who could rhyme and recite to him and who held his hand and didnât hurry him. But in their leisurely wanderings they hadnât noticed a sign saying PRIVATE and suddenly there
was
the aged, aged man, only he wasnât a-sitting on a gate, he was a-standing behind it, holding back two barking dogs with cheeks as pouched and furious as his were, and he was brandishing a walking stick and shouting, âBe off with you, canât you read?â and instead of shouting back, âIâm a headmaster, of course I can read! I can read a damn sight better than you can!â or standing on his head, or reciting a funny poem, Charlieâs father flushed scarlet, lowered his eyes, stammered out an apology as flummoxed as any of Charlieâs own, and hurried away, breathing audibly and holding Charlieâs hand so hard he thought it would burn up with the heat. Charlie could not remember ever having felt so sad. It wasnât just that a perfect day had been ruined; Charlie felt that this incident would stay with him for the rest of his life and that there would neveragain be a day when he would not feel sad on account of it. Propping up his sadness, like poles supporting a rotting pier, Charlie recognised two distinct sensations. Firstly, he was hurt on his fatherâs behalf by the telling-off. How much it hurt his father he could tell from how tightly his father held on to his hand. Secondly, he felt let down, that his father hadnât stuck up for them both and told the aged, aged man what he could do with his stick. A boy doesnât want to see his father disgraced, whatever the rights or wrongs of the case. Was this what his mother meant when she accused her husband of lowering himself, and of lowering her and her children with him? Well, Charlie could now vouch for that with his own eyes. He had seen his father talked to like a servant. And he had seen his father bow his head and accept the talking-to, as though a servant was all he was.
Those were the happy carefree years. The blithe times, when Charlieâs father still had his powers of recovery, could take a rebuff one day and could spring back upside down in his knickerbockers the next, before comprehensivisation did what his wife had never quite been able to do, and drove him under the table.
Charlie was eight or nine, growing taller, growing lonelier, growing shyer, when the table-shrinking started. Although his father was on a pension and there were uncles to help with mortgages and school bills and the like, the change in circumstances moved his mother to the sort of action countenanced by women of her class only during times of national crisis. She went out to work! More exceptionally still, she went out to work as a dental receptionist! It occurred to Charlie that although his mother gave as her only motive money, the real reason she went out to work was so as not to have to look at his father curled up on the floor with his briefcase. An explanation contested by the remains of the person in question who, during one of his periods of lucidity, crawled out from underneath the table to accuse his wife of taking a job as a dental receptionist only in order to be close to people in pain.
âIn which case,â he shouted after her, âyou might just as well have stayed home with me.â
But she was buttoned up in her National Health blue uniform by then, belted and badged as though there were a war on, and already in the street.
Once a week a lady with a mutating mole on her neck and no flesh on her bones visited the house to do the cleaning. Catherine. âAh, Catherine, Catherine â and would that be Catherine Wheel or Catherine the Great?â Teddy Merriweather hummed when he was apprised of her appointment. âCatherine the Great Unwashed,â his wife corrected him with a snort. Charlie was frightened of Catherine because of her mole, because poverty had ingrained her skin with soot, because she called him
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