The Party: The thrilling Richard & Judy Book Club Pick 2018

It was December and my father had been dispatched to post a clutch of Christmas cards in the letterbox at the end of the road. The weather in Epsom had been bitterly cold, falling below zero the night before, and as he turned left out of the house, my father’s foot made contact with a patch of ice and he slipped, falling over onto his back and hitting his head against the kerb, triggering a cerebral haemorrhage.

A neighbour found him, dead in a spreading pool of his own blood, and alerted my mother who was two months pregnant and in the process of making a fish pie for supper. I don’t know what my mother’s reaction would have been and, not having been a witness to my parents’ marriage, I have no idea as to the extent of her affection or otherwise for her husband. From what I know of her now, I can’t imagine her being in love, but perhaps she was and perhaps it was my father’s death that made her into the bitter woman she became. Allow me to give her the benefit of the doubt on that.

She never spoke to me of my father, of the kind of man he was. There were no pictures of him around the house. He existed in my head as a gap: a burnt hole in a non-existent family photograph which I could not fill with any kind of recognisable physical detail, no matter how hard I tried.

My mother told me the story of my father’s death only once, when I was old enough to have found the words to ask her. I must have been eight or nine. For all of my childhood up to that point, my father’s absence had been explained away by two simple syllables: ‘He died’. This would usually be followed by a sigh and a sense that this had made things very difficult for her and that was all I needed to be aware of.

It had taken me a while to pluck up the courage to ask for further elaboration. I remember I chose my occasion carefully. It was at the end of the day, when my mother had come back from her much-despised job at the local cafeteria and she was sitting by the gas fire, sipping from a mug of Horlicks that I had warmed for her in the microwave. ‘How did my dad die?’ I asked.

She wrinkled her nose.

‘I was wondering what took you so long,’ she said. And then she relayed the whole episode with a sturdy matter-of-factness. I remember not looking at her as she was talking, but instead focusing on the fire’s fake flames sending leaping shadows up the flock wallpaper and the overripe-pear smell of gas as it seeped into the room.

One detail of Sylvia’s story stuck in my mind (she was always Sylvia to me, never ‘mother’). I still think of it now, some thirty years later. My mother told me that after she had called the ambulance, she had gone outside, wrapped up in her outdoors coat, and she had bent down by my father’s lifeless form and she had gathered up the scattered Christmas cards from the pavement and put them in her pocket to send the next day.

‘But …’ I said. ‘Did they have blood on them?’

‘What kind of a question is that?’ She took a slurp of Horlicks and looked away. ‘I wasn’t going to waste my time writing a whole new set, was I now?’

I wonder what they thought, those people who received those blood-spattered cards.

My father’s death meant that it was just the two of us from the start. There is a peculiar kind of claustrophobia that comes from being the only child of a single mother. You learn, quite quickly, that nothing you do will ever be enough to fill your parent’s yawning need for filial devotion. What starts off as love rapidly turns into a sort of inescapable hatred and the hatred is even more needy, even more trapping than the love was. It sucks you dry from the inside.

I think my mother’s obsessive love for me co-existed with contempt for her own vulnerability. She was dependent on me for affection and yet she denied that she needed it. I never met her standards because I never knew what they were. They seemed to shift and change on a whim. All I knew was that I was a source of near-constant disappointment.

I could read this disappointment in the wrinkles at the corner of her mouth, bracketing her lips downward. I could sense it in the way she looked at me sometimes, sideways on as I was doing the washing-up or watching The Generation Game on the television or sitting naked in the bath, a trail of goosebumps down my spine because the water was never hot enough. When she looked at me in this way, she seemed to be analysing me, trying to work me out, like a sceptic attempting to understand another person’s faith.

There was some oddness. There always is in that kind of relationship. For instance, she insisted on dressing me each morning, long after I was old enough to do it myself. She would hold open my underpants so that I could clamber into them, kneeling on my bedroom carpet so that I was uncomfortably aware that my penis was at her eye level. She would brush my hair brusquely and tie my shoelaces and prepare my packed lunch: Mother’s Pride triangles with Marmite and cucumber (which I disliked but never told her I disliked) and then she would walk me to the bus stop on her way to work, waving me off as I took my regular window seat and made the short journey to the local primary school.

I returned from school earlier than she got off work, so I would let myself in. She expected me to make my own supper and then to prepare something simple for her, a chicken kiev or a can of baked beans on toast. When she came back through the front door, I could evaluate her mood from the tread of her feet on the kitchen lino. If it had been a bad day at the cafe, she would find fault with everything.

‘Why are you wearing that stupid old jumper? Why have you made me green beans when you know I hate them? What are you, a bloody retard? I haven’t raised you to be a simpleton, have I?’

She would never hit me, but she would nitpick and carp until I felt physically assaulted. Only once did she pinch the tender flesh on my forearm, twisting it anti-clockwise between her fingers until I yelped with the burning pain of it. There was a mark there for days.

You might have thought school was my refuge. My mother, the beneficiary of a generous life insurance policy after my father’s death, had decided to send me to a fee-paying preparatory and it was true that, for a time, I enjoyed the rough and tumble of playtime, the rambunctious whoops of the other children as they scampered around the sandpit. But, fairly quickly, I began to stand out. I was never sure why. Perhaps it was something to do with my face. I have been told I have a tendency to look disapproving or unhappy when I think my features are simply expressionless and relaxed.

Perhaps it was that I ran out of patience fairly quickly with the other children. I began to feel detached from them, older somehow. I’ve always felt older. After a few weeks of watching them sift sand through a red plastic square with holes in the bottom and shriek with displeasure when said red plastic square was removed so that someone else could play with it, I found that I couldn’t understand what it was about the red plastic square that was so appealing.

I tried to evaluate it logically. Was it the physical sensation of the sand siphoned through the small apertures? Was it the idea of having achieved something, of having transmuted a seemingly solid substance into a liquid river of grains? And, even assuming it was either of these fundamentally trivial motivations, why was that so completely absorbing? Why did the red plastic square assume such proportions in these children’s heads, the idea of it expanding to fill all available space, all their angsty desire, their desperate need to play and experiment … how could all of it be subsumed into a single unexceptional item with ‘Made in Taiwan’ stamped on its underside?

The red plastic square tormented me for weeks. I felt there must be a piece of me lacking, a talent for childishness that I didn’t possess. I just didn’t get it. It annoyed me that I didn’t. Believe me, I wanted more than anything to be an unthinking, easy child. I wanted to belong. And at the same time, I knew that I didn’t.

So maybe that goes some way towards explaining what happened next. It was the incident that was to change the course of my life although, naturally, I didn’t realise it at the time. It was to do with the bird.

A sparrow. A defenceless sparrow who had fallen from the sky onto the bricked surface of the playground. Wing broken. Mewling from its beak. Flapping senselessly. Heart pitter-pattering frantically inside its feathered chest.

A girl called Jennifer was the first to find it. Jennifer was blonde and tall, with ungainly limbs and a clumsy way of running which, she confessed to me once in an unguarded moment, was modelled on the way Bobbie ran in the film of The Railway Children. She was one of those children forever destined to be mildly despised for her inelegance and, indeed, when I looked her up on Facebook a few years ago, she still had those unfortunate broad shoulders and a pitifully small number of online friends despite her emoticon-strewn status updates.

Jennifer found the bird as she was playing tag. She stopped, almost tripping over her own shoes, and tears sprung to her eyes. It just so happened that I was sitting on a nearby bench with a book in my hand, and when I saw her standing there, whimpering, I got up to see what was going on.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

Jennifer was breathing heavily, a half-asthmatic wheeze in the back of her throat.

‘It’s … it’s …’ She pointed at the bird’s prone form. ‘I think it’s dying.’

I knelt down and peered closer at the sparrow. It looked at me, moist eye swivelling in its socket. I extended one finger and prodded it, feeling the silky feathers part with the pressure.

‘Don’t touch it, Martin!’ Jennifer was saying. ‘We need to tell the teacher.’

The teacher was duly told and the bird was scooped up by adult hands and placed in a makeshift nest of cotton-wool and pipe-cleaners. This was then put on a high ledge in the hallway, just above a radiator and next to a window overlooking the street outside. The ledge ran parallel to a flight of stairs which led up to our classroom.

For the next few days, when the bell went for morning lessons, an excitable gaggle of schoolchildren would file up the staircase and peer into the cotton-wool nest to see how the sparrow was faring. The teachers seized upon this set of circumstances as a way of educating us about ‘nature’. (They were a bovine lot, those primary school teachers, with barely an original thought between them.)

So it was that some time after that, there was a competition to come up with a name for the ‘school sparrow’. I forget who won it now or what the eventual name was – let’s say it was ‘Sammy’ – but by christening the bird, I noticed everyone felt closer to it, as though it were a form of mascot. Then, we were encouraged to draw pictures of the blessed thing – coloured pencil doodles which were Blu Tacked on the walls like sacrificial offerings. More than once, our homework consisted of finding out ‘facts’ about Sammy. This being the pre-internet era, I had to waste more time than I would have liked poring over The Observer Book of Birds in the local library.

We had been told not to touch the sparrow and not to disturb it with our gawping. But each time I passed Sammy while walking up the stairs, I wanted to reach out and squeeze him in my cupped hands. He was such a small, insignificant thing – barely bigger than a tennis ball. The more the other children stared and whispered, the more they monitored every tiny movement of Sammy’s body for signs of recovery, the more angry I became. It was so stupid to attach such importance to a brainless creature.

But what really made me snap was overhearing Jennifer one morning. Ever since the discovery of the sparrow, she had assumed a possessiveness over it. She appeared to think that her self-appointed guardianship gave her an insight into what the bird was feeling and how long its recovery might be expected to take and she would treat us all to smug reports on its progress. Her father was a vet, as I recall – a fact she took every opportunity to mention.

On this particular morning, she had been invited to the front of the class by the teacher to tell us how the sparrow was faring.

‘I think Sammy might be flying again soon. His wing is almost healed.’

Jennifer looked pleased with herself. The teacher, a woman appropriately called Mrs Love, was smiling benignly, nodding her head in agreement. I think it was this that finally sent me over the edge. Because it was all so bogus. The sparrow hadn’t shown any signs of recovery. Its wing was still as uselessly snapped as ever. Its eyes had acquired a dull patina. The kindest thing would have been to break its neck in the playground.

‘It’s probably going to die,’ I said. I spoke without putting my hand up first and when the words tripped out of my mouth they were louder than I had anticipated. Jennifer took a surprised step backwards. Her lower lip wobbled. The teacher glared at me.

‘Martin. What a terrible thing to say.’

‘It’s not,’ I protested. ‘It’s true.’

‘That’s enough, Martin.’

I felt a hot bullet of anger lodge itself in my throat. I think it might have been the first time I’d ever been told off by a teacher and I felt it keenly. I vowed to myself I would never, ever forget this moment, the indignity of it, the unfairness and the dumb, unquestioning way in which the teacher sided with ignorance over truth simply because it was easier. Who cared about imparting actual knowledge when you could keep everyone quiet by making them draw pictures of a bloody bird?

(I’ve never liked animals. I find it sickening how we fetishise them with tartan dog coats and velvet cat collars and special tins of food with jellied rabbit chunks and how we invite them into our homes, these wild, unthinking things, and expect them to reflect all the human characteristics we most wish to see in ourselves.)

The morning after the teacher had publicly slapped me down, I told my mother I needed to go in to school early to help with the completion of a class project. She dropped me off at the bus stop an hour before my usual time. The school was dark, apart from one light coming from the headmistress’s office. The front door was on the latch. I walked in, taking care to tread lightly so that my plimsolls did not squeak against the floor.

To one side of the hallway were the cloakroom stalls, their pegs empty apart from a single, discarded art-class overall. Beyond, I could make out the receding outline of Doris, the cleaner, who was pushing an industrial hoover along the corridor, swinging the flex from side to side as she went. She was listening to her Walkman, as I had known she would be, humming along to the indistinct tune piping through her headphones and swaying her arthritic hips as best she could in time with the silent beat.

I left my coat and my bag in the cloakroom, not by my normal peg but in a corner, stuffed behind one of the benches, where I could retrieve it later. I slid off my shoes, nudging them into the same cubby-hole. Then I tiptoed back into the corridor and up the stairs, carrying under my arm two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica borrowed from the local library for just this purpose (you couldn’t check out reference books, I seem to recall, so I must have temporarily stolen them). I took the steps slowly, one by one, clutching the weight of the encyclopaedias to my waist, feeling reassurance in their solid bulk.

I gazed up at the ledge, allowing my eyes to acclimatise to the early-morning gloom and then to focus on the blurry outline of the bird’s man-made nest. Pipe-cleaners and twigs and strands of mismatched wool and cotton-wool. When I got to the top step, I placed the two encyclopaedias on the floor and climbed on top. I wasn’t a very tall boy and I had known I wouldn’t be able to reach the ledge without some help. Looking back, I can’t help but feel a bit proud of my foresight. I think it shows a degree of maturity to be able to make such a plan and enact it under my own steam.

I stood on sock-covered tiptoe, leaning forwards with one hand placed flat against the wall to keep my balance but I still couldn’t quite reach the nest. It was agonisingly close. I could brush the tips of my fingers against a protruding bit of twig, but I couldn’t get the purchase I needed to remove it. I didn’t dare use two hands in case I lost my balance and fell with a clatter down the stairs.