Glass Read online

  We didn’t say much in the car on the way home. I only interrupted the silence for really important questions, like, ‘Is glass where our name comes from?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It sounds the same.’

  ‘The word is German. The name is Welsh.’

  ‘Mum’s German.’

  He didn’t reply to that, so I assumed my line of reasoning was correct. How wrong we can be when all we have is logic.

  But I wasn’t stupid. I didn’t care if Dad thought I was. People could think of me whatever they wanted. I knew what was interesting, and that was what mattered. My classmates all had boring ambitions. If they didn’t want to be in the emergency services, they were going to follow their parents into the army or onto a farm, or they wanted to stay in school as a teacher. At a push, they could conceive of breaking news to people as a lawyer or a doctor. Not one person ever claimed they wanted to be a magician, a spy or a ship’s captain. There were a million jobs out there, and half of my classmates wouldn’t even end up in one of the jobs they said they wanted – they’d end up wearing a tie and farming invisible fruit. Not me. I didn’t know what it was yet, but I was going to find something different.

  3

  A Death in the Family

  The week that my mother died was eventful for many reasons. Dad had his last day at work, and after decades on the road, I think he was secretly looking forward to staying in one place for a bit. It was my twenty-second birthday. Max had just got a job, which was a massive step for him. Though no one ever officially discriminated against him, he would always receive a carefully worded letter describing a ‘more able candidate’ or someone whose CV ‘better reflected the qualifications they were looking for’. That was the thing about discrimination that was never mentioned: it was the passive option, the coward’s way out. You don’t have any legs? Well, we do have stairs … Although in the interests of fairness, looking at your CV, I think we can find a more able candidate. One company even had the gall to tell him that the position had already been filled, while they continued to advertise the vacancy.

  So the circle of life continued: Max was gainfully employed and my dad was given a crystal whisky tumbler and a bottle of Laphroaig for his long service to the company. It has always amazed me, looking back, how easily trivial events make an impact on people’s lives. If I’d told him, at the start of that week, that he’d soon discard the tumbler in favour of drinking straight from the bottle, he probably would have replied that he didn’t often drink whisky, and point to the novelty gift on the wall, which had appeared one Christmas under the tree, with no named sender or addressee. It was mocked up to look like a fire alarm. It said IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS. Behind the little clear plastic barrier, there was a minibar-sized bottle of whisky. ‘That’s been there for, what, nine years,’ he’d have said.

  My parents were fussing around the kitchen, having just returned from an anniversary break to Rotterdam. Mum was getting some lunch together and Dad was fiddling with the new DAB radio that he’d bought.

  ‘Can you pass the red pepper, Günter?’ asked Mum.

  ‘Yes of course.’

  What is this button? signed Dad.

  That’s to save the channel as a favourite, signed Max.

  ‘Try one of these,’ my mum said.

  And this one? signed Dad.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  That’s to switch back to FM, signed Max.

  ‘It’s a Dutch waffle,’ said my mum. ‘Try it.’ I bit into it. ‘It’s mostly syrup. Don’t eat them all, we’ve got lunch ready in half an hour.’

  ‘Ishhamazhin,’ I said through a mouthful. ‘Whatshitcall?’

  ‘Stroopwafel.5 I tell you what though, those Dutch, they never eat any veg. I didn’t see a carrot the whole time we were there. They won’t touch a vegetable unless it’s pickled.’

  ‘Sounds like German food,’ I said.

  She rubbed my back affectionately. Mum was always a touchy-feely person, which I miss. Dad’s more of a get-drunk-and-punch-a-wall person now.

  We all sat down for lunch and passed each other dishes, and we all ate healthily, and the food was delicious in a way that I took for granted at the time. It never occurred to me that cooking might go wrong, because Mum made it look easy.

  ‘Shall we all go out for a celebratory dinner tonight?’ asked Mum, as she cut up a spinach and ricotta filo pastry. She put down the spatula. Celebrate? Max has a job now, Günter is turning twenty-two and your father’s finally going to have a rest.

  ‘I told you I don’t mind working,’ said Dad irritably. ‘I’ve been working all my life, another year won’t kill me.’

  ‘It’s not your choice to make, dear. You’re getting older, you have to retire. Simple as that.’

  Me and Günter will help, signed Max. Well I will, and Günter can when he finds a job. Ha! He never lifted a finger round the house. Mum did everything for him, washed his clothes, practically bathed him. He lived off her guilt. I had always tried to tell her that Max’s deafness wasn’t her fault. She was convinced that it was something she’d eaten during her pregnancy, but I told her it wasn’t that simple. I’d even printed out a page from Wikipedia to show her the week before but she had refused to read it.

  ‘What’s the point in reading it if some idiot can come along and write any old rubbish?’ she’d asked.

  ‘It’s not like that, Mum. The people who write this thing, they’re participating in something higher, they’re idealists. There’s an article on basically anything that’s ever existed.’

  She didn’t say anything, but I could tell she was impressed.

  Later that night, after we had decided to go out for a meal at the Seafood and Steakhouse, she picked up the conversation again.

  ‘So this encyclopaedia.’

  ‘Wikipedia.’

  ‘Yes. Can you learn about any topic on there?’

  ‘You can learn about pretty well anything, I suppose.’

  ‘You should brush up, then. One day, someone’s going to ask you about Napoleon or, or, trigonometry, and you’re going to feel very silly.’

  I stared at the menu guiltily. The three men in the family ordered steak, and Mum went for seabass. We all shared a bottle of wine, since it was a special occasion, and we held our glasses silently to the centre of the table. A waiter arrived, carrying four plates using only two arms.

  ‘Who ordered the steak tartare?’

  Did he say T-A-R-T-A-R-E? signed Max to Mum.

  Yes, I signed. ‘It’s my brother’s.’

  The waiter looked at Max nervously.

  ‘I wish I could learn sign language,’ he said as he put the plate down.

  ‘Is there a court injunction preventing you?’ asked my mum with an encouraging smile.

  ‘And who ordered the seabass?’ he cut in.

  ‘That would be me,’ she replied.

  ‘There you are. And two steak frites.’

  He gave a perfunctory smile and made a hasty getaway.

  We ate, and Max talked about all the things he wanted to buy with his new salary.

  Because I’m retiring, signed Dad gracelessly, I might try painting.

  Max and I both stifled a laugh, Max making his small glottal noises, and Mum coughed on a mouthful of seabass.

  But you’ve never liked art. You always used to say that art was for people who didn’t have jobs, I signed.

  But I don’t have a job, signed Dad. It might be good. I need to stay busy or I get glum.

  Mum was still coughing on her food, and threw back a mouthful of water.

  ‘You okay my love?’ asked Dad. ‘Pat on the back?’

  Mum shook her head. Her eyes were filling up.

  Bread, she signed.

  The waiter was studiously ignoring our table so I got up and asked for some bread, as Dad tried to pat her on the back. She put her hand into her mouth, which was the moment that I realised something must really be wrong. My mother always had impeccable m
anners. She winced. Then she tried to drink more water, but couldn’t. Around us, everyone chatted amicably, murmuring and knocking sonorous cutlery together. Mum had closed her lips but her mouth looked unnatural, like she was harbouring a golf ball. She rooted around in her handbag, pushed her plate away and emptied the handbag’s contents onto the tabletop, finding a compact mirror. She opened her mouth again to inspect, but by now she was quite red in the face. I stood up and cleared my throat.

  ‘Is there a doctor in the building?’ I said loudly, not knowing quite where to look.

  ‘Günter …’ began my dad, who hated to make a fuss.

  ‘She’s choking!’ I hissed.

  One woman in the corner had wiped her mouth with a napkin and excused herself from the woman that she was dining with. She had a dark bob and almond eyes. Everybody was looking at us, though they pretended to continue their discussions.

  The doctor led Mum off to the bathroom, picking up tweezers from the spilled contents of the handbag on the table. We shifted in our chairs. Max prodded at his yolk, which burst and dribbled down the side of the mince, pooling at the bottom and mingling with the blood.

  ‘I should go and check on her,’ I said.

  ‘She’s in the ladies’,’ Dad replied.

  Max grinned at me. Don’t let it stop you.

  This isn’t funny, I signed back.

  It’s only a fish bone, he replied.

  All I could think was whether Mum’s last word would be Bread.

  She came back out, eventually, and insisted that the doctor join us for a glass of wine. The doctor, in turn, insisted that she couldn’t leave her friend alone, so her friend joined us, and we spent an awkward twenty minutes trying to make conversation, with Max looking at the time on his phone and asking me to translate the odd comment that he couldn’t catch.

  The next morning, I brought her a cup of tea but she didn’t drink it. She made throaty noises with each inhalation and I didn’t know what to do, other than to phone for an ambulance. As we sat waiting in the lounge, a small bird flew into the patio doors, its beak hitting the window like a hailstone. It dropped to the floor and remained there. Our elderly cat appeared and began to inspect it for vital signs with its paw.

  The paramedics wanted to take her to hospital, so I sat in the ambulance with her. She gave me a wan smile.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she whispered.

  ‘Of course you will,’ I said.

  We hit a little bump.

  ‘I didn’t bring any make-up,’ she whispered, as if it was the only thing on her mind.

  ‘It’s okay. We’ll be out in no time.’ I squeezed her hand. It felt horrible, lying to each other like this. I wanted to say something true.

  They didn’t think that she was in immediate danger, so she sat up in a bed amongst many others and waited for the doctor to come round to her. I asked if there was anything she wanted. I hated hospitals. I was hoping she wanted something outside.

  ‘You know what I would love?’ she rasped, smiling like a dame at a ball, ‘A glass of water.’

  There were only useless little cones at the water cooler down the corridor, so I went into several wards and asked around until a kindly nurse offered to get me one from the staff kitchen. She brought it to me full past the brim, so at first it looked empty. The water level was above the top of the glass, held together only by a strange physics. I took a sip and carried it back to my mother’s ward slowly and carefully. As I reached Mum’s place, I found her looking a little off colour, her skin shining like a waxwork. The index finger on her right hand was extended, as if pointing outside – at the sun, perhaps, or the window. I put the water down and opened the window to let the air in.

  She beckoned me with her hand, and I came over to sit on the side of the bed. Her eyes were red and full. She said nothing, but she looked so sad, as if she’d witnessed a tragedy she didn’t want to share. I looked for a way to comfort her. She shook her head very softly. That was her answer: no, Günter. I am not. I won’t. It won’t. Now I didn’t want the truth. I wanted her to tell me a sweet lie. I wanted the truth to be different. She held up her thumb, forefinger and little finger. The little finger: I. The thumb and forefinger: L. The thumb and little finger: Y. She leant back against the pillow and put two hands over her chest. Love. Suffocation. I put my hand up to her mouth and nose. She had stopped breathing.

  I pushed the emergency help button.

  No one came in five seconds. Her hand was burning hot. I said, ‘Excuse me,’ to the corridor. No one came in ten. She looked like she was stuck halfway up a mountain. Someone ran in after fifteen seconds. She looked strangely at peace. A crowd had formed by thirty. They wheeled her away to a new room where I wasn’t allowed. This wasn’t something we could share. This wasn’t somewhere I could follow.

  And here, at the heart of the crisis, I was alone. Everyone else was busy. I was not. I was the only person here who knew my mother, but these things don’t matter in the end.

  My dad arrived soon after, having followed the ambulance, and Max followed straight from work. I sipped at the water and looked out the open window.

  When I think of Mum in hospital, I picture the sparrow flying into our patio doors. It is that moment that my mind has replayed many hundreds of times, and the cat nudging it as it lay there, the little bird already unconscious, incapable of safeguarding its dignity. I suppose, if my father has always assured me that life isn’t romantic, my mother inadvertently taught me that death is no better. It stops you in your tracks like an invisible wall. From a very acute angle, you can see it coming, but most people find it catches them full pelt.

  4

  The Plain Dealer

  Avon College for Boys is one of those schools that no one wants to talk about after they’ve left. I suppose I’ll have to. But no one really enjoys their schooldays, do they? If you were supposed to enjoy it, they wouldn’t make the uniforms grey. It was a big school, which made it easy to blend in, or would have, if I hadn’t had my early growth spurt. I’m 5’10” now, but I was already 5’8” by the time I was twelve, and the sixth-tallest in the year when we lined up for gym class. I’m sure I would have been the tallest except that I was born in August, so I was young for my year. They say that during puberty you grow up, then out; it was widely believed that I had already completed both stages of development, though as it would later prove I had yet to finish growing out.

  You might think this ensured I was left well alone, but bullies do not, in my experience, pick on the smallest prey. They might reinforce the hierarchy every now and then, but there is no honour in felling a sapling. On the contrary, bullies most like to fight with someone impressive looking but ineffectual. One also has to bear in mind Tall Man Syndrome: having lower blood pressure, and not needing to vocally assert themselves, tall people are more laid back.6

  The fact of my height, coupled with my refusal to behave antisocially, combined to make me a conspicuous target amongst my peers. Although I had pointed out many times that my name was Günter, pronounced with the same phonetics as Oompa-Loompa, many insisted on calling me Gunter, to rhyme with Munter. I was sometimes alternatively addressed as Gunther, or Munter Arse, and over time my year group settled on the contraction Munt. Later, some of the worst boys substituted the first letter again, but I’d rather not dwell on that.

  Karl Baggett was one particularly obnoxious classmate. He spent all his time with the football players and the rough kids but, lacking any particular skill which would have made him ‘cool’, chose to specialise in sadism.7 He was in all my classes except English, Music and Science, and he would always sit directly behind me. I could go into some detail about the reasons I know he was disturbed, but to pick an example at random: he once stapled the webbing between his thumb and index finger during a maths exam, with the only apparent intention of putting off Tom, who was sat next to him, and who was scared of blood. In every lesson, he would prod me in the back, put things down the back of my shirt, flick ink on m
y shirt, and make it impossible for me to take in any of what was going on. The pleasure he took in sitting behind me would always outweigh the attraction of sitting with anyone he’d have wanted to call a friend, to the extent that against both of our wills, we became known as a sort of double act (‘Where are Munt and Karl going to sit?’).

  It is impossible to overstate the ability of idiots to think they have won an argument. Almost every day, we would run through a version of,

  ‘Munt. Munt. Hey, Munt.’ A prod in my back.

  ‘Munt.’

  ‘What? I’m trying to listen.’

  ‘Teacher’s pet.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Günter, pay attention please.’ This from whoever happened to be standing, oblivious, by the whiteboard.

  ‘Do you love your dad?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘GAY.’

  ‘That’s not what gay means.’

  ‘Pretty sure it is.’

  ‘Being gay is when two men want to have sex with each other.’

  ‘Oh my god, you’re like an expert on gays. Did you do a gay degree?’

  Very occasionally – on a good day – I’d get a brief glimpse into the cankered swamp that bore him.

  ‘Do you love your mum?’ (Karl was not an innovator.)

  ‘Yes, very much.’

  ‘Motherf—’

  ‘Don’t you love yours?’

  ‘No, she’s a bitch.’

  ‘Well, what about your dad?’

  ‘He doesn’t want to live with us when he gets out.’

  And so I couldn’t even hate my own torturer, but only feel a great sadness for the world that had made him this way.

  Things got worse when Max joined Avon. Everyone except Karl was kind and inquisitive about Max’s deafness, whereas Karl was just inquisitive, particularly when it came to Max’s vocalisation. There followed some unpleasantness during which both Max’s ego and Karl’s testicles were bruised. As the older brother, I was apparently supposed to have leapt to Max’s aid, but, as I tried to explain, he didn’t need it. He told me it was a matter of principle, he felt betrayed, and there wasn’t much I could say to that. The damage had been done. It was around that time that Max stopped speaking out loud in my presence.