered Jesus with a long pearly claw upon each soft finger. He made himself say, “My sin has offended you.” Once, praying the words Christ forgive me, over and over without stop, he had walked far up the canal walks, away from West Brom, out toward Dudley, then beyond, eventually reaching branches of the disused canal system he had never seen. Once beyond the brownfields and blighted elm trees and ruined foundries near West Brom, the dark motor-oil water of the canal became more and more green, bright as grass and greener still. As he had walked, Cuthbert kept thinking that if he prayed hard enough and long enough, he would see another otter, as he had seen at the Wyre Forest after he and Drystan went into Dowles Brook. This otter would uncurl itself from the mossy water, turn a few spirals, and, with St. Cuthbert’s blessing, save him from drowning, this time from despair.
He remembered this as he made his way through the clattering hallways of his old IB. When he was younger, it had simply been too early for him to learn the language of animals—and too early in Britain’s national life, since it hadn’t yet hit its prophesied bottom. And not until Dr. Bajwa had sent him to the London Zoo had he begun, really, to know that something new was afoot, and to believe he would find Drystan again, and to act, despite great peril, to welcome the Christ of Otters.
“Christ, forgive me,” whispered Cuthbert. “I’ve my own heart of a demon.”
But we take you back, he could hear the dog Osman say. Without condition.