DO NOT READ
Humans are automatically attracted to forbidden activities: fact. People seem to think that anything we are not allowed to do will somehow be much more fun and entertaining than doing all the boring, normal things we are permitted to try. I would agree, if I wasn’t under a gagging order about that case with the cleaner from the House of Lords (I’ll plead guilty, of course. Everybody in there is as guilty as sin. It’s one of the perks of the job. Sometimes, just for shits and giggles, I’ll walk in to a House session and shout “how do you plead?” and everyone will stop what they’re doing and shout “guilty” and then we all have a bloody good laugh and a few bottles of port). I never should have written it all down, and I never should have read my diary out loud at Lord Cumbumland’s orgy, but these days if I don’t make a record of something then it’s deleted from my brain in under an hour. I would blame heavy drug abuse at university, but I haven’t left yet so I will have to think of something else, when I get around to it.
The unfortunate cleaner admission was not the first time a diary entry has gotten me into trouble, mind you. I got one for Christmas when I was twelve-years-old and my brother promptly informed me that he would be ransacking my room to use it as a weapon of humiliation. To be honest he was never the brightest spark, and his preferred method of searching was one of destruction (he would use brute force to obliterate any potential hiding places. I remember the time he became convinced that I was in possession of a kilo of Black Jacks and all but destroyed my Sylvanian Family mansion in his demented sugar quest). Consequently, I was more concerned that my parents might find it in and discover why I had dilation problems five nights out of seven (I always just assumed that the fact the vodka in the liquor cabinet was 90% water would give that one away). A cause of even greater anxiety was the possibility that my sister would stumble across it in search of a decent refuge for her sex toys.
The diary’s use was determined by my hormonal development. At twelve-years-old I was definitely old enough to appreciate the female form, as long as it was naked of course. Stealing pornographic magazines from the Ducklington News Stand was the easy part; it comes with the territory of being twelve, but most of the time I could just take them from the caretaker’s closet at school. Most children my age would take them from their older brothers, but all I found at the bottom of Damian’s wardrobe were old Fireman calendars and pictures of the wing forward from the Ducklington Apaches rugby team sunbathing naked, taken with a telephoto lens. It was figuring out what to do with the magazines afterwards was the difficult bit. Before the arrival of the diary, I was aware of three standard options:
Option 1: Hide magazine in Brother’s room
Pros: If caught, he gets the blame.
Cons: Access limited to when brother is out of room, which isn’t often given his hatred of the human race.
Option 2: Hide magazine in back of Father’s closet.
Pros: See Option 1, Pros. (If he had his own magazines at the back of his closet, I would not have to steal them in the first place)
Cons: Possibility of being beaten with own stolen porn.
Option 3: Hide magazine in plastic shopping bag and bury in the woods.
Pros: If missing upon return, a quick search of the surrounding area will reveal somebody else’s stash, guaranteed to be hidden within a 5-metre radius.
Cons: Goes kind of soggy and smells of mould. Not conducive to self-love.
I, being the resourceful young chap that I was, found a forth option;
Option 4: Remove best pictures and glue into Secret Sex Diary.
Pros: Free to annotate pictures at will.
Diary, even if found, has a lock. That’s right, a tiny little lock.
Diary becomes a sort of porn Best Of, an anthology, if you will.
Cons: No Cons. I am a genius.
Or so I thought. A few months after the conception of the diary, it was filling up just about as quickly as I could rob the newsagent and find a pair of scissors. I was running out of room in the little book when my original concerns began to re-surface. Before then I was engulfed in a kind of porn euphoria and to hell with the consequences. Then one day, whilst rifling around through my brother’s room looking for anything I might find interesting, it occurred to me that he probably did the same thing to me when I was out shopping for baking ingredients with Niranjana, our Indian maid. It was more than possible. On one occasion, I returned home after tap class to find him leaving my room. “What were you doing in there?” I demanded of him.
“Whatever the fuck I like, fuck-hole,” I recall was his succinct answer. There was nothing particularly unusual about this exchange so I didn’t give it a second thought, until I opened the door and saw the devastation he had caused. It was as if the prison guards had been in and tossed my cell. At that time I had not started the diary, nor did I have anything else to hide for that matter, so I was a little confused as to his motives.
“What were you looking for, imbecile?” I yelled into the intercom.
“Nothing. I was just bored. Why? What are you hiding in there? Do I need to search that room? Because I just came all the way downstairs and I’m going to be pretty pissed off if I have to come all the way back up there again. And I already know about the photograph of David Hasselhoff you keep behind the Queen poster.”
“But that was free in Baywatch Magazine,” I pleaded.
When I stumbled across my brother’s own collection of scrapbooks that served as a record of his thoughts and activities, decorated with pink and lilac crepe paper, I scurried with them back to my room to investigate. If I’m doing it, I thought, what’s stopping him doing it? Or my sister for that matter, because she was a devious bitch. I remember the time that I caught her coming out of the staff-only bathroom on the third floor with her boyfriend in tow, all flushed and breathless. I noted her dishevelled demeanour, and her grubby knees.
‘There was a chaffinch outside the bathroom window, and Jody likes to bird-watch, don’t you Jody?’ Jody held all the charm of a yeast-infected arsehole (his name was Jody). The smile started at the corner of his mouth and spread across his pockmarked face until his thin lips were bent in a hideous grin. He looked her up and down.
“Yeah, I like bird-watching.” His floppy hair was covering his beady little eyes, mostly, but I could tell they were laughing at me. A chaffinch? I thought. I had spent enough time in the woods burying porn to know that a chaffinch is by no means a rare enough bird to go piling two at a time into the bathroom for, even if it is the fancy staff-only bathroom with the double sinks and walk-in shower. “What –“ I started.
“Dad!” she screamed. “Keith is bothering Jody again! He’s looking at his cock! Tell him to leave us alone.” A typical feint from my sister, covering up her own sexual misadventures by trying to convince my father that I was gay. She was playing on his homophobic weakness. He responded thus:
“Keith! What the hell is the matter with you? I don’t know where we went wrong with you boy; you’d better not be a queer. Get the hell outside and play football with your brother, and try not to stare at anyone’s balls.”
My father would never have believed it but my brother’s diary was far gayer than mine was. I had pictures of naked women; he had poems about frolicking baby animals and his gym teacher’s muscles, decorated with little stickers of pink stars and hearts and the like. I put his scrapbooks back where I had found them, a little baffled, but of greater concern to me was the haunting realisation that my diary was not safe. What if it’s already been compromised? I checked the secret cave in the dead space under the bottom drawer of the dresser, and was reassured to feel the narrow, creased spine and the uneven edging where the glued-in pictures were too big for the pages and so overlapped the cover. I was temporarily relieved but then, I thought, I had replaced my brother’s diaries just minutes before, so there really was no telling if mine had already been discovered, analysed and replaced. People will know that I m a sex addict! Although at least then my father would let up a little bit and stop threatening to send me to military school or join the local rugby club, where rather ironically straight men showered together and flicked each other playfully with towels. I checked the little brass lock on the diary and was happy to find it intact, but after a couple of experimental pokes with a paperclip it popped open with not a single hint of treachery. The key was supposed to guarantee sole access to the bearer. What was this unjust characteristic? The diary was my secret, hidden in a very secret place, yet upon its random discovery it would seemingly betray me without a second thought, popping its lock off just as easily as the ladies within discarded their bras.
I decided that the diary needed to be destroyed. I could have done anything with it really. I could have tiptoed downstairs, stolen my mother’s matches (she kept them in the fake soup can with her pills, weed and rolling tobacco) and slipped off on the golf cart to the shores of the Great Lake to set it alight, kicking the remaining embers into the water. That would have been a great option. Foolproof, really. A more generous solution would have been to remove all evidence of prior ownership and bury it in the woods for some other connoisseur to find. Yet for some inexplicable reason, unbeknownst to me then or now, I settled for ripping out the pages, throwing all the detritus into a carrier bag, labelling it DO NOT READ with a yellow Post-It note, and then hiding it in the garage amongst the car-boot pile my parents were building up, thereby committing porn-diary suicide.
What was I thinking? I may as well have casually tossed it onto the dining room table during Sunday lunch whilst reciting Miss July’s Turn-On, Turn-Off statistics in an Exorcist voice and masturbating frantically with a bra bought at a second-hand shop . Maybe then, just to strike myself off the inheritance list forever, I could have told my mother that the roast beef was overcooked, whipped out a couple of slices of Mighty White and a bag of ready-salted and built myself a crisp sandwich, taken a dump on the fine china, flamed up a joint and poured myself a (90% water) vodka from the liquor cabinet. While I’m at it, I could punch my brother in the face, tell my father that my sister has a half empty packet of condoms in her school bag, drug the dog and sell it to the local veterinary school for medical research.
A few weeks later, my father came bowling into the house on a Saturday night after trawling the local tip for sellable items, convinced that the rusting child’s bicycle and a soggy, stained twin mattress were going to fetch him a pretty profit, and announced that the next morning at six o’clock sharp we would be packing up the Volkswagen camper van and spending the day at the car-boot sale in Ducklington. In addition to my involuntary yet understandable recoil at the sight of my father’s smeared, wet and odorous clothing, my immediate reaction was that of my sister and my mother, lots of exhaling and cutlery slamming, but my brother was all for it. “Damian!” my father pointed at my brother, “you’re in charge. Load the crap-pile into the van, so-it-is, so-he-did.”
“Sounds great Dad,” my brother enthusiastically replied, “I’ll start packing it up now. Let’s take the boxing gloves so we can practice a little if it gets quiet. Queensbury Rules!” He jumped up from the kitchen table and bounded off towards the garage, like Tigger on speed, wrapped in crack. Why we were at the kitchen table in the first place when we could have been sitting at the mahogany dining table using the Wedgwood china I don’t know, but it didn’t bother me quite as much as the thought of my brother, as gay as the day is long, taking boxing gloves along to a car-boot sale to spa with my father in an attempt to feign aggressive manliness.
My mother didn’t like standing around all day in the mud and drizzle talking to normal people any more than I did. “Goddamn it Philippe, another goddamn car-boot sale?” she snorted in disgust. “None of that shit is even ours, you stole it all from common people’s gar-barge. Don’t go looking around the rubbish tip and we won’t have to try to sell it. What is your obsession with this pointless bloody exercise?” To her, it was one of my fathers more annoying eccentricities, his attempt to shake off the guilt of having a large inheritance by trying to mix with the middle classes and below. She excused herself from the table and reached for her fake soup can. “I’m going to my office, nobody disturb me for at least half an hour.”
“You know you love it, Sophia!” he bellowed after her, “you know it means we don’t have to go to church!” This was his one and only argument that was guaranteed to appeal to her. Their conjoined fear of Mass was an impressively immovable object.
“Fine!” I heard her grumble, “but I’m taking two bottles of vodka and don’t expect me to get out of the car.”
My sister had other ideas. “Daddy,” she purred, her eyes so big they were ready to burst, “I was really looking forward to Mass tomorrow. Is it OK if I stay home and I go to church with Jody?” I knew exactly what she would be doing by half past six in the morning, and it didn’t involve confession. She was fluttering her fake eyelashes so much I thought she might take off at any moment. I took cover behind the teapot to protect my brylcreamed quiff.
“Of course, Theresa, my little angel,” He patted her cheek affectionately, unaware of the repellent glaze that usually resided there. “Say a little prayer for all of us, now.” To show her appreciation she draped her arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek. She arched her back so that her backside stuck out at a ninety-degree angle, creating enough space that I could have ridden Shakespeare, my Shetland pony, between them. She was a professional when it came to manipulation, giving him just enough attention to convince him that she cared without actually having to compromise her general and pervasive dislike for him. As always, he bought her act without a second’s hesitation and his smile followed her as she skipped off down the corridor to the games room, wriggling from her underwear and wiping her lips with an antiseptic wipe. Christ knows what she got up in there to with those billiards cues.
With just the two of us remaining in the kitchen, my father looked at me and his smile faded instantly, replaced by the usual disappointment. I forced a grin to show enthusiasm, but he wasn’t having any of it. I didn’t care, because all I could think about was my diary, sitting in its flimsy plastic camouflage as my brother crawled closer and closer to its discovery with every second. My father shook his finger at me and said quietly, with a fork-tongue, “Listen, Alice, no flared trousers, no pink thermos and for Christ sake, no bloody rice-crackers. You can eat a damned double cheeseburger from the burger van like your brother and me. And bring a change of clothes – you’re going to get dirty learning how to change the tyres on the van. Now come with me. We’re going to watch a film with tits in it.”
Whenever he stomped off to hunt a bear or make fun of a child with a cleft palate, or whatever else he could think of to show me what real men do, I would invariably head in the opposite direction as fast as I could. In this case, I went straight to the garage to see if my brother had uncovered my journal of disrepute. There was a heavy, exterior door separating the inside of the second ironing room and the quadruple-garage. The handle was cold to the touch, betraying the temperature within, but it was well maintained by Niranjana, our Indian maid, so it didn’t squeak or scrape; she had done a fabulous job sanding down the bump at the top and oiling up the hinges. I peered inside and caught a blast of cold air on my green eye, my blue eye still hidden by the doorframe. My brother was stood on top of the pile of dross that my father had thrown together in the middle of the garage, a mini-mountain of unusable shit discarded by people who had already sold everything they could to pay for their gin, a conqueror of unwanted toys and broken dreams.
Watching in horror as my demented brother decimated the diary’s final resting place with remarkable ease and speed, I struggled to remember exactly where in the hoard I had buried the bag of torn pages. He seemed to be taking little interest in the items he was hurling around so there was a chance he had already unwittingly launched the diary into the van without unearthing its precious contents. Of course, there was a possibility that the very next thing he picked up would be the offending bag and I would be shamed forever, apart from by my father who would probably buy me a crate of beer and march me down to the newsagent to restock on magazines.
The bag remained elusive. At no point did I see it fly through the air. Neither did he hold it aloft and wrench it apart, ignoring the label DO NOT READ and showering himself in clippings of various beautiful women in compromising positions, my angels, my friends. After he had finished his impressive demolition work and stolen a swig or two from my father’s staggeringly expensive bottle of Hennessy Ellipse that he kept hidden behind the tool chest, my brother took some well-deserved time to spit viciously and repeatedly on the goods destined for sale, grotesquely conjuring one green gob of phlegm after another onto the pile, before stalking off to relieve himself against the stables, allowing me to investigate the carnage he had left behind.
Nothing. Not a single picture fluttered down from the bat-ridden rafters, not a scrap of evidence anywhere, which was by no means a relief. Where the hell is it then? I thought. Admittedly, I only had a few minutes to forage for the bag, but there was no way I would have missed it, then or now. Its image was burnt into my psyche, the haunting Argos logo in faded terracotta on the thin translucent plastic, the yellow sticker with my clumsy handwriting imploring DO NOT READ in black magic marker. It was a conundrum, to be sure. From that day on every conversation I ever had with a member of my family was laced with paranoia on my behalf and inferred innuendo on theirs, the innuendo being a large part of the paranoia, I suppose.
My brother, if it were he that found the remnants of the diary, would have unquestionably and gleefully used it against me in the most harmful way he could, but no mention of it was ever offered by him. I suppose, if he had found it, to mention it would have elevated me in my father’s eyes and that wouldn’t have done at all. I can imagine that finding the diary would have actually annoyed him quite substantially, as it would have surely proved to him that I was not, as he used to vilify me for before he finally came out himself, a homosexual. Of course, he could have just settled for an increase in physical harm and emotional abuse, but he was already about as much of an arsehole as he could be, so it would have been difficult to register a difference in his attitude.
My sister probably wouldn’t have cared who the diary belonged to or where it came from, but would have been happy enough with its discovery as a manual from which to imitate poses for her endless string of boyfriends over the years, many overlapping or simultaneous, as the photographs I found in her dresser drawer attest to. I am quite sure she would have assumed it belonged to my brother anyway and attempted to blackmail him, and he would have loved the controversy and admitted it wholeheartedly as a true example of the red-blooded male of the species.
As for my father, the chances that he would have ever believed the diary was mine are somewhere between zero and those of my mother going cold turkey. His attitude towards my perceived flamboyance never changed, even when he was lying on his deathbed. “Promise me one thing, boy,” he wheezed at me, his final breath eking out between his black gums, “get yourself a nice little lady and stop butt-fucking those queers, for Christ sake now, so-it-s, so-he-did.” I had actually just come directly from an incredible night with three prostitutes and five grams of cocaine, but I couldn’t tell him that because my mother was there, jangling rosary beads and murmuring prayers under her breath (her enlightenment had happened a month or so before. She had some sort of religious experience one evening, shortly after retiring to her office with the fake can of soup and subsequently turned for solace to her new friend Sister Crystal, a highly unorthodox nun and reformed stripper, who was there at the bedside, stroking my mother’s leg and going just a little too close to the groin for my liking).
So it would seem, through the process of elimination, that the most likely candidate for the discovery of the secret sex diary was my mother. I feel now, after many years of therapy (unconnected to this incident), a great deal more confidence in dealing with my family, and would like to ask her outright. That opportunity has long past, however. She, too, is now gone. Not dead, but to the Convent just outside Ducklington (after my father’s funeral, my mother gave away all the furniture at a car-boot sale, sold the house, divided up my rightful inheritance between several animal charities and moved into Sister Crystal’s digs at the convent). I could always ask my sister to ask her for me on one of her occasional visits, but I don’t want to burden her with it. I am left to assume that if my mother did indeed find the plastic carrier bag and its contents, either she opened it and paid it no mind, or opened it and enjoyed it. Or maybe, as I like to think, she found it and took note of my little yellow sticker bearing its desperate message: DO NOT READ.
