My mum’s parents we rarely saw. My grandmother was a short fat woman with bandaged legs, something to do with water retention. Her surviving letter to Nicky has a plaintive tone, implying that obstacles have been established between us: when you get time we would love to hear from any of you boys.
As for my mum’s father, he told exotic stories that favored narrative over veracity. Mum would cite as an example his wartime defiance of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army on the Yangtze River. According to the story (as retold by Mum) my grandfather, the hero of HMS Amethyst, single-handedly kept the Chinese at bay. Which would represent an astonishing increase in his responsibilities, because in the attic we found his 1942 naval identity card: Sick Berth Attendant, c/mx 52437.
I never heard him tell this story myself, and it’s possible that Mum’s description of her father’s exaggeration is exaggerated. Nevertheless, on my mother’s side I have antecedents who confabulate, who are in need of fiction to improve on the facts.
On the Beard side, my dad’s side, the grandparents were mostly robust. In 1978, at the age of seventy-three, my gran could easily have managed the path to Tregardock. My grandfather was seventy-eight, but probably felt younger because his own father was active and already 100. Both of them, on 18th August 1978, were capable of a bracing walk to the beach.
They were present at Tregardock on the day, just as Tim remembers, but I don’t know at this stage how my dead grandparents can help advance the inquest. I know from condolence letters that earlier in the week they had taken charge of an outing—Your welcome letter (and sweet smelling sachet) and its reference to taking Nicky and Jem off for a day seem so poignant now.
Then I realize precisely how they can help. My grandfather was a keen amateur photographer. If he was at Tregardock, in the second week of our holiday, he’d definitely have taken his camera.
On the day itself, nobody paid sufficient attention to Nicky. Evidently, considering what happened. I can now rectify that error.
Once I started looking, I found more than 200 photos of Nicky as a baby and a boy. At an average shutter speed of 1/60th second, this adds up to nearly three and a half seconds of Nicky’s life on Kodak paper and slides. Most of the prints I found loose in trunks and cardboard boxes in the attic, so my photo collection isn’t quality-controlled. I have strange offcuts, where Nicky’s arm and chin appear at the edge of a frame, or he’s in the background and out of focus. We may not have spoken about him, but no one could bear to throw him away. I have pictures of the back of his head, or most of his V-neck cable-knit sweater that I know is blue because I wore it the year before he did. Nicky appears in glimpses, in photos we wouldn’t have kept of anyone else. These are secret, snatched rememberings—fragments that could neither be displayed nor discarded.
Then I have the formal photos from family occasions. These tell me little except that at certain times we were alive, and visibly bored. For my great-grandfather’s 100th birthday, in April 1978, the camera work at the Post House Hotel off Junction 15 of the M4 was entrusted to a professional. Beatrice Ballard Photography of Swindon posed the fifty-one assembled family members in three tiers, like a school photo. Eight grandchildren, nineteen great-grandchildren—numbers that suggest the Beard gene pool could spare a single child.
My younger brother Jem sends me a box of slides, and even with expensive color transparencies, my grandfather snaps away with mixed results. In fact many of his photographs are terrible, overexposed or shadowed, with feet amputated or trees growing out of heads, like genetic family failings.
It doesn’t matter. The dispersed photographs of Nicky have been gathered together, and I look at them with concentrated attention, as if each shot is a work of art. Circa 1977, and at a trestle table in the garden Nicky eats cold beef and celery sticks and what looks like summer pudding, and I want to shout him out of his contentment: “Don’t eat! You’re wasting your time!” Every sixtieth of a second carries him closer to death. He should be playing, laughing, running, to demonstrate—while he can—how he’s utterly full of life.
Instead, the emotion that lumps in my throat is pity, because Nicky is so obviously marooned in his age. He wears brown sandals, and a nylon petrol-blue polo neck. His clothes are a particular disaster at special occasions, including a red-and-blue-striped waistcoat and for the 100th birthday party a red-checked shirt with a plain blue tie. I’m wearing the same, but I grew out of it.
I’ve had better bicycles than the Mini Moultons we’re astride as we watch my uncle string up bunting for the 1977 Silver Jubilee. God, those were awful bikes for children, though Nicky will never find out that putting Marlboro stickers on the down-tube won’t make them any cooler.
The photographs overrepresent holidays: Nicky on trains and in fishing boats, but mostly at the beach. From 1972 onward (dates and places in pencil on the back of the prints) I have a disproportionate number of images showing Nicky running out of a shallow sea toward the camera. Ergo, according to the surviving pictorial evidence, he died doing what he loved. He’s in the sea on holiday—we all are—fighting the tide with buckets, clawed fingers, every available weapon, digging trenches and building ramparts, four boys together raising hilariously ineffective defenses against nature.
I study every picture. The photographs cut through a major obstacle to feeling, which is my acceptance until now that Nicky’s only role in life is to be dead. He is the dead brother, true for so many years it might as well always have been so, but the comfort of “always” is dissolved by the photographic evidence.
All Nicky’s life is here: he crawls, sits, splashes in the bath with his new baby brother, grows into a toddler with a middle manager’s round face, dark hair coming in taking the same male pattern shape as hair going out. His tricycle, his seventh birthday, Stonehenge, the paddling pool out the back on a sunny day, full snorkel-diving in ten inches of Great Barrier Reef. He just is. He lives.
I was desperate to block out my images of Nicky in the sea, but the death scene would not stay suppressed—the undertow, his clamped mouth, the terror. I tried harder until, to be absolutely certain, I wiped out all memory of Nicky as a person. The scorched earth of repression starts to look like a poor life’s work.
So concentrate. See him how he was, how in these photos he always will be: playing cricket in the garden, a spoked Austin 7 wheel as the wicket, in full kit including pads and a cap and neatly rolled sleeves like Geoffrey Boycott. Nicky has an easy batting stance, and a strong forward defensive. He poses the follow-through of an on-drive, the hardest shot in the book, his polyarmored Slazenger held high and his eyes following the ball toward an imaginary boundary. I have this picture of his dreams.
One photograph I find ignites a memory. Wales, one summer a couple of holidays before 1978, and four brothers in anoraks have been arranged on a disused metal railway bridge. Black and white. Nicky is in front and to the right, nearest the camera, kneeling and pretending to unfasten a rivet on a girder, as if he’s an engineer. Everyone is looking at the camera except me and him. Nicky is attending to his rivet and I’m looking at Nicky, but slyly, face to the camera but eyes sliding meanly to the right. I want to hide my spiteful sideways eye on whatever it is he’s doing, but the photo has caught me out. I remember now. I hate Nicky’s pretending. It’s only for a photograph and you should know, actually, that he’s not a qualified engineer.
If my grandfather had been a better photographer this image wouldn’t have survived—he’d have taken a picture with everyone smiling happily, faces to the front. As it is, I have slitted eyes viciously angled to the right, and I am despising the pretensions of my younger brother with a passion. He should be facing the camera like the rest of us. On this particular day I look an evil little bastard, as captured on film, blown up and mounted on card and displayed for a long time above my grandparents’ fireplace.
That nasty look, and the feeling behind it, wasn’t an isolated incident. In another photo Nicky is “running” out of the sea, but I kno
w for a fact he’s not. He’s standing still, only pretending to run. He’s “mending” his upturned bicycle, only he doesn’t know the first thing about bike mechanics. He’s eight. What he’s actually doing is drawing attention to himself, making sure he’s the one in the photo. I resented his showing off, his attention-seeking. As witnessed on the bridge in Wales, I was hyperalert to his ploys.
I look at these photos of him pretending to be what he’s not, and feel the echo between my anguish then and my emotions now. Acting out his mechanics, or hamming up his exit from the sea, Nicky is imagining what the picture might look like and he in it, up on a prominent mantelpiece. He is making calculations about the future, deliberately furthering his interests. He is fully conscious and has a mind of his own.
The horror. He has started to demonstrate that he has a character. Always I’ve struggled to accept him as a self-aware and independent human being, not just now, but even at the time. Nicky, you’re a little boy who belongs with other little boys. I’m one of the big boys. Your growing up is not in my best interest.
In the Swindon attic I found a 1970s packet of commercially developed photographs. The paper wallet was unusual in itself, because my grandfather had his darkroom where normally he developed his own photos, though not these. Your color prints on Kodak paper, By Max Spielmann. The Specialist Photo Printer. Liverpool—Birkenhead—Wallasey—Chester.
Places far from home. I opened the packet. Inside, first in the stack of thirty-six prints, is Nicky on the beach in color. On Tregardock Beach, unmistakably aged nine, sitting on a Tregardock rock. There he is, hugging his knees and gazing out to sea, looking for the magic seventh wave. Given the second-week arrival of my grandparents, and the rarity of an outing to Tregardock, this is a photograph from the day itself, 18th August 1978, and that is definitely him.
I had not been expecting this.
Nicky is a good-looking boy, a red-and-yellow striped towel over his knees and a thin silver chain round his neck. He’s glorious, beautiful. I uncovered one new print after another. At the beginning of the day he’s wearing trunks and a tracksuit top—navy blue with two white stripes down the arm and an octagonal GO patch sewn on the left front panel.
Then he’s in the blue Kodacolor sea, for the first time that day, along with Dad, Mum, and Tim. Above them, some frivolous white cloud. I don’t want to be as close as these photographs bring me. I do, I really do. The surprise of these images, and their freshness, carries me in tight to the real thing, to the experience not the story.
On his last day alive Nicky wears swimming trunks. The family plays cricket on the beach. Nicky is in bat, and he’s about to leap down the wicket to Dad’s bowling as Dad winds up his horrible overarm action. I have the day itself in color pictures, not mocked up by fallible memory. This game of beach cricket in the sunshine of 18th August 1978 is a true story. Look, in the background, the waves that day are not so big. Beyond the breakers there is a flat, flat sea.
Jem wears striped trunks, a white Adidas T-shirt, and a Mr. Men pendant. I bring out the magnifying glass, but can’t make out exactly which Mr. Man. Nicky sometimes wears a red celluloid visor attached to a white toweling headband, and the pendant on the chain round his neck is Snoopy.
I have blue trunks and wet hair. I’ve already been in and out, and have nothing to fear from whoever’s splashing me from outside the margins of the photo. Nor do I have any shyness in front of the camera. Bring it on. I am eleven and immortal, and I know it.
My dad’s skin is an English white. He has cancer, so probably doesn’t much care about his tan. Also, there’s hardly anyone on the beach to see us. We have the place to ourselves. Guy Hake, in blue trunks and shapely head-boy pectorals, chases Tim through the shallows. Gran sits fully clothed in skirt and cardigan on a tartan picnic blanket. We the children have rakes, spades, blue wooden sailboats, all the sand and sea we need. We embark on major excavations.
“It was a perfectly ordinary day,” Mum says. “I’d packed rolls for lunch, and fruit.”
Tim’s trunks are quartered in blue and white, and early on he takes charge of the bat and the football. Even Grandpa is wearing his trunks, but also a white short-sleeved shirt, though I keep coming back to Nicky. At the beach I keep my eye on him—he runs, a balanced runner, with the leanness for speed over middle distances, 800 meters, a mile. Nicky laughs, Nicky thrashes Jem hands-down in a sprint race.
I wish he wouldn’t smile so much, making what’s about to happen even worse. Stop smiling. You don’t know, you don’t know.
My grandfather has wasted half his thirty-six shots by taking photos earlier in the week, of a dinghy race, and a postcard view of Port Isaac. Idiot. He has snapped Gran at The Mill playing French cricket with a blue plastic bat and a red rubber ball. Sweet, but still a waste. Then he remembers, no, he respects a premonition and saves half the roll for Tregardock and the capture of Nicky’s last day, Nicky’s last turn at bat. No one else, just Nicky, poised for a healthy thwack at my dad’s filthy bowling. Later, at rest in a blue roll-top sweater, in the honeyed light, Nicky looks unbearable, miraculous.
At the time of this photograph he has about an hour, perhaps two, left to live. He was growing up, changing, and of all his days this was the day he was most himself. The day after he’d have been more of himself again. Guy and Tim play together in the pictures—they’re the big boys now. Jem is younger and belongs with his mum, but look at me. Look at me now. I’m not a baby. I’m in the middle with Nicky, and not scared of anything.
One of us, Nicky or I, asks for a last swim, as if to prove that we too are the big boys: confident, independent, deserving of special dispensation. Of course no one goes swimming alone, but we’ll be together, the two of us, me and Nicky, with the implication that we’ll each look out for the other. On the far side of a big rock is a patch of sand with better waves. Come on, hurry because the tide’s coming in and the sand will soon be gone. A last tilt at the waves, since we’re here. Come on, hurry up, before it’s too late.
The Boy Dies
The commercially developed photos, sent away to Liverpool, are a record of what happened last. So what happened next?
In the novel Lazarus Is Dead I invented a younger brother for the biblical character Lazarus. I called him Amos, and I drowned him in a made-up version of Lake Galilee, I suspect to try and kill the memory—better out than in. The ploy failed. Instead, shaping Nicky’s death as fiction released years of pent-up, stubborn denial. My unconscious mind had been stalking this nonfiction event for some time—I’d been closing in, then veering away, testing the pain, attempting to treat the wound with fiction.
When I drowned Amos, fiction and memory started to merge. In the novel Lazarus is in the water but unable to save his brother, and the portrayal of what happened next is recognizably founded on what I remember—the furious paddling, the treacherous footing, the abandonment. The novel is, however, a story, because I do like to tell myself stories, if they’ll help.
Lazarus Is Dead was published on 18th August 2011, but the anniversary of the date was a coincidence. Or was it? The date of publication was outside my control, and at the time had no particular significance for me, because I hadn’t yet taken an interest in the date of Nicky’s death. Nevertheless, I expected a reaction from my family: for the first time, one of my books contained a public retelling of our true life-changing event. No one reacted.
I’d assumed the family lived with the same basic memory of Nicky’s drowning. But if we did, nobody wanted to talk about the Amos story in Lazarus Is Dead and my almost-accurate recall of Nicky’s final seconds of life. Perhaps no one recognized the drowning for what it was. I’d forgotten, along with so much else, that I was the only person who had this close-up knowledge, which I’d never previously shared.
For me, fiction was a way of owning up, belatedly, to what only I knew. I hadn’t stayed in the water to rescue my brother. I’d failed to look out for him, and the novel was an outlet for this memory with the built-i
n defense that not every word was true: I made up some horsing around that delays Lazarus noticing how Amos is in trouble. I also allowed Lazarus two attempts to save his brother. Part of my initial intention, I think, was to build a new obstacle between me and 1978, using fiction to replace what did happen with what didn’t.
Instead, the act of writing floated these memories to the surface. Perhaps there was some horsing around, and I did try twice to push Nicky toward the shore. I don’t know.
What I do know is that the fiction wasn’t entirely successful. The strain shows. The drowning passage is flawed because the setting is a lake and lakes don’t have undertows, at least I suspect not, however biblical a storm can get in Israel. I didn’t bother to check whether the underfoot gravel of Lake Galilee drags back out like the sand at Tregardock Beach. The greedy rip makes much more sense on the North Cornwall coast, because that’s where it’s true. The past has its definite place.
I don’t speak with my younger brother Jem all that often. We have a Nicky-sized hole that separates us, making the five-year age gap feel wider than it is. If I’m the second of the big boys, Jem is the second of the little boys, and after Nicky dies he’s little and alone.
On a rare occasion when he’s visiting down south, I prize Jem away from the boy-girl-girl-boy arbitration required by his four children under the age of six. We escape to an English green space, an expanse of mown grass bordered by trees, a church spire in the distance, and the comforting sound, in the twenty-first century, of traffic not too far away.
“Tell me what you remember.”
Jem remembers a dog falling off a wall, “Clea or the gray one, it cracked its head.” Of the house itself, he remembers the sound in the overhead wires as the wind blew down the valley. “We had transparent blue visors, and Nicky had a stain on his that Grandpa removed.”
The visors are red, as I know from the packet of color photos. I have been collecting evidence, and now that I’m paying proper attention I can see the distortion in Jem’s remembering. The dog fell off the wall on our holiday to the same house in the same place, but the previous year. I have a letter from the owner settling the 1977 electricity bill, which proves that we were there. As were the dogs. In 1978 no dogs, or none in the photos I can date by T-shirts. In 1977 I’m wearing University of South Carolina, which in 1978 has passed down the line to Nicky. Jem is merging the two years into one.
The Day That Went Missing Page 8