A Life in Pictures

I have a photograph of him, taken not long before he pissed off. It’s a funny colour, very sharp and unreal, and it is a bit dog-eared now from the many times I’ve taken it out over the years – usually after a night’s drinking – and cursed him standing there in his security uniform, with his never-changing smile.

I pinched it one day from the bag of photos my mother kept in the bottom drawer of a heavy bureau in her bedroom. It was a strong, plastic bag with a fruit-bunch motif, cushioned in among some old women’s magazines and advertisements for – or from – the packages of fifties-style corsets, bras and stockings. A fitting place, it seemed to me, for this particular picture.

I’ve often been on the verge of ripping it to shreds or simply discarding it, but so far, I’ve resisted the temptation and held on to it. In fact, I quite like the photo, though it’s nothing to do with him.

Why do I keep it? I have asked myself many times. If there is a reason, it certainly isn’t sentimentality. I don’t need a picture of his face. I don’t fear losing grip of his image or personality with time. And I don’t need reminding – it’s just a photograph.

He is standing with his hands on his sides – why do I always imagine that the backs of his hands are covered in black hair? They’re not, he was a very hairless man. I suppose the picture reminds me a lot of the type in fifties American magazines, and they always had hairy hands. He is smiling – once again, I imagine him with white teeth, but he had none for as long back as I can remember, and never bothered with false ones. A peaked security cap is pulled down over his eyes. He has a tunic with short sleeves and a large badge on the pocket, baggy trousers and black, heavy shoes.

Above my father is a very blue sky, dotted here and there with a wisp of white cloud – phew, one can almost feel the heat of that summer day. There are huge shadows across the entrance from buildings, waiting lorries, the security barrier and the hut behind him. A good distance off is the large factory complex with its concertinaed roof and windowless body. From the security hut, an older man in a similar uniform is leaning out of the window. He is smiling, though I bet he hated my father, hated having to work with him and listen to his vulgar jokes, always having to spar with his overbearing presence.

Not long after – and maybe this is the reason I keep this picture – my father was gone. Suddenly took off. At the time, it seemed to me that he had just gone out to work as usual one Friday and never came back. If there had been ongoing arguments, threats to leave, ulterior influences, it had been well-kept from me, then and ever since. He just vanished, and that was that. To be honest, when I realised over the next few days that he wasn’t coming back, I was elated, felt as though I carried a coil of excitement about in my stomach, held a privileged position among children and adults alike. No longer would I have to carry my fear of him.

Whatever her pain or anger was, she kept it to herself, or at least from me. She tore around the house, endlessly cleaning and bumping things around. She did everything – shopping, cooking, ordering me about – with a determined finality. If she cried, and I’m not that sure that she did, she certainly kept it for the dead hours of night-time. She simply got on with bringing me up as best she could. In the years that followed, it seemed to me as if he had never really existed, as if he had been a bad dream, and I quickly – and happily – got used to life without him. Only, every now and then, a sudden panic would shoot through me, and I would dread coming home from school, or from playing up on the green, fearing that I would push open the door and walk into the house and there he would be, sitting in his armchair, smoking a cigarette – ‘Well, what are you gaping at you little bastard?’ – but it never happened. As I grew up, my fear turned to an abstract hate for him, a hate gleaned more from circumstantial wrongs than any hard fact, a hate I built up and nourished as a defence against his returning.

Back then, one thing puzzled me a lot, though at the time, and for years after, I thought I knew what it meant – now I’m not so sure, and I’ve had to put that memory on hold. That weekend, John Morrison came round. It was late, and I must have been in bed – why did I rise? Did he wake me? He was drunk and maudlin, kept blubbering and dabbing at his face with a large handkerchief, going on and on about what a terrible thing it was, why did it have to happen, how he couldn’t cope – even as a child, I remember being embarrassed by this display. She stepped around him, very cold and resigned, answered him tersely and with off-handed complaisance. Finally, she told him it was late, made him get up and leave. John Morrison never came round to the house again, and it seemed as I got older that he started to avoid me. At the time, I thought he was somehow afraid of me, but now I’m not so sure about that.

I take the picture from the drawer and look at it, at the peaked-cap and smiling face, the waiting lorries, the factory-complex and long shadows. I smile and ruminate on the possibility that I might be wrong about a lot of things.

*

I remember another picture she kept in a box in the wardrobe, one she never took out of its tissue paper covers to look at. I would sneak into the bedroom while she was out shopping, take it out carefully, delicately spreading back the paper wings of the box, set the heavy picture on the ground, and stare at every detail.

It was their wedding picture. He is standing behind her chair, one hand holding a pair of white gloves, the other resting on the chair back. His shaven face is swarthy, his jowls heavy, mouth strained in a smile – even then, he is going bald. He looks nervous, at pains with the whole thing, his wedding suit holding him fast.

In contrast, she appears relaxed. Sitting straight and proud, she stares resolutely at the camera. Her upper arms are fat and voluptuous; the white-stitched wedding dress is tight across her breasts. She nurses a small bouquet of imitation flowers. The wedding veil is lifted; brown, tight rolls of hair shape a plump face. Her eyes and lips are smiling, as though she is saying, I’ve got all that I want.

His sister always told the same story when she visited: every evening, he would go to the top of the house with a spy-glass and watch my mother from the open skylight as she crossed the bridge on her way home with the other mill-workers.

‘He was obsessed with her.’ She would laugh and slap her thighs. ‘Obsessed.’

What happened to the obsession? Did the twelve-year age difference or the drudgery of married life finally prove too much?

The wedding reception was held in the café. She still has the receipt – so many teas, sandwiches and bottles of ginger cordial. Morrison was best man. As they carried the cake into the café, some football supporters running down to the railway station lifted the top tier on their way past.

The honeymoon was a few days at a B&B on the coast. He said with a sly grin that they didn’t see the sea at all during the stay; a mist rolled in during the morning, and stayed till the dark of the evening. She said they took a trip to Derry, felt hungry and went into a café in the Bogside. The café turned out to be no more than the front room of a terraced house, with grease on the tables and walls – she retched, and he took her to a more expensive place in the city.

And the sex? It must have been alright. Though she never alluded to it, he liked telling dirty stories in mixed company, even with children present. Anyway, he must have had some experience after six years of army life in the Middle East. He referred to all women of dubious character afterwards as Mary Camel, and extolled the virtues of a hubble-bubble he had smoked in Cairo.

*

She kept two metal-framed pictures on top of the television. In one, he is smiling like Bing Crosby, a hungry phantom leering over the back of a chair, as if saying to me, ‘Here I am you bastard, and you better get used to it.’ He once screamed at me as he hit me with his belt for blunting his cut-throat by using it to sharpen sticks, that things had been fine until I came along. Then he added, almost with a sob, that I had ruined everything, and he left off the whipping and took his razor upstairs.

There they are, in the second picture, poorer quality than the others. Bosom buddies in their suits, shirts and ties, the silly, drunk grins across their dog-like faces, arms around necks like lovers on the pier.

I lift the photo and look closer. Run my eyes over the familiar, grainy features. I study Morrison, that big, pink slug, and see a thousand images of this man invading my childhood with his winks and cheer, beery breath, phony blazer badges and large hands. Always the lad, good old Morrison, joking and laughing. One of the boys, yet polite to the ladies. All things to everyone, but she saw through him, knew him too well, always had a way of turning a remark to catch him off-guard. When he came round to the house on Sunday afternoons, I would always play the same game with him: I would swing on his eagerly held-out leg, and then watch the smile vanish from his twisted face as I pivoted my full weight far down his leg to nearly break it, until my father twigged one day and nearly kicked me through the kitchen door. Morrison interceded on my behalf – only a wean, go easy – but I swear he loved every minute of it.

So, what became of Morrison? He did the only thing someone like Morrison could possibly do – he faded away, became ethereal. After his younger sister found out she was pregnant to a married man, placed her head on a cushion in the oven, and filled her lungs with gas, he cut himself off from everything and everyone.

When someone told my mother years later that Morrison had been found dead from a heart attack on his kitchen floor, the body only found days later when the milkman noticed the profusion of flies on the window, she said she was sorry for the way it turned out, but good riddance to the lot of them.

*

Packing her belongings into cardboard boxes from the local shop – profuse condolences came from the small shop owner who said he had sat beside her at school, said she was a lovely, reserved lady who will be sorely missed – and a small army of bin bags, I came across a letter lying under the photographs.

I still have it because it is his uneven scrawl. How she must have felt when it came to her, after all these years, his presence in her hand again. And she kept it quiet, kept it from me. Then again, what had it to do with me? After he walked out on us, she virtually destroyed his image in front of me, let it be known in her own commanding, powerful way that he would never touch me again in any form or presence, as if, by placing herself between us, she could maintain her own presence of mind.

The letter is better than any photograph. No matter how many times I take it out and read it, devour it, search minutely between the lines and glide over the curving letters, I find more and more to ponder on.

The strange thing is there was no explanation or regret, as though he had done the only possible thing he could do. Just, he had worked all over England, on the roads and building sites, sleeping in doss-houses and short-rented bedsits. Then he had gone to Manchester, took up with an English woman called Mary who suffered greatly before she died – no children, he added. And the polite, almost laughable ending, ‘Well, I’m glad I have written to you and filled you in on the last years. Stay well and look after yourself.’ Yours, etc. No mention of me, no query about Morrison or Morrison’s sister.

I laugh to myself at the absurdity of it all, and even the blandness, the pettiness of our lives. Of course, I can make all the connections between my parents, Morrison and his dead sister, they’re not what really matters to me now – I have my own life to live and I find more reason in all the things that don’t make sense. All that time, and he was sitting in Manchester. When I look again at the first photograph, I see that the sky is really blue, seems to go on forever above the factory, the security hut and lorries, his never-changing smile.

*

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