I also had some other ways to investigate, tentatively, that September though. Before that chaotic summer, when I was sitting on the bed in my room, or actually before going to sleep, I used to sometimes turn the dial on my clock radio from Radio One where it usually was (especially for the top 40 on Sunday) and listen out for police broadcasts on shortwave. I’d accidentally discovered them while twiddling the dial and skimming through snippets of Russian voices thrown into the atmosphere by the darkness which lets radio waves travel further. Heralded by a series of beeps it had been a thrill to hear the muffled Police voices with their “Foxtrot” and “Tango” and realise that I was eavesdropping on real live Police officers though they never seemed to be talking about anything more exciting than going on patrol somewhere. Then Mum had bought a cordless white phone. I know she enjoyed the novelty of it. Being able to walk around and take calls, or go and sit in her lounge, curled up on the green armchair, phone handset held in the crook of her neck talking to Dad when he walked the dogs to the phone box down the road everyday in France. It turned out, I discovered whilst trying to find voices amidst the crackle and hiss one night and being surprised to hear Mum’s voice, that you could actually pick up the phone calls from that cordless phone on the shortwave frequency. I remember laughing with Mum and Richard about this strange thing. Then we just forgot about it. Now I remembered. Then I wished I hadn’t.
I only heard, or have a memory of, two of my Mum’s conversations. It was as if two sides of her, both previously hidden from me and separate from each other, emerged out of the static. The first one was with her friend Susan. Her sole other friend apart from Jackie, our Godmother, she lived in Bradford as well and they’d worked together when they were both secretaries at some point. Susan was a friendly Mum of two who still had a dark version of the seventies Purdy bob my Mother had once sported, and seemed to completely fulfil the requirements of the “2.4 children” ordinariness stereotype. I lay on my side in bed in the darkness, hand on the dial of the clock radio, which was on my bedside table and heard my Mum chatting in a more relaxed way than I ever heard her. She was telling Susan how nothing had been sorted out about where we were living and that Jeff was coming back up from France with Helen and Richard but they still hoped to buy a house they could convert into gites there. Then they were talking about sex and being too tired for it, which was already like hearing someone else talk because I don’t think I’d even heard my Mum say the word “sex” before. It was entirely absent from any conversation we’d ever had or that I ever heard her have. I remember her laughing as she and Susan talked about their husbands and she said “Jeff would want it all the time, but they don’t understand do they that you don’t feel like it when you’ve just put the washing in?” and they both carried on laughing, having bonded over the perennial, ordinary complaint of two Mums in their forties in Bradford in 1991, that could have been the complaint of Mums in their forties everywhere about the difficulties of mixing domestic and wifely duties and how their men didn’t really get it. Suddenly my Mum was Everywoman. I warmed to her.
Then, and it must have been the same day or the day after because Dad was either still at the house in France or on his way back, but they had a completely different conversation. They mixed the domestic and sexual, barely skipping a beat. In the same tone as he’d talked about recording Coronation Street, Dad suddenly said “Well, we could always get a lodger and tell him you’d **** him in the price”. I physically jumped at that. The word “shag”, which I’d never heard him use before, hit me with a visceral jump. Then, the shocking realisation that he was coldly, casually suggesting this as a solution to their financial situation. Trading his wife. And my Mother had just replied “Mmm” in the same way that she’d say “Mmm” to agreeing to buy some milk. As if she was used to suggestions like this. As if it was normal. I had a vision of some random man coming to live in one of the attic rooms and sneaking downstairs to get his payment from her for being there. Again, another reversal. Even if this outrageous suggestion actually happened, shouldn’t the lodger be paying for the privilege? Dad had just put Mum in exactly the same bracket as the house. A commodity to be traded. She had acquiesced. I am up for sale, she was saying with her submission. I replayed this snippet of conversation again and again in my head. I was in shock. Up until now the revelations about their sex lives had been at a distance from the reality of the two human people I knew as my Mum and Dad. Things Jim said, photos I half looked at, Dictaphone tapes I didn’t listen to. Now this was a hidden motor behind their relationship in their own words. I was hearing their secret life and it was real not hypothetical.
In future years I would sometimes say, if it came up, “My parents were suburban swingers, like people in the Sunday Sport” and laugh and shrug my shoulders as people responded in kind with shocked amusement. “Their sex lives are their business really”, acquaintances, a therapist, would sometimes say implicitly or explicitly to that. I always have a sense then of being in one of those dreams where you’re shouting and no sound will come out. Of wanting to say more but feeling that I won’t be heard. To say that really, the problem wasn’t my parents chose to sleep with, but the way that for them sex had become something that was tied up with money and power. My mother agreed to be an object who was bought and sold like a house or a car, and I could still hear her, in that argument seven or eight years earlier tearfully saying “Your Dad wants me to sleep with other men while he watches”. At least one of their employees had also agreed to be bought. To add sex to a list of other services he provided, alongside cleaning and painting ironwork and attaching lightning conductors to chimneys.
Although it could be argued that that, in itself, still wasn’t a problem for me I suppose. Yet, the complicated transactions that my parents filled their lives with, formed the invisible backdrop to our own lives. They gave off a dangerous charge that reeled men like Jim and Andrew into the periphery of it, and meant that everything that seemed solid; a house in England, a house in France, a business, was underpinned by the shakiest of foundations. Dad, who used to be an alcoholic on a bottle of Vodka a day and lived on the precipice of two heart attacks, Mum who had been abandoned by the man she had fallen in love with after her father died and brought up twins on her own. Two people who knew what it was to live on shaky foundations and lose everything. Flirting with losing everything again.
Then came another unexplained incident;
The Friday night after we had all by now got back from France, Mum told me and Helen, as we sat in cane chairs in our sitting room, that the next day some men would be coming to talk about buying the business. It was a very important meeting so she wanted us to be out of the house by nine o clock tomorrow morning and would give us some money so that we could go and get breakfast at the café up in the village. Helen’s eyes widening “We’re going to have breakfast in the café? Wow!”. My Mum saying to me “I want you to look after Helen and get yourselves something to eat. Richard’s already going out for football anyway. I want you to make sure you don’t come back until ten o clock.”. She told us carefully and evenly, not in the way she might usually bark instructions about jobs we had to do, or messes we might have made, but in the way of making sure that we understood the importance of leaving by nine and not coming back before ten. She made it sound like she was entrusting me with the important task of making sure me and Helen both got our breakfast and stayed away from the house. It was the having breakfast bought that underlined how very serious and important the meeting must be. Mum and Dad hadn’t paid for food out that they didn’t have to since I was on children’s menus. Spending money when there’s already plenty of food in the house? Something either of them would be likely to disapprove of totally unless there was a very good reason. Maybe that was why I took what Mum was saying at face value. Some men are coming to talk about buying the business, they don’t want us in the house. Even as both me and Helen came downstairs that morning having had a call of “Get up!” at eight from Mum and were given a whole ten pound note by her in the kitchen, even despite what I knew and was still whirling round in my head all the time, I didn’t doubt that some men were coming to talk about the business and it was really important that we didn’t get back to the house until the time we’d been told. Me and Helen walked companionably along the main road, past the old Victorian library where I used to escape to read on evenings and weekends, across the busy junction where the mill still thrived and up past the newsagents to the little café which had aspirations to be a cosmopolitan coffee shop, with red walls and blue tablecloths. We both asked for bacon sandwiches and coffees and chatted away quite happily about school and France and the dogs and friends, me enjoying the responsibility for Helen, being the one to give the waitress our orders and wielding the ten pound note, and her enjoying an outing with her big sister, the animosity she’d absorbed towards me in France forgotten for the morning.
I kept checking my watch and decided at five to ten, having already had another coffee but not wanting to drag out our time any more, that we could safely set off back to the house. As we passed the front of the house and turned off into the drive we saw the battered red transit van that the workmen for the business had used for years. K, the employee whose name I’d seen on the tapes was just coming down the steps from the back door. J, the foreman of the business was in the driver’s seat. He was in his late forties and had worked for my parents for years. With his wind beaten, friendly face, dirt ingrained in his hands and careful, considered way of speaking in a broad Yorkshire accent he seemed as straight as the wooden rulers he carried when he was doing building work in the house. Both nodded hello to Helen and me. I felt a flicker of suspicion about both of them. Then an unbidden image of K and my mother on my parents bed came into my head. I shook my head imperceptibly, as if to physically take the picture away.
Mum and Dad were sat at the pine kitchen table. Four empty coffee cups on it. “What happened with the people who came to buy the business?” I asked chattily, “They didn’t turn up” said Dad shortly. “Oh”. I said and emptied out the change from the ten pound note onto the table. Mum started filling the dishwasher and Dad got up from the table to go outside. It was only years later that I would conclude that had never actually been some people planning to come and buy the business. And even if there were, it wouldn’t have been necessary to send a twelve year old and a sixteen year old out of a very large three storey house if they didn’t want to be disturbed. We could just have been asked to stay in the attic and be quiet. Or even in the living room. Mum and Dad had needed to speak to the two men who worked for them. About what, or why, is part of a still unknown story.
Meanwhile I was still imagining, or hoping, I was in a love story. I was due to speak to Jim later that afternoon after I’d finished my first shift at the newsagents. In the meantime I’d sent him a letter that week to the Poste Restante address in Mansle and quoted some verses from a poem I’d found in the book of John Donne poems he’d given me, about lovers who were separated. “A Valediction; Forbidding Mourning”. It talks about “dull sublunary lovers” not being able to cope with absence because they can’t survive without the others physical presence, but if lovers are “inter assured of mind” they “care less eyes, lips and hands to miss”;
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.
I did miss his physical presence though and kept rerunning the last time we’d kissed in the jeep. But, it did feel as though we were connected even though we were apart. He was in my head all the time. All through my first shift at the newsagents that Saturday afternoon I counted down the hours until I would be able to speak to him. I quite enjoyed the actual job though. The simple transaction of a customer asking for something, me ringing in the amount to the till, giving them change, counting coins out into their hand. Nothing hidden or double here, just an honest exchange. I liked the smell of the tobacco from all the packets of cigarettes as well, and how it mixed with the chocolate from the bars on the counter in front of us. Just after 5pm I took my blue overall with its temporary name badge off and walked across the concourse to the same phone box I’d used before. Jim had the number and was going to be ringing me, so I was relieved it was free. I stood watching the handset, as the second hand on my watch ticked past 5.10. when I’d said he should ring. I still jumped when it did, even though I was looking at it.
