Free Fullalove by Gordon Burn Page B

here. It’svery far from ‘Orderliness. Harmony/Piles of sheets in the wardrobe/Lavender in the linen’. Whoever it was said men know nothing or little of the ‘wax’ civilisation had a point. A man needs a maid.
    I’ll admit it (already have admitted it): I’ve lived better. But I’ve also lived worse. The back-to-back where I was born will do for openers, with the slop-bucket in the corner of the kitchen, no electricity, no hot water, lush fungal damp, the ceilings cracking and eventually caving in. This appeared to be nobody’s fault, and certainly not ours. I was a war baby. We were living in a port town that had been a regular target for the Germans. Accommodation of any description was in short supply. We were no worse off, and probably considerably better off, than thousands of others.
    My father had gone back to doing what he had been doing before the war. He was a cutter for a Jewish tailor, and every suit he ever wore was a three-piece, and every coat had real buttonholes on the sleeves. He was a big man with a slight stoop and honest brown curly hair who put his wage packet on the sideboard every Friday unopened. I used to go to the barber with him every other Saturday just for the times when ‘Dickie’ Ames cleaned the hair out of his clippers with a lighted wax taper: the sizzle of the hair igniting, the acrid burning smell among all the sweet smells of haircream and shampoo and dense glop. In his spare time my father made wallets and purses, and engraved cowboy scenes with lariats and prairie moons and cactuses onto wide leather belts, which were worn at weekends by a good number of his friends.
    Later, when we’d been given a flat in one of the new blocks put up by the council, my mother went to work as a cleaner in some furniture shops and a pet shop in the town centre. I’d hear her going off in the mornings when it was still dark, the clattering of her high heels, and the heels of the two women who worked with her, echoing up to the fourteenth floor where I was still huddled in bed. Occasionally, I’d see the three women, usually with a couple of men in tow, going into one of the pubs on theedge of the fruit market just after opening time, although I don’t think they ever saw me.
    My father died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage when he was fifty-nine, only seven years older than I am now. I was in a hospital canteen interviewing a man whose wife had just had both her legs blown off by a bomb planted in a litter-bin by the IRA when I was told, and the sudden reversal of roles was disorienting. The sympathy the man who I was interviewing showed me was different not just in degree, but in levels of spontaneity and compassion, to any I had shown him.
    We buried my father in one of his own suits – a narrow chalk-stripe with double-breasted waistcoat with revers. The meat, his thumb and some of the fingers of his right hand were grooved almost to the bone from a lifetime of sewing and from the pressure of his leather-working tools. Almost the last thing I did before they put the lid on was explore with my own fingers the hatchings and depressions that were the most tangible evidence of who he had been. I remember, with the undertaker’s men crowded respectfully behind me in the tiny bedroom, and a chink of very bright light blinking in through a gap in the curtains, trying to have a thought suitable to the moment. Instead, the words that teletyped through my brain were: Friends are still stunned … Parents are deeply shocked … Park officials are still visibly affected … The small town is mourning the deaths …
    The years when I was married are the only time I have ever lived in a house – lived somewhere, that is, where the living rooms and the bedrooms are on different levels. Even had grown up in a house, the children were born into one, but in all the years I lived as part of a family with them, I never felt properly acclimated; never fully keyed in to rhythms of upstairs and down, to