Читать книгу Pete: My Story - Pete Bennett - Страница 11

Lots of this stuff I don’t remember any more, at least I don’t think I do. I’ve just heard Mum and other people talking about those times so often that sometimes I find it hard to remember which pictures and stories are really lodged in my memory and which ones are merely preserved in old photos or family anecdotes.

The first real thing I clearly remember was watching Mum being hit by her boyfriend. I don’t remember the details of us living with him, or anything else about him, I just remember lying on my mattress in the corner and seeing her flying across the room. There was a lot of blood on her face.

She didn’t hang around with that bloke long after that – Mum wasn’t one to be a victim like the sort of battered women she sometimes met around the flats. I remember being upset by the incident, but not really frightened. I don’t think I felt in any danger myself and I think I trusted Mum to be able to sort it out. I just watched it happen, like I might watch a cartoon on the telly. People are always being hit in cartoons and they just get up and keep going, which was pretty much what Mum did. I was drawing pictures of her, all covered in blood, for months afterwards.

After that Mum said that was it for her with men. ‘Sod the lot of them.’ From then on it was just her and me and she didn’t have another boyfriend for nearly ten years. Dad got back in touch when I was six. I don’t know what made him suddenly think of us, but he said he wanted to see me again, which was cool. Mum wasn’t best pleased with him because she only ever got one tenner out of him for maintenance all through my childhood, even though she was having to work so hard to make ends meet, but she wanted me to be in contact with my dad if possible, so they made an arrangement for him to pick me up from the flat.

I had no memory of him but when he turned up I thought he looked really cool, with a really good image, very trendy. He didn’t look like most other people’s dads, which I liked. Mum was still a pretty wild punk then, still wearing the leather jackets, still changing her hair colour all the time, still looking like some Billy Idolette, but Dad had mellowed his image down a bit from the glamorous punk that Mum had first met.

Neither of us was quite sure how to handle our first father–son day out, so we went for a walk. It felt great to have a dad with me, even though he didn’t feel particularly like a dad, just a big man who had turned up from nowhere.

‘Let’s go in there,’ he suggested as we passed the gates of a graveyard.

‘OK,’ I agreed cheerfully. Why not? It looked like an interesting place and I didn’t remember ever having been in there before, although I must have been to the graveyard with Mum when I was tiny, to return her unwanted gravestone present from Johny. We spent a wicked hour or two looking at inscriptions and reading poems about missing loved ones, about walking with the angels and all the rest. I’d learnt to read by then from studying Garfield cartoon books, so I could make out most of the words on my own. Mum wasn’t much impressed when we got back and told her where we’d been.

‘Why can’t you take him bowling or to the park like a normal dad?’ she wanted to know. She can’t have been that surprised though, having spent so much of her own youth in punk pubs, or with goths in the Batcave. Had she forgotten that she and I had gone to the torture museum as a Christmas outing when I was really tiny? I have a feeling pretty much anything Dad could have done that day would have pissed her off.

We had to face it; none of us was that good at being normal, but I wasn’t bothered. I thought it was all cool. Even then I loved people who were a bit nuts. Dad made another date to come the following week and I got myself all ready and waiting by the door in my duffel coat, wondering what we would do this time. The appointed time ticked past, the tense silence eventually shattered by the phone. It was Dad calling to tell Mum he couldn’t get there because he was in bed with some other woman. I guess he was trying to punish Mum or something; there must have been a grown-up agenda going on that I knew nothing about. Not surprisingly this news really, really pissed Mum off. She said she didn’t care who he was in bed with, but he shouldn’t be letting me down. I cried a lot for a while, but got over it pretty quickly. There was too much interesting stuff going on in the world to worry about the bad for too long. I never liked stress, always preferring to move on and find something more cheerful to do or think about. Dad and I didn’t see each other again for another ten years after that.

I loved going to stay with Nan and Grandad in the West Country. They had a garden and a paddling pool and all the things that children think are so magical, all the stuff that we couldn’t have on a council estate in Peckham.

When I was about three we all went to the beach at Weymouth, with Mum’s friend Virginia Astley. Virginia was a very successful singer, who Mum had met at the Guildhall at the same time as Anna Steiger. She played the flute and they sometimes used to busk together outside Kensington tube station. Her dad had been the composer of theme tunes for Sixties television series like The Saint and Danger Man. Her elder sister had married Pete Townshend of The Who and he made a video of us at a party once, with Mum dressed as a bumblebee. Anyway, Mum and Virginia had gone off to the shops to buy something, leaving Grandad in charge of me. Seeing he was distracted rolling himself a fag, I wandered down towards the jetty, which I thought looked interesting, jutting out into the water. It was much too high for me to be able to climb up there myself, so I just held up my arms and looked pleadingly at a passing woman. She took pity and lifted me up. By the time Mum and Virginia got back I’d disappeared from sight and Grandad was a nervous wreck, certain that his negligent child-minding skills had caused the death of his grandson. They were all certain I had been abducted or drowned or something – instant paedo-alert as usual. Virginia was a bit psychic and suddenly shouted, ‘I know where he is.’

She leapt up on to the jetty and ran out to the end where a group of bigger boys were jumping down twenty feet or so into the water. I was just about to take my turn, poised to launch myself off into the unknown when she got there, barged through the crowd of boys and grabbed me as I teetered on the edge. I suspect I owe her my life for that little mercy dash. Cheers, Virginia!

On a much later visit to Nan and Grandad we all went to a Sunday market in the local town. It was really interesting for me, not like anything I’d seen in South London, lots of country crafts and homemade produce. There was a stall selling live rabbits for pets. I’d had a white rabbit before, but it had escaped and disappeared and I really wanted another one to replace it.

I convinced Mum that it would be OK to keep it on the balcony of the flat and, against her better judgement, she gave in – it was hard for her to resist such a cute fluffy little thing when it was actually sitting in her hand. We bought him, christened him Buck, and took him home to London at the end of our stay. Within a couple of weeks he had doubled his size and he just kept on growing. It was like some sort of alien life form, threatening to take over the world. The balcony became a sea of poo and pee. Our family pet was a giant, furry, crapping machine. Even though Mum did everything for this ever-expanding fur-ball, cleaning up after him, shovelling food into him, he seemed to hate her with a terrible vindictiveness. She became terrified to go near him. He would stare at her malevolently and then pick up his plate in his mouth and smash it down on the floor in front of her, as if determined to show her who was boss.

When he stood on his hind legs Buck was about three feet tall and he would attack anyone who dared to come near to him apart from me, so I would hear nothing said against him. I loved him with a passion. I was sitting on the balcony cuddling him one day when something happened to make my elbow suddenly jerk and smash the patio window. It could have been an early spasm, or it could have been Buck making a sudden movement, but either way there was now a hole in the glass. Once she’d stopped tearing her hair out, Mum made a good job of patching the hole up with cardboard, but the next day, while I was at school and she was at work, Buck forced his way through the flimsy defences and into the house.

That evening when we got home the fluffy invader had made the final move in his takeover plan and we spent hours chasing him round the flat as he dived under the bed and armchairs, snarling at Mum as she struggled to flush him out. In the end she forced him out into the open, threw a sheet over him and fell on top of him, wrestling him into submission. Over the following hours we discovered that he had chewed through virtually every wire in the flat; the stereo, the iron, everything was fusing and blowing and giving off sparks as we tried to plug things in and switch them on. Mum went completely mental.

The next day, while I was at school, she felt guilty for shouting, so she went out to the local Peckham market to get another little rabbit, figuring that maybe the evil giant was just pining for company.

The moment Harry, the new rabbit, came out of his carrying box and spotted the brute of the balcony, he leapt on to his back and started rogering away like a lunatic. Like so many bullies, Buck crumpled instantly once his bluff was called. He cowered down, looking wide-eyed and terrified and just sat there taking it. It went on and on and on. Harry just never stopped, day and night, until all the hair had been ripped off Buck’s back and he was shaking like a nervous wreck. The newcomer had also brought fleas into the house, which ganged up and bit Mum half to death. She decided this was my fault now, too.

We were due to go away on holiday and Mum asked a friend of mine, Zoe, to look after the rabbits while we were gone. When we got back Harry had disappeared and Zoe confessed that she had been standing up on the balcony just before we arrived, playing with him, when he had given a gigantic kick and propelled himself to freedom over the balustrade. She and I set off to see if we could find him in the grass near the buildings, but all I managed to come up with was his head and chest, a local cat or dog having eaten the rest. Like the road kill we encountered on the way to Walsingham, this stark illustration of how quickly death can strike reduced me to a sobbing heap. Mum was having some people round for supper that night and she made them all swear not to mention the missing rabbit, but one of them wasn’t able to keep it in – another Tourette’s victim, maybe?

‘So, Pete,’ he said, ‘what’s this about a rabbit? I hear there were some remains found?’

I rushed from the table in renewed floods of tears at the tactless reminder of my bereavement.

After that Mum decided that maybe Peckham wasn’t the best place to keep rabbits, so we took Buck back down to the West Country to a friend of Nan and Grandad’s who had a smallholding with a pen full of rabbits. I felt very sad seeing my half-bald old friend lolloping off into the crowd, but Mum looked distinctly relieved.

Mum had got well into the Church by then, having found that one of the best ways to stop her panic attacks was to repeat the Lord’s Prayer over and over again. A bit like having a tic, I suppose. She was exhausted from all the stress of her years on the road and from being a single mum, struggling to get enough money for us to live, and her religion seemed to soothe her, the Church making her feel like she belonged to a community. It suited me fine. I liked the singing and I liked watching Mum playing the violin in Frets, the clubroom behind the church hall.

Constantly on the look-out for ways to make some extra money while still being there for me, Mum got a job working for a lady called Heather, who was a high-flying Fleet Street journalist. Her job was to cook and help look after her children, AJ and Dean. She was going to be a sort of housekeeper, I suppose. It was a great gig and Heather quickly became one of our best friends, which always seemed to happen with anyone who came into Mum’s life. I used to love going round to Heather’s house. They had a dog called Bonzo and, even though the pit bull had tried to eat my face, I still loved dogs.

‘Can we get one?’ I kept nagging Mum. She kept promising that one day soon we would go to Battersea Dogs’ Home and find a suitable one, but we just never seemed to get round to actually making the trip. One afternoon AJ was having a confirmation party and we were all sitting around in their house. I think Mum and Heather might have been a bit pissed on champagne; they often seemed to have a bottle on the go when they were together. I kept hearing someone tapping at the front door, but I didn’t think it was my place to answer it – it wasn’t my house after all.

‘There’s someone at the door,’ I kept saying.

‘Then go and answer it, for God’s sake,’ Heather said, irritably, obviously having had enough of children’s voices for one day.

Shrugging, I made my way down the hall, but when I got there I could see through the glass that there was no shadow. It was like there was no one there. It seemed spooky and I didn’t like the vibe. I hovered around for a moment, trying to pluck up my courage, but failed and went back to them to confess my failure.

‘I think there’s someone there, but I can’t see anyone,’ I explained.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Heather said and flounced down the hall in exasperation. She threw the door open, with me standing behind her, peering out.

A collie/Labrador dog walked straight past both of us, into the room where the party was happening, and rested its chin on Mum’s lap, whimpering and staring up at her with pleading eyes. Her feet were all sore and bleeding from walking on pavements.

‘Said I was going to get a dog, didn’t I?’ Mum said, as if it was perfectly normal for a stray dog to come knocking on a stranger’s door.

Sometimes it seemed to me like my Mum had magical powers.

We called her Lassie and took her home with us at the end of the party, although we should have been able to see that she was really too much of a street dog to ever be happy cooped up in a first-floor flat. We couldn’t leave her in the flat when we went round to Heather’s house to work because she would crap on the carpets and chew the furniture, so the next day we took her with us. Bonzo jumped on her the moment she arrived, just like the horny little rabbit. I could see them stuck together in the garden and immediately had a feeling things had got serious. We tried turning the hose on them, but nothing worked and a few weeks later we had eight puppies in the flat. There was one honey-coloured one, four black ones and three browns and they all yapped like seagulls whenever Lassie escaped through the window and left them on their own, which seemed to happen most days, driving the neighbours into a frenzy of annoyance.

I thought the whole pet thing was really cool – the more the merrier as far as I was concerned – but Mum had just bought herself her first fitted carpets ever and Lassie was crapping all over them whenever the urge took her. As if that wasn’t enough, there was some sort of back surge in the plumbing system in the flats at the same time and everyone else’s sewage came roaring up into our toilet and overflowed over the rim, like some sort of horror scene from Trainspotting. We were back to bare boards and for a while Mum thought the Devil might be coming after her again.

Eventually it was obvious we couldn’t keep Lassie any more, although Heather gave a home to the honey-coloured puppy, which lived to a great age and finally passed away while I was in the Big Brother house. I was heartbroken to see Lassie go because I really loved her. Someone came in a car to take her away. She jumped in through the back door, all excited about this new adventure, and as the car drove off she gazed out the back window at me as if she was waving goodbye. It was horrible.

After that we just had cats.

Nan and Grandad had a black mongrel called Buster who I used to draw all the time. Grandad knew a bit about art and he was always telling everyone how brilliant my pictures were. Buster was a good friend to me and one night I had a vision about him. In the vision we were staying at Nan and Grandad’s house and Buster was beckoning me to the end of the garden because he wanted to say goodbye. He turned round, gave me one last look and then disappeared into a golden light, a bit like the light that had surrounded the Angel Michael. I knew immediately he was dead and told Mum. The next day my aunt rang to tell Mum that Buster had been put down because the vet had said his bones were starting to snap with age. We worked out that the vet must have been doing the deed at the same moment I had the vision.

Having visions like this frightened me sometimes. At the same time it was also pretty cool to be able to see little glimpses of the future, as if I had a few magical powers myself, an in-built crystal ball.