The Thrill of It All Read online

  Where am I from? Well, Yorkshire, like I said. Before that . . . you know . . . Vietnam. I was born in a place called Dầu Tiếng over there. Rural, it is, in the Sông Bé province . . . I’m probably not saying it right . . . I’ve been in touch, you know, with the authorities down there. And I found them very helpful. But it’s hard with the records . . . Beautiful country, is Vietnam, I was over there last year, very gentle people, and curious, and welcoming, but the place is still messed up. My dad might have been a soldier. American, yeah . . . Anyroad, I was abandoned. A foundling . . . I ain’t sorry for myself, you know, I’ve done all right . . . But that’s what it was . . . Not the best.

  Yeah, the war was still on. But you know, you’re a kid. So you don’t understand what’s going down is a war, it’s all you been used to, like weather. Violence? Sure. I saw bad, bad stuff. Nowt to say about that . . . Because this in’t the forum. Talking to you now, we’re on telly, it’s fine, and I’ve a respect for you personally, always have done. But I’ve limits . . . Which makes me unusual.

  All I know: some farmer took us as a baby to a convent in Tây Ninh City . . . And I’m told I was there until four years old . . . I’ve looked into it. Because yeah, I’d like to know more . . . It’s a natural thing, in’t it, you wonder where you come from . . . I’ve a researcher working for me now, she helps, she speaks the language. And there’s incredible folk out there, in the States, in Vietnam, trying to put all these stories together. Because there’s thousands of Vietnam-born children have a background like mine. Canada, the States, all over Europe. You get to thinking you’re alone. But you’re not.

  First thing I remember is the heat, you know, that heat you get in Indochina. Humid. Then the sound of French. Because the nuns looking after us, they were French. Funny, I remember two of them had the same name, Sister Anna. There was a priest often come to visit, Father Lao, Vietnamese. And soldiers about. Big Yanks talking English. A huge rubber tree – you could see it from the window. And a yard, where there was a bell, and animals and people selling stuff. I mean farm animals, roosters, and these small, black potbellied pigs. And we’d play with the pigs. Me and the other kids. And often I get to thinking, what happened them kids? Break your heart to see ’em. Break your heart.

  One day this European woman’s come and she’s give us a cup of milk. Some diplomat’s wife. You could see she didn’t want to touch us. Nothing against the woman, she was doing her best, but I won’t never forget that. Couldn’t bear to touch us. That’s the West, right there. Mix of kindness and condescension. And fear. Because pity’s the cousin of fear. And to me, the whole thing about aid . . . it wants changing. Going further. Dole ’em a cup of milk? Deluding yourself, man. The crumbs off your plate in’t enough.

  Whatever happened, I dunno, they’ve took us down to Saigon. To this massive great orphanage, like, eight mile from the city, with fifteen hundred kids. Frightening place. Like a nightmare. Poor kids who’ve been maimed, and blind, and deformed. I was there a couple of months, and the night came when they took us away, me and a dozen others. They’ve put us on a bus, give us Red Cross parcels, bottle of juice, pack of sweets. And you’re a kid, all you’re thinking is Christ, what’s this? And now we’re at the airport. Told us, get on that plane. This adoption society, a Catholic charity, they’re taking us to England. And nobody’s ever asking if you wanted to go. But you’re going. Decision’s been made.

  A plane, man. Imagine. And I’m proper scared of planes. To me, right, a plane is dropping bombs out the sky. I don’t want to be in no plane . . . Eighteen hours later, I’m on the ground in England. Cold. Foggy. I in’t never felt cold. And there’s snow. What’s that? You don’t even have the words . . . And there’s no one to ask. So you’re scared.

  This woman and her husband, they’ve took us away. Told us I’m now an English boy. ‘Stop speaking that language.’ They were cruel-hearted bastards. That’s all. Less than human. I won’t say their names. Wouldn’t sully my mouth. Animals. Thugs. I hope they rot.

  At seven I was taken by social services and put in a home. Then at nine, I got fostered by this Irish couple up Rotherham . . . Prefer not to say where exactly. Just private . . . It’s been put about by the tabloids that they treated me bad. They never. They were proper decent people. But we didn’t get on. Fell out when I was a teenager. I left at sixteen. Got nowt against them, no. They’d limitations. Who don’t? I don’t blame ’em for not being able to handle me, I was broken inside. You can’t fix that brokenness. All you do is cope. No, I wouldn’t want to see ’em again – anyway my foster-dad died a couple of years back – but I wish them an easy conscience. They did their best. You know? It’s something. And they give us my name. Francis Xavier Mulvey. And that was my Irish foster-dad’s name. God rest him. That’s a boxer’s name there, right? Francis X. Mulvey. Not as cool as Herol Graham. But I like how it sounds. He’s won twenty-eight fights, man. I never won one. But I’m hopeful, you know? For a pessimist.

  This isn’t the place to continue Fran’s childhood story. When I met him, he never spoke of his upbringing directly, although of course there were hints – if you wanted to see them – but I was as shocked by the full revelations, when many years later they came, as were most of the tabloid-reading public. In his student days Fran was good at setting up smokescreens of irony and indifference, even to those who loved him. You didn’t take it personally. In truth, you rather admired the smoke, tinged as it was with the brilliant glow of his magnetism. Yes, you noticed he’d fall silent when the subject of family was discussed, but you assumed he wasn’t listening, or perhaps had misheard, or simply had other things on his mind. In conversation he asked a lot of questions, always a sign that the asker doesn’t want to be questioned himself. But I only understood this with hindsight.

  I see him in memory, dawdling the draughty corridors of the Arts Block or asleep in one of the bare brick alcoves of that inhospitable building. The college had a cohort of rural Irish students, pursuing degrees or diplomas in Agricultural Science, and it surprised me to notice Fran at one of their discos. Not that he stayed too long. He was beautiful even then, before he’d grown into his beauty, scrawny and kissable, like some teenagers are, a ragged organza scarf around his throat on a wintry morning, a Judy Garland bonnet on his head. In all my life I never encountered a thinner individual. You’d have seen more fat on a chip.

  It is not true, as has been written, that he’d come into the college wearing ‘a dress’. The days of the frock came later. But certainly, his look was unusual even then, among the raggeries of denim and collarless cheesecloth we conventional souls went in for. On his long, slim fingers were profusions of rings, scavengings from the junk shops of the town. He turned the pages of a book as though someone was watching, which most of the time someone was. There was oldness about him. His eyes were cold lakes. He reminded you of those ruined chapels you see in the north of countries, weather-blasted, still hanging on. He had a part-time job washing dishes in the canteen. You’d glimpse him through the grille where students placed dirty plates, Fran wearing the only spangled hairnet ever made. You didn’t reckon that the professors so barely aware of his existence would one day offer seminars on his work.

  It was as though he’d been lifted out of The Threepenny Opera and dropped into Stanton Polytechnic and Agricultural College by some sardonically smirking god. In one of his articles he wrote that society’s esteem for accomplishment was ‘brutalising, murderous’, that ‘the artist has a DUTY to fail’. This was beyond the usual beslobberments of undergraduate drivel that nearly all of us parroted at that innocent time. He actually seemed to believe it.

  In those days, the man that sold him drugs had a question: ‘One-way or return? I’ve both.’ Fran, when we were students, was a stickler for day-tripping. Indeed, he had an intolerance, which seemed to me strange, of drug use when witnessed in others. He could become puritanical if some Arts girl in the Trap took a pull on a jazz-fag. Even drunkenness, which most of us indulged in,
as he did himself, could purse those frosted lips to a scowl. His mode at a party was to stand in a corner, observing from the shadows as the odour of lager and mildew sanctified whatever writhings ensued. I was astounded when he told me he never missed Sunday Mass. I suppose I shouldn’t have been.

  That conversation, our first, I am able to date, for I know it took place on the afternoon of Good Friday 1982, which fell on the 9th of April. The holy day tended to unleash a viral panic through the undergraduate body, for it was one of only two in the entire year when the Trap, being administered by an observant Catholic landlord, was closed or at least shut early. Several pubs in the town were unavailable for the same reason. Others did not welcome students. The unease would commence at the start of Easter Week, rising to full-blown hysteria as Spy Wednesday approached. There would be no drink. What would we do? CHRIST, THERE WILL BE NO DRINK. In some realm of re-enactment Our Lord’s departure from the corporeal zone was imminent, but we had more immediate devastations on our minds. By Holy Thursday night, you could have sodomised anyone in the college in return for a six-pack of Harp.

  The form was to stockpile and repair to someone’s flat, in one of the many crumbling old houses partitioned into bedsits for students or the not-quite-destitute. There, the Zeppelin wailed and the wallpaper peeled. Christ’s tears spattered the windows that the ratepayers of some rural county had arranged for bright youths to live behind. A nice girl studying Accountancy would end up weeping into the communal toilet on the landing, puking like a fruit machine, her hair held aloft by some monster out of Poe, his other paw working its way into her tights. Scholars in a wardrobe chewed at one another under damp coats. The corrugated kacks of the lessee or his cousin dried by an electric fire. Some wurzel would start fisticuffs and get kicked down the stairs, only to return, an hour later, eyes raging for forgiveness, the bottle of Blue Nun he’d stolen from the 24-hour minimart in the town his passport back into the pleasure-dome.

  Rebel-yells, drunken gropes. Lachrymose talk. Backroom fingerings, declined lunges, Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’, stale bread in the toaster at dawn. My Purgatory will be a thousand years of Good Friday, circa 1982, reeking of chips, old carpet, crushed sexual hopes and unlaundered nylon bedsheets sprinkled with Brut aftershave by a student of Agricultural Science. Sad songs say so much, as Elton once told us, but the Bedsitter Blues be bad.

  It was at the original bleak lock-in that I first exchanged words with Fran, emboldened by the pint of snakebite I’d pretended to enjoy. He was wearing a kilt and scarlet-lensed sunglasses. A kilted youth was a rare enough sight in Luton – well, maybe on St Patrick’s Day, but he wouldn’t have fishnets and a parasol, as Fran rather noticeably did. His polo-blouse was in the colours of the Italian soccer club A.S. Roma, the only sporting association he ever admitted to liking. I felt the slogan he’d embroidered – ‘Up the Romans’ – was either deliberately provocative or grossly tactless in the general context of Good Friday.

  ‘Fakkin queer,’ remarked a boy, later an adviser to New Labour, passing by. ‘In your dreams,’ Fran nipped back at him, toeing a cigarette out on the lino. With difficulty, I took a step forward.

  ‘I’m Robbie,’ I said.

  He nodded.

  I waited.

  He raised the crimson shades as though curious. I suppose it isn’t possible that he didn’t blink for ninety seconds but that was the way things seemed. Then he reached into his sporran and tugged from it a naggin of transparent liquid, opened it without averting his gaze from my own, took a docker’s deep slug, wiped the rim on his cuff and offered it unsmilingly. I sipped. Gin-flavoured paint stripper was now on the market. Who knew? I downed a belter.

  The first sentence he ever slurred to me was in the Gaelic language, ‘Labhair ach beagán agus abair gσ maith é’, a proverb known to every alumnus of the Irish Christian Brothers. ‘Speak but little and say it well.’ It was clever of him to address me in Gaelic, a twitching of his antennae. Fran was always good at codes, at sounding you out. My answer, being in Gaelic, seemed to admit me to the nightclub. His watchfulness lowered one notch.

  Well, then he switched to English, or his own version of that language. This party was ‘a droolery’, he averred. Our host was ‘a shitehawk’, the guests were ‘lottery spittle’; enduring them was ‘an emotional groin-strain’. The college we attended was ‘a nest of illiterates’, training ‘flunts’ to be ‘hirelings’ and ‘couch-jockeys’. Bombing it would increase the average IQ of the Bedfordshire hinterland by no insignificant percentage. Vivisection should be the fate of most of its professors, but they lacked the properties of a lab mouse so what would be the point? I was flummoxed by his accent, which turned out to be heavily Yorkshire tinged with Connaught, when I’d expected a bored poet’s drone. Fran sounded like the son of a Mayo-man, which in one sense he was, a fact I learned only later. Strange solecisms peppered his conversation, yet you knew what they meant. That student, ‘a fukken facecloth’, had a girlfriend ‘a hanky’. The pair of them would give you ‘the butt-plugs’. The thug now urinating into the sink was ‘a stonewash Jerry’, Fran’s term for a boy whose mother buys his jeans. The problem with most people was that they ‘never rang themselves up’, a phrase I took to mean that they acted without thinking. I did my best to present myself as an urbane and inveterate self-dialler. I don’t know how convincing I was.

  It was hard to conceal disquiet at his defamations of our lecturers, of the college community generally. Dipsomania and impure practices were imputed to some, incontinence of ghastly varieties to others. Professor X was ‘an eel-faced sadist’, Dr Y ‘a pimple-nippled klutz’, the Dean of Humanities, in all truth the nicest of women, ‘a piñata waiting to happen’. Father Z, the Catholic chaplain, was ‘cottage cheese on legs’, his curate ‘a midget on stilts’. Great was Fran’s ire for the triumvirate of elderly scholars helming the Department of Comparative Religion. A puddle-eyed, ignorant, self-spanking fop, a mule-eared turd and a monk-sucker. Their achievements in bastardry, sloth and betrayal had considerably exceeded their scholarship. The writer in residence was a ‘turtle-necked rat’, the porter ‘a dug-up Troglodyte’. The Adjunct Professor of Architecture had put the grope into Gropius, and any elevator containing only the Moral Tutor must be avoided. The texts required to be read by candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Arts (English Literature, Hons) were ‘an anthology of degraded chimps’ bumfodder’.

  Did I box? Why not? ‘You should.’ In his Yorkshire adolescence, three posters had adorned his bedroom wall: Jean Genet, Grace Kelly, Herol Graham. ‘Kid standing out needs to box,’ Fran said. ‘Look like me up north? You boxed or got shat on.’ He had spent many hours in Brendan Ingle’s gym in the Wincobank area of Sheffield as a boy. ‘Didn’t have the hands. But I could fight a bit, yeah. Nothing like Herol. You look strong.’

  I didn’t ‘stand out’. Nor did I look strong. But it’s arresting to be offered a compliment by way of induction, even when you don’t believe it.

  Not a syllable about music was spoken by either of us that evening. We swapped clichés and inanities about the early novels of John Banville, to whose works Fran attributed significance for they rarely troubled the bestsellers lists back then. Anaïs Nin and Brendan Behan he mentioned with similar mercy, at least I think it was mercy, it might just have been drunkenness. Elias Canetti, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature, was ‘passable, if you like being bored’. Jane Austen? ‘No.’ Dickens? ‘A perv.’ George Bernard Shaw? ‘A peeved vicar.’ Only one of the Brontës didn’t make you want to kill yourself: Branwell, the pisshead brother. I must surely know the writings of Czeslaw Milosz? I didn’t, but I said that I did. It was difficult, given my condition, even to say ‘Czeslaw Milosz’. Try it next time you’re soused.

  Soon he reeled off a prospectus I hadn’t actually sought, the list of authors enjoying his imprimatur. Rimbaud, Verlaine, Kathy Acker (who?), Kerouac, Neal Cassady, the Lake Poets ‘bar Lying Billy Wordsworth’. Elizabeth Bishop wasn’t bad; she’
d rung herself up. Keats and Camus rarely stopped. But Dylan Thomas, ‘a fukken soup-tureen’, was wildly overrated; he ‘couldn’t write “cock” on a shithouse door, not without several attempts’. A piece of pulp erotica called Hot Dames on Cold Slabs was ‘the only important American novel since The Beautiful and the Damned’. Banned here in England, of course. Fran always made a speciality of esteeming banned writers, because he knew you wouldn’t have read them.

  If I’m honest, he struck me as something of a disappointment that evening, silly and a bit predictable and spoiling for a quarrel, neither as brilliant nor as dark as I’d imagined him from afar. In ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ Bob Dylan advises against following leaders. But at eighteen, who wants advice? And come on, don’t be judging me. When young, you were grandiose yourself from time to time. If you weren’t, you loved someone who was. And it isn’t as simple as the attraction of opposites, more a matter of half-glimpsed recognitions. Friendship is a Venn diagram, not an inhabiting of the same space, and the philosopher Montaigne had it right: ‘If you press me to tell why I loved him, I can say very little. It was because he was he, and I was I.’

  I didn’t see him for a fortnight or so. Indeed I remember thinking he must have abandoned his studies, the better to contrive the destruction of the college with a thermonuclear device, for he didn’t show up at his weekly tutorials. I’d made a point of watching out for him. But then, towards the end of April, I noticed him at a lecture, alone, as was his custom, at the back of Theatre L. Mild scoffs issued forth from him as it was alleged from the dais that the literary works of Gerard Manley Hopkins repaid study or gave any sort of pleasure. Students turned to glower at his gum-chewing sternness, an Easter Island statue in heart-attack pink. To one he offered that gesture of sexually tinged aspersion involving the right hand’s middle finger. Soon afterwards he appeared to be feigning sleep or actually sleeping, forehead on the desk before him. He approached me when the talk was over, and I was surprised to see he was carrying a black plastic refuse-sack from which he produced a guitar.