Lockhart

I’m looking back at notebooks we kept at Marxist school. It wasn’t called that of of course. It was a loose collective of forward looking people living together and helping each other to see more clearly. In other words mum was a hippy and dad was any one of the pin-the-donkey crowd of men that insisted on changing the world first and themselves last. I always thought it was Mr Clarke because he liked reading and I liked reading. He was a small man, buttoned down, with slicked down hair. Outsiders sometimes mistook him for a woman from the back. He had breath that would have curdled an oak, but nobody would tell him because there were enough injustices in the world. I was just a child, so I asked him outright.

We were in the communal kitchen. A wooden table took up most of the floor space where we had candle-lit meetings in which Kaftaned adults smelling of patchouli oil voted to outlaw things like fascism and dogs that ate kangaroo meat. It was made out of four railway sleepers fastened into cut-down oil drums, so the room always tilted with the uneven cut and smelled of tar and oil and if you got too close to the table it left tracks on your clothes. Mr Clarke was showing his solidarity by peeling potatoes in the shallower of the two deep lying sinks. Only the back ring in the cooker worked, so dinner tended to be simpler then, potato-with potato- or brown rice with what tasted like stones and probably were. We were catholic in our tastes, but limited in culinary skills and knowhow. Rhubarb was a rare treat. Mr Clarke was precise and very finicky so he treated each potato as if it had just been uprooted from the Garden of Eden. A hacking cough hung over him like September rain and English accent was marked by persistent gloom.

‘Josh,’ he said, when he noticed me skulking in the doorway. ‘I won’t be a minute.

He ran his hand under the cold tap. We only had cold water and bathed as nature taught us in the nearby brook, until it grew too cold. Then we ignored our body vanities.

Mr Clarke carefully dried his hands on the dish rag we used for the dishes and cleaning the table. ‘What was the question again?’ He had a habit of asking and remembering the question at the same time, which was a good way of keeping order at meetings when everybody tended to be too drunk or high to remember the point they were making, but bad for small boys who’d plucked up the courage to ask a difficult question and wanted to slink away and hide afterwards. “‘Are you my da?’”

He paused, treating the question even more seriously than a collective task voluntarily undertaken.

‘Karl,’ I said, reminding him I’d changed my name from Josh by deed poll ratified by the collective committee.

‘Karl,’ he said, slapping his forehead. ‘I should get an F for forgetting.’ He’d once been a school teacher. ‘We should all be so lucky.’

I wasn’t sure if he was talking about being my father or having Karl as as a forename. In any case I felt sorry for him having such bad breath and sorry that his sour intestinal juices were warping my face so I had to hang my head and hold my breathe. ‘I’ve wrote some poetry,’ I said, as a distraction, breathing out.

‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘Let’s see it.’

‘But our dinner...the potatoes --’ I said.

I rushed upstairs. I was the oldest in our dorm. It wasn’t really a dorm, but a room with a high ceiling that flaked like dandruff. The window was locked open about six or seven inches at the bottom because nobody could fix it. The two storey building was full of traps like that.  There were six beds for us. Six kids pushed together and the bedclothes tumbled together in what we called a spaghetti bed. We slept together, but with two children, Alice and Paul, under six it was a skill to avoid damp patches and sticky poo as we called it. I kept my scribbling and drawings in the top drawer of cabinet with a swing mirror in which the silver backing disappeared taking the person looking in the mirror with it. Most everybody was out because the circus had come to town and the adults thought of them as fellow travellers and the children thought a carnival ride would be fun.

I was practicing disdain at the time so wanted no part of either group. I rushed downstairs, almost slipping on the unpatched third bottom step, with my poetry clutched  in my hand and my heart beating like a bongo in anticipation of showing it to someone for the first time.    

Mr Clarke was back at the sink carving out a long career as a still life. I sat at the table and spread the pages of my poetry out on its mottled surface. I saw him looking at me out of the corner of my eye.

‘Better if you read some of it out,’ he said, turning and pointing the potato-peeler at me.

‘All of it?’ I asked.

‘Emm,’ he said and started scraping and sculpting the potatoes. He ran one under the tap, and with a plop, it fetched up in the pot.

I cleared my throat before beginning. ‘It was serendipitous.’ He cocked his head slightly and seemed to be listening. ‘That I’m so poor. You’re so rich. I wash your clothes. And clean your shit. We’re racing around. From dawn ‘til dusk. Ain’t we proud to be poor?’ I looked up he no longer seemed to be paying any attention which freed me and my voice grew in confidence.

‘Yes we are sure. Our lives may unspool. But giving is cruel. It sends out the wrong signs. Rich men don’t want to decline. They support our neglect. We all have bad days. Rich men don’t get fazed. A lesson learned. Never show your concern. Let others fight. For scraps out of sight. The parade is always a scream. Those at the front are not what they seem.’

I realised I could no longer hear his scratching and there was a musty smell. He was standing beside me with his dick bobbing level with my cheeks and the potato knife pointed down at my hazel-coloured eyes.