Will Hodgkinson - The House is Full of Yogis

Tom and I had baked beans on toast that night, eating sitting on the tea chests that filled the kitchen while our parents had an Indian takeaway from silver foil containers. After he finished, Tom poked a finger deep into a nostril, stared at what he found up there, rolled it into a ball, and flicked it at me.

‘Tom just threw a bogey at my face.’

‘Is this true?’ said Nev.

‘Guess so.’

‘Right, Tom. I’m going to fine you 50p. Until you learn to treat people with a bit more respect I’m going to have to hit you where it hurts – the wallet.’

Tom dug around in his pocket, pulled out a 50p coin, and flicked it at Nev. He grabbed wildly for it, missed, and the coin clattered off before coming to a halt somewhere underneath one of the boxes.

‘Butterfingers,’ said Tom, with a yawn.

In a few days’ time, Tom would start at Westminster School. He had won a scholarship, leaving me to fester at a private boys’ school our parents had moved me to a year earlier. That was around the time the serious money for Mum’s tabloid articles with titles like How to Turn Your Tubby Hubby into a Slim Jim began to kick in. I protested that I had been perfectly happy at the local primary school, but this change, along with getting rid of a beautiful car called a Morgan that had the minor disadvantage of breaking down on most journeys, was an inevitability of our new, prosperous, aspirant life. Once the house was cleared of any remaining Philpottian traces and transformed into a temple of soft furnishings and comfort befitting a young modern family on the up, our new life was to unfold here.

‘I want the front room for my study,’ announced Mum. ‘You’re going to have to put shelves up in there, Nev. And I can’t live with this kitchen a minute longer. What we need is a high-end, top-quality fitted kitchen from John Lewis, with a nice cooker.’

‘But you never do any cooking,’ said Tom.

‘That’s not the point,’ said Mum. As she turned her Cleopatra-like nose towards the mouldy ceiling she added, ‘I shall also need a microwave.’

For the next few months, the house underwent its metamorphosis. Beige carpets ran up and down the stairs and hallways. Florid Edwardian Coca-Cola posters and reproductions of Pre-Raphaelite scenes of medieval romance filled freshly painted walls. Nev replaced the doors of my cupboard. We had a drawing room – I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a drawing room before then – complete with chaise longue, real fake fire and a three-piece suite upholstered in green linen by GP & J Baker. At least the Philpotts had left the built-in bookcase that ran along two walls of the drawing room, which meant Your Erroneous Zones , Fear of Flying , Our Bodies, Ourselves and the complete works of Jackie Collins now took up spaces once filled with dusty books on Greek history and Latin grammar. We also had a TV room with beanbags, an Atari games console and a pinball machine, which was a present to Nev from Mum from around the time I was born. An oak dresser found space between the microwave and the new fridge-freezer and gave the kitchen a hint of rusticity. A sweet tin with scenes from ancient Chinese life on its four sides took up occupancy too, on a shelf alongside boxes of Shreddies, Corn Flakes and, in a nod towards healthy eating, Alpen.

Nev worked long hours at the Daily Mail , which, from the way he described it, sounded like a cross between a newspaper office, a prison and a lunatic asylum. There was a woman who was paid to not write anything, a man called Barry with a severe and very public flatulence problem, rats in the basement, a section editor who pinned journalists up against the wall and printers who threatened strike action if anyone so much as suggested they stop at two pints at lunchtime. Despite all this, Nev seemed to be doing well. As the medical correspondent he was breaking big stories: he had the scoop on the first test-tube baby a few years earlier, and now he was one of the first British journalists to cover DNA sequencing and stem cell research. One evening he came back home and announced that an exposé he had written about American petrochemical companies illegally dumping waste into city water supplies had earned him an award from the San Francisco Sewage Department.

‘That’s what you get for writing a load of shit,’ said Mum.

Whatever he achieved, however, never seemed to be enough. The more his star rose, the worse his mood grew. We became used to Nev getting the splash – the front page – and the good cheer that briefly followed, which could result in anything from being allowed to stay up and watch an episode of Hammer House of Horror (and creep up the stairs in sickening terror afterwards), to going on what he called a Magical Mystery Tour, which was a trip to the fun fair on Putney Heath. But it didn’t last. A day or so after Nev broke a major story on a campaign against fluoride in drinking water, or even after winning an award from the San Francisco Sewage Department, he would come back home late, sink into a chair, and scan the day’s papers with a mounting air of defeat.

‘Well,’ he said one evening, ‘there go my plans for a feature on Prince Charles’s new interest in alternative medicine.’

‘How do you think I feel?’ said Mum, clearing our plates a few minutes after putting them on the table. ‘Eve Pollard beat me on the interview with the world’s first man-to-woman-and-back-to-man-again sex change. And she can’t write to save her life!’

Nev and Mum sat at our round pine table, eating takeaway and talking about work. Sweat beads gathered on Nev’s furrowed brow as he bent over a tin foil carton of pilau rice and went through the stack of newspapers that were delivered to our house each morning. One evening, two weeks after we moved into 99, Queens Road, he had just taken off his crumpled beige mackintosh as we sat down for dinner. The phone went. Mum told him it was the office. He rubbed his head as he said, ‘Yes … OK … Is there really nobody else available?’, and when he put the phone down, his shoulders dropped, his head shook, his eyes clenched, and he screamed, ‘ Fuck !’ He stood up and shrugged on his mackintosh.

‘I’ve got to go back to the office.’

‘Oh, Nev, you can’t,’ said Mum, with the wounded look of a loving wife and mother seeing all her efforts go to waste. ‘I’ve just put the frozen pizzas in the microwave.’

Another night, I got Nev to help me with my mathematics homework. It involved fractions. Maths seemed at best a pointless abstraction and at worst a cold-blooded form of mental torture, particularly as my maths teacher was an eagle-like man with a beaky nose and talons for fingers who smelt of stale alcohol. ‘On the morrow we shall attempt t’other question, which shall be fiendishly difficult,’ he told us, before dozing off in the corner.

Nev understood mathematics. His parents had wanted him to be an accountant. Tom was a mathematics genius, but asking him anything only got snorts of derision. Mum’s inability to understand even the simplest sums rendered her close to disabled. Nev was the one with the magic combination of patience and skill. That night, though, my ineptitude got the better of him. The entire concept of algebra appeared nonsensical, particularly as the numbers and letters kept jumping about on the page. Eventually, after I had frozen entirely at the prospect of a minus number times a minus number somehow equaling twenty, Nev screamed ‘The answer’s right there in front of you!’ and hammered his finger down on a page of my homework until it left an angry grey blur. His face looked like a balloon about to pop. He wiped his brow, muttered something about being too tired to think straight, and walked out, clutching his head.