THE BOOK

There was a tatty paperback that I saw once and couldn't read about a couple of pages of because of its very nastiness....

“I lost my job,” grumbled Oliver.

It was a second meeting with his estranged mother since her release from prison and he needed to get a few things straight in his mind, things to do with the horrible Mr Hunt who had allegedly done such terrible things to his mother when she was just knee-high to just about every insect to be found in the real world and even most from fantasy.

“Why?” asked his mother.

She wanted to get to know her son. She had millions of mental images of the sweet little boy that he’d been, she could even remember with awkward affection the overwhelming sensations of his conception when she’d been so much in love with the man she’d subsequently killed. But over all her dealings with the world there was a shadow of her own making, one that should never have been there, should never have been given birth...

“I wanted evidence,” mumbled Oliver. “I wanted to know the truth. I wanted him to pay for his crimes and what he did to you.”

“What crimes?” asked Lydia.

“What you told me about. The way he did things to you when you were still at school. He needs to pay, and pay hard. He would if he was famous. He’d be persecuted for ever by those he’d touched and molested!”

“It wasn’t exactly like that...” began Lydia. “I need to tell the absolute truth,” she added, “I’ve had enough of hiding behind shadows of my own making.”

“What shadows?” Suddenly a doubt forged by that one word was clouding the almost straight-forward series of events that Oliver wanted to establish as real history, the sort that can be tackled and obliterated by a warring soldier. After all, she’d told him, not so long ago. But what had she told him?

She had rowed with his father because of the secrecy that had surrounded an affair she’d had with Mr Hunt when she’d been fourteen, the events she’d boasted about one night ia pub where everyone was bragging. The rows at home had got worse and worse. Oliver could remember outbursts of shouting separated by periods of uneasy calm. Such things had accompanied his earlier years in the same way that summer is accompanied by ice-cream.

He loved summer and he loved ice-cream. He hated angry shouting and, now, he hated Mr Hunt.

“You must understand, Oliver, that when I was a teenager I was what you’d call a difficult child...” she said slowly.

“I’m a teenager and I suppose I know what it’s like,” said Oliver quietly, not liking from the outset the way he suspected this was going.

“You’re a boy. It’s always been different for girls,” whispered his mother. “We’ve always been the oppressed sex. The ones who carry the can for men and their weaknesses… I was aware of that back then, very, very aware … it was the start of women burning their bras, standing up for themselves and to hell with men.”

“I don’t understand...” muttered Oliver, because he didn’t. What was this mother of his on about? What did she mean? Oppressed? He’d never oppressed anyone, least of all a woman, and by golly he never would…

“Take you lads,” said his mother slowly, “it was always manly encouragement to their sons, go forth into the world and sow your wild oats, get some experience of the weaker sex, then when you know all about it come back and find a nice innocent little wife of your own...”

“What’s this got to do with anything?” asked Oliver, “You mean Mr Hunt was sowing his wild oats and you were the field he chose to sow them in?”

Lydia felt miserable.

This lad, this just-about man, was her son and she knew that she had to confess to him. She’d killed the man she’d loved because she’d boasted about the way she’d lost her virginity, boasted over drinks that had taken her always active imagination and turned it on its head, and by so doing her lies had lost her his love. Now the truth must out. She’d lost twelve years of her life and the love she’d felt for the boy’s father to the hideous ogre of lies. Of bragging.

Men could brag, couldn’t they? Why shouldn’t women?

“I’ve ruined a lot for you, Olly,” she said. Had she called him that before the red mist had fallen onto her? Or had he been Oliver?

“Go on,” he insisted, and added “mum...”

“When I was growing up Mr Hunt was your father/s best friend,” she said in a sudden burst of defiance against her own nerves. It had to be said. There was no other way to salvation. If the boy understood then it might eventually make everything right. It had to. It was a last chance.

“And?” he probed.

“The Hunts came round our house and we went round theirs. It was all very civilised. They’d have wine, not much, not much at all, and I’d go to bed early because it was all so boring. You see, Olly, I was easily bored. But there wasn’t much in my room that would entertain a teenage girl. There were books, but that was just about all. And some of the books I had were most inappropriate for a teenage girl. I’d collected them one at the time, borrowed them from here and there, and never returned them, and I hid them in a box under my bed so that nobody knew that I had them.”

“Were they filthy?” asked Oliver, wanting to feel shocked, but probably too numbed by the very idea that the woman who had given birth to him could ever read anything remotely like that. True, she had murdered his father, but filth? That was different, surely?

She nodded. “Worse than filthy,” she said, “much worse...

“There was one particularly,” she almost whispered, “I read it more than once. It was set in Spain, during the revolution there, and people were doing the most perverse things to each other, really nasty, really cruel, and all spelled out in the sort of text that should never have been written. And … Oliver, please don’t judge me, I wasn’t much more than a child … but I read and reread that book, especially the worst bits. And one night when there was a sort of quiet grown-up party down stairs with the odd little noises that happy people make coming up to my room, I fantasised… I imagined I was the girl being ravished, that it was me having my clothes ripped off and my virginity impaled by the cruelty that was….

“Mr Hunt, our neighbour … our truly decent neighbour...”

“You mean…?”

“It never really happened,” she groaned, ringing her hands. “It was there in the book, written in graphic detail with me… I’m not going to say … with me playing a part in my head. And I built up the story in my mind whenever I was so bored I needed something to take my mind off boredom. It became almost part of me, but it wasn’t me, not really. This was before videos, you understand, when the only filth was in books, and boy, some were truly, horribly filthy….”

“And Mr Hunt did nothing wrong?”

“He’s a good man,” whispered Lydia, “I don’t think he’d know how to...”

“And a tatty old book … twisted you, indirectly took my father’s life, stole twelve years of your life … and lost me my job?”

“I’ll see My Hunt and tell him if you like,” she said. “Oliver, I’m sorry.”

“No need!” he said sharply, “I’ll see him! I’ll try and make amends, though I won’t grovel to get my job back!”

“I lived that book,” groaned the woman, “I lived it… really lived it. It should never have fallen into my hands, but it did...

“Please forgive me...”

© Peter Rogerson 15.01.17