Читать книгу The Lost Diaries - Craig Brown, Craig Brown - Страница 33

I learn from the wireless that the American space ‘shuttle’ (horrid word) Challenger has exploded seconds after lift-off. Serves them jolly well right. When will these tenth-raters learn to place me in charge of their operations? Instead, they leave it to nincompoops and incompetents. Of course, these sissies at Mission Control are interested only in themselves. Their instinct is to engineer matters in such a way that their achievements catch up – surpass, perchance! – my own. What nonsense! Do they not realise that I am widely regarded as the foremost expert in the world on the vast majority of subjects? In a huff, they conceitedly disregard me and ‘blast off’ without so much as a by-your-leave. And look what happens! Will they never learn?

A.L. ROWSE

It’s only this that motivates me to write about my father at all: this vexed question of masculinity, of what it is to be a man. An unutterably grey nimbus of brutality surrounded my parents. They fought to the death, brandishing decency, the nuclear weapon of the suburban bourgeoisie. On the crap terrace of our suburban semi, my mother would coldheartedly ask my father how his day had been. Shielding the blow, he would reply, viciously, that it had been fine – and with a final savage swipe he would then tell her to put her legs up, before threatening her with a ‘nice’ cup of tea. The two of them were a schizophrenic hermaphrodite, their marriage a screaming Procrustes, always stretched to breaking point – and beyond. I once overheard my mother say, ‘How about a nice biscuit then, dear?’ It was a dubiously interrogatory phrase designed to force upon the prostrate victim an all-out assault, or attack, that could be met only with the tiny porous shit-brown shield of the absent HobNob. When my father replied, ‘Mmm…lovely,’ I knew then that he had allowed his manhood to wither into a nothingness as weary, diminished and yet somehow sublimely totemic as a small mollusc stamped upon by an elephant before being subdivided with a pair of compasses by an aberrant alge-braitician who is nursing a rare neurotic compulsive disorder that forces him to make things very small, or minuscule.

WILL SELF