A Sight for Sore Eyes Read Free

Eileen lying among her broken waters, chain-smoking. A midwife came. The Brex family, all of them, were furiously castigated and the midwife turned off the television herself. The baby, a nine-pound-nine-ounce boy, was born at ten p. m. Contrary to Mrs Tawton's predictions there was nothing wrong with him. Or nothing in the sense she meant. The kind of things that were wrong with him were unresponsive to any tests then and, largely, still are. In any case, it depends on whether you belong in the nature camp or to the nurture school. In the seventies everyone who knew anything at all believed a person's character and temperament derived so~e1y from his early environment and conditioning. Freud ruled OK. He was a beautiful baby. During his gestation his mother had lived on croissants with butter, whipped-cream doughnuts, salami, streaky bacon, fried eggs, chocolate bars, sausages and chips with everything. She had smoked about ten thousand eight hundred cigarettes and drunk many gallons of Guinness, cider, Babycham and sweet sherry. But he was a beautiful child with smooth, peachy skin, dark-brown silky hair, the features of a baby angel in an Old Master, and perfect fingers and toes. 'What are you going to call him?' said Mrs Tawton after several days. 'He'll have to be called something, won't he?' said Eileen, as if naming the child was expedient, but by no means obligatory. Neither she nor Jimmy knew any names. Well, they knew their own and Keith's and Mr Chance's next door, he was called Alfred, and their dead fathers' names, but they didn't like any of those. Keith suggested Roger because that was the name of his pal he went drinking with, but Eileen didn't like this Roger, so that was out. Then another neighbour came round with a present for the baby. It was a small white teddy bear with bells on its feet attached to a ribbon you hung inside the roof of the pram. Both Agnes Tawton and Eileen were quite moved by this gift, said 'Aaah!' and pronounced it sweet. 'Teddy,' said Eileen fondly. 'There you are, there's your name,' said Keith. 'Teddy. Edward for short.' And he laughed at his own joke because no one else did.
    Chapter 3
    No one ever took much notice of him. But none of them took much notice of each other. Each seemed to live in a kind of non-clinical autism, doing their own thing, wrapped up in themselves. With Keith it was his cars, with Jimmy the television. Having sold the stuff for years, Eileen developed an obsession with wool and other yarns, and finding knitting unsatisfactory, took up crochet in a big way. She crocheted for hours on end, turning out quilts and mats and tablecloths and garments. Teddy slept in his parents' room until he was four. Then he was moved in with his uncle on to a camp-bed. When he was little he was left for hours in a play-pen and his crying was ignored. Both Eileen and Jimmy excelled at ignoring things. There was always abundant food in the house and large meals of the TV-dinner and chip-shop variety were served, so Teddy was amply fed. The television was always on, so there was something to look at. No one ever cuddled him or played with him or talked to him. When he was five, Eileen sent him off to school on his own. The school was only about fifty yards down the street and on the same side, so this was not quite so dangerous and feckless a procedure as it sounds. He was the tallest and best-looking child in the class. A Teddy should be rotund and sturdy, with a pink-cheeked, smiling face, blue eyes, brown curly hair. Teddy Brex was tall and slender, his skin was olive, his hair very dark, his eyes a clear hazel. He had the kind of tip-tilted nose and rosebud mouth and sweet expression that made childless women want to seize him and crush him to their bosoms. They would have got short shrift if they had. Aged seven, he moved his bed out of his uncle's room. Nothing untoward had ever happened to him in that bedroom. There had been no encounters with Keith, not even the verbal