What a bastard I must have been; what an abominable shit. If there are years I'd like to revisit it would be those from when I was around twelve to sixteen, just to see if I could do a better job second time around.
On second thoughts I don't think I'd like to revisit them. I've heard people say, "Those are the best years of your life." They may be for some, but not for me. They were the loneliest years of my life, and no wonder given the sort of arsehole I was.
Always looking for an argument and when I got one saying the most stupid and illogical things just to win it; always irritable and complaining; abusing the teachers; I was suspended from school at least three times and came close to being expelled.
Those were the years of seething hormones, when you shoot upwards but not outwards, so you're a skinny gangling thing, and you tell yourself you're ugly and pimply and no one, especially a girl, could ever like you - that proved to be a self fulfilling prophesy.
Then there's the pubic hair and an enlarged penis that always seem to be horny, which I suppose is okay if you've got someone to play your horn with, but I hadn't, so I had to learn to play solo.
I used to go for long walks on my own, and although I pretended I liked being on my own, I was really praying I'd meet someone to walk with and talk to. Of course, if that someone was female and she said "Let's go behind that bush and fuck," it would have been a bonus, but it never happened.
To add to my woes I caught a vile disease; it's called, "Liking classical music." I caught it from my mother who along with her other maladies suffers from "Going to the theatre syndrome," and an infestation of "I like reading poetry."
The overarching infection mother suffers from is "Being a university lecturer in English."
As those who suffer from these types of ailments will realise, they do not make for popularity when you're a teenager. I seemed unable to engage in activities popular among my peers, and even in sport I went in for long distance running which is hardly a team sport.
If I could turn back the clock and return to those days there would be one reason and one only. I would like to try and heal the many wounds I must have given mother at that time with my petulant and insulting behaviour.
Perhaps some of you have heard the old song, "You Always Hurt the One you Love;" a sloppy and sentimental piece, but with more than a grain of truth. I think I must have loved mother a great deal if the hurts I inflicted are the measure.
Looking back now at those days from the vantage point of fourteen years on, I can see how much mother had to endure, not only from me, but my father as well.
Some said my father was a genius. He and mother had met when both of them were just starting as tutors at the university; my father in the Physics Department. It was expected that he would have a brilliant career; sadly it never happened.
How it all began I'm not sure because I was only a kid when my father first started to drink excessively. By the time I did understand about such things father was an alcoholic. In addition he had taken to gambling believing that mathematically he could come up with a system that would mean he would always win.
Of course, as he explained endlessly, like all such systems it had to be perfected. In the process of perfecting his system to my knowledge he twice emptied his and mother's joint bank account and ran into overdraft. There may have been more times that I did not know of.
By the time I was around eleven his career was in tatters. He had been dismissed, not only from his university position, but from a series of jobs and was on a fast downward slope.
There were times when he had treatment and it looked as if he would overcome his alcoholism and gambling obsession, but it never lasted.
How or why mother tolerated his behaviour and why she stayed with him is still a mystery to me. Knowing her as I do I think she is one of the minority of people who these days take their marriage vows seriously; that and the hope that one day father would get back on track again.
I can recall a time when I was fifteen and I'd just been suspended from school for the second time and father was going through one of his frequent drinking and gambling periods. I found mother sitting at the kitchen table crying. I had never seen her cry before. I wanted to comfort her, but didn't know how.
I suppose my inability to say or do anything arose from the guilty knowledge that I was in part responsible for her distress.
Mother's hope that father would change was a vain one, and finally it was he who made an end of it. One day he left the house and didn't return. Mother eventually contacted the police and reported him as missing. At first I don't think they took it seriously, no doubt believing it was just one more guy who'd run off with another woman.
It became serious when a couple walking along an isolated beach found a heap of clothes that were eventually identified as belonging to father. In addition his car was parked at the top of the cliffs that skirted the beach. No body was ever recovered and at the inquest an open verdict was given.
Most people, including mother, believed he had committed suicide, and that seems rational enough, but I'm not so sure.
What are the alternatives? Accidental death; he went for a swim, got into trouble and drowned? Murder; that's a possibility, the murderer wanting it to make it look like suicide; I think that the police believed it might be murder and questioned mother, me and a few other people, but it all came to nothing.
I have what most would think an absurd belief that father is still alive. He knew he had ruined his life and thought he could make a fresh start, so he faked suicide and disappeared. I sometimes wonder if one day he'll just walk into the house. I don't think I really grieved over father's death. It was in fact something of a relief not to have him around either boozed out of his mind, or bringing yet another financial disaster upon us, or more likely both at the same time.
I couldn't read mother at that time. Always a very quiet person she became almost incommunicado for a while. Perhaps it was something like this that she had expected to happen and she probably felt a sense of relief that it was over and was in the process of digesting it.
I am tempted to call father's death, if that is what it was, a tragic event, but the real tragedy had taken place long before his actual death when he began to ruin a promising career, and with it what could have been a fulfilling relationship with mother.
From what I have been told, when they married they were seen as "The beautiful couple." That's how they were for some time. From the wedding photographs I could see that my father was a very handsome man and mother undoubtedly an attractive woman.
