Goodnight, John-boy: Chapter 44
‘We believe what we have to believe to get us through the night.’ ‘I know that one,’ he agreed. ‘On odd days, I believe you exist, for instance.’
Welcome to Book Two of my dark comedy thriller series, Read Em And Weep.
A new chapter of Goodnight, John-Boy drops every week – sign up for free so you don’t miss it!
If you’re new to the Read Em And Weep series, start with Book One: Serial Killer.
BACK IN THE TURRET, his mother was waiting for him, languidly smoking a Park Lane, dressed in yet another glamorous suit, with the silver fox gilet he’d bought her.
‘Satisfied?’ he said. ‘Is he going to be joining you? Wherever you are?’
‘Hasn’t turned up yet,’ she smiled. ‘But then I’m not really expecting him. I think we both know where he’s going.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘That place near Wimbledon you visited?’
Dave looked across at her and shook his head sorrowfully.
‘Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Verse.’
‘We believe what we have to believe to get us through the night.’
‘I know that one,’ he agreed. ‘On odd days, I believe you exist, for instance.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But on even days, I believe you’re a figment of my imagination.’ He stared at her. ‘So, is my other dad there?’
‘Peter? Where Cooper is?’
‘Where you are.’ She didn’t reply.
‘Do you see him? Is he all right? Could you give him my love?’
She went to the window and looked out at the rain beating down on Farringdon Street.
‘And Ernie Gambo? He’s not there, is he?’
‘No,’ she smiled, ‘I haven’t seen Ernie.’
‘Good. I hope he’s okay, wherever he is. I miss him, too. You see? Not all your lovers were bad guys. Ernie, dad, even Mr Peat wasn’t all bad. Although I still hate him for giving me low chemistry marks. I had so much potential in chemistry. I could have gone far if it wasn’t for him.’
‘Yes, you could have been a pharmacist in Boots now,’ she said. ‘Instead of telling kids what poisons to use.’
He started packing his belongings, including his Viking beard and the moth-eaten fur boa. ‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘I’d really like to know about dad. Is he all right?’
She slowly blew cigarette smoke into his face. ‘You want to know about Peter?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes!’
‘He was the worst of them all.’ And she laughed a ghostly laugh.
He looked pained, but not distressed: after all it couldn’t possibly be true. ‘Don’t say that.’
She looked up at him. ‘I don’t even know where or how to start explaining to you. I’d better warn you. It is not good.’
‘Give me the Ladybird book version,’ said Dave. ‘After all, you were the perfect Ladybird mother.’
‘He was a pig,’ Jean reflected bitterly. ‘He deserved everything that happened to him.’
That was too painful for Dave. ‘Okay. Enough. I’m switching you off.’
But she was still there. She got to her feet and glowered in his face. ‘You know why he agreed to having his brains fried? Because he wanted to forget me. He was trying to get me out of his head, but he never could. Not even with his mad-scientist-in-the-bath bockbier.’ She smiled. ‘Oh, I made sure of that. Reminding him about Africa. What he did to me in Africa.’
‘What did he do that was so bad?’
‘Humiliated me in front of everyone with his Paddy jokes. Spud jokes. Bog jokes. Famine jokes.’
‘It was probably just affectionate teasing,’ Dave placated.
‘I lost my accent because he made me ashamed of it.’
‘That doesn’t sound like Dad.’
‘Not the one you prefer to remember.’
‘There’s another one?’
‘How does this sound? He’d quote Charles Kingsley on the Famine. “I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country…to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not see it so much.” When Peter got drunk, he’d call me his “white chimpanzee”.’
Dave was stunned.
‘Would you like to hear more about Africa?’
‘No.’
‘He was as proud as a whitewashed pig mixing with the nobs in Government House. Celia Miles. The Honourable Celia, daughter of a Viscount with her Woman’s Hour voice, skin like lumpy porridge, hands like cold clams and Mr Punch jaw and horsey face, but, because she’d gone to Cambridge, he just couldn’t keep his hands off her.’
‘I really don’t want to know about dad’s infidelities.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because yours are enough.’
He marched into the main attic to get away from her, but she pursued him.
‘And Charlotte the Harlot. They could have been identical twins. Four eyes, plus fours, square jaws and jolly hockey sticks. I thought the Oxford bag was a dyke, so she wasn’t a threat. How wrong could I be?’
‘This is really more information than I need to know, mum.’
Dave realised how he must have blocked all this out as a kid: conversations he overheard or things she had actually told him. Her boundaries then and now were poor. Conversations he had access to after his mental merger with her. He picked up an old magazine from a pile to distract himself. It was a yellowing copy of Stately Piles.
‘They’re probably in there; Charlotte and Celia,’ Jean noted. ‘It was perfectly all right for him to have affairs, but, because I took a black lover, we were sent home in disgrace.’
She smiled grimly at the memory. ‘So then I had a five-year headache.’
‘But he still had his good points,’ Dave said lamely. ‘After you’d gone, he looked after me and Annie. He sent me to a good school.’
‘Until he ran out of money, because he drank it all. So you had to leave school and become an errand boy, riding round on a trade-bike.’
‘It didn’t matter. I understood,’ said Dave, trying to keep the peace. ‘It was okay.’
She sat down in a broken Captain’s chair; her phantom weight failing to upturn it. ‘Well, I’m not so forgiving. I wanted my son to have a proper education, so he could get a decent job: a solicitor; a doctor; an accountant. A job I could be proud of. Not end up working on …’ she waved her hand dismissively. ‘… The Spanker.’
He sat on the corner of an old 1940’s office desk and confronted her. ‘You’re just the weird workings of my subconscious, mum. When I hear your music in my head, it’s actually my intuition alerting me to danger. That’s all. Nothing else. Freud probably has a name for you.’
‘And how long have people paid attention to Freud?’ she sneered. ‘Less than a century. But from the beginning of time, people have called entities like me a phantom; a muse; a spirit; a guardian angel; a–’
‘Demon?’
‘So thousands of intelligent people, over millennia, were actually stupid, until Freud and co. came along and explained we’re just an illusion of the subconscious, whatever that is.’
‘He’d probably say it’s a side effect of childhood trauma and having a narcissist mother.’
‘I never touched narcotics.’
‘Mum, writers have been having imaginary conversations with themselves since the ancient Greeks.’
‘But we both know this is different, don’t we?’
He went to the window. ‘Storm’s stopped.’
He turned round and confronted her. A curious mixture of nightclub hostess, glamour girl from Photothrill, Ruth Ellis, Diana Dors, and Mother.
‘I believe in you, mum. But I don’t want to believe in you anymore. When I leave this building, I need to make a new start. I can actually achieve something with Space Warp.’
‘And I’d be in your way?’
‘You know you would. I’ll never stop thinking of you, but I have to do this.’ She said nothing.
‘I’m sorry. This is goodbye, mum.’ This time, she faded away.
Goodnight, John-boy is the second book in the Read Em And Weep series and you can buy it digitally or as a paperback.
Thanks for reading! Help me reach more readers by sharing this post.