THERE ARE FACTS about the way that Liam died, that I wish I did not know. All the things I have forgotten in my life, and I can not forget these small details. I have forgotten my twenty-first birthday, also my eighteenth birthday, I have forgotten every New Year’s Eve but two, I have forgotten what my dead brother looked like at the age of nine or ten or twelve, but I will never forget the three little facts the nice people in Brighton told me about the body that they pulled from the sea.
The first is that Liam was wearing a short fluorescent yellow jacket when he died, like the ones railway workers and cyclists wear.
The second is that he had stones in his pockets.
The third is that he had no underpants on under his jeans, and no socks in his leather shoes.
The tides in Brighton are fast and they range far. He wore the jacket so he would be seen going into the water, and his body would be easily found. Liam, who could not organise a box of matches, was, on this occasion, fully organised.
The stones explain themselves.
It is the lack of underpants that makes me cry. Liam was never together, but he was always clean, and though he lived in various pits, they always had running water, he always knew where the nearest launderette might be found. He used an old-fashioned pink soap, with an industrial smell-I have no idea what it was called. I remember standing in the supermarket sniffing all the bars through the paper, ending up with some odourless stuff which he would not use. He put Coal Tar shampoo on his hair, and Listerine on his gums. He sprinkled anti-fungal powder everywhere and made demands for wet wipes beside the toilet. He flossed. His anti-perspirant would strip paint.
Liam took his underpants off because they were not clean. He took his socks off because they were not clean. He probably thought, as the cold water flooded his shoes, cleansing thoughts.
I know, as I write about these three things: the jacket, the stones, and my brother’s nakedness underneath his clothes, that they require me to deal in facts. It is time to put an end to the shifting stories and the waking dreams. It is time to call an end to romance and just say what happened in Ada’s house, the year that I was eight and Liam was barely nine.
Here is Ada’s good front room in Broadstone. The door is painted a white gloss, going yellow. Inside, the room is papered a dusty pink. There is a clapped-out sofa and the two stiff wing-chairs, but Ada has put a fantastic array of cushions on the dark slip-covers, and instead of pictures on the walls she has signed theatre photographs in their frames. The room is slap up against this street, so there is a beige roller blind as well as lace curtains, and from ceiling to floor, there are drapes of theatrical red. The window is the first thing you see as you walk in, it makes everything else seem dim, except for the mirror over the mantelpiece which reflects a bright slice of room. The door opens inwards and is near the hall door, so you have to walk right in to see who is there: Charlie asleep on the sofa-sometimes in his pyjamas-or Ada reading in the wing-chair that is set against the window for good light, or Mr Nugent sitting in the other wing-chair, on a Friday, while Ada avoids him in the kitchen, putting biscuits on a plate.
Some weeks she was not there for him at all. You never really knew where she was. We didn’t hang around Ada, who had a sharp enough way about her, and always had something to do. Ada liked her cup of tea, and when she sat for her cup of tea you could talk to her as much as you liked. The rest of the time we were, as all children were in those days, ‘in the way’.
So I spent much of my time moving from room to room, looking for something or avoiding something, it was hard to say what.
‘What are you doing there?’ Ada would say. ‘What are you doing there?’
There was a terrible boredom about the house, and I could never rid myself of it. Boredom lurked in the corners, and in the path to the garage, and in the little back yard. On this particular day I was variously bored on the stairs, or at the dining-room table, or in the hall, before I got bored again and decided to go into the good room.
What struck me was the strangeness of what I saw, when I opened the door. It was as if Mr Nugent’s penis, which was sticking straight out of his flies, had grown strangely, and flowered at the tip to produce the large and unwieldy shape of a boy, that boy being my brother Liam, who, I finally saw, was not an extension of the man’s member, set down mysteriously on the ground in front of him, but a shocked (of course he was shocked, I had opened the door) boy of nine, and the member not even that, but the boy’s bare forearm, that made a bridge of flesh between himself and Mr Nugent. His hand was buried in the cloth, his fist clutched around something hidden there. They were not one thing, joined from open groin to shoulder, they were two people that I knew, Mr Nugent and Liam.
I am trying to remember what he looked like, but it is hard to recall the face of your brother as a child. And even though I know it is true that this happened, I do not know if I have the true picture in my mind’s eye-the peculiar growth at the end of Mr Nugent’s penis, the bridge of flesh between the man and boy. The image has too much yellow light in it, there are too many long shadows thrown. Mr Nugent is leaning back slightly, his hands are set square on either knee. I think it may be a false memory, because there is a terrible tangle of things that I have to fight through to get to it, in my head. And also because it is unbearable. Mr Nugent is leaning back in the chair, his chin is tucked in to his neck, his face pulled hard back with satisfaction, or pain. He looks like an old farmer getting his feet rubbed.
I don’t know why his pleasure should be the most terrible thing in the room for me. The inwardness of it. The grimace it provokes like a man with a bad fart making its way through his guts, or a man who hears terrible news that is nonetheless funny. It is the struggle on Lamb Nugent’s face that is unbearable, between the man who does not approve of this pleasure, and the one who is weak to it.
I have slept since with men who are like this-they give nothing away until the last, and then they whimper, as though something terrible had happened. The pleasure that overtakes them is like some kind of ambush. And you feel to blame, of course. You feel it is all your fault.
I say I have slept with ‘men’ but you know that is a sort of affectation, because what I mean is that when I sleep with Tom, that this is sometimes what he is like, yearning on the pull-back and hatred in the forward slam, and, ‘What are you looking at?’ he says, or a weird sarcasm at dinner with friends about coming, or me not coming, though you know I do come-at least I think I do-realising then, later, that what he wants, what my husband has always wanted, and the thing I will not give him, is my annihilation. This is the way his desire runs. It runs close to hatred. It is sometimes the same thing.
‘What did I ever do to you?’ I shout. ‘Except love you? What did I ever do to you?’ which question he finds too stupid for words.
I know all men aren’t like this. Somewhere out there a hundred thousand Michael Weisses are walking their sons and daughters to saxophone lessons or piano lessons, living in some mellow American movie, where men are men and their hearts are easy. I know that these men exist, I have even met them, it is just that I could never love one, even if I tried. I love the ones who suffer, and they love me. They love to see me sitting on their nice Italian furniture, and they love to see me cry.
And I know how silly it is. You don’t kill someone by having sex with them. You kill them with a knife, or a rope, or a hammer, or a gun. You strangle them with their tights. You do not kill them with a penis. So it is all-the I hate you, I love you, I hate-a dream of killing and dying, I understand that much; that when you roll away from each other to go to sleep, then the dream is over for another day.
There is also the pleasure of the boy to consider. There is also the question of who he hated, or who he loved. Though Liam, in this memory or image, had his habitual face on, which was an open face of plain white, with two looping black eyelashes over eyes so dilated that they looked navy blue.
He was terrified.
And before the scene became clear to me, I remember thinking, So that’s what the secret is. The thing in a man’s trousers-this is what it does when he is angry; it grows into the shape of a miserable child.
I remember it as being very cold. You remember the cold on some imaginary skin that does not quite coincide with your own and this is where I shiver, as I remember the dankness of the air that day in Ada’s front room.
There is also a smell of Germolene, which will remain for me, for evermore, the smell of things going wrong.
I think, often, of Nugent looking at me when he realises that I am at the door. The boy’s hand (surely it was moving) has stopped, and Nugent, leaning back from his difficult pleasure, takes a moment to notice this. For a moment, he wills the boy’s hand on, imagines it moving, once, twice, until his mind trips over its obstinate stillness and he opens his eyes to see me standing there.
‘Would you ever get out of that,’ he says, and when Liam takes his poor hand out of the man’s flies I feel that I have spoiled it for all concerned.
I pause as I write this, and place my own hand over my face, and lick the thick skin of my palm with a girl’s tongue. I inhale. The odd comforts of the flesh. Of being me.
I have seen great bleakness in Liam’s eyes, on that day and on many days since-but when Nugent saw me, a small girl in a school uniform holding the knob of the door, the look in his eye was one of very ordinary irritation.
‘Would you ever get out of that.’
And I did. I closed the door and ran to the toilet upstairs, with an urge to pee and look at the pee coming out; to poke or scratch or rub when I was finished, and smell my fingers afterwards. At least, I assume that this is what I did if I was eight years old, but perhaps I just ran the taps and looked at the water, or trailed my fingertips over the bubbles of the bathroom glass, or walked the space in an absent-minded way, pulling back from the vertigo of the toilet bowl, and the white bath, so mysteriously full of air.
I look at my own children and I think you know everything at eight. But maybe I am wrong. You know everything at eight, but it is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find.