It just wasn’t his strong suit. He hardly did it, and as he got older he cared
even less about the consequences of not doing his paperwork. It wasn’t a
form of learnt absent-mindedness or elderly decline. The old man really
didn’t give a f*** what happened.
It became more pronounced as my mother, Bobby, was dying and the tedious
bureaucracy of car ownership that had been her domain went untouched. The
summonses and the fines began to mount up — a year after Bobby’s death he
had taken to sporting a beer mat in his tax-disc holder. Among the many
elements of his estate that I dealt with after his death were over
£4,000-worth of unpaid parking tickets, a wide variety of pending utility
bills and a number of unresolved court cases involving motoring accidents
and insurance claims. More impressively, he hadn’t paid any council tax or
made any mortgage payments for eight years. Sometimes the bailiffs arrived,
but his response was always the same. They would knock on the door. He would
then greet them, step out of the house, close the door behind him and walk
out onto the green in front of his flat, ringed by six other mock-Tudor
blocks, and shout: “This man is a bailiff. He wants to take my possessions
away to pay for unpaid bills and unjust fines, but he will not be getting
anything.” They never did.
The boxes, however, remain unsorted. They contain what’s left of his
paperwork; the stuff that I took from his flat when we cleared it out and
sold it, minus the choicest items, which were taken by the police and the
lawyers. The boxes have been through various incarnations: thick plastic
bags, taped-up grocery cartons, old book boxes. I think they have, at last,
taken their final form. In their current state, there are four. There used
to be more, but over the seven years I have carted them from one cupboard,
shelf or attic to another, their contents appear to have contracted.
Although I have unpacked and repacked the boxes, stopping to dwell on the
odd paper,
I haven’t really opened them. I’m always squinting, half shielding my eyes.
The paperwork first arrived in plastic sacks, and putting it into some kind of
order had helped. It felt like an act of salvage. That was the easy bit;
then it stopped helping. My partner, Sarah, said: “Are you sure you want to
open the boxes? You know what happens when you open the boxes… and… I just
wonder if it’s helping any more.”
I knew what happened when I opened the boxes. I started crying. Not moist-eye
crying, or dabbing-with-tissues crying, or tears-down-the-cheeks crying. I
mean head-banging, animal-noise crying. Crying that made my skull tighten
and my head throb; crying that wouldn’t stop.
If I was more like the old man, that would have been that. The boxes would
have mouldered in the loft until my kids got their hands on them. Their
contents would, I imagine, be all but incomprehensible to them. I worry they
are becoming incomprehensible to me. That’s what happens if you don’t do
your paperwork: time comes round and takes your stories; characters flatten
out into the two-dimensional shapes of comfortable family legend.
But I’m not like the old man. I can’t let it ride, I can’t front
the bailiffs, I can’t put the paperwork in the bin.
When anyone is murdered, the police want to take a look at their home. When
they’re murdered in that home, the police want to take a good, long look. In
Ivor’s case, they examined his flat for almost a month in March 2001. He had
three autopsies: one for the prosecution and one for each of the two defence
cases. We got to see him for 10 minutes in the Uxbridge morgue, a low brick
building of studied anonymity.
We couldn’t touch him or even be in the same room at the same time; he
remained a piece of evidence. They let my brother and me into a viewing room
with a glass window through which you could see the broken corpse ruddy with
smashed capillary beds, his battered jowls drooping heavily down his face,
his eyes tiny black crosses sunk in his skull, his dark pelt still lush on
his greying skin.
When the police had finished inspecting his flat, there remained the matter of
his blood; lots of it and all over his new pink carpet. We agreed it would
be a good thing if the carpet was removed and if someone washed the
woodwork. When I asked the police, for no reason in particular, who would be
doing it, they replied: “Rentokil.”
Early April, a blank white sky, and we’re driving down the Westway, heading
out of London towards Ruislip. In the car we are tight-lipped, wondering
whether they really have taken out the carpet, whether they really did clean
the woodwork, wondering what we’ll do if we have to clean the flat before we
clear it. I didn’t think I would dare play it, but I slide in the cassette,
a copy of AC/DC’s Highway to Hell. It’s already wound to track eight: If You
Want Blood (You’ve Got It).
We pull off at the Polish war memorial. I see his smile, not his wounds. I
hear his laughter and swallow my horror. I see myself enter the house
through the back door. The air in the flat is hard and still and cold. At
the edge of my vision I can see strange but familiar landmarks: his
collection of tannin-stained mugs, the deep-fat fryer and its crust of oil
sludge and dust, the stacks of duty-free Rothmans cartons. But the coin jars
have gone and so has most of the linoleum. It’s been removed. He must have
bled all over it as he lay slumped in the hallway. I look through into the
hall. The carpet is gone. They’ve taken the lot, leaving dirty boards, copies
of the local freebie, the sharp tips of the exposed runners, but no blood. I
feel relieved and suddenly emboldened. Walking into his bedroom, it feels
even staler: the curtains are drawn, dust hangs in the air. My parents’
private space: their drawers, their clothes, their bed. I head straight for
the top drawer on his side of the dresser.
I am looking for a letter. I paw through lighters, hip flasks, old casino
chips, scraps of paper with scribbled addresses, rotting Polaroids,
cufflinks and the letter. He wrote it 20 years ago, the first time they left
James and me at home while they flew off on holiday. “Only to be opened in
the event of our demise,” he had said, theatrically but in earnest. We never
opened it. It sat for a long weekend on the coffee table. They didn’t die;
they came back. I always supposed the letter would be in the drawer. It is
handwritten, with an air of mock seriousness. He tells us that he and Bobby
love us and are proud of us. We are to go and see the solicitors, Cathcart &
Co, which, of course, we’ve already done. He tells us: “David look after
James. James help David.” Now I’m crushed. I’m heady with my find. I am
lost. I can hear a distant rasp that is my sister-in-law vomiting: Rentokil
scrubbed his blood up, but they overlooked the steak he was going to cook
that evening defrosting on the draining board. She found it in a pool of
stinking brown blood. We are grabbing papers and folders and anything
official: letters, photographs, paperwork. I’m opening Bobby’s bedside
cupboard.
He hasn’t touched it. He hasn’t touched it for eight years. It’s exactly as
she left it; the old exercise books, lip balms, her last handbag. I rub the
dust from the zip and open it. Inside there’s an appointment card from
Northwick Park hospital, bearing a date for two weeks after she died. There
is a small orange pill pot, with a single tiny capsule of diazepam left.
After that day, I sorted the birth, death and marriage certificates for three
generations, immigration papers and passports. I collected the cards that
celebrated my birth and my brother’s, our Bar Mitzvahs, Bobby’s 21st
birthday and the cards that consoled us when she died. I sifted what was
left of her schoolwork, and mine and James’s, kids’ artwork, holiday
mementos: this was treasure. But the old man’s paperwork remained
unexamined, still toxic to the touch. I shovelled it all in bulging files,
bundles of bills and summonses, photos and fan mail, correspondence with
lawyers, bank and business papers and put it away.
The boxes move slowly from loft to landing to study. I circle around them,
delaying. I read the letter. I hold the pill pot up to the light. Finally, I
begin to sort his paperwork, but I am not being thorough; I’m jumping ahead
of myself. Like the letter in his drawer, there are things I know are here
and I am looking for them, and there are things I want to overlook.
I’ve got his certificate from the Morris School of Hairdressing in Piccadilly,
which recalls his adventures as an apprentice hairdresser, working for
Raymond “Mr Teasy-Weasy” Bessone in his Knightsbridge salon. Ivor at work
with a faux-French hairdresser, the sought-after stylist to the debutantes
and blue-bloods of west London and the star turn on a BBC variety show: a
hint of camp, a swirl of cigarette smoke, a pencil-thin moustache. Ivor
escaping from his suburban prison into the penumbra of the London set,
louche cocktail parties and weekends in the country. I’ve got his discharge
card from the RAF and the tale of how he reported sick for three months and
got an honourable discharge three months later, how he never did drill or
fired a gun or received a uniform that fitted him. I’ve got the transcript
of a police interview with him in the embezzlement case he managed to escape
scot-free — but for the cannabis plant they found in his office. I’ve got
the betting slips and casino cheques and his days of low-rolling and
high-rolling, card-marking and cheating, betting coups and scams in private
rooms at the back of west London gambling dens. This is the easy stuff. I
know these stories and they’re good ones. The stories of his first lives and
selves: secure, fixed and funny. Shall I break the habit of a lifetime and
do the hard paperwork first? The stuff that’s not settled?
I pick up his notebook — I’ve only ever glanced through it before — and I
start to read and to write. As I do so, I see Ivor sitting on the sofa, the
notebook in front of him, a cheap Biro in his hand, tracing his slow,
methodical script. It’s 1994, he is 55 and this is a low. Bobby has been
dead for nine months: breast cancer that came and went and came back again
and ate her liver and shrank her body to a husk before it snuffed her out.
She was 51. There had been plenty of cancer in the family and there’s the
luck of the draw, but the thought nags at me: he didn’t do their paperwork.
If the pressure of their life didn’t kill her, it made the fight too hard.
Seven years earlier, Ivor and Bobby were running Robertero, a women’s clothing
shop in Ruislip Manor. It was a shoestring operation, but run with great
charm and acumen. Nobody earned a fortune, but all the bills were paid
without pain, and that definitely constituted an advance. Of course, one of
the reasons it went so well was that Ivor had learnt a few lessons from
previous brushes with commercial law and book-keeping. Instead of not
keeping any books, he kept two sets of books. In 1987, Customs and Excise
showed up on the not-entirely-unreasonable grounds that the business had
paid barely any Vat for the previous five years. The Inland Revenue was
perplexed by the numbers too. The ensuing bankruptcy proceedings lasted six
years.
Bobby would get breast cancer and, although they did eventually clear all the
debts, she was dead before the case was closed. The old man never did
finalise the paperwork. For the first time in my life I saw him helpless.
James and I arranged Bobby’s funeral. She had to be buried at Bushy
cemetery, where everyone else in the family has ended up, but they had blown
out the synagogue and the burial plans a decade ago, so that was £1,500 now
and another £4,500 later.
I gave the United Synagogue Burial Society the bounciest cheque you’ve ever
seen and we put her in the ground and cancelled it. A few days later, we
told him and he was delighted; he put on a jacket and headed up to town,
where he told the burial authorities that we weren’t going to pay, we didn’t
want a headstone and they could make their own arrangements. He and Bobby’s
father had the row they’d been waiting to have for 40 years and met only
once again before they both died. The thin web of family networks and
friends sustained by Bobby was either left to gather dust or deliberately
broken.
For maybe six months he sat on the sofa in impenetrable despair. He reduced
the sagging golden sofa to a pulp of wood, springs and stuffing. I flip
another few pages. I see him sitting hunched over the pad of paper. He’s
smoking and carefully, methodically, he writes, making his points, then
reading and rereading his notes. He writes: “Watching experienced girls and
ignoring novices; telling members to strip girls off without consulting the
girl; interfering with members’ scenarios; always jumping in at parties and
in so doing preventing paying members getting their fair share of the
action.”
After Bobby’s death we had conversations on the phone where nobody knew
what to say and nobody could tell who was trying to help whom. Ivor had
crawled out of the wreckage of past lives and shed his skin a dozen times,
but this time I really wondered if he had run out of conjuring tricks. But
he hadn’t. In the depths of his grief, he had turned to his remaining
obsession: spanking — in fact to the full range of corporal punishment. It’s
a long-held peccadillo, but now he thinks he’s found a way to have fun and
make a living. He is in with Keith and Abi at the Posterity Club (like the
hairdressing fraternity, fetish clubs are fond of a cheesy pun).
They are operating out of deepest Berkshire, putting on afternoon spanking
parties in detached houses for paying guests. Keith is the main man, he’s
been running the club for two years, but I can see Ivor is not happy. Not
because he’s not the boss — he knows he’s still learning this game —
but because he’s not being respected, the girls are not being
respected, the punters are not being respected. What should be a mutually
satisfying and, above all, profitable affair is being run as an ego trip and
at a loss. I turn the pages: there’s a party in Surbiton to be arranged,
guests and girls to be paired; fragments of scripts for movies and routines
for a cabaret club. And then there is the Red Stripe club.
He has two or three goes at writing his opening pitch in the notebook and then
he finds his voice: “Thank you for writing to Red Stripe. We are the only
hands-on spanking club in Great Britain and these are the reasons why. Red
Stripe is run by people who are as enthusiastic about the spanking scene as
you are. Because the girls who attend Red Stripe parties are truly
submissive and really enjoy the spanking scene, and because we listen to the
opinions of our members. So if you enjoy putting a cheeky schoolgirl over
your knee, pulling down her knickers and giving her a thorough and
well-deserved spanking then you will definitely enjoy a Red Stripe party. We
haven’t forgotten all the submissive gentlemen either. Our dominant ladies
are just as enthusiastic as our submissive ladies and really understand what
is required. If you would like to join Red Stripe, meet the girls and other
like-minded men please send a cheque for £25. This is to cover the cost of
post and the printing of our newsletter which will keep you informed of the
monthly upcoming events for you to choose from.”
A month later he split from Keith and Abi. He put a few ads in the back pages
of the Sunday Sport and the specialist press and the cheques came rolling
in. List after list of party guests and girls fill the final pages of the
pad. For a time after this he went quiet on the details of his life. His
phone was suddenly always engaged, but who was he talking to? No, he
couldn’t come over because he had to go to Manchester. Manchester? He
wouldn’t go to Uxbridge normally. The real giveaway, though, was the nine
video machines in his sitting room, all wired up together and each showing a
paused picture of a woman being caned. I made him tell me about it. It
didn’t come as much of a surprise: my brother and I had found his stash of
spanking porn a long time ago and thought little more about it. Sure, it was
kind of weird, but he was kind of weird. When we talked it over and he tried
to explain what the turn-on was, we never got very far. In the end he didn’t
care, he just knew that he liked it. Self-reflection was no substitute for
having fun.
Ivor never looked back. Seven years on, the Red Stripe club had 2,000 members,
held four or five parties a month and made 10 movies a year. The girls loved
him because he was an old-fashioned gentleman. He made them feel safe and
never failed to pay them on the day, generously. Some, as his pitch claimed,
were enthusiasts, others less so; but he couldn’t abide faking, believing it
bad for both business and the soul. There was a queue round the block to
audition. He set clear rules of behaviour and enforced them assiduously; at
the parties encounters were carefully policed, with code words that girls
could use at any time to terminate a session. There was as little nudity as
was possible given the nature of the fetish, and there was absolutely no
sex. The punters loved it because it was safe, suburban and regulated, and
what turned Ivor on was what turned them on. The whole circus was conducted
with an air of endless and effortless bonhomie. Money, love, fame and fun
were flooding into Ruislip Court.
On a business trip to New York, Ivor was recognised in a fetish club as “the
Headmaster”, his alter ego, who appeared in the fabulously successful Red
Stripe College Classic series of movies. He recalled with relish a
high-pitched New Yorker in a leather catsuit and furry ears who exclaimed:
“It’s the Headmaster! It’s the Headmaster!” A buzz ran through the club, and
proceedings were halted to allow the Headmaster and his escort to take to
the podium and give an impromptu masterclass in the finer points of using
the cane and the paddle. I stopped worrying he might top himself and started
worrying the taxman would come calling again.
In the mass of unopened post in his flat was a letter from Uxbridge police. It
read: “Dear Mr Goldblatt, We are sorry to hear that you have been a victim
of crime…”
In a world where Rentokil is hired to clean up murder sites, this was surely a
grotesque but routine response from the police to the recently murdered. It
had in fact been sent on February 27, 2001, two days before his death — he
had been the victim of a crime a few weeks before. The two were not
unconnected. That’s what I like about the letter: not its irony, but its
prescience.
He’d lived with the sofa and the swirly orange carpet it came with for 30
years and now they were all threadbare. Maybe it was time to start moving on
from Bobby and that life. Suddenly a pair of white leather sofas and a
pale-pink deep-pile carpet filled his living room and hallway. Pale pink?
What was he thinking? A month later there were tea stains on the sofas and
cigarette burns in the new carpet. Ivor calls for a running repair and two
men show up. The small pale one is the carpet fitter. The big bearded one
doesn’t seem to do that much and mooches about.
The old man barely notices as he waves them into the sitting room, the phone
clamped to his head and Nigel from Loughborough or Gareth from Nuneaton
bending his ear about some breach of protocol at the party in Leicester last
week. Or maybe it’s Ken calling to say he’s finished recording the video order;
or he’s counselling one of the girls on some issue in her life — money
problems, boyfriend problems, housing problems; and all the time he’s making
very strong tea, smoking Rothmans and laughing.
The carpet fitters must be taking a good look round. There would have been no
effort to disguise what was going on. The Red Stripe show would certainly
have been diverting, but much more interesting, I suspect, was Ivor’s wallet
and the £5,000 in cash he invariably carried with him, secured by a large,
old-fashioned paperclip. They palm that as they finish the job and, as they
go through the kitchen, the change bottles must have caught their eye.
Three-litre plastic soft-drinks bottles with the tops cut off; 10 to 15 of
them crammed onto the kitchen work surfaces between the toaster and the
cooker, all overflowing with pound coins and 50p pieces. Five hundred coins
a bottle, 10 bottles, another five grand at least. And where there’s that
much coinage and that much cash in a wallet, there’s bound to be more.
He reported the theft to the police; he knew who had done it. He even had them
round to investigate the crime. He cleared up a bit, but he wouldn’t let
them into the sitting room, where the carpet had been fixed and the crime
committed. So what’s anyone going to do? The police left it and wrote
him a nice letter. He left it and never got the letter.
At another time he might well have taken matters into his own hands, or pulled
in a few favours from the wide range of heavies and knuckle merchants he
knew. But he didn’t. He didn’t really need the money back, he didn’t need
revenge, he didn’t need the aggravation. The News of the Screws, with whom
he had advertised in the past, had infiltrated the Red Stripe Christmas
party. He was appalled at the photograph of him they had used, but he was
unshakable in his insouciance: “It’s the life I chose… Might even end up
with a few new punters.” Only once did he hint that his casualness
might mask fear. He had told me just a few weeks earlier that he couldn’t
quite march on like he used to. Yes, he had felt something move across his
heart.
A month later, March 1, 2001, the carpet fitters are in a pub in Hayes. It’s
lunch time. They’re drinking their second or third lager of the day and then
they retreat to the toilets to do the last line of a very large bag of
cocaine. The five grand is spent, the cupboard is bare and the party is
coming to an end. Except it doesn’t have to. Everyone around the table knows
this; they know where to go to refresh their funds.
A friend drives them the 20 minutes from Hayes to Ruislip Court and, some time
around 2pm, they knock on the door. Ivor, alone, knows who they are and what
they want, but you can’t play the kind of games he played with the bailiffs
with this lot. He’s pushed back down the hall and the door closes.
After that the precise details are a matter of conjecture, but we know this
much. Ivor is stabbed 26 times with one of his own kitchen knives. His lungs
are punctured and there are deep wounds in his shoulders and his flanks. He
receives a variety of other blows to his head, neck and arms. At 2.08pm the
emergency services receive a call from him. The carpet fitters are grabbing
whatever they can and leaving. The conversation was recorded and it was
played in court.
I faced almost everything. I watched them argue over the diagram of his knife
wounds, I looked the carpet fitters in the eye, but I couldn’t listen to the
tape. What do you want: some justice or no justice, some truths or no
truths, enough of the story or all the story?
I am told the tape is gentle and dignified. I’m told he didn’t panic, but just
explained the situation and waited for the ambulance. It came 12 minutes
later. He was dead in a pool of his own blood, which was ebbing away into
the thick pile of his pink carpet.
I sifted the contents of his house for another five months. After the trial I
finally felt strong enough to empty it: the furniture, his clothes, my
mother’s clothes, the nine video machines, the bamboo canes and the leather
paddles and the blackboard. Then I started stripping and cleaning. I told
myself it would help sell the flat. How could anyone think of buying it? But
I also imagined that if I cleaned long enough and hard enough, the dull
patina of dried blood that seemed to cling to every surface would finally
go. I hoped that if I emptied the flat of its objects, and pared back its
contents to nothing, I would uncover the place that I grew up in, before
Ivor was the old man, before he was a legend. I couldn’t find that place,
and I didn’t think I would find it in the boxes and among the papers either.
When I make a final trip back to the flat more than a year later, I know I’m
going to say goodbye, but it feels like a hollow journey. There’s nothing
left to take, no scraps of memory remaining.
I’m standing in the bathroom in front of the sink, looking at the light
bending and breaking through the textured windows. The sink is still
leaking. A patch of the rough, greasy brown carpet is wet. I look up at the
waste-water pipe and see an old rag is wrapped around the leaking joint, an
old, grey, fraying rag. Along its edge, woven into the fabric, are two lines
of small navy rectangles. I bite on my own breath.
The navy rectangles edge a huge, white, soft towel. My father is standing over
the bath holding it up for me. I’m four. My brother has just been born and
tonight, for the first night I can remember, my father and I are alone and
he is bathing me. He’s bathing me and lifting me out of the bath in the
rectangle-edged towel.
I unwind the rag from the pipe and spread it out in my palms and I’m crying.
The towel is huge and soft and enveloping. He dries me. There’s the sweet
smell of baby powder in the air.
He brushes my short, tightly curled hair and dresses me in my finery. We eat,
side by side, at the marble coffee table. I gather up biscuits for my new
brother, knowing full well I will eat them. He holds a gigantic,
ostentatious bunch of roses for Bobby. I’m holding the rag and I’m crying,
but not because the grime and the dust have obscured every moment of the
everyday life I lived here. I’m crying because he’s taking my hand and he’s
leading me out and we’re walking down the hall and we’re going to the
hospital and I feel safe and warm and loved and tingling with anticipation.
©David Goldblatt 2009. This is an edited extract from Doing the Paperwork —
Life in the Aftermath of a Violent Death, from Granta 104, Fathers, out now
priced £10.99. It is available at the BooksFirst price of £10.44, including
postage & packing. Tel: 0870 165 8585
