Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [112]
Cries of “Whooo!” and “Yeah!”
A blond boy wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and a top hat turned to the gathering and said, “He’s got to be tripping, man.”
A girl who was clearly not wearing a brassiere beneath her lace dress reached up to offer Hoseason a drag on her spliff. Someone else tried to tempt him with cider.
I pulled Julie away.
Apart from the reappearance of the Apocalypse Man, it was a great weekend.
Julie and I married two months later at Camberwell Registry Office. Neither of us invited our parents. We were very happy for the first six years and not very happy for the next two and a half. She left me in May 1979, the day after Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister. It was a pretty rough week all around. I don’t blame her. (Julie, that is.) I’d always felt grateful to her for loving me, and gratitude isn’t a good basis for a marriage. Feeling grateful all the time will make you bitter eventually. She left me for a charming (and handsome) property developer called Martin. They’re still together. We exchange Christmas cards.
I’d gone freelance by then. I was hardly ever out of work. At first I did anything and everything: graphics for newspapers and magazines, cookbooks, album covers, travel guides. Then I started to concentrate on book illustration and eventually started writing, too. Nonfiction. I don’t have much time for novels. Two of my books were taken up by an American publisher, and in 1990 I flew to New York to do promotional stuff. I fell in love with the city. By the simple trick of overwhelming me, it relieved me of my emotional luggage, like one of those superb hotel doormen pushing a cheap and careworn suitcase toward the gutter with his toe. In 1992 I sold my London flat and my studio, and I’ve lived in Upper Manhattan ever since. I have no regrets. I am content.
I don’t know whether to call it courage or stubbornness or what, but Win went back to work at the laundry three days after the world had failed to end. I imagine she endured a great deal of mockery as well as pain in her gnarled old feet, although the white hat would have covered the shame of her cropped head. She served out her six months to retirement. When she left, she was given an elaborately written certificate confirming her forty years’ devotion to soiled clothes and sheets, a fancy teapot, and a pension of two pounds and twelve shillings a week. She devoted her remaining years to making my parents’ life a misery, by means of prayer and eccentricity and a calculated indifference to personal hygiene. She died, at home, in her sleep, in 1978.
A week after Frankie and I were blown up and apart on Hazeborough beach, my father came face-to-face (or maybe side to side) with Gerard Mortimer in the toilets between the men’s and women’s wards of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital. Now, you’d think, wouldn’t you, that here were two men united in grief who might console each other. Might even defy male convention and embrace each other. Oh, no. They had a bitter, foulmouthed, and furious row that attracted the attention of the nursing staff. They were ushered out of the building onto the forecourt (I’d like to think they both still had their flies undone), where they continued their altercation until the police were summoned.
George got his notice, and his outstanding wages, through the post two days later.
When it was decided that I was unlikely to die, he went looking for work. Eventually he was employed by a small factory in Norwich that produced metal-alloy models of tanks and aircraft and soldiers. He bought a secondhand Ford Popular to travel back and forth in. It was an absolute pig to start in the winter. Ruth had to go out in her dressing gown and Wellies and shove the damn thing, with George pumping at its pedals, until it fired and farted off up the road, leaving her shapeless and breathless inside a small cloud of exhaust.
In 1983, two months before he was due