Chapter 13 - The Alien Examines Taboo For Hindsight

My job as a shelf stacker and floor cleaner in Kwik Save continued. Between my sense of duty and how mechanical the job was I sometimes even felt appreciated there. It was the most constant and public part of a life where the job gave me good cover from all the other divisions of myself that I either had to endure, or had created without realising the long term consequences of what I was doing. Whilst working in Kwiksave I was safe from awkward questions. Nobody was going to ask me any questions where the answers might involve admitting to anything awkward. My regular attendance at The Christian Youth Fellowship was also the first public beginnings of my public commitment to Christianity. I enjoyed being with them, and I certainly liked the youth group leader, teacher John Sargent, who was one of the early men I knew who would give me time just for himself, usually by driving me back to the parental house after Sunday meetings. We had a shared interest in music but he also regularly sensed when I needed some sort of encouragement or was vaguely troubled. Two of the subjects banned from being mentioned in the parental house were now a regular part of my life, money, through work, and religion. As for sex and politics, they two had surfaced and would surface again. And then there was the unmentionable unmentionable, death.

Politics had come up when I had been sent votes in both the local and national elections in May 1979, aged seventeen. Knowing nothing about how to choose who to vote for I had asked Mother and her answers were unhelpful and evasive. Not only was the candidate and party we voted for 'meant to be confidential', according to her the public would be better off with the right to the vote, but never being told or notified when they were meant to vote. The less people knew about voting the better off the country was. Other times when we both watched what we could of 'Newsnight' before dad got home she might have commented, somewhat opaquely, 'They all piss in the same pot'. Whatever the party the different MP's were allied to they all have the same level of individual financial self interest, whatever their different public declarations about 'serving the public'. So denial of denial then, or cynical evasion, family were not going to give me much of a sense of choice about how to think constructively about politics. 

Mother could have been more transparent and informative about politics by explaining the mathematics of the first past the post voting system and the value of voting for candidates that don't win to keep alive the idea of choice in the list of candidates for next time. Mine was one of the many votes cast for a losing candidate in May 1979 that disappeared into the void of candidates and parties who would lose each time they stood, but would never stop standing in elections because they felt they had a duty to provide an alternative to the party that kept winning.

A year after those elections I put myself on the losing side of an argument again, this time in work. The part timers who worked at Kwik Save each said individually at different times to the boss 'We need time off because we have 'A' levels exams to revise for'. At first he seemed to bend a little with their argument, and attempted to make alternative arrangements where they might stay. Then when he realised the scale of time off being requested and he sacked all of the part timers in one go. The boss realised that even if they all stayed a while then one by one they would all be gone in two months time anyway. He decided that it was best to create a clean break with a new set of part timers. I gave the boss a cleaner break than he wanted when I decided to leave in sympathy with the now departed part timers. He did not want me to leave, but I became intent on leaving with Phil and Keith. Before it happened I had no clue that there would always be these employment/education cycles and when education for employees was at it's most demanding then employers would find it easier to replace part time employees until the next peak demand time.

With Phil and Keith taking exams I suddenly thought 'Could I do some serious study? Could I take some exams one day too?'. With serious support from their families they had pre-booked their plans for University when they got their results too. Even by short term hindsight I got from seeing Phil and Keith's home lives change over the ten months I'd been in Kwiksave I realised that I had more choice than I was told I had. One choice I only half regretted was that had I the time to consider I could have stayed on in the same job until at least the summer and got more money. Then I could have left Kwik Save to go on the dole mid-August where I would have reassured officials there that I wanted to study 'O' Levels part time and would be happy to take any job interview they sent me to, though I could not account for what employers made of me.

Between May and September the biggest change for the unemployed was the closure of The Labour Exchange and the opening of the town's first job centre. What was the difference? The white perspex lettering against an orange perspex background above the width of the premises. Also the cards that described the jobs were now laid out vertically alongside each other on the walls  rather than in a filing rack in front of us, and the staff seemed slightly more professional than in the previous premises. There was more room in the place as well. Not that any of that made the lack of jobs seem more numerous or attractive. 

Phil and Keith left the town in August of that year, I had been glad of them being about for the few months we were all at a loose end, they had put some shape into my life that I had enjoyed whilst they were there. But one by one they each left for their universities and I suddenly felt more alone. 

Over the summer, and with close friends gone, I started to use the public toilets more often than before. The reasons behind the increase were simple, I was alone more often and in the town with the summer sunshine men wore lighter, more revealing, clothing which I found to be a mild form of torture. Market days were on Tuesday and Saturday, often I helped Mother on those days. But even as I was meant to be being useful I could be quite easily distracted by some of the handsome and sporty stall holders who made an innocent show of attracting women customers as they bared a muscular forearm, or wore shorts and T shirts that oddly seemed to designed to reveal more through the tightness of the fabric than if they wore nothing at all. They would say that they were dressing for the weather, but it was clear to me that they dressed to appeal to the ladies and increase their sales. I survived through being with Mother at the time. On my own later I felt impelled to seek some secretive but shared sexual relief.

That summer rumours started in Mother's birth family. Mother's older sister, Alice, shared concerns with Mother about the health of her mother, known to me as Gran. They seemed to be about nothing at first. The view was that Gran was tired, as she was surely allowed to be at close to eighty years of age. Then the word 'cancer' was whispered. At first Gran denied outright to anyone that it mattered that she was even tired. But the slowness with which she denied being tired became the proof that she was tired. Then the whisper changed to that she had been to see a doctor about feeling tired and had not shared with anyone, possibly not even Grandad, what the doctor had told her. It was quite possible that in the consultation the doctor had not listened to Gran and she had not been able to explain to him why she might be tired, so there was nothing to report. Equally keeping what the doctor said to herself kept her nominally in charge of what her family knew. 

Even as different families and households we lived apart from each other, Gran's household, Mother's household and Alice, her sister's, household were remarkably similar in structure. The women in the family kept awkward conferences among themselves before telling the men in the family what they thought the men needed to hear. The men were often puzzled outsiders, puzzling over what they were outside of. I was too young to be counted as a man, I was still part child, for all sorts of reasons too long to go into here. So I could listen to the women at a distance closer than the men got, as Mother Alice and Gran tried to agree with each other on the single simple story line to share with those outside of them what Gran was suffering from.

Gran and Grandad owned their own home, called Maydene because Gran's first name was May. It was two former workers' cottages from circa 1900 made into one dwelling. In the back of everyone's mind as the rumours flowed was the phrase 'where there is a will there are relatives', i.e. where elderly relatives had to be cared for and they have money then their carers were seen as less than altruistic by those less able to contribute to the care. The carer who did most to care usually staked the biggest claim over the cared for person's finances. It was common among female relatives to see jealousy and greed when concern was expressed for another relative's well being. Seeking control of the wealth that the ill and elderly relative had through care of them was an accepted form of abuse. This was Gran's main reason for keeping news of her tiredness from her daughters. She could not stop herself and her worldly good being argued over after her death, but she would do all she could to shut down others arguing over her worldly goods whilst she was still alive.

Because Gran shut down all informed talk about it with her family by definition she made any discussion between other family members about her health 'behind her back'. Mother, Alice, and Heather, Alice's daughter, tried to talk, in a united way but all three were competitive and secretive. and talked as if they were gamblers playing cards where solid information was the pack. I knew before Alice did that the cancer had been confirmed. Out of either my being tired of the game playing from Gran downwards or my wanting to be plain speaking I told Alice. If ever anyone 'set a hare to run' I did. Alice was known to be kind on the surface but prickly and thin skinned underneath. It was inevitable the she would blow up for her sense of not being the first to know, and the first to withhold the information from others. The second inevitability that came to pass was that Alice would pull rank on Mother because Alice's husband had a car and could arrange visits and shopping runs for Gran more easily than Mother could for being dependent on the bus service, not that gran was bowing out of going to market every week quite yet. Much later Mother found her way out of rank being pulled on her, when her closest male friend on the allotments agreed to take her in his car to see Gran and Grandad one evening every week.

As an alien I had proved to be a leaky vessel for information. My defence is that I craved the clarity of plain talk and in my own way made sure I got it, whilst getting a fair amount of criticism from several female relatives for imposing my needs over their wish to delay all decisions until they could get the decision they wanted to without being seen to. Cancer became another subject to go on the 'not to be discussed' list. With the little that had been said I could not work out which was worse the cancer the cure, Both could be tiring. Gran's age and general health was what made the cure worse than illness. Nobody knew how much her decision to accept the diagnosis and do nothing about it was an act of Christian faith on her part. Her Christianity was something that everybody knew about, and myself apart, declined to share. All those who said they had no faith felt uncomfortable around her open faith, it was something that made her more her own person.

I was in the dog house with the female side of my family when one August Sunday afternoon I walked to the public toilet in the car park. The height of humour there was misreading the meaning of the 'pay and display' sign outside the toilet itself. I was going to display without paying and complete my willy waving duties in the toilet because I was at low ebb, I had nobody to see, and there was nothing else to do. I was there for a while on my own in the far left cubicle, the hole in the wall facing into the middle cubicle when somebody occupied that middle cubicle. He started partially undressing, and even sort-of waving his willy sort of at me, but waving it half away from me also. I had noticed how some men liked to tease, because they liked to suggest that they were well endowed whilst they were not. I knew how if the tease engaged me then I found it difficult to extract myself from the lies they were getting off on whilst I was getting less out of it. But I continued to look through the hole in the wall, just above waist height that was smaller than the diameter of a man's hand. Very soon alarm bells rang and any sense of the hoped for limited release completely drained away from me, from the hole, the cubicle I was in, from the toilet, from the whole town, and for all I knew the whole universe.

Dad was doing the same thing that I was doing in the next cubicle. Up to that moment we had both assumed that the secrecy of the place had served us well, and in a way it had, we neither of us knew that the other visited the place and lingered. Now we both knew and we were both in shock when we hurriedly dressed and left the toilet. I don't know now who raised their voice in public first, but very rapidly we were both in a defensive conversation that generated more heat than light. Dad was angry and I felt I had to defend myself by all arguments necessary. I resisted submitting to dad then and there, particularly when his arguments that I should not be where we had both just been were knowingly hollow. There were solid, well observed, arguments around how and why willy waving happened but he was not going to make them. He preferred to argue that I should do as he said because of who he was, head of the parental household. He also argued that he could do exactly what he wanted, with drinking and gambling, however inconsistent such activities seemed with the rules he made for others. He argued that he could be as inconsistent as he wanted to be as long as nobody knew about it, but his dependents had to observe a more consistent line, whether they were seen to or not. Any logic of his argument was soon exhausted by his inconsistency as he claimed he was always right because of who he was, after which the encounter between us became wholly negative. The only positive to come out of it was my admiration for the roses that were planted near the toilet as we looked away from each other whilst we argued. They were so calm and colourful compared with how we were with each other.

Initially life in the parental house after our brief open air argument seemed no different from previous. When dad and I were alone the television seemed to be that bit louder, as if it was making some extra effort to stop me being angry and wanting him to talk when he would do anything to remain silent. To put the words to the argument I could not make at the time I wanted to believe that it was possible to admit to being gay and in the closet. I wanted to get out of the denial I had to live with that dad thought was necessary not just for him, but for everybody who waved their willies in public toilets. What I did not know was how fiercely dad would attach himself to the idea of denial at all costs, and how painful it would be for me to have to live around that immoral dishonesty. The tension felt worse to me when on the television there was some great display of sportiness or machismo, because that was when the television seemed to more overtly assume the moral headship of the household in itself. If I thought that I should be allowed to observe and follow some more internally consistent model of masculinity then I was going to be disappointed for a long while. 

Eventually there was some small open disagreement with dad that Mother had, where dad could not use his control of the television to avoid all discussion. The argument started small and specific, but because of all the avoidance of other arguments and communications that had gone on over recent and more distant times the argument widened and reached a point where it became the verbal equivalent of the free for all fight scenes that were seen in saloons in cowboy films which if they were recognised as being anything by the audience were accepted as being the nearest that drinkers and loners ever got to collective emotional release. On Mother's side of the argument was her old sense of grievance at Alice, her sister, but added to that were some serious points about how dad misused the television to shut down how as family members we might relate to each other more constructively. 

At some point I told Mother in front of dad that he sought sex in public toilets. If I had spent my anger at dad that way, then it was to far less effect than I hoped for. When men generally sought to say less about their sexuality, and sexual tastes and wants, to their wives it was because there was a level of mutual incomprehension around sexuality where men and women both projected their misunderstanding of themselves onto each other. With this they multiplied their mutual misunderstanding of each other. With what I said I stepped directly into that multiplied misunderstanding not realising how hard to map it was, so little was said about it. Dad ummed and arred his way past every logical point that was put to him and he refused to recognise that he had been highly inattentive of late by being inattentive of the points put to him. Mother felt hurt at how inattentive and distant he had been.
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The argument changed how the house was run and my parents related to each other in front of me and my sister. But the change was slow and far from being an improvement. Dad took to vacuuming the living room floor whilst we were in the room doing something that we thought mattered to us, to prove to us how he was paying more attention to the house more and less attention to the television, as if with the television being on we were the ones attentive of the television. It was too much like flogging a dead argument to ask him to turn the vacuum cleaner off and try to say to him that he was using the vacuum cleaner the way he previously used the television, to distract others whilst giving him control of the space. 

I felt impelled to be closer to Mother after the row. But as life in the parental house evolved and calmed down after the big argument that closeness unintentionally took on strange and unsettling turns that left me disturbed. I could take that I would never feel close to dad and that he would ever really trust me for much. My sister would always be closer to him than me. That was his choice, and maybe her choice too. Though because she was fifteen, what her sense of choice was was hard to tell. I also knew to not follow dad's example of being evasive about drinking, gambling and whatever else he had to be evasive about. But my being less opaque about myself than dad made himself left me feeling more exposed and unsupported. Mother too seemed to be more transparently needy in some way as we both tried to find the right distance from which to watch dad go through his strange turns. Neither Mother nor I could help ourselves or each other, and yet neither of us had anyone else we could turn to except each other. My biggest relief was that I never saw dad at the car park toilets where people paid in the car park and displayed in the toilets when I was doing the same. I could take the fact that we both did it, I could not take the 'do as I say not as I do' thinking behind him insisting in his right to do it whilst he gave no exit from it and insisted that I should not. I would have liked us both to find the exit from such pretend invisibility.

Alas he never changed but I did. Two decades later, on a rare visit to see family and friends in the town after being away for some years, I visited a public toilet for it's proper purpose. I recognised the brown suede shoes revealing themselves underneath the metal dividing wall that gave users of the toilet their privacy/exposure. I was as far 'out of the closet' as I could be at the time. In my head I heard the words 'Dad do you want to come home for a cup of tea and a chat about camping out for uncomfortable sex in draft-ridden public toilets for long periods of time?'. But nobody else heard the words. They were the words I wanted to say but dare not. Silently seeing how dad was still allowing himself to be trapped was a sharp reminder of how much our paths had parted. I would still have wanted to 'rescue' him from the trap if I could, I knew I couldn't.

Twenty years since I was trapped I had gone a long way from the traps that had once caught both dad and me. I still had further to go to make sure I did not turn out like him. Neither did I wish to return to how I had in the past when I was a help and support to Mother, when being that support had so limited my exits and choices about how to live.

But back in September 1980 I was living in the parental house amid these odd times. I was gearing myself up for what I hoped would be my escape plan. I was going to study four 'O' levels, part time whilst signing on as unemployed once a fortnight. Education was going to be my future. In the meanwhile I continued paying Mother the housekeeping I thought that she was due every week. Sometimes what I thought she was due was more than she said she wanted. But if I paid what she asked then I knew that somewhere down the line she would be covering up being out of pocket, as if being out of money were a form of thrift. 

If I had ideas of escaping to live independently, but messily, as a student then Mother's all pervading ideas about thrift would have made sure that they were never fully investigated. I had to accept the compromise of being a stay-at-my-parents-home-whilst-unemployed student. That was the imaginative limit that Mother and the town had set me to live by, not that such limitations could be imposed on me forever.

Please find Chapter 14 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.