Keep Clear by Tom Cutler

Author:Tom Cutler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, PSY000000, BIO033000, PSY022020, HEA000000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2019-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4:

Steep hill upwards

The one thing we can never get enough of is love.And the one thing we never give enough of is love.

HENRY MILLER

Autumn was unusually sunny and warm that year. As the days shortened, the practical preparations for moving out occupied my thoughts.

When the day came that my father was to drive me to the university, we made an early start. In the passenger seat sat my mother, rotating the map on her knee and telling Dad when he had gone the wrong way or chosen the wrong gear. ‘You’re in third, you know,’ she would say as he negotiated a tricky roundabout or tried to accelerate onto a motorway. I was squashed in the back with my student baggage — artist’s materials, books, LPs, rusting bicycle — watching from the rear window as my past unrolled from the vehicle’s cloaca in an improbable ribbon.

The ancient minster town we were heading for stood at the confluence of two rivers. The ruins of a flint abbey occupied a central plot, its last dissident abbot having been hung, drawn, and quartered in front of his church. Once important, the town had lost much of its grandeur, its modern history being one of brewing and biscuit manufacture. The university was not prestigious, its most famous products being a number of television weather-forecasters and the robotic seat used on his television show by the creepy child molester Jimmy Savile.

Owing to some bungle, no place had been found for me in any of the student halls of residence dotted about the university. Instead I was to be put up in the suburbs by a middle-aged couple, Mr and Mrs Chambers. We arrived at the house, pleasantries were exchanged, my stuff was unloaded, and I waved my parents off.

Dressed in a protective blue tabard Mrs Chambers showed me round. She drew my attention to some framed photographs of her children wearing academic gowns and clasping certificates. She indicated the hi-fi equipment, on the lid of which was a record sleeve. ‘Moon Over Naples’, it said. She showed me the three-piece suite, an antimacassar over the back of each armchair, and asked me to use a drinks coaster. She showed me the cornflakes in the kitchen cupboard and pointed out what she called the ‘conveniences’. From the lip of the toilet bowl hung a small plastic cage containing a chemical block that turned the water blue when you operated the flush. To camouflage the horror of the spare toilet roll on the cistern Mrs Chambers had placed a crocheted dairymaid over it. Everything in the house was spotless. There wasn’t a book to be seen.

‘Mr Chambers will be home at five fifteen and he will take you to the pub,’ said Mrs Chambers, spraying furniture polish at a glazed print of a mountain sunset. Her premonition proved accurate and on the dot I spotted through the modesty glass of the front door the distorted form of Mr Chambers shimmering down the path.

After exchanging his blue

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