Gotta Get Theroux This Read online

  Dad in The Great Railway Bazaar era.

  We moved to Wandsworth, which was, back then, a little rough but more central and leafier than Catford, with trees and commons and Victorian housing stock built for people with servants who lived below stairs. Our house on Elsynge Road felt mysterious and grand, organized over four storeys, with weird nooks and draughty sash windows and creaky stairs and folding shutters. It had been chopped up into bedsits and still showed signs of multiple occupancy, but my parents began fixing it up. They got it carpeted, and the chimney was refurbished, they painted an upstairs bedroom avocado and wood-panelled the entire ground floor. And it was here, seated on the bottom of a flight of slatted wooden steps, aged five or six, that I had the strange realization, thinking about my parents’ lives before I’d been born, that I had not always been here, alive, on earth, and by extension that I would, one day, not be here again. For a moment I was filled with a weird giddy feeling of cosmic insignificance mixed in with a tang of fear, and then I heard a voice saying ‘DPYN’ – an acronym that stood for ‘Don’t Pick Your Nose’ that my parents used with me, and the moment was gone.

  I attended Allfarthing Primary School, which was full of kids in Bay City Rollers t-shirts playing rounders, beanbags that smelled of chocolate, and road-safety films that they showed on a portable screen in the assembly hall. The school was famous for its choir that, by tradition, appeared on Blue Peter every Christmas. Though it went unrecorded in annals and history books, 1978 was a year of great moment in our house, when John Noakes rested his hymn book on my brother’s head on national television. I dug up the tape from the BBC archives as a gift for his thirtieth birthday. You can freeze it and see my brother’s face looking angelic. The year I was due to go on, there was an industrial dispute and all the Christmas programming was cancelled on the BBC. We still got Blue Peter badges, but it seemed all too typical – me missing my shot at the big time. Another piece of evidence that I was at best a warm-up act to the main performance.

  As a consolation for missing out, the school arranged for the choir to make a recording at a professional studio. We were singing ‘Zulu Warrior’. ‘Here he comes, the Zulu warrior / Here he comes, the Zulu chief!’ I didn’t sing that bit. I just had to chant, ‘Chief – chief – chief – chief’. What stays with me, though, is the recollection of being asked, after one of the takes, if I wanted to see the control room. I went in, marvelling at the banks of buttons and knobs. I peered through the internal window and was surprised to see the choir singing again, doing another take without me. Only years later did I realize – in an innocuous version of recovered memory syndrome – it must have been a ruse to get me out of the studio, though to this day the question of what was wrong with my chiefs – whether they were too loud or possibly offbeat – remains a mystery.

  It was also around this time that I composed what may turn out to be my most enduring contribution to posterity and the arts. Ill and off school, I had an idea for a poem called ‘The Beggarman’. It was about a man . . . who begs. He comes to town and plays on an old Mandalay and people put money on his tray. That was one of the rhymes. Then one day the beggarman leaves town and no one knows where he’s gone. It was the saddest and most mysterious poem ever written, so far as I was aware. At the bottom I drew a picture of the beggarman holding his Mandalay and showed it to my brother. He told me a ‘Mandalay’ isn’t an instrument, it’s a city in Burma. So I changed it to mandolin and ‘tray’ to ‘tin’.

  I don’t know what became of the manuscript of ‘The Beggarman’. It is a text only known from references to it, like the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics. But it represents an ideal for the kind of sad beauty and wistfulness I’d hope to achieve in all my work.

  My dad came from an immigrant family of slender means, half Italian, half French Canadian. He’d grown up in Medford, a shabby suburb of Boston, with seven siblings all shouting and crying and hugging. My mum came from a south London family of worrywarts, steady and conscientious, but occasionally brittle and overly concerned about appearances.

  My parents were very different, ill matched in some ways, him more emotionally expressive and freewheeling, her more steady and contained. But I suppose that was also the yin-and-yang of what kept them together, until they separated. Both were first-generation university-educated and placed a high value on literature and the written word. They encouraged us to view the artistic life – and specifically fine writing – as the highest calling, and reading as an essential part of our moral and intellectual sustenance. The house was full of books. Editions of Yukio Mishima, Graham Greene, Patrick White, Albert Camus, Anthony Burgess. Without them saying it – without them needing to say it – we were encouraged to think of ourselves as perhaps slightly better than other people, whose children didn’t read Tolkien or know who Shakespeare was.

  I didn’t question the indoctrination. I was too young to. But it could be a little confusing, especially when it conflicted with signals from outside the home. Later, when we were sent to a fee-paying prep school, the children all advertised their Tory leanings. I knew my mum supported Labour. I kept it quiet. We were not patriotic, nor were we royalist, we did not support a football team, nor did we watch sports as a family.

  On religion, my mum said she was agnostic. I wasn’t sure what this meant. ‘Is that the same as being atheist?’ ‘No, it means I don’t know,’ she said. But she had a soft spot for squishy spiritual thinking and there were books about Gurdjieff, the Armenian mystic, on her study shelves. Once or twice she spent the weekend at meditation retreats.

  They had both been raised in churchgoing households but were lapsed. I once asked my mum why they never had me baptized. She said she thought it would be better if we chose our religion when we were old enough to make up our own minds – something I haven’t yet got around to doing. When my brother was about seven, my mum gave him a book on the world’s major religions. Partly this was to broaden his cultural horizons, though I also have an inkling she was hoping he might pick one out.

  ‘Mum, I’ve decided. I’m becoming a Hindu.’

  ‘Great! That’s a lovely religion!’

  She was conscious of trying to counteract the lazy assumptions that were then part of the cultural climate and which her parents had occasionally been guilty of trafficking in. ‘Do you know, Africans think we’re backward because we sit in baths and not running water,’ she would say. ‘Buddha was preaching the idea of pacifism long before Jesus was.’

  My dad seemed to find British people in general ridiculous, though he also admired a small selection of British and Irish writers of an older generation, like V. S. Pritchett and William Trevor. He had a non-specific English accent he would put on to amuse himself, loosely based on a cleaning lady we had called Mrs Tarpy. ‘Wayew, the sun’s trying to come ou’, innit?’ ‘I go’ a new compu’ah!’

  We were, in many respects, a seventies-style family. My parents were attempting, in a way that was in equal parts ridiculous and admirable, to find a new way of doing things that was less constrained than their own upbringing. I think they were both conscious of not wanting to live the narrow, untravelled lives of their parents.

  There was a copy of The Joy of Sex that used to lie around the house, showing line drawings of an old hairy man and a young woman making love, and Our Bodies, Ourselves, which encouraged readers to look at their vaginas with a mirror and a speculum . . . ‘Touch yourself, smell yourself . . . taste your own secretions.’ I was less puzzled by the vagina concept than by the speculum.

  My father published short stories in Playboy so there was also, conveniently, a stash of pornography in the house. I borrowed these and I find it hard to believe he never noticed them becoming more battered throughout the eighties. It’s possible he thought I was reading his fiction.

  I think my parents felt that whatever we were old enough and interested enough to read, we were old enough to deal with. When my brother turned eleven or twelve, my parents gave him a copy of Colin Wil
son’s Order of Assassins, an omnium gatherum of grisly murders, for his birthday. Evidently they had their limits because either he or my mum tore out one chapter. But thereafter, Marcel rejoiced in telling me about Jack the Stripper, a serial killer whose MO was to choke prostitutes to death using his penis – not something you necessarily need to know as an eight-year-old.

  Later, drugs became part of the conversation, and I overheard my mum saying to my brother, ‘When the time comes and you’re a little older and you want to get high, you can do it with us.’ So when, aged fifteen or so, I told my dad that I’d been smoking spliff with friends the night before, I slightly expected him to say, ‘Hey, cool, man! Did you dig it?’ Instead he flared his nostrils and said, ‘You know, Lou, that’s not very smart. The school will throw you out if they find out.’

  Along with the vaguely hippy-ish ethos went a certain relaxing of the rules on monogamy. My mother had a policy of being OK about sex on location when my dad was away and, to be fair, in the early days his trips could last as long as several months. Eventually his relationships with other women became more consuming, and the strain too much for the marriage to bear. But, like most parents of that era, they were figuring it out as they went along.

  Looking back, I’m conscious of being able to pick out a number of different narratives that cover some of the facts, all equally true and at the same time contradictory. There is one that celebrates the free-spiritedness and open-mindedness my parents brought to their duties, a benign neglect that allowed us to find our own fun and meant they weren’t overly worried about us having long hair or staying out late or reading weird books or watching films with sex in them. Then there is another version of the story that sees them as part-timers, preoccupied with their work, delegating their responsibilities to au pairs, intermittently present, under-interested, and unmindful of the impact their semi-detached relationship with each other was having on us.

  I go back and forth but in general I’m grateful for the space my mum and dad allowed us. They were ahead of their time in some ways, mindful of the need to promote tolerance and understanding about other cultures, trying not to carry on the unexamined racial attitudes of their parents.

  In the years that followed – thinking about their infidelities, the discord, and the way it ended, and the sense I sometimes had of being an afterthought and someone marginal – I would occasionally feel confused and resentful. But those feelings have ebbed away as I and they have grown older, and now I am mainly thankful – for the curiosity they shared about the world, for their love of knowledge, their good humour and indulgence, and more than anything that there was never any doubt how much they loved us.

  Chapter 2

  The Fulani People of Nigeria

  If ever in my life there was a lapsarian moment of loss of innocence it was in 1978, when I was eight, and my parents moved us to a fee-paying prep school called Tower House.

  I’d been excited about the change. As befitted its name, its premises were a house with a small turret in a quiet suburban street in south-west London. The children all wore uniforms and did homework. They studied French and Latin. After the relaxed all-must-have-prizes attitude of my primary, it seemed exotic.

  The excitement wore off pretty fast.

  It was as though I’d time-travelled back into some earlier, more narrow-minded era. All boys. Surnames only – the children even used them for each other. The teachers were almost all men. You had to stand up when they came into the room, and several were subject to strange rages, lashing out, demented with anger. ‘If you can’t remember it now, how are you going to remember it in three years when you take your Common Entrance?’ Corporal punishment was common: a whack on the hand with a ruler or plimsoll or a visit to the headmaster’s office for a taste of ‘The Sword’. The ex-headmaster, and school founder, a half-fossilized Edwardian leftover called Mr Martin-Hurst, garaged his Jaguar at the back of the playground. When he wanted to take it out, all the children had to stand aside as he drove past, like spectators at a Lord Mayor’s procession. It was said that only one boy had ever been expelled from Tower House, and that was for selling copies of the Socialist Workers Party newspaper in his school uniform.

  My brother had swanned through the school, beloved by all. I thought I would do the same, but it didn’t work out that way. Notwithstanding my dedication to my studies and the fact that I generally did well in tests and homework, I had absorbed from my dad a certain iconoclasm and swaggering attitude. I thought being cheeky made me lovable. The teachers of Tower House disagreed. Our English teacher, Mr Townsend, was an effeminate Irishman who lived with his mum and modelled his personality on Noel Coward. He carried a cigarette holder and wore a cravat, telling stories, almost certainly fictional, about a fiancée who died in a tragic accident. Pausing on one long anecdotal ramble, he said, ‘To cut a long story short.’ ‘It’s a bit late for that,’ I interjected, thinking he might appreciate a well-crafted zinger, but almost immediately realized I’d made a mistake as I saw him pause and look momentarily as though he’d been slapped.

  At the same time as I was making enemies of the teachers, I was also, slightly paradoxically, becoming increasingly fixated on work. Without really being conscious of it, I tried to control my anxiety through study: an obsessive dedication to making my homework neat, headings all underlined twice. A single crossing-out meant I had to start again.

  In a way, this was akin to doubling down. If work wasn’t going well, I felt even more distraught. In family lore, one legendary night, aged ten or eleven and preparing for a geography exam, I became fixated on not knowing enough about the Fulani people of Nigeria. My mum did her best to assuage my concerns but I was way beyond reach, in the emotional equivalent of deep space, weeping, raging, hyperventilating. She called my dad, who was away, travelling, maybe even in Nigeria, and through the phone he tried his best to talk me down but, not knowing much about that herding people who count their wealth in heads of cattle and seasonally traverse the Sahel, he was ill equipped to help. For years afterwards the phrase, said hoarse-voiced, ‘Fulani people of Nigeria!’ became a byword for a kind of extreme stress and emotional exhaustion.

  As the culture of Tower House rubbed off on us, my dad noticed we were turning into little twerps. ‘I was worried you were becoming too English,’ is how he put it later on. He wrote a short story, ‘Children’, based on overhearing our conversations with friends, full of mild bigotry and boasts about skiing holidays – it’s in his collection The London Embassy. ‘We went to Trinidad on a yacht my father chartered!’ says one. ‘American schools are rubbish!’ He must have had ambivalent feelings about our education. There was a side of him that liked the idea of us learning Latin and showing off to his American family – a side that, in a way similar to the Fulani people, measured his wealth in heads of privately educated children. But he was still enough the Medford-raised boy to also think we were pampered ninnies, nincompoops who would be better off pinging tin cans with an airgun and learning how to tie sailors’ knots, as he had done as a boy.

  In Tower House school uniform (the hat was my dad’s).

  Our summers on Cape Cod became a chance to toughen us up and connect us to the homeland. He’d bought a house on the north shore, East Sandwich, and for six weeks a year we’d go there while our mum stayed and worked in London. But we had few friends and, though we sometimes saw our extended family for ‘cook-outs’ and trips to the beach, it was more often the case that my brother and I were left alone while our dad wrote in his study in an annex. We’d grow demented with boredom, torment one another – one morning Marcel drove me into a frenzy by repeating the meaningless phrase ‘Bonjouro, Monsieuro Duro’ purely for the pleasure of seeing my rage; we would hack paths through brambles and sumac trees with machetes, or go camping and build fires in the woods, or if it was raining we’d peer into the electronic blizzard of a small portable TV, trying to make out images of distant stations.

  Marcel and I were objects of some curio
sity to our American relatives. With our English accents, we were aware we came across as exotic and quaint. We played up to it, conjugating verbs in Latin to impress them – video, vides, videt – speaking with exaggerated courtesy, like royals visiting a savage colony. ‘I like to read. Tolkien is my favourite. I only wear corduroy trousers.’

  At the end of the summer we’d fly back to London and our other lives, saddled with a sense of doom.

  Aged twelve, learning how to brood.

  In 1983, after four years of Tower House, I took my Common Entrance, and got a place at Westminster School. My brother had started two years earlier – I assume my parents had picked out Westminster because it had a reputation for academic excellence and also for catering to the children of the London media and arts crowd, unlike its rival St Pauls, which, supposedly, was all bankers’ and stockbrokers’ children.

  After Tower House, Westminster was a definite improvement – we’d joined the second half of the twentieth century – and the only odd thing looking back is that our parents should have sent us off to board, instead of enrolling us as day boys, when we lived only a half-hour cycle ride away. I suppose the arrangement allowed them to focus more on their work – and anyway we came home at weekends – but it’s also true that my brother and I had had a brief and embarrassing love affair, one summer on the Cape, with a series of Enid Blyton books called St Clare’s about a fictional girls boarding school, full of midnight feasts and pranks played on wacky French teachers. I can’t say for certain but I tend to think it was these books, at least partly, that made my brother want to board.