The Boy in the Moon

Dedication

For Mam

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

One: Is It Love?

Two: Pendulum Swings

Three: The Hide Man

Four: Seeing Stars

Five: Lining Up

Six: Small Good Things

Seven: Passing Time

Eight: High Places

Nine: Fair Play

Ten: The Sorrowful Mysteries

Eleven: Growing Things

Twelve: Falling

Thirteen: The Boy in the Moon

Fourteen: The Unfit

Fifteen: Perfect Truth

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE Is It Love?

Once, when he was nearly four, she found him outside in the garden staring up at the moon with his head cocked to one side. He was silent and very still. She crept up behind him, quietly, so as not to disturb his contemplation. It was a soft twilight in September – low-slung, grainy sky ballasting a swollen, somehow predatory moon. Her son appeared to be entranced. She turned from him and the strangeness of the evening to gaze back through the french windows to the normality of the living-room – soft light, sofas, cushions, padding. Everything as it should be, where it should be – touchstone suburbia, the reassurance of crystal and chintz.

He sensed or smelled her presence but still he did not move. She wondered at his thoughts and then he turned, slowly, widened brown eyes reflecting moonlight for an instant as his gaze settled on her. ‘It’s not a man in the moon,’ he said.

‘It isn’t?’

‘No. Look.’ He pointed upwards. ‘Look. It’s a boy, and he’s screaming.’

She followed the line of his finger, then shrugged. ‘How so?’ she asked.

‘See – two eyes, and there’s a squishy bit for a nose and look – look, mum, I said – there’s the mouth and it’s a bit to the side and it’s open wide, like this – Look, look, like this …’

He held his head to the side at a slight angle, opened his eyes wide, pulled his mouth to the left and yawned it open as wide as he could. She looked up at the moon, then down at him again. He was right. It did look as if there was a boy screaming in the moon. ‘I wonder why he’s screaming,’ she said.

Her son closed his mouth and gazed up again, but this time facing her so that he had to tilt his head backwards and spread his legs for balance. ‘Because he’s stuck there, of course,’ he said.

It had darkened quickly and his headless form with just the triangle of jawline jutting up was in silhouette. She took a step closer. His shoulders began to move up and down.

‘Shh,’ she whispered, ‘it’s all right, darling. It’s all right, Sammy, just your imagination. That’s all it is. Trust me. There really isn’t a screaming boy in the moon.’

He allowed her to hold him then and she rocked him for a while but he would not be consoled. She wondered at the intensity of his grief or pity, she could not be sure what strange emotion possessed him and when his sobs turned into hiccoughs, she put on her stern face – though she was trembling – and draped her voice in a cloak of impatience while urging him to bed. She knew her son and when he required her control and not her empathy.

When he finally acceded to her terse commands and trundled upstairs muttering under his breath, she felt that they were back in their own landscape. Their own familiar territory, where she led and he followed, albeit reluctantly at times, but followed none the less. And she could breathe again, spontaneously, and not with the forced shallow rasps he sometimes extracted from her when he led her into his strange and unfamiliar terrain.

When she looked up at the moon again, a slender tendril of cloud had snaked across the yawning mouth and she felt the sunken, staring eyes bear down upon her. She shivered and scurried back to the cushioned living-room.

‘Darling?’

His head was under the bath water but he heard her call. He stayed below the water’s surface and counted: one, two three, four …

‘Dahling?’

He allowed his nose to break through the skin of water and bubbles. The nostrils dilated and contracted frantically. After ten years, the way she said ‘dahling’ still irritated him. Perhaps he was a bit too simple-minded.but he thought terms of endearment should be just that – if, for that matter, they had to be used at all. Somehow they always sounded affected to him. He had heard other middle-class Englishwomen darling their husbands in the same fashion. They wielded the word, stretched it and sometimes brandished it. It was ‘dahling’ as a form of possession; it preceded an order, an accusation, as in: ‘Dahling, can’t you …’ Never: ‘can you’, a reluctance on the part of the one addressed being taken for granted. ‘Dahling, do you want to change Sam while I get the bottle ready?’ It was a vocabulary rampant with vague, unspoken censures. A minefield. The only time he ever felt in any way sure-footed was after sex, and then the feeling did not last very long.

In Ireland, he noisily sucked his teeth whenever she said ‘darling’. It was an oceanic distance from the barked ‘Mrs’ his father had used to summon his mother. Adult speculation had Brian wondering if his father had called her that in bed: ‘Suck on this, Mrs …’ No. Mrs, what he remembered of her, was born into the missionary position, horizontally inclined (in every respect), nothing doggy or foreign in the bedroom, certainly no saliva – ever. Now, Darling stood at the door of the bathroom, folding Sam’s pyjamas against her chest. She looked pissed off. Ten years of looking pissed off – the wind must have changed on their wedding day. Brian winked at her – to piss her off some more.

‘I’ve been calling you,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you hear?’

‘Have you?’ He sat upright and reached for the soap. ‘Sorry.’

‘How much longer are you going to stay in there?’

‘I’m nearly done. Did you want something?’

‘Christmas Day – which suit do you want me to pack?’

‘You’re not packing for me, are you? Just do yourself and Sam. I’ll do my own … in a minute.’

‘I’m finished with us. Hours ago. Which suit?’

‘The navy, I think. I don’t know. What about last year’s jacket with the grey trousers? Oh, I don’t care. Anything. Pack anything. It’s all the same.’

She pursed her mouth and tapped her foot. He hummed. ‘The navy,’ he said.

Sam called to her from his bedroom. She rolled her eyes and pretended to hesitate. Then she went to him.

Brian sank back into the bubbles once more. He raised his leg and studied it. Flexed the foot back and forth. In the steamy mirror ahead, he could just make out his features. He lowered the leg and turned his head from side to side. Good, blackish and moreover, loyal hair. He stuck his jaw out – not bad in a jowly, just-going-to-seed Irish politician way. He pulled his lips back and gritted his teeth – still there anyway. He lifted his arm and flexed the muscles; they rose from their torpor obligingly enough. All in all, not bad for forty-three. Little satisfied tremor. In a couple of nights, he would be sitting on a stool under the corrugated iron roof of his favourite local, listening to the buckshot rain above, his tongue gliding greedily over a Guinness moustache.

The thought occurred to him that the thing about being Irish was the measuring out your life in Christmases, Easters and slivers of August. It was the same for the immigrant and for those who waited at home. Around the end of November every year, the pull was at its strongest. By December, he would be filled with a quiet anticipation, coupled with an underlayer of dread – on parole and elated for Christmas, an alien again throughout January and February.

The phone rang. He lifted his other leg to study it. Julia was remonstrating with Sam as she ran from his room to answer the phone. Brian listened. It was Julia’s mother, Jennifer, another Darling. Calling to say goodbye and bon voyage and happy Christmas for the third time that day. He heard Julia impatiently say that she did not want to hear the weather forecast. Whatever horrors awaited them on the ferry would just have to be faced. Brian thought of cauliflowers.

Whenever he thought of Julia’s mother he thought of cauliflowers. It was her hair. White and permed into fat florets which framed her plump cushion of a face. Her eyes were blue and discontented, like her daughter’s. Richard, Julia’s father, was a tortoise – slow, unenthusiastic gait and elongated neck – ready for the guillotine from the birth. The skin on his face seemed to droop too under bristled black eyebrows. Most of the time, Brian could not make out his eyes, just two gleams of light beaming out hesitantly beneath their canopies. It was a habit of Brian’s, to make vegetables or animals of people. He had done so since childhood. Julia had begun as a cat and metamorphosed over the years into a pineapple, although she had had her moments of bovine splendour too. He stretched and listened to her trying to get Jennifer off the phone, knowing from the sound of her voice that she was still folding clothes against her chest with the receiver cradled between her head and shoulder. ‘We’ve managed to get to a phone on Christmas Day in the past, I don’t see why it should be a problem this year,’ Julia was saying. She stopped for a while and listened. ‘Jennifer, please stop fussing,’ she continued, addressing her mother by her Christian name, which meant that she was getting cross. Brian shifted up uneasily in the bath and watched the rivulets stream down the black dense hairs on his legs and forearms.

When he heard the click of the replaced receiver he placed both hands on either side of the bath as though he were just about to rise. But Julia was checking window locks downstairs, bolting the french doors to the garden, checking the various alarms while she cleared away any remaining debris from their dinner earlier. He could hear the musical clickety clack of her heels beating out across the tiled and wooden floors below. A swish of drapes closed, another, then another. Click clack back to the kitchen again.

He was in the main bathroom – he had thought she might need to use the en suite. But she would probably keep going for hours yet and shower just before bed, something he could never understand. More doors opened downstairs. The final final check. Julia, he thought, did not open doors so much as assault them. She wrenched handles and entered rooms with the door swinging on its hinges behind her, as if she expected resistance at every turn. She ran up and down stairs, one hand outstretched in vague deference to a banister rail she never touched. She reversed her car with a savagery that made him wince. And she pounced on ringing phones like a cheetah.

Sam wandered into the bathroom, scratching his head. He lifted the toilet seat and peed.

‘Sam,’ Brian said.

‘Dad,’ Sam said over his shoulder. He yawned.

‘It’s late. You should be asleep. We’ve a long day ahead of us tomorrow.’

‘I know. I had to make a pee.’

‘You packed all the toys you want to bring, then?’

‘Mum did it.’

‘So what did you choose in the end?’

‘Just the usual stuff.’

‘Books too?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Did Mum find room for the spaceship in the end?’

‘No.’

‘I’m sure I could squeeze it into the boot somewhere.’

‘She says there’re too many bits. They’ll only get lost.’

‘She might be right.’

Sam yawned again. He was standing motionless, still holding his penis over the toilet bowl.

‘Sam? I think you’re finished …’

‘I know.’

‘Well, what’s keeping you then? Away with you to bed.’

‘I’m thinking of a poo.’

‘Have you got one?’

‘I’m thinking of it.’

‘Go and sit on our toilet.’

Sam shook a few last drops and flushed the toilet. ‘It’s gone back up,’ he said.

‘Hands,’ Brian said.

Sam gingerly dipped his hands into the bath-water suds. His father leaned across to kiss his cheek. Sam wiped the wet cheek with his pyjama sleeve. ‘Fly is a word without a vowel in it,’ he said.

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘I’m only saying.’

‘Bed. Now.’

‘Your willy looks all squishy.’ A final yawn and he was gone.

Brian looked down. He had not realized he had been in the bath that long. He sighed and lay back. Contemplated the knots and gnarls on his raised feet for a moment. Strange thing, the body. Lived in for a lifetime yet there were parts of it, the back of his head for instance, the middle of his back, his scalp, that he had never really seen except in an unsatisfactory fashion in the mirror. This was, of course, quite apart from all the internal bits. The ridiculousness of self was a thought that had often struck him, as a member of a large family, which in turn had led to the affirmation of self in the smallest and most curious of ways, like his pepper consumption. Even now, Brian could not eat his food unless it was practically concealed beneath a black frost of pepper. He wondered if Teresa, the youngest, still spat into her plate before she began to eat. Quite probably. They had all managed to devise ways to repel nimble, filching fingers from their dinner plates … Feet pounded the stairs, but they ravished the master bedroom. He was safe for a while yet. In the en-suite bathroom, Julia quickly shunted out of her clothes and stepped under the shower. She decided against washing her hair, it was too late. She turned the shower off and grabbed a towel, checking the cabinet above the sink as she dried herself for any last forgotten items. The ladyrazor. And an anti-cellulite cream, brown gunge caked around the stopper, which wouldn’t work now anyway even with a blessing from Rome.

She sucked her stomach in and turned sideways. Her breasts were still full enough, quite large and round with tight compact nipples. In the mirror, the left breast always looked larger but Brian pretended not to notice. She reached for the tweezers and plucked a couple of straying hairs around each nipple, then a couple more above her top lip. She lifted her eyebrows without raising her brow, to see what her eyes looked like without the sagging eyelid flaps. With everything sucked in, pulled up, and her eyes looking slightly surprised, she could see what she was like in her twenties. With a sigh, everything collapsed, thirty-eight again.

The skin was still good – cream with the odd curdle. Nothing special about the lips – they functioned; by contrast, the cheekbones were high and almost anachronistic. Blue eyes, just on the turn, a dulling around the cornea. Remortgaged blonde bob – a clone in the schoolyard and Sainsbury’s. She thought about Brian resplendent in his bubbles for the past two hours and waited for the little spring of irritation to well up, but it didn’t. Instead, something fell inside her, a weight, a charge, and she felt herself opening. It was strange how that could happen. Most of the time she felt irritated. And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, her cervix would widen and she would feel confused.

On a straight run approaching a green light, he braked in anticipation of a change; for the same reason, she pressed her foot to the floor. After ten years of marriage, this was the most significant difference she could cite if they ever had to face a divorce court. Not less than everything – she smiled ruefully at her own reflection, and wondered if she would know herself if she met herself in a crowded room. The features were familiar, of course. But expressions were entirely a different matter. What did she look like laughing? Crying? Sad? She had no idea. She was really a composite of someone else’s perceptions. The thought saddened her for a moment. Then the thought of the two weeks ahead saddened her even more, stretching out like the concept of purgatory Brian had grown up with. A spartan fortnight full of everything her middle-class credenda told her was character-forming, wholesome and true, but which in reality inevitably proved to be wearisome, harsh and boring.

Sam was asleep when she tiptoed into his room with the towel around her. She could see his face from the crack of light which the landing offered, and his head: a miniature universe. Beside him lay the spaceship, contrived to tug at her heart, which was by Sam’s and Brian’s standards made of granite or something entirely extra-terrestrial, a Plutonic ice-ball. Sam snuffled in his sleep. Brian hummed from the bathroom. They were so entirely dependent on her. Awake, asleep, she ruled them. She gazed at the spaceship. It was full of tiny men and women. For a moment, she swelled like a god.

Sam’s dark hair stood up, electrocuted. His long eyelashes cast spiky talons on his cheeks. He was plump, like Jennifer. Julia could see him, years from now, like some tiny Nero, all white curls and cherubic smiles, fiddling while London burned as she, maternal mentor, looked on approvingly. Sam snored. She went to him and stroked the demerara freckles along his cheekbone. He sighed. All softness and light and complicated layers which gave voice to the man he would become. A man. Sam. It was an impossibility. He was too innocent to belong to either sex. She bent to kiss him and his curled fist opened slightly to indicate that he knew she was there.

Thus far, a self-contained little boy, content in his singularity, with an adult vocabulary holding forth in a high-pitched squeak. The gusts of her anger sometimes pinning his ears back, making him blink before she uttered a word. His silent disapproval thereafter sending her panting to the fridge for comfort.

He resisted her embrace for a moment, as she knew he would. But then plump arms wound around her neck and he breathed sweet, unpolluted breath on her. She felt ashamed of her own scent. He tugged at her neck and inhaled deep within her hair.

Outside his room she stood for an instant recalling his first day at school. She had stood by the classroom door and watched him melt into an alien world of masculine declensions that she could never decipher for him. Nudges and back thumps and rushes for the door, each boy trying to outdo the other. The girls huddled in sinister little groups of twos and threes, the boy group swelling to encompass more and more until they heaved in one great throbbing caterpillar, chewing up the playground. She was excluded. After years of being there, the only thing, the only one, she had to be satisfied with nothing responses.

‘What did you do today?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Who did you play with?’

‘No one.’

‘Where did you play?’

‘Nowhere.’

She had found it extraordinary that he was already inculcated in the language of silence, of non-committance, of secrecy, at the age of five. What was there to hide at five? Everything, it appeared. Even more secrets now that he was seven. Sometimes, she felt envious of the silent vocabulary that passed between father and son.

‘Sam.’

‘Dad.’

Everything reasserted by the vocalizing of one another’s name. Sometimes, she felt very alone, stretched out on a rack of inarticulacy. And then Sam would turn to her with one of his blistering, knowing smiles, the ones reserved for her alone, and she felt a renewed confidence. Confident enough to direct them again. For that was what they seemed to want of her.

Not so bad, really, she thought, forcing moisturizer into the parched pores of her forehead. On a good day, in her lemon suit, the grey nubuck pumps and seven deniers, she could still draw herself up, stretch herself out – so taut she could hear herself ping.

In the other bathroom, Brian was humming louder and louder which meant that he was expecting – no, inviting her intrusion any minute now. She pursed her lips and left him to it.

Brian wondered what he had been thinking about for the past half-hour – the blanks were growing longer these days. Nothing much most probably. Some old crap about his own reflection or his sense of self. It worried him mildly that he had succumbed so easily to the self-absorption of Julia’s class – anomalous to his upbringing, he thought with satisfaction. There was grit and hard grind for you. He gave himself a flinty look in the mirror and pulled the towel between his legs, just rough enough to smart a bit. Now so.

He padded, still dripping, into the bedroom. The suitcases were stacked up neatly by the door. His clothes for the morning lay draped across one chair, Julia’s across the other. She was already in bed, reading. Glasses perched on the end of her nose. ‘You’re wet,’ she observed, turning a page with a licked thumb.

He stood by the end of the bed and slapped his palms against his chest. ‘And yourself?’ he asked hopefully.

‘Dry as in Gobi, Sahara … Martini.’

‘No change there then.’

She peered at him over the rim of her glasses. ‘We have to be up at the crack of dawn,’ she said.

‘So?’

Julia sighed, allowed the book to drop to the floor, folded her glasses shut with a click. She studied him for a moment with her head cocked to the side. Is it love, she wondered? After so many years, she felt what she could only describe as ‘shy’ on occasion. There was something slightly embarrassing about making love with your partner. Snorting like a zebra one minute, rubbing Ariel Ultra into the skid marks on his underpants the next. The groping hands of night that would not dare to fondle by day. Waking from an erotic dream in the half-light of a winter’s morning to grab your partner’s frayed pyjama collar – ‘You’ll do.’

Middle-aged sex was nothing if not safe; no need for health exhortations there. It was comfortable and reliable, warmth and familiarity tinged by a certain something unpleasant like the smell of your own sneaky fart under the bedcovers. And safe, God, safe as houses.

There had been moments. They had tried whispering obscenities or, in Brian’s case, little affected grunts, nothing earthy or guttural, no uhhhs, and so patently out of sync that she had bopped him on the back of the head one night: ‘Shut up.’

Understandably perhaps, he was very quiet for a long time after that. Not so much as a gruntlet to dilute the lonely sound of two bodies wearily shunting into each other in the dead of night.

She wondered if every marriage was as smelly underneath the perfume sprayed on for friends and family. Below the surface: strata of unresolved, residual odours – like decay – so that the simplest gesture or caress took on a thousand resonances, rekindled a thousand rancid grudges. Briefly dispelled by ropy buttocks pumping up and down in mechanical despair, beneath which slappy thighs spread just wide enough for entry. Tentative arms reaching out under as yet unsoiled sheets, always ready for rejection – as if it were the only thing that could be counted on. Keeping each other company in the end as if that were an end in itself. She often thought of all the miserable elderly couples out there keeping each other company. Now, for a brief moment, she wanted to cry. She felt that she should – for the passage of love, or what passed for love, or something like it.

‘Tempt me,’ she said.

‘I thought that’s what I was doing,’ Brian responded plaintively. He whipped the towel off and grinned at her. Sometimes he harboured dark thoughts concerning his wife. Sodomy up an alley by a mad, defrocked priest with a club foot – that would soften her cough. He fantasized doing it himself on occasion. On the premise that she was generally softer, a bit soporific, the day after sex – still vocal, of course, but less strident – he’d figured sodomy would buy him a week at least. However, although she was open to most things, the servants’ entrance was most definitely bolted. He had got as far as accidentally on purpose losing his way one time. Just a little prod to see how she would react. Then a cheesy, shame-faced grin when she had craned around incredulously.