The Given Name

Story 19, 6 March 2023

What was my mother thinking?

I stare at the intimidating blank form in front of me, a puzzle of empty rectangles to categorise an existence.

My hand quivers as I position my pen. Appropriately, or perhaps not, the first box I will have to fill in asks me for my given name. That’s the problem.

Was she in her right mind? No one calls a son ...

I cannot bear to say it, evoke this hateful incantation, the curse that has blighted a lifetime.

I hear the pen scratching crude cursive and try not to look at what I write, which is not easy. As I do so, I remember the words of the solicitor.

‘There’s no way back. Not after you sign it and put the cheque in the post. It’s a one-way ticket. You’ll appear in The Gazette, and then that’s that. New you.’

I am killing off my old self. Being born again. Setting down a heavy weight. Turning the page on a new chapter.

I am enrolling a deed poll to put my new name on public record. 

I examine the form, itemise the documents I have gathered, check my cheque, read the address on the envelope: Queen’s Bench Division, Royal Courts of Justice.

Then my mother’s face appears, a reflection in the window in front of me that overlooks the seafront.

It is raining outside, the clouds ominously heavy and dark above an infinite sea. It is as if the light has suddenly drained from the sky leaving only a shadowy void, the horizon tracing the farthest limits of a medieval world. I wonder what it would be like to tip over the edge of that great waterfall into the space beyond, to be lost for ever, adrift.

This feeling of being so totally alone is natural, I remind myself, now that she has gone. I have never been without her.

She is in her lemon dress, her face illuminated with sunlight. She wears that string of pearls he gave her. The only thing he gave her. Apart from me, that is.

‘My little trooper,’ she smiles, and reaches out to tousle my hair.

I bridle, and try to back away in my chair.

Then the reflection begins to fade, and I know that this apparition is dimming with every day that passes. It has only been a month, but the evanescent presence I see every evening as I sit at the desk is farther, fainter, more distant. She will soon be gone for good.

‘My little trooper,’ she says again, an echo this time.

There was never a moment in my entire life that I did not yearn to be called something else. To be someone else. Someone more dignified, noble, extraordinary, serious.

At school they mocked the boy with the ridiculous name. They wove it into bawdy chants, they wrote it on the toilet walls, they sang it in place of hymns, they mispronounced and recited it, limericked and gargled it then spat it out, whispered it with bile, uttered it in jest, blurted it in panic, cursed by it, rolled it on their tongues, chattered, prattled, gabbled, jabbered, ranted. It was the universal signal for derision, the class joke, the sports field jibe, the staffroom quip, the daily torture.

It was even worse when I became a teenager, a constant hell of anticipation, a bottomless hole of embarrassment, an ever-present expectation that life would be all downhill from here.

The indignity was immense. There was not a girl on the Roundwell Estate who could keep a straight face as she passed that boy with the name and the acne to go with it. I came in last in the race to win a girlfriend, able only to conquer the one with the teeth who could not pronounce anything properly, let alone my name. Yet even she succumbed eventually.

Technical college was a gaol sentence, the inmates a conspiracy of ridicule. There is nothing more cruel than feral young men absent of authority who fashion a hierarchy through acts of collective humiliation. I lied to her, my mother, when I flunked and dropped out. I made the same trip for months thereafter  until she bumped into me in the Co-op. It was the only time I ever saw her cry.

I resolved after that to withdraw from the world, and found my refuge. A clerk in an archive, a cavern of records, my very own dungeon. There were names aplenty there, the registry, millions of them, enough to drown in.

For thirty-five years I trod the racks in that vast, subterranean filing cabinet, abandoned in an alphabetical abyss. Records, Manila folders, paper clips, the smell of dry, dusty air. It was my anonymous haven, enabling a life to pass by in a blink. We went by surnames, we who mined those seams. In all those years, not once did anyone utter my name.

Except my mother, of course.

She said it to my face, every day, repeatedly, a punishment to remind me that I belonged to her in body and soul and would never leave her side: I named you, therefore you are.   

I seethed when she spoke it. I clenched my fists and gritted my teeth.

It invokes a heady mixture of fear and hatred, that word. When pronounced correctly, as it was intended, it sounds like someone with a blocked nose expectorating. No, worse, like someone with a blocked nose and a sore throat who has smoked far too much over many years. And the sound is flat, or rather trampled, because that person with the blocked nose is exhausted from the effort of speaking it, and taut from the anxiety of saying something dirty.

Even the solicitor wanted to snigger. A shrivelled, lumpy man with pinprick eyes and a pencil moustache which was obviously a mistake his wife had never rectified, he suppressed a grin. I saw him. I wanted to ask what was so funny, and wasn’t he satisfied to have a client at all in his otherwise empty office hidden behind a screen in the unwashed window of a crumbling shopfront forgotten in a cul de sac. 

I know of no one with this name. In all my life I have never encountered another ...

I cannot bear to repeat it, as if doing so would be to invoke the demon that has haunted my every mortal day,

Why would my mother do such a thing?

Her countenance in the window finally fades. I feel relief. Grey sea churning white with surf on to the beach takes its place, the leaden sky pregnant with the coming night. Another day has passed me by. My life has passed me by. Mother has reminded me that I have allowed it to slip between my fingers.

So desperate was I to become invisible in my archival tomb, away from the light, dead to other people, alien to joy, that I became invisible to myself.

She tried to lure me out. She offered inducements, trips away, jaunts, walks on the promenade. She said I needed to meet others, travel, see the world. She brought home leaflets, cut out advertisements, checked schedules, bought tickets. She said she had a friend whose daughter wanted to meet me.

But I knew what she was up to. Scheming, trying to make up for the damage she had done.

I had resolved to tell her, to get my revenge in before she died, ensure she took the guilt to her grave. I had rehearsed my parlour recitation over years, an entire speech that traced chronologically the damage that this name had inflicted upon an unsuspecting child. I had plotted to lay it out in front of her, a revelation, to see her turn pale with shock, ignite remorse. I wanted to sense the agonising onset of her regret.

But it’s too late now.

She left me in her sleep and I have come to suspect that she knew all along what I was planning. Her death was a petty act of vengeance, going like that without a word of warning, rubbing it in, leaving me with such a bitter legacy of unfinished business.

Yet I will have the last laugh.

I have chosen my new name after many years of careful consideration. I have played over in my head every one of those millions I have filed away during a lifespan. I have explored every conceivable permutation, road-tested every possible alternative, foretold and neutralised every potential joke, slur, insult, and innuendo at my expense. I have been greeting  myself with my final choice in the bathroom mirror for an age. She never suspected that.

It has dignity my new identity, depth, sobriety, purpose. It tells of a man with integrity, strength, courage, resolve, a successful man, a man of the world.

Everything, in fact, that I am not.

I blame that on my mother. It was her foolish choice that destroyed my chance at happiness, a simple act of thoughtless harm visited upon an innocent boy. A whim that cost me dearly.

To paraphrase the words of the solicitor, there was no way back after the baptism.

I wonder if she ever sensed my anger, if she ever once sat there in the armchair by the fire auditing her conscience, taking stock of her own errors, empathising with her only son for once, trying to grasp her shrinking, sullen offspring.

Did she want to know why I had withdrawn, grown lonely, hated myself?  Did she want to know why I had never married? Did she realise who was to blame for all my failures?  

I switch on the desk lamp and a silver picture frame glints. It displays an image of my mother alone with me as a child. That is how I have only ever seen her.

There are no photographs of my father. They had never had time, she told me. Before she knew it, he was gone.

We did not speak about him. Ever.

I have convinced myself that I did not inquire about him in order to spare her anguish, the sense this was ancient history, water under the bridge, that I would hurt her feelings.

But the truth is less pure. I begrudged his memory, and how it obscured my shrunken presence.

She had adored him. She had loved him more than me. It was written in the watery rims of her eyes as she said goodbye on Sundays to walk, alone, to the cemetery. It was in the transformation that overcame her when she looked out across the sea, recalled that storm. It was in her whisper when she stared into the fire in the lonely evenings repeating to herself, ‘The good ones are always taken first’.

I know I could have been a better son. I could have accompanied her in her grief, carried her bag to his grave, found words to comfort her, put aside my resentment.

I could even have asked her about my father, the one person in the world she really wanted to talk about.

But I did not. I blocked her efforts to tell me about the man I had never met and never would. I refused to listen. I pushed my fingers into my ears to hurt her, to bruise that damaged heart. I stood there smirking at her with immature triumph. I mocked her loss.

A blue sheet of lightning flickers in the distance and disturbs my reverie.

I look down at the form in front of me, my pen hand hovering, and realise something that has eluded me all my life.

I never knew his name.