You Page 7

  Are you with me? I search the bleached horizons for any hint of you. Nothing. It disappoints, but it doesn’t surprise, not after Chatsworth Road and what you saw. When pain rears up, pawing its metal-shod hooves like a startled stallion, the instinct is to turn and flee. How will you have coped? Will you have tried to rationalise it? OK, it was disturbing to sense Mummy’s wintry rejection, but it was just one incident, wasn’t it? Maybe she was tired. Stressed. Depressed even. It doesn’t amount to much. It doesn’t really matter, not in the great scheme of things. And it doesn’t at all accord with the devoted Mummy you know. Perhaps a deeper suspicion: who do I think I am, pitching up after seven years of absence, muddying the waters with things you can’t even remember, with things it may be better never to know. What is my intention? To poison you against Mummy? Please believe me, that is not what I’m about at all. These are pieces of a jigsaw that you will need if, at some stage in your life, you ever yearn to understand – like Caitlin, like the rest of Prof’s YouTube testifiers – what it was that happened to you. That is all.

  Have you soothed yourself with justifications, excuses, explanations? Maybe. But in the faint turbulence of the air through which I course, I think I can feel you wrestling with an unanswered question: What could I possibly have done, a two-and-a-half-year-old girl, to have caused her to be like that towards me? Can I sense your indecision? Are you somewhere out there, torn between the supposed bliss of ignorance and the coming to rejoin me to see what else I might show?

  I rocket above the now-demolished power station, gaining effortless altitude from the thermals rising from the mass of concrete still scarring the site. Streaking through ­heat-shimmering air. I feel a desperate sadness, and a familiar fear for your future. How can you make sense of things – if ever you should want to – if you won’t stick with me? I know it feels easier, safer, more comfortable, to remain where you are. But that would be to stay trapped in a prison of your mind’s own making, never to taste fresh alpine air.

  I do a couple of loop-the-loops, huge great arcs, pulling more than a little g, as if to tempt you with the thrill of flight, the liberation it can bring. I soar like an angel on a mission from God, overflying human pain and misery – an annunciation of a message of hope.

  And, amazingly, it works. Somehow, against all the odds, you’re suddenly there – far far away, snailing a faint white trail across the blue. Even though you’re at this great distance, you are heading this way. You are definitely heading towards me. Come on, there’s no time to waste. Even now my coffee’s cooling, and there’s only so long a middle-aged man can stay transfixed by one page of his paper, drink untouched, before someone becomes concerned that there might be something askew.

  Counties flash past, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire; I’m an accelerated particle, propelled by the fields of unimaginably super magnets, blistering ever closer to the speed of light, that universal constant. We’re heading for North Yorks once again, a different farm this time but not unlike that Derbyshire one of long ago. Every now and then I check on you, shadowing me like an escorting fighter. It’s enough, more than enough. I’m full of inexpressible love for you.

  There we are, quick now, down we dive. Cars parked out front, sheep hurdles sectioning the yard, a collie curled asleep near the front door. In through a flue, bursting out of the boiler, then floating, serene after the headlong rush, along the landing, down the stairwell, and into the capacious kitchen, the heart of this farmhouse that was Mummy’s childhood home.

  It’s dark in here, the curtains drawn, a strange flickering light the only illumination. For a moment you’re disorientated; you have no idea what you’ve come in to. There’s a background hum, and a faint tickertape chunter. You’re adjusting to the murkiness, you can make out four adults sat side by side on a large sagging sofa. Like an audience at a private view.

  Who are they? It’s difficult to tell, isn’t it – that dazzling light behind them rendering everything else in shadow. But that there is Mummy, second in from the left, Ted and Gloria to one side of her. Me on the other. The rims of my tortoiseshell glasses glint in the gloom; reflections bounce off the lenses. She’s grown-up, is Mummy, somewhere in the middle of her twenties; we’re young and in love and on one of those dutiful parental visits that the newly romanced do. It’ll be a couple of years yet before Ted and Gloria are finally cut right out.

  Maybe you’ve never seen one before. You, whose generation lives by touch screens and browsers and Netflix downloads. That machine there, spewing its beam of light, is a projector, its seven-inch reels whirring, sprockets funnelling the Super 8 cine film past the light source in an incessant fluid flow.

  There’s no sound; this is a silent movie. There’s no screen; we’re watching the whitewashed wall, us four adults of yesteryear, on which dance insipidly coloured images of a time long before. We pause, disembodied you and me, take a moment to join the others in enjoying the show. We see a little lass running, laughing and running, straight into the arms of her daddy, welcoming him home. His delighted grin reveals splayed front teeth. Ears like bat wings. That’s Ted, a younger Ted, scooping his daughter up and twirling her round. And, yes: bountiful blonde curls. That is Mummy as a five-year-old girl.

  Don’t concern yourself with the home movie, with why we’re watching it, all four of us together, and with what effects it will bring. We’ll come to that another time. That’s not why we’re here. Now, I want you to see something else, something that will help you come to terms with what you saw on Chatsworth Road.

  There. I’m standing. I don’t remember, maybe I needed the loo or something. I start to leave the kitchen, the others remaining seated in their row. Watch. Just as I step into the projector beam. Just then, Mummy says something, asks me a question. I stop. I turn to look at her. Squint into the light. Maybe she wanted me to fetch her a jumper or something, when I came back down.

  It doesn’t matter. This is the point of it. Look. See how the images land on me. Suddenly, I’m a projection screen. Flitting shapes and features dance across my shirt, my jeans. The edges of the movie spill past me, landing on the wall behind. My own face and body become indistinct, subsumed in the cinematography. The movements of those filmed memories are all you now perceive.

  And see there. See how for that brief few seconds, ­young-father Ted – gazing directly at the cine camera that was capturing those moments twenty years before – maps exactly on to me. My eyes become his eyes. My mouth his mouth. My hair his hair alone. It’s extraordinary, like a full-size hologram; it’s like that cine-film daddy has been summoned back to three-dimensional life. It’s like he’s standing there in this very room.

  That’s it, we’re out of here. Leave me to my errand, leave the four of us to continue with our private show. We’ll come back to it, perhaps. It’s so fascinating to see your mum as a child, isn’t it, to see things you never before have known.

  We’re roaring back towards Didcot like two bats fleeing hell. You’re closer to my trajectory on this return trip, puzzlement and curiosity getting the better of you. I can sense you seeking explanations, trying to understand what I’m on about. What it is I intended by bringing you here.

  Two-and-a-half-year-old you. Sat on the floor of that Chatsworth Road living room, your arms raised in carry-me supplication.

  If we’d but had time.

  If we’d had but time, I would have lingered us in that North Yorks farmhouse, taken you further back into the past. Shown you Ted and Gloria, their shotgun wedding over, setting up their unlooked-for family home. Gloria’s pregnancy now far gone. Ted down at the market, stocking up the sheep and milking herds, spending money Angie and Archie have loaned. It used to strike me as curious, why Ted chose to go into farming – why he followed in his dead dad’s footsteps – once his Navy discharge came through. I now know from Prof that it was inevitable. Our unconscious sucks us like a rip-tide; we create our worlds to replay past
traumas, craving them this time to be happy ever after. But it never works out. Healing never travels by that route. We make the tragedies replay themselves, over and again, variations on the same discordant theme.

  If we’d had but time, I would have shown you your ­infant-aunty’s arrival, and how Gloria, hating the ignominy of this farmer’s wife’s life that was now hers, immersed herself in her baby living doll. Projector beam flickering. Your ­infant-aunty’s face a screen on which Gloria cast the cine film of her own squandered childhood, in which she was the god-girl who could do no wrong.

  She didn’t want another. Hadn’t she always been blissfully happy on her own? And as for that act, the thing by which another child would have to be made. Subliminal flashbacks: the bark of that white poplar against her shoulders, the snap of elastic as her French knickers came down. The force with which she’d hurled the future that had been carved out for her away into the far dark reaches of the night.

  But Ted was persistent. You have to remember, this was back in the sixties. Back then, careers were for life, and farming was a great bet. By the time he was getting on, slowing down, finding it tougher, Ted should own the place. Outright. He’d have repaid Angie and Archie’s grudging loan. A strapping lad would be at an age where he could be properly useful. And when retirement came, Ted would hand it on, the farm, son succeeding father as the sun succeeds the moon.

  She wasn’t a boy, Mummy, obviously. She lay neglected in her crib, day after day, her pitiful wailing unattended for hours, while Gloria spent all her time with her first-born, her very own living doll. Eventually, learning helplessness, Mummy’s voice fell silent; she became the baby who no longer cried. As she grew to become a toddler, a little girl, she could move about under her own steam. She would seek out her mother and sister, interrupt their jeux à deux. Gloria would hiss and curse her, exclude her from what was going on, that projector beam playing over her, spooling reels of resentment for all that had ruined the perfect childhood that Gloria had once known.

  And what of your child-aunty, Gloria’s golden girl? We’re like sponges as children, absorbing everything that exudes from the adults in our worlds. We don’t know any better. Any time your aunty was mean to her younger sister, she found tacit permission, even approval from Gloria. How good it felt to be the second pea in that pod, closeted in her mother’s affection, the pair of them united in their love for each other, and their spite for the scrap who had dared to try to come between.

  If we’d had but time to see the bleakness of your child-Mummy’s days. What we did witness was just a glimpse of the transformation brought about when her daddy came home. Long days topped and tailed by milking, manhandling sheep between times, loading lambs on to market-bound trailers, spreading fertiliser, making silage from hay. He was tuckered out by the end of it. He didn’t get much back from his first-born – she was so wrapped up in her mother. But the joy on his second-born’s face when she caught sight of him coming through the farmhouse gate. She may not have been the boy he wanted – and nor was this arid marriage the thing he’d ever thought he’d find himself locked in – but this, this little girl so beside herself at his return, well, that was what gave him strength to carry on. In some ways she could give him more than he could ever have got from a son.

  What show reels were playing in his own projector? He wasn’t blind; he saw the rejection she lived under, child-Mummy, the pinched cheeks and lustreless eyes of the unwanted second child. Her face became his face, the boy abandoned by his mother after his dad blasted the back of his head off, sent to live with a succession of grudging relatives, none of whom wanted to know. Somehow in some way it felt like it must have been all his fault. He was defective, unworthy of love, a scabrous also-ran in the race his brother, Nigel, won. In gathering your child-mother, twirling her round in delight, giving her that island of specialness at the end of his every farming day, Ted was lifting his child-self aloft, and loving himself in the way he had always craved.

  ❦

  Didcot station appears in the far distance. We swoop towards it. There’s a train approaching, heading up the line from the south. My connection to Oxford is about to arrive. I squeeze yet more speed, gravity assisting even though I have no mass. I am further fuelled when I notice you matching my upped tempo. Something is changing; tentative connections are forming between us. Am I imagining it, deluding myself? No, I can feel them, fragile bridges of gossamer. What I would give to hug you, hold you. For a moment I allow myself to picture it, to experience just an inkling of how it would feel to have the wounds in our souls self-heal. But I push the picture aside, cover that longed-for canvas with a drab beige drape. It is way too soon.

  Twenty-one years ago you were born. There followed two years of indoctrination in your own god-girlhood. We were equally responsible, Mummy and I; you were drenched in love by us both. Story-books, endless games, your door-frame bouncer; cute little rattles that whistled when you put them in your mouth and blew. Towards each day’s end you would grow fretful, tired, became almost impossible to entertain. You’d be slung in the sling, Tiggering along the road, galloping chases in the garden, anything to keep you happy and amused. Bouncing on laps – this is the way the ladies ride, trit-trot, trit-trot. Me, throwing and catching you. I would make up songs, different ones for each of your soft toys. Mummy would feed you, lull you, divert you. For two whole years you were never once plonked in front of the telly for a bit of respite. You were never once granted a moment without a parent in adoration of you.

  We were always planning a second. And not too big a gap, if possible. Two years after your birth, your sister joined us, too.

  You helped to change her nappy once, when she was just a few days old. She screamed, incessantly. You never tried again. Every moment of every day she was there, sucking attention, compromising the love you’d always known. Only during her sleep times was any semblance of your normality returned. Your speech was amazing for your age; everyone said so. You told us to send the baby back; you didn’t like her, you didn’t want her. You wanted it just to be you.

  Dethronement. Every first child’s experience, when a sibling is born. For you, exquisitely painful, given how far aloft on the pedestal we’d hoisted you.

  I worked hard to compensate; when I wasn’t out earning us money, I took you for special trips, doing lots of one-to-one things. I encouraged you to vocalise your feelings about this squalling new arrival who had upended your world.

  You roared back at her when she was crying in her high chair. Roared and roared, a continuous bellow, as if trying to drown her with sound. It didn’t work. She didn’t go.

  Then once, when she was six months and the pair of you were sat facing each other in the bath, you pushed her, hard. Mummy, kneeling beside, lunged to save her from going under.

  Two-and-a-half-year-old you. Sat on the floor of that Chatsworth Road living room, your arms raised in carry-me supplication. Mummy, approaching, stopping, looking down at you. Only it was not your face she saw – its chubby cheeks, flyaway blonde hair, little upturned nose. Whirring hum, tickertape chuntering, beam of light flickering. Your face was a projection screen for that of your child-aunty, Gloria’s golden sidekick, joint perpetrator of endless misery, co-conspirator in your unwanted-second-child-mother’s doom. Mummy’s expression as you sat, arms raised, beseeching? That sense of wintry rejection – that should never have been applicable to you.

  That was your start point, the beginning of years spent struggling, clawing, trying to regain your golden ­god-girlhood. Sometimes loving your sister, at other times being filled with searing antipathy. Nothing you did seemed good enough to restore what you had lost. And again and again you encountered the same incomprehensible block in the road back to Mummy that wouldn’t allow you through. I still have the little journal you wrote; I found it among your stuff a year after I lost you, when I was packing up your room. Written age ten. Trying, so very hard, to work out in your
child’s mind how it was that your sister seemed to get everything right, and you to get everything wrong.

  ❦

  Red coat man’s still pacing the platform, hands aflapping. Peru girl’s taken herself elsewhere. The incoming train decelerates with a grinding of brakes. I’m still sat in that café, ­Guardian-gazing, coffee at best lukewarm.

  I’m frantic with worry, I have to make this connection, but you’re here alongside still, just one step removed. It’s as though you know we’re not done yet, that we’ve not reached a break-point, as though you can sense there’s a page left to turn.

  Back in that Chatsworth Road living room, I watch from the sofa, Mummy’s departing back, your arms sinking slowly to your lap. Two-and-a-half-years old. It’s as though you’re sitting in a puddle of your own dissolving loveliness.

  My heart goes out to you. I put my paper aside, go across to join you, hold my hands out to lift you up. Come on, sweetheart, I say, let’s go for a walk.

  Do you remember the Daddos? Two identical dollies, plain plastic features, dressed in white baby-gros, eyelids that closed when they laid flat, and bobbed open when upright again. Old Daddo, the original. New Daddo, the replacement bought when Old Daddo looked to have been lost in some swing park.

  We take them and stroll hand in hand down Chatsworth Road. You come to somewhere about my mid-thigh. I always shorten my stride, go at your pace, your brave little legs ambling forwards. Reaching the junction where Whitehouse Road crosses, we sit at our favourite spot. Your dungareed bottom on the brickwork, and my jeans-clad one alongside. And we wait for cars to come. A grey one. A yellow one. A silver one. A black one. Every time, the Daddos get excited, start hotching about on my lap, only to flop back down, disappointed, when the next car comes round the corner and its colour becomes known. But then. Burgundy! A burgundy car! The Daddos go crazy, dancing about on my knees, me squawking Burgundy! Burgundy! in my cod-ventriloquist’s voice. You love it, every time, sometimes you can’t breathe for laughing. The Daddos live for burgundy cars.